Turn social presence into business growth – Part 2

In this season finale, we explore the art of crafting a compelling personal brand, sharing your unique story, and reaching a global audience on social media.

This episode is part 2 of our 2-part special on leveraging your online presence for business growth. We’re joined by Ash Jones, the visionary founder of Great Influence—a platform dedicated to helping businesses and individuals amplify their brands.

With over a decade of experience and expertise, Ash has guided some of the most prominent entrepreneurs, including Steven Bartlett and Gary Neville, in developing their personal brand strategies.

Ash shares how a strategic personal brand can boost your business by enhancing brand recognition, fostering trust, creating new opportunities, and driving sales. But most importantly, he reveals how to build your personal brand the right way.

If you’re ready to expand your online presence and create content that not only engages but converts, this is the episode for you.

Here is his unfiltered advice below:

• Removing gatekeepers has made personal branding accessible to all
• Relationship building is now happening offline and online
• Define your goals to help build your personal brand
• Learn what you’re comfortable sharing with your audience
• Post on social media with stakeholder management in mind
• Sleep on it before sharing something vulnerable
• Everyone has to start their personal brand journey from zero
• Master the psychology of personal branding
• Keep your audience engaged by evolving your identity
• Be selfish—post content you’re passionate about
• AI can’t build your personal brand—it’ll make you sound generic
• Building a successful personal brand requires strong support
• Your personal brand must come from you to be authentic
• Skip the growth hacks—craft your personal brand the right way
• Take comfort in the fact that everyone gets nervous
• You can’t copy and paste someone else’s success
• How to keep up with the shifting sands

Removing gatekeepers has made personal branding accessible to all

Bex Burn-Callander:

Maybe you can start by telling us why it’s now so important that founders, and business leaders think about personal brand. Why is it so relevant now? Why should this be a priority for our listeners?

Ash Jones:

I think it’s always been important, but the issue is that it’s always been gatekept. So if you are a founder running a business, being a voice for that business and being well-known in your industry is always going to help with driving business and creating growth and opportunity.

But the ways that you would be that voice 20 years ago, where you’d need to write a book or be featured in a magazine or featured on a radio or public speaking event, are very different from now.

The idea of social media didn’t exist, and all those other mediums were gate kept by somebody else. You had to know an event organiser to ask you to do the event and you had to know a journalist to write about you to get into a publication.

Whereas now you can create a LinkedIn account, or an Instagram account and you own the platform.

You decide everything with it, and the power has gone to the individual now, and we’ve seen this across a ridiculous number of industries like music, sports athletes, influencers, YouTubers.

This idea of people being able to be a voice where they couldn’t before because the gates aren’t kept by people now, it is down to us.

And I think that happened first and foremost around probably the early adopters. People like Gary Vaynerchuk, he’s been leveraging social media for 15 years now, and he was kind of very early to it and understanding it.

And then when we started working on Steven Bartlett’s personal brand, that was in like 2015 and we were really early in terms of the UK and an entrepreneur leveraging social media.

And then now you’ve seen a lot more founders and entrepreneurs start to dip their toes in the water over the past few years.

And there’s been a bit of a trend of it happening. And I think it’s like the S curve and there comes a point where everybody knows about it now.

And it’s not like when I started Great Influence 6 years ago, I had to go tell people about the idea of doing this, that it was a good idea for a founder to be using social media in a certain way.

And that’s not the case anymore.

You’ve now got the biggest companies in the world at board level talking about how the group CEO or their leadership team should be more visible online as a voice of the company. Those conversations are happening at every level of business now.

So I think it was just a matter of social media unlocking the door and now we’re seeing everybody not only know that it exists but know that they have to be doing it in some way, shape, or form as well.

And I’ve been doing this for a decade now, and at the start, you had the startups leveraging it and startup founders in this country.

Steven Bartlett is one of them, maybe like Alan Barratt at Grenade was somebody who leveraged social media in the early days of Grenade.

And it was the thing the startups did, and then the scale-ups do it and then the corporate companies do it and the group CEOs do it. It just climbs its way up.

And I feel like personal branding now is at a point where everybody not only is aware of it and understands it, but they know the importance of it and where it fits in terms of priorities within business and having to do it.

And there’s nothing new to it. The art has been around for decades and has been leveraged by the smartest people in industries.

In the past looked like having a book rather than having a LinkedIn account. So I think the barriers being removed for people has naturally meant it’s more accessible to people, therefore more people do it.

So yeah, I think it’s that that’s kind of driven it.

Relationship building is now happening offline and online

Bex Burn-Callander:

As well as removing the gatekeepers. And forgive me if I’m wrong, but it feels like there’s been a real blurring between the professional self and the personal self.

So the person that you see today who’s talking about their business, you might not hear about their families.

Even it was 10 years ago, you might not hear about their families, what sports they do, their heartbreaks, whereas now it feels like everyone is talking about authenticity, which also means the kind of transparency.

So I think people are showing a lot more of themselves as well.

