What's The Difference Between A Personal Brand And A Company Brand?

What's the difference between a personal brand and a company brand? And which one is better? That's the question I've been getting from my students. And I thought I'll answer that in this particular podcast. Hey there, Sidharth Rajshek here. Welcome to the Freedom Business podcast. And in this episode I want to answer the question of what's the difference between a personal brand and a company brand and which one is better? More from a perspective of a knowledge business and a coaching business. Now, what I did is when I started my business, I started off as a personal brand. I went as siddharthrajsekhar.com and I started to load all my courses and I started to do all my coaching around my name. Because in the initial stage of my journey, I needed to establish my own credibility and the best way to do that was through my personal brand. But the problem with the personal brand is if you are going to do this for a long enough period of time, you need to actually find a way on how you can grow beyond your brand. Meaning if it's going to be going beyond just your name, but something bigger than that. Okay. And so what I did was I evolved my company from a personal brand to a community brand or a company brand over time. I'm still the face of the brand, but the focus is more on the community. So in my first two years of my coaching business, it was more like Siddharth Rachikar, the brand. And the second two years, I mean the second phase, the year number three and year number four, I started to shift the focus to Internet Lifestyle Hub. So Internet Lifestyle hub right now has over 20,000 paid members. And when I went through this first phase of the journey, I think I reached around 4 or 5,000 people. And then I realized at that point of time that it is not about Sidharth Rajshekar anymore. It's not about me, it's about them. It's about the community. And then I evolved my entire coaching business to go with a company brand or a community brand. Now if you look at the typical branding stuff, what happens over there, people who are building company brands are building to sell, okay? Especially the startup world, they come up with an idea, they come up with a software or concept and they build that particular app or whatever and they're building that to sell. And that is the whole intent of building those kind of typical company brands. But when you're approaching a knowledge business, it's slightly different. And the way that I look at it is I wanted to build something around my name and my credibility in the first phase so that people get to know me, they. They get to trust me, and they're able to connect on a personal level with me. And then when I launched and evolved it into a community brand, as I'm seeing the people in my community who are being loyal to the tribe, who are loyal to the community, and not just because of the association that they've had with me, but primarily because of what, you know, what are the values that I stand for and how those values get extended to the community brand. So now I have a lot of facilitators in my community and a lot of folks who are actually supporting me on the bigger mission, which is beyond just, you know, me making money or profits. And because of that, the community brand has taken a whole different different shape and shape and form. So to answer the question is, which is better? Okay, personal brand or company brand? My answer is to start with a personal brand to establish your credibility and evolve that not just as a company, company brand, but evolve it into a community brand, where the community has a set of vision, mission, values, and a set of ideals that it stands on. And even though you may be the driver of the community, the focus is not on you. You can start to empower other people to step in and also help grow the particular community. And when you build a community with such kind of loyalty, it's going to directly impact the business growth. So the way that I'm building my community is I'm not building to sell this. I'm not playing the valuation game. I'm playing the value add game. And if you have this similar mindset, then taking this approach is the best thing to do. I hope you found this podcast useful. Tune into my future episodes and I'll be answering more questions like this in the future. I wish you all the best. And if you're not a part of my community, attend my next webinar, check the description and be a part of the tribe. All the best.