Branding - You vs. the Company with Kurt Schmidt

Since social media started, every individual has crafted a personal brand online, even if that’s not what we thought we were doing. Each profile picture, post, and status update tells a story about who we are and how we want to be seen. As social media has evolved, we now have different spaces to show our different sides. Your Facebook may be fun family events, and your main Instagram might actually belong to your dog. LinkedIn is the obvious space for your professional brand, but there is an additional layer when speaking for your company. From sales reps to CEOs, you need to distinguish between you and your company.

Kurt Schmidt has done just that, expertly balancing and blending his professional brand. Kurt is President and Partner at Foundry in Minneapolis, MN. He also has his professional brand as the host of The Schmidt List, a Podcast and YouTube channel featuring weekly interviews with movers and makers in technology and design. Kurt answered several key questions on managing your professional and business brands.

First, tell us a little about you and Foundry. How did you end up with the agency and how is it different?

Foundry is a design agency. We design and build custom software for folks. The unique approach that we identified early on is that strategy is a lacking component when it comes to this type of work. A lot of places and agencies rely on the client for the strategy. The client comes up with what it needs to be and how it needs to be done. Our agency is there to help people figure out what they should be doing, what the strategy should be.

Strategy in our mind is just: is this an opportunity or a distraction? It's that simple. We try to filter out the opportunities and then distractions while our distractions are. What I found is that there are very few agencies out there that help people through that process.

[Those agencies] might help them quickly upfront and then not for the long term. And that's where we shine. Foundry is co-founded by two partners, Robert, an engineer, and Nils, a designer. And so it was kind of “you've got your peanut butter and my chocolate.” I came on about a year after it was founded, and I had been part of growing agencies my entire career, and this was finally my opportunity to come and do it on my own.

When did you decide that you were going to start the Schmidt List?

I had the idea of doing it many years ago, almost ten years ago. The company that I worked at, I wouldn't say they frowned upon it, but they weren't supportive of the idea of doing something on your own. They were more. If you are working there, you were the organization. They wanted it under their brand, which I understand.

I didn't want to do something that represented the place I worked for. I wanted to do something that represented my journey as a leader. So, not long after being at Foundry, I noticed I was listening to many podcasts, and a lot of people I knew listened to a podcast. There just wasn't anybody doing this type of show. I was having these great conversations with folks. I was doing speaking events. After I would talk, I'd sit down, and I'd chat with folks, and I'd be like, “man, somebody should just record these conversations.” I realized, “why don't I just record these conversations?” So, I started doing that. It has been about four years.

Why create the Schmidt List instead of the Foundry Podcast or something more directly connected to your company brand?

As a leader, I'm very cognizant of that. When I speak from my role as a company president, I'm speaking for the entire organization. Which means I'm speaking for all those employees. That's a different role in a different hat. When I'm speaking about me and my professional journey, giving advice, that's me emoting my background, my experience vs. speaking as the president of the company.

I wanted the podcast to be more optional for employees–maybe if they found that stuff interesting, they would listen to it. If I'm the president doing a Foundry Podcast, you feel more like you're obligated to listen. Then I might be that person at the all-staff meeting saying, “well, since you all listened to my show last week, you know that I've been thinking about this.” I wanted to keep the two very separate. To help enhance and grow my role at the organization but separate from it.

How do you balance representing the Foundry as President and your professional brand?

There are very rare occasions where I come out and be the president of Foundry. If Foundry needs to send a message, we all agree on it. And Foundry sends the message. Just because I talk more than the other two doesn't mean that my ideas drive everything. So it's truly a partnership. But like I said before [my roles overlap] a little bit.

There is my professional opinion because many of the people who come to me specifically for help are not looking for custom software development. They're looking for help on “How do I delegate to a team?” Or “I have a negative employee. How do I handle that person being so negative?” “I'm struggling with sales. Where should I go and look for people to help with marketing?” Or “ I'm trying to grow my career, but my boss is blocking me, or they're not listening to me.”

Part of the reason why Schmidt List exists is to give easier access to me as a coach and a mentor. Then as this guy who's the president of a fancy agency, because you typically–at least me growing up–I didn't have access those people whose role I dreamed about being in when I was in my twenties. It took me a long time to get there. But one of those reasons I feel like it took longer was because I wasn't a part of the club, and I didn't have those connections. So I wanted to create a space that allows accessibility for people to be able to just talk to a person like me.

