Peter Murphy Lewis with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Personal Branding in Business

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Peter Murphy Lewis talks with Jason Barnard about leveraging personal branding to drive business growth.

Peter Murphy Lewis is a Fractional CMO and the Founder of Strategic Pete. Peter successfully utilizes his personal brand to generate 90% of his revenue. He highlights key challenges like maintaining a personal brand’s influence while planning for potential business exit.

Peter also emphasizes how personal branding has significantly impacted his career, including opportunities from TV shows to documentaries. He shares strategies for integrating personal brand with business objectives, using LinkedIn as a tool for visibility.

Jason Barnard and Peter Murphy Lewis discuss the importance of social proof and strategic PR in strengthening a personal brand, ensuring it aligns clearly with business objectives. This episode shows how to transform personal visibility into sustainable business growth.

What you’ll learn from Peter Murphy Lewis

• 00:00 Peter Murphy Lewis and Jason Barnard
• 01:55 What Did Jason Barnard Highlight in Peter Murphy Lewis’ Knowledge Panel?
• 01:59 What Did Jason Barnard Say About Peter Murphy Lewis’ Subtitle in His Brand SERP?
• 02:37 Why Did Peter Murphy Lewis Say Using His Middle Name Was Luck for 10 Years and Then Intentional?
• 03:04 Why is Using a Middle Name Important for Personal Branding?
• 04:17 Why Does Having a Popular Name Create Too Much Competition and Ambiguity in Online Search Results?
• 06:06 What is Personal Branding in the Context of Entrepreneurship and Leadership?
• 06:27 What Makes Personal Brands Unique From Local Businesses?
• 06:38 Why Do Entrepreneurs Rely on Digital Presence to Build Credibility and Trust?
• 06:44 Why Do Leaders Focus on Personal Branding Over Traditional SEO Tactics?
• 07:17 Why Do You Need AI and Search Engines to Validate Your Digital Authority?
• 09:06 Why Do You Need to Focus on Your Website as the Strategic Focal Point for Machines?
• 09:41 How Do Assistive Engines Such as ChatGPT Help People Discover Professionals, Even Unintentionally?
• 10:12 How Can B2B Professionals Use Personal Branding to Attract Potential Clients?
• 10:24 How Does a Strong Personal Brand Help Build Trust in B2B Marketing?
• 11:16 Why Does Peter Murphy Lewis Prioritize Driving People to His LinkedIn Instead of His Website?
• 12:03 Why is LinkedIn the Best Platform for Building Trust When Selling High-Ticket Services?
• 12:46 Why is Jason Barnard Understood by All Llms and Able to Generate Accurate Responses About Him?
• 14:14 How Does Associating Your Name With Your Business, Media, and Services Impact Your Brand Strategy?
• 14:51 How is Being Seen as a TV Personality by Google an Advantage?
• 15:41 What Are the Common Pitfalls People Face When Building a Business Around Their Personal Brand?
• 17:35 What Exit Strategy Should You Consider When Your Business Revolves Around Your Personal Brand?
• 21:18 How Do Leaders Transfer Client Trust From Personal Brand to Their Capable Team?
• 21:49 How Do Successful CEOs Balance Strategic Leadership With Team Execution?
• 22:15 How Do Leaders Empower Teams While Remaining the Go-to Problem Solver?
• 22:43 How Do Leaders Optimize Their Time Between Problem-Solving and Team Execution?

This episode was recorded live on video February 18th 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N-OEzC20gI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mko_aIV1YE
Peter Murphy Lewis

Transcript from Peter Murphy Lewis with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Personal Branding in Business

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy, a legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Peter Murphy Lewis.

[00:00:43] Peter Murphy Lewis: I’m happy to be here. I’ve never been sung to for an intro.

[00:00:47] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. I just noticed I took an extra breath because I realized your name’s quite long with Peter Murphy Lewis and I had to get the full breath in so I could get to the end without running out.

[00:00:57] Peter Murphy Lewis: Well, at least I don’t have like a Junior or Peter Murphy Lewis III afterwards.

[00:01:02] Jason Barnard: Yes. Ooh, that would be difficult. Today we’re going to be talking about Leveraging Personal Branding to Drive Business Growth. And I’m really interested in this because my personal brand drives a lot of business for Kalicube. It’s hugely valuable. And I know that’s the case for you, and I think you know as well as I do, perhaps even better, how important your personal brand is for business. As a CEO, you’ve recently just exited a company and your personal brand was important there, I imagine.

