Who am I, anyway?

Am having another one of my mini (online-) identity crises. To be clear – this is not a real crisis and almost certainly doesn’t matter at all, so please don’t be concerned for me. I would though value any thoughts you may have.

I’m self employed and mostly make my living selling consultancy services, and this year a bit of software too. The consultancy has a website, as does the software.

I also write my blog (on which I don’t have any proper analytics), and send it out as a newsletter (which has c650 people signed up). The blog is clearly me, not the company, while the newsletter is sort of both, which is confusing.

I also run a monthly online get-together, which is branded in alignment with the consultancy. It’s basically still me though.

Am pretty sure that all my customers have used my services because they thought that Dave might be able to help them out. They almost certainly didn’t think that Localise was the company they needed as their transformation partner, or anything like that. People are hiring me, not my company.

I clearly need a company, and having one that gives the impression of being a proper organisation, rather than just a bloke in a shed in Norfolk, is probably helpful for giving people confidence and making conversations about IR35 a bit easier.

But I have really struggled to do anything useful with the Localise website, despite having very good intentions. On this blog, though, which is very much my own authentic voice, things have been going great, and newslettering is far easier these days as a result.

I’ve always admired those people who make their living from their websites – Ben Thompson springs to mind, Ed Zitron is another (but there are many more – and in these days of Patreon and Substack, it’s more possible than ever. I would love to do that, but I think my niche is too niche for that, and I am not remotely convinced than the content I share is worth paying for. It works, though, as a form of marketing – the only form I use.

So what am I wittering about? I suppose it’s whether I ought to just carry on as I am, with a hotch-potch approach to ‘branding’ – doing some things as me, some as Localise, and some as both?

Or should I double down on one of these – accept my fate, that I won’t ever build a multinational consulting empire, and focus everything on doing things in my name, maintaining a cursory online presence for the company for appearances?

And what else could or should I do with that personal brand? Ought I be wrangling the blog audience, the newsletter, the online meet-ups into something more tangible and joined up? Ought I start a podcast, or courses, or do some other form of content creation that people might actually value enough to pay for?

Or simply leave it all as a fairly shambolic bunch of loosely joined small pieces, accepting the messiness, and being grateful to be able to make a living doing what I know works, rather than tilting at a Ben Thompson or Ed Zitron shaped windmill?