Colette Symanowitz

Personal Branding: Nature vs. Nurture?

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:54:53 GMT

Does personal branding come naturally or is it something you consciously have to work at? In my experience it is a mixture of both.

In terms of the “coming naturally” part, my MBA studies and my classmates helped me develop greater self-awareness of my strengths and weaknesses, and what my personal competitive advantage was. So I gained a better understanding of what elements made up my personal brand, and what I needed to do to differentiate myself from the rest of the pack. However, until you realise your strengths, you cannot consciously market them, and only your close circle of family and friends will know about them “coming naturally”.

Before I started the MBA I had no idea I was any good at connecting people and helping people get access to positive opportunities, because I didn't do it at the time. But then during the MBA I started a summary group to help us share the workload. This mushroomed into an email-based initiative organising events, circulating jobs, helping MBA entrepreneurs to market their services and other useful stuff for our class. I got such a kick out of this, and was happy to do this for no reward other than knowing that I’d made a difference to someone. However, an opportunity presented itself that enabled me to build a business out of what I loved doing. Because of the success of this initiative, my MBA classmates approached me at the end of the MBA to start a community that would keep us together (incidentally this was the spark that led to MBAconnect.net, the social network that I run for the MBA community). They said something along the lines of: "We know you'll make this happen because this is what you do better than anyone else we know." This was a defining moment for me, because that was when I realised what my personal competitive advantage really was and what I needed to focus on to differentiate myself.

So yes, up until that point it did come naturally.

However, since then, it has been an area I have had to focus on very deliberately in order to build my personal brand and to stay good at it. In small start-ups, it is vital to have a human face that is the brand, someone who lives, eats and sleeps that brand. Think of Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple and Steve Jobs, Microsoft and Bill Gates, Adrian Gore and Discovery, and Nick Binedell and GIBS. With start-ups, when the company is created, it typically embodies the personal values of the entrepreneur/founder and thus is an extension of their personal brand. So in marketing your start-up and building its reputation and client base, you are building your own personal brand, because the company in its fledgling state represents everything you stand for.

How do you market yourself when you don’t yet have a known personal brand? For me it means putting your photo and your email address on your profile in social networks so that you’re contactable (even if spammers can also contact you). This enables you to attract opportunities, positive outcomes and winners into your life. It means taking every opportunity to market your own and your company’s differentiators, replying personally to emails, making the effort to keep the personal touch and not automating everything in your company. This is time-consuming but it’s worth it. I am loathe to lose that personal side as MBAconnect.net grows, because that is a big part of what makes us such a connected community.

But consciously marketing your personal brand isn’t a skill you develop overnight. It takes time to become comfortable with selling yourself, especially as South Africans where we aren’t as confident as other countries like America. When I was developing MBAconnect.net, I remember being reluctant to put my photo on our website, and wanting to have only a generic email address, so that I looked “bigger” and less like a small start-up. It was my husband and my MBA classmates who convinced me to put myself out there, to consciously market myself as MBAconnect.net’s founder. It took a while for me to become comfortable with this. Only once I defined what my strengths and values were (and by extension MBAconnect.net’s values and culture), did I fully embrace this. And doing what you excel at in your business makes you excited to get up in the morning, it impassions you and everyone you connect with.

Once you define your personal brand and it becomes your competitive advantage that you market, you can command a premium for it. Think of an excellent accountant who leaves a firm to start his own thing and his clients follow him. Or a hairdresser who does the same. Happy customers will be loyal to you because they believe in you and they know what you can deliver, and they want the services that you’re known for. By focusing on what you excel at and consciously marketing your personal brand around this, you’ll become an expert in that field and people will repeatedly seek out your services in that area. Think of Tiger Woods' golf game, or Clem Sunter and his strategy expertise. Tony Robbins is famous for his motivational talks that he can command a high price for. Think of consultants whose clients come back and ask specifically for their services; no-one else’s.

So in summary, your personal brand is made up of the things you naturally excel at and that you do better than anyone else. But if you don’t consciously market them and nobody knows about them, you may as well not have those talents. So get out there and don’t be afraid to let people know what you’re good at!

