You Don’t Need to Be the Best: You Need to Be Known with Amelia Sordell

You Don’t Need to Be the Best: You Need to Be Known with Amelia Sordell

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 234 of the Business Development Podcast, and if you've ever asked yourself how to truly stand out in a world where everybody seems to be doing the same thing, this episode is your wake up call. Today we're joined by none other than Amelia Sordell, founder of Klowt, the UK's top personal branding agency, and one of the most authentic voices in the business world today with a following of over 250,000 people on LinkedIn and a fully inbound $3 million agency built from scratch during the height of the pandemic.

Amelia didn't just catch the personal branding wave. She helped create it. From rock bottom Business Failures to leading a brand that's reshaped how executives, founders, and creators market themselves online. Amelia's story is raw, real, and entirely relevant. In this episode, she shares her unfiltered truth on building trust at scale, overcoming fear, and thriving through failure, and why being the best known matters more than just being the best stick with us.

You don't wanna miss this episode.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said. Business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal, and we couldn't agree more. This is the Business Development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

And broadcasting to the world, you'll get expert business development advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business, brought to you by Capital Business Development CapitalBD.ca. Let's do it.

Welcome to the Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host. Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello. Welcome to episode 234 of the Business Development Podcast, and if you guys have questions regarding personal branding, this show is for you. Today, we bring you Amelia Sordell. Amelia is a trailblazing entrepreneur and the founder of Klowt, the UK's leading personal branding agency with a career that began in sales and recruitment.

Amelia quickly realized the immense power of personal branding. Since launching Klowt in 2020, she has helped transform the online presence of high profile clients, ranging from corporate giants like Skybet and Patty Power to startup founders and LinkedIn Top Voices. Amelia's journey in personal branding began as a means to market herself, but quickly evolved into a full fledged agency that operates on a 100% inbound business model, driving remarkable growth and influence in the branding space.

Now, 33. Amelia not only leads a $3 million agency, but also manages a thriving online community of over 250,000 followers. Her expertise at Building Trusted Scale has positioned her as the go-to strategist for anyone looking to elevate their personal brand. Amelia's work is a testament to the power of authenticity and business providing that in today's market, it's not enough to be the best.

You have to be the best known. Amelia, it's an honor to have you on the show today.

Amelia Sordell: Thanks so much for having me. That honestly, that's one of my favorite things. I say that all the time. It's not, not to be the best, it's you have to be the best known. So yeah, love, love. That's how we've started with this.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh my gosh.

And you know, we talked about this briefly, but I kid you not, I get questions all the time at this point on personal branding and I'm like, Hey, I'm just out here doing the best I can. I am not the expert. I will find you experts. And so I feel like 2024 has been the year of like personal branding.

Everyone's trying to figure out what the heck are we doing? It's like the importance of it came outta nowhere. Me and you both know that's not true, but it really feels that way. 'cause 2023, everyone's just talking about AI and then 2024 came and we're like, holy cow. Like something's changed, but we don't know what it is.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah, and I think also just on the topic of ai, right? I think that there's such be. Joint conversations to have, because I think so many people do think that they can AI their personal brand, and I'm sure we'll get into that in a minute. But actually the whole point of building a personal brand is to differentiate yourself from everyone else.

And, you know, if you've, you've been scrolling through LinkedIn like I have, it's very, very easy and very, very quick to figure out who is actually, you know, promoting, you know, posting their own content and writing their own content. And, you know, being that authentic, true human being, which is what the whole point of personal branding is.

And who is just using ChatGPT to get things out there because they think that just by posting content make, it's gonna help you build a brand. I actually think as we move through to 2025, what you're gonna find is the people who have. The courage to start sharing who they really are right now are gonna be the people that win in the future.

Because it's gonna be so easy to figure out who's shortcut it and who's not. The only thing that's gonna differentiate us is gonna be the person and the people within a business.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's just so much fear, right? There's so much fear with sharing your authentic, true self with the world, especially in such a public manner.

That's like the number one objection I get all the time when I'm chatting with people and I'm saying like, Hey, like I think it's time to put yourself out there. And they're like, I know, but I am really terrified.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah. But it's the same as everything, right? So I have a big sign up here, which you can't see, but it's literally just above my desk here.

It says, just post it. And I have that kind of philosophy across the board with pretty much everything in my life. And I think that's because I've had. I've had a lot of failure, Kelly, like, so I've gone from failure to failure, to failure to failure. I've had three businesses all that failed, one of them quite spectacularly.

And I think when you and a marriage, which is also, you know, a pretty, pretty decent failure to have on your cv, I think when you have been through things that have gone wrong, like in the sense of like, oh my God, like what's the worst that happened? Like the worst happened in all of those instances. It gives you perspective.

And the perspective of that for me is like, I don't care whether anyone likes what I have to say or not. 'cause it's my opinion and like, what's the worst that's gonna happen? You get five likes or something. Okay, who cares? Like, or so, or someone. Or someone doesn't like you, whoopty do, you don't even like everyone, you know.

So I think if more people realized that, I think a good way to frame it is, and I just wrote a post about this, literally about five minutes before we jumped on this recording. I've never met a person who is more successful than me. You know, bashing my business. I've never met a person who has more followers than me bashing my LinkedIn content.

Mm-hmm. I've never met someone who is more fit than me. Prettier than me. You know, rich than me, whatever. Telling me what I should eat, drink, you know, work out like how I should. I've never met someone who is doing better in life. That bashes people. Right? Yeah. And that is because when you're at the top, you don't compete, you collaborate, you don't hate, you love, right?

And so if you come at it from that mindset of people, if people don't like what you have to say, whether it be online or in person, then like, it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter. Ignore them. Focus on the people that do, do wanna know what you have to say and the value that you do provide. And to your point, when you kind of open this, like it's not enough to be the best anymore, you have to be the best known.

And so you can either use the source as an excuse to not do that. 'cause you say you're too scared or you could just getting, get on with it. Yeah. And actually get, make some progress.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I think like there's a lot of fear around cancel culture, especially in Canada, I think, I think in North America as a whole, right?

And, and especially when we're talking about who we really want to get out there and get their personal brand, you know, like who we're speaking to as entrepreneurs. So they look at it as like, oh my gosh, I, you know, I mean, I wanna put my views out there, but I'm afraid that it'll reflect negatively. We'll get ca or business will get canceled or whatever.

Amelia Sordell: I'm like, whatcha saying that you're gonna get canceled? Do you know what I mean? Like, I, so I said on my podcast the other day, I was like, I, I con, I'm convinced that I can't be canceled because I don't care enough. Like, I don't, I don't care enough about what Steve from down the road thinks about my content.

Like, I, I don't think. There's only two, two ways you can get canceled. One, you are just a diabolical human being and you say things that are diabolical and the whole world agrees that you're diabolical. I think that is, that's one very easy way to get canceled. And if you wanna go down that rope, then you're probably not listening to this podcast.

Yeah. The second way is of like, if you, if you, you say something without context or without thinking about it, but even in today's culture, and does cancel culture even exist anymore? I've seen so many examples of people who said the wrong thing, they put their foot in the mouth and they've gone, sorry, I didn't mean it like that.

And everyone's like, okay, cool. I, I don't think, I think people are really scared of that as a result, but the reality is it never happens ever. There are so many people who, in my opinion, are not particularly pleasant people and post a lot of not particularly pleasant things that are thriving. So if they can thrive and have a platform, then what, what are you so afraid of?

Like what do you, what do you actually wanna say that you think you're gonna cancel? I think that's more of a, more of an issue than like the actual cancel culture itself. Right. I think the thing is though, to your point about being worried about what you're saying impacting your business, the beauty of having a personal brand is they are sisters, not twins.

Your company brand. And your personal brand. Right. And so we quite often work with heavily regulated industries like finance, medicine, you know, farm pharma you know, medicinal cannabis for example, where you can't say things. On your company page because they're so heavily governed, like governed. And so they're so heavily regulated.

So what we get do by getting around that is we will post from the founder's page or the CEO's page because you can get away with really sharing the reason why you founded that business or you've been a part of that business in a, in a, a channel that is safe to do. So you couldn't post on the LinkedIn company page of a medicinal cannabis business, the story of to why, you know, the founder founded the business because it might not be in line with me.

Medical guidelines or the FDA's guidelines, right? Yeah. But you can post that from a person's page and that is what's gonna make people interested in what the brand has to say. I think a lot of people worry about a lot of shit that it's never gonna happen. And I think if you bear in mind that you're a good person and you have good values and your values are in line with your companies, the likelihood of you saying the wrong thing is like.

Slim to none. And I say a lot of shit, Kelly. I say a lot of shit and a, and a lot of shit that people don't like. Right. But we're thriving. So.

Kelly Kennedy: You know, you're from the uk, you guys are allowed to say whatever you want.

Amelia Sordell: Well, I don't know about that. I'm, I'm Australian actually. And Oh really? The, and the, the culture in Australia is like very, like, just say whatever, like, we're just like, whatever.

Say whatever you want. Yeah. I, I actually think it's the opposite culture in the uk people are really like, are, I know you're in, in Canada, but we have a lot of American clients, north American clients, right?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: And they are so much more up for. Having a go. Whereas in the UK everyone's like, well, no, no, no.

Can't do that. We can't, we can't, we can't be the center of retention, darling. 'cause then everyone wanna think, we're so spoiled and we're so awful, we can't, oh God, we could never post about the success. Have that client. I'm like, why not? You should talk about these things. They're like, no, no, no, we can't do that.

So yeah. But culturally, it's so much easier to get North American clients around to the idea of self-promotion as a strategic marketing imperative, which is what it is, right? Well, I'm not, I'm not here, out here posting content as I want followers. I can give two shits how many followers I have. I do care though about how many needs I get and the opportunities to do this kind of stuff.

Like you approached me to do this, right? Yeah. And that's not because I am some, you know, whatever. It's because I have an expertise and a particular topic that you wanted to talk about. And so you've come to me because you know that I'm the expert in that space. That's what personal branding does, that it's not about, look at me, it's about look what I can do for you.

Or even better, look what I've done in the past.

Kelly Kennedy: Well take us into it. Like how did you end up on this path? Like, not to mention launching your company like Mid Covid, like.

Amelia Sordell: I know, rogue move. Oh God. There's so much to unpack there, Kelly. Okay, so how did I get into this? I was a recruiter. So actually we used to go further back than this, so I've always had.

