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Bob Gentle talks with Jason Barnard about the personal brand business roadmap.
Bob Gentle, is a coach, consultant, speaker, and a top-rated podcaster. With nearly twenty years of experience in digital marketing, he spent most of his time running his own agency – Amplifyme.
Bob shares his proven Personal Brand Business Roadmap for combining magnetic leadership presence with effective sales strategies that actually convert and emphasizes the importance of understanding one’s unique strengths and how these can be leveraged to create a robust leadership brand. He also outlines the five crucial sections for building a personal and leadership brand.
Get ready to transform your personal brand into a powerful leadership brand and discover how to evolve from being “one of many” to becoming “the one among many” through strategic brand positioning and authority building. Stop waiting for success to fall into your lap and learn how to harvest the opportunities you’ve been cultivating.
What you’ll learn from Bob Gentle
- 00:00 Bob Gentle and Jason Barnard
- 00:26 What Aspect Did Bob Gentle Help Jason Barnard and Kalicube With?
- 01:54 Why is Bob Gentle Coaching Jason Barnard Despite Their Theoretical Competition in a Similar Area?
- 02:17 Why Does Bob Gentle Describe His Role as Similar to a “Ringmaster” for People Who Want to Build Their Personal Brand Online?
- 05:58 How Many Stages Does the Personal Brand Business Roadmap Have?
- 06:09 Stage 1: Personal Brand Foundations
- 07: 20 What Should Come First, Choosing Your Specialty or Building Fame?
- 09:16 Why is it Important to Know What the “Center” of Your Target Audience Looks Like?
- 11:18 Stage 2: Authority and Network
- 13:08 Why Does Jason Barnard Believe Appearing Great on Google and ChatGPT Will Attract People?
- 16:14 Stage 3: Discoverability
- 23:45 Stage 4: Products and Services
- 24:42 Stage 5: Selling and Scale
This episode was recorded live on video November 12th 2024
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
amplifyme.agency/podcast
https://youtu.be/DMULau_vbRY
https://youtu.be/aXxrNPD77eQ
Bob Gentle
Transcript from The Personal Brand Business Roadmap – Fastlane Founders with Bob Gentle
[00:00:00] Jason Barnard: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard
Hi, and welcome to Fastlane and Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard and Bob Gentle. A quick hello, and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Bob Gentle.
[00:00:20] Bob Gentle: I am not a singer. There’s no chance in hell you will get me to sing. But thank you very much for having me.
[00:00:24] Jason Barnard: It’s a pleasure. It’s one of the things I do quite well along with running my company, Kalicube, and you have been helping me with that in terms of my personal brand and how my personal brand can help to drive business for my company. I find that super interesting. I find you super smart, and I’m really happy to have you here to talk about the Personal Brand Business Roadmap of Bob Gentle, version three.
[00:00:49] Bob Gentle: Well, thank you very much. First of all, I don’t think it’s ever happened to me that a client has had me on their podcast and said, this is Bob. I’m working with Bob because I make, I make a point of not telling people who I’m working for because it’s a little bit like when Oz pulls back the curtain and you can see what’s happening behind things. So it’s a real treat to be able to actually do this with you today, and I think it’s a testament to your confidence and the success in your business that you’re willing to do that. So I really do appreciate it, and it will make it a lot of fun.
[00:01:24] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And you just made me think of that. We pulled back the curtain and people said, but it’s the same person.
[00:01:31] Bob Gentle: Yes. You’re just the younger, much more handsome version.
[00:01:34] Jason Barnard: Thank you very much. You’re so charming. But in fact, there are multiple reasons why I think it’s really interesting. Number one is Kalicube is here to help our clients boost, amplify, control their personal brand online, and that’s what you do. So we’re theoretically competitors, and yet you’re coaching me. Now, why do you think that is?
[00:01:54] Bob Gentle: Well, I think where I come from is… and you mentioned The Personal Brand Business Roadmap. If people want to build their personal brand online, if they want to be more visible, if they want to be more successful in business, that’s a very diverse range of skills and talents that you need to bring to bear. And my role, I guess, is a little bit like the ringmaster that I help people understand where they’re strong, where they’re weak, and within that, there are some unique skill sets that are particularly valuable. So whenever I’m working with a client and they need to go really deep into a rebrand, for example. I’m not going to be the rebrand guy, but I’m going to be the person that helps them identify, that’s the priority right now. Similarly, if somebody knows that they’re just not showing up in search or in AI the way that they deserve, then they need to speak to Jason Barnard, because I’m not the guy who’s going to take them deep on that. I’ll help them identify it and prioritize it, but I’m not going to be executing on it most of the time. I execute at a very superficial level across lots of different things. But sometimes people need to go deep and just get that nail hammered in properly. And that’s where people like you come in.
