How You Can COMMERCIALIZE Your PERSONAL BRAND with Mary Henderson [Bullpen Sessions Episode 39]

Mary Henderson, how the heck are you?

I'm great, Andy. How the heck are you?

I am doing good. All right. This is my first interview. I'm excited about this, Mary, because we're doing this interview. It's a Tuesday and it's 3:09 my time on a Tuesday. But what time is it for you in Melbourne, Australia?

It's 7:09. 7:09 Wednesday my time.

It's rare I get to interview somebody who's actually on another day than I am.

This is, I know, isn't that cool?

The beauty of social, beauty of technology though today, right?

We're so lucky.

So, Mary, for the audience listening in that has no idea who Mary Henderson is, just take a minute or two to kind of introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are and where you live and some, some of your interests.

Okay. So I specialize in personal branding. I commercialize personal brands and typically I work with coaches, consultants, business owners and I help them digitalize their knowledge into an online business and help them become an authority by using social media to position themselves as the go to person. And I live in Melbourne, Australia. I have two children, I'm married and my hobby actually, believe it or not, Andy, is actually cooking. I love cooking, actually. I'm like a real, real, like a full on chef type of a cook. You know, I cook beautiful cakes and like really full on getting immersed in the creativity of it.

And I do a lot of reading, like I love reading. So in my spare time you'll always find me on Kindle, in an audible book or an actual book in my hand. And I think that that's very important to keep my mind healthy. So that's a little bit.

Well, and I always say a rule of thumb to be honest podcast Mary, is you've got to be abundance, abundant mindset, thinker. You're definitely that. And just the constant reading, it tells me you are also a constant driver of growth, which is great.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And I hope because you and I think are both, we like the art of storytelling. I'm going to figure out how we can find a way to create analogy around cooking and personal branding. And I bet you you already got one.

I do, I think.

Okay, perfect. Well, here's where I want to start with this. So if you just listened in, you heard Mary introduce herself, she is all things personal branding, very, very, very good at it. It's unbelievable what she can do to help people create their personal brand. As a coach, as a consultant. What I love about your branding, Mary, is you Got to end from a beginning to an end solution. We'll get into that in a little bit, but here's where I want to start. You actually at one time were in corporate sales. And one thing that you accomplished, if I have it right, you helped an organization, Australia go from 4 million in sales to 54 million in 48 months.

Correct.

Which is ridiculous. But you actually brought personal branding to the corporate world, which is almost unheard of. Would you mind sharing that story?

Absolutely, Andy. And can I just remind everyone that's listening to this, this all happened back in 2001, okay? So we are not talking about personal branding, you know, under the banner of LinkedIn or social media. As you know, it's loosely promoted today as a LinkedIn profile, you know, or it's your authenticity or things of that nature. You know, back in 2001, nobody knew what personal branding was. I happened to come face to face with this idea of personal branding because of an experience that I had with a client. I come from the tech industry in sales and I had this face to face experience and realized there and then, oh my God, if I can solve this complex problem, and I will, I will, you know, the tenacious Mary stepped in and said, you will, you will find a solution. And I thought I could actually build an entire brand around Mary and also the problem that I can solve. So that was before I had my sales team and I did that, Andy. I actually went on. I was so driven to create a brand for myself because I knew what it could do. I, I knew that I could become a specialist. I knew that I would be seen, I knew that I would be heard. And I also knew that I could be seen and heard on a global scale through our clients because they all had relationships with vendors on a global scale. And remember back then we had no social media. Okay, let's just be very clear. So I started this whole process without social media. Then I was headhunted because now I'm a brand by an American multinational. And that changed the trajectory of my life. And what happened is that I was given this super senior role managing Asia Pacific. The company had just come to Australia and they had acquired a small business who had a very strong relationship with one of the largest retailers here. So it started as a $4 million business. And then I came on board after three sales directors tried to actually grow the business. No success. So I walked in and they said, what do we need to do to actually build this business? And I said, first of all, we need a full sales team that can manage lots of different niches, and I need you to support me financially to be able to do that. So they gave me a massive budget. I built this amazing team, and I said, there's one more thing I need. I need to get rid of job descriptions, and I need to get rid of job titles. And they were like, no, we don't do that. You know? And I said, oh, no, no, but you will do that if you want me to build your business from 4 million. And I knew, Andy, that if I could position every one of my salespeople as specialists. Right, specialists, okay, this is different to a job title. So what's the point of having 35 business development managers?

What separates them? Nothing. But Now I had 35 specialists. One was a specialist in networking, the other was a specialist in peripherals. So that I had all these special specialists in my business that were managing different business units or different business silos.