I've always had skills in marketing. It's funny actually, 'cause my, I never forget, my grandmother said to me that when I was really little, she was like, Amelia's, because she's my, she's not from Australia, she's my, my Aussie aunt, my Aussie nana. She goes, Amelia's gonna end up in as a presenter or in pr.

Those are the only two options she's gonna, because she's just so, she's so, she's so in your face, like whatever. And so that, that was kind of, I don't know whether that was sort of subliminal and I sort of went into that path because of it. But I decided very early on that I wanted to work in public relations.

And so I went and did a degree in, in PR when I was, you know, at university. Hated every second of it. I did some internships in my summer. So I worked my, as I'm sure loads of people on this podcast. I send you yourself, Kelly, you know, running your own thing. You'll understand. I worked my absolute nuts off.

Like I used to go, like when I was 18, I was doing, you know, nine to five, Monday to Friday at university. I. In my Saturdays, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, I worked in a nightclub 9:00 PM to 2:00 AM every night. And then on a Sunday I worked 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM in a close job. I did that for three and a half years.

Wow. And then in the summer holidays when school was out, I was doing internships. So I'd be working in, I worked at Mark, I did Hill Gate pr. I, I learned a bunch of PR agencies and, and and departments I worked with and I think. That is sort of symbolic of the work ethic that I've always had. I've always been like, I wanna achieve something, so I'm gonna go out.

I get it. And there's a very entrepreneurial, I think, rogue path to be like, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And everyone be like, oh, like that's a bit crazy. Like, why is she doing that? But I've always been very ambitious in that way. And so it was no surprise then that I start my own business and I learned very quickly how to market that business.

You know, I spent all my time on YouTube. I learned how to code, I learned how to, you know, get your stuff in the Daily Mail. I learned how to send quote to you know, celebrities and get them pictures. Like I learned very fast how to do that. And year one, it was really successful. Year two failed. Sub spectacularly to the point where I had to sell my car.

I had to move outta my house, I had to move out. My parents had like 26 pence in my account. At one point. I remember calling my mom being like, mom, I can't afford to put petrol in my fee at 500 to drive from my house. I'm giving up to you because I'm broke.

I have all this stock that I can't sell, but I have no money.

And so she trans very kindly transferred some money into my account and, and I got home and me and my little dog turned up in the door, like, oh, everything. But that was the, the kind of kickstarter and catalyst of me getting to personal branding because after three months of the sort of cigarette coffee and vodka diet of like mourning my business, and looking very skinny and disheveled and like I'd been through, you know, a, a death to be honest. Yeah. I got on Google and typed in, as I'm sure every entrepreneur can relate to this, what is a job that you can do that requires no experience, that's gonna pay the most money? And the number one thing that came up was recruiter.

So I thought, I'm gonna do that because I, I know how to make money, but I dunno how to do anything else. And I've, you know, I've only worked for myself really so that, you know, whoever's gonna hire me needs to give me a, give me a shot and know that I can sell. So I was like, cool, I'll go and do recruitment.

And sort of six months into the recruitment, I was doing pretty well, but I could never understand why they were requiring us. If anyone's been in this, this kind of sales environment before, you'll understand why they were, required us to make a hundred calls a day. For like one or two jobs to come on.

And of those one or two jobs to come on, we only had like a 25% success rate of placing them. I was like, this is like mental. Yeah. Like what a waste of my time. And you know, I was a cocky kind of 25-year-old, so I was like, yeah, well this is a bunch of bollocks and like, clearly these guys are nothing about recruitment because this seems like a total waste of my time.

So I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna prepare a list of like, say 20 to 50 companies I really would like to work with. So I found that my little specialism was sort of SaaS software as a service, but more, more niche than that. I really enjoyed working in like consumer behavior data.

I've got a real interested human behavior, right. Hence why I'm probably in the industry that I'm in now. And so I find psychology really fascinating and so I really enjoyed working with these companies because, you know, you, you get lots of little tidbits in the CEOs and it was like, it's really cool. It was.

And I kind of prepared this list of like 25 to 50 companies that I was like, I could do really good job for these people. And I started DMing their CEOs on LinkedIn. And the way that what I would do is I'd go on this, I don't dunno if it exists anymore, but there was a company called nerdydata.com and used to be able to go in there and type in, you know, like Klowt whatever, and it would pull up all the data from Cloud, but it would also pull up all the available data on your competitors acquisitions, you know layoffs, like market value, like whether they've just taken any shes or got rid of any.

Shes like, everything was available and it was free. It was amazing. And so I went on there and I would like message like Tom Smith, the CEO of GWI. I got Global Web Index and which is by the way is a billion dollar company now. And when I was working with them, they were like a real startup and he had like 30 people.

Wow. And I'd message him and be like, Hey Tom I know you don't know me and you probably hate recruiters. Ha well, but by the way, did you know your competition just had an acquisition? Which usually means they're gonna start hiring, so they're probably gonna come poach your staff. And he'd be like, wait, what?

How do you know that? And I don't. And I'm like, well, funny you should ask Tom. You should have a conversation with me and then maybe I can tell you about it. And so I inadvertently started building a personal brand on a one-to-one scale with these CEOs and had a lot of success with it. So instead of spending a hundred, you know, making a hundred calls a day and spending three and a half hours on the phone, which is what my target was, I was like doing three calls a day, getting on three jobs a week.

And those three jobs a week were like retained 30% terms C-level, like heads of department roles. Wow. Yeah. So I was, I was billing like 30 grand a month, six months into my recruitment career off doing basically no work. And so I was like, I've cracked it. This is great. Yeah. And then the kind of next level up from that was, well, if I'm getting all this success with the dms that I'm sending, maybe I could scale it out more by posting content.

And that kind of like then took off. And so, you know, by 2018, I, I sort of built up a bit of a cadence. So I started posting and then 2019, and because I was posting so much, I got headhunted by the private equity company to go and basically help their founders build out their personal brands and like work out their recruitment marketing strategy and their employee engagement strategy of everything that sat around the people piece.

And then when Covid hit, as you rightly pointed out, I like the very sensible and risk averse person that I'm was like, do you know what would be a great idea? In the middle of a global economic crisis and a pandemic where we're not even sure whether we're gonna make it all out alive, I'm gonna quit my job and start a business with no savings and two children in, you know, and a mortgage to pay.

And so yeah, in August 2020, I quit my job on a Friday, started a Klowt on a Monday, and by week four we were oversubscribed and I had to hire someone. And that was all off the back of my personal brand. I just posted, I was like, Hey, I'll start this business. Who wants to work with me? And everyone was just like.

God. And then, yeah, the rest is history.

Kelly Kennedy: What an amazing journey. That's awesome. You know, I do want, I do wanna go back and talk about one part of it though, because I have talked with a lot of entrepreneurs like you who have been through a lot of loss, who have lost everything multiple times. And one of the questions I always have is, how the heck did you manage to pick yourself back up?

Because my gosh, I can't imagine the pain of losing your baby, which is what your business is. Let's get real. When you put as much loved blood, sweat, and tears into a company and it fails, it isn't just like, it isn't just a failure, it feels like a personal failure. And I can't imagine, oh man, I can't imagine what, what that must have been like.

And you know, like you were pretty young at the time, but still like, you know, how were you able to pick yourself back up in that moment? Because I think that that takes a really special person to be able to, fail at business and then be like, you know what, I, I can do this. I'm gonna pick myself up. And not only am I gonna do it, I'm gonna do it better.

And you know what's crazy? Every single entrepreneur I've talked to on this show has become successful again, and not just successful again, way more successful than they were the first one or two times. And so I just wanna chat with you about that. Because, you know, I think there are a lot of people who, their businesses might be struggling right now.

Amelia Sordell: And I mean, look like, by the way, us too, right? Like, it's not, it's not all, I think it's so easy for founders to sit like talk about like how well they're doing and it's so successful, whatever. But like, this market's rough right now. Like it's re like, it's bad. Like we, we are half the headcount we were last year, like, you know, it's not all cupcakes and rainbows, but that's, that's, that's.

Price that you pay for being self-employed, right? It's your responsibility to make sure this ship is sailing regardless of what the waters look like. You're a captain, you've got pe, you've got your team on your ship that you need to make sure that everyone's getting to that destination. And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's crazy.

But to your point around like how you pick yourself back up again. I mean, I, I think we, I, what I found the more times I failed, and by the way, I failed thousands of times. I fail every day. Like, and I'm very proud to say I am a failure because. I think, I don't think failure is the opposite of success. I think it's, it's, it's part of it, right?

It's the 'cause each time you start something, you think it's gonna be different. And every single time you fail and everyone's going, I told you so, I told you so, like da, da, da, all like, you know, the worst, you know, people make fun of you for doing those things, but you only have to be right once. Right?

You only have to get Yeah. The decision making, right. One time. And for me, it, whether that is relationships or friendships or business or business decisions or whatever, you only have to be right once. And the more you do it, the more likelihood you are to be. Right? And so, yeah, I think how you picked yourself back up again the first time hurt, bad, like really bad, and took me like nine years to recover from, the where my marriage was over, that also really hurt. But now I'm just kind of like, you know, and I'm not, I'm not saying that I'm not being frivolous with when I say this because Klowt is my baby and I would like mortgage every single thing I owned to, to make sure that this was a success, because I believe in it.

But I know for a fact that based on what I've been through, if this wasn't to work out, that everything would be fine. And I think if you can go into life and relationships and it's so poignant, right? It's not just business, it's not just career, it's also your life relationships. Like, how many times have you not, you know, followed your heart with someone 'cause you're like, oh my God, what if it doesn't work out?

Or how many times have you not done that thing that you really wanted to do? 'cause you were like, oh, what if it, what if it doesn't work out? Yeah. If you knew that everything you did was gonna work out, what decisions would you make? You would go, cool. Doesn't matter how many times I fail 'cause I know it's gonna work out.

Yeah. I know it's gonna work out and that is how I live my life. Whether that's not, if some people are gonna listen to that and go, my God, that's so woo woo, but I'm happy my kids are happy. Like my team I think are happy. You know, I'm looking around like, is everyone happy? I do you know what I mean?

And I think when you have that attitude, your life just changes and your perspective changes. And so when there are rough waters and then when there are things not going to plan, you're like, okay, that's correct. How do we fix it? You're not flapping when you flap, you make bad decisions. And I think people flap because they haven't made enough bad decisions to get experience from making them.

Mm-hmm. And when you have experience, you then make better decisions. So like, yeah, you, you need both. You need to fail in order to be able to succeed because no one knows how to win without having practice. How many times has Husain Vault run and done a shitty time or fallen over? How many times do you think Beyonce has done a bum note like.