Ash Jones:

Yeah, I think again, it was something that was always happening, it’s just that element of it was happening offline.

So how relationships were built were typically offline and it wouldn’t be strange for you to have a meeting with somebody in a business context.

I’ve literally just had a meeting now and we spoke for an hour and a half about all things business, marketing, personal brand, and then at the end of the meeting she said, “I’m a fan of Metallica.”

And I was like, “Me too.” And we start talking about heavy metal bands and going to festivals and stuff like this. And that’s what happens in business.

It starts off in a business context and then you start learning more about the individual and the other elements of them as a person.

That’s always been happening in your business offline, whereas now it’s starting to happen online where people are bringing that element of themselves in some way, shape or form to the online piece.

And again, it plays the exact same role. It’s relationship building with people and it’s about giving people a rounded version of who you are as a person.

And there has been a trend towards it online in the last few years, but its forever happened offline and it’s how relationships are really built and developed in business, I think.

Define your goals to help build your personal brand

Bex Burn-Callander:

And I guess those conversations that you have that develop naturally when you’re at a meeting or you’re in the room with someone, that feels very easy, building a personal brand feels more intentional.

So how do you start with that particular project? What do you begin with? Because it doesn’t just happen on its own as a result of a conversation, you have to start somewhere.

Ash Jones:

Yeah, I think for me, I always start at what outcomes are you trying to create from doing it? What are the specific business and career outcomes that you’re trying to generate? And that looks different for everyone.

I’ve found, through working with a lot of different people in different industries at different stages of their career and business growth, they’re all trying to outcome different things.

But understanding what those outcomes are, like for somebody, say you are a founder who’s in the first year of the business, you’re responsible probably for the majority of the growth and opportunity.

It’s your network, it’s your intros, you are driving the sales, you are driving the hiring, you’re driving everything. And knowing, “Right, okay, I’m responsible for bringing customers or sales or the hires in.”

So being very clear on what the outcomes are means that you can reverse engineer how you make that happen.

And I think when people lose sight of the outcome they’re trying to generate, that’s when they end up doing things that aren’t right for them.

And I think it’s very easy now to turn up on social media and grow an audience talking about anything. And really we’re in business, we’re all looking for some kind of opportunity that we’re trying to create from doing this.

And if you’re going to put time and resource and effort and energy into something, there has to be an ROI.

I think being very intentionally clear about what that ROI is that you’re looking to get, kind of leads you to what steps you should be taking.

So if you’re somebody who’s like I say, a founder in year one, responsible for driving all the sales, you really need to be doing a few things online to generate that to happen.

And there’s a few things that you don’t need to do. They would be nice to have, but you don’t need to do them to get to the outcome that you’re trying to generate.

And from my experience, everyone’s path is different. So there is no, “Here’s a personal brand strategy, apply it.”

It’s very down to the individual and then you work backwards to build the plan, which makes it a bit difficult because it is very bespoke, but if you figure out what it is, you’re able to generate it.

And I think a lot of people approach personal branding a bit of a laissez-faire way, and they never end up getting the opportunity that they’re looking for because the execution isn’t geared towards making the opportunity.

Learn what you’re comfortable sharing with your audience

Bex Burn-Callander:

But there’s a tension here, isn’t there? Because if for example, the outcome that you are aiming for is to increase sales to your business, then it’s quite hard to do that on social media without turning everyone off because no one likes to be sold to, right?

But at the same time, then you wouldn’t be posting pictures of your dog or the view of the river on the way to work in the morning because that isn’t technically working towards your outcome.

So how do you navigate that I guess grey area between this is my authentic self and I want you to buy my product.

Ash Jones:

I think on selling to people, it’s selling without selling.

So take me for example, I run a personal branding agency and the way that I can help the agency get clients is to be somebody who talks about personal brand.

I never really say “Great Influence does this or we do that.” I just talk about personal brand as a subject. And by doing that, it tends to mean further down the line conversations happen that can turn into business.

But I’ve never really directly sold the work that we do and what we do, I more just talk around the subject of it.

So I think there’s an art to selling without selling and thought leadership is a big part of that. And then the second aspect is do you bring the personality and personal side into it in some sense? And I think it’s a very personal choice.

So there’s undoubtedly some benefits from bringing personal elements of who you are into doing this because it helps you to foster and build relationships and build connection with people that they can resonate to.

But I think there’s a pressure now to do it that maybe didn’t exist before because a lot more people are doing it. I don’t think that people have to buckle to that pressure.

I think the trick to all of this is doing something that you’re really comfortable with.

And for me personally, I try to show up online for the sake of the business. And there’s things I’m not comfortable sharing.

For example, professionally for the past 3 months, Great Influence has been amazing. But my personal life has been a mess for the past 3 months. But I’m not choosing to bring that online because I’m not comfortable talking about it.

If I was, I maybe would figure out how I talk about it, what’s right to talk about and how does it relate to the people that I’m speaking to into the world that I’m sitting in.

