Personal Branding: The Lighthouse Branding Model

More and more people are talking about the importance of personal branding, both in career searching and in career development. Effective personal branding not only makes you stand out from the crowd to employers and recruiters, it can also increase your job security by communicating your value as a leader and team player to your organization.

What is personal branding?

Personal branding is the process of identifying the unique and differentiating value that you bring to an organization, team and/or project and communicating it in a professionally memorable and consistent manner in all of your actions, both online and offline, to all current and prospective stakeholders in your career.

The Lighthouse Personal Branding Model

The lighthouse is a great model for breaking down the branding process into four key steps: the foundation, the beacon, the tower and the beam.

Foundation:

Your foundation is your unarguable strengths and experience in your chosen area. To identify your own foundation, write down the strengths that differentiate you from the rest and ask your friends, family and colleagues/managers to do the same for you. Identify the top three to five overlapping strengths that support the career direction you want to pursue.

Beacon:

Your beacon is the memorable and consistent communication of your strengths and experience. Now that you have identified your foundation, it’s time to create your beacon by finding a word or phrase that represents these strengths and can become your brand. Develop a short pitch that can follow your brand, describing your strengths in more detail. Ensure that your word or phrase is versatile and can change with your direction.

Tower:

Simply put, your tower is your visibility, reach and presentation, both online and offline, which support the beacon. This is really everything you do to proactively build your personal brand. The higher you build your tower with your efforts, the more visible you will be to potential career stakeholders. Here are some ways to proactively build your brand and credibility in front of your target audience:

Create a LinkedIn profile and follow the suggested steps to complete your profile 100 percent, making sure you include your personal brand and pitch in your subtitle and summary sections.

Create a Google account and profile for improved search engine optimization.

Include your personal brand on your resume, cover letter, business cards, email signature, voicemail message and across your other social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Consider creating a personal website/blog site where you can house all of your information, including experience, education, skills, honors, entrepreneurial efforts and more.

Start your own blog with a unique point of view on your industry/area of interest.

Contribute value in your book or product reviews, your tweets, your comments on other blog posts, your own blog articles or articles for print publications, your discussions in LinkedIn Groups and your advice via LinkedIn Answers or other forums.

Start a company full-time or on the side with relevant and valuable products/services/resources for the industry.

Publish and offer print and/or electronic publications.

Get quoted in the media by joining HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and contributing advice, experiences and insights to writers and journalists seeking expert sources.
Beam:

Your beam is your career direction and more active personal branding and career search strategy. It involves you gaining and projecting a strong understanding of where you want to go, what you want to pursue and how you will pursue it. First, you need to determine what functional area, geography and industries/companies you want to target. Then, you need to actively network your brand with potential career stakeholders. Here are some ways to start:

Join associations or networking groups within your industry and attend events to meet new contacts and build your target network. Be sure to share your personal brand with those new contacts.

Conduct informational interviews with target network contacts (whether or not you’re seeking a job) and share your personal brand with them in your introductions.

Find ways to bring fellow industry thought leaders together on a project or at an event.

Find ways to contribute to the projects or events of fellow industry experts.

Get recommended on LinkedIn and display testimonials from customers, clients and partners
Personal Application

I used this model to help develop my own personal brand during my MBA career search. Having identified my foundation to be my endless energy, out-of-the-box creativity, relationship building and problem solving, I looked for a word that could pull all of those strengths together into one memorable brand message. The beacon I chose was “generator” as I generate energy, creativity, relationships and solutions to problems. I was pursuing a career in marketing and brand management, and therefore, I became a brand and marketing generator. I proactively built my tower by incorporating my brand directly into my online profiles, my resumes and my entrepreneurial efforts. I then took a more active approach, targeting the “beam” by incorporating my personal brand in my interview responses, networking introductions and informational interview outreach. It was this process that helped me successfully secure my current employment, and this model continues to help guide all of my professional and entrepreneurial ventures.

Top 5 Mistakes People Make When Getting Business Insurance

This might come as a surprise to some, but getting the right insurance for your business might be one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a business owner. The consequences of inadequate coverage, or no coverage, could be devastating. There is a whole world of things that can happen to you and your business. Not protecting yourself and your business with the right insurance could cost you in so many ways.

