Expertise and Personal Branding

By Steven K. Haught, MBA

Do you build your Personal Brand without becoming an Expert or do you become an Expert first… which builds your Brand?

The first time I heard the words “personal branding,” I did not know what was meant. After watching and observing the personal branding of celebrities and leading business leaders, I finally understood what it means to prepare, package and advertise “you” as a brand.

I also learned the most important aspect of the personal branding phenomenon… building your personal brand without the underlying expertise is a recipe for disaster. 

And there’s an important question that comes immediately to the forefront for anyone thinking of being the journey of personal branding… Are you building a personality or a brand? 

If you are an expert, you don’t need to tell people that you are an expert. Your audience will know based on what you say, what you are doing and what you have done. Why is it important to become an expert before building a personal brand framed around your expertise?

Becoming an expert takes hard work but really pays off, but only after you’ve put in the time to develop the knowledge and skills essential to be viewed as an authority on your topic.  Only then are you an expert.

Let me give you the bullet points of what I mean.  You begin your career, in your primary field of interest.  Your first job is entry level.  You are given basic assignments in a supporting role of the team you hope to join one day on the frontlines.  A top sales professional. You are in a position to observe your dream job in action everyday, by watching those who are working in the job you want.  You do your basis support role and you watch and soak up every bit of information about the dream job in the hope that one day you will be able to apply that knowledge.  Over the next five years, you moved up progressively with added responsibilities on the sales support team.  One day, there’s an opening for an entry level sales executive position.  This is your chance.  You hit the ground at warp speed and quickly prove your worth.  That led to more and bigger opportunities at other companies. You make it to your dream job and you perform for 20 years at the top of your game and the profession.  All this time… about 25 years invested you have been building your expertise not your brand. 

You have become so successful that colleagues and even competitors seek to model their teams after your style, adopting your strategic sales processes.  You have arrived at the door to your brand-ability.

Ultimately, when your expertise becomes so known that your industry seeks to style and model on your style ands way of doing things, you are a brand.  Your expertise and reputation have merged into one, becoming your  brand.   Many doors will open for you once expertise and brand are synonymous with your name.

Maybe you are really good at what you do, but you are still not sure about personal branding potential.  If you want to become an expert who gets rewarded with choices that typically only come from a recognized brand, the try doing the following.

Specific expertise target. It does not really matter what you do as long as you decide you want to be really good at it. It could be accounting, marketing, finance, graphic design or sales. The key is to go deeper into a key area in your discipline which will be very important in the future. So for future self-marketing, it’s going to be data analytics or content marketing to present yourself to the world.

Specific expertise goals. In order to become an expert in a given area, you need to go deeper in your discipline than others might go. People who have a “mile wide of knowledge but only one inch of depth” will not become experts. Set very specific quarterly goals that get you closer to being an expert in your field.  Seek challenges that will expose you to situations within your field that others will ignore

or pass by.

Elevate your practice. You know the saying “practice makes perfect?” Ignore that. You can’t become an expert by just practicing what you already do and know. You have to go deeper, take risks and seek out people who are out on the edge of an expertise. For example, when people first saw smartphones, some technology folks said the real future was in applications. Early adopter experts talked about, used and predicted applications for years before the medium became popular. When it did, they were the real experts.

Acquire deep knowledge. Years ago, when SEO (Search Engine Optimization) became important for searching on the Internet, some people learned just enough to do their marketing job. Others went way deeper, attended conferences, threw up SEO’d websites on a weekend to see what would happen, hung out with software coders and graphic artists and learned the second and third layer of SEO science. They become the experts who we then listened to at future conferences, they wrote the books, they started next generation marketing agencies and so on. Deep knowledge in a future trend, skill or tool can be highly rewarded.

Mentor and feedback. It’s hard to become an expert without relying on mentors and advisors. In Lord of the Rings, do we really think Frodo would have delivered the ring without Gandalf? You could probably do it without them, but you are at risk of taking longer and potentially making career limiting mistakes. Getting feedback on what you are doing well, and not so well, is priceless. Especially from someone who actually cares about you. 

Constant progression. If you want to be an expert over an extended period of time, you need to be relevant. In other words, once you become an expert, you still need to evolve and grow in order to maintain your expertise. How many times have you heard this, “He or she used to be good, but not any more. They just don’t know what’s going on today.” Evolve and progress if you want to maintain your expertise and be viewed as a “relevant voice” with in a discipline.

Welcome to the edge. You know you have become an expert, not when you say so, but when others say you are. The first time you are asked to speak at a conference or conduct a seminar, and be  introduced as a leading authority in the world, you will know you are a legitimate expert in your field. And when that happens, remember how you got there.. it was not because you had built your brand, it was because you had built a deep expertise in your professional passion, whatever that might be.  

Humility comes to all who reach the pinnacle of any achievement, or it should.  As an expert, you have a responsibility of not telling people how great you are but sharing insights and knowledge about what you see coming next in your field of expertise. Take your responsibility seriously.