But I think you have to be comfortable with what you are doing with the execution of what you’re doing. And the minute that you start doing things you’re not comfortable with is the minute that you lose the consistency that you have to put in to make it all happen.

And I mean, it’s never say never. I’ve seen people go on a journey with this that we’ve worked with and they’ve naturally over time become more confident, more comfortable.

They naturally start talking about things wider than they initially started in the first place and their personal lives and all that kind of thing does come into it at times, and they grow the confidence to do that.

But I just think it’s very much about understanding what you are comfortable with and coupling that with the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve and going, “Right, okay, given what I’m trying to achieve and what I can do and what I’m comfortable with, what’s the execution that ticks those 3 boxes?”

And if you figure out that the consistency part becomes really easy. And I think one of the struggles with personal brand is consistency.

People can have spurts and moments where they’re very active and they feel on it and all these things, and then all of a sudden, it’s been 2, 3, 4 weeks and they’ve fallen out of the rhythm.

And I think it’s because they haven’t found that almost like trifecta and ticking the right boxes. And then I found that the people that do, consistency becomes very easy.

Post on social media with stakeholder management in mind

Bex Burn-Callander:

It’s really great to hear you, an expert be so pragmatic and sort of tackle these issues because I do feel there’s a lot of pressure to overshare and to share the bad stuff.

And in fact, we’ve had guests on this show whose businesses were really struggling and then, it was the founder of White Rabbit Skincare.

She went on Instagram and basically kind of had her breakdown in public saying, “I’m going to have to close my business. I’ve been throwing everything into this for the last few years and I can’t do it anymore.”

And then the response was enormous. She sold out within 24 hours every product she had went. But then she might feel pressured to keep sharing those kind of moments and sometimes maybe it’ll feel to her like it’s oversharing.

And I think that’s really hard for founders to know where to draw those boundaries.

Ash Jones:

The issue is that you’re not someone with no responsibilities. You’ve really got to bring into the picture the idea of stakeholder management.

The majority of people doing this in a business context have at least 1 person who it matters what they say, and it impacts the other person involved.

Whether you’re a freelancer and you have a client, you’ve got to think about what you’re saying through how the client perceives it.

Or you are the CEO of a 500-person company and you’ve got investors, you’ve got employees, you’ve got partners, you’ve got suppliers. There’s all those kind of things.

So stakeholder management really does have to come into the pitch with this. And you have to know the balance of, “Okay, I’m comfortable sharing something that’s a bit personal or a bit revealing of the business. How do I do that in the best way given the idea of stakeholder management? What can I say that’s going to toe the right line with our team? What can I say that’s going to toe the right line with the investors?”

And it is a bit of a complex thing to do. And I’ve seen a couple of instances. I literally saw one this morning of the founder of a fashion brand and she was essentially saying, “I can’t do this anymore.”

And in my head, I was thinking, I don’t think that’s the best thing for you to say. There’s a way to say what you want to say, but you’ve just got to package it in the right way.

Because what you’ve just posted, yes, a bunch of people on social that follow you and your audience are going to see it, but your team is going to see it and your leadership team is going to see it and your investors are going to see it and what confidence does it give them?

Yes, you’re going through a moment, and they’ll know that you’re going through a moment.

And the problem isn’t sharing the moment and being honest and vulnerable if that’s what you want to do. But it’s just being a bit smarter about how you package what you’re saying for it to land in the right way and to balance this idea of stakeholder management in the right way.

And I get it because business is a very emotional thing, and if you’ve got a voice online, you naturally feel a gravitational pull towards speaking, it helps you. It’s cathartic in a sense.

So I completely understand it, but I do think there is an element of, you’ve got to toe the line and you’ve got to be careful.

And it’s about being very tactical. I feel like personal branding in business is very, very, very tactical. Everything has to be thought out, it’s intentional because of those reasons that I just spoke about.

Sleep on it before sharing something vulnerable

Bex Burn-Callander:

So would you say if someone is having a moment like that or they would naturally take to social media and say, this is the worst day or something that you should always sit on it for a day? I mean, what’s the best advice when it comes to hitting the pause button in those moments of stress?

Ash Jones:

Yeah, I’ve felt it personally. Like I’ve been there, I’ve written the post and then I’ve just sat on it for a couple of days, and I’ve realized that essentially, I just needed to journal a little.

And then if I want to take something and share it and I think, “Oh, this could actually be quite valuable.” I’ll go back to the journal and figure out what of that is private and what is not private.

So yeah, I’d say anything that you think is going to be a vulnerability, it’s always worth sitting on it for a couple of days as nothing is ever immediate.

And then also it’s worth getting somebody else’s outlook on what you’ve said.

If you trust somebody, run it by them and just sense check things because I think it’s very easy nowadays to just to fire off a thought because you literally just open your phone and press post, you can do it in 15 seconds.

