The cost of staying quiet as a modern leader

Personal branding is a topic that often leads to more questions than answers. What does it really mean? Why should it matter to you? How do you know whether yours is any good – and what does “good” even look like?

Amelia Sordell is on a mission to demystify it. The first page of her book, The Personal Branding Playbook, sets the tone. Her dedication reads: “This book is dedicated to anyone and everyone who has ever had the audacity to be 100 per cent OK with the consequences of being themselves, both online and off.”

It’s a sentiment that captures a challenge facing today’s business leaders. Your name is part of your company’s balance sheet. Investors Google you. Candidates scrutinise your LinkedIn before they apply. Your team’s belief in the strategy is based on their belief in you. Yet many leaders still hide behind the corporate logo, afraid of saying the wrong thing – or even saying anything at all.

Sordell’s argument is simple: in a world where attention and trust are scarce, the courage to show up as yourself has become a commercial advantage.

Entrepreneurial instincts have always been part of Sordell's DNA. As a child, she charged her parents 20p for hand massages. Later, she had an online hustle, buying Levi’s jeans from charity stores and Mulberry purses from sample sales, then selling them on eBay for triple the price.

“When I was at university,” she recalls, “I would go to lectures during the day. I would work in a nightclub from Wednesday to Sunday. Daytime on Saturday, 10 till 6, I worked in a clothes shop… so I worked around 100 to 150 hours a week, every week, for three and a half years. My mum would joke that the reason why I did that is because I did not want to live in the uni halls.”

By 21, she had launched a fashion brand. Within 18 months, she had investment, stock in 15 boutiques and interest from online retailer Asos. “We were in The Daily Mail almost every single week,” she says. “Our clicks and our purchases just went through the roof for about eight months.”

She had effectively hacked early influencer marketing by gifting clothes to WAGs and reality stars, then tagging products in Shopify “Colleen Rooney’s coat” or “Danielle Lloyd’s dress” so that fashion articles would pick them up.

But then disaster struck. A new retailer placed a £100,000 order – and vanished. “Between them, placing that order and it being delivered, they ceased to exist,” she says. “I was left with £100k worth of stock that I just couldn't shift.”

At 23, she faced a brutal choice: take on a personally guaranteed loan or shut down. She chose liquidation.

“At the time, it felt like a death,” she says. “You grieve something like that because you put your whole identity into your business. It becomes you, so then when it fails, it feels like you failed. I felt like that for probably 10 years. I wasn't good enough and that's why that business failed.”

Only with hindsight did she realise the failure was down to a youthful naivety and a “bit of a shitty retailer,” not a fundamental flaw in her. Many CEOs carry their own version of that wound – a failed venture, a misjudged crisis, a bet that didn’t pay off. The difference is that most never speak about it.

But Sordell does. Publicly. On LinkedIn.

People find it very easy to post about failure once they’ve already “made it”, she says, but: “People don't talk about their failures when it's in real time and they're not really successful. I think that's in part why I've managed to build a brand around having audacity, because I just say it when it's not going well.”

If the phrase “personal branding” makes you think of humblebrags, cringe posts and overly polished selfies, Sordell is unequivocal: you’re missing the point.

If you’re hiring, raising funding or trying to attract better customers, she argues, putting yourself out there as founder or CEO is one of the fastest, lowest-cost levers you have.

The data backs her up. Some analyses suggest personal posts on LinkedIn attract around 561 per cent more engagement than corporate or brand updates. With this level of reach, the real question is whether you use it or let someone else define who you are.

She came to a realisation after recently re-reading her own book to record the audiobook: “What I've learned through running an agency and working with very wealthy people who want to have a personal brand and have absolutely no personality is that not everyone should have a personal brand… but we all need a why.

“I think often we spend a huge amount of time thinking about the thing that we're doing and not enough about why we're doing it. That ‘why we're doing it’ is often the thing that keeps us going. Your why then becomes the thing that makes you disciplined enough to do it.”

For CEOs, that why might be attracting talent or investors, building trust or shaping the public conversation around your sector. Without a why, personal branding feels like vanity. With it, however, it becomes a leadership function, much like investor relations only more scalable.

So, how can you audit your personal brand? This doesn’t start with follower counts, says Sordell: “First and foremost, do you like your personal brand? Does it excite you? One of my pre-requisites before we post any content is, ‘Would I share it?’.

“If the answer is no, then that's not getting posted. If you don't believe in what you're saying, and you're not excited about what you're saying, then why do you expect anyone else to be?”

A simple audit for leaders can look like this:

• Search yourself: Google, LinkedIn, YouTube – what story does the first page tell?
• Ask your team and board: Give them three words: how would they describe you to a stranger?
• Compare that to your intent: What do you want to be known for in the next 3–5 years?
• Apply Sordell’s test: Would you honestly reshare your last five posts if they came from someone else?

Then build forward intentionally.

Sordell points to a programme her agency ran with Sky Bet. At the time, the company’s board were very reluctant to post on LinkedIn. The company was struggling to compete for digital and tech talent in the North of England and battling the perception that a gambling company was a less attractive employer than a shiny digital agency.

Her team developed a two-part programme: educate the executive team, then support them to execute. Within 30 days, with five executives posting twice a week, they started to see results.

“They increased their careers page visits by 100 per cent month on month,” she says. “There was no ad spend, no crazy marketing strategy, just those people posting twice a week – one post with a team update, one about their thoughts on leadership. That's it.”

It also unlocked momentum across the organisation. Many leaders worry that encouraging employees to have a strong personal brand will make them ripe for poaching. Sordell argues the opposite.

“LinkedIn ranks members’ content above company updates and sponsored ads,” she says. “LinkedIn creates more B2B leads than any other channel put together. And it’s a fact that leads produced by individuals’ personal brands, whether in person or online, convert seven times more frequently than any other channel.

“The idea that we can't encourage our team to post because then they might leave is foolish, because chances are they're going to leave anyway. So you may as well get the most profit and the most extraction out of that resource while they're with you.”

She points to Gymshark as an example of a brand that has democratised brand advocacy: “They have a foundational empowerment of all of their team to be like, ‘We know you're not going to be here forever. Post about it.’ You’re an intern, post about it’ etc. From the top to the bottom, it's instilled in the culture. It's unsurprising that they are now a multi-billion-pound activewear brand when no one could penetrate that space.

“They create good products but they have a culture where the whole company is represented by people. Nike works with massive athletes and pays them millions of dollars, but Gymshark is like, ‘Here's our intern, right under our nose… why not use those people who are already bought into the brand?’”

If you’re a business leader reading this, take a moment this week. Map your current personal brand presence. Ask yourself: Does it reflect your purpose? Does it align with your strategy? Are you showing up where your stakeholders expect you to be?

Then commit to one action this quarter – a speaking slot, a content series, a high-impact post – that aligns with your brand narrative and resonates with your leadership mission. Because when you lead the brand with clarity and intention, you unlock influence that reaches far beyond your title.