BIRD WILLIAMS: You're listening to Bird Means Business Episode 35.

Hello Hello Hello! And welcome to the Bird Means Business podcast. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I hope this episode puts a pep in your step. I hope that if you're not having such a great day that all of a sudden, now it's like, "Yeah. You know this is good. I needed this." That's my hope really with every episode that you're able to take notes and have ideas pop in your mind and basically just grow as an entrepreneur, and as a person. 

Alrighty, so I get this question a lot. "Should I be the face of my brand? Am I supposed to show my face on social media?" So, we're going to talk about it. 

Before I get started I want to share another listener shout-out. It is actually my dear sister, Kelly. She is the sweetest, and she is not aspiring to own a business, but she tunes in anyway. And she'll call me with her feedback and questions and comments. She's actually a personal banker so she'll say hey have you considered this you should add this. I just love it so much and it means so much to me because she's my only sibling and she's really been my biggest cheerleader from day one, and I just love her so much. So Kelly, if you're listening, thank you so much for all the love and support you've given to me over the years. I love you so much. 

All right. I want to share a little bit about my signature Bird's Eye View business plan program. It's my signature program and it's something that I've really refined and honed over the last few months that I've had Bird Williams Consulting. And, man. It is just really special. And we talk in detail. Actually a lot in the program about how to position you your brand and your ideal client within your marketing message so if you have questions about that, you also already know that I really need to get a business plan together. I would love to chat with you about it you can actually go to birdwilliamsconsulting.com/birdseyeview. And you can kind of see how everything looks there and then it will prompt you to set up a consultation call.  Completely free 15-minute call. Or We can really just chat through your specific needs and I can share more with you about how the program lays out, and we go from there it's a lot of fun, and I've worked so many clients through it now and I'm just really excited about it. So, again, you're going to get more of what we'll talk about today in the episode in that program, right. 

So, when it comes to deciding on whether or not you should be the face of your brand, it really depends on the business. It depends on what people are buying, more specifically. I'm going to give you two stories, in two businesses that I've owned, on how it's kind of looked. Okay? 

So first, The League. You may have heard me mention that I own a gym. It's my first business. it's called The League. It's here in Houston, Texas. We launched it back in 2013. There's such a beautiful, beautiful mix of people, community as a gym. We all push each other to be stronger and better. There isn't competition. It's more of like, "You got this. Let's go." It's just such a vibe. I love it so much. And we have 10 incredible people on our team, service reps, and instructors who are just phenomenal. And we could not do it without them. I'm sorry I feel like I always have to say that because I just love our team so much. Okay, so when we launched, we didn't have those 10 team members. When we launched it was just Terry and I. I worked the front desk, which is our service rep position now, for every single shift. Terry instructed every single shift. And this happened for whoo, probably like nine months to a year. I can't remember exactly. I've shared before that, man it was a hot mess. I'd have like two laptops on the desk, as I was doing the service rep position. One laptop was to sync to the scanner to check people in, and the other one was for me to work on whatever I was trying to work on in the business. That's obviously not good. That's trying to multitask and I'm not being able to be present with our clients who are coming in through the door and checking in. Nor am I able to be present in whatever I was doing in my business. So again, it's important as your business grows at some point you're going to have to be able to release control. And so we began to hire onto our team, hiring service reps, hiring instructors, and so on and so forth. I think it was about two years later, we launched our second location. And so the talent came that Terry was the one teaching all the classes. He had the majority of classes. And the way we were thinking is like well we want to, you know, preserve as much cash as we can and continue to grow the business and, you know, we weren't paying ourselves per hour, but we did have to pay employees. And so, we had him teaching a lot of the classes. But y'all, whenever we grew, whenever we would launch that second location, it was like people wanted to still take Terry's classes. Like people were excited about him, you know because he was kind of the face of the brand. And it was a little bit of a problem because we had two locations. He couldn't be in two places. We didn't want people to go to one or the other. And so we began to aggressively focus on making it less about Terry, and more about our people. And we never really intentionally made it about Terry or tried to make him the face of the brand. I mean we had The League's branding and all that. But because he was so integrated in the business, it just kind of happened that way. So it's something I tell people who I speak with and talk with like, make sure that you're conscious of that, right? Because we couldn't grow our business, to where it is today if we would have kept him as the focal point. Even though it was unintentional, you have to be really careful with that sort of thing. So when it comes to a business like the gym where you really want people to buy into the training program. We have PAC(K) training. It's our proprietary training format. That's what, in hindsight, from day one I would have promoted. I would have tried to hire on people sooner and make the class distribution more equal so that it was not about one instructor but about the whole team, and about the training program. So that's looking at the face of your business from one lens, one perspective. 