And that comes with a danger of, especially a lot of entrepreneurs can be quite impulsive and it kind of plays into that. It’s very easy to be impulsive and just shoot something off and then not even think about it.

And yeah, unfortunately, we’re in a world where your actions tend to have consequences. And I don’t say that to put people off the idea of personal branding, it’s just the reality and there’s great pros and opportunity that come from doing this, but there’s also great cons that come with it as well.

And you’ve got to find the balance between the two. And for me, the idea of personal brand, if you’re in business, it’s the number one most important thing because it feeds everything.

So that’s the level of importance and ROI and opportunity that you can create from it. There’s a reason why the people at the top of the game are investing so much into this.

Like Steven Bartlett has a team, and he spends the majority of his time doing personal brand because it feeds literally everything across his entire business life.

But you also have to get the balance of knowing the potential pitfalls of what you’re getting into and finding the line with things.

So I find that the majority of people know where the line is themselves and it’s just making yourself aware and sense checking.

Everyone has to start their personal brand journey from zero

Bex Burn-Callander:

You mentioned Steven there, we have to ask, how did you end up working together? Tell me a bit about that partnership and how you’ve helped him to become, I mean we can say super brand. He’s a super brand today.

Ash Jones:

Yeah, I met him in 2012 when he just dropped out of university. He famously did one lecture and dropped out and he had a business idea, and I met him at an event that had nothing to do with business.

And we had a mutual friend, and I was about to go to university for 3 years and I wanted to do something else alongside studying.

A mutual friend introduced us, Steve was 18, and he said, “Oh, Steven’s doing something to do with business.” And we spoke. And then yeah, I started working with him on this idea that he had.

And that idea took around 2 years to work on. And then that led to Social Chain, which was the agency that he built. And I became part of the founding team at Social Chain.

And my job at first was Marketing Director at Social Chain, so I was trying to help the agency market itself and build awareness in the industry.

And that very quickly pivoted to me building/working on Steve’s personal brand, as we realized that was the best way for Social Chain to drive business.

He wasn’t doing personal branding at the time. He started by just doing public speaking.

In the first year of Social Chain he was doing small events to 15, 20 people. And whenever he did them, it always drove business opportunities for us in a big way.

So we sat down at the end of the first year in 2015 and me and Steve had been speaking about something along the lines of making content for a couple of years before that, we just never had a reason to.

And now there was a really clear reason to because Social Chain would benefit from it massively. And then that journey started.

It was like, “Right, okay, let’s figure this out and start from the ground up.” And I’ve spent 4 years going on that journey with him.

Bex Burn-Callander:

And the result is Diary Of A CEO.

Ash Jones:

Yeah, it is crazy to think of the journey that he’s gone on. And the interesting thing is, when we sat down to film something for the first time, where we started was video content and we’d film videos.

And when we sat down for the first time to do it was a 2-and-a-half-minute video and it took 7 hours. He just couldn’t, he knew what he wanted to say, but he’d never done it before.

So he was stumbling over his words, we were going over it time and time again, and he was a bit in his own head, overthinking things and all this kind of thing.

And if you look at him now, 10 years later, he’s so incredibly well-versed at the art of being a speaker in different formats and mediums, but it wasn’t always the case.

I literally sat in the room for 7 hours to get a 2-minute video, whereas if you ask Steven Bartlett to do a 2-minute video now he does it in one take. There is no second take.

And there were 50 takes of our first video. So it speaks to the fact that everybody starts somewhere.

And I think again, part of the pressure is that in business, we don’t want people to see us starting from zero.

But with your personal brand, you don’t have any choice but to be publicly starting from zero, you can’t do it in private, you have to go out into the world and do it in public.

And unfortunately, you’re starting from zero. And I think people have a big difficulty about their professional network seeing them not be good at something.

But you have to let people see you not be good at it so you can get good at it. And I think that’s a bit of a barrier.

So whenever I talk about Steve, I always try to use that story of how he started exactly where everybody has to start, at zero. He was just willing to not be good in public for a while to learn how to be good in public.

Master the psychology of personal branding

Bex Burn-Callander:

And then what does he get so right now, why has he become such, I guess, a business icon? Because yes there’s practicing and being able to deliver a 2-minute clip in 2 minutes, but in terms of how he comes across, I guess the feelings he engenders in the people that are watching or listening.

What is he getting right? What is it that’s so crucially on target with his personal brand?

Ash Jones:

Yeah, I think of all the things that he’s really great at in terms of a thinking mind on a subject matter, personal brand for me is the thing that he’s best at.

How he thinks about it is a step above the majority of people that I’ve seen.

And it has nothing to do with social media, it has nothing to do with content. It has everything to do with how you position yourself, and how you create the right perception of your image and identity in others. So that’s social proofing, reputation, trust building, and influence building, all the psychological and branding aspects of personal brand. And his lens on that is really, really strong.

And one of the examples that I use to explain this is, when we were at Social Chain, he had a videographer, he did a daily vlog for the agency and the videographer would follow him around everywhere.

