his personal branding, something just for celebrities

and social media influencers.

Or should architecture practice owners be building their personal brand to.

That is exactly what I'm going to be chatting about with Bob gentle . In

this episode of architecture business club, that weekly podcast for

solo and small firm architecture practice owners, just like you.

He wants to build a profitable future proof architecture business

that fits around their life.

I'm the host, John Clayton.

If you want to get notified when I release a new episode and get

access to free resources and exclusive offers, then go to Mr.

John clayton.co.uk forward slash ABC.

And sign up to my three weekly email newsletter.

Now let's talk about personal branding.

In today's episode, I'm chatting with Bob Gentle.

Bob works with leaders at every stage of business to help them step

out in front of their marketing with a powerful personal brand.

He does this for his podcast, YouTube channel, coaching,

masterminds, and consulting.

His mission, helping business leaders around the world discover, set, and

achieve their goals online, then build a business that they love.

Bob is also the author of the Personal Brand Business Roadmap.

Everything that you need to start, scale, or just fix your expert business.

You can grab a free copy of the Personal Brand Business Roadmap at amplifyme.

agency forward slash roadmap.

Bob, welcome to Architecture Business Club.

Thank you for having me.

I'm really looking forward to this.

It's nice to meet you properly again.

I don't do this very often.

It's really nice.

Well, I'm absolutely honored to have you on the show.

I'm a big fan.

So, um, yeah, it's great to have you here.

Bob, I know that you're a.

You're a sci fi fan?

I'm a sci fi fan as well.

Do you prefer books or films?

I guess I don't find the time to watch movies as often as I would like.

And to be honest, there aren't enough sci fi movies made to keep my appetite fueled.

So I read a lot.

I probably read a book every two weeks.

Wow.

Have you got any, have you got any recommendations for me?

I, I enjoy fiction books, uh, as well as non fiction.

So have you got any ones that you could recommend that you've read this year?

Um, there's a really nice series called Red Rising.

Which, well, it's the first book in the series, I think it's called Red Rising,

which is a really nice, um, it's like a space opera, you might call it, um, at

the moment I'm working my way through the expanse on audiobook for when my hands are

busy, um, and then I'm reading a really obscure Amazon only self published, um,

space conquest series at the moment, I'm really enjoying, I'm on book seven.

Oh, wow.

It must be good.

Yeah.

I can't remember what it's called.

That's the problem with Kindle.

You never see the covers really.

Too true.

Um, Bob, well, we could talk about sci fi all afternoon, but today in

the episode, actually, what, what you're here to talk about is personal

branding and, um, what a personal brand can do for architecture business,

uh, architecture business owners.

So for those that aren't familiar with the concept of personal branding, can you

briefly explain what a personal brand is?

So everyone will be familiar with the idea of a brand.

Um, we think of brands all the time, brands like Coca

Cola and Nike and North Face.

We're familiar with them and we're familiar with them because they've spent

a ton of money trying to make that happen.

Um, a personal brand is exactly the same, but it's for an individual

rather than an organization.

When you go to marketing school and the.

They teach you about branding.

They will tell you that a brand is what people say about you when you're not

in the room from a company perspective.

And that being the case, we all have a brand, a personal brand, because we

exist in the minds of other people.

Most of the time.

Our personal brands are established accidentally.

They're not intentionally cultivated and they're not really amplified that widely

beyond necessarily our friendship circle or the people who knows through work.

So my business is really helping people grow beyond the accidental

into the intentionally cultivated and.

In many respects, the globally amplified personal brand and then helping

people build a business around that.

That's a really interesting answer because essentially that's

how my personal brand started.

It was accidental.

I'd love to say it was intentional.

Um, so that's interesting that that's a common theme that

you see with personal brands.

Bob, you've worked with, uh, architecture practices before and many

service based business owners before.

What do you notice about the way that they typically market

themselves and their services?

I think this is really a nice extension of the last question.

So like I mentioned, everybody has a personal brand and what I see in many

successful architecture practices is that they're the leadership.

Are often naturally charismatic, probably quite outgoing, those seem

to be the qualities that unless you're being structured about your sales and

marketing will naturally lead towards, um, a thriving practice because

people like to do people business with people they know, like, and trust.

So if you're somebody that lots of people know, and they know, like, and

trust you by extension, you're naturally going to have a fairly healthy practice.

If you're good at what you do as well, the other side of the spectrum is

introverts that may be less charismatic where everything else is equal.

They won't necessarily thrive because they don't have the systems

and processes to market themselves.

