IAM1803 – Personal Branding Coach Helps Others to Stand Out

Naomi Garrick Teaser 00:00

So as a public relations agency, we're a boutique agency, so we're small, but we execute really big projects. We specialize in lifestyle brands, and what we do is we help individuals, companies, or businesses to be seen, heard, and experienced by their ideal target audience.

Intro 00:14

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:42

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit over 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focused on the visibility game, a.k.a. Marketing, Advertising, PR, and Sales. I often say the name of the game is being found in these tools will help you to do that. We have heard the philosophical question, if the tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If there's a really, really great product or service and no one knows about it, how great is it? Really? What impact does it ultimately make? This is where we will go into this month, looking at visibility, branding, marketing, public relations, sales, being the lifeblood of businesses, building media companies, and so much more.

This is probably one of the most exciting and probably the most excruciating topics, but we hope this month to demystify or maybe even vanquish that fear and help and arm you with the tools to be able to increase your visibility. So buckle up and sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Naomi Garrick of Garrick Communications. Naomi, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Naomi Garrick 02:11

Hi, Gresh. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 02:14

No problem. Super excited to have you on as well. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Naomi so you get here about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Naomi is an author, international speaker, and personal branding coach that helps individuals, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and CEOs to discover, define and develop their unique personal brand in order to effectively communicate their expertise and stand out in their craft or in their industry.

She is a Certified Reputation Champion by the Public Relations Society of America, a PR Consultant and a Personal Branding Coach with over 16 years of experience in Public Relations and Marketing, working with 100+ brands and individuals. Naomi is also the founder of Garrick Communications, a boutique PR agency in Jamaica, and is passionate about helping others to discover and develop their unique personal brand in order to stand out in a noisy world.

Naomi, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Naomi Garrick 03:00

I am ready.

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Gresham Harkless 03:02

Awesome, Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I want to hear a little bit more about your CEO story. What let you led get started with the business.

Naomi Garrick 03:09

Sure. Okay. So I never ever thought I was going to be the CEO of anything. My journey is interesting because I actually studied hotel and tourism management. So I live in Jamaica. Tourism is our number one industry. At that time where we were starting to choose what subjects we want to take to go to university here, I had no clue what I wanted to do. People always told me that they thought I had the personality for the hospitality industry and so that's something I just jumped into.

I thought maybe one day I would be managing a hotel. Working in the hotel and visiting a hotel are two different experiences and I used to live on the property. So I worked at the hotel and lived at the hotel because most of our hotels in Jamaica are on the North Coast, so by the beach, and I thought that was great at first until I started doing it. Then I realized that, okay, this literally is a 24-hour industry. So especially when you live on the property, you're working all the time. I noticed that a lot of the women that were in senior positions, were always at work. A I always wondered if I wanted to have a family or children. When would that happen to me? Or how would I spend time on that side of my life?

So I made a decision to move back to Kingston and to try and figure out life again. I started working in media and marketing and from media and marketing, I got approached to do a few press releases for some entertainers here in Jamaica because I worked for a company called RETV, which it would have been like the MTV of the Caribbean thoughts. Through that experience, I started dabbling in PR and I realized that because of the media relationships that I developed over the years, I had real relationships with the decision-makers, the gatekeepers, the people that decided what we actually see, hear, and experience in the media.

I also was a pretty good writer so I started to explore that more. Did a deep dive into PR. We didn't have Google yet, so I had to really read about the PR industry and being a publicist I went full force into that. I made a random decision after I had my son, who's 13 now, that I wanted to be in a position where I had the ability to say no if I didn't want to do something and two, I would have the flexibility to be able to spend more time with him to do the things that really mattered. So I made a decision to start my own company and be an entrepreneur, not saving six months' salary, like I've been told, or hear now, I just knew what I wanted to do and I just took the leap.

The great thing was that because I was in PR and I had developed these media relationships when the media heard that I was going off on my own, one of them, our number one newspaper here in Jamaica offered to do an article about this transition, and that's how I got my first client. To date, the company is 10 years old, we celebrated our 10th anniversary last year, and never advertised the business. It has always been through relationships and referrals and different recommendations and of course our results. That to me also showcases the power of PR and why we do what we do.

