Personal branding for small business owners:

it's about creating exposure, not feeling exposed

I was invited on to Sumantha McMahon’s Upgrade Your Education Business podcast, and we covered a lot of ground: personal branding, pricing, community, and what it actually feels like to change direction in a business you've built from scratch. This is the longer version of that conversation.

Where the passion for community comes from

I spent eight years working at home on my own before it was cool and before there was any cultural narrative around it being difficult. My transcription business meant sitting with headphones on, listening to other people talk for eight, ten, sometimes more hours a day. It was the kind of work that hollowed you out. Boring beyond description, and isolating in a way that crept up on you before you noticed it had arrived.

When I started using LinkedIn and then Clubhouse, I realized how much I'd missed just talking to other people who were on the same path. People who understood what it was like to be building something alone, who didn't look at you blankly when you said you were worried about lead generation or pricing or whether the direction you'd chosen was the right one. I felt more human just from having those conversations. More inspired. More connected to a version of my working life that felt worth showing up for.

So when I built The HoLT, it was because I was building the thing I'd needed and hadn't had. Not just a place to learn, but a place to exist alongside other business owners without having to justify yourself or perform confidence you didn't feel that day.

What community actually does for you

One of the most underrated things a community does is normalize your experience. We fool ourselves constantly into thinking it's just us. I'm the only one struggling with this. I'm the only one who can't figure that out. I'm the only one who loses a client and feels like the whole thing might collapse. And then you go into a room of other small business owners and say something out loud and three people immediately say oh yes, that happened to me last month, and here's what I did.

The emotional rollercoaster, the extreme highs, the extreme lows, the wanting to throw it all in multiple times a week. All of that is normal. Not a sign that you're doing it wrong. Just the reality of running a small business and learning so many things in such a short period of time while wearing so many hats. Community doesn't fix that. But it makes it survivable in a way that going it alone simply doesn't.

The practical side matters too. Someone asks in our advice channel whether anyone knows how to do a particular thing. Three people jump in. One knows the answer. One's been through the same problem and can share what worked for them. One offers to jump on a call. That's a different quality of support from Googling it at midnight on your own, and it costs £65 a month rather than hundreds of pounds for a specialist you may or may not be able to trust.

On staying present in your own business

Sumantha raised something I hear occasionally and always have feelings about, which is this idea that there's no point in building a business unless your goal is to eventually extract yourself from it entirely, hire employees, turn it into an asset, and walk away. I understand the logic, and I know that's a valid goal for some people. But it's not the only valid goal, and I get a bit tired of it being presented as the obvious endpoint everyone should be working towards.

My goal with The HoLT was never to build something I didn't want to be in. I built something I did want to be in. I'm in there every single day, answering questions, connecting people, hosting calls, and I genuinely love it. We had 250 business owners at our Christmas party and it was one of the best nights I've had in years. That's not incidental to the business. That is the business. If you build something based on passion and purpose, you often don't want to leave it, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The more useful question isn't "when will you exit?" but "what would need to be true for you to be able to take time away when you need it?" And the answer to that is usually: a good team, clear processes, and a business that isn't entirely dependent on you doing every single task. You can have all of that and still be present, still be the heart of it, still show up because you want to rather than because you have to.

Changing direction without shame

I walked away from LinkedIn training while it was still going really well. There was no dwindling of enquiries. I was still making good money. I just wasn't enjoying it in the same way anymore, and I could see that with The HoLT I could help far more people in far less time for a similar amount of money overall. One path had a ceiling. The other had scale. The choice felt fairly obvious once I framed it that way.

But I notice a lot of people feel something like shame about changing direction, as if pivoting means the previous thing failed. It doesn't. The LinkedIn training didn't fail. It was still going strong when I walked away from it. I just decided to go somewhere else. You're allowed to do that. You're allowed to reach the top of something, decide there's nowhere further to go from there, and choose a different mountain.

I genuinely think I'm missing the shame gene when it comes to this stuff. I tried to climb Kilimanjaro last year and didn't make it to the top because my body couldn't handle the altitude. Do I feel bad about it? No. I gave it a shot. Most people in the world will never attempt it. The trying is the thing to be proud of, not just the reaching the top.

Pricing: the framework that changed how I thought about it

When I first started charging £99 for an hour of LinkedIn training, I was overwhelmed by it. That used to be what I'd earn in a ten-hour day doing transcription. It felt audacious to the point of being ridiculous. And then someone who I'd charged £99 told me she'd made £50,000 in the six weeks since our session, and asked why on earth I was only charging £99.

That reframe shifted everything. I'd been pricing my time. She was buying knowledge that changed the trajectory of her business. Those are not the same thing and they should not be priced the same way.

When I raised my prices the first time, my approach was simple. I announced the increase, said the price was going up on a specific date, and offered ten spots at the current rate as a last chance. Every time I did it, people took the spots. The only pushback I ever got was from people who were never going to hire me and who I wouldn't have wanted to work with anyway. Nobody whose opinion I respected told me I was charging too much.

There's a useful heuristic here: if you're never getting any pushback or hesitation on your pricing at all, you're probably not charging enough. The right price will occasionally make someone pause. It will rarely make everyone pause. If it makes everyone pause, revisit it. If it never gives anyone pause, put it up.

There's also a deeper version of this, which Sumantha identified and which I think is worth naming. A lot of us price based on our own relationship with money rather than our clients' relationship with it. I grew up putting things back in the supermarket because I couldn't afford them. I was on benefits with my son. When I was first pricing my coaching I was thinking, who's going to pay three grand for three hours of my time? Because through my lens, three grand was enormous. Through the lens of a business owner who'd save six months of trial and error, get a clear blueprint, and be on their way to making £50,000 in six weeks, three grand was actually pretty reasonable. Those are different relationships with that number and you can't price from your relationship alone.

Personal branding: creating exposure, not feeling exposed

Sumantha asked me about personal branding and specifically whether I agreed with the idea that company brands are becoming less important and personal brands are becoming more important. My honest answer is that I think it's more nuanced than that. Company brands aren't dead. The Beyond Meat social media presence is brilliant and warmly human without being about a specific person. Business brands become more personable, and personal brands become more powerful. Both can coexist.

What I want to push back on is the idea that building a personal brand means oversharing. I hear this a lot. People think personal branding means posting about what you had for lunch, writing their diary on LinkedIn, making themselves vulnerable in ways that feel deeply uncomfortable. It doesn't mean that.

The way I explain it to clients is this. Imagine I tell you I love to travel. My favourite food is Thai. I've got a dog and some cats. I'm a solo parent. I'm covered in tattoos. For each one of those things where you think, oh me too, we've created an invisible thread between us. You'll remember me more because the thing you're most familiar with in the world is yourself, and now I'm connected to that. Add three, four, five of those invisible threads and every time you hear my name or see me you'll stop and pay attention.

You don't need to tell people every detail of your life to create those threads. You don't need to tell them every single place you visited in Asia or everything that happened at the full moon party. Telling people you used to be a backpacker in your twenties is enough. That's the connection point. Everything else is optional.

Share your values. Share a little of your experience. Share what matters to you in the world. That's enough to connect with the right people without making yourself feel exposed. The phrase I use is: it's about creating exposure, not feeling exposed. Building a personal brand should feel like opening a door, not standing in the street with no coat on.

Watch the full episode with Sumantha below.