The Profitable Creative, Episode 97 — "Mastering Personal Branding"

Christian opens the show with a shout out to the one listener in Brewster, New York, and welcomes Liam Darmody of Liam's Brand Stand. Liam introduces himself as a personal brand strategist and business innovation coach. He spent the first 20 years of his career in sales ops and revenue operations at startup companies, where he was the guy who got stuff done. He always felt something was missing: he was a marketing mind who loved thinking about how brands connect with people, and would have studied consumer psychology if he could do school over.

In 2020, during the pandemic, stuck in a small house with an infant and a toddler, he started posting on LinkedIn to replace the water cooler conversations he missed. Two years later, a CMO at a big technology consultancy who had followed him for six months recruited him to stand up and run an employer brand and talent marketing team. Liam wrote the job description himself. Two years after that, the company was acquired for a little over a billion dollars, and six months later he was let go.

At a crossroads, with his wife reminding him he had talked about a consultancy for years, he launched his own business on August 7th, two years ago. His pride and joy: he has not had to touch savings, paid all the bills, and never missed a mortgage payment.

The first challenge was expectations. Liam had a relatively large LinkedIn audience when he launched and naively thought clients would come flooding in. It took about three months before people started thinking of him differently, since for years he had just been the guy sharing content with no ulterior motive. That misalignment set him up for disappointment and an emotional roller coaster.

The second challenge is being a business of one. Woo is his number one StrengthsFinder trait; he is a hugely social animal who misses the team dynamic almost daily, and fills the gaps with community and conversations on LinkedIn and with clients.

The third is that nobody does it for you: when Calendly breaks, or there are accounting and bookkeeping questions, it is all on him. Christian adds that the mindset shift is about responsibility: as an employee you have a narrowly defined role, but as an entrepreneur every decision is yours, which can lead to gridlock when something breaks and there is no one to call.

Liam had to shift his content strategy from posting whatever he felt like to talking consistently about what he does, how he does it, who he helps, and how he helps them. People with sizable followings used to ask him, "What are you even doing here? Your content is all over the place," and his answer was, "Well, I'm not doing anything here. I'm just here for vibes. Like, I like talking about business and building relationships with people." That had to change.

The adjustment was hard because he never liked self-promotion; he wanted to trust his audience as adults who would check his profile and book a call if interested. But people's attention is short, so he has to stay in front of them with core content pillars, and he leans on AI as a thought partner for efficiency.

The sales phobia is always there a little, Liam says, because he never wants to come across as salesy. He reframes it: personal branding builds affinity for who you are as a person, and social selling means adding people to your network strategically so they can see how you think and communicate. The goal is for people to think, "This person seems like somebody fun to work with," and eventually one piece of content prompts them to reach out. That inbound path is how most of his business works.

He also practices old school relationship building sales: when he connects with someone in his ideal client profile, he tells them directly, "I will never pitch you, but I will create content that is very interesting and hopefully useful for you. And if I can ever be of service to you, let me know." Addressing the elephant in the room, whether this person will hit you with a pitch in the next five seconds, lets him feel good about it. "I just look at social selling as socializing as opposed to selling."

Christian agrees: sales 101 is that people do business with people they know, like, and trust, and leading with a pitch that smells of desperation raises defenses. Once defenses are up, you have to chip away at objections instead of having a natural conversation. Liam adds that many people struggle to let sales conversations happen on the prospect's timeline. Everyone wants to close as quickly as possible, but it is not about you; it is about whether the person could find your services useful and whether now is the right time.

If the timing is wrong, they will not invest the time they do not have, and the partnership suffers. That does not mean avoiding direct questions: "Is there anything preventing you from wanting to start sooner?" is fair game. And if someone says a bonus is coming in two months, you can meet them halfway, half now and half later. Selling somebody something on your timeline is the wrong motivation.

Christian notes that people make buying decisions emotionally, not rationally, which makes it easy to manipulate them the wrong way. He tells a story from the movie Ruthless People, where a salesman pitching a giant TV to an excited husband sees the man's pregnant wife walk up with a toddler and backs off: "No, man. You don't want this."

Liam agrees the worst thing that could happen to him is a client agreeing to work with him and then regretting it. He wants clients to be jazzed and confident, saying "Yes, I decided to work with Liam Darmody and it's a great decision," not "We'll see how it goes." So he keeps a lighter touch. He contrasts this with the "get them closed, get the dotted line signed, they'll realize the value later" approach: for him, people are adults, and he would rather earn their confidence than rush them.

Christian raises the tension of selling people what they want versus what they need, using bookkeeping as an example: nobody wants bookkeeping, but you need it before tax planning or profit planning can work. Liam's approach is to suss out what people actually want or need and meet them where they are: if someone is not ready for a four or eight week one to one partnership, they can start with a single hour, and come back for something more robust later.