That’s why engaging in a process of obtaining business insurance right for you and your company is so important. Do you know what general commercial liability insurance is? Well, if you don’t, then it’s just another reason why doing it right is so important. Not doing it right might cost you when you need help the most — during crisis. It’s why people get insurance. It’s why smart business people get smart business insurance.

Doing it right essentially means avoiding some common mistakes made when trying to get the best insurance policy for your business. Knowing what some of these mistakes are, and avoiding them in the future, will help you in your quest to simply make the right business decision when it comes to insurance.

Top 5 Mistakes When Getting Business Insurance:

1. Discounting the importance of business insurance

Business people of all types, whether it be CEO’s of large business conglomerates, or even someone just working out of their home office, have their own set of reasons for getting insurance specifically for their business. But not all business people necessarily think this way. Some think it might be too costly. Some think it might not be necessary . Some may even think that they’re covered by other insurance policies that they have for their property or for themselves.

Not having the insurance specifically tailored for your business often comes as a result of simply not thinking that it’s necessary. But it is. Take general commercial liability insurance, for example. This kind of insurance protects businesses from the costs of lawsuits resulting from basic damages done to people or property that have even the slightest contact with what you do. Not having this coverage when someone decides to throw a lawsuit at you, even if frivolous, could cost you in terms of money and reputation.

2. Not knowing the basic issues

It’s nice to think that insurance is just insurance, but it isn’t. Would you get car insurance for you house? Would you get life insurance for your healthcare? Of course you wouldn’t.

Yes, some of the issues involved in business insurance are similar to other forms of insurance. A good policy will, for example, protect your assets in case they get stolen. It will also protect you if bad weather destroys your business property. These are straightforward insurance issues for your business. But don’t be fooled into believing that they’re the only insurance issues for your business.

For example, take general commercial liability insurance. Some business owners might not even know what liability insurance actually is. It’s the insurance that protects you from the financial costs resulting from a lawsuit from somebody who claims they or their property has been hurt or injured as a result of the way your business conducted itself. General commercial liability insurance is the kind of insurance those companies engaging in commercial activities get to protect themselves because people hurt themselves on their premises or one of their products did damage to someone’s property. Being knowledgeable about these kinds of things will most certainly help you get the right insurance.

3. Not getting insurance early enough

There are two things that can happen to you if you don’t get insurance for your business early enough. The obvious one is that you’ll need it before you get it, and you’ll be stuck with paying for the damages from a storm or a lawsuit yourself. The other thing that can happen is that you will not have a budget for your start-up for the proper insurance, so you’ll get stuck with inadequate coverage. That’s the last thing you want to happen. Therefore, to avoid it, thinking about insurance as early as possible, even at the business plan stage, will help you create the budget you need to get you adequately covered for all future circumstances.

4. Getting the wrong kind of insurance provider

Perhaps the most tempting option for someone seeking business insurance is to get it through insurance companies they’re already doing business with. So, for example, you like how your house is covered, and who’s covering it, so you’ll seek to extend that coverage to your business, too.

The reason this is inadvisable, or should at least be looked at very carefully, is that your property insurance provider might simply not have the kind of experience with the kind of insurance you need for your business.

For example, if general commercial liability is what your particular business is in need of, even if a provider carries that kind of insurance, they may simply not have enough developed expertise to know what’s right for your particular needs. Ideally, only those companies and agents who have dealt with your kind of business before can help your kind of business get you adequately covered for your particular situation.

5. Getting the wrong kind of coverage

Following from the risk of getting the wrong insurance provider, a mistake to avoid is getting the wrong kind of coverage. Ultimately, you’re the person in charge of making the right business decisions for your company. You’re the best person suited to look out for your own interests. No one else is. That’s why it’s incumbent upon you to make sure you’ve got the right coverage for you and your situation.

As much of the above already suggests, delegating these decisions is important. Yet, in the end, it’s you who has to decide if you have the right kind of coverage for your business. After going through the entire process, collecting all the information, and talking to the right people, it’s you who makes the decision. Make sure it’s the right one for your business and where you want to take it.

Collaborative Learning

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