An influential business leader who was my mentor and role model once challenged me about my goals and expectations:

"I need you to move to a level that justifies my business profile, personal brand, and precious time."

I was impressed at how confident the person sounded regarding their personal brand and worth, I felt indebted to work on my own brand.

I noted that high performing and inspirational business leaders have some things in common:

• They are clear in their conversations, stick to an agenda for each meeting, and rarely exceed the allotted time for meetings because they know the value of time.

• They do not look down on ideas or business proposals so long as they make sense. They however challenge your logic with eye-opening questions that will lead you to consider solutions.

• They put all their efforts into assigned projects and take accountability for resultant success or failure.

• They invest so much in their personal brand: a person who knows their worth will always uphold it and keep developing their value.

Just like a company brand defines who they are and what they stand for, a personal brand defines and distinguishes you in the marketplace.

You (and others) may never know your worth until you start working on your personal brand.

1. The first thing to develop is your skillset or professional knowledge - featuring among the top professionals in the marketplace is not a mean task. It takes years of building and developing your experience, taking on challenge after challenge and winning. It also needs you to sharpen your skills in the domain via learning and certification.

Focus on problem solving, analytics and skills

Expertise comes with problem solving; do not come across as a salesperson/marketeer forcing your products on clients. Be the partner/consultant who knows their pain points and talk about solutions to address these problems.

This needs you to research about the industry and current trends, the company's ambitions, weaknesses and how you can help them address these. Avoid using a one size fits all approach, which may not differentiate your offer from others because then your price will be challenged.

Differentiate so that you can set your own caliber. Every client is looking for an extra if not a unique value proposition.

II. Master Soft Skills: Apart from the technical skills everyone brings to the workplace or industry, we need to master critical soft skills like resilience, being visionary, communication, being inspirational, intuition, dealing with different characters and listening to come up with solutions that address the problems/opportunities at hand. For this reason, managers are critical and high ranking in the workplace- they use both their hard and soft skills to bring out the best in each of their team members

2. The second thing to focus on is your style/personality, which, to a large extent, defines your brand. This is largely to do with who you are or have shaped yourself to be, to attract the right connections. Aspects that someone is known for like reliability, honesty, commitment & time keeping matter in business.

3. Invest in your appearance or the first impression you give to people: The look and feel of a brand is quite important and that is why we must invest in our looks, speech, eloquence, language, and overall presentation to our audience and maintain this as a brand. A smart mind may go unnoticed in an average or rugged appearance.

4. Establish Connections: Businessmen and salespeople aside from their skillset rely mostly on their connections. These are built through positive engagements and commitment to the relationship.

5. Build Trust: A story is told of an account manager who had to preside over negotiation meetings with their competitor on behalf of their client. The account manager had to endorse the competition offer that was required as a backup service to their own. That was the level of trust they had built with their client.

Better yet, they should have negotiated with the competitor to give them the offer and resell it to their client as a bundled (primary and backup) solution because they had the leeway to do that and avoid entry of the competitor.

Those are some ideas that can put your personal brand ahead in the marketplace but there is a book worth reading entitled "You are a Brand "by Catherine Kaputa and below are some of the key takeaways:

• Building a strong personal brand takes time and effort, so be patient and consistent in your efforts.

• Networking is not just about collecting contacts; it is about building genuine relationships that benefit both parties.

• Personal branding is an ongoing journey, not a destination. Embrace continuous learning and adaptation to stay relevant and achieve your goals.

As Catherine Kaputa puts it, "if you do not brand yourself, other people will, and it won’t be in the way you want to be seen. Or you will be invisible, which is never good.”