Personal Branding Secrets Every CEO Needs to Hear with Jen Dalton, Founder and CEO of BrandMirror

Linda Fanaras: Welcome to the B2B Brand 180 podcast. We're here today to make a 180-degree shift in your branding and growth strategy. Hi, I am Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency, and your host today. Today's guest is Jen Dalton, founder and CEO of BrandMirror, an award-winning personal branding and executive visibility firm.

With 20 years of experience and brand strategy, Jen helps CEOs, entrepreneurs and leaders clarify their unique value, dominate through leadership and turn visibility into revenue. She's the author of “The Intentional Entrepreneur”, “Listen” and upcoming chapters in “Mastering the Corporate Chess Game” and “Speak Your Way to Sales”, which is scheduled for early 2026. Today you'll have some great takeaways. Number one, you'll learn the three biggest mistakes CEOs make when building their personal and company brands, when to lead with your personal brand versus company brand and how to decide in real time, and how to be deliberate in directly accelerating your scaling talent, attraction and revenue through brand strategy.

Hi Jen, it's great to have you here today and I think you can bring a lot to our audience as far as their personal and professional brands and how to really move the needle. So thanks for coming in today. Jen Dalton: Thank you. Linda Fanaras: So what would you say are the top three things most CEOs and executives get wrong about personal and company branding?

Jen Dalton: When I think about different stages of a company's growth, for startups, the personal brand of the founder is the brand at the moment, right? It is the brand that they are pivoting from and into something new. So I think CEOs, whether you're a startup, CEO or you've scaled, really misunderstand or under leverage how their personal brand gives a face to the company. People follow leaders, not just logos.

And so I think it's really important for CEOs to understand what's the role of their brand throughout the business strategy and the business life cycle, and what's the role of the organization's brand because they're very different and with very different goals. Linda Fanaras: Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. So Jen, I think if someone's launching or relaunching a personal brand, are there some absolute must have elements you think that they need to get right from day one?

Jen Dalton: That's a great question. One of my clients had an IT government contracting company where their personal brand was not meant to be visible. They provided services to the government, et cetera. But now they're pivoting and they’re launching a totally new business also needing technology.

So they're bringing that sort of knowledge of how to scale with technology. But it's a brand new business and it's an online retail. My company is Madeline James, so you can go check them out. And the reason that's important, and the reason I say go check it out is because we're having to build the founder's personal brand from scratch.

And even if you're an employee in the federal government or let's say you're an employee, which for me, the first 10 years of my career, I was at a company, I was working hard for the company, I wasn't thinking about what was I going to do next? Do I need to have a personal brand? And so I think it's really important to build your brand before you need it. And so for Madeline James, we're building the company brand, but for Jessica James, who's the founder, we're having to build her brand from scratch, which means introducing yourself, right?

Here's who she is, here's what her background is, everyone already has a personal brand or zero personal brand associated with them. So an important first step is to think about what's the evidence I can build which meets my audience where they are. So it's explaining, for example, for Jessica, why did you start this business? What is this business?

Why do you care about it? What's the story behind it? And even if you're, let's say a CEO pivoting or you were an employee, you're launching a business, we have to bring the audience with us. If you're launching a brand that has nothing to do with what you've done in the past, we've got to help people understand why you, how does this make sense and bring the audience with us.

If I went out tomorrow and said, I've launched an album and I'm going to go be the next Taylor Swift, people would be like, really? I don't see that. And so the same thing is true with our audiences. If you're pivoting or you're doing something different, we have to think about what do they know about us?

How do we want them to feel? What do we want them to do? And so we have to give them the words we want them to have about who we are now, what we're doing next, why it makes sense. And sometimes that pivot, depending on how much you're creating content or out there speaking or networking, it can take 6 to 12 months.

So it's not a short-term thing. We have to build that visibility and that credibility in order to have the impact we want to make. Linda Fanaras: Yeah, no, that's helpful. You actually helped start to answer my next question because I was curious how long it may take to for our audience to really learn how long, if they really put a plan together, how long it would take to build that personal brand foundation.

And within that, are there specific milestones you think are important that should be tracked or just show? Jen Dalton: So I love that question. I was actually talking with a client of mine this morning and they are in the government space and projects for that get bid on a year out. So for them, they actually need almost two years to build their brand.

