Personal Brand

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently after reading a blog by Mark Suster where he argues that if you don’t define your personal brand, someone else will. He’s absolutely right, it happens all the time and doing an MBA changes the way that you and other people perceive your brand. After reading the article I tried to remember back to the last time I actually stated my brand and for me, pretty much the only time I do it regularly and explicitly is when someone asks “So what do you do?”

When you answer this question, the person you are talking to puts you in a mental box: “that guy’s an engineer” or “she’s in finance”. That then gets packaged up with whatever preconceptions that person has about the box they’ve put you in “that guy’s an engineer; he must be socially incompetent” or “she’s in finance; she must be totally focused on money”. I might be focusing on the negative here, it could quite easily be “that guy’s an engineer; my dad was an engineer and he was awesome” but the outcome is the same. You, as the speaker, have almost no control over the impression you will leave.

This freaks me out a little and it stops me from actually telling people what I am. I want to say “I’m an entrepreneur who started an engineering company with a couple of buddies which went OK, then started a couple more businesses that didn’t go so well. I didn’t do much engineering (because the other guys are better at it than I am) so I filled in the gaps to let them do their jobs better (sales, marketing, accounting etc.) and our businesses didn’t fail because the engineering was wrong, they failed because of everything else so I went to school to learn some skills so I won’t screw up as badly next time and now I’m a student.”

But I don’t. Not just because it’s a bit of a mouthful but also because it’s not going to create the kind of first impression that I want. So how do you get around that?

It comes down to the message you want to communicate. The easiest way to stop being put in a box is to give people an answer they don’t have a box for (some people who have written on this topic before me have suggested things like: “I’m a pirate” or “I run around in circles waving my arms a lot” which gets a giggle but really doesn’t solve the problem). Some people deflect the conversation by stating who they work for rather than what they do (I work for Nike) to create a good impression but that doesn’t tell me who you are unless you’re the personal embodiment of Nike, and a certainly hope you’re not!

And back we come to personal branding: How do you want the world to perceive you? When I read through what I’d like to say but don’t there are three themes that I’m trying to get across.

1. How do I add value? I make other people better. This can be as simple as getting the little stuff done so that they can concentrate on their job and as complex as diagnosing when someone doesn’t have the skills that are needed for the task and can’t ask for help so you have to intervene so that the job gets done but the person doesn’t feel bad about the way that it went.
2. I am disruptive. Anyone who’s sat in a class with me knows I can’t keep my mouth shut, I believe that education is participatory experience, if you don’t challenge what’s being proposed then you’re going to fall for any old crap that someone pushes at you. This extends to my professional life as well, I love technology for it’s ability to completely change the landscape of an industry. It’s one of the big drivers behind my push into 3D printing. Change is amazing!
3. I like to learn. I’ve always been surrounded by people who value education (my parents, my brother, several cousins and many of my friends are teachers or in academia). This has led me to sign up for MOOC’s, use codecademy and spend at least an hour a day to reading blogs and education sites (I’d recommend the conversation, macrobusiness, hack-a-day and seth godin’s blog as a great range of interesting reads that you can digest quickly on a mobile device in between whatever you are doing). I’m interested in stuff.

Distilling this down, I can turn it into three key messages:

• I make others better
• I am disruptive
• I want to learn

How this ties back to the MBA is that I feel a bit like that about being a student. If I say I’m a student to someone, they look at me and think; here’s guy in his 30’s who’s still at school, mustn’t know what he wants to do. Some people might argue that if I gave some more information, “I’m doing an MBA at Melbourne Business School”, I might get a different reaction but I still have no control. Maybe the person I’m speaking to thinks an MBA is a waste of time, maybe they don’t like formal education. Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether I’m a student or not, that’s not who I am. What I really want to communicate is those core concepts: Disrupting and making others better and learning. So now my response is clear, when I get a question like ‘what do you do’ I can answer it in terms of what I really want to communicate:

               “I’ve gone back to school to study so I can help the people I work with do their jobs better because we are going to change the world”

Plenty for the listener to respond to, creates a huge level of engagement, hard to put in a box and, creates a positive, memorable first impression. That’s what I wanted to say.

Planning for the Next Step

So I’m rapidly approaching the end of the MBA and that’s pushed a whole new challenge to the fore; the job-hunt.

Ideally I’d like to do a start-up (second only to a private equity buyout of Dungeons and Dragons from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro but that seems… unlikely, at least by me, at this point). The issue is, after 18 months of self-funded study I’m getting to the stage where I can’t even afford the big boxes of Mi-Goreng noodles anymore (check them out, terrible but amazing!) so I need to find another funding source if I’m going to do this. There are plenty of places out there that do this (packages that include: some seed funding to keep you in noodles and internet; sometimes physical resources like storefronts or workstations and; mentoring) but two worth checking out are:

• Y-combinator: the biggest and the best out of the States
• Sketchbook Ventures: a local incubator that’s just opened funded by the guys from Catch-of-the-Day

Y-Combinator is the grand-daddy of the incubator/VC scene, located in Silicon Valley in the States and having spawned a host of startups including some really successful ones like Dropbox, reddit and AirBnB. Sketchbook has just started up in Melbourne and just divested Vinomofo which was bought out earlier this year and has been the test case for their incubator.

So I’ve got together with a couple of people (if there’s one thing I’ve learned from 3G Engineering it’s: “everything is better in a team”) and we’re putting together some pitches for the incubators. I haven’t sat on the other side of the table so I can only imagine the huge principal agent problem that these guys face. Y-combinator gets a couple thousand entries for each batch (they run their program twice a year) and end up taking around 60 teams on. 10 guys, 200 hundred pitches to review each and then after the first cut, probably re-reading and sharing a bunch for discussion. And in every one, each team is convinced that their idea is going make everyone rich (or happy, or environmentally responsible, take your pick).

So there are two parts to this, firstly we need to work out what idea (or ideas) we want think are our best. The second part is communicating our idea to the judges; demonstrating competence without isolating people with too much detail. There are a lot of good tools out there for doing both of these things (one I really like is the business model canvas by Alexander Osterwalder) but because it’s trying to cover a lot of ground, it doesn’t focus on some of the stuff we think is pretty important. So we’ve decided to split up the ideas phase from the pitch phase using our own model:

Ideation Filtering Model: criteria for determining the best idea to pitch to incubators

In reality, nothing in any of the pie-sections is new, it’s just a different way of combining it and presenting the information but I guess that’s the secret to a good idea; looking at a bunch of information a different way and figuring out what’s important to you so that when you put it back together it tells the story we want.

So we’ll see how it goes. Right now I’m heads down on a new project in the 3D printing space, where the aim is to:  give the user the ability to make their board game character look exactly like it appears in their imagination. It’s fun, I get to combine my passion for dungeons and dragons with the exploration of a new technology and make a cool contribution to the community at the same time.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your feedback on the model, when you’re thinking of ideas, what other bits are important?