Triggers for starting your own business

Colette Symanowitz — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:17:59 GMT

What is it that makes some of us become entrepreneurs? Is it something within us or triggers in our environment? In most cases, it’s a combination of both, with trigger events helping us discover the entrepreneur dormant within us. Research on entrepreneurs reveals a number of environmental trigger factors for starting your own business, which this blog post will focus on.

1. Financial necessity:

This could be a divorce (causing “loss” of a primary breadwinner), job loss or not being able to get a job. In low-income countries such as India or Brazil, entrepreneurship is often the only way to earn a living. Raymond Ackerman, South Africa’s great retailer, was fired from his position as GM of Checkers in 1967. His reaction was to buy Pick n Pay and the rest is history.
In some cases, financial necessity can create survivalist entrepreneurs who start a business because they have to, not because they want to. And this desperation and lack of choice means they’re probably less likely to be successful in their venture. But obviously there are exceptions such as Raymond Ackerman.
If you’re starting a business only to make money, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons and you should stop where you are. Successful entrepreneurs the world over will tell you that money shouldn’t be your main aim. As Raymond Ackerman said, have another primary goal and the money will come afterwards. As an example, Henry Ford’s aim was to democratise the motor car so that it was within everyone’s reach. My main driver is to build a vibrant MBA community through MBAconnect.net, the social network that I run for MBAs, and to help them get access to positive opportunities. Putting the community before revenue helps me ensure the site adds value and is relevant to their needs.

2. Life-changing event:

Some examples include divorce, job loss or a near-death experience (which happened in my case when my son and I came close to dying during his birth).
When you go through something like this, your priorities rapidly change. After our experience, climbing the corporate ladder was no longer important. My priorities became centred around family and having a business that allowed me to spend more time at home with them.

3. Job/corporate dissatisfaction:

You could be dissatisfied with your current job or with corporate in general. I was in the pharmaceutical industry, and my frustration with the creativity-stifling bureaucracy, politics and slowness to implement new strategies helped me decide to go it on my own.

4. Education:

Entrepreneurs are often highly educated people. However, whether education is a trigger for entrepreneurship or simply a link is debatable, as there are extremely successful entrepreneurs like Richard Branson who aren’t highly educated. His dyslexia is well-known.
In my case, I did the MBA to help me broaden my skill set. In doing so, I gained the skills to recognise and leverage gaps in the market, and to successfully run my own business. It also gave me the confidence and self-belief to start a venture in a totally new industry.

5. Role models:

These could be family members, your peers, or the culture or society you belong to.
The American culture is very supportive of entrepreneurs. This could be why they are one of the three leading countries in terms of early-stage entrepreneurial activity levels, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) scale. This is an annual assessment of entrepreneurship worldwide conducted by major business schools. South Africa, by contrast, doesn’t encourage entrepreneurship, and our GEM rankings are low. Our banking system doesn’t tolerate entrepreneurial failure, with many entrepreneurs being unable to get bank funding to start their businesses. And for those that do manage to get but whose ventures don’t succeed, they often lose their homes and credit ratings.

6. Opportunity/idea

In some cases the business idea and opportunity presents itself and is too good to pass up. It’s a case of right place, right time.
In high-income countries like the US or UK, early-stage entrepreneurship is often opportunity-driven.

Do these triggers remind you of events that have happened in your life? If so, and you aren’t already an entrepreneur, maybe you should ask yourself why not. You could be ignoring your life’s calling. After all, life has a way of throwing us challenges to test if we have the courage to become who we really are.

Failure as an Innovation Strategy

Colette Symanowitz — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:40:42 GMT

Can failure be an effective strategy for innovation? It all depends on whether you perceive it as positive or negative, and what you learn during the process.

I’ve used examples from the MBAconnect.net social network that I run (for MBA alumni and current students from all business schools worldwide). However, all these lessons apply not only to social networks but also to other industries, products and services.

If you run a social network, you need to constantly enhance your website in order to stay current and relevant to your community, so you’re constantly watching market trends and trying new things. On MBAconnect.net, we try to listen to common suggestions from our community, and we ask a core group of our MBAs what they think of an idea for a new feature or an improvement on an existing one. If this market research is positive and the benefit outweighs the cost, then we build the first iteration and launch it. And our members will tell us if they like it or not, and if not, what we can do to improve it.