[00:01:29] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, my personal brand from the. From the company that I just sold is what got me a TV show. My personal. Yeah. And then my personal. My personal brand from the TV show then got me a documentary. So, like, this has been a domino effect since 2007, when I was 27 years old.

[00:01:49] Jason Barnard: Oh, that’s cool. Now what we’re going to do is look quickly at your Brand SERP and your Knowledge Panel. This is what I always do with the guests. And you have this magnificent Knowledge Panel. It looks really great, but it says TV Personality as your subtitle, which isn’t strictly accurate except that your TV stuff is dominating. But that’s a beautiful Knowledge Panel. And your about text is brilliant. And you look like a superstar.

You are a superstar. But then I was thinking, well, Peter Murphy Lewis, there’s only one of those. But there’s a lot of Peter Lewis’s and there’s a musician and you don’t even get a look in here. And that’s the problem with having a common name or a popular name. Did you use Murphy in the middle because you have a common name or is that luck?

[00:02:37] Peter Murphy Lewis: It is luck for the first 10 years and then intentional for the next 10. So the luck happens that my middle name Murphy is very important in my family. I have a lot of Irish heritage, and growing up I had 13 first or second cousins with the middle name Murphy from an old grandmother who lost her last name Murphy, and we all got it inherited as a middle name. So Murphy has been critical for me since I was a kid. Well, when I moved to South America, people thought my middle name was my last name because everyone uses their two last names when they write it out. So people thought I was Peter Murphy and it moved into Peter Murphy. And I love that you pulled up the screen share because that singer, Peter Murphy, came into my travel company, the one that I sold 30 days ago, and I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know he’s a famous musician.

But if you’re in the rock world, if you’re into 80s music, you definitely know who Peter Murphy is. And I received a phone call from somebody on my team who was a head receptionist at my office, and she said, Peter, I know that you just made a reservation. Why did you pay for it? And I said, it’s not me. And they’re like, who is it? And they Googled it and they realized that it was the singer who happened to be in Santiago, Chile, who was doing a tour, and he came to the office. And then I realized that I couldn’t be Peter Lewis because that was too, too common. And I couldn’t be Peter Murphy because there’s going to be. There’s somebody way famous, more famous than me. And at that point I decided I have to go with Peter Murphy Lewis.

[00:04:14] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. And it is a huge problem. That’s a delightful story. Having a popular name, let’s say, like Peter Lewis or even Peter Murphy, it means that there’s too much competition, there’s too much ambiguity. Google can’t figure out, as we’ve just heard from your story, human beings can’t sort it out. And so you need to disambiguate or become so phenomenally famous like Robert Smith or Barack Obama, that everybody knows who you are. Although Barack Obama is a very unique name, that was a very bad example. I do apologize. But at Kalicube, we come across this all the time, and people trying to make a mark and become visible with a very common name or a popular name is a problem.

We either tell them to rebrand or become very famous. What you’ve done is rebrand. And I think Peter Murphy Lewis is a really cool name. Correct me if I’m wrong, but once you’ve nailed it in your mind, you’re totally comfortable.

[00:05:10] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah. And you know, like, when, when I sign off, I’ll probably do this on the podcast with you. When I sign off from anything, I always say, hey, there’s only one, one Peter Murphy Lewis on LinkedIn. Come connect with me. And it’s true. And if there’s ever another Peter Murphy Lewis, I’m going to have to go meet the person and pay them to take off one of those three names.

[00:05:28] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. That’s a really good piece of advice already is give yourself a less common name or a unique name and connect with me or Google me, because you’ll always see that superstar look. It’s so easy to get when you know what you’re doing and when you’ve got a great visibility, which you do with the TV personality side of you. So I’m looking at personal branding as business growth. And first thing, you need to define what personal branding is in the context of entrepreneurship and leadership.

[00:05:59] Peter Murphy Lewis: Well, I don’t have, I don’t know if I have a good definition, so I might have to have you answer that since you’re even more of an expert in that. I just live it because that is what brings in the revenue. I think you probably coach people and guide the Internet to solve it, but what I can tell you is that it brings 90% of my revenue. Right. It is my social proof online. As a fractional chief marketing officer, it’s not like I have, you know, 249 Google five star reviews on Google My Profile. Right. I’m not a great Mexican restaurant in small town.

And so you. The social proof other than case studies is the Internet. And in a time, you know, with this fluctuation of SEO, you can’t really determine what Google’s going to do with your keywords, but you can position your personal brand rather easily if you know how to do it. And you know, like, I can’t give it some of advice on how to do it exactly the same way that I did, but I can tell you that that’s where we lean into.