[00:03:12] Jason Barnard: Right. Well, we really specialize in search and AI and I was looking at your five steps and we basically cover the first three, which is the foundations being understood, authority and network being credible and discoverability being deliverable is how we talk about it. Understandability, deliverability, credibility, and that’s where we stop. But what we do is take whatever you’ve got and make sure the machines understand it. What you do is help me build it and prioritize what I need to do and then add the other two steps, which are products and services and actually selling something.
[00:03:47] Bob Gentle: I think for the listener or the viewer, whichever you are, it would probably make sense if you had this in front of you at the moment, if you wanted to. You can go and get it. It’s completely free, amplifyme.agency/roadmap. It will ask you for an email address. I’m sorry, but you can go and get it for free. And it will help put this conversation in some context. But what’s interesting is with that first level with the website and how you actually show up online, you show up online with significant authority. And I think one of the questions we had together early on is who do you want to look important to, who do you want to look valuable to and what do you want to look valuable for?
Because it’s as you’ve identified, Jason, and the Kalicube Process, it’s quite easy for you to really dominate search results, both with generative AI search, but also things like Google Knowledge Panels. But what’s actually the signal that you’re sending once you’ve achieved that dominant position? What are the emotional triggers that you’re pulling? What’s the value that you want to transact on? Because everybody’s very different. And I think what you were aware of is you were pivoting from being very valuable for one thing to one group of people, to wanting to be super valuable for one specific thing for one specific kind of person. And that requires you to be able to articulate it and communicate it and then codify that in the kind of work that you do.
[00:05:22] Jason Barnard: Yeah.
And you’re really good at articulating kind of what I’ve been saying. I tend to geek in and over explain. And you’ve been providing me with great focus, prioritization of what I’m actually doing and how I’m saying it to the people that I’m trying to communicate with. And what I can then do is take all of that that you’ve given me, publish it online, and then the Kalicube Process, which is what we do for ourselves as much as we do for our clients, is actually communicate that to the machines. But what I’ve done, while you were talking, I was listening, I do promise. But I also got this out, which is your roadmap. So for the people watching on YouTube, you can see the Personal Brand Business Roadmap, which has about 26 steps I think divided into five sections.
So Bob, walk us through it, starting with number one.
[00:06:12] Bob Gentle: Well, I’m not going to go through it node by node because that takes about an hour, an hour and a half to do in my sales pitch. But in simple terms, The Personal Brand Foundations layer one, this is understanding what is our zone of genius. Because if we can do the thing that we enjoy the most and the thing that we find flow state in the most, then everything from that point onward is going to be easy. And one of the things that if you’re a service provider, lots of my clients are service-based businesses. Probably the easiest to understand in that context. Then if you’re accustomed to doing business in a local community, you’re never going to be able to spend that much time in your true zone of genius because you have to be quite general. And I think this is what you’ll have experienced at the beginning of your search marketing business is you had to do anything for anybody. But the more high profile you become, the more you can really focus in on that thing that really makes you shine.
So understanding what that is…
[00:07:20] Jason Barnard: Yeah, no, no, I’m sorry. So putting the focus of my super genius niche to one side. If I can become famous, then I can choose the one specific thing I want to do. So I need to be famous first or do I need to choose a specific thing first?
[00:07:38] Bob Gentle: I think it’s a gradual process, but you need to understand where north is and your zone of genius really is. Okay, this is the light. This is what fires me up. This is the direction that I want to go. And then gradually, over time, you build an audience around that thing, you build a foundation of content around that thing. And gradually your audience builds, your reputation builds, your authority builds, your network changes. And soon, you’re allowed to spend all your time doing just that one thing. This is been my journey.
I get to spend all day talking to people like you about how to make this happen. That wasn’t my reality five or six years ago. I was running an ordinary local digital marketing business, but I knew through conversation with my clients, this essence was what they valued the most. And so gradually, over time, always keeping that as the direction of travel, it has become reality. So that’s why that’s really the first point on the roadmap. From there, we’re really looking at, well, who’s that most valuable for? This is the other side of the equation. What is your value and who is it most valuable to? This is your niche or your niche, depending where you come from.
