From time to time, I like to post success stories to show you that personal branding DOES work. If you have your own story, please email me. Today, Paul will be talking about his story on how he transformed his life by establishing his brand and then realizing that he should be constantly meeting new faces and communicating his value. To view more success stories, please click here.
Who is Paul Singh?
Paul has been an entrepreneur for nearly 10 years. With two successful startups under his belt, he is a process guy at heart and now focuses on helping startups and small businesses systematize the way they build their own path to getting ahead. His blog, Results Junkies, now reaches thousands of people every month and he’s currently writing a free ebook (coming in October 2008) that outlines a systematic, entrepreneurial method for succeeding.
Paul Singh’s story
Having bootstrapped my own ventures from the ground up, I managed to convince my younger self that networking was a waste of time. I routinely toiled away for hours on end, hiding behind my laptop deep within datacenters and coffee shops in the DC Metro area and actively avoided nearly every opportunity to meet other entrepreneurs.
Fast forward nearly 10 years when I joined PBwiki as the Director of Support and was immediately challenged to build my own personal brand. I wasn’t exactly sure where to start but I began blogging twice a week and stumbled across Dan’s personal branding blog. I spent a weekend reading through nearly every post but, being a process guy, needed to systematize the way I would tackle my own rebranding efforts. I ended up creatingca simple, five-step plan to rebranding yourself and found it to be more useful than I ever imagined.
My advice to others would be to simply get started, today — as with most things in life, you are your own worst enemy. You can choose to continue reading about personal branding to no end and dreaming about your “ideal” job or you can force yourself to spend at least 10 minutes to get started right now.
Today, I am PBwiki’s Director of Information Systems and routinely attend networking events in the San Francisco Bay Area and the DC Metro area. In fact, I specifically set aside a $3000 budget per year to travel between the coasts to keep in touch with entrepreneurs that I’ve met at these same events. Having a strong, consistent personal brand has led to a number of unexpected opportunities, new friends and a decent amount of side income as well.
The point is that you need to own your personal brand and you have to get started today. You’re unique, just like everyone else — start capitalizing on that uniqueness today and watch yourself get ahead in life faster than you ever imagined!