[00:07:06] Jason Barnard: Right. Which is a really great point. I like that I’m not a Mexican restaurant that can have five star reviews. And it’s very, very true as an individual, how Google and AI represent you. When somebody searches your name or explicitly asks about you for information, do you recommend them? You have to get the machine to give you the kudos, the representation that you want.

[00:07:28] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, well, I mean, kind of going to kind of what you do well and what I’ve worked on. You and I met a year ago in Saigon and I was blown away by your methodology. And I wasn’t able to do it. But there’s one small thing that I could do. What I started to do is kind of between what you and Ferry do, another speaker who was at the convention and is I worked really hard on everything about PR and backlinks. So like if you look at strategicpete.com over the last year, you’re going to see hundreds of backlinks, hundreds of backlinks on high websites that I’m trying to do. And I’m positioning Peter Murphy Lewis more than worrying about my SEO. And I feel like I’m kind of the bridge.

I just need you both to find polish my process.

[00:08:15] Jason Barnard: Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, 100% and very does digital PR and you’re talking about backlinks. But in fact, backlinks are now no longer necessary. If Google has recognized your name, especially Peter Murphy Lewis, which is unique. Every mention of you is a linkless link. Google will understand. And if you then do what we do, which is hold everything really suddenly in a ball, if you like, for the machine, consistently over a period of time, the machine will understand and become confident. So I would argue the media, the PR side is incredibly important.

The links are a bonus. And I agree 100% with you. You need to get out there, but you also need to hold those pieces together. And you’d mentioned Strategic Pete, which is your website. How much do you focus on that? Because that is the focal point for the machines.

[00:09:06] Peter Murphy Lewis: A lot. A lot. And so what I’ve done in the last 18 months is anything that I think that will help our clients, I test it first on me. And I can do that. Right. Because Peter Murphy Lewis is not that unique. So I can’t. No matter what I test, I’m not really going to damage anything.

It’s not like I have a direct competitor. Strategic Pete is a unique name. There’s not a lot of. There’s not a lot of fractional CMOs in the space. So I’m always testing these different items to see if they’ll work for me. And then I roll them out as a product to help with my clients. And kind of, you know, you and I were sharing right before we went live was yesterday somebody on LinkedIn said that they found me through ChatGPT. Now that wasn’t intentional.

That’s something. If I hired you, I probably could have done this earlier. Or I could have pulled the glue together so that it happens across all of the LLMs. But finally, my kind of scattered organic way to solve this, this PR push is starting to bear results. And you know, I tagged this up just to go a little bit in a rabbit hole, Jason. Since I’m in the B2B space, I’m coupling all of this work with those customer identification tools that when someone hits my website they tell me who they are on LinkedIn. So I am tripling down on my personal brand and my name and what Strategic Pete does on LinkedIn. So instead of trying to, you know, cold email these people or cold call these people with SDRs, I’m getting them to use my LinkedIn as my second webpage.

So using my brand, get them to LinkedIn Connect, get them to trust and then I can show them that I can prove these processes that I’m sharing with you now.

[00:10:50] Jason Barnard: Right. Which is brilliant. So getting out there and making sure that content is recognizably you and the website is a great way to do that. Because from your website you can point out and say, well, that is me, that is me, that is me. And the machines will then see your digital footprint in the way that you want to represent it. But from the perspective of pushing people to LinkedIn, why do you push people to LinkedIn and not to your website?

[00:11:16] Peter Murphy Lewis: I think because when you’re selling a high ticket service like I am, like fractional chief marketing service, my entry level advisory role starts at $5,000 and goes up from there. And our higher end engagements where I’m advising and my team is responsible for quarterly goals and all of the execution and then offering kind of our guarantee, we offer a guarantee that’s performance based with bonus that goes up to $30,000 a month depending on how big your company is, like with private equities, then people need to trust me. People don’t want to jump on a call, people don’t want me to sell them. Right. They already know that as a marketer, as a TV person, as a documentarian, maybe I’ll be a good schmoozer. So they better check, they better check my references, they better check my energy and so forth. So LinkedIn right now is the best place for me to do that for a couple of different reasons. LinkedIn does the algorithm of pushing out my content to new connections.

LinkedIn does the algorithm, if I write a good post with a good video, it’s going to re-show it to my connections. And then LinkedIn does the algorithm that is telling me who’s looking at my site. I’m not going to get the same thing from YouTube, I’m not going to get the same thing from Google, I’m not going to get the same thing from Meta ads or Google Search either.

