Are Personal Brands Killing Firm Brands?

Speaker A: Foreign m.

Speaker B: You're listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Malicki and Jeff mckay.

Speaker C: All right, we're rocking and rolling. Yeah, buddy.

Speaker A: I have a question for you. Do you consider yourself a firm first marketer or an expert first marketer?

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: I don't know what the question is, but the answer is yes.

Speaker C: Yes. The answer is yes. No. That's a great question. So we're coming out in, uh, the conversation with the uh, end in mind.

Speaker A: No, I didn't think about it that way.

Speaker C: If I were honest. If I were honest, and I like to consider myself an honest person, but never trust anybody that says, uh, trust me, I'm honest. I'm a firm first marketer. I'm firm first. It's gotta be firm first.

Speaker A: One brand, one firm. You know, it's funny when we're setting up, this topic is, um, are personal brands killing firm brands? Is the essence of the topic. And I was thinking about the call we did a couple weeks ago, uh, where we talked about great points of view and how I came at it with a bunch of firms and you came at it with a bunch of people and I expected maybe I was like, maybe you're going to say expert first and I wasn't sure how you were going to answer it. I'm the same. I tend to be firm first, but I also feel like we're in this moment where all the inertia feels like it's to be expert first. It feels like it's all like we did that whole episode on the decline of trust in institutions. And, and I posited that it's not a decline as much as it is a shift. Shift from institutions to individuals. All the trust is m moving to people. And so it seems like there's a huge shift in that direction. And particularly I would argue small and mid sized firms. There's a lot of really strong reasons to go there to shift to that expert first model right now.

Speaker C: Yeah, you just got my mind racing there because I'm thinking small firm, medium firm, large firm, short term, long term, and the momentum in the market is towards. Well, I shouldn't say that because I don't know what the facts are, but there are a growing number of solopreneurs where the firm, the point of view, the individual are all one. That's all they'll ever be is solopreneurs, walking experts, if you will. But I just don't think that it doesn't scale effectively. So the difference is if you're scaling and you're building a firm, you have to be able to transfer all that personal brand equity to the firm at some point or you're not going to be effective.

Speaker A: It's interesting because as you were saying that what came to mind was there's this move in the broader business culture around basically, how big a business can you build with how few a number of employees? And there's even some big voices saying, well, I think I can build a billion dollar company by myself as a individual, with just me and AI. And I listened to a podcast about this and the host that talked about it said, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard because it would be horribly boring. It would be miserable to spend your entire life just you and AI and have nobody to go on the ride with you. So why would you ever want to do that? I was like, actually, that's a really good point. It's like, you know, why are you doing this in the first place? I don't know. So, yeah. But yeah, there is this broader shift

Speaker C: company by myself that might be fun. I could throw you to the curb and, uh, just build it on my own. That might be fun for the introverts of the world. But that is, I think that's a really interesting point. The outer limit of solopreneur firms or very small firms is expanding with AI. So maybe I will amend my earlier conclusion. I don't know. You're going to have an opportunity to convince me differently this, uh, in this conversation.

Speaker A: Well, as always, I think it depends. But I feel like there's. When I first started to think about this episode, when you proposed it is. My initial reaction was to look at it through the lens of size. Like how big is the firm now? To determine whether a personal brand poses a risk. And then I thought, well, why am I looking only at the risk layer? Maybe I'm thinking about this too narrowly. The presumption is that personal brands killing firm brands is a bad thing. Maybe it's not a bad thing. Maybe it's a good thing. You know, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to jump to a conclusion too quickly, but we're definitely seeing one thing that also came to mind as we were thinking, I was thinking about this topic was if you. I don't know if you've noticed this, but most. I see a lot of firms create meat creating media brands. So there's like the Eurasia group comes to mind. There's a guy named Ian Bremmer who is a voice for the Eurasia Group that I really. I really like Ivan. I think he's a really great thought leader on kind of what's going on in global geopolitics. And the Eurasia Group has a media arm that basically is the brand and operating company for all of his and his peers. Media work. I've noticed that a lot of companies are doing that now. It's kind of started with Gary, um. Vee. Right. Gary Vee was one of the early people to do that. And so this notion that the people that make up the firm and build the point of view and build the perspective in the market and are, uh, the voice of the market now, have a media brand connected to the core of the business as a separate business to monetize, that somehow is a pretty commonplace thing now. I don't think that's unusual at all.

