The Diary of a CEO host Stephen Barley and Alex Hormozi are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, yet they still publish thousands of pieces of content every single month and spend an insane amount of time planning and producing it, which raises an interesting question. If the people who have already made it can't stop posting online,
is building a personal brand actually freedom, or is it one of the most demanding business models of all time? So in this video, I wanna show you the truth about what it actually takes to grow a personal brand now, and these are all based on having grown my own multimillion dollar personal brand, as well as helping hundreds of others do the same too. I'm also gonna help you work out if you should actually grow one, as well as reveal why it could be hurting your business if you're already trying. So let's start with the first reason I think personal brands are a dangerous business model for many people, and it all comes down to this chart. When I first started building a personal brand, this is what I thought would happen.
You post content and your audience grows and you start making money, and eventually, you are working four hours a week sipping pina coladas on the beach somewhere. So income goes up, and then the time you have to work goes down significantly. That is the dream. Right? But for me, and most personal brands I know, it looked more like this. So the income, it did go up. However, the amount of time I had to spend working
never really came down. Because with a personal brand,
you become the marketing.
Now, this also just so happens to be the exact same thing that makes personal branding so powerful,
but the downside is growth is heavily tied to your personality
getting attention and always trying to keep it. So if you disappear for too long,
your business growth could slow down because you're no longer bringing new attention into your ecosystem. And that means you can't ever really fully remove yourself from the machine in the same way that traditional businesses eventually can. And it's why a lot of personal brands work very hard long after becoming very successful. Meanwhile, I know people that have a traditional business, and these guys are worth millions,
they and could disappear for weeks or months, and their company just keeps running because 100%
of it is run by other people. Their face isn't required, and that's the first reason a personal brand is an awful idea for so many people because it is often sold to you as a lifestyle business. In reality, most personal brands never become true lifestyle businesses because the founder usually has to stay involved
in some meaningful way. But why else does the amount of time personal brands have to work never really seem to drop to that lifestyle vision that many of us imagine? Well, think about how traditional businesses that are not led by personal brands work. I'm gonna use my first business, a gardening business, as an example. So this is what I had to do to create freedom. First, I needed to get clients,
so I just put a leaflet. When I had no money, I delivered them myself. And then when I had money, I hired someone to do it for me. That grew the business year after year. And by my early twenties, it allowed me to buy a property, and I had a nice Mercedes a and pretty good lifestyle. Then once I had enough clients,
I could just pay someone else to do the work. Now, you compare that to when I started to build my own personal brand. So I sold my gardening business, and I decided that I was gonna try and be internet famous.
And now what I had to do was research ideas, I had to write content, I had to film, I had to edit, I had to study analytics, I had to respond to comments,
I had to keep up with trends, and I was just on one platform. If I had then tried to post content everywhere,
like the strategy that's often pushed,
I would have needed to manage all of that stuff multiple times across Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, and email too.
Can you see the problem? Right? Most people don't fail at personal branding because they are bad at making content. They fail because they accidentally build themselves a second full time job. Now you might be thinking, alright, Ed. There's an easy solution here. Just hire people to help you. And you're right. That is the solution.
But this creates another problem people massively underestimate when it comes to growing a personal brand. So let's say you wanna do the multiplatform
strategy that everyone recommends online, where you post content to YouTube and Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, everywhere.
To pull that off, the first thing you're probably gonna need is to hire someone to oversee this giant system. And this person will probably think about things like strategy content, what gets posted where and when, what gets repurposed,
what's working, what isn't, and then how this strategy evolves over time. The thing is, there just aren't that many people who are genuinely elite at growing these kind of creator led businesses
because it's such a new industry still. And the people who are very good are either famous personal brands themselves or they know how valuable they are. So experienced strategists and operators
can get expensive
very quickly. Just to give you an example, top YouTube strategists charge about $25,000
a month, and they're not even managing the whole system. Then what you're gonna need is some video editors, because if you are serious about video, you're gonna have to cut up a lot of content. And on top of this, you're gonna want a VA to post things and look after email
and just take a lot of this work off your hands. On top of that, we've also got software and tools that you need to pay for to keep the system running. So before long, what looked like just posting stuff online
starts to resemble a full blown media And the reality is hiring a team who's actually good enough to help is probably gonna set you back about 30 to $50,000
a month now, and it's why Cody Sanchez and the top personal brands are spending millions
every year growing theirs. Now, let's be fair. Some people absolutely build personal brands for far less than that, but usually,
that's because they became the strategist first.
So they learned what works. They learned how to structure content. They learned how to measure. They learned how to get attention and keep it. And then what they've done is trained cheaper people to execute their own system, which is a very viable route. But no matter which way you go, it usually means learning the game yourself before things will become much easier to scale. So either way, the cost of growing a personal brand usually gets paid through a large time investment or a large financial investment or both. And then there's the next issue, which most people forget to mention, and that is that
even once you've grown a personal brand, spent a ton of time and effort on it, it will eventually
slow down a lot. And I think the best example of this is how it happens in Hollywood in the music industry. So you remember Taylor Lautner, right? This guy. He was like the biggest heartthrob in the world for years. Where is he now? And then you think about the band LMFAO.