So that's really the simple answer.

It's most architecture practices, unless they get to a certain

level are often successful.

Accidentally, and it comes down to this whole thing of hard work beats

talent, where talent doesn't work.

This is the opportunity for the rest of us.

Um, I'm a natural.

Screaming introvert.

I don't necessarily like, I do now, but I had to desensitize myself to

all the anxiety that I had around being a podcast guest or having my own

podcast or any level of visibility.

It's painful.

Um, so I'm not entirely answering your question directly,

but I see most architecture practices don't actively market.

They depend on happy accident.

And sometimes when the odds are stacked in their favor, it can work,

but more often than not, it doesn't.

Um, I hope that makes sense.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I think that is a fair appraisal of how it usually works.

Many, I mean, many successful service based business owners,

they don't, whilst They might inherently have a personal brand.

They might, they certainly might not realize it.

Um, in your experience, how are they usually winning work?

Most architecture practices in my experience, and this is true

of many businesses, will probably have the lion's share of their

opportunity coming in through referrals.

Outside of that, they may dabble with some advertising and get mixed results.

That's probably the long and the short of it.

You can become very intentional about, um, referrals and they can, you can

build a fantastic practice, but from my perspective, it's not a strategy and

it's probably only one of four strands that you should be properly leveraging.

That's really interesting, actually.

Um, certainly when I started out with my own practice, that word of mouth

referrals was pretty much the source of, you know, 90 percent of the.

The incoming work, which can create problems if you do something like

I did, where you relocate, to the other side of the country as

a local service based business.

For me and my business to, to, to, to paraphrase or not to

paraphrase, but to build on that, um, that used to be my business as well.

My business was entirely dependent on my local network.

Um, and before the pandemic, I couldn't have imagined relocating because I

would have been cutting off my own feet.

Um, so I made an intentional.

Step before the pandemic, it was very lucky to stop any form of

business networking and focus on my personal brand in order that I

could become location independent and that people outside my area did

know, like, and trust me at scale.

And I think that's really where the answers lie.

For most people, the

So are there any other problems that if you do grow your

business in that way, where it's typically word of mouth referrals,

possibly a little bit of advertising.

Are there any other potential problems that You anticipate that

business owners might encounter.

I mean, we've highlighted one already.

Are there any others that spring to mind from your experiences?

biggest one for me is if you do business largely in a local

area, that's a limited catchment area.

And depending on the number of people and the associated

economic activity, your number.

Growth is going to be limited.

On the one hand, more importantly, your ability to specialize is going to

be really curtailed because so one of my clients, they just design hotels.

That's all they do.

And they design hotels all over the world.

Now that you can't do that.

If the only people who know about your are in Bradford, because there's a

limited number of hotels being built.

Similarly, if you want to specialize in super advanced green buildings

that are going to be, um, eight figure plus buildings, people who build those

buildings are going to need to know about you and there aren't going to

be that many of them in your area.

So growing beyond.

A, your own limited catchment area and the associated revenue ceilings that

you'll hit or wanting to really become the only person who does that one thing.

That's impossible.

If, if you don't have visibility outside your area,

That's a really good point.

And I guess if you, if you do switch things up to grow your business in that

manner, it affords you the opportunity to perhaps be more niche, um, and more

selective with the types of projects and clients that you're working with.

In which case you get to maybe work on more of the things that you really love

rather than having to be a generalist that's doing a bit of everything.

I think I like to think less in terms of market and marketing

and more in terms of audience.

Hmm.

Um, and with audience comes opportunity.

Uh, so if you're really intentional about growing an audience as an expert, then

that audience will serve opportunity where you want to focus on specialism.

Um, the better known you are for a thing.

The more opportunity you'll get to do that thing.

Just bringing it back around to the idea then of

developing your personal brands.

So, uh, if that, if you wanted to develop a personal brand, how, can

you give any other examples of how that would help grow the business?

Um, the examples are so numerous that I struggled to isolate one.

Um, I use the example of the architect focusing exclusively on hotels.

A good example for me is a plumber.

I can't remember his name, um, but there's a plumber in America who I've met a couple

of times, but I'm terrible with names.

If you ask me to name a film, thankfully you warned me with that one.

This plumber.

Started creating YouTube videos and he did all right, that small YouTube

channel grew and what that allowed was for him to move away from simply

being a plumber to somebody who taught plumbers how to market themselves and

that simple plumber is now comfortably sitting on a multi million pound business.