So now 10 years in, I'm the CEO of Garrick Communications, but over the last year and a half, I started really exploring public Personal Branding. As you mentioned, I'm an author. I wrote three books last year about building your personal brand. I'm starting to realize now another transition as CEO because I really love people development and I get so much fulfillment from that era of my life now. So I'm using this PR to really figure out, do I want to continue being the CEO of an agency or do I want to be the CEO that helps to develop individuals? I'm on an interesting journey right now.

Gresham Harkless 06:29

Yeah. I appreciate you for breaking that down. A lot of times we have to realize that destination we get to is not always the final destination as businesses change, we have to evolve as well.

Naomi Garrick 06:39

So my favorite quote is the journey is the reward because, I think it's a Chinese proverb, but everything that we do in our lives helps us to become the person that we are today. So we may not know it at the time, but everything that I've done throughout my personal life and my professional career has led to this moment to me even being on this podcast.

So, I think it's really important to recognize and appreciate every step of the way. Also, as a coach, I try to help people to look back at that journey and see what are the things that I have done in my life that actually made me now offer something completely different just because of my experienced different areas. How do I tie all of that together to become now this CEO that maybe never existed? Because no one has had the type of experience that I've had and now can bring this kind of value to someone that might need it.

Gresham Harkless 07:27

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I know you touched on a little bit. I didn't know if there's anything more you can tell us about, how you work with clients, and some of the things that you do to serve the clients that you work with.

Naomi Garrick 07:36

Sure. So I'll talk for us from the Garrett communication side. So as a Public Relations Agency, we're a boutique agency, so we're small, but we execute really big projects. We specialize in Lifestyle Brands, and what we do is we help individuals, companies or businesses to be seen, heard and experienced by their ideal target audience. We do that by utilizing the media. So traditional media like your newspapers, radio, TV. Cable TV, or if we would use digital media, so whether it's a website, a blog, a podcast, and then we also look at experiential marketing to engage people as well. So that could be an event, a launch, some kind of on-the-ground activity where people get to really touch and experience the brand.

That's what we've been doing for the last 10 years. We've worked with international companies like Coca-Cola, and then we've worked with some big Jamaican brands as well, like Appleton Estate, Jamaica, and Rome. So that's what we do from the Garrick Communication sites. But again, it's all about us. What has really worked is relationships. So we ensure that whether it's the media, whether it's a supplier, whether it's our internal team or our clients, we build real relationships.

So people feel very comfortable working with us. It's like we have this really big extended family of clients and suppliers and media personalities that we work with to deliver this final product to our end user at the end of the day.

Gresham Harkless 08:52

Yeah.

Naomi Garrick 08:52

Then as a personal branding coach, what I really do is I help individuals. My brother said it to me the other day, he was just like, I think what you really do is you help people to see the greatness that they don't see within themselves. What I do is I really help individuals to take a look at themselves, starting with some introspection to see who they are, what's the unique value that they believe they offer, and then how do they communicate it to their ideal audience. So whether that's through online or in person, how are you showing up in these different spaces and letting people know that you actually can solve their problem?

So that's really what I've been doing with the personal branding. It has been really fulfilling for me, being able to meet different individuals and to show them what to me, something that I can see clearly after a conversation that they can't see for themselves and then showing them how to actually now communicate this. So they're doing something that they really love and offering real value and being of service.

Gresham Harkless 09:44

Yeah, that makes so much sense. Often when you're talking about who you are, what it is that you do, what makes you unique, and those things, you have to develop that relationship with the people that you're speaking to or connecting with on social media or offline, as you said, as well. So I think sometimes we forget that.

Naomi Garrick 09:58

Absolutely, we forget that, and sometimes we don't take the time to really think about ourselves. And so I ask people all the time, what do you do? And immediately they tell me their job title. But really that's not telling someone what you do. You could be an HR manager, but what is it about what you do in that role that actually is different or better than another HR manager?

So I help people to try and identify their thing. What is it that you love about this job that I should hire you for something? I think it's taking the time to really, reflect and look on ourselves and see, what have we done? I spoke about the journey being the reward. How do you use this for your special journey? Because I believe that we could all be the stars of our big blockbuster movie because nobody has had this life experience that we've had. So how do you use that experience now to actually create a product or a service that you can actually get paid to do?

Gresham Harkless 10:47

Yeah, that makes so much sense. So I know, and this might be, your secret sauce you might have already purchased or touched on this, but I was going to ask you for your secret sauce. What is the thing you feel like sets you apart and makes you unique? Is it really that ability to see that in other people to help bring that out that you feel sets you apart?