Now, another is Bird Williams Consulting which I just launched this past November, so about eight months ago. And it was completely different. Now, you have to understand, when it comes to being the face of a brand, your girl, Ashley, is like, "No thanks!" I love being behind the scenes, I mean that's my whole thing. I just want to make stuff happen and keep it moving. I don't want to have to be all perfect and polished and you say the right things. I like to be honest. Y'all know I keep it real. So when it came to launching the consulting firm, that was kind of my plan. I was like, you know, I'll have a logo. I'll just make it about the brand. But there's a difference when it comes to an online service based business. There's no brick and mortar. There's no product, in a sense. It's actually me, is what I'm selling, right? And what I began to learn when I began to research around online marketing and that sort of thing. In order to get people to pay you for a service when you have an online service based business. They have to know, like, and trust you. So they have to know about your brand and who you are and to be aware of you. And then they have to actually decide that they like you like, "You know what? She's cool. I like her. She's my vibe", or whatever. And then they have to trust you enough to give you their money to work with you. And so in order for people to know, like, and trust you, one of the best ways is for them to actually see your face. For them to actually be able to look into your eyes, like take your sunglasses off, and speak to people and let them hear your voice. I wasn't really prepared for that. And I've talked before, I think it was Episode Five when I really launched the podcast live. I talked about my process for even coming to a podcast. Initially, it was a blog that I was gonna do. Then it was a video show and then I was like, whoo, that was way too much. Let's just do the audio with the podcast and it's a perfect fit. But I say all that to say I didn't really want to have to put my face out there but because of my business type and because of what I'm selling basically and people are buying, I need to have my face on things. And also I don't think of my businesses like, I don't want it to be a machine. I don't want to just pump people through a system. I actually do want to connect with people. And sometimes it's harder to do that like right now I'm in my guest bedroom closet, and I am talking to you but I don't see you there. And even when I do suffer Instagram, I don't always feel like I'm in there in the room with you like I would maybe at our gym. But it's important that I'm still connecting with you in some way. And even though it can feel one-sided sometimes. Like I said when I get feedback and comments, like yes, okay. This is working. It's connecting with people. So it really just kind of depends on the business. 

I'll give you another example. And this is just a vague example, but I get this question all the time. I have an actual client that I'm thinking about, but I'm not going to use their name or even their business. This is a completely separate example. But let's say you are a photographer. And you're like, I just want to show all my pretty pictures, and I just want to show all my behind-the-scenes stuff, which is amazing and great content. You definitely want to do that. But you know what else you want to put? Your face. You want to actually let people see who it is they're going to be working with on their wedding day, see who it is that they're going to actually be engaging with because that will help them know, like, and trust you. If you're basically selling a service that is based on your skillset like it is with Bird Williams, is based on my experience with running multiple businesses, and I'm giving that. Then it's like, yeah. People need to see me basically. 

In Episode 29, I actually talk about how I took students from my online course that I did back in January. It was my first online course. It was so much fun and I was like, I am all about connecting people. It's like one of my favorite things ever in every way. So, I was very excited for the businesses in that group that I knew actually veteran entrepreneurs that I can connect them with it. So we actually sat down over coffee or at the restaurant or whatever it was and we actually talked through like, what do they need to know. Like, let's just get down to it kind of thing. And I'm so grateful for those entrepreneurs who sat down with me. And it was really interesting because, in one of the conversations, it was this man who's like goals entrepreneur, like amazing. And he was sitting down with one of the students in my course and he actually answered this question differently in the same conversation because he was thinking about it in the same way that I'm talking about it. It kind of depends. So I say that because it can be confusing. Do I show my face or not? Well, you don't want to if your business is more like my gym was where you want to be able to grow it and don't want to grow it around a specific person. But you absolutely need to if you are the one providing the service. Does that make sense? 

