Look in the mirror and meet Ms. / Mr. Platform!

Congratulations! You’ve begun to leverage your personal brand. You have grown beyond a self-employed practice. You are growing an organization that offers multiple services and products, to multiple markets, in different packages, beyond the limitations of your working time. To achieve your vision, you have begun to construct a platform, with standard operating procedures, processes, and systems.

Your personal brand will soon pivot upon this platform. Many more prospects will communicate with many more professionals, because of your vision, passion, and management. To meet the expectations of your clients, you may have to certify and license professionals to duplicate your level of excellence. Your business systems are more income-producing intellectual property.

Surely your organization still benefits from your reputation-based personal brand. This year, your family will be less and less dependent on your personal time-based income. You work directly with clients because you want to. You select clients who value your level of competency and charisma. Hopefully, you dedicate more work toward charitable purposes.

Many platforms and innovative business models rely on new technologies like the Internet. Your platform may be easily described as an on-line community, intranet, or portal. While you must stay current, technology has a way of making work impersonal. Systems often make organizations bureaucratic and less flexible. Use the high-tech to promote the high-touch: Relationships are vital to our personal brand.

You have grown beyond just being an expert in your field. You now represent a lifestyle or a way of doing business. Now more than ever you should clarify your vision and communicate your business purpose.

Embrace your position as a role model. MAESTROs – the next Personal Brand Persona – actively lead leaders: Use the Personal Brand Formula to help nurture future leaders. Loyalty is earned by uplifting others, not by oppressing them. Personal Branding your leaders is the best way to delegate, empower, discipline, and encourage higher levels of responsibility and achievement. Your business model should enable the right leaders to become your partner; it is better for them (financially and emotionally) to work with you, than to compete with you.

You have grown your practice into a firm organization by focusing on a community of clients. As you expand and diversify, it’s best to grow through this community. Do not abandon or alienate your loyal clientele. Whatever your growth strategy, they are in the best position to help you achieve success (or collapse the foundation beneath your new platform).

Like your client services, your marketing may also become more professional and lose the personal touch. Make your clients’ successes the anecdotal evidence of the value of your new platform.

Your marketing should no longer focus on your personal brand. Leverage the personal brands of your future leaders. If you do not have leaders to showcase, or if your personal brand is too vital, then develop an animated mascot in your likeness. (You can also use mascots as foes or villains, to illuminate the struggles of your clients.) Mascots will help you retain your personality beyond your personal involvement.

Business modeling will help you anticipate the challenges through “what-if scenarios.” Systems thinking will help you realize the interdependencies hidden as your firm grows more complex. And don’t let technology get in the way of your personal brand of excellence.

But first things first, your platform will be a work in progress for this year. Soon you’ll have all the right pieces (products, professionals, and processes) for you to orchestrate a smart business!

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