Speaker C: You used an interesting word there. Monetize. Um, so what's the revenue model? I don't. I'm not that familiar with Eurasia Group. I don't know what the. What they sell.

Speaker A: Um, consulting.

Speaker C: They do sell consulting. Right.

Speaker A: Uh, basically consulting firm on geopolitical risk at its core. But I. To your point, I don't know them that well either. So, um.

Speaker C: Yeah, so I think what you're monetizing, how you're monetizing it, I think kind of impacts the structure as well.

Speaker A: I mean, to your point, we're, uh, living in an influencer economy. Everywhere you go, you see people doing their thing. I was out in California around the holidays, and I'm walking down the beach, and there's a guy standing in the rocks, and he's kind of just standing there. As I'm walking up, I see him standing in the rocks, and as I get closer, I recognize he's got an iPhone and he's, like, making some kind of video that, you know is going on YouTube. He's not just enjoying a day in the beach. He's out there doing whatever, you know, whatever he's doing. So we're kind of living in this influenza economy, and it's definitely bleeding into firms, right? Where you. You're. You're taking individual experts and you're, uh, you're accelerating them or making them more visible. I mean, we've talked about that.

Speaker C: So as you described that, that would be a key data point for individual brands, killing firm brands, because we're influencers, and influencers are the key. And as you say that, I'm just seeing, uh, the firm is nothing more than a risk Management tool and an accounting tool for the individual influencer brand. Right. You limit the liability of uh, whatever the business model is. Uh, then you have some accounting entity and that's it. That's a totally different business model to me than scaling a firm when it comes to, to. Well, I think from business generally, but from a thought leadership and a point of view and a brand perspective, you're not even thinking about how to position a firm. You're worried about clicks of an on an individual. That's, that's a very different process and mindset to go through.

Speaker A: Well, I have to admit I didn't follow your commentary about accounting and risk. I didn't understand. But where you ended up. One of my initial thoughts on this was that if you were to start a firm, brand new firm, today, right out of the gate, if I were going to advise you on what to do from a marketing perspective, and I'm not talking, you're coming out of the gate with venture capital money or private equity money or something. You're starting a business, you're bankrolling this yourself. I would say that you want to focus on building the visibility and authority of the, uh, individual leaders of that firm. Right away you would start there versus starting with the firm. Whereas I felt like 10 or 15 years ago, you could take a small firm and build a niche through content, through search, through blogging, and make that firm visible. You can't do that anymore. That game's over. And the uh, logical extension is really to elevate the individuals themselves and give them authority and put them out there through podcasts or videos or newsletters or substacks or speaking and that combination thereof. So anyway, where I was trying to get with this is that I think if you're a small firm just starting out, I think right now that is the logical path, the most logical path. It's not the only path, but it is the one that jumps out to me as the one that I would probably recommend. If someone picked up on the phone and called me and said, I'm starting a firm, where do I start? I would say, well, let's think about your, your personal authority and your partner's personal authority and how we make you more visible.

