Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.288)
If you're business owner struggling to build a clear and authentic personal brand that protects your career and attracts opportunities, then our guest, Philip Van Dusen is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. Philip Van Dusen is a brand consultant who serves SMBs and creative entrepreneurs. Philip, who previously served as VP of design at PepsiCo,
is a thought leader who shares his expertise in brand building on YouTube to his 300,000 plus subscribers in his bonfire mastermind community and on the brand design masters podcast. Philip, so excited to have you here. Looking forward to this.
Philip VanDusen (00:38.52)
Thanks for having me on the show, Adam.
Adam O'Leary (00:40.594)
Absolutely, so I've heard you discuss how a personal brand acts as a career insurance policy Can you explain why having a clear personal brand is so crucial for business owners in today's uncertain job market?
Philip VanDusen (00:54.648)
Well, for business owners, it's having a person behind the company or having a face behind the company is one of those kind of key aspects of branding, which in the age of AI and really in the last decade or so has gotten increasingly important, mostly because the buying public today doesn't trust corporations anymore. mean, we don't trust faceless corporations. know, the mom on this
can smell a cell online a mile away. so you establishing a face to your brand and a personality behind your brand that people can relate to as a human is one of those things that will make your business so much more attractive to people and help them build that connection and that affinity for your brand in a lot easier than trying to beat them over the head with a bunch of
bunch of content that doesn't have a person behind it.
Adam O'Leary (01:53.888)
Absolutely. No, that makes total sense. And when you're talking about a personal brand, let's go just a little bit deeper on that. What would you say is the most important characteristic of a personal brand? So if I was to go ahead and start today, what would be the first thing I'd want to go ahead and do?
Philip VanDusen (02:00.792)
Sure.
Philip VanDusen (02:11.458)
Well, the first thing that you have to do, there's kind of four pillars to personal branding that I'd like to talk about. The first one is credibility, then there's visibility, value, and authority.
And you have to start with credibility. So you have to start with what is it, what is that thing that you know? What is that towering strength of yours that you can bring to an audience and create transformations for them? So the first thing you have to do is really figure out what is it that you're great at and what do you know a lot about? And that's kind of built through...
your own self understanding of your abilities, but also you're crafting your own story and being able to articulate that story in a way that takes people on a journey with you so they understand where you came from and why you're doing what you're doing, what your mission and your purpose is. And also is establishing you as an expert and giving you an opportunity to display that knowledge that you have. The next step.
And this is the one where a lot of business owners struggle.
a lot of people who building personal brands period struggle, which is visibility, which is establishing a place where you can be seen. You can be seen regularly, consistently, where you can be heard, where you can over time be recognized, and where people know how to find you. And that's the place where most people struggle because either they don't know where to show up or they don't know how to show up. They don't know, or they're afraid. They're just afraid of the sound of their own voice. They're afraid of seeing
Philip VanDusen (03:48.001)
seeing themselves on video or in photographs. And that hurdle that a lot of people meet when they're building a personal brand or a brand for their company is where 85 % of the people kind of fall down. And if you can get over that hurdle, that kind of dare to suck hurdle, as I like to call it, and get out there and try and put yourself out there.
that you're already ahead of 85 % of other people. so visibility is kind of the next step is finding a platform and finding a format for you to become known. That could be writing, could be podcasts, could be video, could be blogging, whatever that is. It also could be physical stages. So you could speak, you could decide to write a book. There's a million different kind of formats of content that you can start to become visible on.
And then you have to start delivering that value. So how do you describe or how do you put out the value, that knowledge that you know that's gonna benefit other people? What is that problem that you're gonna solve? And then as you do that over time consistently, you build your authority and your independence, essentially. And so you kind of mentioned at the beginning, building a personal brand is kind of like a personal...
career insurance policy and that's where you are establishing a presence and a reputation for yourself outside of a company or an agency that you work for or if you're working for yourself and you have your own company, how do you build that personal, that human entity that people are gonna be able to be attracted to and identify with so they can trust your company?
Adam O'Leary (05:45.024)
Absolutely and in a question on this so you're talking about visibility How many places do you actually recommend that somebody goes ahead and and start sharing content? Is it just one place or five places like people talk about omnipresent? But is that better or is it one place is the ideal?
