Episode 2: Leveraging a core piece of research content to build your personal brand with John Preece

17 Mar

Welcome to episode #2 of The Thought Leader Show, hosted by Bec Sands and Andrés López-Varela. This episode is available on Spotify, Stitcher and Apple Podcasts, and if you enjoy it, we would love it if you could please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your friends.

In today’s podcast episode, we interview John Preece, the Chief Property Officer at Hub Australia, Australia’s largest privately-owned flexible workspace operator. John is a passionate advocate for flexible work practices, excited by the structural change in how organisations ‘consume’ workspace as a service, and the opportunities for knowledge workers presented by flexible working. John has over 20 years’ experience in commercial property. In his role as CPO at Hub Australia, John creates commercial partnership arrangements with property owners, and oversees the design and implementation of flexible workspaces.

Show Notes

3:00 About John Preece, our interviewee and a snapshot of his business background and how he describes his personal brand

3:50 How John’s personal brand fosters honesty and transparency and conveys this to his audience

3:54 Steps John has taken to grow his personal brand and how having a corporate profile is different to having a personal brand

5:27 How one piece of core content became a series of thought leadership posts for LinkedIn to prompt conversation and debate online

6:34 The opportunities that started to come from sharing thought leadership content on LinkedIn, including speaking opportunities and podcast interviews and how this has created his personal brand over time

7:30 How we often see thought leaders take a topic they’re passionate about and elaborate on that

8:00 What thought leadership means to John, and how he does need to tread carefully with what he says publicly and have empathy for various different views

9:00 How having a personal brand has provided John with opportunities that he hasn’t had in the past

9:30 John is clear about his personal brand commentary being his own personal thoughts and opinions, rather than that of his company

10:45 The mindset John has had to adopt because people don’t necessarily agree with his views. How John has dealt with an inherent desire to please people or at least not upset others, and how he’s navigated this while building his personal brand

13:00 Why positivity is key to John’s personal brand, rather than giving into the temptation to present views in a negative or complaining way

14:07 How John knows he’s sharing value and helping other people, rather than just being self-promoting – and why interacting with others on social media is key to this

17:00 Other personal brand activities John does for his career, including media commentary for his corporate role, and the parallel stream that John runs with his personal brand doing things like panels and podcast interviews

19:50 Why John listens to a lot of podcasts and the thoughts of other people around the world and how this helps him when it comes to building his personal brand and his career as well to broaden his horizons

20:50 Some of the mistakes John has made building his personal brand and those he sees, and what to do instead

21:50 The brands and people that have provided John with inspiration that he’s applied to his personal brand

25:00 Rapid-fire questions with John, including his favourite book podcast, and his final words of inspiration

29:00 How much time John spends building his personal brand

32:30 Bec & Andres have a post-interview chat to discuss highlights of the episode and what we took out of it to help you build your personal brand