Award-winning personal brand expert Nik Scott is passionate about helping women entrepreneurs identify their strengths and use them to differentiate themselves from everyone else in their industry. A firm believer in Selfless Self-Promotion™, Nik challenges her clients to think of personal branding as a service to others instead of self-serving.
As a speaker, Nik has trained thousands of entrepreneurs across the nation on how to establish, grow, and maintain their personal brands. As a consultant, she’s worked 1:1 with local politicians, non-profit leaders, corporate executives, and small business owners to position themselves as authorities in their niche. Just as she’s done as a speaker and consultant, it is her mission to teach you how to leverage the power of your personal brand in order to establish your credibility, amplify your expertise and increase awareness for your business.
Hi Nik, can you tell us more about you, and what you do?
My name is Nik Scott. Through online courses, training, and resources, I help women entrepreneurs grow their personal brand. I do this to help them establish their credibility, amplify their expertise, and increase awareness for their business.
Tell us how you created your brand and what the inspiration was behind it.
I’m passionate about helping women discover their unique qualities, so they can use them to differentiate themselves from everyone else in their industries.
The fact of the matter is everyone has a personal brand, but when it comes to personal branding (the conscious and intentional effort to influence public perception of themselves) women often find it challenging. Let’s face it, personal branding can have a bad rep. When it’s done incorrectly and for the wrong reasons, personal branding comes off as selfish, pretentious, or even conceited. That’s why I’m a firm believer in Selfless Self-promotion™. This is a concept I developed to help my clients embrace personal branding as a service to others instead of self-serving. I teach this philosophy extensively in my group coaching program FABB Public Speaking.
Go in detail and tell us about how your brand works.
FABB Public Speaking is a 6-week accelerator that teaches women how to kickstart their speaking business utilizing my FABB Framework™. I take my clients through a journey where each week they complete very specific milestones. By the end of our time together, they have everything they need to get booked and paid to speak.
In addition to being one of the best ways to optimize your personal brand, public speaking has many amazing benefits. Public speaking boosts your confidence, helps you stand out in the workforce, heightens your level of influence, positions you as an expert and thought leader, builds self-awareness and improves your knowledge. Not to mention public speaking increases your chances of getting a promotion by 85% and can 10X sales for your business.
Explain the challenges you went through while you were working on brand creation. What are the challenges you go through on an everyday basis?
Without challenge, there can be no progress. Simple and plain.
The biggest challenge for me has been learning to balance all that I’m doing professionally with what I have to do personally. When you work in the digital space, there are no set work hours. Social media and the Internet are always open for business, so finding that right balance between when to work and when not to is an area of growth.
When I started my business back in 2008, social media was not what it is today. Not many people had a smartphone. If I wanted to connect back then, I had to make time to do it. I couldn’t just whip out my phone and work. So, when laptops got smaller and phones got smarter, I had to become more aware of my time. It was easy to call everything work, because, well, everything WAS work! But all work and no play is not good for anyone.
For me, what works is just that–being present and aware. When your business is based on the Internet, it’s easy to get distracted and miss out on moments because you’re trying to curate the perfect piece of content.
I’ve found it valuable to hold myself accountable. While it’s pretty much accepted that everyone at dinner is taking photos of their food, I’ve learned when to say when. Too much of anything can potentially harm you–even if it IS “work.” I refuse to sacrifice human-to-human connections by being buried in my phone 24/7.
My growth has happened at its own pace. I’ve trusted the process and timing. I savor every moment.
How do you manage your business finances?
At this point, my business is 100% online and 100% self-funded. All of our payments for products and services are handled through an online payment gateway/processor.
Tell us your future vision about the brand. How far do you want to take it? What is your dream about taking it to the next level?
It is my mission to help 288 women grow their personal brands over the next year. My group coaching program FABB Public Speaking is just one of the vehicles that will help me accomplish this goal.
What message would you like to give to anybody who has a plan of creating something of their own and making a living through it?
The #1 message I have for anyone planning to create something of their own and make a living through it is to embrace the fact that it will be a marathon, not a sprint.
When you’re just starting out everything is exciting and you’re eager to work endless hours, go live on Facebook three times a day and schedule a month’s worth of blog posts. But that momentum can only last so long before you’re exhausted and burnt out—which oftentimes leads to less attraction and attention given to your business.
Many people begin as solopreneurs, meaning they are a one-person show. That means they are doing things that may or may not come naturally to them, things they may or may not like to do, or things they may or may not be good at. And the truth of the matter is many of these things aren’t as income-generating as they might have thought before they got started!
The lack of consistent income combined with exhaustion (not to mention the FOMO environment social media creates) could leave someone starting out feeling like they’ve failed. But I’d encourage them to flip the narrative. Embrace right away that it’s okay to start where you start so that you can grow into the Super CEO that you will ultimately be—if you keep pushing at a STEADY (not fast) pace.
