Every good brand has always been personal

Personal branding is everywhere right now, and if you run a business with a team behind you, most of the conversation probably feels like it was written for somebody else.

A lot of it comes from the influencer years. People built audiences by being visible, and now they’re growing up and want to be taken seriously as businesses, so they’ve started calling what they do a personal brand. The phrase has come to mean a person on camera most days, sharing as much of their life as the algorithm will take. The business owners I work with run nurseries and padel clubs with teams behind them. They have no intention of becoming the face of anything, and they shouldn’t have to.

I’ve spent twenty years building brands, and every one worth its price started with a person. Business happens between humans. A parent decides whether to trust a nursery long before she’s compared fees, and what she’s responding to is the worldview of whoever decided that nursery should exist. That’s personal branding, and it was doing its job long before anyone bought a ring light.

A brand built on identity takes what’s already true about the people behind the business and chooses, deliberately, which of those truths it carries. Nothing is invented. You keep what belongs to you, and the brand holds what your customers need to recognise.

The most interesting brands I build have more than one founder behind them, which means more than one worldview to hold, and all of it has to meet a customer who needs to feel seen. The brand becomes the bridge between how the owners see the world and how the people they serve experience it. Get that bridge right and something shifts. The personality starts with the founders and then takes on a life of its own inside the business.

Same market, same area, completely different brands

This year I’ve worked with three nurseries serving the same families in similar locations. On paper they’re competitors. Put their brands side by side and you’d never mistake one for another.

Polka Dot Farm was built on Sian and Faye’s belief about what a nursery should be. That belief shaped the visual identity, and it runs through the day-to-day life of the site so completely that the staff are an exceptional example of what the brand stands for. It started with Sian and Faye, and now it lives in the business. Polka Dot Farm sold this year, and it was a hugely successful sale in the industry. The sale belongs to them and the years they spent running a brilliant nursery. What I’d point to is how much of the value sat in something a buyer could see and feel: a brand identity and culture so embedded in the team that it would carry on after the founders stepped away.

Nomi is a nursery I helped rename and re-identify, and we launched the new brand this year. Visually it looks nothing like Polka Dot Farm, and that’s deliberate. Anne’s worldview and lived experience are her own, so her brand speaks in its own way. It has a clear message and style that feeds the whole ecosystem of the business, from the staff to the children, and as her nursery grows the team have adopted it as theirs.

The third is a nursery I’m working with right now, [NAME / “a family-run nursery”], and its owners are a family themselves. Their brand is being built from their story and what they believe, and it looks completely different again. The spark comes from them. Before long it will be carried by every person who works there.

If three nurseries in the same market can hold three identities this distinct, there’s no template for yours. The part of your brand nobody can copy is the people who started it.

A brand anyone on your team can run

The real test of a personal brand is whether your newest team member can carry it on a Tuesday afternoon while you’re nowhere near the building, and whether the customer in front of her still feels exactly what you’d want her to feel.

That’s the brand worth building. It grows with you, holds together as you hire, and keeps your best customers choosing you when someone cheaper or closer opens down the road.

It’s also what the DeBrand Method is built on. We decode who you are and who you’re becoming, design a brand around the parts that matter, direct it into the way the business runs, and decode again each time you grow.

Curious where strangers place your brand right now? Mira will show you in five minutes.