And then the rest of the layer. Go ahead.
[00:09:06] Jason Barnard: There’s another point that I always missed is, is the person that this is valuable to willing and able to pay you to help them with their problem?
[00:09:17] Bob Gentle: Well, again, the niche is a gradual refinement. Your niche may start off fairly broad, but you need to know what the center looks like, because it’s a little bit like a bullseye. If you know, okay, this is the target. And in the center there is executives, entrepreneurs and leaders who have the means and motivation and are genuinely doing truly incredible things, this is who I’m for. Then as long as you keep heading in that direction, and as long as your products and services align with that, gradually over time, it can become real. So these are the two refinements. Your zone of genius and your niche.
And over time, you get there. So the rest of the layer one is really just finding ways to articulate that, to communicate that, to make sure that wherever people find you online, that’s the version that they meet. And again, the layer one, that’s where the kind of work that you do is fundamentally important. For those leaders who are probably quite a bit down the road in terms of building their business. They’re probably very successful. But new level, new devil. If you want to show up as authentically and truly the expert and the subject matter expert and owning your authority online, then the kind of work that you do is really the gold standard for actually demonstrating that.
[00:10:43] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean, my perspective has always been I can educate the machines. For me, that’s the easy part. Getting Google to say whatever I want, getting ChatGPT to spit out the information that I want it to spit out and say, for example, I recommend Jason Barnard explicitly for Knowledge Panels, which is cool. And I never really realized that other people weren’t looking at it that way.
I felt everybody could see that that was super important. But it isn’t immediately obvious and it hadn’t struck me until you told me.
[00:11:16] Bob Gentle: Yeah, and it isn’t. I think this whole thing of you don’t know what you don’t know and things like Knowledge Panels and how you show up in generative AI, they don’t matter for most people, but for some people they’re a wonderful opportunity. They really are stunningly dramatic authority plays and this is really what layer two is all about. Layer two is about moving you from being visible into an authority and something. An analogy I often use with clients is business communities act a little bit like a pack of wolves and they’ll move to support these animals that they see as strong and shun or kill these animals they see as weak. It sounds terrible. But there’s an unconscious process happening from the reptilian ancient brain that when we see somebody looking strong online, we move to support them because we want to be around that success. We don’t even think about it.
Now that sounds quite mean and manipulative. But within The Authority and Network layer, we’re really looking at what’s it going to take to position you as a speaker, as a regular podcast guest, to have you networking quite differently, to maybe writing a book, maybe teaching what you do, showing up on social media, providing enough information for people to actually feel that they really know you. And all of these things really interestingly begin to position you as somebody that other people who are on the same journey of authority start to see what you’re doing and invite you to participate and collaborate. It becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
[00:13:09] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I mean I was looking at it from the perspective of everybody uses Google and now ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, Perplexity, whatever it might be. If I can look great there, everybody’s going to flock to me. And I’ve been successful at people coming to me. But what I failed to realize is I then have to communicate with the people I’m talking to in a way that resonates with them. So it’s all well and good getting the AI in Google to recommend me and present me as this superstar and this incredibly successful entrepreneur. When people come to me, I need to be actually speaking their language empathetically, addressing their problems in a realistic and helpful manner.
[00:13:44] Bob Gentle: Yeah, I think a good comparison might be. I’ll often encourage clients sort of within the personal brand foundations layer. One of the things that I’m recommending is that they codify their process in a framework of some kind, so that they have a method of explaining what they do which is external to them. It’s almost pictorial, like my personal brand business roadmap, in order that they can become their own cheerleader. Most people find it very difficult to stand up and say, I’m fabulous. But they’ll find it much easier to stand up and say, this framework is fabulous. And we can then use that framework within the authority layer as something that we teach. So it drives our content, but it can also drive webinars, it can drive workshops, it can drive all kinds of things.
And it becomes. It’s a difficult thing to very quickly describe, but it’s something that can live outside of us, if you see what I mean.
[00:14:49] Jason Barnard: Right. Yeah. And I think. I suspect this is probably the next coaching session we are going to do is that I can use the Kalicube Process that I created and say, the Kalicube Process is absolutely brilliant. It solve all your problems. Here we go. And the focus is no longer on me, but on the Kalicube Process, which is a formula for solving your problems of control and visibility in AI and search.