And luckily she's talking to me two years before she needs the next thing. And so we were talking about building their brand around climate change and environment and they're a global, they're in Indonesia, they're not here in the States. But either way it would be true, right? It's thinking about when do I need my brand to really be out there and fully visible?

And for her, one of the things she said was, yeah, I've looked at my LinkedIn profile and lately because she's been posting about environment and climate change, the people visiting her profile are in that sector. And so I'm a big fan of LinkedIn. We're talking about building your online presence, which let's face it, when people Google you, LinkedIn is usually the thing that comes up first. And so you can go to your LinkedIn profile and you can see who is visiting my profile, what companies are they at?

Are the things I'm putting on LinkedIn, whether it's the keywords in my profile, whether it's the content I'm creating, is it attracting the right people to my online profile? Am I getting people at the companies I might want to be hired by or the industries I'm interested in? So there definitely are ways to track that, for sure, digitally. I think in person it's thinking about if you're going to go and attend a new networking event or go to a conference, how do you start to build out your sphere of influence?

And it should look different if you need to go into a different industry or a different sector. So I think there are ways we can put milestones in place for visibility for your network. If you start speaking because you want to become a speaker, fantastic, do a small event first. Practice with 8 or 10 of your friends and family or colleagues and see how it goes.

And then if you like the way that talk went or if you need to make adjustments when you do a webinar or an in-person event, you've got some evidence already that you gave a talk. You've got confidence in the content so you can deliver a talk. So I think for a lot of folks it can seem overwhelming to be like, oh, I have to build a personal brand. We just want to start right?

It's baby steps. Building your evidence and finding the rhythm that works for you so you'll succeed. If people are like, how often should I post on LinkedIn? And I'm like, well, how often are you doing it now?

And a lot of times they'll say, well, not at all. And I'll say, well, please don't start posting every day. Your audience is not going to be ready for that. Try once a week, once a month, once every two weeks.

What will you actually do? Right? The same client I talked to this morning, we were having that conversation because she posts maybe once every three weeks. And I'm like, if we want to change your brand in a certain timeframe, we're going to need to have your activity match that goal.

It still needs to be thoughtful. It shouldn't just be liking or sharing. You need to add in what you're thinking. You need to show people how do you think, how do you operate, what matters to you so you can build that Know, Like, and Trust (KLT) factor in whatever venture you're pursuing.

Linda Fanaras: So if somebody just didn't even have, really, a personal brand at all, if you were going to give somebody 3 to 5, like, start here... Jen Dalton: Great question. There's some simple exercises. One would be to sit down, and this is going to be super simple, but actually it's really powerful.

Write down five words you would use to describe yourself and then go ask 5 or 10 people that you have either worked with who know you, maybe who don't know you very well, how would they describe you in five words? And look and see how off is perception versus reality. You can also do the same thing and think about what are your top 3 strengths? What do you really bring to the table?

Ask the same people, what are the things that you come to me for? Because if you need help with this, I'm the person you call. Because a lot of times, perception/reality is not in alignment. We think we come across one way and maybe 60% of the time we're right, but that 40%, we could be missing an opportunity, whether it's an opportunity to be better or an opportunity to go, wow, they thought I was strategic, huh?

I didn't know that. Right? So I think the first thing is get a sense of perception versus reality. The second thing is do write down the 3 things you're trying to be known for.

What are your areas of expertise? And I do a nice little Venn diagram and I start to brainstorm with clients. Show me or talk to me about a time when you were really good at each of these skills or a combination of these skills. And let's start to build out the evidence we have to work with.

And I think third is think through how do you want to build your personal brand and for whom? Who is your audience and who else is already talking to them? And how do you want to be a part of that dialogue? Because a lot of times people write because they think, I have to tell everyone this...

Linda Fanaras: Right. Jen Dalton: ...which I'm super happy for you, however, we want to share content that the audience wants to hear, that they're interested in. And so it's really important as sort of a third part of that exercise is to think through what do I know that I can share that's of value and how do I phrase it or write it or speak in a way that connects with the audience.

I think sometimes we just have that audience messaging misalignment, which it's all good intentions, it just happens that it's two ships in the night. So I think being really clear on who are your top three audiences, if you're trying to have everybody in the world be your audience, that's not going to work, right? If you’re a CEO it’s your employees, it might be your board, and it might be the community for example. But think about those audiences and what messages do they really need to hear in their words, not yours.

