Britney Gardner’s podcast, The Know Like & Trust Show, is a podcast that I can find myself listening to for hours. She’s smart, grounded, and has genuine conversations that go deep into the world of personal branding — from both the business side of tactics and marketing, as well as the personal side of meaning, purpose, and ultimately making business decisions that support building the life a person values.

I could pull favorite quotes from almost any part of our recent conversation, but I love this section about ten minutes in that gets into the nitty-gritty side of the brand consequences we face when scaling a big personal brand…

“I am not a brand builder. I am a company builder. But I partner with people who have put the work in to really establish a significant personal brand around themselves and who attracted a large social following. And I work with them to create a scalable model around their business, and to take what they’ve started and build something significantly bigger than either they think they could do by themselves or necessarily want to do alone.

“I tend to work with people that are mission-driven in some fashion that, and have a larger purpose beyond just making money or selling units. And one of the things I’ve learned to do very early, often before we even become partners or start working together, is we have a deep conversation about brand and values.

“What I ask, is to go through their brand and identify what is non-negotiable? And what is everything else? On the non-negotiable side, we have core values, morals, or really deep-seated, ethical beliefs. And then in the everything else category, we have opinions, aesthetics, tactics, wording, and all sorts of details.

“And one of the things that I’m really trying to kind of gauge with them is how much control they’re willing to seed to the market and to the rest of the world the things that are outside of the non-negotiable side of the brand? How willing they are to allow us to learn from the market, and willing to let the audience educate us as to what is important, rather than us making the assumptions that we know what they, the audience, really value.”

Thanks for a great conversation Britney!