Who is the Schmidt List’s audience, and how does it overlap or not with that of the Foundry?

The audience is mostly middle management role. Not all of them, but a good chunk of them. They are people that find themselves uniquely in a position of managing when they never really planned on being a manager. But there they are. And managing a team is one thing, but also being able to manage your peers and your bosses is also a very different skill set.

These are things you never learn in school. I don't care what MBA you got. That emotional labor and emotional intelligence you have to work on and continually work on. There's no point when you're just automatically “oh, I'm totally emotionally intelligent now.” It's a spectrum. A great number of people who listen to the show are looking for ways of moving their agendas forward and getting their ideas listened to so that they can create better work environments, better innovations all across the board.

Why did you pick that audience?

For me, it was because that was the hardest part of my journey as a leader. I was an individual contributor for a long time, and then I realized that I had built a team that was so good that I was the only one that could manage them because I was the only one who cared, at least at the organization I was at. I wasn't as good as these people were. I had hired people who were better individual contributors than I was, but my own skill sets involved were different.

They were more on the soft skills side of things. And what I found was that as we tried to replicate me or tried to grow, it was really hard because those soft skills are not things that are just inherent or things you learn at school. Again, back to that. So what I find is that those are the areas that are really hard to get from a book and where I learned the most was from experiences that other people had and learning from those experiences.

What topics does the Schmidt List cover?

As I mentioned, emotional intelligence is one I like to focus on–things where people think they know what they mean, but they don't know what they mean. I love to have people on who don't look like me because I learn a lot more from them. It's a great way for me to build that network and grow those relationships with folks, because I'm putting myself in a position where I'm saying, “Hey, I'm here to learn from you and your experiences because they are important, your voice is important, your experiences are important, and they should be amplified and shared.” I like to focus on those. You know, the kind of topics, “how do I grow my career in an authentic [way]?”

Why is creating original content and promoting it on LinkedIn important?

LinkedIn is a great place to say it in an environment where there are professionals, not to say that on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or Snapchat there are no professionals. But when people go to LinkedIn, they have their professional lenses on. They put on their professional glasses and they tuck in their shirt. They are in a different mode. They are searching for a specific type of content on LinkedIn that they're not searching for on those other platforms. They're looking for a certain kind of inspiration that they're not looking for in other places. Now, don't get me wrong, LinkedIn is salespeople, recruiters, and financial advisors. That's [a lot] of LinkedIn, but there's a great amount of people on there that are truly just people like I am.

I wish somebody would have told me this when I was growing in this career. I wish I would have shared more along my journey so that people could learn from me and recognize that, I think in the midwest and Minnesota especially, we have a real problem taking credit for our work. The idea of going on LinkedIn and self-promoting is very taboo.

LinkedIn is great, and social media, in general, has been great because it just reminds people what you do and that you're doing it because that's all we needed to do. You add on a little bit of a dash of me being like, “this is how I look at things as the president of the company,” that says a lot because the work that we do is 80 percent trust, 20 percent skills. You people have to trust that.

What advice would you give someone starting to establish their professional brand?

1 - I would talk to other people about their experiences like you're doing with it. 2 - spend some time understanding what your position is first. What is your position on things? What is your vision for the world? How do you want people to talk about you when you're not there? And once you've got an idea of all those things, it's not easy, but it becomes much more straightforward to figure out “what should I be talking about?”

I know some professionals that are really great. They write articles every Friday on their blog and they post it on LinkedIn. They're awesome professionals. And I read those and they're great. Other ones do newsletters and then post clips to things. I know some people that all they do is just like and comment on other [content]. They don't post any original stuff, they just respond to other people and those people are still super valuable.

People get really scared about how they're going to be viewed and they think they just think about it too much. And I understand they overthink it because it's scary. But, you know, the worst thing that can happen is you're just forgotten.

What are the biggest mistakes you see people making with their professional brand?

They're reactionary, they don't really have a plan. They don't have a defined audience like who they're talking to at other times. They have the wrong audience that they're going after for the value that they can create.

Don't wait for somebody else to give you permission because they're never going to; it's never going to come. Your clients aren’t going to give you permission, but that doesn't mean they don't also want to hear from you.

You can find more of Kurt’s insights with the Schmit list on LinkedIn, YouTube, and across social media. Check out the Schmidt List website to learn more.