What’s the return on investment on a CEO?

In an era of TikTok fame and influencer-driven brand booms, the tools to create and scale your personal brand has arguably never been easier, but is it for the C-suite and what are the risks involved?

Fred Schebesta is the co-founder and CEO of Finder

Business leaders could be missing an important marketing tactic by not leveraging their own personal brand to aid the bottom line of the businesses they lead.

While not a brand move for everyone, there are wins to be had from leaning into self-promotion and being more vocal about the things you stand for – without having to dance on TikTok or upload pranks to YouTube.

The co-founder of global fintech Finder, Fred Schebesta, made a personal and business decision back in 2020 to focus on building out his personal brand with the aim of positively impacting the businesses with which he’s connected

As marketing fads rise and fall and advertising budgets ebb and flow, there’s often no fail-safe, stable brand tactic that can weather all manner of societal, economic and political bumps in the road, but a non-moving and powerful tool is arguably the very business’s founder of the business.

Sydney-based entrepreneur Mr Schebesta, who is also co-founder of crypto investment fund Hive Empire Capital and an adviser at NFT gaming platform Balthazar, describes the move as a secondary tactic that aims to successfully impact his ventures.

Fred Schebesta is the co-founder of CEO of Finder, among other ventures.

“It can be challenging having your own brand and your business brand,” he says. “While they are not the same thing, they can align and can prove mutually beneficial, but you also have to be careful about the risks, what you weigh in on and how that could impact the other business,” he explained.

“While I will personally review chicken burgers and Finder will go and review your mortgage – which are not really connected – it’s the times when I am personally contributing to things like a Senate sel­ect committee on fintech, pushing for open banking or discussing cryptocurrency, that both my brand and the business would align in a big way in terms of innovation.”

Finder had been entirely self-funded until it secured its first external funding of an initial $30m million from Future Now Capital in December last year.

The raise implies a pre-money $650m million valuation for the comparison site turned fintech.

Mr Schebesta describes his personal brand as very much its “own planet”, orbiting around the “sun” of Finder, as a powerful but secondary marketing tactic to bring attention to the company.

An added benefit of having a personal brand, he says, is that you can adapt it much faster than the “big mothership” of a business, allowing for swift and agile reactions to contemporary events.

He argues that more leaders, regardless of whether they are the actual founder, should focus on building their personal brands, but he says it can’t be forced and they must be serious about carving out time to be creative and create suitable content.

“You really can’t try and manufacture it as it has to come out authentically,” Mr Schebesta says.

“Putting a face and a personality with a business makes it personal, it helps people connect and gives it an edge. That’s a differentiator that not all companies have.”

Former chief executive officer and president of T-Mobile US John Legere, whose journey up until his 2020 exit at the telco is described in corporate history as one of the greatest turnaround stories of all time, is widely regarded as a more unusual CEO.

Former chief executive and president of T-Mobile US, John Legere’s antics included crashing rival AT&T's party. Pic via @RogerWCheng.

Mr Legere stood out from the inaccessible suit-clad pack with his long black hair, branded leather coat, a rebellious attitude which saw him gatecrash a rival’s event, and even his own cooking show on Facebook Live, called “Slow Cooker Sunday”.

Mr Schebesta recalls seeing the rock ’n’ roll-style CEO chief executive in an advert in the US for the Nasdaq-listed company and thinking how unlike a typical CEO he was, which is what made him so appealing.

“It made the brand seem so much more personable. I’ll never forget seeing him and questioning if they had created this as a joke or if it was real,” he says.

The focus on Mr Schebesta’s brand has seen Finder’s former global head of communication, Michelle Hutchison, evolve her role to become chief operating officer at Schebesta Ventures.

So far Ms Hutchison has worked with Mr Schebesta to publish his Amazon Australia best-selling book, Go Live! 10 Principles to Launch a Global Empire, launch a newsletter with more than 7000 subscribers, participate in more than 100 podcast interviews and launch the online course Go Live! With Fred Schebesta: How to Develop Your Business Idea online course.

Fred Schebesta’s book helped him gain a wider audience

Stats on social media prove his pulling power, having amassed more than 73,000 followers and millions of video views since joining TikTok in August last year.

With a revised focus on pushing content on Instagram his followers are heading towards 5000, his private ‘The Disruptors’ Club’ group on LinkedIn group has more than 2300 members and he launched a weekly TV show hosted on Ticker TV called Ticker Ventures.

“Having dedicated resources and investment with clear goals and a strategy is the only way to effectively create and build a personal brand. It takes focus and commitment and careful thought into style, tone, the types of content and the channels to cover,” Ms Hutchison says.

Measuring the return on investment on brand Fred and demonstrating that it has impacted Finder and Mr Schebesta’s other businesses still remains a grey area in terms of official effectiveness metrics.

Beyond media mentions, an increasing number of speaking invites, interview requests, more brand endorsements, spikes in traffic, app downloads and book sales, Mr Schebesta admits it’s tricky to measure the full impact it has had on his other businesses.

“While we have seen an impact in terms of more interest and opportunities, there’s a lot of indirect or secondary results and qualitative measures that have contributed to growth,” he says.

“I know many people have only been introduced to Finder through me and although it’s all anecdotal, the feedback so far from my social channels has been so positive that it’s something we’ll continue to focus on.”

Fred Schebesta’s home in Sydney