[00:15:15] Bob Gentle: I think for you, for example, a great way of using this authority layer is there are lots of people who have online communities for entrepreneurs. There are lots of conferences. What you do is very on trend as a topic. Nobody’s really teaching it, though, because nobody really understands it. So if you were to reach out and offer workshops and training to these organizations, yes, you could do the speaking thing. But workshops and training is something that you can offer every day virtually. So instead of having to go out and pitch what you do, you simply go out and pitch the teaching of what you do.
People tend to not pay for information, they pay for implementation. So by demonstrating that you are the subject matter expert through sharing, those people who think, you know what, I understand it, I trust you just do it for me. They’re your ideal clients. So the teaching is quite useful for that.
[00:16:14] Jason Barnard: Right.
[00:16:14] Bob Gentle: The next layer is The Discoverability layer. And this is where a lot of people make mistakes, especially business owners and entrepreneurs, because they look at social media and advertising and SEO and things like this and it gets quite confused. So I often look at discoverability and content marketing because this is essentially we’re discovered through our content, whether that’s a search result or a social media post, or a blog post, or a podcast. So I use an investment portfolio analogy and if you ever speak to an investment advisor, they’ll say you need to have some short term investments, medium term investments and long term investments. So the short term investments from a content perspective are paid content. You pay your money, you’ll get your result today, but the day you stop paying, you’ll stop getting your result. So it’s okay, but it’s not really an asset as such.
Then we have the medium term investments and here we’re talking the push networks. So LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, you can start creating content today. You’ll gradually build an audience. In time that audience will start to know like and trust you and they might turn into opportunity for you. But if you stop creating content very quickly, that all fades into the distance again. Then we have the long term investments. And here, and I’m going to change this because I’ve never looked at it this way before, but actually you have a big contribution in the long term investments bucket. Traditionally I would say blog, podcast and YouTube.
And I, I say it this way because with every investment we have a very high interest rate. We’re actually building a true asset. It’s value appreciates over time. So right now, for example, I can create no content for the next six months. Five or six hundred people a day will still find me for the first time every day because of those assets. And the reason that happens is because they exist within a search ecosystem. Podcast, we have Apple podcast and Spotify and YouTube. YouTube, we have YouTube, the world’s second biggest search engines.
This engine. Now blog always used to be what I would talk about, but actually these days I would start looking at. But what is it that contributes to the kind of work that you do? What’s going to drive Knowledge Panels? What’s going to drive generative AI? What’s going to drive 21st century search? I don’t actually know the answer to that at the moment. Which is why you’re really important. But most people don’t build a discovery asset and they are especially powerful.
[00:19:25] Jason Barnard: Right. And sorry, that brings me to a point that occurred to me as well, is that what the 21st century is looking like from a discoverability perspective on search and in AI is it’s all going to be hooked onto who’s created and who’s published the content. So the machines are understanding who I am and who Kalicube is, and then saying, well, I understand who they are. I understand that they’re credible. I understand who they serve, and their content is therefore useful for this particular audience. And I can deliver that. Which is why we talk about understanding. Do they understand who you are, what you do, which audience you serve? Credibility. Do the machines think you’re credible? Deliverability, do you have the content? Have you given them the content that they can then deliver to the subset of their users who are your audience? And it’s all based on the person who creates and the company who publishes.
So I think that’s the key.
[00:20:20] Bob Gentle: I think as well, I often feel bad for overemphasizing the podcast side of things, but I don’t feel bad because from a leadership branding perspective, and I think this is what I want, personal brand is a phrase that I’m gradually moving away from. I’m moving towards the phrase of leadership brand or leader brand, because this is actually the goal. The goal is not simply to be one of many, because everybody has a personal brand of one kind or another, but it’s to have a leadership brand, to be the one among many. And a podcast has a massive contribution to play to this. Contribution to play, contribution to make. A lot of people look at a podcast as a content play. And one of the first conversations I have with clients when they’re looking at launching a podcast is, let’s assume nobody’s going to listen. How is it still going to be a big win for you? And we’re judged by the company we keep.
So there’s an authority by association element to this.
[00:21:24] Jason Barnard: Yes.
[00:21:25] Bob Gentle: If we’re seen with big fancy people, people will start to see us in the big fancy box too.
[00:21:31] Jason Barnard: And if I may add, if the search engines, Google, AI, Bing, see you hanging out with the big fancy people, they assume you’re a big fancy person, too. So that whole credibility thing plays with your audience, human and the AI algorithm audience, which is what we specialize in and makes total sense that leadership brand is super, super powerful. I love it. I think I might drop personal brand as our pitch as well. Steal your idea. Sorry, Bob.
