Today we welcome to the show Michael Peggs from michaelpeggs.com. Michael is an accomplished writer, blogger, and speaker. Peggs, as his friends call him, has been featured in Fast Company magazine, the Huffington Post, business insider, under30CEO and the Daily Muse.
He is a Wall street refugee, a recovering techie, a day-dreamer and now officially an entrepreneur-in-training. Through his website and personal appearances Peggs helps people just like you and I understand how to build our brands and discover our individual gifts.
Peggs believes that everybody is a genius and as your chief branding officer, he shares strategies on how to stand out from the crowd and show the world who you really are by DOING YOU.
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Main Questions
Peggs started your career as an intern of Wall Street. One of his key takeaways from that experience is that people settle for jobs that they know are not intended for them. His advice; cut the cord sooner rather than later.
After his stint in New York, Peggs decided to take his own advice so he headed to warmer climates. He ended up working at a start-up in Silicon Valley. While he was adjusting to the California lifestyle, Peggs decided to take his first stab at entrepreneurship and started a local job search website called peggsit.com. Peggs learned shared some valuable lessons from his experiences both as a start-up employee and a start-up founder.
His take on start-ups for the younger employees? While great for people who are skilled, if you are still in a place in life where you need guidance on your journey they are not the best place to go. For Peggs, surviving at start-ups as an employee is mostly about fit. While he enjoyed the pace of the start-up, to his credit, he realized that start-ups weren't for him…yet..
As for his own start-up, Peggs was overwhelmed with how quickly it began to grow. He knew that this level of success and growth had to be managed and he wasn’t in a place to manage both.
During this same time, Peggs had also started writing for companies like Fast Company and the under30CEO. His hustle was noticed by Google, who reached out and eventually hired Peggs as a development partner.
I asked Peggs how he was able to leverage his past experiences and skills to land a job at Google. Google is looking for something different, they are looking for thought leadership and communication in a way that builds community. It’s no longer about how you determine the number of ping pong balls can fit in a 747.
It’s about standing out and being true to your personal brand; it's about Doing You.
Personal Branding 101
Peggs recently left Google. But he didn’t did leave the ordinary way meaning you give two weeks notice, pack up your stuff and go quietly. Instead in true Peggs fashion, he created this goodbye Google video.
I asked Peggs, what made him want to record a video? Again the answer came back to personal branding and establishing his thought leadership. Peggs knew from his time at Google that video connects. It’s snackable content that short, to the point and frankly, it’s all about branding.
No one was doing goodbye videos before. My guess is that more people will now.
Peggs’ defines personal branding as the way we market and sell ourselves to others. He referenced the now infamous article written by Tom Peters in Fast Company magazine called:
Peggs has been able to use the principles in this article to understand and grow his personal brand. But the work didn’t happen during normal business hours. It happened after most of us decide to turn off the world and sit down in our comfy chairs to watch the latest episode of our favorite shows.
For Peggs and other successful entrepreneurs, the real work of building your business and your brand is done at night. It’s when your real world starts. When discussing how to balance it all, Peggs tells us that our passion projects have to start on the side in the margins of our life. He references the following sage advice from his father:
You do what you need to do until you can do what you want to do.
The challenge is that most people don’t know what they really want to do. This is where a personal branding coach can help. Once you determine what you want to do, you can plot a plan with the end in mind and figure out what you need to do to get there.
Or as I've said on this blog before; We need to align who we are with what we do.
Peggs – Your Chief Branding Officer
Peggs, like myself, believes that everyone should have some form of online presence. A medium you can control and manage your reputation. As we’ve discussed before on this blog, most first impressions don’t occur in the real world, they occur while we are sleeping.
As the Chief Branding Officer, Peggs helps individuals and companies to tell their stories online. He helps you market yourself in a way that influences people. On his website, he gives away a lot of free training and products to help individuals like us get started creating our personal brands.
Check out his Job Search Blueprint and The Resume Remix at:
Michael Peggs
Peggs has an awesome YouTube channel. I personally like his The Point video series where the tagline is “We Dare and We Do in an effort to become a better you”.
Check it out here:
You can get in touch with Peggs and learn more about him and his offerings at his website or you can email him directly at:
eMail: michael@michaelpeggs.com
Peggs, once again it was my pleasure to speak with you. Good luck in your future endeavors.
Peggs’ final words of advice to us: Just DO YOU.
