https://www.jwogrady.com/tags/personal-brand/ Recent content in personal-brand on jwogrady Hugo en-us Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:15:00 -0500 https://www.jwogrady.com/posts/identity-and-brand/ Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:15:00 -0500 https://www.jwogrady.com/posts/identity-and-brand/ <p>Two things increase a local business&rsquo;s market share, and almost everyone conflates them.</p> <p><strong>Identity is your personhood.</strong> Your values, your journey, the milestones that shaped you into whoever you turned out to be. It is not a logo and it existed before the business did.</p> <p><strong>Brand is the manifestation of that identity</strong> — the thing you actually do, made visible. It is downstream. It is what the identity produces when it meets customers.</p> https://www.jwogrady.com/posts/evidence-storytelling/ Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0500 https://www.jwogrady.com/posts/evidence-storytelling/ <p>If you run a business and you have ever thought <em>we should really be writing about this</em>, and then not written about it for eight months —</p> <p>this one&rsquo;s for you. I&rsquo;ve been you. I&rsquo;m partly still you.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s the thing I want to put a name to, because we built it this week and it works: <strong>Evidence Storytelling.</strong></p> <h2 id="the-problem-stated-plainly">The problem, stated plainly</h2> <p>Every business is told to produce content. Every business owner knows why they don&rsquo;t.</p> https://www.jwogrady.com/posts/personal-brand-first/ Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:45:00 -0500 https://www.jwogrady.com/posts/personal-brand-first/ <p>If you have ever gone back to something you wrote a few weeks ago about your own plan, and found it describing a plan you no longer have —</p> <p>yes. That one. Let&rsquo;s talk about that.</p> <h2 id="what-i-would-have-told-you-yesterday">What I would have told you yesterday</h2> <p>I have two Hugo themes. A theme, if you haven&rsquo;t met one, is the design layer: it decides what a page looks like and leaves the writing alone.</p>