Here’s a question I think every professional should be able to answer: What are you known for? Not your title. Not the company you work for. Not the logo in your email signature. I mean you. If your name came up in a conversation when you weren’t in the room, what would people say you were really good at? What would they associate with you?
For a long time, I didn’t think much about that question. I worked hard, built relationships, represented great companies, knew my business, and took care of my clients. I assumed that was enough. Then I decided to help build a company of my own, and somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t just building a business. Building the company forced me to build myself.
When we started bisqqit, the goal was fairly straightforward. I had seen the same issue over and over in radio: a media plan could look perfectly good on paper, but when you actually mapped station signals against a client’s retail footprint, the story could look very different. There were gaps, overlaps, and opportunities that a traditional ranker simply couldn’t show you. I knew there had to be a better way to visualize it, so we built one.
What I didn’t anticipate was how much building that company would stretch me personally. Suddenly, I wasn’t just selling radio anymore.
I had to explain a completely new idea, market it, write about it, present it, defend it, and teach people how to use it. I had to walk into conversations where people had no idea what I was talking about and somehow make it make sense. More importantly, I had to become comfortable putting my own ideas and opinions out into the world.
At some point, I realized people weren’t only evaluating the product. They were evaluating the people behind it. Did I understand the problem? Did I know the industry? Could I offer a perspective that was useful? Was I willing to share what I was learning? Could people trust me?
That realization made me much more intentional about building my own professional presence. Not because I woke up one morning and decided I wanted to become a “personal brand.” Quite frankly, that phrase still makes the whole thing sound far more glamorous than it really is. Building a professional brand is work. It means writing the article even when you aren’t sure who will read it, sharing an idea before it feels completely perfect, contributing to industry conversations, helping people, making introductions, showing up at conferences, and continuing to learn.
Over time, those things start to accumulate. People begin associating certain topics, ideas, and strengths with your name. That, to me, is where a real brand begins. We tend to think of branding in terms of logos, colors, fonts, taglines, and websites. Those things certainly matter for a company, but your personal professional brand is much simpler. It is your reputation repeated. It is what people consistently experience from you and what they have come to believe you are good at.
For me, that has evolved considerably. Radio has always been part of my professional identity, but over time so have mapping, retail coverage, agriculture, marketing, data, strategy and writing. Some of those things weren’t part of the way people viewed me five or ten years ago, but they are now because I kept learning, kept working in those areas and kept talking about them. That is something I think gets overlooked in all of the advice about finding your niche and staying in your lane. Your lane is allowed to get wider. In fact, if you are growing professionally, it probably should.
Building a brand also doesn’t mean you need thousands of followers or that every post needs to go viral. I think we have confused visibility with popularity, and they are not the same thing. You don’t need everyone to know who you are. You need the right people to understand what you are good at.
I have posted plenty of things that received modest engagement, only to have someone mention the topic months later. Someone will send me a message about something I wrote, introduce me to another person because of a subject I’ve been discussing or remember a project I shared long after I assumed everyone had scrolled past it. Those moments taught me something important: people are paying attention even when they aren’t clicking the like button.
That is why I have started thinking about all of this less as personal branding and more as professional equity. Every article, presentation, conversation, thoughtful post and introduction is another small deposit into your professional reputation. Every time you help someone without immediately asking for something in return, you add to it. Every time you demonstrate what you know rather than simply tell people what you know, you add to it again. For a while, you may not see much return. Then one day, you do.
That is the part I am experiencing now. My career has entered another chapter, and one of the most interesting things about that transition is realizing that although I changed companies, I didn’t have to rebuild my professional identity. I brought it with me. The relationships came with me. The things I had written came with me. The expertise I had developed came with me. The reputation I had spent years building came with me. I wasn’t walking into every conversation as a complete stranger, and that matters. It makes introductions easier. It creates credibility faster. It opens conversations that might not otherwise happen. Sometimes it creates opportunities you weren’t even looking for. That is when all those years of writing, networking, learning, posting, speaking, and putting yourself out there begin to make sense.
And that brings me to the people in our industry who may be reading this from a very different place right now. There are a lot of incredibly talented people in radio finding themselves at an unexpected crossroads. For some, it came through a layoff. For others, a role changed, a company changed direction, or a career that once felt certain suddenly doesn’t. When you have spent years attaching a big part of your professional identity to a station, a company, a market, or a title, losing that can shake more than your paycheck. It can leave you wondering who you are professionally without it.
If that is where you are right now, I hope you give yourself permission to look at the crossroads a little differently. Maybe the question isn’t only, “What job do I want next?” Maybe it is also, “What do I want to be known for next?”
You don’t need to know exactly what comes next. You don’t need a new company, a new title, or a perfectly polished plan. Start with what you already have: your experience, your knowledge, your relationships and your perspective. Share what you know. Reconnect with people. Write about the part of this business you understand better than most. Explore something new. Let people see the value you bring outside of the title you just left behind.
You may not be able to control when a company changes direction, eliminates a position, or decides your chapter there is over. But you can begin building something that belongs to you: your reputation, your expertise, your relationships, and your voice. Sometimes a moment that feels like an ending becomes the exact moment you start creating what comes next.
I also think this is why professionals shouldn’t wait until they need their network to start building one. We’ve all seen it happen. Someone suddenly needs a job, a client, or an introduction, and that is when they become active again. They start posting, reconnecting, and trying to revive relationships they haven’t touched in years. A network works much better when you build it before you need it. Congratulate people when something good happens. Share someone else’s work. Make introductions. Offer an idea. Write about something you understand. Contribute to the industry you want to remain part of. The goal isn’t to constantly promote yourself. The goal is to remain part of the conversation.
And building your own professional brand should never mean building something at the expense of your employer. In fact, I believe the opposite is true. A strong professional reputation can make you more valuable to the company you represent. Your employer gives you products, resources, expertise, platforms, and opportunities. You bring your relationships, experience, credibility, and perspective. The two should strengthen each other.
But companies change. Titles change. Territories change. Industries consolidate. People are promoted, recruited, laid off, or simply decide they are ready for something different. Through all of those changes, there is one professional asset you have the ability to keep building: your own name.
When I first started building bisqqit, I thought I was building a company. I didn’t realize at the time that I was also building the next version of myself. Looking back now, I am incredibly grateful I took the time to do both.
So I’ll leave you with the same question I started with: What are you known for? And if you don’t immediately know the answer — or if the answer used to be tied to a title you no longer have — maybe that isn’t something to fear. Maybe it is an opportunity to decide what you want the answer to be next.