You have to just, and how many babies have you ever met or adults have you ever met that didn't like able-bodied adults? Have you ever met that didn't learn to walk, but yet every baby falls over a thousand times before they figure out how to do it, right? You just have to realize that it's part of life and stop allowing society to tell you that failure is, it somehow makes you not enough.

Yeah. If anything, you are holding your back yourself back for potential. By not failing. You should embrace it. You should wanna fail as much as humanly possible because then you get data to make better decisions next time.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, I love that. You know, like the reality is, it's like I've fallen on my face so many times.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah. Right. I mean, I fell over on Saturday. My brother, me and my, my brother will like, be really, really raucous at my birthday party. Like, shoved me over and I fell over in front of everyone. Yeah. I was like, whatever.

Kelly Kennedy: I'm, I'm always trying to encourage, you know, people to pick up a mic and start doing their own show.

And you know, so many people are like, oh, I, you don't mean I'll, I'll suck at it. I'll fail. I'll, I'll do so badly. And it's like, guys, I like, I make mistakes. All the time to this day, like 230 some episodes. I still make mistakes. I still like, when I do my individual shows, like they are edited guys. They are not live shows, right?

Like the reality is I, yeah, I, I I mush mouth all the time.

Amelia Sordell: Oh, mush mouth. I like that. I mush mouth all day. That's all I, I just stumble with my words. The difference is though, I don't even care if I do it now. Like I don't even how to edit them. Like we've, we've got some of my best perform, my best performing podcasts I've ever done have been when we've just like, let it run.

And like I've, I've gone, oh shit, my phone's going off and like, whatever. And, and, and PE people love it 'cause they're like, it's real. And that's the thing as well. Like, I posted something today where I basically said like, you know, just do it for the plot. It's so poignant about what we're talking about. I said, your life.

A movie and you are the star, you're the producer, you're the writer, you're the, you know, it's your narrative, right? And whether you make good decisions, bad decisions, wins, failures, you know, all those things, they're just little plots to the story arc of your story. Like, we're all gonna end the same way.

We all know how this goes, right? Like no one's living to infinity. We all die. Like, hate to break it to you. But it's just part of creating a narrative and either whatever decision you make, you either get an amazing outcome or you get an amazing story. And either way you win. Either way you win.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Yeah. It's so funny, like, I've talked to so many people on this show who were ahead of their time. Liz Ryan is another one. She wrote a book called Human Workplace. I don't know if you've ever read that book. Anyways, like was really chatting about personal branding back in 2016 and, and, and even before then, like she's got like 3 million LinkedIn followers.

Pretty impressive actually. But, but yeah, like, just like I look at people like her and I, and I really look at you in the exact same light where it's like. How were you so ahead of yourself? Like I really do think, like how did you figure out in Covid that personal branding was gonna be the next big important step for business, for individuals?

And you know, I get it. Personal. Branding's been around forever. I get it. Like we've had rock stars forever. Like, I, I totally understand that, but I think from like a standpoint of, we didn't even know how to use LinkedIn four years ago. Right? Like how are you, how did you see this coming, Amelia?

Amelia Sordell: I wish I could say it was really strategic.

It wasn't. I think I think I just fell into it. I figured out, 'cause I was doing the do right, that I was reaching more people by posting than my company page was reaching. And the other employer that I was working for at the time. And that struck me as interesting, and it also struck me as interesting that now people buy through influencers.

They don't necessarily buy a few brands, and I think that's because people, B brands lie, right, like 90, I think it's 2% of people trust the opinion of a stranger than they do of a company brand. So that's why companies like TripAdvisor exists. It's why Glassdoor exists. Like all these review sites are created for peer reviews because we trust our peers, albeit strangers, more than we trust a company brand.

And so, I dunno if it was like a conscious, like, I'm really smart, I know marketing super well. Like this is where the world's going. It was more kind of an observation of, well, people have always bought from people and is it an interesting that, you know, business used to be done on a golf course and now it's done through LinkedIn dms.

I wonder if I can just scale that out and reach a million people instead of reaching one person. And it wasn't really like, you know, in four years time, we're gonna be the UK's leading pastor branding agency. That wasn't what I was setting out to do. What I was setting out to do was, I'm really good at this thing.

I've noticed that there's a, a gap here in the market. If I can just get paid to cover my bills, to do something I enjoy, then like that's a win for me.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: And obviously it grew, you know, quite quickly after that, but Yeah, it's, it's funny actually 'cause sometimes I, I fail to, again, we'll talk about failure, zoom out a little bit and, and look at actually where.

World is and what is like the next thing. And I think that's true of a lot of people that run their businesses, right? You're quite often in the weeds of it and you're getting pulled in so many different directions. Like, you know, you're trying to concentrate on doing something and someone needs something there and someone needs something.

Then they get an email. It's like, like you don't really have time to sit down and work, right? Yeah. You to do your actual job. It's like, you know, you do it at 8:00 PM when everyone else is asleep.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, yeah.

Amelia Sordell: But it's, it, it's, it's I was thinking about it the other day when I was, you know, in that sort of wondering time and it's normally like first thing in the morning, like 5:00 AM when no one's awake or it is after work when everyone else has kind of put tools down.

And I was like, what is the next thing? Like what is the, what is, what is, you know, you talk about the year of pastor branding being 2024. I'm like, it's gotta be in person, dude. Like the, the in person thing is so. It's such a unique experience. Like for us to be doing this right now is so nice. Like, I'm, I'm like, how Kelly, like, we connect, like, I like him.

He is cool. Like I would never have had this interaction with you online. Right. Or rather in a kind of scalable setting. This is obviously online, but it's, it's an unscalable setting. But if we were doing this in person right now and I had a coffee or you had a whiskey like whatever, or was like, we'd be, we'd be like, like this, right?

Yeah. And you'd be in each other's space and you'd be physically looking at each other and like, you know, you get all that kind of frequency coming out of, out of each other. And I think digitalization of the world has meant that it's never easier to start a company. It's never easier to get ahead. It's never easier to build a brand.

It's never easier to reach a million people. Right. But we've never been so disconnected from Yes. Individuals. Yeah. And so my strategy, you know, albeit might be wrong, but we're gonna give it a crack over the next kind of 18 months, is how can we reach the individual? How can we. Make the individual person feel seen and connected and like they matter and that they understand and that they're understood.

And so for me, that looks like offline. That's like, okay, cool. Let's go do speaking gigs. Let's go do yeah, podcasts. Let's go do let's meet people. Like I sat down on a train, I say I sat on a train. I was going on the train to the airport the other day, and this young man, unfortunately for him was walking on the carriage and fell on me like, literally fell on me.

He was so embarrassed. It was, it was hilarious. But we all got, we all started talking and like he worked in, in a and r and music company and da da. And it's those little moments that I think we've lost as a society. And I think it's also representative of where we are as a world, right? We've never been more polarized.

We've never been more disconnected. We've never been more like, I agree. No, I disagree. Yeah. And it's because we don't have any human connection. So I think. The next thing for me is human connection in person. You know, whether that be through books, like, I've got a book coming out, right. Amazing. This, it will hopefully be out by the time this podcast is out.

But I have a book coming out that is so much more intimate than you scrolling through TikTok and seeing me go like, build your personal brand guys. It's like I'm talking to Kelly about what his life has been like and how he can help fix it by building his al rap. Like that's, that's really intimate.

You're in someone's bed when they're reading, right? So yeah, that's my strategy.

Kelly Kennedy: That's yeah, it's absolutely amazing. And it's so funny 'cause I was literally talking to Aaron Hurst the other day who wrote a book called The Purpose Economy and he's like, dude, just like, do you know your neighbor? And I'm like, no.

Like I know their names. Yeah, but I dunno them, he's like, dude, like, have them come over for supper. And I'm like. Why, like why did, why is that? Never, it's so funny. Like I'm in business development. That's it. I understand, Kelly.

Amelia Sordell: That is, you just nailed it. It's the why.

Kelly Kennedy: I understand, right? I understand the value.

Yeah. But it's crazy, right? Not I totally, I totally understand the value of like an in-person meeting of like getting to know someone, having lunch with somebody. It's an amazing experience. Like I live for it really. I really do, but yet I'm afraid to invite my neighbor for supper, right? Like it's a weird Yeah, it's crazy.

You're right. In this time of like being super connected, we've never ever been more disconnected as like a species.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah. Like think, think about your parents, right? Your parents would've been on a neighborhood watch board. They would've been, they would've had the neighbors over probably once a month for dinner.

They would've mowed each other's lawns. They would've taken each other's bins out. Like the community, like, and I am, I am, I feel very, very lucky. I. A, I believe this, first of all and I, because I know that, I know that's not a, it's an old school kind of mentality of like cult, you know, being community and dah, dah, dah.

And that's because my parents are like that. And my parents were always like neighbors over, like everyone on my parents street where they still live and they've lived there for 20 years. It are best friends of my parents. They're at my parents' house all the time. My mom's at next door, neighbors, like, they go for coffees, they go for water.

They have book clubs. Like they have this beautiful community where they all look out for each other. And I've definitely taken that into my adulthood. So my community, they're, I'm very good friends with my neighbors. That side, like our gardens open at the back, right? And we live side by side. And so our kids go back and forth between the gardens and I'll turn around and like their daughter will just be in the kitchen.

I'll be like, oh, hi. Like, does your mom know your hair? She's like, yeah. I'm like, cool. Great. I'm, and like that's the relationship that we had. Yeah. You know, they were on holiday the other week. I took their bins out. They didn't even have to ask me to do it because I knew, I knew they were away. So I just did it.

And, and they would, I know they would do the same thing for me. So I think. That as is essence like, I know I talk about personal branding stuff, but that is, that's personal branding is ev. It's that. It's the, it is the, it is the person that you wanna show up as in the world and how you wanna be received by the world.

Everything from how you post that piece of content on LinkedIn, it's gonna drive revenue to your business, to how you spoke to the barista when they gave you the coffee in the morning, how you smiled at your neighbor down the road. Did you check in on your other neighbor who you know is going through a, like, it's all just these little tiny interactions and it doesn't matter whether it's in person or online or in real life or in any email or whatever it might be.

These all form a perception of what people think about you.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: And I think if people were more conscious of that. A, they'd be perceived better and therefore would get a better result out of life, period. But also, B, I think that rubs off on people and it makes them more conscious of how they're perceived.