You couldn't escape him, like, twenty years ago. Musicians, actors, movie stars, people who were once household names, they peak and they fall off, and this is true for many personal brands. So we look at MrBeast. His views are now coming down, and they're maybe half of what they once were. Andrew Tate's public interest, look at this on Google Trends, it's massively in decline. Tim Ferriss too. The truth is very few people managed to maintain the exact level of reach and attention that originally blew them up for more than just a few years. And this is incredibly
hard to avoid because of something called hedonic adaptation.
What that means is, people quickly normalize what once felt special to them. So your content can go from the most exciting thing in the world to, just another post from that person I used to watch, simply because audience have consumed it so much, it no longer feels special. But also, when someone blows up their personal brand with a new format or style,
everybody copies them. So that which made you internet famous soon becomes cliche,
and people move on to the next new hot thing or format,
as the one they used to love slowly dies out. In 2022, YouTube was all about b roll and fast paced editing. Then in 2024,
it became about stripped back authentic content. And now in 2026,
it's starting to change again. And the only real way you can fight this is by constantly reinventing yourself, which is what Madonna was famous for doing, and it kept her culturally relevant for many years. So this is the danger of personal brands. Your entire business depends on something incredibly
unstable,
human attention.
And human attention constantly chases novelty.
Bringing us on to the next problem, which does something very weird, and it actually changes the way you will see the entire world day to day if you attempt this. Now, if you've experienced this, please let me know in the comments because almost everyone I know has says the same thing happens to them. So let me give you an example. I recently went to The Maldives and I walked into the villa and I went, wow,
this would make such a great background for a video. And then I went to an event in London and I thought, this would make a really interesting vlog. And then you're chatting to someone and they say something interesting and deep down you're thinking, that would be a good tweet. What happens is over time, growing a personal brand stops becoming marketing,
and it starts becoming deeply tied to how you experience your day to day life, which is why so many creators eventually burn out. Because growing a personal brand lives up here rent free. And years ago, I asked Sam Ovens, the founder of school, if he would ever go back to making YouTube videos, and he said no, because he didn't wanna lie in bed at night thinking about how he could have made a video better when his attention should have been focused on building the actual business itself. The truth is when you start to grow a personal brand, you will catch yourself thinking about how any experience or any moment or any conversation could become content rather than actually being present in it, and it can take over your entire life. So much so, this can actually then start to damage your business. And I have seen this happen many times. So one example was someone making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, but they didn't really have a personal brand. And they've seen all these podcast clips and creators online saying, you need a personal brand. Attention's the new oil. You're running out of time.
So they started thinking, I need to do this too. So instead of focusing on the business,
they spent three days every week doing hooks, planning content, filming videos, looking at analytics. And ironically,
the more attention they gave to growing the personal brand, the worse their business started performing. And this is where personal brands can become dangerous for some business owners because a lot of people have been made to feel like attention itself is the solution to all of their problems, where really the highest leverage thing they could do is fix and improve their business first. So if personal branding is just a high paying job that you can never really quit, it costs a fortune to scale, and eventually your attention will fall off, is it actually worth it? Well, here is my honest answer after doing this for the last five to six years, and having helped a lot of other people do it too. For most people, I think the day to day reality
is it would make them completely miserable, especially if you don't actually enjoy making content because it's the job.
