For thirteen years, Richard Osman was best known as the very tall man sitting behind a desk on Pointless. Alongside Alexander Armstrong, he became one of those television personalities people felt they knew, even if they’d never consciously decided to follow his career. He was funny, intelligent, dry and slightly self-deprecating, and after years of appearing in people’s living rooms, there was a familiarity around him that is incredibly difficult to manufacture.
Then came The Thursday Murder Club. What started as a debut novel became a publishing phenomenon, followed by more bestselling books and eventually a Netflix adaptation. In 2022, Osman stepped away from his regular role on Pointless to give himself more time to write, moving from a career most people would have considered extraordinarily successful into something completely different.
On paper, it looks like a reinvention. From a personal branding perspective, I think it’s something much more interesting.
Osman didn’t leave his reputation behind when he left Pointless. He took it with him.
And that’s one of the biggest benefits of building a strong personal brand that businesses often overlook.
A Strong Personal Brand Should Give You More Options
When we talk about personal branding, the conversation tends to focus on what it can do for you right now. Build your LinkedIn presence to generate enquiries. Make videos so potential customers recognise you. Grow an audience so more people discover your business.
All of that is valuable, but it’s only part of the picture. If you spend years consistently demonstrating what you know, how you think and what you’re like as a person, you’re building something that can eventually become much bigger than a marketing channel for your current business.
You’re building familiarity around your name.
That familiarity can travel with you if your career changes, your company evolves or you decide to build something completely different. It’s one of the reasons I think personal brand visibility is increasingly becoming a genuine business asset rather than simply another part of a social media strategy.
Richard Osman demonstrates that particularly well because television and crime fiction aren’t obvious neighbours. Yet the move worked partly because audiences already understood something about the person making it.
Richard Osman Wasn’t Really Starting From Zero
Whenever somebody makes a significant career change, we tend to describe it as “starting again”. In reality, experienced people rarely start completely from scratch because they bring their reputation, relationships, knowledge and previous work with them.
When The Thursday Murder Club arrived in 2020, Osman was already one of the most recognisable personalities on British television. His name meant something before anybody opened the first page, and millions of people already had an impression of his humour and personality.
That doesn’t mean recognition made the books successful. The books still had to be good enough for people to recommend them, buy the next one and keep coming back. Plenty of famous people have launched products that disappeared once the initial curiosity wore off.
What recognition gave Osman was a stronger starting point.
He wasn’t asking people to discover Richard Osman and discover whether they liked his writing at exactly the same time. A relationship, however distant, already existed between him and a huge audience.
Businesses can build a smaller version of exactly the same advantage.
Visibility Creates Options You Can’t Always Predict
One of the reasons business owners sometimes struggle to justify investing in their personal brand is that they want to know exactly what the return will be. If I make these videos, how many enquiries will I receive? If I post on LinkedIn three times a week, how much revenue will that generate?
Those are perfectly reasonable commercial questions, but personal brand visibility doesn’t always work in such a neat line. Some of its value comes from creating opportunities you couldn’t have predicted when you started.
A business owner who becomes well known in their industry might initially create content to generate leads. Over time, that same visibility could lead to speaking opportunities, partnerships, podcast invitations, recruitment opportunities, investment conversations or the audience for an entirely new business.
The original objective may still have been lead generation, but the reputation becomes capable of doing more than that.
This is why I like the idea of thinking about visibility as creating optionality. The more relevant people who know who you are, understand what you’re good at and trust the way you think, the more places that reputation can potentially take you.
Your Personal Brand Can Be More Portable Than Your Business Brand
This is particularly important for founders because companies and careers rarely stay exactly the same forever.
You might sell the company you’re currently building. You could launch another one. Your role might change, your service might evolve or you could find yourself becoming interested in an opportunity that has very little to do with the thing people originally knew you for.
A company brand belongs to the company, whereas the reputation you’ve built around your own name can move with you.
That’s not an argument for making the founder bigger than the business. A strong company should absolutely have an identity that exists independently of one individual. But I don’t think that means founders should deliberately remain invisible either.
Done properly, the two brands strengthen each other. The company gives the founder somewhere to demonstrate their expertise, while the founder gives the company a recognisable human being people can listen to, understand and eventually trust.
If circumstances change later, that familiarity doesn’t simply disappear because the logo has changed.
Osman leaving Pointless is a particularly clear example. He stopped being a regular presenter in 2022, but the years he’d spent building recognition didn’t remain behind the desk when he left. They became part of the foundation for whatever came next.
People Remember More Than Your Expertise
There’s another reason Osman’s reputation was able to travel between careers. People didn’t only know what he did; they had developed a sense of who he was.
His television persona had a recognisable character to it. There was the dry humour, the intelligence, the self-deprecation and the slightly unusual way he observed things. Whether somebody had watched him on Pointless, seen him on a panel show or heard him interviewed elsewhere, there was enough consistency for an impression to form.
That’s an important lesson for business owners because professional content can easily become so polished that the person disappears from it.
You can give excellent advice without giving people much reason to remember that the advice came from you. If every video sounds like something anybody in your industry could have said, you’re demonstrating knowledge without necessarily building much of a personal brand around it.
This doesn’t mean manufacturing a louder personality for social media. It means allowing enough of your real personality, experience and perspective into the content that people gradually understand how you think.
Professional doesn’t have to mean personality-free.