Philip VanDusen (06:01.706)
I think that one place is by far the ideal. It's so much better to go deep and in one area and narrow than shallow and broad. The quickest way to fail is to try to show up everywhere all the time, because A, it leads to burnout, and B, people don't know where to find you. One of the best reasons for kind of going deep into one particular platform, at the beginning anyway, is that people know where you are.
And if people are, we're all inundated by a million social platforms and formats and you are, if you're not showing up consistently in one particular feed or one particular location, people are not gonna be able to find you and you're just gonna get lost in all the thumb scrolling. So I recommend that people actually kind of choose a platform that's appropriate for the audience that they're trying to reach and that they,
go deep on that platform for at least six months to a year before they ever tried to branch out to anything else.
Adam O'Leary (07:03.261)
I love that. That's awesome. That's really really good advice and when it comes to delivering that value I feel like a lot of people get stuck. Okay, so I know what I'm the best in the world at but How do I go ahead and express that in terms of the value? How do I actually start sharing that? I just sharing case studies? Am I sharing step-by-steps on what I'm doing? What does that actually look like?
Philip VanDusen (07:26.87)
I think that the biggest kind of hurdle or roadblock that people meet when they're starting to kind of share that value is they haven't really clearly defined what they're doing. A lot of times people, they know what they know, but they don't know exactly who it's for, how it's going to benefit them, or how to make those stories so people can identify with them.
So one of the exercises that I have my coaching clients do is to develop a personal brand positioning statement essentially. And that's where you're laying out who you are, what you offer, who you offer it to, why you're better, and why you're different. And those are five things that are very key, but you would be surprised that when you ask people that question, tell me who you are, what you offer, who you offer it to, why you're better, why you're different.
So many people struggle at that. Like they haven't really taken the time to clearly define and articulate where they are positioning themselves in the market and what they are delivering in terms of value. And until you do that, can't, because everything else stems and flows from that. All of your content flows from that. All of your products and services flow from that. All of your marketing and advertising and outreach flow from that.
So until you kind of take those foundational strategic steps and capture and codify some of that information, you're just kind of flailing around. And I see a lot of that. People are just kind of like throwing spitballs at the wall and hoping something sticks and then chasing something that happened to get a lot of likes or follows and finding out that they've kind of painted themselves into a corner of talking about
or delivering some value around something that they're A, not passionate about, don't have a lot of expertise in, or isn't really creating that transformational solution for their target audience, which is what they actually should be doing.
Adam O'Leary (09:38.077)
love that. So you're talking about getting hyper, hyper, hyper specific on who your ICP is, your ideal customer profile. And something that I'm thinking about here is you said stories. So when you were talking about value, you said the word stories. How do you go ahead and use stories when you are delivering value?
Philip VanDusen (09:55.962)
Well, in my particular case, use, I've been at this branding thing for 30 years, so I've accumulated a lot of stories with all the clients that I've worked with and coaching clients have had. But when you're starting off, if you don't have a lot of that industry experience and you don't have a lot of case study experience or stories to tell around that, you start with your own story. Because one of the things about
any kind of personal branding is that people say, know, who can I talk to? Who can I help? You know, what do I have that anyone needs? And I like to kind of give people the suggestion that talk to yourself a year ago. Talk to yourself a year and a half ago when you were struggling with something and you were just learning something that was going to get you over that next hurdle. Talk to the person who's just a few steps behind you and then learn to articulate what your
your journey was, what your hero's journey was. Where did you start off? How did you become interested in what you did? What were your struggles? What were your challenges? What were your wins? Where did you create a transformation for yourself? Where were those sort of pivotal watershed moments in your career where you had epiphanies or where you made leaps in achievement or progress?
start writing those things down. This is actually an interesting point, Adam. I was coaching a client who was doing a women's lifestyle brand startup about five years ago. And her startup was kind of complicated. It was a little bit of workshops, it was a little bit of product, it was a little bit of life stage coaching. And she was developing her own positioning statement for her company.
But when she talked about it, she kind of had a hard time clearly articulating what it was. And so I encouraged her actually to just go on a whole bunch of podcasts. And when you're on a podcast and people are asking you questions, one of the things you're forced to do is really kind of talk through what it is that you do. And if you do that on multiple occasions, your story actually starts to gel and solidify within yourself.
