Tech; own your own brand — why (pt.2 planning for success)

Simon Sigré
Nov 5 · 4 min read

“Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.” — Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

Possibly a little on the epic side, however, the point stands. You could possibly determine with a degree certainty how important owning your own brand may be to you in the future based on what you know now.. but you will never know for sure until it comes time to test and at that point it could be too late.

I will now outline my case for why you should (or must) in the context of my own experience and I will do so under two high level categories;

  • Your brand — planning for success
  • Your brand — identity security

Your brand — planning for success: I wouldn’t consider myself ridiculously successful, however, all things considered I do “ok” and certainly have more accessible avenues/opportunities open than many of the people around me. Success is something that each person has to measure as a distance from where they are vs where they want to be.
As stated in pt.1 I attribute a component of this to early awareness of the importance of my brand and a healthy degree of early days Internet/social media hygiene. If I pause for a moment and consider the most recent 5 job/official position changes they all have the following in common;

  • All offered to me v.s. me applying
  • All would be considered a “promotion”
  • All are a direct result of my personal brand curation

I was quite fortunate to score a tech-support job with a lot of room to grow in January 2003 and from day-1 our little team of 3 started to make a name for ourselves .. I wont bore you with details.. but inside of 2 years my colleague and I had a live-cam running from the office (with active viewers) and customers asking us if we where going to put out our own calendar.

March 2005 Simon & Becky Cam

Unbeknown to us at the time.. this idea of being “visible” (not visually) would make every aspect of the wider organisations resistance to change/evolution easier.. Rebecca and myself became brand ambassadors for ourselves and the technology we supported.
Over time our team grew, our ability to mandate increased Rebecca went on to do bigger things abroad but the foundations we set allowed our service offering to increase and team expand to >20 people.

I noted throughout this time (some 13 years) that colleagues, “superiors” and other staff acted bewildered that I was “afforded luxury” or “free reign” by those who sat close to (or at the) top .. I recall a number of occasions thinking to myself “its because know one knows who you are”. It was about this time that I began to feel a tad stifled in how far I could push things.. this was made very apparent to me upon successfully being able to be able to have a autonomy section added to my contract. For me, and that time, this was as far as the brand could take me in a quite large (and extremely conservative) organisation.
Throughout all of my boundary testing and “pushing the mark” our team was evolving, innovating and fast being recognised within Australia as leaders at what we did .. our customer base had expanded (through demand) to almost saturation point and I wanted to ensure that my personal brand (and those around me who believed in what we did) was able to gain from this success.
In one case I received a funded trip to go and talk to a perspective customer on behalf of a vendor (naughty naughty).

Case studies are an odd thing, its industries way of using customers as marketing material whilst also allowing a customer (company or person) to obtain some notoriety .. Traditionally the partners (resellers) are excluded from this shameless promotion and its vendor + customer.
With this in mind (and having close access to a few vendors) I decided to go on a marketing blitz…I wasn’t looking to leave my employer.. but I had started to realise that eventually I would have to.
Sophos, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, F5 Networks .. the deal was simple .. Ill provide the content and energy.. the vendor pays for flights/accommodation, publishes the story and ensures it gets some traction and whilst it was my teams story .. my brand had to be associated with it.

Fast forward a few years and that promotion and brand awareness has had me provided a US VISA (and apartment) for a truly amazing Californian technology partner, an opportunity to work for a leading security vendor out of their HQ in North Sydney and and then to relocate and stand up a Security Operations Centre in Melbourne which has (in the past 2 weeks) now merged with some complimentary companies and we now represent part the largest private security practise in Australia.

I mentioned above that success is something that you have to define and measure for yourself. I’m not driving a G-Series Mercedes .. nor living in a luxury Penthouse.. but.. I haven’t tried/aspired to either.. for myself the above success (and I believe it is) was rapid organic growth based on good brand curation. I am exactly (almost) where I want to be.

I don’t believe the above process was luck, nor timing.. and I honestly believe that if I had to start all of that again that I could. I don’t think its ever to late .. but it does take a lot of effort.

If in doubt, plan for success because you never know when life will want to expand to new territories.

Simon Sigré

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Network & Security Guy • Keyboard Cowboy • Coffee Enthusiast • Digital Nomad

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