Sam Bernards is a legend among Utah entrepreneurs. He came to BYU to speak and we struck up a really nice conversation where Sam left me with some nuggets of wisdom.
Sam broke down for me the way he goes about evaluating a pitch deck, how he hope to work with the companies in which he invests, and how he learned great lessons along his career journey. He told me how to establish my own personal brand and how to market myself as an entrepreneur.
As a manager working at Wal-Mart, Sam demonstrated innovative thinking at its finest. He was tasked with finding a way to bring Wal-Mart stores into tough markets in big cities across the US. He spent months planning and coordinating and after all his efforts was successful in the launch of what we know as Wal-Mart Express. Sam talked about how he had to plan his relationship building with all the people involved in this process. One of Sam's coolest comments was on how he put a big map across the entire office he worked in where he placed the picture and plan for each executive that he had to work with.
After sharing parts of his story with me, Sam proceeded to give me some cool ideas on how to plan my future as an entrepreneur. He said I should look at myself through 3 different lenses and ask the following questions:
1. What am I good at?
2. What do I like to do?
3. What am I seriously passionate about?
He told me to answer these questions with the best knee-jerk answer I could - 3 answers per question. After having written down my answers, Sam told me to look for patterns among the answers I wrote down. These patterns should be summed up with one simple word - these words will define my personal brand. Pretty cool, right?
Maybe you'd like to try the personal brand exercise and throw those words onto your LinkedIn profile, I definitely did on mine!
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