Marketing yourself is the hardest brief

The hardest brief I’ve ever written is for myself.

I spent 15 years at Vestas building campaigns for a brand that had scale, heritage, and a clear position in the market. I knew who we were trying to reach, what we wanted them to feel, and what success looked like. The brief for new campaigns was hard work, but it had a shape.

Now I’m a few weeks into building PAQ Anyway, and the brief is me. And it turns out that’s a completely different game.

I need to brand myself and create lead generation for fractional work and this includes cold outreach. It’s one of those things that looks simple on paper: reach out, explain what you do, ask for a conversation, etc. But honestly, I don’t enjoy the thought or the act of selling myself. It feels cliche, it sounds like so many DMs I get on LinkedIn and it doesn’t sound like me. So I’m spending a lot of time figuring out how do I reach out to people, brand and sell myself in an authentic way. Otherwise, it feels like I sound like a robot pretending to be human, or worse, a consultant pretending not to be selling something.

What I’ve noticed so far: the leads that have gone anywhere have almost all come from outside my immediate network. Not from people who already knew me, but from adjacent connections, warm introductions from unexpected places, people who found me through content. Someone who has been doing fractional work for a number of years told me that the instinct when you launch your own practice is to go deep on the people you already know, but that’s the wrong instinct. I was told that my existing network already knows me and what I can do and that the interesting conversations are happening one step further out. And this turns out to be very true.

The second thing I’ve noticed is that marketing yourself requires a different muscle than marketing a brand, even a brand you care about. When it’s your name on the brief, the objectivity disappears. You second-guess how to present yourself, your competences, you struggle to tell if you sound confident or arrogant, specific or narrow, interesting or desperate.

And it turns out that fifteen years building other people’s brands was excellent training for everything except this and the answer, as far as I can tell, is to treat yourself like a client. Write the brief as if someone else handed it to you. Who are you actually trying to reach? What problem do you solve that they’re already aware of? What do you want them to do after reading this?

It doesn’t make the outreach easy, but it at least makes it honest.