If I asked you how important your reputation is in business, you’d probably tell me it’s everything.
So why is personal branding still treated like it’s something completely different? Mention it and half the room probably pictures LinkedIn influencers, cringey posts and someone sharing what they had for breakfast.
But that’s where personal branding is so often misunderstood.
Your personal brand is your reputation, made visible.
You already have one. It’s being shaped by the projects you’ve worked on, the conversations you’ve had, the opinions you share, the way you lead and what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.
Social media hasn’t created personal branding, It’s simply changed how far that reputation can travel.
And that’s the bit I think matters.
There will be people reading this who have spent 20 or 30 years becoming exceptionally good at what they do. Inside their existing network, their reputation probably does a lot of the heavy lifting already.
But what about the people who don’t know you yet?
The potential customer you’ve never met, the main contractor you’ve never worked with, the journalist looking for an expert, the candidate deciding which company they want to work for.
The people who already know you probably don’t need convincing, Personal Branding helps with the people who don’t.
And you can see the power of that really clearly when you think about people with incredibly strong personal brands.
Say Martin Lewis, and you think money.
Jeremy Clarkson, and you think cars, farming and very strong opinions.
Steven Bartlett, business and entrepreneurship.
That’s what an incredibly strong personal brand does, their name immediately means something to you.
And none of that is accidental. They’ve built such a strong association between their name, their expertise and their personality that you feel like you know them. And with familiarity comes something incredibly valuable in business: trust.
I’m obviously not suggesting your MD needs to become the Jeremy Clarkson of scaffolding… But wouldn’t it be valuable if, when somebody mentioned complex access, engineering, safety or whatever their particular expertise is, their name naturally entered the conversation?
That’s the bit of personal branding businesses should care about.
Because in construction, you’re often selling something expensive, technically complex and potentially high-risk. Trust matters.
If a potential customer has already seen your Technical Director explain how they approach a difficult access problem, or your MD gives an intelligent view on what’s happening in the market, that first meeting isn’t really the first interaction anymore.
They’ve already had a chance to understand how you think, what you know and the experience behind it.
And if your name comes up around a table, there’s a chance someone in that room already knows exactly why they should be listening to you.
And this is probably my favourite thing about personal brand: you won’t see half of it happening.
- You won’t be in the room when somebody recommends you.
- You won’t know your name came up in a conversation about a project six months before you ever hear about it.
- You might not know that somebody has been following you for a year before they finally send the message that starts a conversation.
- You might meet someone you’d love to work with over a game of padel at ScaffEx… By the time their train gets home, they’ve looked you up, seen the work you’ve done, the people you work with, what you know and what you have to say. That one conversation suddenly has a lot more potential. No particular reason I’ve chosen that example, obviously ?
That’s reputation doing its job when you’re not there to do it yourself.
And I think that’s particularly powerful in an industry like this one, where relationships have always mattered.
Personal branding doesn’t replace those relationships, It simply means your reputation can keep working beyond them.
So, if you’re thinking about your own personal brand, here’s where I’d start.
Be clear about what you want to be known for.
Not everything you know. Not every service your company sells. What do you want someone to immediately associate with your name?
Have something worth saying.
Talk about what you’re seeing in the industry. Share what you’ve learned. Say what you think could be done better. You don’t need a controversial opinion every week, but you do need to give people a reason to listen to you rather than the company page.
Sound like yourself.
The strongest personal brands I’ve worked with aren’t polished online versions of somebody else. Their expertise is real, their opinions are actually theirs, their stories happened and their personality comes through. If I meet you after following you for six months, I shouldn’t feel like I’ve met a completely different person.
And think about who you actually want to know you.
You don’t need everybody in the industry to know your name. You need the right people to understand what you’re good at, what you bring to the table and why you’re someone worth remembering.
And if you’re not sure where to begin, start with one question:
What do I want people to say about me when I’m not in the room?
Then ask yourself whether the people you want in that room would know it.
You may already have spent decades building an incredible reputation.
Now imagine walking into the next room and finding out it got there before you did.