A traditional business would probably make most people happier. But for a very specific person, I think growing a personal brand is gonna be one of the best things they ever do because if it does work for you, there are very few business models where one person can build so much leverage in a niche so quickly. But who is that right person? Well, I think if you can get to the end of this video, hear out what I'm about to show you, and you still think to yourself, you know what? I wanna do this, then it's you. So now let's look at why personal brands are a great idea in spite of everything I've just shown you so you can make that choice for yourself. Starting with the elephant in the room, and that is that personal brands nearly always fall off. The thing is, you actually want that to happen because falling off only kills your business if all you built was attention instead of trust. So let me show you what I mean. So back in 2022, I had this big breakout moment. I was getting millions of views a month, and then eventually, felt the platform changing, and my views, they felt harder to get because the style that I'd kinda come up with became cliche, and everyone was copying it. So I shifted my attention towards the actual business and providing more value and helping the audience that I'd already built rather than obsessing over continually to increase the amount of attention I got. And weirdly,
my income doubled, and then it doubled again. Because the fall off phase is often where personal brands and even musicians
can make a heck of a lot of money. Say, for example, Blink one eight two, they can still sell out a great big stadium even though they're no longer culturally dominant. And that's the same with people like Simon Snake or Tim Ferriss. You might not have consumed a single piece of content from them for years,
but you still trust them and you still value their ideas, and you would probably be very excited to work with them because the goal of building a personal brand is not permanent virality that consumes you. The goal is to build trust and reputation
that continues to pay you long after your peak attention phase. And when you reach that point, you unlock the real benefits of a personal brand. Because thanks to the trust you once built,
you get invited onto podcasts, and all the listeners will be your ideal buyers, meaning other people make content for you and distribute it for you, and you make money that way. People then invite you to invest in things like this delicious new tonic
that I was asked to invest in along with much bigger names. You get invited to speak at events, and most people, I believe, earn more in the fall off phase because they can finally focus on monetizing the audience they build rather than focus on always trying to get attention. In fact, I've had loads of people buy my products after not watching anything from me for years based on value I gave them in 2023
because trust compounds
far longer than attention. So that sounds good. Right? But what about the fact this takes just so much of your time and you can never really create a 100% non dependent on new lifestyle? Well, there's ways around it. So if we look at Sam Ovens, the founder of school, I think he's one of the very few people that's actually pulled this off. And I believe that if he never appeared online again, school would continue to grow for a very long time because all he did was he used the trust and reputation he built years ago through making YouTube videos to launch something that no longer requires
his face or his visibility. In fact, what he did was smart. He used his personal brand and network to attract and empower other creators to promote it for him, so he's using their face instead. And that is something you can do when you are very well respected in a niche. It's actually crazy. I spent a while trying to find examples of other people who have done it as well as him, and honestly, there are just not that many people who have stopped making content even though they could. Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, Alex Hall, Moses, Steven Barlow, they could all disappear tomorrow, and they'd be fine. But I also think a lot of people at that level, they enjoy this game, and they like building and creating and staying culturally relevant. So they keep playing, and they keep putting all their time into it because that is the lifestyle they want. But you probably don't wanna do that. I don't think many people do. So what if you wanna do this in a way that it won't consume your life forever?
Well, if I was starting again from zero, this is exactly how I'd do it to avoid many of the problems we've talked about. So first, I would just stop thinking of this as trying to build a lifestyle business. Because honestly, lifestyle businesses via a personal brand, they exist after you've made it, when you can switch off. To get to that point, it's a huge amount of work. And I honestly believe there's hardly any real lifestyle businesses on this planet. It's just a nice thing to sell people. But instead,
what I would do is I would think of it as this. I would set out to say, I am going to build a media company. Because the the moment you start thinking of it like that, you instantly think about building a team to help you scale your personality
instead of focusing on this whole kind of, like, solopreneur
idea where you do it all yourself, and that is a very time intensive trap you will fall into. Then I would only focus on one platform at the beginning, because trying to post absolutely everywhere
is great in theory,
and it's the advice people like Gary Vee will give all the time, but it's not for beginners. He's giving advice to people with loads of money to invest in that system.
Really, most beginners don't have money, experience,
or the systems to pull it off. So instead of spreading yourself way too thin, I would master one platform first. Now, personally, I would choose YouTube because, one, I'm biased. My service that you pay for helps grow YouTube channel. But secondly, because long form video, it builds trust better than anything else online, as well as the other benefits I'm gonna show you in a second. Then
I would focus far more on building trust than chasing virality. Because attention gets you noticed, and the views are gonna feel really good. But leaning into it too heavily,
it won't save you when that fall off does happen. So focus on trust because that's gonna pay you for decades. So I'd be thinking about always trying to make the most genuinely useful content, not just trying to trick people to click or trick them to watch for longer. And then I would make one really good product people recommend to their friends, so that when I was ready to scale, it wouldn't crumble under the pressure. And then I would master the foundations of what makes amazing content. Pretty much hooks,
storytelling, creating frameworks, simplification,
and build some kind of system that got me a result. Then once I had started to get some traction on a platform and the system was working well, I would hire people to help run that system with me or for me. If I had a ton of cash at that stage, I'd pay someone really good. If I didn't, I would train someone up to do things the way that I was doing them. And then once I had enough money, that's when I'd start building the big omnipresent,
multiplatform social media marketing machine that puts you everywhere online. And I would outsource as much as I possibly could so that I was only left with the one thing I could obsess over and focus over that I genuinely love doing so I could finally become world class at it. And if you can do this, your earnings will go up, the amount of time you work will go down.
And this is why YouTube's so powerful, powerful, because you can build one video into LinkedIn posts, shorts, clips, reels, tweets, emails, Instagram carousels, and now the cool thing is
AI can help so much with that process. You might only need one or two team members to help you build and manage this system, whereas before, it took a heck of a lot more. So if you watched this entire video and thought, I still wanna do this, then you are probably the exact type of person who should. And if you wanna learn how to actually build a YouTube channel properly, one that gets you into the top 1% of your niche so you could generate view sales and leads, watch this video next. I'm gonna show you exactly
how I've done it and helped hundreds of other businesses do it too.