Building a Personal Brand Does Not Help your Clinical Research Consulting Business

Is it just me, or are personal brand businesses being pushed more recently?

Perhaps I have been living under a rock until now.

This is supposed to be a good path to financial freedom, but I don't quite understand how building a personal brand helps my clinical research consulting business.

In this article, I will discuss my thoughts on how a personal brand may or may not be useful for a clinical research consulting business.

What is a Personal Brand ™️

You.

You are the brand. Your experience, opinions, endorsements etc.

This a the brand.

With a personal brand, you have a following of people who are into what you do and what you stand for.

The Pitch for a Personal Brand ⚾

My takeaway of the general idea with a personal brand is this:

1. Build your brand - gain followers, accolades, content, and experience.
2. Use the brand to sell products - to current followers or people that learn about you through your content.

Chris Drucker makes a point in Rise of the Youpreneur when he states that a personal brand business is future proof.

What I take this to mean is that as long as you have a following or can gain new followers and have a steady stream of products to sell, you will never go out of business.

How Would a Personal Brand Work for a Clinical Research Consulting Business 🧑‍💼

This is where I start to lose understanding.

I suppose the pitch is that if you build a personal brand you will attract more clients for your business.

To start to build a personal brand, the recommendations from those pushing this concept is to put content out on social media. Lots of content, on lots of platforms.

This feels like an enormous waste of time. I outlined reasons why social media is bad for business in another article. The short version is that:

• It is hard to build an audience
• It costs money to communicate with your followers
• It takes time away from solving problems for your clients
• It is generally a toxic place to be

Other recommendations are to get on podcasts, talk on stage, write books, build digital products, and just generally market your personal brand.

This seems like a lot of time spent advertising a brand and no time spent doing any actual work solving problems for clients.

Maybe this personal brand advertising works for physical or digital products, but doesn't seem to work well with clinical research consulting.

If a clinical research associate is spending all their time blasting social media about nuances of being a CRA, where is there time left to do any real work?

Hire a Team 👥

I think the personal brand guru's would say, you don't do the work, you hire a team to do the work.

Ok, so now you are not running a clinical research consulting business, you are running an agency. Is that the business you want to be in? Generating sales and making a profit by paying your employees less than you bill them out for?

I wouldn't want to be in this business.

Another part I find confusing is whether or not the team is supposed to do all the boring parts of building a personal brand (content marketing, social media marketing, etc).

On the one hand it seems like a waste of time for a business owner to be on social media and trying to learn how to use it effectively.

Then on the other hand, building a personal brand where all the expressed ideas are written by a team (or AI) seems disingenuous.

Financial Costs 💰

A see a few financial problems with building a personal brand for a clinical research consulting business.

First, the pitch from these brand gurus is to take their course or join their community (for a yearly subscription cost). Here is the first cost. I have seen this as little as $60 per month, but as high as $500.

Other costs include:

• Time spent not working
• Social media (advertising or boosting posts)
• Hiring a team

The Brand is the Business 🏢

My take away from having a personal brand is that this is the business.

All your time is spent building an audience. Then occasionally you try to sell them your own digital products or sponsored products.

Certainly a good business to be in for some people.

Personally, this type of business doesn't get me excited. I don't wake up every morning with a burning desire to hop on social media.

I want to make a real impact and solve problem's for my clients, rather than talking about solving problems.

Summary

This article has summarized ideas around building a personal brand for a clinical research consulting business. Generally, this doesn't seem like a good use of time for my business, and I suspect the same is true for many businesses.

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