And he’d do a speaking event and before he did his talk, he’d walk around the room and then he’d find a certain spot and he’d ask the videographer to come over and he’d be like, “Right, if you set up the camera here, the room is going to look the fullest and you’re going to get the best shot of me on stage.”

And it’s that kind of thinking of presenting yourself in the right way and trying to really craft how you’re perceived.

And the people that I’ve worked with that really understand this are always thinking, “How do I present myself to the world and how do I out from a crowd? And how do I bring the me that exists offline into the online, and how do I take the offline me and package it and present it in the right way?”

I think even now he’s got even better at the art of that. And it’s presented to us in the form of a podcast, it’s presented to us in the form of a social clip, it’s presented to us in the form of Dragon’s Den as a program.

But if you actually look under the hood of that, it’s all the fundamentals that I spoke about there, and they’re just being delivered in certain mediums and certain formats. So it’s focusing on those things, that is the art of it to me.

Keep your audience engaged by evolving your identity

Bex Burn-Callander:

And the consistency, I suppose, where you’re continually reinforcing what people think you stand for, what people know that you want to talk about or have experience of, you just keep returning to those themes.

Ash Jones:

Yeah, I think you’ve got to evolve as well. And what I really like is how music and musicians and artists have really leveraged this.

If you look at the music industry, it’s so perfectly set up for somebody to build a personal brand in that there’s almost an expectation that you have to evolve to survive within the music industry.

Whereas in business, take Gary Vaynerchuk, he’s kind of been the same thing for 15 years now, and there’s not an expectation or a culture of evolving your image and identity that exists within music.

So if you look at David Bowie for example, there’s a really great image on, if you Google ‘David Bowie evolution’, it’ll come up and it’s like 40 different versions of David Bowie.

And he always had a different identity in how he looked, how he sounded, how the music sounded, how he presented himself, he constantly evolved throughout different eras and periods.

Elton John is the same, Beyonce is the same. Think of anyone who’s had longevity in music over decades. They’ve really, really mastered the art of evolving their own identity.

And it’s because you have to in music, if you deliver the same album 3 times, the sales start to go down and people want something new and something fresh.

You see it in a band like the Arctic Monkeys, how they went from this Sheffield-based lad band on album 1 to album 5 being this like LA rock and roll leather jacket, slicked hair.

They had to evolve because if they delivered the lads from Sheffield on a night out 4 or 5 times, people aren’t interested anymore.

So there’s a pressure and expectation and the culture of music is set up, if you’re going to be successful as an artist, to evolve your image and identity and how you come across the world.

And that doesn’t really exist in business. And I think that’s a great thing to take away from it, is you have to always be evolving.

And if you look at Steve, it’s one of the things that he’s done really well. If anyone followed him in the early days of building Social Chain, before people knew his name, people referred to him as the guy in the hat because he wore this fedora hat on stage.

And that was the first evolution of the Steven Bartlett’s personal brand. It had a look. He talked about certain topics that he doesn’t talk about now, he came across in a certain way and he did certain things.

And then he evolved that, and he evolved it again. And now he wears all black, he has Diary Of A CEO, it has distinctive branding and the Huel Association. There’s an image that you can build.

And you look back over the 10 years of Steven Bartlett and he’s gone through multiple phases and understood this idea that you have to evolve and push the boundaries.

I even think with Diary Of A CEO, you look at that and it was a podcast, and he took it live to theatres. And naturally, you would just take the podcast and put it in a theatre, and it’d be a live podcast.

And he didn’t do that. He made it like a musical, a theatre show. It was like a play at times. It was a hybrid of different things to create something different.

And I think it speaks to his ability to understand that you have to evolve the medium and evolve your identity to keep people interested and engaged.

And sometimes it doesn’t work and sometimes it does work. And I think looking at music artists is a really great inspiration that you can take.

Be selfish—post content you’re passionate about

Bex Burn-Callander:

And it should be a relief that you have to evolve because there’s nothing worse than having to talk about the same thing constantly. I mean, you get bored, let alone your audience.

So the idea that what you’re talking about this year might not be what you’re focusing on in a couple of years should be a relief and something to be excited about.

Ash Jones:

Yeah, I think you really have to keep yourself excited. Again, consistency is the game here. And the trick to consistency is to stay engaged and excited, and if you’re not excited, nobody else can be.

So it has to be a very selfish act, I think. And I’d imagine the same thing exists in music, they say with songwriters, “Don’t write for the audience, write for yourself.”

The minute that you’re not writing for yourself is the minute that you start to stagnate and become bored, and you start producing things that aren’t great, and the audience don’t connect to.

And it’s a very selfish thing.

And in business, if you’re going to create a personal brand, it has to be from a selfish point of view, it’s like, “Do I find this interesting? Do I want to talk about it? Is it challenging me to think in a different way?”

And all too often people can phone it in, they can get their marketing team to send them a report and it’s like, “Just take this from the report and post it.” And they’re not really interested in, it’s very passive.