So if I were to have a juice company, for example, I wouldn't show my face. I would make it about the juice and make it all about the juice. Every now and then of course I might put something from the owner, but I'd also put something from my team. For example, here's a spotlight on so and so who presses the juices and our awesome customer service lady or whatever it might be, right? So you want to make it about the whole team and not just one person. You really want to think in terms of how it will affect your sales and affect your growth. 

Another thing to consider is that maybe you have a really powerful story that could really resonate with your clients, and maybe even bring in free advertising or PR. Well then, yeah, go with that as in terms of why you started your business. But again, just know that as you grow, there could be some obstacles to that. 

But I would say in general, the bigger you get, the more faceless you would become. And again, it depends on the specific businesses. But I even think about when I was working with a client who is trying to sell their business. In some cases, that could be detrimental if you were trying to sell your business and you were the one that was tied to the business. But in other examples, it could be powerful like Colonel Sanders, you know. His face is still in all the branding and that's a part of it. That's a part of the value of the business. 

I want to say this too. It kind of depends on the person, okay, because the hard truth is, some people aren't wired to be the face of any business. You gotta know yourself and you really have to just ask yourself, or even as someone who loves you, those questions. If you're wondering like, should I be the face of my business? Can I really carry that? But it's like do you really want to be the one on camera? Do you really want to bring everything of you personally into your business? Really just analyze the strengths that you have as a CEO and again, focus on your core competencies because there might be times where it just makes sense, maybe make someone else, the face of your business because you can focus on other things. For example, if you're the face of your business and then there's some big personal scandal, your business could be affected. Right. So it's one thing to, you know, happen to show pictures of your face and of yourself as the owner or even your team in terms of like being the face of your brand. And another thing to strategically place yourself as the face of your brand and to really take on that role. I mean that's a lot. That's like, you have to make sure you have, like, even with for example my husband has an app called Terry the Trainer app. He has to have his hair cut at certain times like before he's gonna be filming a whole bunch and like, you know, really thinking about his wardrobe and all that kind of stuff. He does a lot of different speaking engagements as well. That's like a whole thing. You want to really ask yourself like do my personal values really match my business and all of that? Am I really positioned best there? And then also like am I just really okay and comfortable with being in the spotlight and being the person who's like speaking on behalf of the brand and being on camera and that sort of thing.  So you just want to really make sure that when it comes to that second route of like, oh yeah I'm gonna make myself the face of the brand, that you are aligned and you're thoughtful and mindful about it as well. 

In summary, I find so much value in being, quote-unquote, the face of my brand, when it comes to what I am providing, and how I'm serving my clients because it matches. it aligns. It works. But when it comes to you know another business that I have, that's not the case. So you really just have to kind of explore that. And I really wanted to try to provide some clarity around that. 

But in general, most of the people who are asking me this question, really just don't feel comfortable with, you know, hearing themselves speak, or they feel like they mess up all the time. I've shared like blooper videos which I might share a link to it or something, me messing up so much when I was doing the video show route of getting content out each week, and that's why I moved to the podcast because it was just a hot mess. Even with editing. It was hilarious. So a lot of times it's just that. It's just like, I'm afraid. I don't want to really put myself out there. That makes me nervous. And if that's the case, hey, kick those limiting beliefs behind too. We don't want to carry that into anything. There are actually so many other things you should consider when it comes to that, but not that you're not going to do it perfectly. Because guess what? None of us will. It's really just about showing up and if you reframe your thoughts to caring about who you're actually serving and how it's going to benefit them, it's like, what matters if I stumble across a few words or don't do something perfectly or don't have on makeup or whatever it might be. And, again, this is something that I've grown into. I did not feel those feelings, you know when I started all of this. You will find again and again that the secret to success is just showing up, just saying, "You know what? I'm gonna do this imperfectly. And it's going to help somebody so it'll be worth it." Okay. 

If you have any questions, hit me up, let me know. I am here to help you. I want to journey with you for this process. I want to be the resource that I wish I had when I launched my business and was Googling all the things and trying to figure everything out and making a lot of mistakes. So, if you have questions you can just go to birdwilliams.com/consultation and we can chat about where you are, what your needs are and I will let you know how I can serve you. I'll probably get really excited because I get really excited on those calls. I get really hyped about what I get to do in this business. It blesses me so much. I love it. And it's like a real honor for me to be in this role to help other people, for real, like I love it so much and I feel really blessed and grateful for it.

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