The most repeated growth advice of the last two years is to make the founder the brand. Post every day, show your face, let customers buy from a person. It works, and I am writing this on a site built around my own point of view, with a LinkedIn habit to match, so treat me as an interested party.
John Schnatter was Papa John's. His name was on the company, his face was on the pizza boxes, and he was the guy in the commercials. In late 2017, after he publicly blamed the NFL's handling of player protests for weak sales, he stepped down as CEO. In July 2018, Forbes reported that he had used a racial slur on a May conference call with the marketing agency Laundry Service. He resigned as chairman that week, and the company confirmed to CNBC that it would pull his image from its marketing. He still owned roughly 24 percent of the business. A source told CNBC there were no plans to change the name.
That last detail is the trap. The company could take the face off the box within weeks, and it was never going to take the name off the door. Founder-led branding fuses the brand to a person, and a person is the one brand asset you cannot version-control, send through legal, or retire on your own schedule.
Most founders will never have a week like that. The more common failure is quieter. The founder gets bored, sells, burns out, or changes their mind about something in public, and the brand turns out to be a person who no longer wants the job. A company that built its whole voice on the founder's feed goes quiet the day the founder logs off, and it usually discovers this after the audience already has.
The fix keeps the founder and moves the brand. Let the founder carry the point of view while the company carries the promise, written down, owned by the business, and sayable by people who are not the founder. One test: could someone else on your team write next week's post and have customers recognize it as you? If they could not, what you own is a person, and you are one bad week away from learning how much of the company was them.
My own practice has not solved this either. The Brand Whisperer is, for now, mostly me, and I do not have a succession plan for a point of view or any confidence that one exists.