That he doesn't have to get his hands dirty anymore, and he's focusing all

his time and energy into teaching, being charismatic, creating content.

So that's one example.

I think another example might be, um, where to go with this.

I suppose another way I could phrase the question would

be, you know, are there any other benefits from having a personal brand?

That might be another way to phrase the question.

I think.

The core benefit for me is again, where everything is equal, so I have a choice

between architect A and architect B.

Architect A is perfectly competent and has a good portfolio.

Architect B has exactly the same.

He also has.

Potentially a podcast or a YouTube channel, or he's very active on Instagram,

or he's doing public speaking, or he's written a book, or she's a prolific Tik

Tok creator, or she hosts an architecture conference, or I could go on and on.

There is a point of difference here where instead of.

Me having to choose between A and B, I'm now having to decide, would it

be ridiculous for me not to choose B?

I, where everything else is equal, one is an industry authority that's

clear and visible associated with other industry authorities and option

A is a perfectly competent architect.

Which one are you going to choose?

You're going to choose the one with the celebrity x factor

because everything else is equal.

So you move from being one of many to the one of many.

People don't have to decide now whether to use you or not, but

whether to exclude you or not.

It's a very different decision.

So for me, when people decide I need somebody to help me with what

I'm doing, and I'm in the mix.

It's really unusual that somebody would pick somebody else over me,

because pound for pound, we're going to be very similar, but I bring

an awful lot more to the table.

So for me, that's the biggest advantage.

I love that.

I absolutely love that, Bob.

It makes it such that it's almost like a no brainer to go for architect B.

And, and that, that question then of asking yourself, you know, well,

why, why wouldn't I use these people?

Why wouldn't I work with this, this practice, this firm, this person?

A vendor of any kind is a risk, and we're all doing risk

calculations in our mind when we're choosing who we're going to use.

So what can you do to de risk yourself?

Authority.

Influence, competence, connection, all of these things are de risking,

de risking, de risking, de risking.

So, the other person, there's a cloak of risk over them, you've

lifted that cloak of risk away entirely, complete transparency,

and Over authority and competence.

You can't really lose.

I guess it's that, um, no like and trust

that people talk about that.

If you are.

Positioning yourself as a leader in your space, an expert, and you've got, well,

you've got the content or you've got ways to prove that you're not just saying it,

that actually there's evidence here that those potential customers are seeing,

whether that's that you are a public speaker or you've got a YouTube channel

or you're prolific on social media and you're a really helpful person of value,

that's immediately going to build far more trust than they're going to have

with any of those other competitors.

I think the thing in the architecture industry is the minimum

effective dose is way lower than it would be in my industry, for example,

because hardly anybody's doing it.

So the opportunities are even greater.

And what I love about.

The personal branding and the content side of it is it's building the low,

the know, like, and trust at scale.

So you can do it.

It'll allow you to build out of your local area where natural social osmosis

would just take care of it for you.

Got it.

Um, is developing your personal brand.

Is that, is that going to be right for every service based business owner?

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Now, back to the show.

I would like to say yes.

However, if you're listening to this thinking, I am a horrible

person, I'm genuinely horrible.

If being horrible is what you're amplifying, you may struggle.

However, um, I would argue that.

Even people that I find horrible are attractive to other people.

And for me, this is one of the biggest hangups.

You can't be liked by everybody.

And one of the biggest pushback, um, pieces that I find with clients is

if I start creating content, what happens if people don't like it?

And that used to really, I used to, that put me off for years.

But then I realized one third of people are not going to like it.

They're going to actually reject it.

One third of people, they're going to be completely ambivalent.

They won't care.

But one third of people will love it.

And those are my people.

And I find that that rule of thirds is pretty much universal.

So, you'll have, you'll have experienced this before.

You meet somebody, you think, I really don't like you.

It's rare to have that actual visceral, I can't bear this person, I need to

get away, but they've got friends, people like them, weird as it is.

So for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.

It's basic physics, the principle of magnetism.

You can't attract without pushing others away.

And once you can learn to celebrate that and realize.

It's really important that I do push some people away, everything

becomes much, much easier.

Um, so to come back to the actual question, thankfully I remember it.

Is it for everybody?

Probably yes.

Um, I can't imagine anybody suffering from being better known.

That's a great point that you made there that I just want to pick

up on about repelling people as well as attracting people that by stepping out

in front of your marketing with your personal brands, that you are going

to start attracting people that are.

a good fit that are your people, but also to start to push away those other

people that might have got in touch that you might have been tempted to

work with, uh, ultimately may have led to being, um, a bad client that you're

actually also repelling those people away.

