Excellent question! I know Alex Pitt has her own consultancy “Strange”. I personally work as a sole trader and have my “company” set up for invoicing etc and my website (Services to Literature) but I present myself as a freelancer on LinkedIn.

Selin Yigitbasi-Ducker Daniela Maestres Kelly Cuesta Alexandra Goldschmidt – how do you go about this with your brand consultancy services?

Good question Carolyn Seet . Unless you are going to build a large company, your personal brand will always be stronger than your company brand, so positioning yourself as an expert, rather than a company, makes sense. Thought leadership should also be in your name.

You can still have a company for contracts, billing, taxes etc as Lexi Radcliffe-Hart does and I do too. It can also be useful for scaling. For example, I have a Chief of Staff and several experts that I bring in to help my clients, but I bill everything through my company, then those individuals invoice me and I pay them.

This is a great topic to talk about Carolin Greiner! I would agree with Ben Legg that building a personal brand is a stronger route to go down as an expert, and with Lexi Radcliffe-Hart that the admin side of the company should be considered separately.

I communicate as the founder of a larger company, as I employ others to work on projects and I want to make sure clients know that they’re working with a team and not just me personally. It allows me to put clients in touch with the relevant people depending on what stage of the project we’re at, without any surprises about who will be involved with their work.

I think there’s a thought pattern that a lot of portfolio careers have, where they feel the need to seem ’bigger’ or ’more established’, and use a brand name to do that. What it really comes down to is: what problem are you solving for that client? What value will you bring to them by solving it? If it’s you personally that’s going to be providing those solutions, a brand name can be jarring, as it puts up a barrier between you and the potential client.

TLDR: Positioning yourself as an individual who can solve client’s problems gives them a direct route to a solution without any smoke and mirrors. If you’re going to be working as the leader of a larger team of people, going for a brand name is probably a better route.

I hope that helps!

Interesting discussion! I just had a client having to make the same decision, and we discussed this at length.

In essence, I agree with what has been said so far and think that it all boils down to what your objectives are and, as mentioned before, how big you want your company to be. Of course, sometimes we don’t know that beforehand. Also, there are many examples of successful businesses that have proven this advice wrong (i.e personal brands that have grown into bigger corporations and kept the name of the founder, and freelancers that work under a company name to make themselves look more professional and it works beautifully).

My advice is, take all of this great input that’s been given here, let it sink and then go with what resonates the most with you. At the end of the day, it’s you who is going to look at that logo, sign off emails and write contracts in that name, so it has to be something that you feel really comfortable with and that makes you beam with pride. I don’t think that this is a make or break decision, although there are certainly more practical and strategic ways of approaching it.

Good luck!