So Kelly, you invite your neighbor over the for supper he'll, or she'll be like, oh, oh, that was really nice actually. Maybe I should do that for him. And then they'll invite you for supper, and then they'll take that and then give that to someone else and go, oh, well that was really nice to do that with Kelly.

Maybe we should ask the other neighbor. And then it kind of transcends, right? So, yeah, it's infectious. I think you, I think, I think that should be your challenge. You go and invite your neighbor for dinner.

Kelly Kennedy: It really is. Yeah. I, I totally, I know it's one of those just weird things that it, it really hit me hard when he said that, and I was like, what?

Like, I didn't even think about like how. How big that is and yet I can't be the only one. I'm sure there's like millions of people out there who are like, I know their names, but like we don't know each other, but we live like 20 feet apart.

Amelia Sordell: I would hazard a guess and say that 90% of people dunno their neighbors.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, it's crazy. You're absolutely right. And I look like I grew up on an acreage in the country and like people would just drop into the house at like any given time. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Like we just have like random kids just show up and be like, Hey, is Kelly home?

Amelia Sordell: That's my house switching to my house.

Kelly Kennedy: And it's so weird.

Amelia Sordell: I don't even know where my kids are. Sometimes they'll just disappear. I'll be like, where are they? And I'll be like, I'll get a message from my neighbor being like, oh, I'm Hendrick. They're alive. They just next door.

Kelly Kennedy: That's amazing. Yeah. It's something that we should definitely all aspire for.

I think we're just afraid, right? Like we love our kids so much.

Amelia Sordell: But what, what? What are we afraid of?

Kelly Kennedy: I dunno. I dunno. What are we afraid of? But it's, something happened, like something happened at least here in the western world in North America, where suddenly we just became afraid of everyone. Right.

Amelia Sordell: Social media happened is what happened.

It's so funny because my whole business is built on social media, right? And I think social media's great. We've met because of it. My book came about because of it. This business exists because of it. You know, there's endless things that I could tell you. Like I've met two of my best friends in the whole world on LinkedIn.

Like those are women that I will write or die for. Like I would give them my last penny if I had, if I didn't have anything else and they needed it, right? Love them to death. But the other side of social media is that it's polarizing. You only get what you like. So you get fed algorithmically stuff that just confirms all your biases.

You feel so disconnected from reality because all you are seeing is a curated highlight reel of what someone else wants to, wants you to see, not what the actual truth is.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: And so you then look inward and think, oh my gosh, I must not be doing so well because all these people are doing so well.

And, and so all you do is just spend time in your head. It's actually incredibly narcissistic to spend. Hours and hours and hours and hours and hours looking into a black mirror and expecting that your life is gonna be different to how it feels right now. And it's funny, and I think it's 'cause I work, I 'cause I work in this industry, I don't spend time on social media outside of work.

I don't even have any apps on this phone at all. Wow. Like, I don't have a single social media app on that, but I should just lie. I have read it and I have YouTube on that phone. That's it. And that was a conscious decision for me because for me, social media is not a consumption app. It's a creation app.

I I is a distribution channel for me to win business, for my business, to attract talent, to attract opportunities for a specific goal that I'm trying to reach. I'm not gonna spend three hours of my life scrolling through TikTok because I think it'd be a waste of it. Although I do thoroughly enjoy the Madagascar king Julian memes that are currently during the rounds 'cause he is my favorite character of all time.

And I do aspire to be King Julian in another life. I would like a mort and a Maurice. As sidekicks. But yeah, I, I just think, I think social media is both the greatest blessing of all time because we can connect with people and meet family members may never knew existed and yeah, meet your friend, like it is amazing.

And you could take that, transcend that beyond, right. Dating apps like you meet the love of your life on a dating app. That would never have happened before. Sure. But the other side of that is, two things can be true at the same time, right. Is we're never more disconnected. People are having relationships through a phone and not in real life people don't even call anyone these days.

Yeah. Like if I suggested to someone now call the client, they'd be like, oh, I can what? I can WhatsApp them. I'm like, but why would you wanna do that? You need an answer to an urgently pressing question. Just call them because call them. Right. We're all afraid to be humans and to speak to other humans, and that's because we live in our phones.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. And I, I totally relate to you. I have like an entire podcast on telling people to pick up their phone and call their clients. So Yeah, I totally get it.

Amelia Sordell: But what so afraid of Yeah. Get, get off WhatsApp and pick up the damn phone.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. We really live in a time where like, in order to differentiate yourself, it's not hard, but you almost have to go back in time.

Right. It's like, don't be on social media, do the things that no one else is doing. Which the big part of that exactly is really be yourself, actually connect as a human being and, you know, pick up your phone and leave a voicemail, whatever, right? Like, but like, we live in this time where people are afraid to do that simple thing.

And you know, like I hope with this show that over time we inspire people to go back. That's, that's really what we're trying to do on the show is like bring authenticity and humanity back to the world because real authentic connection is important. But I also understand that like, we live in a time when for, for many reasons, people are really afraid.

They're really afraid to do things like that. And yeah, like I said, I hope it's conversations like this that really lead people to like wake up and realize, you know what? There's a whole world out there with people who you can create genuine, meaningful relationships with.

Amelia Sordell: Do you know what's so funny?

We all spend so much of our lives trying to stand out, right? Like, we all wanna be recognized for the individual, unique, beautiful person that we are. And yet everyone does the same thing. Everyone just applies for a job with the same CD that looks exactly the same as everyone else's. Everyone does the same cold message on LinkedIn with exactly the same template that they found on HubSpot as everyone else.

Like, just do something different. If everyone's doing that, you should be doing the opposite. Yeah, like it's, and it's funny to your point around in person and like, you know, doing things differently. I did a speaking gig, so I have this thing right where I need, I need to meet the three people a week in person that might not be any lead or business connector, whatever, but I think would be good to have in my network and I think I would be good to have in their network.

I'm a big connector of people, Kelly, so I'm sure along the way somewhere I'm gonna go, Kelly, meet this person, this person y because I love doing that for people. It's my favorite thing to connect people and for them to get something out of that connection. You know, I've, I've, I feel very, very fortunate to have a big network of people and I've, you know, connected people who've gone on to start businesses together.

That's been really successful. And I've connected other people who've gone on to date and like, it's, I just love it. It's amazing. You know, when you meet two people'll be like, you need to, I dunno why, but you should need to meet each other and you're gonna be great. I message quite often when I go and do speaking gigs or whatever.

I'll go through the speaker list or the delegate list or whatever, and I'll just message, you know, there was, I did a, a talk a couple of weeks ago, I 200 speakers. I was like, I'm gonna message every single speaker. My EA hated me 'cause she had to arrange all of the coffees. But I messaged her and she said, Hey, I'm really sorry I missed your talk.

I know I was super busy. You were super busy, but I would love to meet you. And I, I, I just wanna hear about you really. And it's funny 'cause 50% of the people came back and was like, I'm not interested. I don't wanna buy what you're selling. And I was like, no, I'm not selling anything. Like, I just wanna say hi.

And the, and then kind of the other sort of 50% were mixed between like, oh. Okay. Yeah, sounds great. Like, let's do it. And the other, the other 25% were a little bit apprehensive as to why I wanted to meet them. And, and it's, it's funny 'cause now I've had some of these coffees with people. They're like, oh my God, this is so cool.

Like, you know, I should be doing this more and dah dah. I'm like, yeah. Like, it's great because you never know who those people are gonna know, gonna be Yeah. Gonna like, whatever. And I just think the bigger network you have and the more lives that you can touch with even just being like a nice happy influence and just talking, having an opportunity to talk about bullshit in life with someone who isn't necessarily super close to you Yeah.

Is like a nice bonding experience. And Yeah. I'm, I, I'm a big believer in networking. I think it's the greatest skill that anyone can have. And I would hazard a guess and say 90% of the opportunities I've ever had in my life have come through someone coming across me or knowing me or introducing me to someone or da and yeah, like.

You, you don't have to fight. Fight alone. Right. Get a group of allies around you, the e rally for, and that they rally for you. And that's just a little bit easier when you have that.

Kelly Kennedy: Totally. And you know what's funny? Like I look back to launching this show too, and like obviously when I started talking to a wall about business development, you know, a year and a half ago, I had no idea what was gonna happen.

But honestly it's been incredible. Like I've met so many amazing people at this point. We're well over a hundred interviews with, with just incredible individuals. And I've made so many friends. And that was, you're right. Like that was like the, the unexpected, amazing thing that came out of it. And you know what, like you said about like the biggest opportunities that come to you, they don't typically come to you from your direct connections.

They come to you through second and third connections just outta nowhere. It feels like sometimes. Yeah. It's crazy.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah. I won the biggest deal of like one of the first kind of year of business with the biggest brand name as well, through someone had liked my content and like written like, I don't know, like Amelia's great and just.

Just at that kind of same time, someone was looking for help with how to humanize the board's brand online. And so that person introduced me to the kind of head of talent development or head of director of common internal comms or something at this company. And we ended up doing work together. And you know, looping it back to personal branding like that is the power of personal brand, right?

If you give out value and value is subjective, right? But to me, what value looks like is what does your audience care about? Motives, challenges, loves, hates, like you need to create what value actually means is, I see, I feel seen in your content. I have that problem and you are helping me solve it, or I have exactly that feeling and I can relate to that.

Like, that is, that is the concept of value, right? It needs to be good enough and trigger an emotion enough for people to wanna pay you, almost like as they do, right? Pay you with a, like pay you with a view, pay you with whatever. But if you can give enough of that value away, people will advocate so hard for you because they, they are genuinely grateful for the time and the effort and the, and some people don't give a shit, right?

But that's okay. They're not your people. They genuinely are grateful for the impact that you've had on their life and therefore are so willing to introduce you to opportunities because they're just so grateful that you know you. Even if it was just one tidbit, right? Like I remember I had one of my best performing posts in terms of ROI of leads was I posted about my divorce and I said.

I tell people I'm getting a divorce. I think it opened it with like, when I tell people I'm getting divorce this on LinkedIn, obviously. So there'll people listening to this thing like, you post about your divorce on LinkedIn, you're crazy lady. But that's the point, right? You can be a person and a professional at the same time, right?

Yeah. Just because I'm going through a divorce doesn't like, that impacts my work. Like, sorry, I hate to say like, divorce is disgusting. It's the most horrendous thing that you can ever go through. And so of course it impacted my work and so of course I'm gonna talk about it because loads of other people go through the same things.

