Your top talent will leave.
It’s not if — it’s when.
People don’t stay at one company their entire careers anymore. Your employees, even your best and brightest, will eventually leave.
This doesn’t mean you should shy away from investing in their personal brands. In fact, building your talent to be the best version of themselves benefits you and them tremendously — especially when developing a media brand.
But what happens when you invest in employees' personal brands and they walk away?
Why build personal brands when they are bound to leave?
For well over a year, Will Aitken has been making Sales Feed’s audience learn and laugh as a lead creator of great content that serves the media brand’s culture pillars.
Investing in your talent’s personal brands comes with risk: The larger they grow, the bigger the loss when they leave. But the alternative of not investing in building employees’ personal brands comes at an even greater price.
Personal brands create cyclical audience growth — which is a fancy way of saying: When their brand grows, so does yours. Thought leadership with a human face and personality resonates much more deeply than any stuffy business-branded content.
Even when talent leaves, their mark on the company should still lead to increased reach and that all-important humanized brand appearance.
By being personally and professionally invested in Sales Feed’s social media, content and branding, Will became part of the brand. And while his presence will be missed, Sales Feed will continue to reap the reward from his time with them — laughs and all.
What comes next? New face(s)?
Sales Feed’s audience is well-established, with several content creators already on board and tons of submissions from their audience, they have plenty of content to carry them through the next few weeks.
The Sales Feed team also works on a constant-creation time clock, meaning the creativity never stops.
With several weeks of content readied by Will, his face (and marketing jokes) will continue gracing the Sales Feed channels for a few weeks beyond his final adieu.
But once the well runs dry, where do you turn?
Really, there are two options:
- Establish a team of part-time contractors
- Find a new full-time personality
But according to Tyler Lessard, Head of Sales Feed, there is really only one option and it requires only one hire.
A part-time contributor will never provide the same velocity and volume of content as a team member passionate about making the media brand successful.
There is power in working with a contributor who lives and breathes the content, business and culture of the media brand daily. You just don’t get the same commitment from part-timers, no matter how good they are.
While you may not get the diversified content of a team of 5 part-time voices, a single, invested personality will always be thinking about the perfect content to craft next for your audience, how to best engage them and actively participate to provide value to the community.
For media brands, that’s really, really important.
Hiring replacement talent — No cloning lab required
When you lose a personality that truly resonates with your audience and your brand, it can be easy to fall into the trap of looking for an exact replacement.
But trying to clone those personality brands is a big mistake — it gives your audience a cheap alternative to the voice they grew to love and respect. If they love Dr. Pepper, some off-brand “Mr. Spicy” isn’t going to cut it.
Hire someone to be themself. The more authentic they are, the better it will be for your business and media brand.
Switching voices and taking on new talent doesn’t necessarily mean you need a rebrand. In fact, it usually doesn’t.
But it does give you an opportunity to step back and reassess what’s important.
For Sales Feed, humor is an absolute necessity. And funny isn’t easy. So, rather than recruiting new talent with impeccable sales experience, Sales Feed focuses on finding the best possible person to help their audience laugh, learn, and be a genuine pillar of the sales community.
Replacing talent is an opportunity to keep your brand’s future flexible — don’t squander it by trying to clone your lost talent.
Audience building experience > subject matter
When hiring someone to evangelize for your brand, their personality will be displayed for all to see.
It can be tempting to sift through subject matter experts to find the one with the most impressive track record. But if they don’t know how to build an audience, none of it matters.
Exact following doesn’t matter — but their potential to grow does.
Don't discount the skill building an audience takes. Proven ability to create full-stack, high-velocity content is extremely valuable.
You can teach new talent about your industry. Teaching someone to create full-stack, high-velocity content with comfort and confidence is much more challenging.
Your team understands your audience. You have subject experts on staff, ready to help guide content and inform decisions. The best person for the job typically won’t be another industry expert — they’ll be a savvy, audience-builder, brimming with personality and an eagerness to learn.
Losing your top talent doesn’t mark the end of an era — even if their personality brand was the face of your company.
Instead, it’s an opportunity to shape the future of your business through an ever-evolving media brand that continues to resonate and build affinity with your audience.
