Patience Jones: Hello, and welcome to As Built, the podcast from Graphicmachine about architecture firms and buildings, and how both get built. I'm your co-host, Patience Jones. With me is Brian Jones, your other co-host. Thank you for joining us. Today, we are talking about personal branding. I feel like this phrase sort of lends itself to all kinds of misconceptions about what we might be talking about, so let's start with defining: What is personal branding? I'm going to answer my own question.
Brian Jones: Good.
Patience Jones: What we mean by that is taking a similar approach to how you might develop a brand for a company or a firm, and using that to create more opportunities for yourself as a professional. I'm going to use Brian Jones as an example. If Brian Jones is an architect, what do I as a prospective client think when I hear the name “Brian Jones?” What do I know about him? What do I associate with him? What assumptions do I make about his capabilities because of what I have read and heard and seen, either from him or on other channels? For years, I think, the assumption was that this was sort of something that happened organically on its own, and there isn't really much you can do about it except keep doing your work and doing it well. But that's not really true anymore, if it ever was, and there are lots of things that you can do to shape and develop your personal brand, so that you can be more in control of your current and future opportunities.
Brian Jones: I think I want to back up just a little bit from that, as to maybe the reticence that some people may feel about doing personal branding. Historically, and you kind of touched on it a little bit, personal branding happening organically was something that was sort of viewed as merit-based: I would be featured in a magazine or I might be featured in an article, or somebody might be talking about me, and that was merit-based. What has happened to those “merit-based” publications, and I'm using air quotes you can't see-
Patience Jones: Oh, we can see.
Brian Jones:... is that many of them have become sort of what they would call pay-to-play, where you buy the editorial space and/or you buy an advertisement, and in reciprocation, they produce an editorial about you. So, those don't have the same truth to them anymore. They're not happening organically because you've done something amazing, so this sort of taking charge of your own narrative is really important, because otherwise, your story's just not going to get told, and you can't count on those networks to carry that for you.
Patience jones: There are so many other channels and ways that people collect information and absorb information. Going to a magazine is not the primary way that people are learning about architects. That may not be anything that they do, period.
Brian Jones: Most of those publications really service the architecture community and not prospective clients, so if you're looking for the comradery of your fellow architects, then they are highly successful. If you're looking to grow your influence in a client place, they may be less successful.
Patience Jones: And there is a place for those publications, and many of them still do legitimate, merit-based features of firms. We don't want leave the impression that if you've been on a cover of Record, that's not a really big accomplishment, because it is, and it means a lot. But for clients looking to hire you, they may not read that magazine. They may not know what that means, and there are more accomplished, impressive architects than there are available covers of Record.
Brian Jones: Absolutely. I think you laid it out right there in a very important way, and I just want to underscore it a little bit, which is the idea that the prospective client may not know what this means. There's a lot of potential for promotion, and they may just see it as another aspect of that. They may not give it any more import than a social post that you might put out there. So, that's just setting the groundwork for why we're talking about this today.
Patience Jones: Personal branding is different than a company branding in a lot of ways, but one of the ways is the approach that you take to it. So, if you've ever been involved in a firm rebranding, sometimes, and I'm not saying this is the right way to do it, but sometimes it starts with, "Who do we want to be as a firm? Let's develop a brand that's aspirational to that thing, and then over time, the firm will become that brand." This is not what should happen in personal branding. Personal branding is not saying, "Okay, you need to become this other person, and then you'll get lots of business." It's saying, "Okay, who are you right now? What are all of your skills and all of your experience, and how do we showcase that in a way that resonates with who you need to be reaching?"
Brian Jones: The natural question here is, yes, in a perfect world, promoting myself sounds great, but I have a lot of problems with promoting myself. The truth is that from a statistical standpoint, we are at a moment in history where peoples' trust in companies and firms, as far as what they produce, is at an all-time low. The need for you to put yourself front and center has never been more important to how vital your firm is and how much it grows. This is something to think about.
Patience Jones: I think the word “promotion,” too, is worth talking about because it's kind of a gross word. People hate it, and architects especially hate it. Personal branding is not about promotion in the typical sense of promotion that's like, "Hey, everyone, look at me." It's about finding non-gross ways to showcase your expertise, and the scale of subtlety to brazenness is quite large.
Brian Jones: Yeah.
Patience Jones: It really is just about finding the approach that works best for the architect and best for their audience. There are people who, by their nature, are going to be very much more in the showman category of, "Look at what I'm doing. Hey, everyone, look at this." And that's who they are and that's where they're most comfortable and that's what they like to do, and people sort of know that about them. And then there are people that are going to be much more shy and reluctant to be doing that, and it doesn't feel right to them to be that way. They would rather say quietly to someone, "Hey, I think I know how I could solve your problem." If you take that person and you try to apply the showman mentality, it's just going to bomb.
Brian Jones: Disaster.
