Ah … the personal brand.

Throw out a question on personal branding and you’re guaranteed to get a heated discussion between proponents and opponents. Which never makes sense to me, because we all have a personal brand. It’s called reputation.

From a business perspective, the challenge is how to make sure your brand is working for you rather than limiting opportunities for your company to grow.

There was an interesting conversation at the Solo PR Summit last week about how to navigate between being a business owner and owning a business. It’s a challenge for a lot of solo-owned companies to figure out when to say “I” and when to be a “we.”

Greg Brooks made a great point:

“It’s about threading the needle between the personal brand and scalability.”

Bingo. Warren Buffett isn’t Berkshire Hathaway. Richard Branson isn’t Virgin Group. You can have your brand and scale (your business) too–you just can’t scale you.

Photo by lukar14 (Flickr).