Personal branding key component in entrepreneurship: experts

When Moe Asgarian, 34, came to Canada from Iran in 2009, he knew he needed to find a way to stand out from the competition in the business world.

“In everyday work, you cannot take a look at the road you need to go on,” he told Metroland Media. “You need someone from the outside who can give you feedback.”

The real estate broker decided he needed to build a personal brand, and turned to Dr. Shahab Anari, a personal branding strategist and professional business coach.

Now, Asgarian manages a team of five people at Asgarian Group Real Estate that consists of four agents and one assistant.

“In a crowded marketplace, there are tons of people who are doing exactly the same work that you are doing. The main question is: do you want to be a job title, or a personal brand?” Anari told Metroland Media. “How do you stand out from the crowd if you just introduce yourself?  How can you differentiate yourself from the others?  And how can you build the trust that you want with your audience? Those are the key questions you want to answer in order to start to build your personal brand.”

In order to start building a personal brand as a millennial entrepreneur, Anari said millennials must define their vision for the future and find out what excites them.

He came up with his own methodology for personal branding that he calls the three Cs: clarify, communicate and cultivate.

The first step is clarifying your brand and deciding who you want to be as a professional, he said. After that you want to start communicating that brand to your target audience by using marketing strategies like networking, writing, advertising and web.