And it’s no surprise that those are the people who tend to have zero consistency in doing this, and they don’t make great strides.

Whereas if you ask the people who have made something great of it, they’re very passionate about it and it keeps them engaged, it’s stimulating them and it’s developing their thinking. And it’s a big personal development journey I found as well.

AI can’t build your personal brand—it’ll make you sound generic

Bex Burn-Callander:

And that point about not being passive, we hear a lot now about AI and people using AI to craft posts to kind of craft a personal brand, but does that count as sort of being a bit too passive and not taking the lead, not being authentic, or is that the way of the future? Is AI going to be our partner when we’re building our brands?

Ash Jones:

I think it will undoubtedly play a supporting role, but it has to be your personality that you’re bringing to the table. And right now, AI is making you sound like everyone else.

In the future, that’s probably not going to be the case, where the conversation around AI and personal brand completely changes, but right now it’s not making you stand out from anybody else.

And it’s almost like a bit of a red herring because you think that you’re using it to build your personal brand because it’s helping you do it consistently, but it’s not helping you do it well, it’s just helping you do it.

So I’m a very big believer in the idea of understanding yourself and then bringing that to the table and staying really guard-railed around who you are and what you’re about.

And really in business, I think we’re trading on a couple of things in terms of building reputation and influence and authority with people.

And it tends to be stories and ideas, like our story and the story of what we’re doing in business and what we’re experiencing can be one tool that we leverage to build reputation and influence and authority.

And then our thoughts, opinions, and ideas is the other thing. And the thoughts, ideas and opinions, you can’t AI them, they have to come from you and they’re not easy to come from you either.

It’s like you have to go through the process of iteration 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 before you get to the good idea.

And I think somebody like Rory Sutherland is a great example, he trades on the power and strength of his ideas and that’s what gives him authority, reputation, and influence.

And if Rory Sutherland used AI to do that, he wouldn’t be Rory Sutherland, he’d be trading at a much lower level than everybody else, but it’s because he takes the time.

I would love to know how much time he puts into developing those ideas because I think it’ll be a lot more than people expect.

And you see it with authors, they have to take a lot of time to develop the books that they write, and this is no different. And we’re in the business of trading ideas and thoughts and opinions and you can’t phone those in. You have to put in the work to get to them.

Building a successful personal brand requires strong support

Bex Burn-Callander:

So are there no shortcuts? I was going to ask you about the hacks you can use to kickstart your personal brand, but if you can’t really rely on AI and you have to put in the time and the thought to come up with the original concepts and ideas, then does that mean that there are no hacks?

You just have to set boundaries around a certain period of time every day or twice a week and just devote that to this particular intentional activity?

Ash Jones:

I think the hack for me is just support, rather than something to gain a system or hack the process. It’s just support to be able to do it. So no army is built alone kind of thing.

Take business for example. It’s very, very, very rare that you get a business that is truly successful in reaching great heights just off 1 person alone. It takes multiple people to be able to do it.

And it’s the same thing here, within a business if you’re going to do marketing, it’s not just 1 person. It’s a number of brains coming together to make that happen.

And I was at an event yesterday and they were talking about how one of the issues is that marketing is left to 1 person, and it never should be. And that’s why companies don’t get ahead in their marketing is because it’s usually left to 1 person.

And with personal brand, it’s very rare that I’ve seen somebody who is operating in isolation be able to do it very, very well.

And there’s a number of different ways of what support means and looks like, but I genuinely believe that you can’t do it alone.

You need somebody to be helping you, whether it’s planning, creating, ideating, feeding back and observing, auditing and reporting. There are multiple ways that support can help. And I think that for me is the hack.

It is really hard work and the people who create a competitive advantage in business are the ones who put in the hard work, but you find they’re never operating alone, there’s always support around them to help make that possible.

Because you’re dealing with people that are running businesses here, they’re very time poor people and you have to create the right ecosystem to enable them to build a personal brand and make it fit within everything that they need to do.

And it is possible, I’ve seen it. Having worked with Steven Bartlett and Gary Neville, they’re two of the busiest people that I’ve ever met, and they make it happen at scale, and they make it happen really, really well.

And it’s the support around them and their own drive and them putting the priority and time in needed and all that brought together that makes it possible.

Your personal brand must come from you to be authentic

Bex Burn-Callander:

I guess you can either have a really great team around you which limits the amount of time you’re spending on it, even if you have to spend some time, you have this supporting cast or you do have to invest a lot of your own time. There’s no middle ground. It’s either you pay for talent to support or you sacrifice your own time.

Ash Jones:

I just think it’s like anything else in business, you have to learn to delegate. If you are the founder or CEO, you can’t be the executor too.

It’s your vision and it’s your ideas and you’re setting the direction a lot of the time. And it’s the same thing with personal brand, but we get it confused because it’s us. Like I am the individual.

Whereas with marketing, you can disconnect emotionally, and it can just be tactical and it’s still your vision. You set the direction, you give the feedback, you go, “This is where we need to go, this is working, this isn’t.”