Patience Jones: Nobody's going to be happy. It's going to come across as really inauthentic. This is about saying, okay, if your jam is to whisper quietly to people, then how do we make the most of that? How do we make sure you're whispering to the right people and you're saying what they need to hear?
Brian Jones: A really simple way to think about this is that if you were hiring somebody and you had three choices and you only knew something more about one of the choices, you would probably be more likely, assuming that it was positive information, to go towards the person that you knew the most about. That is true of everyone, and it's why conveying what you are as a person, who you are at this moment, is really important.
Patience Jones: And what you've done. You may have so much knowledge and certifications and publications and experience, and personal branding is not just about getting better clients, although it definitely is about that. It's also about moving up in your firm or moving to a different lateral in your firm or going to a different firm or starting your own firm - being the person that people recognize as, "Oh, that's the person who knows a lot about..." fill in the blank. In an ideal world, you as an architect want a client who's going to say, "Oh, I want to work with that person, whatever firm they're at." So if this is so effective, why don't more people do it?
Brian Jones: A large part of it is fear: fear of being judged, fear of feeling like, they're not the professional that they really are. That's a portion of it, but then most of it is time and the amount of time it takes to try and come up with a plan, to execute the plan, et cetera, is really problematic.
Patience Jones: I also think employers, whether that's a firm or somebody else, can sometimes discourage this sort of personal branding because they don't want to create a situation where somebody is poised to leave the firm. They are fearful that person will become really well-known, and then they'll leave, and they'll take all the clients with them. And at the end of the day, if somebody's going to leave, they're going to leave.
Brian Jones: Yeah.
Patience Jones: They might go to a better place if they've been able to build up their brand, but if they really want to leave, they'll leave. What you as a firm are missing out on if they're not building up their brand is all the benefit of them being a known, recognized subject matter authority that could be attracting clients to your firm and attention to your firm and press to your firm because you're scared that one day they might leave you. The fear is sort of the fear of- of being seen and being judged. We've talked about this before, but I encourage everyone to think about the imposter syndrome versus the Dunning-Kruger effect. Architects tend to suffer a lot - that's my official diagnosis - from imposter syndrome despite the fact that they are extremely well-educated, well-qualified, have loads of experience. They are always hearing that voice: "You don't really know how to do this. You're not really as good as you think you are. This project isn't going to go as well as your last one." This isn't because you as an architect are missing anything or have failed at anything. It's because there's an imposter syndrome that's just endemic to the profession. At the other end of the spectrum is the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the people who are frankly just not good at very much, but believe themselves to be amazing and believe themselves to be far more accomplished than they are. They go very brazenly into this world, telling everyone how great they are and that they can do all of these things. And if they can do that and they don't have anything to back it up, architect friends, you can do it because you do have things to back it up.
Brian Jones: We've talked a little bit around this, but let's kind of focus in on what this is, what it's not when you're thinking about personal branding. One of the first things that comes to mind is that it's not advertising. This isn't just producing ads about yourself. That is... No, no. That is not what... No, not what it is.
Patience Jones: Please don't do that.
Brian Jones: The other thing it is not, and this tends to be the tripping point for a lot of professionals, is getting into magazines. That’s seen as a rite of passage. Again, it plays a part in the puzzle, but it is not the puzzle itself. While your efforts may help you get into magazines over time, that in and of itself is not the end.
Patience Jones: Just to reinforce, personal branding is not about turning you into something that you're not. It's not about saying, "Okay, you've been doing institutional architecture for 10 years. Let's make your brand about single-family residential, and we'll turn you into an expert on that." That's not what this is. If you wanted to make a transition and say, "I'm tired of doing institutional. Now I want to do single family." Okay, let's focus on how we build up a brand for you around that, and what will you have to do to be able to do that.
Brian Jones: How do you go about starting this?
Patience Jones: The first thing is to do a little introspection and come up with a list of things that you are good at, accomplished at, and that you like to do. This is going to be hard because, again, see imposter syndrome. So you can either pretend that you're talking about somebody else, or you can ask somebody close to you to come up with a list about you. That will give you a starting point for what might be the components of your personal brand.
Because we know that this is hard, we've developed a program. There's an option for a complete do-it-yourself approach, where we set you up with a workbook that's customized to you based on all kinds of information that we get from you. Then there's a plan where we do this all for you, so you still have to give us the information, but then we build out your brand for you and help you execute on that, help you keep growing it. There are links in the show notes if you want more information about that. I think starting with, "What am I bringing to the table?" Because the answer is a lot. You just have to identify it with some specificity.
Brian Jones: The big takeaway here is, I think, that this is an important thing that you need to do for the growth of yourself and for the firm where you are.
Patience Jones: Absolutely, because as people start to age out of firms, they start to retire, there are going to be vacancies. There are going to be leadership gaps. And the people deciding who that next level of leader will be are going to be looking at things like, "Well, who is this person really, and what are they bringing to the table really?" And clients will be doing the same. So take what you're already good at and just talk about it in whatever way feels most comfortable to you.