Sometimes the market research gives false positives or false negatives, so instead you have to rely on your gut to guide you. But you make the best business decision based on the information that you have at the time. This makes it a lot easier to accept the outcome, whether it works or not. If it works, that's great. If it doesn't, that's part of the learning. And often, gems emerge in the failure process that give you greater understanding of your market and how you can serve them better. So failure is a very necessary element of the learning and experience curve. After all, how do you recognise success if you haven’t experienced failure?

Like Guy Kawasaki says, "Ship, then test". You can test ad nauseam, but the best way to know if your new feature or improvement on a current one is ready to be launched, is simply to launch it and let the market tell you. If you over-test before launching, you might be perfecting unnecessarily or adding features (both at extra cost) that the market doesn't want. Also, as they always said during my MBA, “Analysis is paralysis”. This means that excessive testing can create a cycle of more testing and more analysis, and less action.

So in summary, just get your product or service out there and iterate. Or as Nike says “Just do it”. And learn from the outcome, be it positive or negative.

Networking 101

Colette Symanowitz — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:10:36 GMT

Gone are the days when hard work alone would get you the career advancement you wanted. In today’s connected world, everything hinges on networking and relationships.

Networking is often easier for men than women. The business I run (MBAconnect.net, a social network for MBAs) is all about networking, so it is an integral part of what I do. But for many women, the assertiveness required may be perceived as “masculine” and aggressive, so networking doesn’t come naturally. In my experience running MBAconnect.net, our women members are more reluctant than the men to give out their contact details or to post their pics, often for fear of unwanted sexual advances. This is an added complication that men seem less concerned about.

The good news is that, no matter how weak you are at networking, you can get better. I’m constantly working to improve my networking skills, and here are a few tips I’ve picked up which may help you:

Practice
Most of us avoid networking because we’re bad at it. So, when we do it, because we’re out of practice, we don’t get the results we want. As Nike says, “Just do it”. No more excuses. Go to as many networking and business events as you can, so that you have more opportunities to practice. From someone who’s been there, it does get easier, your networking skills will improve and so will your results.

Carry business cards and pen and paper wherever you go
I’m always amazed how many people come to networking events without business cards. How can you network if you can’t follow-up on the contacts you’ve made? I keep business cards in my wallet, my gym bag, my car, my laptop bag, and wherever else I can. Even at the shops or the gym, you never know when someone you meet may be a useful contact that you want to connect with afterwards. And because other people often don’t carry business cards, you should also carry pen and paper to take down the other person’s contacts. It’s also a useful memory-jogger to write a short blurb about that person and what you need to follow-up on, on their business card.

Go to networking events on your own
If you go to an event with someone you know, such as your husband or partner, it’s only natural that you’d want to speak to them rather than strangers at the event. To avoid this, go alone (it’s not as hard as it sounds). If your partner is also going, then deliberately sit with people you don’t know instead of with him/her (but tell your partner why you’re doing this, so they don’t take offence).

Quickly assess the value of the contact you’ve made
At networking events, the goal is to meet as many people as possible. With practice, you’ll learn to assess quickly if the person you’re speaking to is a valuable contact or not. If they aren’t, don’t waste time (and potential opportunities to meet other useful contacts). As soon as a gap in conversation comes up, excuse yourself politely and move on. “It was good meeting you, I’m just going to get a drink or going to the bathroom” usually works. Don’t be discouraged if this is difficult – even now, I still battle to find the gap to move on, but it is getting easier with practice.

Always follow-up
After each networking event, go through the business cards you’ve collected (and the blurbs you’ve written on them), and follow-up, e.g. by email, soon after the event with those who are useful contacts. This creates a positive, professional impression, and shows the other person that you’re serious about networking and creating valuable relationships.

In conclusion, theorising about networking does help, but the only way to get better is to do it. Get going today, and start building the relationships that can make a hugely positive impact on your career and the number of opportunities that come your way.