Expertise and Visibility Need Each Other
At Digital Sparks, we talk a lot about visibility because being brilliant at what you do has limited marketing value if the people who might need you have no idea you exist. But that doesn’t mean visibility should ever replace substance.
The two need each other.
Osman’s existing profile gave his books an enormous amount of initial attention, but attention alone couldn’t have built a successful publishing career. Readers still needed to enjoy the books. They needed to recommend them, buy the next one and decide that Richard Osman the author was worth following independently of Richard Osman the television presenter.
Business works the same way. A strong personal brand might get you into the conversation, but the quality of what happens next determines whether you stay there.
An estate agent can become the most visible agent in their town, but they still have to deliver when somebody trusts them with their home. A consultant can build an enormous LinkedIn audience, but clients will eventually judge the quality of the advice rather than the number underneath the profile picture.
Visibility gives expertise more opportunities to be discovered. Expertise gives that visibility something worth discovering.
Your Content Should Be Building More Than Today’s Lead
This is where the Osman story becomes particularly useful for businesses creating content today.
It’s completely reasonable to want your marketing to produce enquiries, appointments and sales. Ultimately, marketing has to contribute commercially, and nobody should spend their entire week producing videos simply because getting a few likes feels nice.
The problem comes when immediate conversion becomes the only way we judge whether content has been worthwhile.
Somebody might watch one of your videos today without needing what you sell. Three months later they see another, and a few weeks after that one of your LinkedIn posts appears in their feed. They might never like, comment or send you a message during any of those interactions.
But they’re becoming familiar with you.
Eventually, their circumstances change. They need an estate agent, accountant, recruiter, consultant or whatever it is you happen to provide, and suddenly the person they’ve quietly been watching for six months has an enormous advantage over the business they’ve never heard of.
That’s why brand recognition on social media matters so much. The value of a piece of content isn’t always contained within the 24 hours after you publish it. Sometimes it’s one small contribution towards a reputation you’re going to benefit from years later.
Don’t Build a Personal Brand That’s Too Small for Your Future
There’s a balance here because personal brands still need clarity. If you talk about completely unrelated subjects every day, it becomes difficult for people to understand why they should follow you or what you’re actually good at.
But clarity and restriction aren’t the same thing.
If your entire online identity is tied to one product, service or job title, you can accidentally build a brand that only works while your current circumstances stay exactly the same. The better approach is to give people a broader understanding of your expertise, beliefs, experience and personality.
If you’re an estate agent, property should obviously form a significant part of your content. But you might also talk about your local area, customer service, running a business, negotiation, leadership or lessons you’ve learned after twenty years dealing with buyers and sellers.
Those subjects still make sense because they’re connected to your experience.
Over time, the audience isn’t only learning that you sell houses. They’re learning something about you.
That distinction is what makes a personal brand portable.
You Don’t Need Millions of Followers for This to Matter
Celebrity examples can make personal branding feel slightly unrealistic because Richard Osman already had access to an audience most business owners will never have.
Fortunately, you don’t need his audience.
Most businesses don’t need millions of people to know who they are. They need enough of the right people to know who they are.
An estate agent operating in one town doesn’t need national fame. If enough homeowners in that area recognise their face, understand their expertise and associate their name with useful local property advice, they’ve built something commercially valuable.
The same applies to a recruiter working in a specialist sector, a mortgage adviser serving a particular audience or a consultant operating in a relatively small industry. A few thousand relevant people who genuinely know what you’re about can be considerably more useful than hundreds of thousands who don’t particularly care.
That’s why visibility shouldn’t simply become a numbers game.
Reach matters because people can’t recognise somebody they’ve never encountered. But the objective isn’t fame for the sake of it. The objective is useful recognition among the people who might eventually matter to your business.
What Could Your Reputation Unlock in Five Years?
This is the question I think more founders should ask themselves.
We spend so much time thinking about what our content needs to achieve this month that we rarely consider what years of consistent visibility might eventually make possible.
Perhaps the audience you’re building today generates leads for your existing company. That’s already valuable. But what happens if you decide to launch another service in three years? What if somebody approaches you about a partnership? What if you start a podcast, write a book, expand into another market or decide to build an entirely different business?
If you’ve spent those years becoming known and trusted, you don’t arrive at the next opportunity empty-handed.
You bring people with you.
That’s effectively what makes Richard Osman’s story so interesting. The television career created familiarity, but it didn’t dictate what he had to do with that familiarity forever. When another opportunity emerged, the personal brand he’d already built gave him a platform from which to explore it.
Build a Reputation You Can Take With You
The lesson from Richard Osman isn’t that everybody should walk away from a successful career at 51 and write a murder mystery.
It’s that the reputation you build in one chapter of your career can become incredibly useful in the next.
A good personal brand shouldn’t lock you into one subject, one company or one version of yourself. It should give people enough understanding of your expertise, personality and perspective that they’re interested in what you do next.
That’s why I think business owners should view personal brand visibility as something much bigger than this month’s social media calendar. Every useful video, thoughtful post and genuinely helpful piece of content is contributing to an asset that sits alongside the business you’re currently building.
You may use that reputation to generate more enquiries today. You might use it to launch something completely different five years from now.
The important thing is to start building it before you need it.
Because when the next opportunity arrives, it’s considerably easier to take people somewhere new when they already know why you’re worth following.