[00:22:02] Bob Gentle: But there’s more. So within the second layer, The Authority Layer, one of the elements is what I would call The Dream 100. And it’s really looking at who are the role models that you aspire to, who are the people who are maybe a few steps ahead of you in what you’re doing. That if you could spend time with them, it could change your life and really making a list of people that if you could be around, it could just completely transform everything. And a podcast is a wonderful vector for actually beginning those relationships because podcast provide access. And one of the things a podcast demands of you is that you use that access responsibly in a way that serves you and in a way that serves other people and in a way that serves your guests. But a podcast allows you to skirt past all the gatekeepers and you can ask for time from most people, knowing that it’s not, you’re not asking for handouts, you’re going in offering something that’s actually genuinely valuable. Because smart people know that podcasts interviews are much more than a podcast interview.
[00:23:22] Jason Barnard: Right. No, 100%. So moving on to the last two, because we’ve done 1, 2, and 3. Personal brand foundations, authority and network, your discoverability. Then it’s products and services and selling.
[00:23:36] Bob Gentle: Well, I tend to not focus too much on the last two in this kind of conversation because, well, in sales conversations, I’ll put it that way. But the productization, I think there’s a whole industry geared towards helping people monetize their personal brand. And the problem is that they will all tell you that their thing is the most important. There are people selling courses, people telling you that you need to build an online community, telling you that you need to sell information products and all this kind of thing. And it’s mostly BS. There’s what’s right for you today is different from what’s right for me today. So helping people understand what’s the right suite of monetization options for them. Most of the time, it’s going to be actually premium services to begin with. And then gradually as your audience builds, you can monetize further up the funnel in a volume play. So depending on what your business is, there’s different ways of approaching that in terms of the sales and the scaling side of things. I’ve had clients who are very high profile who just didn’t have a sales process. And so by simply injecting a very simple sales process, and by sales process, I mean, most people try and fix a bad business with more marketing, when actually what you need is not more marketing, that’s probably working. What you need is a process of starting conversations and pivoting those conversations into would you like to buy one? It’s astonishing how really logical, confident people will avoid that. That’s generally where the money always is. Once you’ve got that, now you’ve got something you can scale and systematize, but as long as you’re avoiding conversations, you’re going to struggle. So the way I’m working is typically partly as a strategic advisor, partly as a coach, and partly as a technical support advisor to help people lock in a balance between marketing and sales.
[00:25:55] Jason Barnard: Right, and I can vouch for you because I’ve been working with you for a couple of months now, and definitely you’ve helped me to focus, you’ve helped me to prioritize, you’ve helped me to position myself better. And now I can take all of that, which I’m starting to do. I’m walking the walk much better than I was before and wrap it up, package it for Google and the AI to be more successful than I was before with them. So I’m hugely grateful to you and I’m also grateful to you for coming on the show. So multiple gratefulnesses to you, Bob, thank you very much.
[00:26:29] Bob Gentle: Well, it’s my absolute pleasure. Maybe just finish with one thing. I had a client that was a very large multinational and they were the third biggest in their industry, and it was a big common industry. And I was on a call with the executives in the US and in the UK and we were talking about marketing. I was there to talk about marketing. And I asked them what their sales process was. You know, what their sales process was? They waited for the phone to ring and I was just astonished.
And I think a lot of people run their business like that. And with the best will in the world, you can build a magnetic leadership brand. You can be very high profile and you’ll have, the analogy I would often use is it’s like you want to have a successful crop and you spend all your time in the field nurturing the crop, watering it, making sure it grows and the sun shines and the pests are kept off. And your harvest process is that you walk into the field with a basket and you wait for it all to jump in. That’s how most people run their business. So I’m not going to go too deep on the sales and scale, but I think you can see where I’m coming from, that’s all the marketing in the world. Not a sales process, it’s pointless.
[00:27:53] Jason Barnard: Right. And I love the story at the end. And I’ve just realized that when I’m guesting on other people’s podcasts, I definitely need to improve my storytelling. Thank you so much, Bob. That was absolutely brilliant.
[00:28:04] Bob Gentle: If you have enjoyed this conversation, you will love my podcast. It’s Building Your Leader Brand. It’s very easy to find. And Jason, thank you very much for having me.
[00:28:14] Jason Barnard: It was an absolute pleasure. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Bob.
[00:28:22] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.
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