Naomi Garrick 11:02

I'm starting to see that now, but also I think from the agency side is that I never used to see myself as a creative. I come from a very creative family. But they're more creative in terms of art and design. So I always thought that I was the one that just didn't get this creative streak, but I'm starting to embrace the fact that my creativity is in the ability to ideate. So I love to sit with clients and just create ideas for their business or their brand, and then we find the right people to execute it.

So I think one is the ideation process, but then also what I mentioned about the relationships. I think the relationships for me is why we have a lot of our retainer clients keep coming back. Because they trust us with their brand and they trust us as just as an individual as well. Someone that understands what they're trying to do and they can call and actually have a real conversation, not just about the work.

I think the relationship has definitely set us apart. And having that boutique experience where even though we execute a big idea, we still can bring it right back down to a very small scale with how we relate and engage with the people that we're working with.

Gresham Harkless 12:05

So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. That could be like an app, a book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Naomi Garrick 12:15

Which I started doing last year, getting up really early. Then I found that just creating blocks of time. So I guess time would be the big thing, but creating blocks of time to do specific things, whether it is to check emails within this block.

So I'm not consistently checking emails. I'm responding to people. I read Tim Ferriss which is The 4-Hour Workweek, which I highly recommend. He spoke about the fact that he only checks emails twice for the day because he finds your email inbox to be like a giant to-do list for everybody else.

Gresham Harkless 12:46

I definitely appreciate those hacks. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. That could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice, or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Naomi Garrick 12:57

I just made a post about this today and I heard Oprah saying it's something like you are exactly where you're supposed to be. I go through the CEO journey, you have the ups and you have the downs and you're just like, why are things working out for me or why am I in this situation? Why am I having this experience? And as time progressed, I realized that in every one of those situations, I needed it to happen because it led to something else.

Important or just a different kind of project, or if I lost a project, and then I realized that if I had this project, I wouldn't have gotten this opportunity, a bigger opportunity that was waiting around the corner.

Gresham Harkless 13:35

Absolutely. Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show. So Naomi, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Naomi Garrick 13:45

Being a CEO means to me having an opportunity to lead a team and to bring value through your unique experience to the rest of the world by service.

Gresham Harkless 13:57

Definitely appreciate that, appreciate your time even more Naomi. What I want to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. Then of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

Naomi Garrick 14:09

Okay, great. So if you don't mind, I would love to share some of the things, as we start a new year, it can be very daunting. Don't be so hard on yourself that you didn't accomplish these goals. This really helps me every year when I'm starting to refocus. So one, I like to do a reflection on the previous year. So I actually take time to write out all the things that I've done for the year, the little things and the big things. So no matter what I'm doing, whether it's my job, it's coaching, it's relationships, I'm going all in.

That way, if I fail, it's okay because I know that I gave it my best. So that's my theme and I apply it to everything. Then I start looking at the goals for 2020. What are some things that I really want to accomplish? I look back on the 2019 goals. Are there goals that need to now come to 2020? Or can I just scrap some of those goals altogether? Then the fourth thing I do is I have to find my circle of genius. So I recommend, just like whether it's a mentor or mentors, but look at the areas of your life that actually could use some support and then identify those people that are really going to help you to be your best self or to help talk, help to make you accountable for those goals, whether it's professionally or personally.

So I rely on different people in my life for different areas to help, to keep me accountable, to ensure that if these are my goals, they check in with me or they give me some additional advice, or they'll point me to a different resource that I didn't think about. I think sometimes we, as CEOs, feel like we have to do everything ourselves. We have to realize that it's okay to ask for help. It helps us to cross that bridge a lot faster and probably even better, because someone's done it before, and now we don't have to do it the same way they did it. We can do it better, or we can learn how to make it work for us.

Gresham Harkless 15:50

Yeah.

Naomi Garrick 15:51

I think that's what I would leave with your listeners and then to find me on Instagram I'm at The PR Chick or at naomigarrick also you can visit garrickcommunications.com or I am naomigarrick.com. So if it's PR Garrick Communications. And if it's personal branding it's iamnaiomigarrick.com.

Gresham Harkless 16:08

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Naomi. What we'll do is we'll have those links and information in the show notes. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 16:15

Thank you for listening to the I am CEO podcast powered by Blue 16 media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

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Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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