As a former brand manager and current marketing strategist at The Repositioning Expert, I’m deeply invested in this controversial topic. Personal branding (think founders like Elon Musk or Richard Branson having huge visibility behind their own names),  creates incredible trust. After all, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 82% of people trust a company more when the CEO is on social media, and 77% are more likely to buy when the CEO is featured. CareerBuilder research shows 44% of a company’s market value ties directly to the CEO’s personal reputation, and 90% of employees think brand image improves when CEOs are active on social platforms. Yet despite these compelling numbers, there’s a massive problem nobody talks about.

The Valuation Killer Nobody Sees Coming

John Warrillow, founder of ValueBuilder (ironically, a Toronto expert I discovered in American newsletters!), has analyzed 80,000 companies through his work on succession planning. His books “Built to Sell” and “The Art of Selling Your Business” reveal a devastating truth: the stronger your personal brand and the more your company sales depend on it, the less buyers will pay at exit. Nobody wants to purchase someone else’s personal brand. Beyond valuation issues, personal branding demands enormous time – you are the content, requiring filming, production, posting, conference travel, and so on. It’s particularly challenging for introverts or those with limiting beliefs around visibility, security, and privacy. Inconsistency kills effectiveness, and while you can hire help, you remain the irreplaceable message.

The Strategic Solution: Make It About Them, Not You

After examining all this data while maintaining my strong belief in founder visibility, I’ve discovered how to build personal brands that don’t tank company value. First, niche down ruthlessly to specific industries or interest groups, then super-niche into one facet of their pain – not generic positioning. Get visible, but make your visibility about the industry and their pain, not about you or yours. Your expertise exists within the context of their problems. With omnipresent marketing focused on your target industry’s pain points, you build visibility around expertise and company reputation simultaneously. You’re the initial voice, but the message can transfer to other company stakeholders who repeat it in the same circles, establishing your company as the industry expert independent of you personally.

The Real-World Example

My client Vanessa exemplifies this perfectly. She won multiple awards this year – Inc. 5000, Winning Women, WBENC Star, and she’s now in final pitch competition rounds for WBENC (A women’s business owner network). Instead of constantly promoting her wins to build her personal brand, we’ve repositioned the messaging slightly differently: We use the platforms these accolades provide to educate and honor not just the awarding organizations, but other winners – specifically those within her target market. This creates win-wins: we provide content and traffic for fellow winners while positioning Vanessa alongside them, subtly dropping seeds about her target market and services. This approach builds both personal visibility and brand equity for her company.

Humans Buy From Humans

There’s nothing worse than faceless, nameless brands absent from human visibility – they blend into the vendor sea. Even in my book “Gentle Marketing,” I discuss how products like Nike (the supreme athlete) or The Body Shop (the animal activist beauty brand retailer) are given human characteristics because humans relate to humans. Open the door to visibility and awareness with your personal brand, then sustain it by building stronger company brand equity for valuation. Get out there strategically, speak to the right people about them – it’s always about them, never about you. When you approach personal branding this way, you’ll build massive company valuation while leveraging founder visibility for growth.

Want to reposition your messaging to grow your leads? Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, watch my Podcast onYouTube or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk.