Connecting with my past
A dozen years ago when I lived and worked in Denver, I had a colleague who spoke of himself as a personal brand. It was a curious idea that didn’t quite click with me, but I admired him for dancing to his own beat. He was a heck of a multimedia producer and one sharp dresser. He knew how to sell and knew how to package a solution for clients.
Stephen and I had one obvious difference in the way we approached multimedia and web projects. While I’d do everything myself, artwork, code, and copy; Stephen would hire others to do the work. He was perfectly capable of doing it himself, but he understood something that I didn’t. He knew that if you’re sitting at the computer pushing pixels or stumbling over something that doesn’t work the way you want it to, you don’t have time to get out of the office and build relationships.
Eventually I realized that I could be buying elegant solutions and packaging them for our clients rather than trying to create proprietary solutions. The old me didn’t like that notion because it meant that rather than keeping the money that we earned, 80-90% of it would be paid out to others for services our clients could, at least in theory, buy for themselves. What I didn’t realize is that clients have many responsibilities beyond figuring out how to get their product noticed and not everyone wants to become an authority in creating media experiences. That’s the value of an agency. It’s the integration of solutions with insight and understanding of their synergetic value to an overall marketing strategy.
Stephen was way ahead of me in the way he approached this business. He understood the idea of building a personal brand–something that has suddenly become fashionable a decade later. And while I’m still a little uncomfortable with the idea of thinking of myself as a brand, I hope I’m at least catching up with my old pal on some of the other insights. Please check out his work at Fuel Brothers and tell Stephen that “Tim says Hi”.
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