When you’re an entrepreneur, consultant, or small business owner, building your own brand is crucial for establishing credibility, trust, and recognition within your industry. A strong personal brand sets you apart from competitors, provides opportunities for networking, collaborations, and long-term career growth, and helps you attract clients or customers.
At a recent Houston Social Media Breakfast, host Jennifer Texada spoke with Vanessa Oler and Holland Hettinger, co-hosts of the podcast Ask Your Work Wife, about their experience building a brand with passion and integrity.
Their podcast Ask Your Work Wife, which helps “ambitious women who want more out of Corporate America,” has been in existence for about two years and is a huge success. As Vanessa explains, “We are responsible for about a million – it might be a million and a half at this point – of dollars in women's bank accounts. That's new jobs, that's raises, that's promotions, that's increase in scope and responsibility with commensurate compensation.”
Learn from Strong Role Models
Vanessa talks about being raised in a family where her mother was “quite a trailblazer” and believed that women are incapable of being leaders and successes in their own right, or that their identity isn’t defined by their family status. “It was never, oh, you're only half a person until you get married, it's never you are only going to be a mom, it was never that. It was, what do you want to do? And guess what, you have to pay some bills so you better make sure it makes you money.”
Her parents also had a service-minded approach that focused on building up people in the local community. “We had people at my dining room table all the time, just asking my parents for help on their resume, to get connected to jobs.”
A Collaboration Built on Complementary Strengths and Skills
Holland shares how she and Vanessa first started out as accountability partners in college, helping each other focus and work towards their respective goals.
“The first several years of our relationship, it was just monthly accountability calls, and through this I was able to get to know Vanessa's huge capacity for seeing the vision for someone else, seeing their potential, seeing what they have to offer the world. And I'd seen people just be drawn to her for that, and I was drawn to her for that too. So she's coming to me for structure, and I'm coming to her for vision,” says Holland.
See Your Potential Through Others’ Eyes
Vanessa understands the power of having someone else point out and hone in on your potential.
“I think that's the best part about ambitious women just like Holland, is, like, you just have to point them in the right direction, tell them kind of the rules and like where the landmines might be, and they will just go,” she says. “And I think that that's the power of an accountability partner, and that's the power of somebody being able to step outside of you and see what you have inside of you.”
Create the Best Marketing Approach to Support and Promote Your Brand
Vanessa and Holland work together as a smooth running machine, dividing tasks according to their respective skills and interests. They record several podcasts episodes on the same day and then create promotional material around them. “So for us, we meet every other Saturday and we record five or six episodes at a time. And then that gives Holland a couple weeks to go through and edit them. So she edits it, I do social media,” explains Vanessa.
Their marketing approach is equally thought out. “It really came down to, like, the core principles of brand marketing, right, like who are you, first and foremost, then who are you talking to, and you have to get very very specific about it. We're here for ambitious women. That’s not everyone,” she says.
Be Clear About Your Target Audience
There are a lot of people who listen to my podcast, they're like, ‘it's not for me.’ I'm like, ‘great, I know everything I need to know about you. When you want to change you'll come to me, when you want something more, you'll come to me. Until that point I don't care, like you can stay over there on the couch that's fine. But as soon as you tap into that ambition I got you, right, and then and then it really comes down to, like, what are the real issues that that person's dealing with,” Vanessa notes.
“We have probably three kinds of big personas that we work with,” she adds. “And the one that I love the most and is named ‘Holland’ appropriately, is the ‘oh shit, I need a job.” This is often a woman who experiences something like a major life change where she suddenly needed a certain size of income. Or it could be someone who realizes they simply want more, like “someone [who] just finds herself maybe being in a job and being the primary breadwinner, and has never been told that she can want more out of it. Right now it's just making the ends meet and that's fine, but like guess what, you have a whole life you can lead and a whole personality and a whole, like, desire” that may be yearning for more,” she feels.
The second brand persona Vanessa and Holland identified is the person who is just starting out.
“It’s 2024 and you get a lot of messaging [in the world] that women are equal, you can do whatever you want, we can have whatever we want, but again I've there's still womenour age who've… been raised with this idea that you're not allowed to want something,” Vanessa points out. These are the people who wonder “Where do I start? How do I do this?… What are my rules… I think that person is ambitious, she's ready to run, but she is lacking that information that unlocks that key that says wait, how does Corporate America work?” she explains.
The third brand persona Vanessa and Holland identified is the person who is “already in corporate America,” Holland says. “She's been there for some time and she's hit a little bit of a ceiling.”
“What we find a lot with this persona, with the women that we work with, is that she doesn't have a lot of the foundational work that we teach,” she notes. “She might be missing some of the foundational pieces that we think about, like building relationships with mentors, champions, and your manager, how you're relating cross functionally, how you're relating up, down and around. And it's those things that can, like, build out this supportive network within your corporate America space.”
The Three Moves Framework
Vanessa and Holland came up with the Three Moves Framework that helps women get where they want to go.
The framework looks at, “do you have the foundation that you need, do you have the wherewithal to get through the rat race with intention and direction by focusing on these up down and around relationships, and then do you know what mastery looks like? Do you know what arrival looks like, and then how do you turn that arrival into your next foundation so you can level up again?” says Vanessa.
“Once those limiting beliefs are deconstructed, your potential is limitless,” she argues. And to get the things you want, “it takes structure and vision,” which she believes is hard to do on your own. “Not that you can't, but I think having people around you – we're humans, we're social creatures, and having a system around you to support you in your ambition, I think two can go further than one and more tactically.”
Video is Social Media King
Vanessa and Holland agree with Jennifer that, “video needs to be a big part of your social media.” Vanessa adds: “Video is king and you need to get used to it.”
For people who are camera shy, they recommend first shooting video that doesn’t include them directly and then slowly working up to getting comfortable with on-camera appearances.
With social media overall, however, the main thing to remember is just go get out there. “Once you get your content buckets down and your batch creation down, it really is just like, get it out there, get it scheduled,” Vanessa explains.
Personal Branding Should be a Focus
Focusing on your personal brand should be a priority, Holland argues. “I think the thing about seeing these, like, either high high producers on LinkedIn or elsewhere where it's, like, all they talk about is their company…. that's not gendering any confidence in your expertise and what I might be able to work with you on.”
To hear more of Vanessa’s and Holland’s insights, watch the full livestream.