Course, particularly founders and executives who are my yes. Who are my ideal audience, right? That's great. So when I share things of I feel seen content that I know they're gonna relate to, of course, like it's gonna, you know, be something that I wanna talk about. Anyway, I posted this thing and I said.

Whenever I tell people I'm going through a divorce, everyone says, I'm sorry. I said, I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry that I spent 10 years with this amazing person. We have two kids together and we're very, you know, we've had this amazing life, but now it's done and I get to have a, I'm grateful that I had to get to have a second shot at it, right?

I might meet someone new at some point and get another marriage right. That I like. What an amazing thing. And I had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of messages, like it was wow. Mental from people saying, thank you for sharing that. Because that's exactly how I feel and I don't know how to express it.

And I just wanna say thank you for saying what I'm thinking, and like, thank you for the authenticity and da da. And we ended up winning business off the back of it because people could see themselves in that. And that post wasn't like, here's five ways you can build a personal brand, an executive. Oh, it was, I'm a real human going through real shit and this is hard, but hey, it's gonna be fine.

And that was valuable to people that I was trying to. Create a connection with.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow. Yeah. It's you're absolutely right. Like it is, it is a founder's president's executive challenge. I can't tell you how many people I've interviewed on this, on this show that that's the story. I I killed it at work, but, you know, at the expense of family life at yeah, at a divorce, at the, at the loss of relationships with my kids, you know?

It sounds like you really do prioritize family life though, and I wanna chat about that. Like, did you eventually find work life balance or is it still just a gigantic myth?

Amelia Sordell: So I don't think work life balance exists. Yeah. And I'll kind of explain what I mean by that. I think when we talk about balance, we think about an equal distribution of something, right?

So I don't, I don't think any human being can equally distribute themselves anywhere. Like you think about your friendships, you think about your. Relationship with your mother. You think about your kids, you think about your work, you think about, you know, there's so many the things you wanna do. Mm-hmm.

How many people are compromising what they wanna do? Right. That's not balanced. And so I don't think it's, it's a reasonable expectation to, and it's a huge amount of pressure to put on yourself to say, I'm going to be balanced, so I'm gonna hard stop at this time and restart at that time. And like, and I found so much of my anxiety and stress came from trying to manage my life instead of live it.

And so actually what I do now is when I'm at work, I'm a, I'm not thinking a single thing about my kids right now, a single thing about my friends, my boyfriend, whatever it might be like, that's not in my. Peripheral, whatever. 'cause I'm here with you, I'm talking to you about my work and about my life and whatever.

When I'm with them, I'm a hundred percent focused on them. I'm not interested in work, I'm not interested in, in all those things because I'm with, I'm with the kids then like that is uncompromisable time and if I need to pick stuff back up again when I'm not with them, that's cool. Like we can do that.

And I think your life is a, is a lot like a battery. You get, you know, to your point around you met so many CEOs and presidents and whatever who've killed it at work, but just like it's done terribly. Not terribly, but like they could have done much better at home. I don't think you can do, I don't think you can kill both at the same time.

Your life as a battery, whether that be through your entire existence, you know, the 88 odd years or whatever it is we are blessed with to be on this planet, or whether that be on a day-to-day basis. You, you're a battery, you're gonna get energy and radiation and draining from different things at different times.

Sometimes your work is everything. It's like, oh my god, so much energy for this. Everything's gonna so well, like you called. It's like, oh my God. Ah. And so you just wanna live in that 'cause you're just drinking it in because everything is just, you're killing it. Right? And there's other times the work is exhausting and you don't wanna spend any time there because it's like a drain.

And, and, and in those times, you're probably killing it in your home life, right? Because you're getting all your energy from your kids and from your partner and from Yeah. You know, your, your, your, your horse riding, your boogie boarding. Like whatever it is that you do that makes you happy, you, you're getting it there.

But then at other times it's the opposite. Sometimes your home life's horrible, right? Like, if you've gotta come home and you've got a husband and a wife who's nagging your head off because you've not done the dishes or you've not done like that, feels very draining. So, of course you spend time at work.

'cause that's really killing it there. Right. And I think, I think instead of saying balance to people, I think people just need to be present. Like, if you're at home, be present at home. If you're at work, be present at work. If you are doing your hobby, don't worry about anyone else. Do your hobby. Like, and I think if you can find a way to sort of muddle through that and reconcile in your head, that is never gonna be balanced.

It's gonna be very unbalanced. But that's okay because you need different things at different times. Just like you need different things from different people. You can't, like, I, I always, I have such an ick with the word like the one, right? I think it's so misleading. The same with dream jobs, same with, you know.

Yeah. Do what you love when you never work a day in your life. Like it's all just a bunch of bullshit, right? You can't expect one person to give you everything. What you're gonna get from your romantic partner is gonna be different to what you get from your mother. It's gonna be different to what you get from your kids.

It's gonna be different to what you get from your best friend, to your grandma, to your colleague, to your co-founder, to your whatever it might be. Everyone has why they say it takes a village, right? I think the, the sentence it takes a village, village to raise a baby should be, it takes a village to live a nice life.

You need different things from different people to have your energy charged in different places. You can't expect one thing to fulfill you. And if you do expect one thing to fulfill you, whether that's a dream job or a dream career or a dream person or whatever it might be, you're gonna be constantly disappointed and probably quite burnt out.

To be honest, that's probably where a lot of that burnout comes from.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's funny because every, like, you know, I mean, I've been fortunate enough to, to have had some pretty great accomplishments in my life, and they don't, you don't get there and you're like, I did it. I'm done. Yeah. You're like, what's next?

I did it. What's next? Exactly. And it's like, it's like this moving goalpost, but I feel like life would be so boring if you just accomplished something and then it was all over. Right? It's like you have to, you have to move the goalpost a little bit. You have to always be aiming for something a little bigger.

So like, the idea, you're right, that like, one thing, even if you accomplish it, is gonna make you happy. It's not, you know, I've talked to so many multi multimillionaires who, you know what I mean? It, it didn't make them happy, it just gave them bigger ambitions.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah. Well, and that's the thing about life, right?

Like no one's, no. That climbing's such a good example of this. And even running probably right? You hit your PB of your runtime and then the next thing you wanna do is the next pb.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: You're like, yeah, cool. Great. Well done. Right. No, what's next? Or like, you climb Mount Everest, the next thing you wanna do is K two, because it's way more deadly.

Like, it's, it's, there is not a single, I don't think there's a single happy person in life who isn't constantly pushing themselves. I, I actually, I actually think struggle and pain in the pursuit of a goal is the, is the key to happiness. Yeah. Because you're striving for something, the human, the human condition is to strive and to struggle to achieve something.

And then you achieve it, and then you find the, like, it's that constant motion. And I think this idea that there is some nirvana at the end of the ladder, it's just is a, it's very anticlimatic or to B, very disappointing. And C, you get there and then you lose all sense of purpose. You've gotta constantly be like.

And also find time to celebrate, right? Like you, I think when you're very ambitious, you, we do all fall into this trap, and you'll know this as well, like salespeople, we're just all the same really. We're all just slightly psychotic and always looking for like the biggest, shiny, shiny object, right? Yeah. And I, I, I say salespeople are very intentionally all entrepreneurs, salespeople.

We, we are all in sales. All of us. Like, it doesn't matter what your job title is, you could be C-R-O-C-P-O-C-T-O, founder. We we're all in sales. And what we do need, we constantly is striving for stuff, but we do need to find that time to celebrate and go, oh yeah, that's pretty cool. I did that actually.

And also take that moment to just chill for a sec before you start aiming for the next thing. Because I think you then get into this rat race of like, I made a million. Cool, let's make another two. Let's make another three. And then you just do the same shit to get a bigger outcome. And it's like, where's the fun in that?

Yeah. Like, where's the fun in working just as hard as you did last year to make another million on your revenue? Like what does that, what the, the, the happiest time I've had over the last three years has been in the struggle, in the pursuit of the next different thing, not in this next same thing. Right?

It's like, could we, do you reckon we could do this or let's go find out could we could do that? Let's go and find out. But like once you hit these things, I think when you try and do them again but bigger, it becomes boring. It's like Nika Holgenburg, right? He won the championship and he was like, I quit because he was like, I did it.

I don't need to do it again. So much respect for that enough. Yeah, no, I agree. I have so much respect for that. So much respect for that.

Kelly Kennedy: Amelia. It's so funny. I was literally at a lunch last week and, honestly, I can't, I can't even tell you. Everybody's asking me, Kelly, how do I build a personal brand?

And I'm like, don't look at me. I'm gonna recommend three people. I want you to go to LinkedIn. I want you to check out Amelia Sordell. I want you to look at Marcus Chan, and I want you to look at Nat Berman. They are absolutely killing it and the personal branding, like, but I get asked it all the time, Amelia.

And so I know we're probably coming up close to time, but I wanted to just chat with you today. I hope you have a little bit of time to just give a little bit of advice to the people who haven't started their personal brand yet, but they're recognizing, they're a C-suite executive, they're executive of any type really at this point.

And they're realizing that like, I need to build a personal brand, but I don't even know where to start.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah, I mean, look, it's a, it's a good question. I think we, so I specialize on LinkedIn. So we, we do LinkedIn, we do podcasts, right? That's our thing. And the reason we do those two things is they intertwine when you.

Build a personal brand on LinkedIn. You attract opportunities like this, which I have through LinkedIn. And then there creates a further opportunity to create more content for LinkedIn, which then creates more opportunity to do things like this. And so the two really feed very nicely into each other, particularly when you specialize in thought leadership, which is, in my opinion, is sort of str like you, a personal brand exists everywhere, right?

You have it with your colleagues, you have it with your mom and dad, you have it with your buddy, you have it online, whatever. But thought leadership is sort of a sub niche of personal branding where. In my opinion, this isn't a defined definition where an executive or a founder or someone who's got a particular area of expertise is strategically position themselves as the expert in that space for whatever goal it is that they're trying to deal with.

They're trying to exit, they're trying to raise capital, they're trying to attract a, a specific group of people into their network. They wanna brand awareness, whatever that might be. Our thing is thought leadership, right? So we don't work with influencers, we don't work with, like, we turn down like people with pretty big, you know, followings before.

'cause it doesn't make sense for us to do that 'cause we wanna work with thought leaders, wanna say things that only our clients can say. But where I would start. If I was treating you as a client, Kelly, and you can impart this, hopefully knowledge on your listeners, but also in your conversations that you have in the future around this is, I think it's really important that you understand what your goal with this is.

