Matthew Paulson weighs using your name versus a separate brand name for your business. Personal names build recognition but trap you as the bottleneck, make delegation harder, and tank the business's resale value. A distinct brand name lets you step back and pivot without losing everything.
Hey, everybody, Matthew Paulson here today. I want to record a quick video to discuss whether or not your personal name. So Matthew Paulson should be the name of your business brand. So should the brand be MarketBeat or should it have something with your name in it? And how closely should those things be related? There are generally two schools of thought on this. There's the thought that the train of thought that I subscribe to is that they should be kind of separate and distinct. So the name of your business and your personal name should be two different things. And then there is another train of thinking that says you are your business. Your name should be synonymous with the name of your business. So there are a lot of online entrepreneurs that try to make a big personal brand name for themselves in all of the content they produce. Kind of the best example of this is the Smart Passive Income show with Pat Flynn. There's a guy named Pat Flynn that runs a few online businesses. He's got a blog called Smart Passive Income. He's written a book, he does speeches at conferences. And the names Smart Passive Income and Pat Flynn are pretty much just inseparable. You can't think of one without thinking of the other. There are some nice benefits for doing this, but there are also some cons. Some of the benefits are, one, you get to be kind of Internet famous and people know who you are. When you walk into a room or you go into a conference, people already recognize, hey, you're Matt Paulson from the startup Q and A show, which I do hope that happens someday. But, you know, that's not the focus for me. So it is nice because you get to kind of build, have your name be a brand, have people know who you are, and then you can use that personal branding moving forward in other projects you do. But there are also some cons to doing this. And I do think those cons tend to outweigh the benefits of having your name and your brand closely associated. So the first is you kind of get stuck in a hamster wheel of content creation. So if you are the brand, people expect your content to come from you. And you only make money as long as you are creating content and stuff for people that comes from you. You can't have somebody else do that because they're not the brand you are. So if the brand is Matthew Paulson, I can't have my assistant, Rebecca McKeever write content for me because she's not Matt Paulson. It just does not work. But if the brand is MarketBeat and MarketBeat is the brand that People know and love and not Matthew Paulson. Rebecca McKeever can come in and create content and people won't care as much because they're following MarketBeat. They're not following Matthew Paulson. Second, it's really hard to sell your business when your name is the brand name of the business. Pat Flynn would have a very difficult time selling smart passive income because 90% of the value of that brand is his name. And if his name and he doesn't come with a business, there's just not much of a business left. So if you want to have a business that you can go public with or sell down the line to somebody else, I'd encourage you to try to keep your name off stuff as much as possible so that the brand is getting sold and you don't have to come with that brand. The third kind of con to having your personal name associated with your business brand is that it's very difficult to switch to being something else. Like everybody knew Michael Jordan as a basketball star and then he tried to play minor league baseball and he just could not get past his own shadow of being known as an NBA world champion. Nobody was willing to accept that he is now a minor league baseball player. That was a real challenge for him. And if you are really known for one thing and then you want to be known for something else, it is kind of a big transition to get people to start thinking of you. You know, you used to be this person, now you're this person. It's hard to make that switch when your name is very closely associated with your personal brand. And then finally when your name your, when you are your person, when your name is your business brand, it becomes very difficult to systematize or delegate your business. So in a normal business, you can always bring on a new team member, a contractor, an employee, and have them kind of help run the day to day operations of your business. But when your personal brand is your business, people expect that every interaction from your business comes from you. So they want you to respond to their emails, they want you to respond to their social media, their tweets, their Facebook messages, all that. They want you to do that. So it's hard to get hand that off to somebody else when people are expecting you. The same is true for content creation. It's just tough to get team members to be able to become you and respond to people. It's hard to do that. So instead of trying to make your name be the focus of your brand, I always like to make the focus of the brand to be my readers. So MarketBeat is kind of the brand, but the focus is not in MarketBeat. It's how is MarketBeat helping the audience? So you're not saying, hey, come learn from me. I'm an expert. It's, here's this great service that is incredibly helpful, practical, and useful to you. MarketBeat is all about you, helping you out and helping you become a better investor. By doing this, you're not personally tied to creating content. You're not stuck with your business. You can sell it. I really think it's just a better idea to have a separate brand like MarketBeat that is separate and distinct from your personal brand for a lot of different reasons.
