09-10-2026SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE

Personal Brand Special Report: 207 insights and ideas to grow your brand and career

We asked more than five dozen people, from CEOs to chefs, how they’ve used their personal brand to boost their careers and how you can too. Plus: How to build your brand as career insurance or even an escape hatch to independence from Corporate America.

Pictured: Zinia Lee, Dillon St. Bernard, Noah Greenberg, Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel, Dr. Uché Blackstock, Andrew Yeung, Melanie Masarin, Greer Hiltabidle [Photos: Philip Vulkelich]

In the summer of 2021, Eric Pacifici started living a double life. 

By day, he was one of thousands of associates at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the largest corporate law firms in the world. Outside work hours, though, he was moonlighting on Twitter as @SMB_Attorney, an anonymous account where he shared the kind of legal insight behind real multimillion-to-billion-dollar merger and acquisition deals that one wouldn’t typically find outside a law firm’s deal room. There, he was one of one.

At first, the secret account was just a hobby. Within a matter of months, though, Pacifici’s inbox was flooded with the same kinds of requests: “I have a 2, 4, 6, 8, $10 million deal: Can you help me with it?” he recalls.

Five years later, those same followers are the core clientele of SMB Law Group, Pacifici’s boutique M&A firm that’s doing hundreds of deals annually and has hit more than $1.9 billion in total deal flow since 2022.

“Lawyers are risk averse by nature,” Pacifici says. “My big law mentor had an expression: ‘The nail that sticks out is going to get pounded in.’ Basically, wear your blue or white shirt, shut up, do your work.” 

Pacifici has found the opposite to be true. He attributes his success almost entirely to the personal brand that he built on Twitter/X and, later, LinkedIn. His clients seek him out not only for his expertise, but also for his candor in a profession that valorizes secrecy. “People want authenticity,” he tells me. “They want to work with a real person.” 

In other words, they don’t just want a deal attorney; they want Eric Pacifici.

Today, Pacifici’s story feels less like a moon shot aspiration and more like a template for where the workplace is headed. Employees are increasingly rejecting the age-old mantra of “shut up and do your work,” and are instead deciding to wrest some power in the corporate workplace back into their own hands. 

You can see it in the Google search data. In just the last year or so, Google searches for the term “personal brand” spiked massively and have continued to trend upward. “A personal brand is the new currency to survive in the present-day job market,” says Dillon St. Bernard, Gen Z social media strategy expert and founder of the creative agency Team DSB.

Over the past five months, I’ve solicited input from 66 people to learn how and why they’re building their personal brands. My colleagues Shalene Gupta and Sage Swaby interacted with another 86 people. CEOs, artists, venture capitalists, consultants, entrepreneurs, chefs, doctors, and many more—these experts shared their stories, ideas, and insights for developing, growing, and running their personal brands. 

Nearly everyone agreed on one point: Opting out of the personal branding game is no longer an option. In fact, it may be the last, best way to stand out in a digital ecosystem overrun by AI content. 

In this Fast Company special report, the first in a series, you’ll learn: 

How to identify your personal brand and manage it with intention

Why personal branding is intertwined with social media—and how to find the platform where you can win

The secrets of today’s three major personal branding strategies: the inside game, the trampoline, and the escape hatch

What to do when your personal brand threatens the corporate one you work for

What ‘The Brand Called You’ looks like today

In 1997, when Fast Company published a cover story titled “The Brand Called You,” it canonized the concept of a “personal brand” for the first time. The author Tom Peters, who had already become synonymous with chronicling business excellence, heralded creating “the micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh” as a new way for individuals to improve their value in the economy. “To be in business today,” he wrote, “our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

At the time, as Bill Taylor, Fast Company’s cofounder, tells me, there was a sense that because companies were turning away from strict organizational hierarchies in favor of more fluid structures, employees would self-organize, gravitating toward people based on their reputation. “Back then, fundamentally, the way you expressed yourself was through an organization,” he says. Personal branding could build someone’s identity within a company, making them the colleague everyone wanted to work with, the manager with the best team, or the peer who scored the coolest projects.

Since then, personal branding has broken containment from the conference room to a wide variety of channels where one can amplify their public persona—from LinkedIn to X to social video to newsletters to podcasts to live events. Regardless of the medium, there are still employees developing brands to accelerate their career within a given organization. 

Jack Corbett applied to work at NPR in 2019 as a music video intern, a position that worked primarily on the popular Tiny Desk show. In his application, he included a barrage of different links to a single example of his work: an experimental, mostly fictional documentary he had filmed in college full of grainy audio, medieval monks, stuffed polar bears, and cowboys. The video plays like a fever dream—and it got him the job. 

Corbett’s knack for experimenting with funky concepts, trying new techniques, and embracing purposefully low-fidelity audio and visuals came in handy during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Tiny Desk temporarily stopped hosting concerts in the office. Corbett used that time to create an ultra low-fi explainer video for the podcast Planet Money about the stock market circuit breaker, which he filmed in front of a green bedsheet. His managers suggested that he turn the initial 3-minute cut into NPR’s first TikTok. The relatable, down-to-earth video, which now has more than 36,000 likes, set a precedent for how news organizations were allowed to show up online. 