Like there's no point in you having 10,000 followers if you're not gonna do anything with it. So what is the goal? Are we wanting to get a book deal? Do we wanna raise capital? Do we wanna get new talent into the business? Are we trying to generate new leads? Are we trying to get brand awareness? Are we launching, are we trying to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Beyond that, what do you want? Do you wanna find more time so that you can spend less time in your business? Do you wanna spend more time with your, like what are the, what is the goal with all of this? And from there, what do you need to attract or who do you need to attract to make that goal happen?

So does that need to, if you're raising capital, for example, do you need to attract venture capitalists? Do you need to attract PE firms? Do you attract managing partners If you are a founder and to exit, do you need to attract other founders, other entrepreneurs, other who could maybe introduce you to these people?

You know, what is the goal? Because the defined goal will help you figure out who you need to attract to make that goal happen, and then you can figure out what you need to talk about to make those people interested in you. And as I've said it before, right, it's the, I feel seeing content when we work with clients, we do what we kind of call empathy mapping, right?

So what are the things that you, like if I was trying to attract you, Kelly.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: What are the things that Kelly would care about? What are his pain? What, what are his pains, his challenges, his obstacles, his failures, his his wins, his his likes, his dislike. What, what does he care about? And it's not a singular person, but you need to treat it that way, right?

Because VTS VCs will care about a particular thing. Founders will care about a particular thing. There's loads of different nuance, you know, whatever. Which is why it's so important that you know who you need to track on to make the goal happen, right? And then what you can do is you can start posting, let's say hypothetically on LinkedIn, two to three times a week.

You can say, right, the first person I'm gonna do is on a Monday. And for that I'm gonna share a personal story that directly relates to a challenge that Kelly has, for example, today, right? I post, so a failure is a challenge that my clients have, and you've said this already and I know I'm bang on with this.

'cause every time I talk about personal branding, I always get the question of like, oh, but I'm scared, right? So I lean into that massively because I know that's, you know, the failure thing is a huge, a huge trigger for lots of people that I'm trying to work with. So I do a failure post, right? Because I know that's gonna attract thing.

The second post that I'm gonna do is gonna be one that's related to my business and like how hard it is to scale the business and like the challenges that I have for that, because I know it's gonna resonate with founders. I know it's gonna resonate with them and I'm trying to sell to them, right?

And then third post I'm gonna do is some kind of results. Like what are the, what is the, what is the results that I get from my clients? Like, you know, when we work together, what does success look like? And I mean that with like data, not adjectives, no one's sold on the ROI of lots, right? Yeah. They're sold in the ROI of.

This person spent $7,000 with me last month, and we got 'em half a million views and then half a million views translated into a feature in the financial times, a new business acquired and 15 new hires. That's a great ROI as far as I'm concerned, if you know what recruiter fees cost, right? That, that to me, if your primary objective was to generate sales, let's say hypothetically for your business or sales can be many different things.

Your sale could be product or service. Your sale could be you selling yourself as an employer to a new employee. A sale could be that you're trying to attract podcast opportunities, right? And you can figure out that framework around whatever your end goal is. The result could be I share a clip from this podcast on that bird post because I wanna attract more podcast opportunities, right?

So I'm like here, like, here's me on this podcast and like, like, I think I did an okay job. What do you think? Go listen to it. Like that's also a sales post. And if you do that two to three times a week for six months, I will guarantee you that you will see a significant increase in your views of not only just your.

Content and your page and your followers and all that kind of stuff, but you'll also see it on your company page. And also the visits to your website will increase your goal. Conversions will increase. Your opportunities will increase. You have to be consistent with it. You have to know what your goal is and you have to, you're talking about in order to resonate with the people that you're trying to resonate with.

Because the biggest issue that I find with this whole personal branding thought leadership is there seems to be two different camps. There's the one that's all about self-promotion. Look at me train, which is fine. Right. You know Alex, Sam is a really good example of this. He does a really good job of, this is what I think.

Look at me like a lump it. Yeah. Yeah. And people are so triggered by that and, but I love his stock and it's so articulates, so clever. It's so simple. It's so triggering. Andrew Tate used to do the same thing, right? Different camp completely, but same playbook. They very good at doing that. But it is the look at me thing.

And that's okay. By the way, you can fall into that camp. The other camp is we're way too professional to be talking like that. And so we must be considerate of everyone's perspective because in every single thing in the entire world, and therefore you're boring as hell and no one wants to interest, no one wants to read what you have to say.

But your team are kind of pushing you to do this 'cause they know how important it's right. You are a thought leader. I can't say that LinkedIn. And so you kind of fall into these two camps and people are looking at these two sort of examples going, I don't fall into either of these, so maybe I just shouldn't do it at all.

The reality is you, your sense check of your personal brand should be what does your personal brand look like When you're in front of your favorite client or customer employee, that's your asset test. How honest would you be with them? What would you say to them? Because I'd be much more worried if you were like saying horrible things in front of them than if he said something wrong online.

Right? Because they know you. People online don't know you.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: So yeah, I think top tip would be goal audience speak about things, the audience care about. You don't have to talk about your business all the time. Talk about stories from your perspective about your business. Yeah, just post it. You know, I can sit here all day and tell you how to do it, but there's, you know, you could read a million books in the world on how to be a better person, but you've actually just gotta do it.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the beginning we chatted a little bit about ai. Yeah. And so can we, can we chat about how should people use ai? Should they not use ai? How do you use ai?

Amelia Sordell: I'm a huge Chat GPT fan. I love it. But I don't love it for the reasons that you are gonna expect me to love it. So I use it for things like research.

So I use Chat GPT instead of Google. So I'll go, Hey Google. So for example, to on Wednesday I've got a podcast coming out with a, with an amazing guest. She's a 24-year-old owner of a social media agency that's worked with like Netflix matters. Spotify. Like she's killing it, right? And so as part of my prep, I will go, Hey Jack, do you know Vicki Owens it?

And they'll go, yeah, she's, I'm like, great. And so then I prompt it with my formula that I've built over the last like, you know, six months to get the extract what I need to extract from it. Yeah. Yeah. To then help me figure out what I'm gonna ask her to get the end. I'm trying to get from that podcast so that that's how I use chat.

I'll do the same thing for content, right? So I'll go, Hey, chat. Do you know who Amelia So is on her? So narcissistic. But it does help. And it'll go, yeah, Amelia. I'm like, cool. I'm Amelia. Hi, nice to meet you. I'm trying to achieve this goal with my content and I interview talking about this topic, this topic, this topic.

And my audience are these people, these people, these people. And this is what they care about. And this is what's motive and dah, dah, dah. Can you please send me a list of 12 things that I can deliver over the next 12 days? It's gonna hit this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing. And I let that in, like give me content ideas.

And then I go out and deliver the content. I write the content, I speak the content, I deliver it. But I've used AI to do the hard work of like, well, what do I talk about?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: Which is everyone's problem, right? And actually we built an algorithm ourselves to do that because I used to spend so much time like prompting.

Chat to give me stuff. We were just like, well, should we just build something that can just do it automatically? And so we have this platform called Get Klowt that basically we have a, a sort of an assessment that, you know, you tell us who your audience is, we then tell you what they care about. It tells you what platform we should be under that, and it's all, we kind of repositioning it the minute to be just LinkedIn before it was kind of lots of different platforms.

And then what it does is it feeds you content prompts once a week for your entire week. So on a Sunday you'll get seven prompts that are specifically designed. So, so hypothetically, Kelly, your clients, which I believe they are your audience, are founders and entrepreneurs, right?

Kelly Kennedy: Yes.

Amelia Sordell: We will then feed you on our, our formula of what we know what works on LinkedIn, which is roughly kind of a 50, 60% split of like personal stories with 50 60, well, 40, 50% split of more kind of valuable niche of content and results, right?

And so we will feed you these content prompts so that you know exactly Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If you choose to post that many times, this is what you need to talk about. This is the question that you need to answer. These are the examples you need to give. Here is the hook that I would use.

Off you go. And then you just have, it's, it's, it's there. Like you don't have to think about it. All you're doing really is answering a question, which is so much easier to do than think of what your audience would care about. And then we say, share this with a picture, or share this with a video, or blah, blah, whatever it might be.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. Like, I know you share a lot of video. Is that like your preferred, is that your preferred media to share?

Amelia Sordell: I'm just lazy, Kelly. I find videos so much easier, honestly. Like, and also I, I, I enjoy talking to people and also I'm not afraid. I used to be, I, the thought of having a camera in my face before was absolutely spine tingling.

Yeah. You know, I remember, I remember the first video I made. It took me about. Three hours to record. Three minutes because I just, I just couldn't get my words out and everything was scripted and.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: You know, all of those things. Because I've done it so much now, I could rock up. I, I've rock up to like big keynotes and I just wing it 'cause I know it.

I know, I know, I know what I'm talking about. I only talk about three topics, right? Branding, failure, and, yeah, that's it. Pastor brand and failure. That's basically what I talk about. And so when I go to these keynotes, yeah, sure, the slides are prepared and all that kind of stuff, but I know what I'm saying.

I don't, I don't need just script into whatever, but that's only because I've done it now so many times. And that's the same with video. So my preferred medium is video because I've done video so much and I perfected, you know, how I articulate my message. I think I, you know, I say what I mean, and I mean what I say.

And there's, you know, as much as I, you know, drop a little square word in there and kind of stumble over my words over there and dah, dah, dah. This is how I wanna come across. And I think it's the best way for me to connect with people is through this medium. Because, you know, as I said to you earlier, like in person is the best way you can build a personal brand.

And the second best way to do that is through being, you know, a foot away from someone's face on their phone while they're scrolling through LinkedIn. It's also the easiest medium to build your personal brand on because I only have to show up for this for an hour and a half or an hour 15, and I now have a month worth of content that I can chop up into micro pieces of, you know, whatever.

Yeah. And so if you're trying to do it scalably, for anyone that's listening to this, you better get comfy with video then baby, because it's the easiest way to do it. Right? You say 12 questions, you answer 12 questions, 12 videos all done. But I also enjoy writing. So I have a newsletter. I, a lot of my kind of style of content, my format, and that's probably also a thing to note, you know, what is your format?

What is, what, what are you gonna own as a format? For me, it's, it's video, but it's also this really long form, like, I think beautifully story told content around a and divorce and, you know, business and, you know, all of these things. Very human conditions that I find a lot of joy in writing and I love to write.

And so I like putting out that kind of content. But you might not, you might wanna do video, you might wanna do graphics, you might wanna, you know, whatever it might be. But I think you find your medium and you find your flow and it's all nerve wracking and all horrendous and all makes you feel a bit sick when you first start doing it.