But other people tend to be the ones that are helping you execute. And I think with the idea of support as well, it’s getting the balance right. What you don’t want to do is pass it off to somebody else because that’s not going to work because you’re not getting an authentic representation of you.

You’re getting a watered down version of you. If it’s somebody else’s responsibility to be you, it never ever works.

Whereas really, it’s finding the right process, the right ecosystem, the right way of working, that means that you can show up in a way that’s scalable.

Because the minute that it’s passed off to somebody else, in a way that means someone else comes up with the idea because you haven’t got the time, is where it becomes unauthentic and not truly representative.

And it’s just not as good because that person is not you. It’s you that’s in the hot seat, it’s your ideas and your opinions, your thoughts, your stories, your lessons, that people care about.

And that’s where the gold is, and I think again, too often you could work with somebody in your team or externally and they can put words into your mouth, or it’s their responsibility to come up with the idea.

And it’s never going to work from what I’ve experienced.

Skip the growth hacks—craft your personal brand the right way

Bex Burn-Callander:

But what about when it comes to building your personal brand? Because you said at the beginning of the call, “I like to be the guy behind the camera. I like to be the one that’s like doing the editing and the directing and working on the strategy. I don’t want to be front and centre.”

But obviously for you, you also have to show that you can do this for yourself. So how have you found that process and is it much harder doing it for yourself than for your clients?

Ash Jones:

I think it’s harder doing it for yourself than it is for clients because you’ve got the emotional connection, and you bottleneck yourself as a result.

But it’s teaching me something different that I wasn’t getting from clients because I am not Steven Bartlett and I’m not Gary Neville, but I do have a responsibility to show up for the business that I run and try to figure out how I can become an influential voice within my industry.

And how do I go about that as somebody who wasn’t somebody to do this in the first place? I think I’ve seen myself go on the journey over the past few years of finding the confidence and understanding of what my position is in the world and being very clear on what my guard-rails are.

I think I’m at a point where I’m starting to see my approach to personal branding start to pay off for myself. Like with clients that we work with, I’m very much like you don’t have to be everything to everyone.

You actually have to be quite targeted and intentional in the voice that you’re trying to build and who you’re trying to be in the world.

And sometimes that means avoiding talking about some things and just sticking to a certain lane for a certain period of time.

And I’ve stuck to the lane of personal branding for a few years now and it’s starting to create the right opportunity.

I’m not just building an audience on social media that results in nothing. I’m seeing the real-world opportunities as a result of sticking to my guns.

And I’ve had to be quite disciplined and avoid doing things that I know could, quote on quote, “perform better”, for the sake of believing in doing the right thing to create the opportunity I’m looking for.

And I know how to make people go viral. It’s so easy. It’s so easy. Give me 6 months, and I can get anyone 100,000 followers, probably faster. But that’s not going to result in anything for them past the number on their social media page.

And for me, it’s like you’ve got to take the slow hard route of avoiding fast growth and hacking the system and doing content that’s not right for you, but it just works on social media.

And you’ve instead got to do the longer process of figuring out who you’re trying to be in the world, how you show up in the right way, and generate the outcomes that you’re looking for.

And the difference is that you’re not a flash in the pan. You don’t have one year where you are popular and then you disappear forever. You slowly over time build a sustainable career.

And I think a really great example of that is Daniel Priestley. So I got his book in 2015 and it’s called Key Person of Influence and it’s essentially around the idea of personal branding.

So he’s been around for 10 years now to my knowledge, but in the last 12 months, he’s really having a moment.

He went on Diary Of A CEO, he’s doing more speaking, he’s on more podcasts, he’s on more media, and his own socials are growing. And he’s somebody who is just kind of stuck to his niche and understands what it is.

And he’s just put in 10 years. And that to me is like, “That’s the game that you’re playing.”

Bex Burn-Callander:

We say it all the time on this show, it takes 10 years to build an overnight success. Like the people that you see, and you think, “Wow, where did they come from?”

They’ve actually been plugging away doing this, building their reputations for an awfully long time before they become the overnight success.

Take comfort in the fact that everyone gets nervous

Bex Burn-Callander:

But I wanted to just come back to what you said a moment ago about on this journey you learned to build your own confidence.

Can you tell me about any moments that made you feel like you were saying the right things, and that it was resonating with people? What were those little markers in your journey that you read as, “Okay, this is right for me and I’m actually doing something worthwhile with my time”?

Ash Jones:

I think there were 2 or maybe 3 and one of them is 2 in 1, so I’ll explain.

The first one is when Gary Neville went on Have I Got News for You [British comedy quiz show] maybe 18 months ago now, and he’s been doing TV for a decade. So he is very well versed in TV, but he’s used to live TV on Sky Sports and Have I Got News for You was autocues.

