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...