I Didn't Think I Needed a Personal Brand. Then Bob Asked Me One Question.

I've spent more than 30 years building businesses, managing people, solving problems and developing relationships. From starting in automotive sales in 1993 to eventually becoming the Chief Operating Officer of Landscape Effects Group, I built a career around getting things done.

When that chapter of my life ended in 2022, I started two businesses of my own, JG Fleet Services and JP Smitty Sauce.

So when my longtime friend Bob Manor started talking to me about building my personal brand, I wasn't exactly convinced.

I remember asking him why I needed one.

I had two companies. Those companies needed websites. People could learn about what I did through the businesses themselves.

Why would I need a website about me?

Bob asked me a pretty simple question.

"If it wasn't for you, would either of those companies exist?"

Well, obviously not.

That question got me thinking about something I'd never really considered. I'd spent my entire career building businesses and helping other people grow theirs, but I'd never put much effort into explaining who I was or what connected all those experiences.

People who knew me understood my background. At least they understood parts of it. But someone who didn't know me personally would have had a pretty difficult time putting it all together.

And if you searched Jason Gill online, good luck figuring out which one was me. Apparently, there are a few of us out there. LOL.

That was the beginning of my experience with Influence.VIN.

Seventy-One Questions That Changed Everything

Bob introduced me to something called the Polaris Method.

I didn't really know what to expect. I figured we'd have a few conversations about my career, what I wanted to accomplish and maybe how I wanted a website to look.

Instead, I was given 71 questions.

They weren't just the typical questions about your job title, qualifications or accomplishments. They got into my experiences, how I think, what drives me, what I've learned and what matters to me.

I answered them as openly as I could.

And then Bob and his team went to work.

What happened next absolutely blew my mind.

When they showed me the first version of JasonGill.ca, I couldn't believe what I was looking at.

It was me.

Not some polished, corporate version of me that sounded impressive but didn't feel genuine. It captured who I was, how I thought and what I'd spent my life doing.

The headings, the messaging, the way my experiences were connected, even the overall personality of the website. It all came from those 71 questions.

One of the things that stood out was the industrial iron structure incorporated into the homepage design. It felt strong, practical and built around the kind of work I'd spent my career doing.

The language had that same feeling.

Resilient Builder. Relentless Operator.

I wouldn't have sat down and come up with those words myself, but when I saw them, they made perfect sense.

That was the strange part. I was looking at a website that described me more clearly than I probably could have described myself.

I gave some input on the colours, and we worked together on developing my logo. But the writing, the headings, the positioning and the underlying direction had already been developed from my answers.

They had taken me to what I would call the 99-yard line.

I barely had to change anything.

And for somebody who usually has an opinion about everything, that's saying something. LOL.

They Even Wrote My First Blog

Something else surprised me.

The first blog published on JasonGill.ca wasn't actually written by me.

Bob and his team created it using the information I'd provided through Polaris.

Think about that for a minute.

I'd answered 71 questions, and from those answers they were able to develop a website that reflected my personality, connect decades of experience and even write an article that sounded like something I would say.

I remember reading it and thinking about how much of my life I'd spent doing things without ever really documenting them.

I'd been too busy working, building businesses, solving problems and moving on to whatever came next.

I had the experiences. I just hadn't taken the time to put them into words.

That first article showed me there might actually be something worth sharing.

And that's where this whole experience started becoming about much more than a website.

Connecting the Dots

Once the personal website was built, the work continued into my businesses.

Influence.VIN built a new website for JG Fleet Services, connecting my experience in automotive sales, management and fleet operations to the services I now offer clients.

They also rebuilt my existing JP Smitty Sauce store, moving it from Shopify into Kajabi.

Those are two very different businesses.

One involves vehicles, equipment, purchasing and fleet management. The other involves barbecue sauce, seasonings, grocery stores and trying to figure out how many cases of product to bring to an event.

But both businesses exist because of the same person.

Me.

That was the point Bob had been making from our very first conversation.

Each business needed its own identity and purpose, but there was value in connecting them to the person behind them.

And now, instead of having disconnected websites that don't tell the whole story, someone can discover one part of what I do and follow the connections to the rest.

I hadn't realized how much of my professional life was invisible online until we started bringing it all together.

From Being Difficult to Find to Having a Story People Can Follow

Before working with Bob, searching my name didn't produce much useful information about me.

There were other Jason Gills, scattered references and very little that clearly connected my career, my experience or my businesses.

Now there's a personal website that explains who I am, links to the businesses I've built and includes an expanding collection of articles about things that matter to me.

