I hear this phrase time and time again in the business world, and I just can’t stand to hear it anymore. I need to set the record straight. You can’t build a personal brand; you have to uncover it.

As a business owner who helps small business owners and startups, I often hear people referring to building a personal brand when they first start out in business, or when they are thinking about starting a business. But it’s not going to help you if you don’t understand branding.

The difficulty is that many people watched as celebrities, like Kim Kardashian, capitalised on their personal brand and turned it into a marketable ‘thing’ to sell to the masses. People now believe that it’s what needs to be done when starting a business. It’s not.

When you think about personal and professional brands, what do you think of?

When I’m teaching about branding in my courses and my membership, I often start with big brand names and ask people to list the words and phrases that come to mind when they think about some of the household names that we know well: Spotify, Amazon, McDonald’s, etc.

Invariably, people give me similar lists each time I run the exercise. I very rarely get words or phrases that come up that aren’t part of that company’s brand.

When I then ask them to do the same exercise when it comes to themselves or their business, they get stuck in a loop of “what they want it to be”. But here’s the difficult bit – when you start to think about what you want your brand to be, rather than focusing on what it is, you start to build something that is not authentic.

Trust me, as a business owner, you want your brand to be authentic so that you can live and breathe your brand every day, and it doesn’t become performative.

Performative brands don’t build trust with their audience and their clients.

What most business owners want is for people to place their trust (and cash) into a business that aligns with them, and you can’t do that from behind a mask. You have to strip the mask off and see exactly who you are.

That’s why, when I’m running a branding review for clients, I start with uncovering who they are, what their values are, what words others are using to describe them and the business, and what their content and website looks like. All of these questions factor into a person’s brand.

It’s not just about colours, logos and fonts.

When you start in business, you’ll hear a lot of people talk about branding… branding items, creating a logo for your brand… the list goes on and on. You’ve probably heard some of these phrases if you’re in the business world.

That’s because we merged the phrases of “graphics” and “branding” a long time ago, but to understand your brand, you have to strip them apart.

When I was working with my graphic designer on my logo, font and colours for my business, he asked me a lot of questions about the nature of my services, who I was helping, what my values are and a whole host of other questions so that he could understand my business brand.

Not once did he ask me about what I would like my values to be. Or who I would like to be as a business owner.

He was uncovering part of my brand so that he could bring it to life with stunning artwork (I absolutely love my graphics for my business and thank James Mossop regularly for how well he captured our conversation into graphics that work for me).

You can’t build a brand.

You have to uncover it. As a business owner, you are integral to the business brand. You cannot become the business brand online and then be yourself when people meet you. It creates such a feeling of distrust that your business will fail long before it begins.

I suspect that what people mean when they say “I want to build my business brand” to me is: “I want to build up my business brand following”, usually on social media. But the incorrect sentence really riles me because I have seen and spoken with business owners who have become so fixated on who they need to show up as when they step into the social media or networking spaces that they forget that they are the brand.

You cannot build it from a bunch of spare parts that you find lying around that you like the look of. You have to discover who you are as a person and bring forward the bits that are going to suit your business. That only happens by looking internally, not externally.

If you’re still not sure about what your personal and business brands are, book a branding review session with me. I will help you to uncover your brand and use it in a powerful way that will get you recognised and flying on social media.