Can You Be Known for More Than One Thing?
Depending on when you met me, you might know me from events, from fashion and image consulting, from marketing, or from the vertical garden business I'm involved in, and each of those people would describe me a little differently.
Meanwhile, the advice on personal branding is nearly always to pick one thing and become known for it, which sounds sensible until your experience refuses to fit under one description. So what happens to the rest of it? Are we supposed to pretend it never happened?
Can you build one personal brand across multiple businesses?
Yes, as long as people can tell what they would hire you for today. Your businesses are what you run, and your personal brand is what people associate with you, and those two lists don't have to match.
It's also less unusual than the advice assumes. NORC at the University of Chicago's 2023 survey found that 31.8% of business owners currently own more than one business, and 48% either do or have owned another one in the past.
So perhaps it's time we stopped treating a career with more than one business as something unusual.
Does working in different industries make you better at what you do?
It can, when the experience changes how you work today. Changing industries doesn't automatically make anyone better at their job, but it can change what they notice.
Producing an event and marketing one are different jobs. Producing means making the whole thing happen, with the experience, the people, the timing and the logistics. Marketing means getting someone interested enough to attend in the first place. I've worked in both, and each requires a different way of thinking.
Then there's fashion and image consulting, where presentation and perception play an enormous role. How someone sees themselves isn't necessarily how another person sees them, and I find that particularly relevant to marketing.
You can have years of experience, excellent clients and a business you're proud of, but that doesn't mean someone visiting your website will understand what makes you different.
And sometimes that's the problem. Not your experience, but how you're communicating it.
Do you need to choose one niche?
No, but you do need one clear answer to "what can I hire you for?" Choosing a niche helps define who you serve and which problem you solve. It doesn't require deleting everything else you've done.
My consulting today helps experienced service business owners explain what they do, why it matters and why potential clients should choose them. That's what someone arriving on my website needs to understand.
My background in events, fashion and image consulting is still part of my professional experience, and I can bring it into a conversation when it's relevant.
I'm not selling five services. I'm just not pretending marketing is the only thing I've ever done.
What do you say when someone asks what you do?
Say what you do today in one sentence and let the rest come out naturally if they're interested.
Mine is the line above, and it's enough to start a conversation.
Someone asking at a networking event is making conversation, not commissioning a biography, and the answer with three businesses, two careers and a project in development mostly teaches them how to look politely over your shoulder.
The same goes for your website and LinkedIn profile. Nobody should have to work out which of your previous businesses is the one they can hire you for now.
Why do referrals get complicated when you've done several things?
Because people recommend the version of you they met. The person who knew you in one business describes that business, and the person who found you later describes another.
I wrote about this in Why Referrals Don't Turn Into Clients. Someone might recommend you for one thing while you're promoting something else, and the person receiving that recommendation is left trying to work out what you actually do.
With several careers behind you, that gap can become even bigger, because nobody gets a notification when you change direction.
And we can't expect everyone we've ever worked with to keep track of what we're doing today.
But we can make it easier for them.
If referrals are important to your business, make sure the people who recommend you know what you currently do and who you work with. One clear sentence can make a difference.
How do you decide which experience belongs in your personal brand?
Start with the work you want to be contacted about today, then look at everything else you've done and ask yourself one question:
What did I learn from that experience that matters to the clients I want now?
Using my own background, I've worked on both producing events and promoting them, which are two very different parts of the same industry.
And fashion and image consulting gave me experience working with presentation and how people are perceived.
Neither is a separate service I'm trying to sell through my consulting business today, but both are part of my professional background.
That's the distinction I think matters.
You don't need to list every business you've owned or every position you've held. You need to identify which experiences help someone understand the work you do now.
And if something isn't relevant, it doesn't need to appear on your homepage.
That doesn't make the experience any less valuable. It just means it doesn't have to be part of every conversation.
Your experience doesn't have to fit into one job title
You can be very specific about what you do today and still have a professional background that covers several industries.
Those two things don't contradict each other.
The mistake is thinking your personal brand needs to explain every part of your professional life, when what someone really wants to understand is whether you're the right person to work with.
You don't have to promote everything you've done to benefit from everything you've learned.
And if part of what makes you good at your work comes from an industry you left years ago, why would you hide it?
You spent years gaining that experience. You might as well put it to good use.
Prefer listening? Listen to the episode below.
I'm Veronica Di Polo, a marketing consultant based in Moraira, Spain, and host of Branding Momentum, a marketing and messaging podcast for experienced service business owners and consultants.
If you're experienced, your clients are happy and somehow new leads stopped coming in, my free 3-day email sprint shows you why that keeps happening and what to change first.
Listen to the full episode: Spotify | Apple Podcasts
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