Linda Fanaras: How does a strong personal leadership brand actually help a company scale and faster, get bigger deals... Jen Dalton: For leaders and CEOs, when I think about there are things internal to the company around your leadership brand, for example, how are you connecting with your employees at every level? I was really fortunate in my corporate career, I was maybe sort of third level. I wasn't entry level.

I'd gotten promoted, I'd gotten promoted again, but my mentor was like six levels above me. But if I called him, I needed help because I was running into an obstacle with a partner or whatever, he would make himself available. And he did that because he knew if I was on the front line and needed help, it was urgent. He couldn't say schedule time three weeks from now.

So I think for leaders, it's setting aside time to really connect with your employees at different levels, build trust, help them know that you're on open communication and you can set boundaries. But the last thing you want to do is be out of touch with your employees and not really know if they're disgruntled what's happening. They might have a great idea. So one of the CEOs that I knew in my past life, he would do innovation lunches once a month.

He would bring together a set of 10 people and every month it was a different 10. And that was a way where he could connect with employees, get ideas, and really be present externally. It's really important for CEOs to think about what are the customer journey or partner journey touchpoints that they should be a part of. I'll give an example.

During COVID, we had huge supply chain issues. One of the CEOs I knew at the time had said that their purchasing agent had reached out to their partner who provided chips, which there was a big shortage of chips. And the purchasing agent said, gosh, they don't have enough for us. We're like number 11.

And the CEO called the CEO of this chip manufacturing company and said, Hey, why can't, where are the chips? And he is like, you're 11th on our list. You're not one of our top 10 customers. And so I asked the CEO, I said, well, when is the last time you talked with that CEO of the vendor or the business partner?

And he goes, well, I haven't really, because I've empowered my purchasing agent to own that relationship. Well, the purchasing agent owns a specific element of that relationship, but it's the CEO's job from a leadership standpoint to reach out and make sure they've got all of the relationships in place to have their supply chain work. They're not stepping on the purchasing agent's toes. You could also think about, for CEOs, like one of your salespeople closes a big deal.

Do you reach out and tell the client how excited you are? Do you reach out to the salesperson? So it's how do you create these moments that are really wow moments that show you lead in really specific values-driven ways. I think it's important for CEOs to communicate, here's what I stand for.

Hopefully it aligns with the company values, right? And then not be wishy-washy. Linda Fanaras: Yep. Jen Dalton: So the more transparent they can be, I think the better.

Linda Fanaras: The better off. That's great. Thanks Jen. So I'd love to finish up by asking a few rapid-fire questions, which means your challenge is to answer them in one or two sentences, one or two sentences, or one or two words.

So the biggest personal branding myth executives still believe. Jen Dalton: That their voice doesn't matter and that it's about themselves. Linda Fanaras: Great. One non-negotiable platform for CEO's thought leadership in 2026.

Jen Dalton: LinkedIn, a hundred percent. Linda Fanaras: Great, fastest way to destroy trust in your leadership brand. Jen Dalton: Don't have integrity and lie, break your promises. That's the fastest way.

Linda Fanaras: Who should own the CEO's personal brand strategy? Jen Dalton: The CEO should along with a CMO, for example. Or even Chief People Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, someone in one of those rules. Linda Fanaras: Great.

And then one move today that instantly elevates perceived executive authority. Jen Dalton: I was going to say, recognize your employees, but that's not related to authority. I think for authority, identify who the thought leaders are that matter to you, and start to share that and get brand association, right? You don't have to create content, you can curate really cool stuff from other people to get you started.

Linda Fanaras: That's awesome. Jen, thank you so much for all these game-changing insights on personal branding and leadership visibility. I'd love for you to share how our audience can get in touch with you. Jen Dalton: You can visit brandmirror.

com , connect with me, get a complimentary consult. I love talking to people about personal brand. You can of course also connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Instagram, Jen V Dalton . Linda Fanaras: Awesome.

Thank you for listening, and if you love this episode, please hit like share, comment, or subscribe, and let's keep elevating B2B branding together. And if you're ready for your own Brand 180, visit mill.agency or lindafanaras.com and we'll see you in the next episode.