The Founder Frenzy:
Why you should invest in your team’s personal branding
"Brands don’t sell. People do."
Ahh the age-old marketing adage. We’ve all heard it before — it pops gleefully into our heads as we swap out a full stop for an emoji in an effort to sound more ‘human’ — but are you applying it where it matters most?
The reality is, while glossy websites and bespoke brand activations are lovely, the thing that is most likely to open doors, start conversations, attract leads, and ultimately secure clients is the person or people leading your company. Founder, CEO, Managing Director, Creative Lead — the title isn’t important. But the vision, expertise and reputation that has got those people to the helm of a company draws intrigue and creates trust.
Company leaders are quickly becoming their brand’s most powerful marketing tool. Let’s explore how this relates to event profs specifically, and how you can begin harnessing this asset to generate leads, build credibility and drive growth 👇
How do we know this works?
In our own experience, and in the conversations we have with our clients, we hear the same things over and over again:
“The majority of our leads come through my personal LinkedIn, rather than the company’s”
“The Director’s personal profile has way higher engagement than the company profile”
“Most of our clients starting following our founder long before they approached us for business”
It’s happening all the time! According to the Edelman-LinkedIn Thought Leadership Impact Report (2024), 73% of decision-makers say they are more likely to engage with a business if its leadership is active and visible on LinkedIn, while, in the 2025 report, 53% stated that brand recognition becomes less important when thought leadership is high. Your senior leadership’s online presence is a serious boost to your brand cred.
Why does this work?
1. It builds trust and credibility
People trust people. When senior leaders show up consistently and authentically, they’re demonstrating time and again that they 👏 know 👏 their 👏 ish! Their personal experience, insights and stories humanise the business and establish authority.
2. It cuts through the noise
The B2B event supply space is crowded. Whether you’re selling event tech, infrastructure, AV, or staging, your audience sees a lot of similar offers. A visible founder helps differentiate your company, both in what you do, and how and why you do it.
3. It drives organic leads
LinkedIn content from personal profiles consistently outperforms company pages. Personal posts can get up to 8x more engagement according to LinkedIn data. That means more visibility, more shares, more interested people sliding into your DMs, and more inbound leads 💅
4. It supports relationship-led sales
The event world is a true “who-you-know” industry. Deals often happen through direct outreach, referrals and relationships. A well-positioned founder with a strong, active network can be the face of these interactions, and develop a reputation as someone who is truly engaged with the industry and worth recommending to others.
5. It gets you noticed in search results
Having more sources of positive information about you and your brand available is a game changer for getting you featured in AI search results. As more and more people turn to LLMs as their default search engine, brands need to ensure their SEO is keeping up with and tailored to these AI search functions. Check out our previous article for an in-depth look at AI searches and how to ensure your brand is getting picked up.
Building a personal brand
You’re on board - great!!
Now it’s time to put the wheels in motion and build your senior leadership’s personal brands. Here are our top tips:
🔁 Be consistent: Post regularly, even if it’s once a week. Be a familiar voice in our feeds.
🗣️ Define your tone of voice: Are you authoritative? Reflective? Casual? Choose a voice that feels natural.
🙋 Show your personality: People connect with real stories, behind-the-scenes moments and honest takes (but maybe avoid “what proposing to my girlfriend taught me about B2B sales…” y’know?).
💡 Offer value: Share lessons, trends, and tips your audience can use. Give people a reason to pay attention to your content.
💬 Engage with others: Comment, message and support your peers. It builds visibility and community.
And with that, you’re on track to build a killer personal brand 💪 The great thing about this method is it can apply to as many of your senior team as you wish. Those who genuinely want to engage with thought-leadership, appear on panels and be a more public personality can get fully involved. But if it sounds like your worst nightmare, just sit it out! As we’ve already said, it’s not about the title, it’s the person behind it that makes this effective.
Can we help? 📞
We know that founders, Directors and C-Suite professionals are busy bees, often lacking the spare time to become LinkedIn-fluencers. But we might be able to help!
Electric Cat offers personal branding to individuals and teams, structured however suits you: workshops, consulting or full white-label management and ghostwriting your content. Sound like it could be useful? Have a natter with the team to find out more...
