Ep. 194: Rocky Buckley – Unleash Your Personal Brand Potential

Connect with Rocky:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rocky-buckley/

http://powerpersonaproject.com/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from a management accountant's perspective. Today, I'm speaking with Rocky Buckley, a personal branding consultant who helps experts maximize the value of their unique knowledge and skills. Rocky does a great job of demystifying the concept of a personal brand and explains how understanding and embracing your specialization helps management accountants and others thrive in a chaotic world.

Adam: (00:36)
Rocky, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate you coming on to share your expertise with us today. And so today we're gonna be kind of talking about personal branding and there's so many things happening in the world like pandemics, wars and in a lot of ways you have to kind of find a way to make yourself stand out in order to show the world, Hey, this is who I am, and this is how I want to go. And so kind of, maybe we can start off. Maybe you can define what does it mean? What does personal branding mean and why is it important for us?

Rocky: (01:06)
Yeah, well, personal branding is really an offshoot of branding itself, which, in a nutshell basically is a way to take a shortcut into people's minds, right? We're in a crowded marketplace. There's a lot of noise. We're bombarded with marketing messages all day long, all sorts of different inputs and the ability to stand out, as you said, to be able to sort of penetrate through all of that noise and cut through in a way that resonates with the type of person that we're we're targeting. It becomes very important to figure out a way to do that. So on a corporate level, you know, of course, branding is sort of that company's vision mission, what they're all about. And then all of that gets crystallized into, you know, visual form. It can be a logo, it can be a style, it can be a way that they communicate their message to the world.

Rocky: (01:58)
So when you take that to a personal level, the same sort of principles apply, what we're looking to do is take all of those aspects of ourselves that make us unique, different, you know, and really connect with that kind of person that we are for that we're really targeting at. And being able to kind of create a shortcut version of that, a crystallized version that somebody can very quickly get what you're all about and get whether or not they connect with you or not. And again, we're not looking to please everybody, but we are looking for those people that we are trying to connect with to resonate with us. And so, you know, when we talk about personal branding, you know, some people just naturally come across in a way that cuts through, right. They just have a big enough personality where they resonate with people, but for most of us, you know, it requires some conscious thought and design.

Rocky: (02:48)
It's sort of like thinking through, you know, what are those elements about me that are different? What are those aspects about what I do that I really want to convey very strongly? What's that sense of purpose maybe that I have, right. That makes me excited about what I do. So it's being strategic and kind of being able to figure all of that stuff out and then being able to distill it in a way that's constructed for public consumption, right, for other people to be able to get and get it really quickly. So that turns into, you know, your messaging and your visual branding and all of that kind of stuff. But ultimately we want a snapshot of ourselves that people will be able to kind of understand really quickly that simple, fast, you know, and easy and cuts through the noise.

Adam: (03:29)
It almost makes me think of that old fashioned elevator pitch that you would say, you know, if you're in an elevator, what would, you know, what could you say to somebody in that ride on the elevator in a sense, right?

Rocky: (03:38)
Yeah. Yeah. It is that really that fast because, you know, especially now as people are moving more online and the online market, as you just mentioned, pandemics and wars and stuff, it's really made people rethink their business. A lot of people have now decided to come online much more than they ever were before by necessity or by choice, right. When you step into the online marketplace, you know, you find it's even more crowded and you're connecting people through a scroll on a phone typically, or some kind of a timeline where, you know, if you're scrolling, let's say through Facebook, I mean, Facebook can only put so many people on your timeline, and it's basically a way to compress the world into this one narrow thing that people can scroll through. And so for you to be able to actually have somebody stop the scroll and actually pay attention to you for more than a few seconds, like that's a big deal and we've gotta master kind of the art and science of being able to know how to do that. Right. And so, yeah, the online marketplace is really, really crowded and yeah, more important than ever before. And it's just going to become more so, you know, there's billions of people in the world that haven't even come online yet, you know, so like it's, and the population of course is growing and so on. So being able to construct an effective personal brand that cuts through this is sort of a master skill that I think is only gonna become more important as time goes on.

Adam: (05:07)
So what I'm almost hearing you say, it's almost like we need to make ourselves like a specialist in a way to make sure that we stand out in that way. Does that make sense to make ourselves a specialist?

Rocky: (05:16)
Well, I think being a specialist is one aspect of a way to stand out. I think that specialization is more of a conversation about business model. I think there's a reason why we would wanna specialize beyond just the branding elements of it. Specialization allows us to do things like raise our prices a lot, charge a lot more. And it really affects then everything downstream in a business model. From a branding standpoint, yeah, specialization is one of those ways that allows you to filter all of the people potentially in the market and start to narrow those down into a slice that you can target very specifically. So for example, you know, a good, good example of that might be as if you were a doctor and you were a general practitioner, you know, versus specializing in one part of the body.

Rocky: (06:09)
Right. And so therefore, you know, you're gonna basically be for those people that are looking for that one thing, you know, I have a problem with my nose or something like that. And I'm looking for a nose doctor as opposed to a general practitioner. So when it comes to something like accounting, yeah. If you can specialize and be great in that one area, you're gonna cut down the potential number of people that you're trying to reach. And the potential people that are looking for you are gonna be able to find you much more easily because you're focused on that one thing. Yeah.

Adam: (06:42)
Hmm. That makes sense. Yeah. Cuz when I think about it, a lot of times accountants have to wear so many hats, especially if you're in a small to medium size business and you're a CFO or controller, you kind of have to be a jack of all trades. You have to do a lot of different things. And so there have to be ways to differentiate yourself in a way. So a lot of times people start with certifications, you know, IMA offers a certification, certifications are one way to kind of make yourself a speci...