How losing my job is helping grow my personal brand

Last month I lost my job. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in both corporate and agency marketing, along with building a fitness services business “Your Level Fitness” and a personal brand. From a skills perspective I’ve done pretty much everything there is

It seems like working full-time for a company “regardless of what you do in addition” makes you soft. You’re working for a perceived guaranteed paycheck and feel this false sense of security. I actually landed my last job in large part due to my side business and personal brand.

Until writing this article my pillar content has been mainly my podcasts. The Daryl Perry Podcast has over 1300 episodes on its own talking about everything from genuine self-confidence, being comfortable in your own skin, men’s mental health, nostalgia and some tie ends with YLF…which also has it’s own pod. Both have a mix of solo and interview episodes. I’m always trying different things out based on listener feedback and my own intuition.

The distribution for my content has largely been social media and SMS. I’m fortunate enough to have my first name last name on most social platforms. When I first started the job I tried doing both their work and my side projects for a while but then got into the routine of the work I was doing for the company. As things in my personal life started to change putting out content on the Internet and running a service-based business was becoming harder and harder. I never really stopped putting out content 100% but for my standards the distribution was way down. Looking back I should’ve just taken as much time as I needed to take a break and/or refocus.

Earlier this year as the company culture began to change I started to wonder if I had I left myself too vulnerable if I lost my job. I felt this way but with so many changes in my personal life I wasn’t ready to commit to changing my business structure and put out enough content to promote it. By the way, you can never put out enough content. 😉

Even though it felt like something was coming, having our entire team laid off suddenly was a shock. At that moment I didn’t know what to feel. I knew our team and everyone else impacted by the layoffs at the company had put so much effort and energy into their work and now suddenly we didn’t have jobs.

The initial thought was to jump right back into the job market almost as a way to cope by ignoring what just happened. As I started to think about doing that though, it became apparent that I needed to take a little bit of time away just to figure out what my next steps would be. I still applied to jobs but I was selective about the ones I put in for.

The marketing industry is kind of funny where it’s almost expected that people will jump from job to job after being at them for less than a year but I’ve never done that. When I worked at the agency I was there just at two years and this position that was eliminated I’ve had for almost three, so while I didn’t know too much about what my next step was going to be I knew I didn’t wanna take a job that I would regret not long after starting.

After a week or so I started getting back to what got me my last job - putting out daily podcast episodes, posting on relevant social media platforms, setting up networking meetings and just having conversations with people.

My next step was evaluating the businesses that I had associated with my brands. YLF will now be an online fitness community with the majority of it’s revenue coming from merch sales. I do still offer coaching but it’s on a very selective basis.

I then decided to beef up my online store by releasing at the very least a new product if not a new design each day. I do share these on social media as part of my constant stream.

The distribution of hub content is what’s really fascinating to me right now. At the moment social media is all about short digestible clips 15 to 60 seconds at a high volume. Tik-Tok started this but Meta has adapted to it as well with reels being very popular on both Instagram and Facebook. I’ve started to take some of my videos and put them out as shorts on YouTube. This is very interesting to me because I put out over 200 videos on YouTube over a couple of years time without much traction. However, the two Shorts I’ve put out over the last week have each gotten well over 100 views. As this landscape continues to change I will keep experimenting and putting out content relevant for each platform I’m on.

I’m very excited to continue to grow as a marketer by working on my own brands while also talking to companies about work opportunities.

Even though it’s only been a few weeks since I lost my job I feel like I’ve had enough time to take a step back and move and the directions that I need to move forward in with both my career, professional and personal development. Let’s see what happens.