[00:12:29] Jason Barnard: Right, absolutely brilliant. Now coming back a step, you mentioned ChatGPT sending you a client. Just a really quick story with it’s called Deep Seat, the Chinese model. First thing I did was install it and see if I asked it who is Jason Barnard, what it answer and as you said all of the LLMs understand who I am. It spat back immediately exactly the right answer. 800 words, my life story. And that is because of the organization of the information we’ve got and getting into the data sources of these language models. But the point for me was that we’re getting clients through ChatGPT who are asking about Knowledge Panels and then coming down the funnel to me and to Kalicube.

But actually mostly to me is the same thing happening for you.

[00:13:15] Peter Murphy Lewis: Identical. Identical. One of the things in the last year that has become a significant arm revenue stream execution of my team is documentaries. So in the last 12 months I have sold or been commissioned for three documentaries and I have six right now in the pipeline. And these are six figure documentaries for companies and industries and they are all coming through that exact same process. And so we’ve started to make sure that every single time you’re searching for documentary it’s related to Strategic Pete and Peter Murphy Lewis through press releases and vice versa. Right. Like anytime you’re searching for Peter Murphy Lewis or Strategic Pete, you’re knowing exactly what the services are before you have to talk to me.

[00:14:01] Jason Barnard: Right. And what I hear there is that you’re associating your name to your strategic business name to media that you’re producing and you’re the services you’re offering.

[00:14:14] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, well I mean like the example you, you pulled up the screen like TV personality. I, that was organic, that wasn’t intentional. Right. So TV Personality, somebody picked pointed that out to me in the last six months. I don’t think that that’s been there that long. I’ve been doing TV since 2017, we’re in know 2025. So it took seven half years for Google to determine that’s what I am and now it’s having a huge impact especially now that I’m doing impact stories through documentaries.

[00:14:45] Jason Barnard: Right. And so for you being seen as a TV personality by Google is actually an advantage.

[00:14:51] Peter Murphy Lewis: Huge advantage for me. Right. Like how many fractional chief marketing officers can compete with somebody who also has the added advantage that they do documentaries and TV personality.

[00:15:01] Jason Barnard: Right, yeah, that’s a really good point. And so that subtitle is vitally important.

[00:15:06] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah. And you know, like my documentaries are going to be on Amazon prime within the next six months. And if you’re a big B2B company, fantastic. I need a fractional CMO. But can the fractional CMO get you on Amazon Prime? Samsung Roku. Right.

[00:15:23] Jason Barnard: Absolutely. Okay, brilliant. So can we, can we now look at some of the problems and the pitfalls? You, you’ve obviously knocked it out of the park. So this isn’t going to be personal experience, I would imagine. What kind of pitfalls do you see people falling into when they’re trying to build a business around their personal brand or use their personal brand to drive?

[00:15:41] Peter Murphy Lewis: Well, I can give you pitfalls for me, right. I’m. No, you can tell me. We can. There’s self deprecation here. You and I are going to get along fine. There’s, there’s, there’s three pitfalls right away at the beginning, right.

One is it’s going to be hard to exit my company because things are dependent upon me. I just sold my company 30 days ago. My first company that I found in 2007, and this is my second company. So this one’s going to be a little bit harder to sell. The second one is all sales have to come through me, right? Like people want to talk to Peter. Peter. People want Peter’s hands on it. I have a team of 15 people behind me.

Most of them are as brilliant as anything that I could ever potentially be. Some of them are way smarter than I’ll ever be. But people want to talk to Peter and people want Peter on the phone. And so I need to figure out a way to make sure that I’m not the bottleneck for giving other people the solutions that we solve. And then the last one is AI. Right. Like I’m on the board of a bank and a TV person. There’s people who are already sending fake emails with voices and text messages to my family who are imitating me, right? And, you know, easy it is to come up with a picture of me and a video of me and a voice like me.

If there are there, there’s more than. There’s about 70 episodes of one hour episodes of TV of me on the Internet. 70 episodes to make AI of me.

[00:17:17] Jason Barnard: Okay. Right. So if we come back to the first two problems, which are the more solvable problems. Number one is you’re focusing on your own personal brand, which will mean the exit is more difficult. Have you got an exit strategy? Have you got an idea of how that might go through?

[00:17:35] Peter Murphy Lewis: I don’t have a perfect one. So my priorities professionally in life are to work with the team that I love working with. I am financially at the point where I am frugal enough that I could retire in the next three or four years, but I want to keep working with my team. So if I never can exit until the day that I die, I’m not going to have a problem with that. My wife told me the other day, she goes, you know, my therapist said, it’s probably very unlikely that you’re ever going to really retire. And I said, boom, tell your therapist to send me the invoice. So I don’t, I don’t. I’m not really worried about this exit because I enjoy so much what I’m doing.