But the more you do it, the more it becomes kind of second nature, right? It's like when you go to the gym, when you first try and lift those first dumbbells, you're like, oh my god, horrendous. And then by like, week three, you're like this easy, like, get onto the next one, you know? So.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing. You know, Amelia, I want you to lead us into Klowt.

'cause I think you guys can offer a lot of services to the people that are listening right now. I know you do public speaking. What are all the services that you offer through Klowt?

Amelia Sordell: Good. Thank you very much Kelly for teeing that up so nicely for me. No. We are checks in the mail. We, so we only look at, we only look after link.

We only do LinkedIn and podcasts. Right. And that is a really strategic decision to only do those things. We build out social media strategies for executives and founders on, on LinkedIn. We build and manage those strategies or create content. We post the content, we do the community engagement, all that kind of stuff.

The surrounding that sort done for you model. We then have a done with you model, which is we will come in and do consulting with like large businesses typically you know, with big boards and typically quite a lot of stakeholders involved, which is why they don't go, go down the retainer route. And in that we will help devise what does, what does a human executive look like and help their kind of internal comms team deliver on that message and make sure that the executives are consistent and then they're bought in and they understand why this is so important and yada, yada, yada.

And then we do workshops and our platform get Klowt, which is like you do it yourself, right? The DIY option where I will come in, teach people and teams typically like sales teams, marketing team, internal comms team, tele act teams, how to build their personal brand to deliver on the goals that the business has because an individual has 561% more reach on LinkedIn than the company brand.

So if you can get even 20 people in your business posting content, you've got so much more reach, so much more reach than if you spent all of your resources and time just posting on the company page. And so we go into these businesses, we train them on how to do it, we keep them managing consistent by plugging them into the GET cloud platform, which we kind of build sort of custom algorithms for teams or so.

Like with a business right now that's, you know, 5,100 huge business. They do like half a billion sorry, half 500 million in profit a year. Wow. Not even in revenue profit. Right. So it's a pretty big business. And they are looking forward. They need to be hiring great talent. They also are doing a brand rechange and a brand refresh to position themselves as more of a challenger brand as rather a hefty, kind of clunky, big player in the space.

And so a huge part of that is to humanize the brand. It's not just this logo anymore. It is, there are human beings working here. And so we're doing a big bit of strategy work with them with the minute where we're plugging social media team, the marketing team, the ad team, the internal comms team, the everything team to humanize their business.

From the ground up. And that looks like all the board of directors doing p branding. We've got, I think, 20 to a hundred. We're currently in the mix of like what we're picking right now, but 20 to a hundred champions to be employee advocates within the business. And then there's kind of a last layer at the bottom where we're sending out a newsletter every beginning of the week, every week from the CEO basically shouting out good work in the business and, you know, good posts in the business and all that kind of stuff to create this sort of culture internally of like communication.

And that's, that's a thing that I think a lot of people get wrong about branding is they think that it's this outward facing thing, personal branding and the impact that branding has is just as much inward you, your culture as a business has to be like. So reflective of what you're putting out there, because otherwise what's gonna have happen is you're gonna lose trust with your existing team.

If you are going out one and saying, we do this, and we do this, we this, and you're not actually communicating that internally, that creates a disconnect, right? And it creates distrust. What you really want to happen is like everyone to think that you are the dog's bollocks and you're amazing, and then when you go and post this content, they then come up to you in the water cooler and go, oh my god, Steve, thank you so much for sharing that.

I love that. It's amazing. And when you get all of this right, that's the most amazing byproduct of personal branding for businesses, is the re-engagement that you get with your existing team. Because when was the last time A CEO walked through the office and had a moment with someone, everyone works from home.

You can't create those moments anymore. Those osmosis I'm bought into you. I like your vision. I like you as a person. Let's go to war. Woohoo. You can't create that anymore, but you can create that on LinkedIn. You can create that in your internal Slack channels. You can create that and newsletter. You can create that in an internal podcast.

How many companies have an internal podcast where they've got 500 employees and their CEO does a podcast every single week. That's just for the team.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. You don't hear it.

Amelia Sordell: Like, what a great idea. You never hear it because no one thinks about this shit.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. I've actually tried to convince a lot of my clients to do it, but they're reluctant.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah. Because they're like, oh, that sounds like a lot of effort. Do you know what, it also sounds like a lot of that effort, Kelly, telling your shareholders and your Fortune 100 board that you've lost 20% revenue share this week year because you lost half your staff.

Kelly Kennedy: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. No, and it's like you said, it's like it's never been more challenging, I think, to really engage your staff and keep them connected because of that dissidence.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah.

Gen, gen Z particularly have no loyalty and rightly so. Right. You, if you don't give them a reason to be loyal, like why would they wanna be like they, you know, they're seeing, they've got over analysis paralysis from their best mate who's flying around a private jet after being an executive assistant in Dubai.

Like they wanna go do that. Why not? You know? Yeah. Yeah. But you've them a reason to stay and they'll stay.

Kelly Kennedy: Totally, totally. Take us into your public speaking.

Amelia Sordell: Public speaking God. Yeah, it's, it's, it's fun. It's definitely quite sweary, that's for sure. I'll never forget, I had a, I had a I did a public speaking gig and they flew me to Spain for the day in, earlier in the year.

It was fabulous. It was great. I loved it. And they said, right. Just to let you know, Amelia, that we which I really swear on the stage here, because we don't wanna get, we don't wanna offend anyone. And I was like, okay, interesting, interesting choice of speaker seeing as you don't want people to swear, but that's fine.

And so I got on stage and I was like, right, I'm super happy with my microphone. Like, super happy to be here guys. Thank you so much for having me. I've been told I'm not allowed to swear, so we're gonna get us out of the door, the out of, you know, get us off the table really early and I can see the receipt, the organizer in the back going, oh shit.

But, you know, it was, it was great. No, my my speaking style is very, and I love the speaking stuff I said to you earlier. The in person thing is just where. I think I do my best work. It's where I have my most impact and it's where I get the most joy and all the speaking stuff comes about because I do stuff like this and because I post this kind of stuff online and go, this is what I do, this is what I talk about.

Like, and it kind of creates this perception, which is what the whole point of personal branding is that I am the competent speaker and therefore people wanna pay me to go speak. And I think, you know, I never used to charge for speaking ever. It was always free. I always thought it was a such a, a, a, a, a gift that people were even interested in what I have to say.

And I still think that, you know, when, when we get in, I get invited to do stuff or you know, paid to do stuff, I'm like, what fucking honor? Like if people have spent all these hours and time and effort into organizing this thing and you, you wanna pay me to be there? Like, wow. That's like very humbling, you know?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But the way that I started off doing it is I just said yes to everything. Like ev and as it made me sick, Kelly, when I first started, like I remember the first one I did, I forgot all my words. I was like sweating out every single like pour I had on my body. Like I just would black out like the whole time.

And I remember I've seen, I've seen pitch the album. I'm like, how tall does that play look like, just like a blur. But then you do it again and you do it again, and you do it again. And I think also Covid for me was a really good time aside from kind of quitting my job inside the business stuff because everyone was online.

And so I, you know, going back to what you said earlier, I do really mean it when everyone's doing this. You do that. And so when everyone was kind of going on Link Instagram and dah dah dah, dah and all that kinda stuff, I was like, well, cool. I'm gonna do LinkedIn live. And like, I'm gonna go live when everyone else is being static.

And no one's, no one's being authentic and everyone's putting this highlight wheel out. I'm just gonna go live and I'm gonna be sweary and obnoxious and all these loud things at 12:00 PM on every Wednesday and we're just gonna talk about LinkedIn. I was like, I don't know what the plan is, but like, let's just see what happens.

And I did, I did, I think I did a live like 130 weeks in a row or something. It was like, wow. Every single Wednesday, like boom, boom, boom, boom. And everyone to this day that followed me then and still follows me now, still messages me and said, I still wish you were doing those live and maybe we should do them.

Maybe we should. Maybe, maybe I've gone into that, that mentality of bigger businesses now where I'm now doing what everyone else is doing. I should do the lives again. But doing the lives actually was like such a great training ground for speaking because. I'm literally, I, I was literally staring at myself, first of all.

So for anyone that's ever been alive on LinkedIn before, you'll know that you're sat in a studio much like we are now, where you can't actually see the guest. You can't see the guest, you can't see the the, the people who've tuned in. You don't know how many attendees there are, or you can hope is the a the text working because you don't know, because you can't see it on LinkedIn and B and the way I used to get round that Kelly, is I'd go welcome to you know, the LinkedIn live, accelerate LinkedIn.

I super happy to be back here, da da da. If, if you are, if you're live and on the call, like, let me know where you're tuning in from because I could see the messages, right? Yeah. So that was how I'd know if the tech was working because I get like a delay six. I have to keep talking for like three minutes.

I keep talking for three minutes and then all a sudden I.

But because I had to do these LinkedIn lives for an hour right, by myself, and I only had guests like two times an hour for myself, I'd have, I'd have to just keep talking. And so if I stumbled over my words, no one's coming to save me. Like, I haven't got anyone on my stage. It's just me. And that training ground was great because I messed up so many times.

I made, I like, it was, it was, it was whatever, but it almost. Made it worse and better at the same time because I couldn't see anyone.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, yeah.

Amelia Sordell: But, but also, like, I knew there was people there. It was like, it was, it was this weird thing. But I'm so grateful for the experience because it made me articulate a point really well, it enabled me to learn how to, you know, use my hands when I'm talking.

Because it's, you know, if you sat there like this for LinkedIn live for an hour and didn't move, it was very engaging. So I ha you've gotta take up space rights at, at least on a stage, you can walk backwards and forwards and whatever. Yeah. But in a box, you've gotta take up space and you've gotta frame yourself and you've gotta make sure that you're moving so that people can listen to you and absorb what you're saying.

And I, I learn all those things. You're doing that. And so I think, I, I always say to everyone, I, there's two things I go write every day. Even if you post nothing, just write in a journal. Write something every day, and record something every day. Like just to camera, just look. You don't have to post it.

Just record something every day.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: It makes you figure out how to articulate a message with such simplicity that. And I think that is, not to be in an arrogant way, but I think that's my gift. I don't think I'm different from anyone else, but I think I've worked out how to articulate a point in a simple way that doesn't come across as over well.