Speaker C: Mhm. This may be splitting hairs.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: But I'm going to disagree with you.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: And say I would start with the firm.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker C: And how is it, where is it going to be positioned in terms of its market focus, given its capabilities? So this is going back to the prudent pedal. Go to market model. You have to have some kind of fulcrum. And that fulcrum is market focus. And you even alluded to it when you said form a niche. I think you need to own a position in the buyer's mind as a firm. Then the individuals points of view, their personalities, their personal brands should reinforce that positioning. I think that's the proper order. I think that's the mechanics of how it should be. There's a range for those personal brands in order to run and kind of be natural extensions of the thought leaders themselves. But if they, what they're saying and doing are not reinforcing and building the market focus and the positioning of the firm, then there's no point. Yeah, now, now, now you might argue that, well, we start with the individuals, we see what takes hold and then we'll position the firm around those individuals. But I think you start with a business case for the market positioning, the segmentation of the market.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. By the way, I articulated what I was saying incorrectly. You're absolutely right. You have to start there. What I was thinking about was what comes next. And what comes next is how do you create visibility awareness, leads conversations for the firm. And I don't think you do it through the, uh. If it's a small, brand new small firm, I don't think you would do it through the lens of a corporate brand way you might have before. Like for instance, I'll just give very tactical, specific examples. If you were going to launch a thought leadership program, I wouldn't advise that you do it as a blog on the corporate channel, but I would advise that you have a individual or a set of individuals be the voice through a, um. Yes, you know what I mean. And a visible voice. Not just like writing it behind the scenes and authoring it from the firm, authoring it from them with their voice in mind. So I think it's. Once you've got that. So I was thinking, I guess a layer past what you said. I agree with where you would have to start. I agree you can't just like take a collection of individuals, slam them together and start, you know, I don't know, run a podcast or something and expect good things to happen. It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: You're listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Malicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms, and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy Prudent Petal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on itunes. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Speaker C: Yeah, but when you think about it, you think about the brand in professional services. McKinsey, uh, Goldman Sachs, BCG and Arthur Anderson. Yeah.

Speaker A: Stantec, Arab, Gensler and the AE firms.

Speaker C: Yes, yes, Those all are named for individuals. But when you look at those brands now, name one individual from those firms. They were able to make that transfer and now it's about their systems, their standards, their collective expertise. Uh, you're hard pressed to find one piece of thought leadership at McKinsey that doesn't have eight authors on it.

Speaker A: Yes. And you're hard pressed, unless you have business relationships with them, to name the authors. I mean, I would argue, I love that you went there because I feel like this notion of our personal brands killing or eating firm brands or something. There's an interesting discussion at small, at the enterprise, it's a totally different game. I think those large firms have spent the last 20, 30, 50 years doing exactly what you said, building out this huge monolithic brand. Not, um, monolithic, that's the wrong word, but this huge, reputable, well known brand. And they purposely avoided letting individual voices take on too much of a role, uh, in that. And I also feel like in this AI era, uh, everything's shifting back to brand. Right. So I actually think they're really well positioned at this moment in time. Because you're even seeing, I saw an article in the Journal the other day that um, B2C marketers, a lot of them are pulling back on their performance ad spend because it's not working. And they're recognizing that the late stage funnel stuff, the stuff that they use to drive sales at the end of the journey or whatever, isn't working very well. And they're pouring money back into brand marketing because they're now realizing that, oh, we've got to build brand authority, brand visibility, brand, all those buzzwords or whatever you want to call them. And that's where the AI era is going to play out. The AI era is going to play out in the brand layer. It's not going to play out at the search engine optimization game that uh, we've been living in for the last 10 years.

Speaker C: Here's where the tension exists though. Yes, in professional services, the people are the product. We're not talking about toothpaste and mustards and you know, cars here. These are individual people and their relationships that are really important. But you can't have a firm who's marketing position is, you know, we're your Trusted advisor or towers Perrin used to have building relationships, producing results for a tagline which was just, I mean that's that you couldn't come up with a worst tagline, uh, in my mind. But, but that, that would be what the research would say. People want, they want relationship, they, but they want results associated with, with that. But if you just put that out, you're not going to move the ball because nobody's going to believe that that's where the personal brands, where they are the product, start to play the major role. But they need to transfer that equity to the positioning of the big firm. You know, when did that happen with McKinsey and Anderson and Goldman Sachs? When they were 200 people, 500 people, 5,000 people. I don't know what the demarcation point is, but I suspect as you move into an enterprise client base, the brand takes on a uh, much more important role. So if you're a uh, 200 or 300 person firm going after an enterprise client, there has to be more to the firm than there is the individuals. And you know what would be uh, an interesting perspective on that? If you think of a firm like Jump Associates, I mean that's not a huge firm, but the majority of their clients are enterprise, isn't it?

