Brand Yourself

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We are in our 23rd or 24th year. We just hit the Inc. 5000 company for the third time.

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We have dozens and dozens of employees in multiple countries and the event I’m about to share, no question, was the most pivotal change that caused more growth, more ideas, more anything, than anything else that’s ever happened. So I’m gonna jump right in. Many moons ago, I want to call it end of 2012, I was on a call with two ladies and a site partner of ours, and these two ladies were trying to negotiate something else for one of our site partners, and I got involved with the discussion.

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And I noticed that one of the two ladies was fairly strong, and there was something magnetic, and she was very protective of this site partner’s future, his growth, and it was kind of exciting. It was really cool, and I remember hanging up that call. I really didn’t know these two ladies at all.

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I met them on this call, and I remember hanging up the phone. I was upstairs in the kitchen. I was using our fax line because I wanted to make sure my cell phone didn’t drop.

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So I ran upstairs, got on the landline, and hung up the phone. I remember running down to my office and scratching these two ladies’ names on a piece of paper, and I called them back immediately, right after hanging up the phone, and I said, is there any chance I can ask you gals a question? What exactly do you do for my site partner? And they said, well, we’re kind of in the field of CEO branding. We help CEOs launch a second career.

Most importantly, though, we elevate the CEO’s name so that it stands in the light that the CEO needs it to stand in, and they went on to explain that a lot of executives and a lot of leaders of companies, they don’t realize how, in this world of Google, when they’re doing business, how many people are Googling the name of the CEO, the name of each manager, the name of the company. So they kind of educated me real quick on just the power of the CEO brand, and I said, you know, that’s amazing. Could you do that for me? And the lady’s like, well, sure.

And so we started discussing how it works, and she goes, the first thing we need to do is we need to get you to write a book. And I says, well, as a matter of fact, I just finished my book. And they said, oh, well, then let’s go right to the next step.

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We need to get you on stage. And I said, oh, well, that’s going to be a problem. You know, I’m not a public speaker, as a matter of fact.

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And I walked them through my very first public presentation of which I had an anxiety attack. I broke out in a sweat, and I quit the project that was on that day, never to speak again. It was brutal.

So I said, that’s probably not going to work.