To lead by example was a core principle I believed in. I didn’t know what that meant in the bigger picture; I’d watched myself golf for the first time, and I hated what I saw.
Not the swing. The swing wasn’t the best, but everything else was. The way I walked. The way my shirt sat. The “pigeon toe-ness,” as I called it out loud to no one. I zoomed in on old footage from a trip to Nairobi and thought, “Is this really what I look like?”
Then I turned the camera on myself, unedited, and told 10,000 people about it.
In other words, I shared it as a podcast episode. Watch it here.
If you’re a business coach, a consultant, or a fractional exec who tells clients to “show up authentically,” that’s the job. Not the advice. Do it on camera, with “all the things” you’ve never told publicly. You don’t get to hand clients a playbook you haven’t run yourself.
Let’s get into it.
The Business Case Came First
Growth is hard. It’s even harder when you’re required to do something completely outside your comfort zone. I didn’t start making raw, personal videos because it felt good. I started because the business told me to if I wanted to stay self-employed.
A year and a half ago, I was running an agency that had quietly turned into a full-scale marketing agency focused on lead generation, a pivot I hadn’t fully admitted to myself yet. Two trips to Nairobi changed that.
I intentionally — the keyword that’s also conditional — recorded the second trip with some encouragement, mostly for myself, and something in that footage was more me than anything I’d posted before. People responded to its rawness. New viewers responded to my story- and that didn’t matter to me at the moment (as I’ve learned YouTube as a platform, I’ve learned it does matter… more on this later).
That response forced a decision. I could keep running client work the old way, faceless, templated, interchangeable with every other agency pitching the same services. Or I could bet on the thing nobody else was willing to do: put my actual face and actual story into the business. I picked the second one, and it changed more than the marketing.
Building a business around showing up on video forced me to clean up my operations, sharpen how I communicate, cut the free consultations I used to give away to prospects who were never going to buy, and think further ahead about the brand instead of just the next invoice. Vulnerability turned out to be as much a systems problem as an emotional one.
You can’t fake being real, so you have to actually get your house in order (in all the ways).
That’s the strategic layer. Here’s the human one.
Plus, it felt really good to tell people what I did without meeting them.
What Leading by Example Actually Costs
Two weeks before I hit record on that video that inspired this article, I weighed 328 pounds. I’ve been “big boned,” my word, and the word other people used, less kindly, my whole life.
I was a fat kid.
I couldn’t talk well because of the speech impediment I still have, funny enough, given my last name is Webster and I can’t always land my R’s and W’s. Parents whose own dysfunction I inherited before I understood what to do with it.
I didn’t sit down and record a weight loss video. I sat down and told the truth.
It’s not that I’m fat. I’m broken. We’re all broken.
The number on the scale was never really the point. There’s a weight that’s spiritual, emotional, psychological, and it doesn’t show up when you step on anything. I talked about several things that showed me I was broken:
- being a people pleaser to ensure I wasn’t left out;
- about FOMO from a childhood where not fitting in had a cost;
- about realizing, mid-scroll through old photos with my fiancée on the couch, that I couldn’t stand what I saw; and
- that the mirror at home had been lying to me for years, because a mirror only ever shows you what you’ve arranged it to show.
I could have kept that off the internet. Plenty of coaches do. The highlight reel is safer, and it’s certainly easier to script.
But if I’m going to stand in front of a client and tell them their audience can smell a performance from a mile away, I have to be willing to let my own audience watch me not have it together. That’s not a marketing tactic. It’s the actual mechanism.
Putting myself on video instead of “putting on a show” forced authenticity I couldn’t fake. The camera exposes you for who you actually are, whether you’re ready or not. Subconsciously, we know that and do what we can to perform- and that’s the problem.
Showing up on camera as yourself means we’re on a healing journey of being okay with our imperfections, insecurities, and flaws.
When we know perfection doesn’t exist, the performance goes away, and authenticity shows up.
The Content Competition Can’t Be Fake Anymore
Here’s the part that matters if you run a business, whether it’s just you or you’ve got a small team behind you: the game has changed, and it’s not changing back.
Competition used to be local and template-shaped. Now it’s global.
AI can produce a serviceable blog post, social media post, or a passable ad in seconds, and the viewers may not be able to detect it, which means looking professional stopped being a differentiator. When everyone can buy the same polish, polish stops proving anything.
What AI still can’t fake, not convincingly, not yet, is a 304 pound guy telling you he’s scared to post a video because it exposes the parts of him he’s spent thirty years managing. It can’t fake a founder admitting the pivot they made wasn’t confidence.
ICYMI- I’m talking about me. It’s all in the video (big smile).
Solopreneurs are competing against agencies now. Small companies are competing against tools. The only asset that doesn’t scale, the only thing a competitor genuinely cannot copy, is you recording, saying what’s never been said in your own truth.
In other words, it’s you showing up on video in a way someone can relate to.
That’s why I tell every prospect who walks into my business the same two things now: get a CRM, and get on video. Not because video is trendy. Because in a market flooded with content that could have been generated by anyone, being unmistakably, verifiably yourself is the last durable advantage left.
Lead By Example, Or Don’t Call It Coaching
I forgave the people who called me names as a kid, the fatty and Humpty Dumpty jokes, all of it; not because I owed them that, but because I didn’t want to keep carrying it into how I show up now. That’s the healing side of this.
Hence why I say business is personal.
The business side is simpler: if you coach people on building a brand that resonates with being honest, on showing up as themselves, you have to have already done the uncomfortable version of that yourself. Not the highlight reel. The actual footage.
That’s why I’m comfortable telling you I’m not broken. I’m healing. I’d rather build a business and coach other people building theirs from that honest place than from a highlight reel that can’t survive contact with the truth.
People resonate with truth, not performance.
When I stopped caring about what I looked like on camera, my comments started to appear.
YouTube Engagement
In my earlier videos, I didn’t receive any comments because that was also my intention. The goal to be a YouTube Partner was the intention, but I was chasing something vanity and I didn’t like my videos (go figure!).
Once I said, “Who cares!” Everything changed.
I got those comments because I showed up as me.
If this resonates, watch the full story here: Why I HATE How I Look (Am I Fat?), and read more on the business pivot that started it: Why I Pivoted My Business. For readers who want to see other examples of this in practice, McKinsey has a good rundown on how leaders can tap the power of vulnerability.
Are you done not taking action?
Whether you need a fractional CMO to steer your marketing, a website that actually brings in business, or help building your own video presence to generate leads, that’s what I do at NDUB Brand, and if you’d rather have me tell this story live, I also speak on this as a keynote. Reach out and let’s talk about what your next season should look like.
It’s time to move from surviving to thriving. Let’s get to work.
If you need help, hit me up.
Founder, NDUB Brand of NW & Associates, LLC