Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

In this National Entrepreneurship Week, I remembered a famous quote from Tom Peters on personal branding. Lets learn why personal brand is the must requirement for an entrepreneur.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You. — Tom Peters

Here are two classic readings on personal branding:

Brand You - Fifty Ways to Transform Yourself from an ‘Employee’ into a Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion by Tom Peters.

Personal Branding for Technology Professionals – Distinguish Yourself and Thrive by Rajesh Setty.

The personal brand can be defined using three important parts:

1. what you say about yourself.
2. what “paper” says about you.
3. what others say about you.

We all know the fame of brand name of the big companies and the way they leverage out of it. The employees of these companies also tend to leverage from their company’s brand name. When you tell someone that you are working for a so-and-so big corporation, you can see the change in perspective the way people look at it.

But for an entrepreneur, there is no such external brand he or she can leverage out of it. He or she has to build a brand on his or her own. It is an elevator pitch of an individual, which one needs to use to introduce him or her in a compelling manner. We as individuals are human enterprises, and just like a business, we have assets. We can receive the benefits of these assets by leveraging them to create value for others and ourselves.

Personal branding is not a destination, rather it’s a journey. And we need to work on it in a consistent fashion. In this National Entrepreneurship Week, let’s start working on building our personal brand. I strongly recommend to read above mentioned books to learn how to build personal brand and how to levarage out of it.