I’ve been running my own businesses since 2011. I know the risks you've taken and how exposed you feel, not just by the prospect of failure, but by the demands of showing up day day in day out, and sometimes falling short.

I know that entrepreneurship involves the highest highs and the lowest lows. And I've made it my mission in life to make those highs higher and those lows less frequent.

I'm not an accountant, a productivity expert, or a psychologist. For the love of God don't let me anywhere near your logistics or your production plans. I'm not good at a lot of the skills you need to run a successful business, but I am good at marketing and I’m really, really good at brand characterisation. It’s my thing.

A childhood spent with my nose in a book and an early career in publishing meant that when I accidentally spent a decade managing some of the worlds biggest and best loved brands, I looked at them squarely from the view of audience and character.

It was no great leap then, when I co-founded two eCommerce start-ups and my own digital marketing agency between 2011 and 2014 that I was the Oprah of brand personality. You get a character, and you get a spokesperson and you get an alter-ego. I saw how effective it was in getting my clients out of their own heads, out of their own way and into their own flow.

We started with the, exciting, revelatory work of uncovering their own often obscured values and desires, uncovering profound insights into their target audience and marrying the two into brand strategy that felt more like them than, well, them. We teased out meaningful stories, messaging and points of sales conversion. Then we distilled it all down into a brand persona with a name, a tone of voice, quirks, hobbies and a mission.

However it wasn’t until 2018, when I was unsuccessfully pitching for capital to expand my eCommerce side hustle that the power of brand persona was revealed to me on a personal level. Amongst hysterical, self-conscious laughter, I created my own Persona and turned my pitch performance from ordinary to extraordinary. My own Brand Persona gave me just enough distance from my own vulnerabilities to communicate the potential value the investment represented to my audience easily and confidently. I haven’t delivered an unsuccessful pitch since.

It’s a hugely exciting time to be in brand development. Artificial Intelligence has whittled the time taken to complete the necessary grunt work of data analysis and research down from days to minutes, leaving us free to focus on the big picture. It’s made this work faster, more affordable and more accessible than ever.

As a lifelong fan of the underdog, I find that the unfair advantages that big business have over small business maddening. I find our increasing reliance on just a handful of advertisers worrying. And I’ve made it my mission in life to help overcome these challenges by exploiting the one advantage we have over our big business competition; our humanity.