I think the nice thing about it is by the time people come

to you, they've already decided they like you and it makes the

whole sales process much easier.

Um, similarly, if people have had the visceral reaction to you that they don't

like you, you're never going to talk to them, which is also really nice.

That sounds like a huge benefit.

So Bob, what would be the, the top three things perhaps that you

would recommend or, or the first three steps that you'd recommend

for anybody that's thinking, yeah.

This sounds great.

I want to go out and I want to try and build my personal brand.

Could you, could you start us off with some, some tips

to help people along the way?

The first thing that being intentional about building a

personal brand requires is visibility.

So where are you going to be visible and what are you comfortable, what form

of visibility are you comfortable with?

Um, so in fact, I'm going to back up because there's a

more important question here.

If somebody is completely unaccustomed to being visible on social media or

any kind of content, then there's going to be a big fear factor.

People are going to be scared, whether they'd like to admit it or not.

Uh, fear is probably the number one barrier of entry because

people are worried about.

All kinds of things.

So the first thing I would do is write down all the things you're scared of

because fear shrinks in the light.

So write it down and be specific, be detailed.

Writing, I'm scared of visibility is insufficient.

Why?

Why, why, why?

Because once you've moved through that, you'll realize

a lot of this is irrational.

And, um, and by writing it down, you'll start to understand what

you can maybe put against it.

What I mean by that is...

If you're scared of video, why are you scared of video?

I'm scared of video because my friends and family will make fun of me, or I

don't like the sound of my own voice, or my face always looks weird on camera.

So understanding that is a good start.

And then there's a process of slowly desensitizing yourself to that,

because what you're scared of, Now doesn't have to, I'll tell a story.

It's the easiest way to explain this.

So I was sitting in a mastermind conference and in a conference, in a

mastermind session, in a conference and a mastermind, if you're not familiar

with it, is you sit on a table with a group of five or six other business

owners and you talk about stuff.

And this was a marketing conference.

So I was talking about my own fear of visibility.

And honestly, I couldn't even post a selfie on any social media platform.

And if you know me now.

Many people know me as the selfie guy, so things have changed, but I remember

thinking to myself, why a backup?

Sorry, this is all slightly disjointed.

I spent 15 years working in search and rescue and I was perfectly happy

jumping out of a helicopter, abseiling off cliffs in the middle of a storm at

night, swimming out to sea and raging storms, but I couldn't post a selfie.

And I got to thinking, how do we train people to do scary things?

Because I'd seen people go from person off the street through to somebody who was

perfectly comfortable recovering a body.

And time is the magic ingredient here, a process of gradually

desensitizing yourself over time.

So for me, it was start with just taking a selfie, don't have to post it.

Then it was posted to an Instagram story where it's going to disappear tomorrow.

And you start to get feedback from other people and it's positive feedback.

And you think, It is working.

And then I post a selfie with a little bit of a story under it on LinkedIn.

I have a customer.

Fantastic.

So what was scary becomes normal, becomes key differentiator,

comes competitive advantage.

And it all starts with understanding the fear.

So that's number one.

Number two is, if you're going to show up, don't be a boring, repetitive, I was

going to use another word there, but I won't, don't be boring or repetitive.

So if I ask you, what are you going to post on social media?

The instinctive thing is, well, I'm going to post about

architecture and that's important.

But if you look at anybody who's famous that you know, you know them

because they exist in three dimensions.

So allow yourself to exist for your own audience in three dimensions.

So post what you're doing for fun.

Let people know about your family.

If you're comfortable with that, what are you interested in?

You know, I like sci fi.

Um, there's a lot.

So give people enough to have a relationship with, but also talk

about what you do for money.

Um, I often use the device of what you might call the five themes of you.

What are the five themes you can regularly turn to that

will make you more interesting?

The third thing, and I said, don't be repetitive, but be repetitive.

Um, if you look at any.

Brand that you know, well, you know, well, because you see them

everywhere all the time people pay far less attention to us than we

would like them like to think they do.

And therefore our key messages need to be repeated fairly frequently.

Um, it was one other thing, but I can't remember what it was.

It'll probably come back later.

It's fine.

That that's, you've shared, you've shared some, uh, fantastic tips there.

Is there anything else, Bob, that you wanted to share about personal

branding that we, we haven't covered in the conversation?

I'm going to say yes.

