How Does ‘Brand You’ Get Bigger?

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An acquaintance got his performance review recently. The evaluator was positive, but mentioned a concern. Namely, this man was a ��master craftsman.�� Clients loved to work with him. The problem was they wanted to work with , and he was only one man with only 168 hours per week at his disposal. How was he going to scale up to meet demand?

It��s a question many of us face these days. We��ve learned to be ��Brand You,�� selling what we do uniquely to avoid becoming an outsourced commodity. But whether you��re an architect, consultant, composer, real estate agent or writer, how do you scale up if what you��re selling is yourself?

There are a few usual approaches. You can charge more, but you might top out on even your best financed client��s scales. You can outsource all your non-core work to assistants — also a good idea — but what if demand for your core work still stretches beyond a reasonable work week?

As I was walking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend, I recalled that another man faced that same problem centuries ago. Rembrandt, the painter, was sought after by many of the nobles and royal families of 17th century Europe to crank out his religious paintings and portraits. His solution — common at the time, and the model my friend��s evaluator actually suggested — was to build a workshop around him. He trained apprentices in his methods. Then his workshop produced many of what we now think of as Rembrandt paintings. Sometimes the students merely copied his works. Other times, they��d start a painting and he��d finish it. This bedevils art historians, but it seems that many Rembrandts were, to a degree, joint projects.

It��s interesting to think how this would work in a business context. Many of us spend little time on training ��apprentices�� for three reasons:

It doesn��t seem immediately productive in a job-hopping world It��s tough to explain skills that feel like second nature Some of us worry about being replaced or creating our own competition.

We also cling to the ��great man�� theory, that any worthwhile creative endeavor must be hatched, like Athena from Zeus��s head, by one person, fully formed. Sometimes it��s hard to get our heads around the idea that collaboration can still work for creative endeavors.

But it��s worth thinking about. If you��re running a Brand You business, and trying to scale up your work, how would you create a workshop? How could you train others in your methods? How could you collaborate with other creative people while keeping the vision that people hire you for in the first place? I��d love to hear tips from people who have successfully scaled up a business based on selling their own creative work.