He also educates people clearly on what they get for their money, because rushing through the offer leaves buyers unsure. He lays out the full menu: a self-paced digital course that is more affordable, a cohort-based learning experience for group learners, and one to one coaching. Christian quotes P.T. Barnum: "Always leave the audience wanting more." It is better to deliver something exceptional that leaves them wanting more than to oversell and disappoint against misaligned expectations.

Christian shares that his business coach, who teaches other coaches, barely talks about what he does on sales calls; he only clarifies what the person wants and what it would look like to have it, so the prospect envisions the transformation and goes all in. Liam agrees the best sales artists make it completely about the other person. Inexperienced salespeople talk through the sale: once you hear buying signals, stop, because everything you add after that decreases the emotion and the chance of the sale.

Their joint advice: "Shut up and let the other person talk." Liam is generous on discovery calls, even opening Sales Navigator to show prospects useful things on the first call, whether or not they become clients. He trusts that value leads to business, sometimes six or eight months later. The way to stay top of mind is to keep adding value and building trust, not to pressure people or jam a sale down their throat.

Christian asks how this translates for creatives like videographers, for whom selling can feel different than coaching. Liam's advice: a videographer has skills most people do not, so show them constantly. Post video content on LinkedIn, run how-to sessions, for example teaching people to use AI video clipping tools. Teaching is advantageous because video remains labor intensive: editing takes time, attention to detail, and storytelling. By teaching the process and showing work that is far better than what viewers could do alone, the creative builds trust and demonstrates the value of hiring a professional. His prescription: talk about what you know and show the quality you can deliver at least twice a week, on LinkedIn and every other channel.

Christian asks whether creatives should publicly critique existing work. Liam says it can work if you are mindful not to seem negative or mocking: break down something a brand created and show how you would have done it. He follows a logo designer on Instagram who redesigns big company logos, and the before and after makes you think, "How does he think that way?"

Christian shares his own rebrand story: he did not see the need until his head of revenue brought back the designer's work, and the designer's intake form asked questions like "If your logo could be a person, who would it be?" on a scale of 1 to 10. Liam's principle: his favorite products show him a problem he did not realize he had until he experienced the solution, like Uber in Washington DC in 2013. If you can get someone thinking differently about a problem through an exchange with you, that alone is tremendous value, and it puts you in a different light than everyone running through a pitch.

Christian raises the fear creatives feel hearing sirens that AI will take their jobs. Liam sees two camps: people who view AI as coming for their livelihood, and people who ask how to harness it for whatever is next. His bet is on the second camp: if creatives learn to master AI and quadruple or 10x their productivity, they can take on far more clients. The key is doing the upfront work on instructions and desired outputs; then you get promoted from writer to editor, and editors have far more bandwidth than writers.

Liam has put all 4,500 of his LinkedIn posts from the last five years into Claude and ChatGPT projects with specific instructions, so output sounds like an amalgamation of his content. It is not perfect and he still tweaks it, but it lets him publish at scale in his own words. The human element never goes away: the eye for beauty, the eye for detail, the understanding of what a client might want. What changes is only the process of creating the output.

Christian compares the AI panic to QuickBooks: 28 years ago colleagues said it would kill accountants, yet business owners have no more clarity around their finances today than 25 years ago. Existential technology threats rarely work out the way anyone predicts. Liam laughs that learning QuickBooks was one of his own hardest challenges as a new business owner.

His view: we are just scratching the surface of AI, and nobody knows what it looks like two or five years from now. Creatives and entrepreneurs should focus on getting better at solving problems in a quality way as quickly as possible; AI helps with the "quickly" part, and the rest, judgment, skill, thinking, knowledge, understanding of clients, is still on us. The human element will continue to be incredibly important, perhaps more so now, and people generally want to work with other people.

Christian shares the analogy that finally made AI click for him, via Scott Chang: think of AI as a hard drive holding all the knowledge of human history with a million processors, and you are the computer, the brain. Liam uses the same line of thinking: AI is the cloud for your brain. Store everything there and retrieve it whenever you need it, which frees your mind to move faster, stay less cluttered, and think more clearly.

He walks his dog once a week while talking through his brand's future with a custom business coach he built in ChatGPT, which sounds odd for a solo business owner with no one else to talk to. When ChatGPT launched custom GPTs, he built a personal brand strategist GPT that has been used 11,000 times, and he now gets clients through ChatGPT from people using it.

AI capacity doubles every six months, they marvel. The best place to find Liam is LinkedIn: he pretty much lives there, and there are only three Liam Darmodies on the platform, only one in North America. His services are at liam's brandstand dot com, and he is on Substack at led.substack.com. Christian is on Substack too, as Christian Brim, and Liam promises to subscribe. Christian closes by asking listeners to rate, share, and subscribe, or to send a message with feedback, joking they will replace Liam.