One Man Brand

You may not know this, but I’m not just a design and branding guy. I’m also a musician.

I’ve been playing guitar and bass since I was a pre-teen and am now learning to actually read music and play piano.

I’ve done multi-track recording from the days of 4-track cassette machines to today, recording digitally with Logic Pro.

The cool thing about multi-track recording is that you can play all the instruments yourself and sound like a huge band.

Which leads me to a TikTok video I saw yesterday that completely blew my mind.

Maybe you’ve seen it too.

It shows a somewhat chubby guy (hey, I’m not shaming here, the dudes got his bare belly hangin’ out and you can’t not see it) who’s playing the guitar, while he’s playing the drums and singing all at the same time.

He’s actually hitting the drums with a drum stick and strumming chords with the same hand simultaneously.

He sounds like a full-on rock band that’s pretty much kickin’ ass and takin’ names.

But he’s also working really damn hard to do it.

What kicked on my branding brain though was a comment someone left on the video:

“Why doesn’t he just get a couple pals to help out? Can you image how much more awesome he would be?”

When we consultants, freelancers and entrepreneurs first start running our businesses, we need to keep expenses low and take huge pride in doing everything ourselves.

We try to be a one-person band. We do the branding, the marketing, deliver the products and services, we do the books, we do all the admin.

In the beginning, we can kick out the jams solo for the most part.

But eventually one day we realize it’s really damn hard to do it that way.

And then we ask ourselves: What if I got a couple pals to help out?

We have to figure out how to scale.

Because when we do that, we find out how much more awesome we can be.