And beforehand, he’d never done that before. So it was a new thing for him, even though he’d done TV but he filmed this little video in the green room beforehand saying, “I’m actually nervous. I’ve never done this before. And I just wanted to share that even after 10 years in TV, this happens.”

And that was just a very comforting thing to know. The same nerves that I have of showing up in my little way are the exact same nerves that Gary has showing up in his way on national television.

It always exists. You’re never going to get rid of the feeling, you’re always going to feel uncomfortable, but the people that do this well will acknowledge that. They sit with the feeling, they let it happen, and they do it anyway.

And I saw the same thing happen with Steve when he went on TV for the first time. And how he felt beforehand versus what he had to do in front of the camera were two different things.

And you realize that the biggest people doing this feel the same way you do and it’s quite an empowering thing like, “Right, okay. They feel it too, the difference is they push through, and I have the choice to either push through or not.”

So for me, I was like, “Right, okay, I’m always going to try to push through.”

And then the second thing is probably in the last 6 months or so, I’ve just found the confidence and I don’t know what it is, I don’t know where it’s come from, to believe in what I say with conviction.

And I noticed that yesterday I was speaking at an event, and I just felt I spoke with conviction, I really believed in what I was saying.

And I didn’t care what people thought, this is what I believe, and I said it with conviction. And if it’s for you, great. If it’s not, that’s fine.

Whereas beforehand I was maybe unsure and a little meek, and the only way I’ve been able to do that is just do it more and more and more.

You have to learn in the arena kind of thing. You can’t learn in private. And the more that you put yourself out there, I’ve personally found, you become more comfortable in the setting and when you’re comfortable in the setting, you start to relax your shoulders a little and you can settle in.

And once all that anxiety goes away because you’re familiar with doing the thing that you’re being tasked with, that’s when you start to be able to articulate yourself a little better and you build a bit more confidence.

And then eventually you find that you’re getting more conviction around what you’re saying. And then that comes across in your tone of voice and how you hold yourself and your body language and all these things.

And it really, really, really is a journey. I’ve seen that from working with people and seeing them go from telling me that they’re never going to have a photo taken of them or film a video, to producing video content every single day across 5 platforms in a journey of 5 years.

It just takes time and the confidence kind of builds naturally from throwing yourself in the deep end with it.

You can’t copy and paste someone else’s success

Bex Burn-Callander:

And can you recall, and will you share with us an example where you made a mistake, like your greatest mistake when it comes to personal brand and then I guess what you learned and how you moved past it?

Ash Jones:

I think the biggest mistake is not something that was one definitive moment. Touch wood, I’ve not had a disastrous incident kind of thing.

But I think there was a moment where I looked at what other people were doing, it was working for them and I thought, “Right, okay, I’ll apply that to the work that I’m doing.”

And I just copied and pasted what others were doing and applied it to who I was working with. And this was maybe around 2022 and there was a period of maybe 3 months where I was kind of like, “Right, that’s what we need to be doing for who we’re working with, and that’s the way to get ahead.”

And I lost sight of the fact that the reason why it worked for that person was because nobody else was doing it and it was right for them to do.

I’d always held that view, but there was a short period where I lost it for a few months and I had to remember and bring it back to the fundamental principles of what I believe in, which is, that you have to figure out who you are and show up in a way that suits you.

And if you do that, you tend to do things that nobody else is doing because you’re not focused on what anyone else is doing. You’re focused on what’s right for you.

So I’d say that was probably the biggest mistake that I made. I let my tunnel vision swerve off for a little and I had to pull it back.

How to keep up with the shifting sands

Bex Burn-Callander:

And on that theme, have there been any moments when through no fault of your own, maybe it’s an algorithm changing or some tech megatrend where you felt like you’ve been thrown a bit?

 In your work with your clients, with their personal brands, have there been curveballs that have been thrown your way that you’ve had to adjust to, change course or learn from?

Ash Jones:

I think with entrepreneurs, everything’s changing all the time. It’s constantly shifting sands from the business strategy and what they’re doing to the overall business.

There are always changes being made internally and things progress in different directions. Negative things are maybe redundancies or cash flow issues or anything like that.

And then people leave businesses, they exit them, they start new ones, and all of a sudden you might have to completely shift what you’re doing, and you’ve got the plan ahead for that, even down to how the social platforms operate.

So take LinkedIn for example. There was a report recently where engagement and reach for the average person on the platform has nosedived, like it’s 50% lower than it was 2 years ago.

So LinkedIn had a golden era that you could take advantage of. And there’s always shifting sands to contend with.

But I think the thing that saved it is thinking about what personal brand actually is, the foundational elements have nothing to do with something that’s not in your control.

It has nothing to do with how an algorithm reacts and through focusing on that rather than how can I become popular on LinkedIn. If you just try to figure out how to become popular on LinkedIn, you’re at the mercy of LinkedIn, you’re building a castle of sand, kind of analogy.

And taking the time to lean into the right fundamentals of personal branding mean that you are not excused of shifting sands and challenges, but you’ve got a lot more control over things.

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