I'm not suggesting I've suddenly become some internet celebrity. Far from it.

But there's a big difference between someone searching your name and finding almost nothing relevant, and someone being able to understand who you are and what you've done.

Bob calls part of this Recognition Capital.

The way I understand it, you can spend decades building experience, relationships and credibility, but if that information isn't visible or connected, the people who don't already know you have no real way of understanding it.

I had built a reputation in the real world without giving much thought to what that reputation looked like online.

Influence.VIN helped me begin connecting those two worlds.

The Part I Never Saw Coming

Here's where things got interesting.

I've always enjoyed helping people.

Throughout my career, whether it was mentoring someone, helping a customer make a better decision or supporting somebody through a difficult situation, I've gotten a lot of satisfaction from knowing I could make a difference.

But I never really thought about writing as another way of doing that.

Once JasonGill.ca was established, I started sharing more of my experiences.

At first, it was mostly about business, discipline and lessons I'd learned throughout my career. Then I started writing about more personal things.

My family. My daughters. My marriage. Friendships. Starting over. The mistakes I've made and the things I'm still trying to figure out.

I've also become more active on LinkedIn and more deliberate about documenting the things I've learned. I've started using Bob's RALS Method (Riff, Anchor, Lift, Shred) with ChatGPT to help organize ideas and turn everyday observations into articles.

What surprised me was how much I enjoyed it.

I'm certainly not a professional writer, and I don't pretend to have all the answers. Most of the time, I'm writing about things I'm still working through myself.

But people have started responding.

Sometimes it's a comment on social media. Other times it's a private message from somebody who connected with something I wrote.

Those messages mean a lot to me.

You can't easily measure whether a blog helped somebody think differently about their family, their career or a difficult situation they're dealing with.

There's no dashboard that tells you someone read something you wrote and decided to make a change.

But every once in a while, somebody reaches out and tells you that something resonated with them.

And that's enough to make me want to keep writing.

When I originally asked Bob why I needed a personal brand, I was thinking about websites and businesses.

I never imagined that having my own platform might give me another opportunity to help people.

That might be the most valuable part of this entire experience. 

What Bob Actually Helped Me Build

Bob and I have been friends for a long time, and I'm also a paying client of Influence.VIN. I think that's important to make clear.

He didn't simply sell me a couple of websites.

He challenged the way I thought about myself and my businesses.

His approach, which he calls Recognition Engineering, started by understanding the person before building anything around them.

That's what made the Polaris Method so interesting to me.

The work wasn't about inventing some new image or making me sound like somebody I wasn't. It was about taking what was already there, making sense of it and finding a way to communicate it.

The websites were the visible result, but the process also changed how I thought about sharing my experiences and making myself accessible to people who didn't already know me.

And I don't think I fully appreciated that at the beginning.

Maybe Your Experience Is Worth More Than You Think

If you've spent 20 or 30 years building a career, running businesses or developing relationships, you probably have a tremendous amount of knowledge that other people could benefit from.

The problem is that much of it lives in your head.

That's certainly where mine was.

You might assume that because people in your industry know you, your reputation speaks for itself.

But the world is different now.

People search your name. They look at your website. They check LinkedIn. They want to understand who they're dealing with before they ever pick up the phone.

And sometimes they're not looking to do business with you at all. They might simply be looking for someone whose experience helps them understand something happening in their own life.

I didn't see that possibility when Bob first asked me about building a personal brand.

I thought I needed two company websites.

He helped me understand why the person behind those companies mattered just as much.

Today, I have a place where my professional experience, my businesses and my personal writing all connect. More importantly, I have a place where I can continue sharing what I'm learning.

And I'm still learning plenty.

It's funny to think that this started with 71 questions and a conversation about why I would ever need a website with my own name on it.

I wasn't convinced.

Then I saw what they'd built, and I was absolutely blown away.

Now I'm sitting here writing another blog, something I never really imagined myself doing a few years ago.

And if one of these stories helps somebody along the way, then this whole thing has become worth far more to me than having a nice-looking website.

I started out thinking I needed websites for my businesses. I ended up finding another way to connect with people.

Not a bad return on 71 questions.

About the Author

Jason Gill is a Canadian entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience in automotive sales, management and business operations. A former Chief Operating Officer at Landscape Effects Group, he is the founder of JG Fleet Services Inc. and JP Smitty Sauce. He shares his experiences with business, family, personal growth and the lessons he's learned along the way at JasonGill.ca.