#151: She Built a $1M+ Company But Owned Nothing: How to Build a Personal Brand That Survives Your Business (Lisa Bragg, MediaFace) 2023

You built the company. You are the company. And that can feel like a strength until something goes wrong and you realize you have nowhere to stand that wasn't inside that one entity you'd poured everything into.That's the trap most founders don't see until they're already in it. This week, Lisa Bragg joins us. She's a former broadcast journalist, founder of Media Face, and author of Bragging Rights. She built a multi-million dollar content company in Canada through government contracts and journalistic credibility and then hit a legal situation that made her want to walk away. She couldn't. Not because the situation required her to stay, but because she'd never built herself as a portable asset. That crisis became the clarity that changed everything.What we break down:The RFP unlock: How Lisa turned a failed government bid into a feedback loop — and why the debrief she requested was worth more than the contract she didn't getThe identity trap: What happens when your company's reputation and your personal credibility are the same thing, and one of them hits a wallMarketing to your future self: The specific framing shift Lisa made to stop leading with where she'd been and start signaling where she was goingThe gazelle decision: How Lisa scaled back from 12 to 20 employees, made more money, and slept better — and why she calls that successBragging as service: The reframe that makes self-promotion feel less like ego and more like clarity for the people you're meant to helpThis episode is for you if you've ever realized your business is growing but you personally feel stuck, if you're doing great work and nobody outside your immediate network knows it, or if you've thought about a second revenue stream but can't figure out where you'd even begin.The paid playbook this week goes deep on all three plays: building portable credibility outside your company, using government RFPs as a scalable revenue channel, and signaling your future positioning before you have the receipts to prove it. Become a paid subscriber and get this week's playbook HERE