This founder built his personal brand with his track record of failures

A photo of Leonard Kim.

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Leonard Kim is a personal branding strategist. His company, Influence Tree, is what’s known as a personal branding accelerator.

Kim has a pretty intriguing personal story. He’s very open to sharing his biggest failures, which led him to a point where he broke his ankle and was stuck on the couch for three months with nothing left to do but write on his laptop. It was only then that he discovered many of the strategies and tactics of how to build a personal brand.

Who is Leonard Kim and what do you do for a living?

Over the last three and a half years, I’ve built a pretty successful personal brand. Inc. magazine, Entrepreneur, and Forbes all named me a top digital marketer.

I run a company called Influence Tree and what it does is teach people how to position their brand, get featured into publications, and grow their social media following.

Three and a half years isn’t long to build a personal brand. How did you pull it off?

You can be an overnight success but that doesn’t always mean that it leads to long-term success. People think that Michelle Phan was a one-time, one-hit wonder who became a huge success, which changed everything for her. But when someone discovered her video, people saw that she had other videos that have around the same quality, the same message, the same everything as the one that blew up. And that’s what made her successful for the long term.

Some people out there have that chance to become a one-hit wonder. Their one piece of content sticks out but when you look at the rest of their content, they don’t have that same quality, that same oomph, that same connection. Those are the ones that fizzle out and don’t make anything happen.

What happens when something goes viral is people look at that one piece and they learn more about someone. So, they read through the other content. They look at the bio. They go through everything else. And that’s how you create a fan base. So, there’s a little bit of luck there.

But when I was starting to build my personal brand, I really didn’t have any successes I could lean upon. I couldn’t say, “Entrepreneur or Inc. made me this.” All I could say was I failed at next to everything I did in life.

From 2006 to 2012, I worked in a few different businesses. They all went under. There was that real estate market crash. I was expecting to make US$50,000 a month, but that vanished because everything just went down in the fire sale. I tried working at an investment fund but that didn’t work out. I tried doing marketing for a few startups. But, you know, when you’re working at a startup, there’s a 95 percent chance that the business is going to fail within the first five years.

I realized that if I keep investing into things like that, chances are they would fail. And I would have to start over and over and over again, which is kind of what I had to do throughout my life. I just got sick and tired of starting over.

Then, I had this itching urge to just market myself. I didn’t really have anything to market because there was nothing great going on in my life. So, I just talked about all the bad things that happened.

Someone once told me, “Leonard, no one is absolutely useless. You can always serve as a bad example.” I thought about it for a moment, and I was like, “Wait, I’m that bad example.”

Tell us a little bit about before you started building your personal brand. 

You have your own company that does personal branding. How did you do it?

Can you give us some practical tips?

Do you have to be involved in every single social media channel?

How long would it take before people could see results?

What’s the best way to get into the big publications?