"Nowadays, everyone needs to have a 'why should I choose you and not AI?'"

Kat left me with this bombshell midway through our call. The sheer honesty and bluntness were perhaps what threw me off, especially since for the rest of the conversation Kat was jovial and ultra-positive. 

My motivation to speak with Kat arose from the niche she works in. While everyone wants help with posting on social media platforms, very few actually want to sit down and work on the foundations of their brand. Positioning is one of those foundations. And Kat’s foray into this began when she saw a clear need.

"As solopreneurs, we do a lot of our own marketing. We're already busy with running our business and marketing takes up such a huge amount of time especially when you don't have your positioning correct. Because with every single piece of communication, you have to start from scratch every single time."

Then there's the question every discovery call eventually arrives at. "Why should I choose you over one of your competitors? You need to have a really good answer for that."

Kat didn't set out to become a positioning strategist. Towards the middle of last year, she was ready for a change. She discovered she enjoyed mentoring freelance designers and her interest in website design was waning. 

"In those mentorship calls, the thing they were confused about most was positioning. The conversations mainly focused on how they should talk about themselves online and how they should attract their ideal clients. And I really loved that part."

She then continued, "I was getting good feedback from my website designs, but the feedback from the positioning work was just so much more fulfilling. I was really helping people overcome blocks in their business and actually start attracting the clients that they really wanted to work with." At the end of last year, she decided to go all in.

The switch changed her immensely. Kat started the new business at the beginning of this year and assumed she could carry her personal brand over from the design days. "I thought there would be lots of overlap. And then as the months went on, I realized that I want to be a different person in this business, and I really am a different person."

Kat calls herself a personal positioning strategist. Her work essentially sits between personal branding and positioning a business. Most of her clients come to her when they have a few years of work behind them and are trying to organize it into something tangible to attract new clients.  

Kat truly sees the difference in her clients’ marketing once their positioning is in place. "Once we've talked about their stories and what topics they need to talk about and own, then creating content just becomes much easier. So it's about saving time and also being more effective with what you're actually doing."

Solopreneurs are essentially building a reputation for the work they do (which may or may not result in them hiring people in the future) AND for themselves. The person and the business are the same thing. So why not build a brand for your business?  “What is the point of a personal brand?” I ask her. "Elon Musk has a personal brand, but then Tesla has its own brand as a business, whereas a solopreneur needs to have all of those connected."

Her clear argument is that if you post about your own work under your own name, there is no Tesla to hide behind. Your positioning IS your brand.

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But things change all the time, so how does one’s personal brand evolve? She mulls over this question and responds, "When you start your business, you'll do some branding work, and then over the years your business changes, but maybe your branding doesn't keep up.” 

She continues, ”I would say if you are being authentic to yourself, I know authentic is a buzzword, but if you were really kind of being true to yourself, then the evolution will make sense. As long as you're not trying to fit into a box that you think you should fit in with your personal brand, then evolution is a normal part of it. On LinkedIn, we're very used to seeing businesses grow, or entrepreneurs pivot and go into other things."

She then elaborates on how you can ensure a seamless evolution of your personal brand, “Use LinkedIn as a test lab. You can write a post about it and then a week later everyone's forgotten. So if you're thinking, maybe I want to go on this idea, do a post about the idea and then see how people respond to it, see how you feel about it."

She immediately follows it up with a caveat, "Don't make such big changes while you're going through this process. I made this mistake a few times earlier in the year: I changed my headline and my about section, and then two weeks later I'm like, oh damn, I shouldn't have made such a big change. I should have waited a little bit."

Which brings us back to the line from the beginning. Kat has some sharp advice on how you can navigate your positioning in the age of AI.

First, compare yourself to the people your client is actually weighing you against. "Let's say you're a coach. You look for coaches that are around the same price range, maybe location, offering similar services. You don't need to look at the most famous coach in your industry and compare to that, because your ideal client may not choose between you and that coach."

Second, widen the field. "It's not just competitors as in other coaches. You have to look at courses, maybe apps, YouTube and nowadays definitely AI. You need to differentiate yourself from all of these other options," she pensively remarks.

Third, build your sounding board. “Solopreneurs are short on sounding boards. Most days you only have yourself and nowadays maybe Claude. A strategist or someone who is listening for the right things, could be really valuable. A model can organize your notes. Whether it can hear the thing you haven't quite said yet is the important question.”

So how do you actually build your positioning? Kat's process runs in four steps: a free diagnostic call, a two-hour intensive, research and finally a roadmap she calls The Positioning Blueprint.

The intensive digs into three areas:

People always ask Kat about the big "aha" moment, and she pushes back on the idea. “There isn’t one single moment. It is usually a series of discoveries. It could be me telling my client, 'Oh, you said this and this. Does that mean that?' And then they confirm or deny my assumption.”

She believes that most of the time these ideas are buried in the heads of solopreneurs and the right person can help extract them. According to her, “seeing their own words mirrored back to them makes their positioning very clear."

If you're doing this yourself, three things from our conversation are worth stealing:

1. Work through the three areas listed above. Write them down in your own words, before you even touch your LinkedIn headline.

2. Pick realistic competitors, then add the non-human ones (courses, YouTube, AI) and write your "why me instead" sentence for each.

3. Keep it all in one place. "If you don't have all of that information in one place, it gets really easy to get really scattered in your brain. At the beginning of the week when you need to create content, you don’t want to always be thinking, what do I need to be posting? I don't know what to post this week. That's a problem, so try and keep your ideas organized."

Kat is less than a year into a business she built on top of an old personal brand, and she's still finding out who she is inside it. "As I'm speaking with people more and more, I'm understanding my own personal brand and my own positioning." A blueprint is a snapshot of someone who is still moving.

Grow-th Takeaway: Kat’s principle is clear enough. Get your positioning down on paper and refer back to it. Voilà! Marketing for your personal brand now stops being a weekly blank page.

Another key takeaway is that AI has made expertise abundant on LinkedIn. If anyone with a prompt can get the information, it stops being the reason someone picks you. What's left is perspective, and the specific way you connect things that nobody else would.

Her reading list. Obviously Awesome by April Dunford and The Brand Positioning Workbook by Ulli Appelbaum. 

Her mastermind. Kat is currently running a small-group mastermind (October to December) for solopreneurs working on their positioning and LinkedIn presence. Each week, participants workshop real posts together and come back to see how they landed. The next cohort opens in January 2027.
Join the waitlist here

Find Kat here. Website · LinkedIn