If you have a growing business right now, congrats! But if you still haven’t built your own personal brand apart from that business of yours, then it’s time you start creating one – because there is more to you than just your business!

In today’s episode, Erik Cabral speaks with Greg Kihlstrom about why and how he built his personal brand alongside growing his company. Greg is a CX, EX, and digital transformation consultant and coach, an author, a keynote speaker, an Agile certified coach, and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Greg is also the host of the podcast called The Agile Brand

Starting a company at 25 years old, Greg thought it was the only thing he could identify himself with. But he eventually realized he had to make a separation between himself and his company and create his personal brand.

Listen in as Greg also shares his passion for making people, processes, and technology work together with the end goal of making happy customers.

Here are some power takeaways from today’s conversation:

Episode Highlights:

The Classic Entrepreneur Fallacy

There’s this fallacy around being an entrepreneur where you get to do what you love every single day. But you end up having to worry about all the stuff you don’t – the legal, the operational, the financial, etc.

However, as an owner, it's your job to sell. Nobody can sell like you. Although at a certain scale that has to change, some things, or at least some percentage, will still fall on you. And so, even if you don’t like sales, you don’t like finance, you don’t like the legal or the operational stuff, you have to learn to embrace those things. Figure out the things you’re good at and those you should strive to be better at. At the same time, recognize the things that you’re not good at, which you can outsource if those are draining you emotionally.

Building Your Personal Brand

A lot of people try to write down and figure out the zeros and ones behind creating a personal brand. But it’s not a blueprint or formula you can just create.

Your personal brand isn’t created exactly by design. Instead, it’s something you need to figure out along the way and the pieces will then start to fall into place. It’s a matter of making that conscious decision to create that separation between what you do and who you are.

The Key to a Good Customer Experience

As good a job as you could do branding, marketing, and advertising your brand, if the experience of the customer was terrible, then it’s going to be hard to keep saying how good it was.

If the employees that are designing and building the product or front line employees delivering that product or service are unhappy and disengaged, then how in the world are you supposed to deliver a good customer experience?

Resources Mentioned:

Website: https://www.gregkihlstrom.com/

Books: https://www.gregkihlstrom.com/books

Podcast: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlstrom