A Business’ Brand Doesn’t Have To Be Synonymous With Your Personal Brand

By Alexandra Zendrian

The financial services media industry recently saw two stalwart figures — Robert Huebscher and Michael Thrasher — start new ventures.

In Huebscher’s case, he had built a brand, Advisor Perspectives, which he started in 2007, and through hosting its associated podcast, Gaining Perspectives, he had become at least somewhat synonymous with the brand. And Thrasher spent his career at Institutional Investor and built its recently defunct RIA Intel, as well as stints at Pensions & Investments and Informa’s Wealth Management.

Though both gentlemen’s journeys are unique, they both show the value of honing your craft and creating a niche.

How Huebscher Built His Brand

“I probably took somewhat of a non-traditional route with my personal brand because I was always focused on building a company with lasting, enduring value,” Huebscher said. “And that needs to transcend me personally. So I always thought of placing myself in a prominent position but always being secondary to the brand that I was creating with Advisor Perspectives. But I never shied away from using my name prominently and I promoted myself in a number of ways — through speaking engagements, I spoke at a lot of conferences, I wrote some articles myself, and I sort of went out of my way to engage with people who are industry thought leaders and interviewing them and just building reputation.”

Huebscher also used the Gaining Perspective podcast as a way to build his brand, although he considered his primary role on the podcast was to make his interviewees look good.

Building his brand through the podcast “showed that I was there to ask good questions, I completed the necessary research beforehand, and to construct an interview in a way that it would deliver valued information to anyone who was listening.”

A Glimpse into Thrasher’s Journey

“I saw this opportunity and it just sort of seemed like the right time,” Thrasher said during an interview a week after launching Modus News, a weekly newsletter for professionals in the family office sphere.

While Thrasher’s career started in the registered investment advisor (RIA) world, it eventually branched out to include family offices, which particularly intrigued him.

“Along the way over the past year, I had begun crossing paths more with family offices,” Thrasher recounted.

He then started sending out a newsletter every few weeks about family offices for Institutional Investor.

“I came to learn that a lot of the professionals that work for family offices, and these are people that number in the thousands and this doesn’t even include the professionals in the orbit around them, the asset managers, investment banks and all these other places,” he said. “This was a pretty big group of professionals who felt a little bit underserved journalistically.”

That combined with Thrasher’s enjoyment stemming from creating this newsletter provided a win-win situation. Throw in the mix that Thrasher was in the place financially to be able to do this and it was a recipe for a fresh family office newsletter. 

“When those three things lined up, I thought, ‘Ok, I’m gonna go for it.'”

In its first few months of being delivered to family offices professionals, Thrasher describes Modus News as, “It seems like it has good momentum and I think it will be successful.”

But how did he know he was ready for this? 

“I’ve been a journalist for a long time and I’ve written about wealth and asset management or some corner of it for many years, and so a lot of people were already familiar with me, which certainly helped,” Thrasher said. “I don’t have some kind of online presence that made this decision feel obvious or like it was going to be easy.”

Thrasher has been part of start-ups and small teams before, making starting something new of his own easier to envision. 

“I’m in the entrepreneur sweet spot — I felt like I knew just enough that I could do this but I probably don’t know enough that I have the necessary level of ignorance and naivete to actually have the courage to do it,” he said.

When asked if he felt he had the brand cache to make it on his own, Thrasher noted that’s not how Modus News was designed.

“Even though I am the person who started the company and I am the lone person writing the lone newsletter product at the beginning, so I am synonymous with it, I still don’t think about the business as a personal brand,” he said. “I want people before anything else to think of Modus as a newsletter and not a thing that I am personally writing necessarily. Even though these are the same thing at least at this phase… A lot of people have leaned really heavily into their own personal brand and have built amazing businesses. And their own personal brand has been a massive tailwind for a business. But it’s not required.”