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You’ve probably been told you need a personal brand. The advice usually shows up with an image of someone filming themselves in a parked car, or posting three times a day about their morning routine, and your reaction is the right one: that’s not you, and you don’t have time for it. So, you do nothing, and a competitor who’s no better at the actual work keeps getting the call instead.

Here’s the part the influencer crowd leaves out. A personal brand isn’t a performance. It’s your professional reputation, made visible to people who don’t yet know you and your business. The customer who already knows you doesn’t need it.

An influencer treats the audience as the product. The followers are the asset, the attention is the revenue, and the work becomes feeding the feed. That’s a full-time job, and it isn’t yours.

You want the opposite. For you, the audience isn’t the product; it’s a small group of the right people who send you work or send you good people. You’re not trying to reach a hundred thousand strangers. You’re trying to be the obvious choice for the few hundred or thousand who operate in your world. That’s a far smaller job, and you can do it in a couple of hours a week.

The fastest way to fail at this is to try to be everywhere. Pick the one platform where your customers and referral sources already spend their time. For most owners who sell to other businesses, that’s LinkedIn. We’ve written about getting your Company Page working, in Revive Your Stagnant LinkedIn Company Page and Using LinkedIn’s Algorithm to Fix Your Stagnant Company Page; your own posting is what gives that page something to amplify. Pick one platform, and ignore the rest until it’s working.

Then pick one thing to be known for. Not your whole business; one corner of it where you’re genuinely good and your customers genuinely struggle. The roofer known for getting insurance claims approved. The bookkeeper known for pulling owners out of multi-year accounting messes. Narrow isn’t a limit on your business, it’s what makes you findable; the owner who tries to be known for everything ends up known for nothing.

This is where it stops being a second job. You’re not inventing content. You’re showing the work that already crosses your desk.

A customer asked you a great question this week, so use your answer as a post. You solved a problem most owners in your trade get wrong. The before and after is a post. You made a hard call and explained your reasoning to your team. That reasoning is a post. The raw material is already in your day; the only new step is writing down what you’d have said anyway, in plain language, for one reader.

The owners who burn out are the ones who treat this as a separate production. The ones who keep going treat it as narration of work they were going to do regardless.

Once a week, every week, beats daily for three weeks and then nothing. The reader isn’t counting your posts; they’re forming an impression over months, and the impression that forms is that you’re still here, still steady, still on top of your corner. Consistency is the whole game, and consistency depends on a pace you can sustain when the business gets busy, which it will.

Set the bar low enough that a bad week doesn’t break the habit. One short, useful post every Sunday or Tuesday builds a brand.

You won’t see it in follower counts, and you shouldn’t look there. You’ll see it in a sentence. A prospect opens a call with “I’ve been reading your stuff.” A referral source tells you “I sent them your way because you clearly know this.” A candidate writes “I’ve followed your posts for a while.” The number that matters isn’t how many people watch; it’s how many of the right people show up already trusting you.

That’s the whole return: you didn’t become an influencer, you became the name that comes up when someone in your world needs what you do. The work was always yours; now the right people can see it.

The Co. Letter provides general business information. It is not legal, tax, or financial advice. Consult a licensed professional for guidance on your specific situation.

Question: I have employees that occasionally bring their young children to work when problems arise at daycare or home. Ours is an office environment so I don’t really mind it, but it is happening so often that I think it might be a good idea to have a liability waiver or something in the employee’s file. What do you think?

Answer: Thanks for writing in, and good instinct. Yes, get something in writing. While you’re at it, do a little more than a waiver alone.

We’re assuming your employees are at will and that you’re in the United States, where the rules on this vary a good deal from one state to the next. With that said, three pieces work better together than a waiver does on its own.

First, written ground rules. Spell out what the courtesy is and what it isn’t: no sick children, no disruptive behavior, not on a regular or scheduled basis, and a plain statement that it can be withdrawn if it’s abused. Your ground rules clearly keep the arrangement from turning into a standing expectation.

Second, a solid liability waiver. A young child in your office is a slip, trip, and curious-hands risk, and the waiver is what addresses it. This is the piece you most want a professional to draft rather than pull from a template.

Third, a clear statement that the arrangement is not an employee benefit, and that the signed agreement is not, and should not be read as, any form of employment contract. That line matters most when your team is at will, because you don’t want a courtesy reinterpreted later as a promise.

Remember, there are a lot of state-specific laws on children at the workplace and on what counts as an employee benefit, and they’re easy to trip over without knowing it. Have an experienced business or labor attorney in your state draft the ground rules and the waiver together. It’s a short engagement, and it’s far cheaper than the alternative.

The Co. Letter is not your attorney, and this column is general information, not legal advice. An agreement like the one described carries real legal consequences and varies by state. Have a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction draft and review any waiver or agreement before you ask anyone to sign it.

Have an interesting business question and need a free bit of advice? Send your question to [email protected]. No confidential info, please!