Philip VanDusen (12:16.715)
And you can do that just talking and turn on Zoom and hit record and you can tell a bunch of stories to yourself and watch it back. But when you're having those conversations, whether it's at a conference or whether you're being interviewed somewhere or whether it's just a networking coffee conversation or a Zoom conversation with someone that you meet on LinkedIn, you're practicing telling that story. And you'd be surprised how many kind of, how many case study ideas
you know.
motivational stories will come out of talking about yourself and talking about your journey. And over time, you'll kind of start to build up a little bit of a portfolio or a toolbox, so to speak, of ways that you can articulate what it is that you do and the transformations that you create.
Adam O'Leary (13:10.958)
amazing and if you had to say one simple win that somebody could go ahead and implement right now to strengthen their personal brand what would you recommend?
Philip VanDusen (13:20.815)
Well, like I said earlier, I think that a lot of people don't have a personal brand problem. What they have is a clarity problem. And once your value is clear to yourself, your brand becomes easier to communicate in every single thing that you do. It's easier for you to remember. It's easier for other people to remember. And if they can remember it, they can recommend it. They can recommend it to their friends. They can make network connections for you. They can introduce you to colleagues.
Once you get clear on what it is that you do and find a way to clearly articulate that, the opportunities actually start to find you. And so as soon as you kind of nail down that personal brand positioning statement, which are getting really clear on what it is that you do, who you do it for, and what that transformation is that you create, and you get that one sentence nailed,
And it's really a lot of wordsmithing. mean, you got to spend some time with it because the first time you write it, it's going to be a 300 word paragraph. And then you just start paring it down and paring it down and paring it down and getting down to the essence of those words. You have to kind of channel your inner copywriter or break out chat GPT. Chat GPT is great for stuff like that, especially for people who aren't used to writing in that kind of strategic way and kind of build that elevator pitch for yourself. Because once you do that,
It instantly will improve your website, the copy on your website, your social media bios. You'll be able to introduce yourself better. You'll be able to network better. Creating content will be easier for you. It'll be easier for you to kind of capture a number of different themes of your content. What I suggest people do is write five theme buckets of things that they are going to talk about in their content. And then...
do like two or three ideas around each theme. And before you know it, you have 15 or 20 pieces of content ideas that you have. And so as soon as you nail down that positioning, that strategy in a really clear, know, crystallized way, everything else becomes easier.
Adam O'Leary (15:34.672)
Amen to that. I totally agree. And I know that you have a free gift that you'd like to give our audience. How can they go find it and what is that gift?
Philip VanDusen (15:44.815)
Sure, I've developed a tool, it's called a personal brand wheel. And what it is, is it's a tool or framework that's loosely based on a life wheel, which is something that a lot of personal coaches use. And it's broken into 12 quadrants. And in those quadrants are kind of 12 key components of building a personal brand. And this tool has a number of question prompts that come with it, that help you.
kind of fill it out. And what it does is it helps you kind of map out where you are on your personal brand building journey now, but then in kind of where you're performing, what you've considered, what you may need to work on, what needs refining. But then it's also a tool that you can use to track your progress over time and make sure that you're not kind of ignoring or, or, you know, accidentally not paying attention to something that you should be because personal branding is complicated. There's a lot of moving parts to it.
And so this tool, the Personal Brand Wheel, is really, really helpful in making, kind of creating a visual framework that you can clearly kind of focus on the different aspects of building your brand and making sure that you're addressing them all. And so if you go to philipvandusen.com slash PBW for Personal Brand Wheel, you can download that free PDF. And as I said, it's got a lot of questions and props in it.
instructions on how you can fill it out and it's pretty clear about how it can be how can be valuable for you
Adam O'Leary (17:16.35)
That's outstanding. Philip, thank you so much for your time. I absolutely love this. I actually have literally a page of notes based on our conversation here. So thank you so much.
Philip VanDusen (17:24.975)
Absolutely, it was great being on the show, Adam.
Adam O'Leary (17:27.74)
Absolutely and everyone thank you so much for listening and I will see you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