I dunno. Arguably it's not over explained and it's human. And I think if you can nail that, then it doesn't matter what stage you're on, whether you're virtual, in person, online, whatever, you will find a way to cut through the noise of people. 'cause that's, that's a, that's a really, a good, a really good thing to know how to do.

And I think if you are recording yourself every day and you're writing every day, it just gets better and better and better and better and better. Yeah. That's how you deliver an amazing keynote. And that's when you start getting paid. Because people go, that person is what they're talking about. They, they, you know, the people are very engaged in them and they know how to deliver it with such an articulation that gets everyone in the room go.

Yeah. That's ideal.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, I, I love too that you like kind of really narrowed it in, right? Like I'm the same way. The only thing that I can talk about is entrepreneurship and business development. There's nothing else. There's nothing else really that I'm gonna talk about that I'm an expert in. Really. Yeah.

And so I think on a certain level, by you just saying look, like I'm gonna talk personal branding, I'm gonna talk about, you know, my challenges. Yeah, that's a great, like it really does make it easy for you to hop up on a stage and be like, I got this. I know these things like the back of my hand. 'cause I live them every day.

Amelia Sordell: Yeah. But then that's the thing, right? I literally wrote something this morning and, and this, I do this as well. So a little tidbit for anyone that is, is thinking about building the brand is anytime I have an idea, I just document it in my notes. So I have like, I'm not joking about 1800 notes that have not become posts yet where I've just heard something about.

I'm like, that's great. Lemme just write it down. And one of the things I wrote down today was. Like anyone that hasn't accomplished something shouldn't be selling that as a service.

Kelly Kennedy: Yes.

Amelia Sordell: Like if you, if you haven't accomplished pers if you've not built a personal brand, who the hell am I to tell you how to do it and ask you to pay me to do it?

Yeah. If you haven't, if you haven't got the sickest body I've ever seen in my life, I'm not paying you to be my pt. Like, and this is the thing, right? I think people go, you asked me a question earlier, which I think is such a good point here. You said, how did you know that personal branding was gonna be a thing?

Well, I didn't. I'm just good at it. Right. And so I did it and because I did it for so long, I became a practitioner. But, and then when I was a practitioner, I could charge for it 'cause I was five years ahead of everyone else because I, I'd done it for five years before I'd even ask for any money in return.

I think too many people are opportunists in a bad way. They see there's so many personal branding agencies now. There's so many freelancers to do personal branding and I'm not trying to shit on anyone. I think ev there is, I'm such a collaborator like I. I meet with one of my biggest competitors.

Often we have coffee, like we talk about war rooms, we trade stories. Like I've got no, I've got no fear of competition. I like competition. And I actually think you should collaborate with your competitors, not compete with them, because you're all going through the same thing. And trust me when I tell you there is more, there is no industry that's niche enough that one company's gonna have a monopoly on it.

That's right. Yeah. Like, you just, you just, you know, be grateful that they're there. Right. Some people like Pepsi, some people like Coke, some people like neither. Like it's good, it's good for, it's good for business. But yeah, I think you need to be an expert in what you're talking about and what you're saying.

You're talking about moreover, what you're selling. In order to be credible, the last thing you wanna do is be talking about something that you have no idea and talking about. 'cause that's where a, you'll be found out and that's inauthentic. And, and you know, God forbid that happens because once you lose that sense of honesty, yeah.

Yeah. But it's very hard to get back. Very hard to get back. But like, moreover with your personal brand, like it's a lot easier for me to sit here and talk about cups and personal branding 'cause that's like been my life, right? That's what I've lived. I couldn't sit here and tell you about HR law or, you know the, you know, the stuff that's happening in Israel and God.

'cause I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. And that is not my area of expertise. And I think there is another thing on that, which is like, you don't have to talk about everything. Like just pick a lane and stick to it. Like, you don't have to comment on everything that's happening in the world. You don't, you might have an opinion on it doesn't, you have to talk about it online.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: And I, yeah, I think pick it, know what you are good at, pick that lane and stick to it. And don't get distracted because when you get distracted is when stuff kind of falls apart.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. You know, Amelia, you're, you're a rockstar. You really are. You are like the queen of personal branding.

You, you're absolutely killing that.

Amelia Sordell: I love that

Kelly Kennedy: You launched an amazing organization. You're gonna be changing the world. There's a lot of people right now listening that are like, you know, I want to be just like that. I want to do things just like that. We have women listening right now, and you know what's funny?

My, my fiance makes me very aware all the time that, like, when I come on here and chat, usually I'm not, I'm trying to speak to everybody, but the reality is it's different for women. And I recognize that it's not the same. And, and I struggle because I can't understand it. So I just try to speak from my own experience.

But, you know, can you speak to, you know, our, our woman audience today? And just like, you've, you killed it. You crushed it. You're crushing it every day. You know how were, you know, how can you inspire them? I know they need a little pick me up. How can you inspire them today?

Amelia Sordell: You know what's so funny? I've got, I.

And I've come from a pace of privilege, right? I'm a white middle class, like, you know, double dual parent household. I went to private school. Like I've, I've had all of the things that you could possibly want to be afforded in life. But on the other hand, I haven't had anything given to me. Right. I appreciate that.

I've had a leg up for sure. But I haven't had anything given to me. Like, I remember when I was 16, my dad was like, well, we'll we pay for your food and we'll pay for your education. He was like, everything else on you. And like, I'm so grateful for that because it gave me the strongest work ethic. Like, I remember I got my first job the day that I got my social security number.

I was like, done. I make you money baby. And I remember making like five bucks an hour and thinking I was rich and then getting fired three months later. 'cause my dad's such a bad word. I just hated w that face. I was just like the worst. But I think I'm gonna reframe it slightly. I think if you think you've had no opportunities in life, you will have no opportunities in life. If you think that there is a ceiling to what you can achieve because of something that exists outside of your control, there will be a ceiling to what you can achieve. When I say just post it, that's a lifestyle for me. That's not a LinkedIn Instagram, but that is a lifestyle.

I don't believe there is limits to my potential. I don't believe that I have a disadvantage of the woman. I don't believe, if anything, I think it's given me an advantage because I'm so much more empathetic. I'm so much more emotionally intelligent. And I'm so much more intuitive about stuff whether it be that a deal that I don't feel quite right about or, or someone that I think I need to meet, but I, I'll just make it happen because I'm like, I know that needs to happen.

And I think there's a lot of women that will disagree with this, and this is absolutely okay. I know my opinion's not for everyone, but I think all you lump ourselves into the female founder or the female entrepreneur or the, you know, however you, the, the girl boss thing really irks me. I think you limit your potential because you are, you're putting yourself in a table over there when there's a and building one, which is great.

And, and I love the community aspect of that. I love, I'm such a big believer in women supporting women. Like I have an amazing group of females around me and they are like, we are so supportive of each other, whether you're having a baby birth and a business, like you got a new EpiPen. Like, we're like, yeah, like, we're like, we know what I mean?

Like, we, we are so supportive of one another. And I love that. I'm, I'm, I'm that girl and by the way, I, they disagree with me on some of the things that I'm about to say. So, and, and I think that is such a great dynamic, right? You can have friends that challenge you and you don't have necessarily the same opinions, but you still root for each other anyway.

But I think that when you label yourself in this female founder box, in this, in this, you know, woman, business owner, whatever it might be. You're building a table over there and there's a perfectly good one that exists over there. And trust me, those lot are being like stakeholder managed to get more women at that table.

Like there is positive discrimination that's happening right now, particularly at the top because there are no women, very few women who are getting VC funding, who are still on boards and all that kind of stuff. So all these big companies are incentivizing their internal act teams to get women there because their previously has a big pathways there historically.

I think it's better, it's getting better now anyway, and so there is a positive affirmation going over there, not a negative one. And I think we live in a world perpetuated by social media, which is. Not the patriarchy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and all these things, which has existed by the way, and still exists for many women.

We haven't spoken about black women, we haven't spoken about ethnic minorities or women living in socio lower socioeconomical situations. 'cause they have a completely different set of challenges that I have. But all I can speak to is from my experience, I think when you believe that something is true, it becomes true.

And thoughts are very powerful things. If you believe that you will go and get that thing. If you believe that you will grow that business, if you believe you'll get that pay rise, if you believe it, you can do it a hundred percent. There is a statistic around, like, this is perfect example of this. Men will apply to a job that they re reach like 20 odd percent of the requirements for because they're like, fuck it, I got 20.

I'll just figure it out. Women need to meet 80% of the requirements to consider whether or not they will apply for that job. And that's 'cause they have a limiting belief that they're not good enough for that job. Why? Why are you not good enough for that job? Just apply for it. What's the worst that's gonna happen?

They're gonna reject you Boohoo. You wouldn't have got it anyway if you didn't apply it. So you may as well apply. Yeah. And I think it's that mentality thing. If you believe it, it becomes it. You believe you didn't get any opportunities because you believed you weren't good enough for that role. And so you never created the opportunity.

You didn't even try. And I think if we can get more girls, like at what point does society beat confidence out women? Because my little girl is so like as the classic bossy. Assertive. Like she is everything she said to me the other day, she was like, mommy. And I said, yeah. And I go like she goes she goes, I love you, mommy.

And I said, I love you too, baby. That's really sweet. And she goes, and I love daddy and I love this. And then she went through the list of people that she loves and then she goes, you know, I love the most. And I was like, who most expecting her to say like her bear? And she goes, me. And I was like, I've done such a good job.

Like this kid loves herself more than everyone. Like I smashed it out of the park. Yeah. But at what point do we beat that? Out women because that Yeah, it, most little girls are like that. Most little girls are like that. Yeah. And so I think if we just change the societal narrative, it's not even just changing society.

It's the narrative around being a woman and say, actually, yeah, you're a woman. You are different from men. Why would you wanna be the same, first of all? Yeah. Ew. No offense. I love being woman taken. Yeah. I love you. I love my dad. I love my brother, I love my son, I love my boyfriend, I love all the things, but like, I'm good.

Thanks. I don't wanna be you. We bring different things to the table.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

Amelia Sordell: And I've got just as much of an opportunity as you do. And if you just tell yourself that, more often than not happens. But again, I appreciate I'm coming from a place of privilege and I have had afforded to me many things that most people haven't.

So, but that would be my pep talk for sure.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing, amazing. Well thank you Amelia. This has been really great. Like, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I very much look forward to airing this episode. And yeah, thanks again. Keep killing it out there.

Amelia Sordell: Thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun.

Kelly Kennedy: Until next time. This has been episode 234 of the Business Development Podcast, and we will catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists from. For More, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.