Speaker A: Dollar clients are mega enterprise.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder what Dave would say about this conversation. At what point did the jump brand become more important than Dave's brand? Or has it? I don't, I don't know.

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know the answer to that either. Um, I do think to your point, there's a moment in time at a certain scale where the two are intertwined and that's when it's really sticky. You can look at McKinsey right now and you can say, oh, there was a guy named McKinsey at some point and uh, you don't even think about who he was or even the financial institutions of the world. The J.P. morgan's the world. There was a guy named J.P. morgan Morgan who was like a Robert Barron. Right. He was not necessarily a well regarded man at the time, looking back, but they sure play him up as if he was right. But there's a weird middle zone that firms go through where you have to somehow get from the founder, the leader is the brand, to the brand is the brand. And um, we see firms at both ends of that spectrum, but it's hard to kind of articulate what the middle is like, what that transition is like. I'm sure you've worked with firms that are in that transition, as have we. And it's never easy. I never found a very clear script on exactly how you do it. It's like you do this, then this, then this, then this. I mean, it's never that straightforward and that simple. It's all situational, and you just have to sort of figure it out and figure out how to navigate it. I mean, some of it comes back to what we just talked about in our, you know, who are your next conversation. A lot of it is that it's, you know, looking for the opportunity to bring more voices forward and a wider set of voices. So it's not all dependent on one kind of overpowering voice. All right, what, uh, have we missed here? What have we not talked about that we should be talking about that I'm not thinking about?

Speaker C: I think the point is there is no clear demarcation point. There's not like, get here, then switch. It's a tension that exists ad infinitum that you have personal brands and you have a corporate brand and they need to be synergistic, they are symbiotic, they feed off of one another. And it is not a problem to fix, it's not a problem to avoid. It's a tension to be managed. And if you have all of your brand equity tied up, uh, in one influencer brand, you could be successful that way, but you have a lot of risk associated with it. And somebody is going to be overworked for sure because they're not sharing the load. Most of the clients that I have have one or two thought leaders, and they're strong and we want them to be the market face. We want them to be in the market like you described. But I always start building the next generation, and we just covered this topic, the next generation of thought leaders, you have to start spreading the risk and the knowledge to others in the firm. It's just that simple.

Speaker A: Well, it's a, um. I'm going to summarize some of what I heard you say. One is a feature, not a bug. So it's not a problem. It's actually a great thing because it's, you know, in professional services, one of the unique things about a consulting firm is that the people are. Like you said, the people are a large. I'm, um, not going to say they are the product anymore because they are a large part of the product. Increasingly, I think if you look at AI native firms, you're going to see all kinds of firms where the product service mix is unrecognizable to what it would have been 10 years ago.

Speaker C: That's a great point.

