Dave Buck :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good” might not bring instant encouragement for people who have been “downsized”, or put out of their jobs, however that may be described by whatever weasel words are in corporate HR vogue these days.

But one area in which I see potential gain for many people is in a field I know a bit about, coaching.

For people who want to get back into a paid job as quickly and as effectively as possible, it could make good sense to find a coach who specializes in helping people with that process or an aspect of it, for example effective social networking for business or how to prepare for and conduct yourself in an interview. That can help the person seeking a job and of course it can also help the coach.

For others who may be thinking of something more like striking out on their own, now might be a time to look at professional coaching, a business which many people run from a home office.

About six years ago I was at a bit of a crossroads myself, not that I’d been put out of work – I’d had my own consulting business then for about fourteen years so I was the only one who could “downsize” me. No, it was more that I was restless for a new professional challenge that the consulting work I was doing then was not giving me.

I will always be grateful to the friend, himself a coach, who encouraged me to look at becoming a coach.

My first reaction was “that’s not me”, but as I researched the industry I started to see that this could be something I could enjoy doing and which could be personally and professionally satisfying.

And I will always be grateful that in the process I teamed up with Coachville, a global community of coaches and a provider of extraordinary resources.

True to the spirit of its founder, the late and extraordinary Thomas Leonard, whom I was privileged to meet and observe demonstrating coaching, Coachville is always coming up with new angles on coaching, new programs to help keep coaches at the leading edge (or ahead of it, sometimes!).

The latest offering, the Coachville Business Academy for Professional Coaches, is to my way of thinking extremely timely. The programs to be offered by the Academy are clearly focused on helping coaches establish and grow their businesses to be financially viable as well as rewarding in other ways.

I’ve posted some thoughts about the Academy initiative at my Des Walsh dot Com site. In that post I mention that on Monday, December 22, Coachville CEO Dave Buck will be hosting a teleconference call which is being billed as a preview for programs about to be launched by the Academy. There are actually two calls, presumably to accommodate people with different timezones.

The first call will be at 12 noon on Monday December 22 – Eastern time USA; the second will be at 7 pm ET, Monday December 22. I will be tuning in to the second, because the first will be in the depths of night my time!

If you are already a coach, or someone you know is, or if you or someone you know might be wondering whether coaching could be a cool thing to get into (hint: it is) then I commend Dave’s call to you. It will give you a sense of the Coachville “style”, which is special.

There is a pre-requisite for participating in the call, namely to be a member of Coachville. There is no charge for that and you get access to some great resources online. So the steps are, if you want to participate and are not yet a member of Coachville, go here to join Coachville. Once you are a member – or if you are a member already – you register for the call here.

If you have any questions you would like to fire at me after reading this post and don’t want to use the public comments, please get in touch via the Contact form on this blog. Or contact Coachville directly.

In the second of this short series on Business and Branding, Finding What Works, I mentioned that my core brand these days is effectively my own name, as in the name of my other main blog, Des Walsh dot Com. Another way I could put that is to say that I am practicing “personal branding”. The decision to use my own name as my brand, or as the focus of my brand, was influenced by several factors, including:

flexibility in being able to make the brand refer to what I’m working on now, rather than what I was focused on previously
ability to build on the presence I have established online, especially through the past 4.5 years of blogging and related social media/social networking activities
it doesn’t hurt that there are not, so far as I’ve noticed, namesakes in the business spaces in which I am interested

The Brand YOU concept

As I mentioned in that previous post in the series, I actually started using my own name as a business brand way back in the late 1980s, when I started in business and – like most of the people I knew who established their own consultancies – just took my own name and added “& Associates”. In between then and now, actually just before I started blogging, I became aware of the branding implications, via the “brand you” concept as I learned it from Dave Buck, now CEO of a coaching organisation I belong to, Coachville, who in turn acknowledged the use and promotion of the term by Tom Peters. In the onsite explanation of his program on the Brand YOU topic, Dave says:

Your brand is your trust mark – it distinguishes you from the field. Not like competition, but like uniqueness. As Tom Peters aptly predicts “It’s Brand YOU or canned you; become distinct or extinct”. It makes you a (very well) known entity. It’s how you connect with the people you intend to serve. Speaking of service, that’s the real essence of Brand YOU – making your talents, gifts, experience, knowledge and value adding products so well known, that the people who want and need them can easily find you.

This is not about an ego trip – although I suppose it could be for some people – so much as about using your own name as a business brand. And social media, which by definition is more about people than about companies or other organizations, lends itself to processes of “Brand YOU” marketing.

Nor does that have to be restricted to promoting only the businesses of solopreneurs and other one-person operators.

Personal branding and company promotion

Paul Chaney explains how personal branding can also be used to promote a company brand. He cites some outstanding examples in the social media space, people who have become, in that world, “household names”. He outlines how, by becoming well known and respected, these individuals have helped raise the profile and reputation of the companies employing them.

The question that immediately arises for me, with my coach hat on, is this: assuming a client buys the idea that the CEO or some other person in the firm could be allowed, encouraged even, to build their reputation online as a thought leader in their field via a personally branded blog, with the accompanying/supporting idea that this can only enhance the firm’s reputation as well as the blogger’s, what happens when that person gets a better offer and leaves to work with another firm?

Surely the obverse of the company’s fortunes rising with the blogger’s comes into play, with that blogger’s subscribers and other readers now seeing the blogger’s new firm as the one to consider buying from, hiring, etc.

Could companies being asked to support executives and others blogging require them to sign a “non-compete” document, effectively stopping them blogging for a period once they left the company? Taking “gardening leave” from blogging?* And if so, would that requirement constitute, in some jurisdictions, an unacceptable restraint of trade?

Blogger contracts? Attorneys at twenty paces?

For those of us who are home-based, solopreneurs this is not likely to be a problem. But many of us are also in the business of coaching or consulting to companies, which can be expected to have an interest in the topic. If we encourage them, say, to help one of their key people to build their personal brand as a thought leader, in the expectation or hope that the firm will have an “aura” benefit, what do we say to them about what happens when that person gets a better offer and leaves to go and work for – and perhaps blog for – a rival company? Or at least keep blogging but with people knowing he or she is with the new firm?

*Interestingly, in checking for a link to explain the UK/Australian term “garden leave” or “gardening leave”, I found a link to a recent legal decision in the Supreme Court of Victoria (Australia), in which one of the protagonists was Bearing Point, who from what I’ve read fought their case down to the wire: so who does Paul Dunay, one of the stars in Paul Chaney’s post, work for? Yes, BearingPoint. Small world. And in fairness it should be noted that Paul Dunay has an ‘opinions are my own’ type disclaimer on his personally branded blog, as well as stating his connection with BearingPoint.

What’s your take on the personal branding via social media possibilities? Any drawbacks? And do you buy the argument that personal branding via social media can help the brand of the company which the practitioner – blogger, podcaster, tweeter – works for?

Business and Branding #2: Finding What Works

Business and Branding #4: Online Reputation Management