The second way that I make sure that, like, my life gets easier, even though I might not be able to exit is revenue share. Right. So I’m trying to figure out a way that my managers buy into this process of giving me the center of attention, even though they know that they’re the ones who are doing so much of the great work behind me.

[00:18:40] Jason Barnard: Right. I mean, I would imagine as well, kind of from my perspective, I’m saying, well, we’re building up Kalicube on my own name. I don’t intend to exit. I’m a little bit like you. But if I wanted to exit, I could simply pivot away from a personal brand driven corporation to an enterprise or a bigger corporation, where Kalicube becomes the driver. And I simply have to plan ahead and pivot the marketing away from myself and the emphasis towards Kalicube.

[00:19:07] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, that makes sense. You know, like I have. Even though I haven’t planned it out, I’m sure that when the time comes, I’ll talk to 10 smart Jason’s who already have that mapped out, and then I’ll go there. That reminded me of a point about five years ago when I got recruited to work for a private equity company that had bought a distressed asset and they need to turn it around, stop, churn, rebrand, and sell it. And we did that. But one of the ways we did is we built a podcast. So we had a successful podcast similar to yours, and it was highly dependent upon me asking interesting questions, my face, my voice.

But all I did. At some point I realized, you know, like, you can’t, I can’t be on a podcast three hours a day, otherwise I’m not going to be able to take this company to the level that it needs to get. So, I just brought on a co-host and that co-host slowly pulled over just as much as recognition. And then she was able to help me 3x the podcast because people started to assimilate the podcast with me and her.

[00:20:03] Jason Barnard: That’s brilliant. And the idea of kind of shifting across like that and if people who can’t see this, I’m moving my two hands from left to right. Shifting one person out by shifting another person in over a period of time is also a great strategy. I talked to somebody about that as a strategy for their company the other day. And the other one is if you’re building up on your personal brand, everybody wants to work with you and it’s difficult to convince them that your team is as smart as, if not smarter than you.

[00:20:31] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, I. Well, real quick, before I go to that one, because I started to solve that with my last three big clients, I am now removed and all I do is see strategy. But real quick, it reminded me of a bad joke, but I know, Jason, you’re a great host. You’ll laugh. So I just realized with Strategic Pete, if I’m going to bring in a co-host, I have to bring in somebody named Pete.

[00:20:58] Jason Barnard: Right? Okay. Yeah. But shifting from Pete to Pete, they’ll be going, well, which Pete? So it’s like these twins, Mind you, if it’s somebody who doesn’t have a beard, the two Petes. Oh, there’s lots of possibilities. Brilliant.

[00:21:11] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah. So moving to the second question. The way that I have figured this out with the last three clients is the onboarding is always includes a project manager or a second wing, a right hand man, a right hand woman next to me that is going to be leading the strategy. And that account manager. And that person gets credibility and leverage and trust from me live on the call. And obviously I tell this when I’m talking to prospects, right? Like, hey man, you know, I, I manage these clients, I oversee the strategy. I have an amazing team of 15 people. They only bring me problems.

Everything that they know how to do, they’re going to do the execution. Why would I be doing things that everyone else knows how to do? And smart CEOs know that. Right? Because it’s the same way they run their team. Right? Like CEOs not sending off a cold email so they wouldn’t expect me to be running ads. I would run the strategy. So that has worked. I didn’t know how to figure that out two years ago, but today I do.

[00:22:11] Jason Barnard: Oh, I really like the people. They only come to me with problems. They know exactly what they’re doing with everything that’s common, normal, run of the mill. When there’s a problem, they come to me and I sort out and that gives them the reassurance. That was absolutely brilliant. Oh, sorry, go ahead. You had something.

[00:22:29] Peter Murphy Lewis: Yeah, I mean, to double down on that. And that’s my job. Who’s the person who’s right now doing the majority of the sales is to only take on clients that my team can execute on and that I can solve the problem. My team doesn’t have to solve the problem, but I can solve the problem for any of my clients in less than five or ten hours a week. My team can do the execution for 40, 80, 120 hours, depending on how many people I put on that client.

[00:22:54] Jason Barnard: I love that. That’s brilliant. Can we end there, please? Thank you so much. Peter Murphy Lewis, that was absolutely brilliant. I love the end. That’s really helpful for me as well. Thank you everyone for watching you get the outro song. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Peter.

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