You’re good at what you do. Like, REALLY good. You’ve built a business that brings in six or seven figures. People pay you serious money for your brain. And yet your brand looks like it was assembled during a lunch break using a Canva brad kit called “Elevated Sophistication.” 🥲
Let’s fix that.
Because building your personal brand as an expert (whether you’re a business consultant, a fitness coach, a strategist or literally anyone who sells their expertise) has nothing to do with slapping a logo on a neutral background and calling it “premium.” Instead, it’s about building something that actually feels like you while making people want to throw their credit card at you.
So let’s walk through how to actually figure this out. (Please put Pinterest away for now 🤪).
Step 1: Get Clear on What Your Work Is Actually About
Not what your LinkedIn headline says. Not the corporate-sounding elevator pitch you rehearsed in the mirror. What is the real thing you do?
Let’s say you’re a business consultant. COOL. So are about four million other people. 🤡 What’s your version of it? Maybe you specialize in scaling product-based businesses using lean ops. Maybe you’re the one people call when their team culture is lowkey imploding and nobody wants to say it out loud.
That specificity is your foundation. The thing you want to be known for. The “they’re the best when it comes to…” sentence that people finish for you when you’re not in the room.
If you can’t articulate this in one breath without using the word “holistic,” we need to go deeper.
Step 2: Figure Out Where You Come In
This is where most experts wander off a cliff. They describe what they do but completely forget to mention how they do it (which is the part that makes them irreplaceable).
Two fitness coaches can both help someone lose 20 pounds. But one does it through military-grade discipline and 5 AM wake-up calls and the other does it through intuitive movement and zero food guilt. Same result. Wildly different experience. Wildly different brand.
Your approach is your personality showing up in your work. It’s the reason some clients are obsessed with you and others quietly unfollow. (Good. Bye Felicia.)
Ask yourself: how do I do this differently from everyone else in my space? What’s the philosophy behind my method? If your answer is “I just care more,” I’m begging you to dig deeper. Caring is not a differentiator. It’s the bare minimum.
Step 3: Decide How You Want to Be Perceived
This one is sneaky because a lot of people skip it entirely and then wonder why their audience treats them like a commodity.
Perception is not accidental, it’s created. And it needs to be carefully calibrated, because the gap between how you think you’re coming across and how you actually come across is often the size of the Grand Canyon.
Do you want to feel approachable or exclusive? Playful or authoritative? Warm or sharp? You don’t have to pick one forever but you do need to know what lever you’re pulling and why.
This is your tone of voice. And tone of voice is not just “what words you use on Instagram.” It’s the emotional texture of every single brand touchpoint: your website copy, your proposals, the way your visuals feel, the vibe of your client onboarding emails. All of it.
The important part: your tone of voice directly shapes your visual identity. If your brand voice is sharp and authoritative, your visuals should reflect that with clean lines, confident typography, a high-contrast color palette. If your tone is seductive and indulgent, rich textures and dramatic contrasts will reinforce that allure.
When your tone and visuals are aligned, you create clarity and confidence. People immediately understand who you are and what working with you will feel like. That alignment builds trust faster, makes your brand memorable, and turns the right people into buyers because there’s no friction between what they see and what they experience.
Step 4: Make Yourself Impossible to Confuse With Anyone Else
Most expert brands look identical. Most luxury brand designers stick to the same safe formula: beige palettes, thin serifs and “elevated minimalism” that’s really just boring with a trust fund. Wellness coaches are still out here serving boho energy like it’s 2020 Pinterest. Everyone’s playing it so safe they’ve flatlined into matching beige coffins.
And it makes sense: defaulting to your industry’s visual language is the path of least resistance. But it’s also the fastest way to become invisible. You end up looking like a slightly different flavour of the same (plain) yogurt.
Standing out doesn’t mean being loud for the sake of it. It means building a visual world that’s yours. A world that gives your brand meaning and context beyond just “here’s my logo and my hex codes.” Something that makes your visuals consistent, recognizable and impossible to confuse with the consultant on everyone’s explore page.
Think of it like this: a logo with no brand world to live in is just a graphic. It doesn’t tell your audience who you are or why they should care. The concept behind the brand (the visual world it lives in) is what turns a nice design into a brand that your clients actually feel something about.
The Part Where I Tell You What You’re Probably Getting Wrong About Building a Personal Brand as an Expert 💀👀
Because I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t. 🍿
You’re putting too much of yourself in. Not all of your quirks and personal lore belong in your brand. Your love of true crime podcasts and your chaotic Spotify Wrapped are delightful at dinner parties and on your IG stories. They are not brand strategy. Know which parts of your personality serve the brand and which ones are just noise.
You’re cosplaying as someone more corporate than you actually are. This happens constantly. You think “professional” means buttoned-up and serious so you build a brand that looks like an accounting firm’s website (ew wtf). Then you show up on a sales call cracking jokes and your prospect is confused because the vibes don’t match. Your brand should feel like an extension of the REAL you, not the version of you that’s trying to impress a boardroom.
You’re not getting the tone right. Tone of voice is one of those things that sounds simple and is actually pretty hard to nail. Too casual and you lose credibility. Too polished and you lose personality. The sweet spot is the intersection of what feels authentically like you (how you actually show up in real life) and what your clients are comfortable with (which depends on your type of business, your market positioning, and the context you’re operating in). That takes intentional calibration, not just vibes.
So What Now?
You sit with these four questions like they owe you money:
- What is my work actually about, specifically?
- How does my personality and approach show up in how I deliver it?
- How do I want people to feel when they encounter my brand?
- What makes my brand visually and experientially impossible to mistake for someone else’s?
If you can answer all four with clarity and zero corporate jargon, congratulations, you have the foundation of a brand that doesn’t just look good but actually works. One that resonates instantly with the right people and makes the wrong ones self-select out (BYEEEE)
And if you’re sitting there thinking “I know branding matters but I still haven’t found someone who can translate all of this into something real”… WELL, my friend. You know where to find me. 😉