Corbett then helped Planet Money build an audience of almost 800,000 users on TikTok, amassing 90 million videos on the channel as of this writing and winning an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2023. The next year, he became Planet Money’s visual host. Because of his creative point of view and on-camera personality, Corbett’s brand has essentially come to define Planet Money’s online presence. 

This is the best possible outcome for both the employee and employer. Corbett, leaning into his personal brand, went from intern to star on an important franchise, earning trust from his company to pursue his unconventional ideas. “The personal brand is a really good way of building your own power,” Corbett says. “Ultimately, people respond to individuals and creativity—that and the Duolingo bird.”

The career trampoline 

Corbett’s brand lives well beyond NPR’s walls among his fans, and NPR can’t control that. For him, and everyone else, having a strong personal brand is about power.

Amid everything from job market stagnation to AI-related mass layoffs, the stark reality is that “the same rules and assumptions that got folks the American dream no longer apply,” says St. Bernard, 26, the Gen Z social media strategy expert. “We’re often forced to be ‘unicorns’ of our craft and hop from job to job to get paid what we’re worth.” But a personal brand is also, as he adds, a way “to protect yourself from the never-ending shifts across industries.”

After “The Brand Called You” took off in business culture, the idea was often associated with shameless self-promoters, so much so that Taylor, Fast Company’s cofounder, ruefully recalls one columnist proclaiming it a harbinger of “the death of Western society.” Increasingly, though, the personal brand is an insurance policy for the worst of times. 

The first time that Chanele McFarlane was laid off, it was in the middle of her maternity leave. Just two years later, it happened again. “Both times, I was about four to six months into my 12-month maternity leave,” she recalls, “and was holding my baby on my lap while getting laid off via video call.” 

In both instances, McFarlane, who’s a senior communications leader, knew exactly what to do. For years, she’d cultivated her brand via her blog—Do Well, Dress Well—offering professional advice to working women, which led to frequent speaking opportunities and a network of supporters. She took to her LinkedIn page, where she has just over 3,300 followers, and let her audience know that she’d been laid off.

The messages immediately started pouring in. Some followers simply wanted to wish her well, while others offered leads: Hey, I saw this job posting, thought of you. Between recruiters reaching out and opportunities forwarded to her from her audience, McFarlane found a new job in two months the first time she was laid off and in seven months the second time. 

McFarlane credits this to her “personal brand trampoline,” or the idea that, when you’ve developed a brand, “no matter what happens in your career, you can propel yourself back up to better opportunities.” Because of the six to 10 hours a week that she puts into preparing for speaking engagements, attending events, and prepping posts for her LinkedIn and Substack (she migrated her blog and it’s now called Today’s Brand), she feels secure that, regardless of her employment status, she’ll always have something to fall back on.

While McFarlane’s current company supports her outside-of-work endeavors, brands like hers can sometimes be the hardest for companies to manage. Companies are attracted to the value a personal brand could bring to their own, but issues of ownership and credit can sour those relationships. 

When Bob Knakal, a New York City real estate sales whiz, joined the global firm JLL in 2018, he brought three decades of experience, strong media relationships, and an established reputation as an expert voice in the field. At first, Knakal says, his employers seemed to consider his market presence a strength. But after a management change, the new marketing team, he recalls, was “company, company, company.” It “drove them up the wall” that his social reach (which has reached 220,000 followers across platforms today) significantly outpaced the company’s. 

In early 2024, within a span of a few weeks, Knakal scored a CNBC segment and a feature in The New York Times. The headline: “This Real Estate Kingpin Maps Out the Path to Megadeals.” Knakal thought the story was great. “I would’ve paid a million dollars for this piece,” he says. His employers, it seems, didn’t share the sentiment.

“[It was] February 14th,” Knakal recalls. “I walk into a meeting, a guy from the executive committee is sitting there, and as soon as I walk in, the head of HR walks in right behind me. I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m getting fired.’” 

That same month, though, he used his massive network as a jumping-off point to start his own firm, BKREA, which closed 43 deals worth $1.78 billion in 2025, its first full calendar year. For more on companies’ challenges in managing personal brands, why this has to change, and almost 200 insights on how to lead employees today, my colleague Shalene Gupta’s special report will debut on Monday, September 14. 

From side hustle to building a business around your brand

That tension between company and employee isn’t always that dramatic, but it can exist even—perhaps especially—when your personal brand has little or nothing to do with your work. 

Sammi Cohen was working full-time at Amazon when she inadvertently created her own dream job. Like the M&A lawyer Pacifici and his Twitter account, Cohen had no idea that posting her first-ever TikTok would eventually ladder up to a new career path.

In March 2022, Cohen was two years into a role in Amazon’s logistics division. The role satisfied her interest in operations, but it didn’t tap into a key interest that she’d maintained since childhood. “I’m a business nerd,” Cohen says. Specifically, “the storytelling narrative of a business is what makes me tick.” When a friend suggested that she start making TikTok videos about that passion, she balked. Me? TikTok? Yeah, right, she remembers thinking.

But the comment stuck with her. A few days later, she posted a video about Sophia Amoruso, founder of the apparel brand Nasty Gal—and immediately, something clicked. “It felt like I scratched an itch,” Cohen........

© Fast Company