Personal Brand Cannot Be Planned in Excel

In my understanding, a brand is a set of actions and decisions you make to achieve your goals, mainly business ones, but they can also be life goals.

If you plan it with your head and not with an influencer course from Instagram titled “How to build your brand in 4 weeks and earn 100k” then you know it’s not a goal in itself but one element of the puzzle. Just like creating a LinkedIn profile won’t change anything automatically if you don’t do further actions.

To summarize: Personal brand is decisions about what I will do (e.g.: write on LinkedIn, look for podcasts where I can appear, try to get good conferences), who I want to reach and with what message.

And reputation? In my understanding, it’s the result of these actions, independent of ourselves but from the cognitive filters of a specific person.

Example: For one person, appearing on Kanał Zero will be a huge honor, while for someone else, the fact that we appeared with Stanowski will be a reason to cross us off the list of potential suppliers. Same with WOŚP, some television or anything that refers to our worldview.

We have no influence on this, but we can predict it and make our own decisions.

Okay, but where’s that Excel?

I showed Monika at the spring editions of I Love Marketing and InfoShare as an example of such a person with whom we’ve been building her brand for over 2 years. Based on detailed plans, processes in Miro and Excel sheets with budget or media plan.

I don’t do this alone, Monika also has people she works with because she likes and respects them. Marcin Malec is a storytelling wizard, teaching her light writing. Daria designed the identity and supervises me in its implementation in various touchpoints, and the team is actually much larger.

Does it work? It works like a well-oiled machine. Several thousand LinkedIn followers didn’t come from nowhere, and Monika is planning several big things for this year.

Why did it work out for Monika and not necessarily for others? I hope I won’t get killed for this list 😊

1. Effect proportional to work effort. A large part of people say they’ll do something, Monika does it.
2. Surrounding yourself with the right people. Monika has a gift for finding great people (but I just complimented myself) and making them want to work.
3. Excel is boring, but it brings you down to earth. Many people want to be everywhere at the same time. Then there’s a lack of resources, mainly strength, time and money. Monika goes step by step. LinkedIn is handled, time for the next channels.
4. Delegate what you can, but not everything. Every experienced manager knows that you should delegate what you can. However, if we outsource everything in such projects, we lose the most important element of personal brand – authenticity. Monika delegates, but she writes the posts herself, chooses graphics and topics herself, and responds to people on LinkedIn herself because it should be her message.

It was great to meet together at the workshops, this time about Excel and plans.