Um, all content is not equal would be my fundamental message here that

there are things like TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn

where they are content hungry machines.

And for most people.

That just feels like a hamster wheel lined with crushed glass

and barbed wire on the edges.

You can never get off and for most people, that is their experience

of content marketing and it's soul destroying because you're constantly

having to be content creating always on your game and Then people will ask

you, what about search engine marketing?

What about Facebook ads?

There's just so many places you can go.

So I like to use an investment portfolio analogy in order to help people

understand where to invest their time.

So we have short term investments.

You pay your money today, you get your results today.

This is really ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, whatever.

You create content, you can push it to as many people as you want.

That is a rich man's game.

It's not for you and I, or most people listening.

There is a place for it.

It's not at the beginning of your content marketing journey.

Then there's the medium term investment.

And here we're talking about the kind of things we just discussed.

Social media, social content, social networking.

It's where you create your content today and it's gone tomorrow.

Um, but you can get lucky for me.

This is the medium term investment.

It's the current account, if you like, and.

It's where agencies play.

If you go and hire an agency to do your marketing, they will probably

stick in that medium term investment.

Then we have the long term investments.

This is podcast, blog, and YouTube.

And for me, the podcast really is the product that just keeps on paying.

I call them the long term investment because they pay

compound interest over time.

Every time you create a piece of content, it goes into the bank.

It will generate relationships today and tomorrow and every

day for the rest of time.

Similarly with YouTube.

Additionally, they're creating relationships.

They're creating industry authority by association.

They are creating opportunities for sales conversations.

They are creating.

Content that you can come back and spend in the medium term investment bucket.

Um, but the core difference is the compound effect over time that.

You're building a true content and attention asset.

When you come back to the medium term investment, you realize most

people are just going to the casino.

They're hoping to get lucky.

Um, and when you understand all that, you can look at content creation from a

much more, um, sustainable perspective.

Wow.

That, that's just a massive value bomb that you've just.

Dropped at the end there.

Thanks for that, Bob.

That's fantastic.

There was another question I wanted to ask.

It isn't about personal branding.

Um, I love to travel and discover new places and I just wondered if you

could tell me one of your favorite places and what you love about it.

This could be anywhere, near, far, anywhere you like.

It's a tricky one because everywhere is awesome.

And this is another important message when it comes back to personal branding.

I'll answer the question specifically in a minute, but I have a friend.

Who is a coach and he lives in Hawaii and I look at what he does

and I think it just looks so exotic.

It just looks, it's warm all the time.

I'd love to be there.

He comes to visit me here and in Scotland and he thinks he's arrived in fairyland.

And when I realized that what's ordinary for you is amazing for somebody else, and

this is true of everybody, um, again, it puts a whole different perspective on.

Your brand that if you lean into the mundane, it becomes a

superpower to answer your question.

Specifically.

I love sunny places.

I don't have a single favorite sunny place because I haven't been to enough

places to have settled on a favorite.

I love California because it's always sunny.

A gorgeous day.

There's never a bad day there.

Even when it's pouring with rain, it's still lovely.

Similarly, I grew up in Hong Kong.

I love the place.

It's just heaven.

The climate is astonishing.

Um, but I think everywhere is awesome.

It's nice, actually, if you can, um, come from that perspective

where you can sort of celebrate and enjoy the places that are nearby.

You're absolutely right.

We take for granted some of the places that are on our doorstep.

And there are some fantastic places where, where we all live.

Yeah, absolutely.

Bob, that's been absolutely amazing today.

Thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your knowledge.

It's been fantastic to talk about personal branding.

Where can people go to connect with you or to find out more about you?

So I have a podcast, the personal brand business show.

You can just search personal brand business show on any podcast player.

It's easy to find.

My website is amplify me dot agency.

And you can find me on any social media platform, all of them, just

search at Bob Gentle or Bob Gentle.

I'm really hard to miss.

Brilliant.

And would you like to remind everyone how to get the

personal brand business roadmap?

Yeah, you can visit my website, amplifyme.

agency forward slash roadmap.

There will be a giant pop up.

So even if you can't find the page, it's hard to miss.

Um, and yeah, it really does help walk you through all the stages of.

Building the personal brand and then marketing and monetizing that personal

brand beyond simply the services and products that you necessarily have today.

Brilliant.

Thanks again, Bob.

Thank you.

You've done a really good job.

I've had a great time.

Thanks.

Next time.

I'll be talking to Stephen, drew the founder of architecture, social,

all about how to find, hire, and retain great architectural staff.

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