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PERSONAL BRAND RETAINER

A team working on your personal brand, week by week, for six months.

The Personal Branding Journey produces your positioning and your story. Finishing it is usually energising and overwhelming at once: you know what you want to be known for, you have it in writing, and then you are back at a full diary with no obvious place to start applying it.

The Personal Brand Retainer is the work of that stage. A team works with you for an hour every week and works through whatever is in front of you, deciding what each thing looks like once your positioning is applied to it. Over six months, your visibility, what you publish, and the decisions in front of you stop being handled one at a time and start aligning around the same positioning goal.

personal brand retainer
HOW IT DIFFERS
THE JOURNEY VS THE RETAINER

The Personal Branding Journey set the direction.
The Retainer is the work of using it.

Personal Branding Journey
Personal Brand Retainer
Length

A defined project of about three months, ending with your Personal Brand Positioning and your Personal Brand Story.

Six months of continuous work, reviewed before it renews.

Who sets
the agenda

We did. The sequence was the method, and it ran in a fixed order.

You do. Each session starts with what you have brought to it.

What we are
answering

What you stand for, and who you are speaking to.

What to do about it this month, and this week.

Clients tend to describe the change as moving from a project with a finish line to a standing arrangement they use as things come up.

PROCESS
HOW THE SIX MONTHS RUN

A plan for the six months, and then
the daily work of applying it.

The first month is spent working out what has to change. We look at where you currently appear, what you have published, which platforms and which rooms are genuinely serving the positioning, and which are habits carried over from an earlier version of your work. That produces a channel and editorial strategy for the six months: where you will be visible, on what subjects, at what rhythm, and what should be measurably different by the end.

From there the sessions absorb whatever the weeks bring. A speaking invitation that may or may not be the right room. A draft that says the right things in the wrong voice. A board conversation coming in ten days. Each one goes through the same question, which is what it looks like once your positioning is applied to it, and the answers accumulate into decisions about what you keep doing, what you stop, and what you start.

Content, made with you

Posts, articles, editing, ideas, video within reason. Written in your voice and worked on together, rather than produced for you and sent over for approval.

Strategic preparation

For the meeting, the introduction, the panel, the interview. What to say, what to leave, and what the room is actually there for.

Profile and speaker assets

Bios, speaker profiles, and the materials an organiser or a journalist asks for at short notice.

PROFILES
WHO THIS IS FOR

Four situations we see most often.

A transition

A sale, an exit, a succession, a step down. What is said publicly, and when, matters more in these months than in any other.

A platform moment

A significant talk, a book, a board seat, a nomination. Rare in a career, familiar to us.

A change of remit

A new role, a new mandate, a new audience, and a positioning that has to move with it.

Sustained visibility

No single event, simply the discipline of being consistently and accurately known over years rather than weeks.

In each of these there is a run of decisions to be made about what is said publicly, and a short window in which to make them well.
PROCESS
HOW IT WORKS

Six months, one hour a week,
one report at the end.

SESSIONS

A standing weekly hour

One sixty-minute session each week, at a fixed time agreed at the start. We book the first three months when we begin so the slot is in your calendar before anything competes for it. Sessions are recorded, and the follow-up is ours rather than yours.

WHO YOU WORK WITH

The same two people, for the full term

One lead takes every session and an account director handles the work between them. Neither changes during the six months, and nothing is delegated onward.

TERM

Six months, then a decision

A month before the end we discuss whether to continue, and what a further term should do differently. If the right next step is elsewhere, we will say so.

THE REPORT

A written record of the six months

Issued once, at the end of the six months. The themes, the decisions, the work produced, the things you said that were worth keeping, and the opportunities we see ahead.

OWNERSHIP

Yours outright

Everything final we produce with you is yours, to use however you choose, during the term and after it.

SCOPE
WHAT IS NOT INCLUDED

Where the Retainer ends.

Your organisation

The Retainer covers your personal brand. Where your organisation needs positioning, content strategy or ongoing support, we are glad to scope that separately.

Materials, not outreach

We prepare the materials, and the approach comes from you. Speaker profiles, pitches and media assets are ours to build. Contacting editors, producers or programme committees is for you or your PR team.

Standing production

An existing podcast or channel is scoped separately. If something of that kind emerges during the six months, we will look at it properly rather than absorb it.

The term

Work is created for what is in front of you during the term.

START
WHERE TO BEGIN

The Retainer follows the
Personal Branding Journey.

The Retainer assumes the positioning work is already done. Without it, each session would spend most of its hour establishing what you stand for before it could reach the decision in front of you, and the value would be conversational rather than cumulative.

If you have not done the Personal Branding Journey, that is where to start. It runs about three months and produces the two documents the Retainer works from.

Read about the Personal Branding Journey
personal branding journey main
FOR LEADERS
THE SERVICES WE OFFER

Start your journey in a team or individually.

Personal Branding Workshop

Your leaders already carry reputations into every room they enter, whether anyone has shaped them or not. This is the session where they decide what those reputations should say, in front of each other, so the organisation gets the benefit rather than the risk.
Learn More

Personal Branding Journey

The Personal Branding Journey is our core engagement: a series of individual sessions in which we work out what you stand for, who needs to know it, and what in your record proves it. You finish with your Personal Brand Positioning and your Personal Brand Story, written in your own voice, ready to use.
Learn More

Personal Brand Retainer

A team works with you weekly and works through whatever is in front of you, deciding what each opportunity looks like once your positioning is applied to it. Over six months, your visibility, what you publish, and the decisions in front of you stop being handled one at a time and start aligning around the same positioning goal.
Learn More
NEXT STEP

If this is the right next thing,
a proposal follows.

It sets out scope, term and fee for your Retainer. The conversation before it takes about thirty minutes, costs nothing, and commits you to nothing.

Start a conversation