And so that made people feel really good. And the way I did that is that we had a sales conference that we kicked off the start of my position in that company. With the sales conference. I got all my team together, and we sat down in a circle, and I wanted to know about every single person. I wanted to know what their gifts were. I wanted to know what their values were. I wanted to know what they thought they were good at. I wanted to know about their family, everything. I wanted to know what their hobbies were. And I took copious amounts of note. And at the end of that sales conference, I looked at these people, and I could see where their strengths were, where their weaknesses were, what their passions were. And I matched each individual to a portfolio. Okay, so the fashionista guy was matched to the fashionista client. So I matched them all. And so. And then I gave them full permission. And I said, when you come to work, you must be unapologetically yourself. You are not a job title. You are not a box. You are not. You are not a robot. You are not a human robot. You're human. Act human. Be human. Be emotional. Give it all you've got. Not one person left the organization during my tenure. Not one. Not one in my team. Because they would say to me, andy, Mary, I love coming to work because I could be myself. And I am driven by success. Like, that is my absolute driver. So when clients work with me, I'm just driven by their success. That's what motivates me. So naturally, I was driven by my success with my sales team so that I wanted them to win. Andy. All my sales team were earning six figures, even the 25 year olds.

Wow, that's, you know, what you just said speaks to my heart because it wasn't at a corporate setting, Mary. But when Amy and I moved out to Colorado six years ago, I tell this story a lot. I went to work for an insurance agency that I was their only sales rep. They didn't have any marketing game plan. And I was now in a market where nobody knew who I was. And it was there where I realized I have to grow a personal brand. Literally no one knows who I am. And if you don't have a personal brand, you're irrelevant. Right? And I also truly believe that humans buy from humans. They do not buy from logos on business cards. And so for you to be able to bring that personal branding it to a corporate setting is absolutely phenomenal. Now, I did it in 2014, or at least started that journey. Let's fast forward. That was 2001.

It's so much easier now to create a personal brand, isn't it? But at the same time, it's extremely dangerous. So let's talk about the ease of which you can create a brand online, whether it's LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. Where do you see people today going wrong with trying to create that aura, that personal brand on social media?

Well, it's really, really obvious to me that so many people want fame and fortune. Like they actually want to be famous. And I think that most people want that. They want the easy, the easy route. They want to cut corners, you know, and you can see, I see people on posts, you know, hey, I'm here to build a community. Just follow me, you know, And I'm like, no, don't just follow me. I don't want anyone to follow me because I'm building a very, very specific tribe. So what we need to do is we need to discern that there's personal branding and there's personal branding. Now, did you hear how I started introducing myself? I said, I commercialize personal brands. There's a big difference. Okay, you can't build a personal brand, doesn't exist. Like, what are you building? You know? And somebody said to me only a month ago, hey, such and such helped me with my personal brand. And I've done that really enthusiastically. And I'm like, that's great, but what are you going to do with it now? And they're like, oh. And I'm like, exactly. That's my point. If it can't be commercialized, it's just another shiny object. So I think a lot of People don't understand that a personal brand is just a business. That's it. You are the business. Like let's get real here, let's simplify, take up, take away all of the shiny stuff and let's get to its core. What is a personal brand in today's market? It is a business. It's the one human being that has become the business. That's it. It's really simple. But this whole notion around fame, that's actually quite sad as far as I'm concerned.

Do you think part of that has to do with the fact that people have seen.

Certain companies or just people in general, personal brands in general, blow up overnight so that the goal is no longer to be targeted about your social media presence, your branding, to make sure it's speaking to your target audience. And now everybody's just focused on trying to grow that next billion, billion dollar business. To be famous, to be wealthy, to be rich. Do you think that's where people are going wrong is they're just now focused on the massive wins because they've seen others do it on social media?

Well, the thing is that let's look at those people that have blown up overnight. I mean they have to keep that momentum going. So most of them can't. So you might have a video that may go viral, but one video doesn't cut it, or one piece of content doesn't cut it, or one keynote on a stage doesn't cut it. This is an ongoing process. This is daily. So you can't build a brand overnight because of one video or one post. That person is desperately wanting to fame. You've got to keep that momentum up. And it's not just that, Andy. There's a difference between a post blowing up overnight and suddenly it's gone viral. And everybody knows you versus somebody who wants to be known as the go to person for their area of specialization. Two different scenarios, right? I don't work with that scenario of people who want to go viral and become famous. I have no interest in that at all. And the reason for that is because my tribe of people that I work with, they are super smart. They have exceeded the 10, 15,000 hour rule that of working in their specialization. And I need that depth of currency to actually help them commercialize their brand. Otherwise I'm just working with air. You know, I've worked with two people, you know, in as in my coaching business that have wanted to become famous only. And it's a disaster. It's a really big disaster, you know, and you don't realize until the aftermath. You look back and you go, what was all that about? What just happened? And then what it does, Andy, it impacts my brain because I haven't delivered on my promise. But my promise is that at the end of the journey with me, you will have all the tools in place and implemented for you to start becoming known as the go to person. And I've got clients that are in micro, micro niches and they are killing it right now. I mean, killing it. And so it works the way that I run my personal branding.

My personal branding approach is not.