William Arruda is an author and sought-after speaker on the topics of personal branding, career advancement, and employee motivation. William’s book, Career Distinction (with coauthor Kirsten Dixson), is a careers bestseller and has been instrumental in helping Arruda gain national recognition as a celebrity in his field. Drawing from 20 years of corporate branding experience, he founded Reach, a personal branding firm that provides presentations and workshops focused on the human side of branding. William has appeared on BBC TV, the Discovery Channel, Fox News Live and Radio America and has been featured in Forbes, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur.
Can you give a general overview of yourself and your business?
I am the President of Reach Personal Branding, which I founded in 2001. Before starting Reach, I spent 20 years in corporate branding and consulting at Lotus, IBM and KPMG.
What prompted you to target the personal branding niche?
I read the article The Brand Called YOU by Tom Peters in Fast Company back in 1997. Tom coined the idea, and on the day I read that article I immediately decided I would form the first and leading personal branding company, which combined all areas of my expertise, my passion and developing people.
What steps did you take in devising your niche marketing strategy?
I wish I could say I did a lot of research or had a fully thought-out business plan when I launched Reach Personal Branding. I didn’t. What I had was a fervent passion for the concept of personal branding and unwavering belief that personal branding would become critical to having a successful and fulfilling career. My marketing strategy was telling everyone I knew and everyone I met about this cool concept called personal branding (not a strategy you see in many MBA textbooks!!!).
How successful has your personal branding niche been for your business?
When I started Reach Personal Branding, I was one of about five personal branding experts in the world. For the first few years, it was a struggle. I launched Reach a little before the world was ready for it! Now, there are thousands of personal branding companies (over 350 people in 25 countries have been certified by my company alone). None of the original players are still in the game, but I stuck with it. I don’t know if it was optimism or naïveté, or stubbornness – but I stayed in. Perseverance has been great for my business.
Now, personal branding has emerged as a proven technique not only for job search, but for talent development inside companies (most of my business is with Fortune 500 companies).
When you are the pioneer and have had all those years of proving your methodology, building the business and creating visibility, you have a great competitive advantage. That has positioned Reach as the global leader.
What role has your book played in growing your business?
Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand has done things for Reach and for me that nothing else has. It increased credibility, opened conversations with the press and potential clients and further separated Reach from the competition.Being a published author has also been on my long list of goals; so the release of Career Distinction allowed me to remove that goal from the list with an incredible sense of accomplishment.
Describe your overarching PR strategy, both before and after publication of your book, and results you’ve achieved?
Before the launch, my goal was to develop a huge list for pre-orders. If I had published the book back in 2002 as originally planned, I would not have had the long list of contacts. By 2006, there were almost 100,000 names on our contact lists. This was a great start.Then, we hired a new publicist. We wanted to have all the press stories and talking points ready before the book’s release. This was easy to do because months went by between submission of the final manuscript to Wiley and the actual book release. It’s a slow process!Lastly, we built a web presence for the book – http://www.careerdistinction.com– web-based marketing was a major element of our book marketing strategy. We wanted the web site in place before release.
After the release, I incorporated the book into every one of my speaking engagements, wrote lots of articles based on topics in the book and did lots of radio TV and print interviews. I convinced many of the clients who hired me for keynotes to buy books for participants or make the book available at the event. This had a huge boost on sales, making it a careers bestseller.
Can you describe the process of conceiving and writing your book? How did you fit it into your overall schedule?
I started writing the book in 2001 with a colleague and incredible coach, Andrea O’Neil. It was initially called Bulletproof Your Career.A few months into it, she realized that the book didn’t fit into her long-term goals. So I shelved it for years. Then I started writing again in 2006 and asked Kirsten Dixson (one of the first people I certified in the Reach personal branding methodology) to be my coauthor.
One of my brand attributes is collaborative. Because I had been in business for so long and had created so much content over the years, it made it easy to write the book. It was more a matter of selecting the right content and refining existing material than creating content from scratch. Although the two chapters on online branding were completely new, when writing a book you have to be willing to say no to things – even to potential business. If you want your book published enough, it is not that hard to say no.
How has the Internet advanced your reputation as an author and personal branding expert?
It has been the single best tool for increasing visibility and credibility. I am the same person I was before the book, but clients, audience members, the press – pretty much everyone (except my parents) - see me a little differently. Being a published author brings more career cache than virtually any other activity.Being a personal branding expert, I knew of the power of publishing, but I am surprised at how impactful it is.
When did you first realize you were Slightly Famous?
Several years ago, I was at London Heathrow in the British Airways lounge and someone came up to me and asked “Are you William Arruda?, I saw you speak last year.” Because a major part of my business is public speaking, I meet tens of thousands of people each year. Of course, I can’t remember everyone in every audience, but clearly, some of them remember me. It’s a good feeling.
Do you have any advice to those considering a book as part of their marketing strategy?
Write it. Now! Don’t delay. The old adage says that everyone has at least one book in them, and I believe that. It is the single best way to express your personal brand while increasing your visibility and credibility. It changes everything!
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