Speaker A: So I don't want to say that because that's not true. But it's one of the few places where the people absolutely play a huge and pivotal role in. It's everything, right? We always talk about it. It's the marketing of the firm, it's the sales effort of the firm, and it's the delivery. Now, you think about other businesses. It's usually not all three things. I mean, the people you go to a Verizon store and you work with people in the sale, but you don't interact with the people in the marketing, and you don't interact with them on a daily, regular basis as you're using the product. But in a professional services firm, all three of the things are intertwined, and that's a little bit different. I guess, uh, where I'm going to net out on this is one, I don't think that personal brands are destroying firm brands. I don't, uh, certainly not at the enterprise level. The huge firms that have been in the market for a long time is not happening, and nor will it happen. In fact, I think there's more mag. There's. There's becoming more magnetic in the AI era. I think for smaller firms, you do need to think a little harder about making your individuals a little more visible than maybe you're comfortable with in the early onsets just because of the dynamics in the market right now. But my advice in general is just to be purposeful, is be purposeful about the choices you make. Don't fall into a model without thinking about it. You know, don't just lean into the founder brand, because that's what everybody's telling you to do. Without thinking about the repercussions of that and know what you're trying to do. I mean, if you're trying to scale, um, a firm in three to seven years and sell it well, if all the equity in the brand is tied up with the founder, that's going to reduce the value of the firm a little bit. Unless the founder is planning to stay and be aware of that and be purposeful about how you make your investments, then. So to your point, I don't think there's a perfect mix here. But as long as you understand the pros and cons of each investing in the firm's brand, investing individuals, brands, and you're making smart decisions or purposeful decisions, I'm not gonna say smart, because you're gonna make a lot of bad decisions. Right? We all do, but purposeful. Then you're gonna be okay.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I, I, I'll go back to my M point. I think you need to start with the firm's positioning.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker C: It's market focus. And then the thought leaders with an ass need to build and reinforce that market focus. And they can do what, whatever they want, you know, within reasonable parameters, as long as they're building that brand and transferring that equity back up. I think, uh, that's the key. We didn't talk about it in detail, but I think AI is also impacting the mix of this as well. I think AI is pushing us towards more individual, more human brand and distribution of, of that thought leadership, more personality associated with it. So it's something else to consider.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, M, There are definitely firms out there and you know them and you've worked with them where they work really hard to keep the people behind the veil from a marketing perspective. Now they want to author everything from the firm. They don't want to put anybody's name on anything. Um, and I just don't, I don't believe that it's realistic to operate that way anymore. I just don't think you can do that in this reality, like you just said, because AI can replicate everything. And so if, if I, if there's not a voice, if there's not some personality to it, if there's not some context that makes me want to connect with, with the marketing in some meaningful way, I'd be hard pressed to bother. So, all right, let's take this to wrap. What, what, what are your wise words of wisdom? You always have good wise words of wisdom. What do you, what do you, you know, if, if you were, uh, I know you are, you are CMO right now. You have fractional cmo, you know, what would you, what would you take away from this conversation? What would you say? It's the most important thing to think about.

Speaker C: If I were a CMO and I play one on television, um, on podcast.

Speaker A: Definitely one on the podcast.

Speaker C: On a podcast. Oh, yeah, I play one on a podcast. I would revisit my positioning and make sure that I'm, um, crystal clear as a firm on positioning. What's my market focus, given the core capabilities that we have now that we plan to have in terms of our performance envelope. Uh, m, and think about the brand gap, where I am, where I need to be. And then think about, you alluded to it, um, the marketing, the sales and the delivery, the IC triad, as I call it, and where are the individuals going to be elevated in order to close that gap. And what does that look like? And it's going to be some kind of quorum of thought leaders that allow us to close that gap as quickly and as powerfully as possible. But I start with the positioning. I use the thought leaders to reinforce it and get there. Uh, then the rest, I think, just falls out naturally from there.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I think you're absolutely right. All right, man. Well, um, I'll talk to you in a couple weeks. We're going to talk about budgeting next time.

Speaker C: Budgeting? Who wants to talk about budgeting?

Speaker A: Everybody wants to talk about budgeting, right?

Speaker C: We talk about federal budgeting.

Speaker A: No, no, I don't ever want to talk about zero based budgeting yet. And that's the.

Speaker C: We're going to answer the big question. Uh, where should I invest my marketing dollars?

Speaker A: Yes. How are you going to invest your marketing dollars? Where and how? Which will actually be an extension of this conversation if you think about it. I hadn't thought about it, but it really is.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that'll be a fun conversation.

Speaker A: It will be. We're going to get spreadsheets out. It's going to be a great time. I love it.

Speaker C: Love it. Okay, buddy, see ya.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Um, find content related to this episode@rattleandpedal.com Rattle and Pedal is also available on itunes and stitcher.

Speaker A: Mhm. Sam.