An Interview With Chad Silverstein

Trust Yourself. You learn a lot about people when you work in personal branding, and one thing that keeps coming up is that many successful folks suffer from Imposter Syndrome and always fear that they don’t deserve their success. Invariably, they do. It is impossible to earn the trust of others if you haven’t earned the trust of yourself.

In today’s digital-first world, personal branding has emerged as a cornerstone of professional success and influence. Behind many of the most recognized leaders and personalities stands a strategic partnership with skilled publicists who craft and convey their stories, values, and visions to the world. I had the pleasure of interviewing Ray Hennessey.

Ray Hennessey is CEO and Executive Partner of Vocatus, a communications, growth, and marketing company that focuses primarily on financial services and reputation management. Hennessey, who has counseled and advised Fortune 500 and Inc 5000 CEOs and CMOs in marketing, sales, and executive visibility, spent 25 years in media, including leadership roles with CNBC, FOX Business Network, Entrepreneur Magazine, SmartMoney, and Dow Jones. He is the author of the book, Beyond Sorry: How to Own Up, Make Good, and Move Forward After a Crisis.

Thank you for joining us. To start, could you share your “origin story” with our readers? How did you begin your journey, and what challenges did you face in the early days?

I never expected to end up where I am now. My career was in media. I wanted nothing more than to be a newspaper reporter, then got what I thought was my dream job for Dow Jones, which led me to writing a weekly column on the IPO market for The Wall Street Journal. That led me to a regular gig with CNBC on-air, which I didn’t expect. I later got the chance to be on the founding team at the FOX Business Network. It was only later, after a stint at Entrepreneur Magazine, that I switched to public relations and marketing at a firm where I eventually rose to CEO. One of the challenges was making that transition. For years, as a journalist, you tend to write and report based on your biases and worldview. So much of public relations is cutting through those biases to craft the right story for your client. Before getting into public relations, I really didn’t have the respect for the industry that I should have. I was surprised how collaborative and symbiotic it was with journalism. Despite widely held misperceptions, public relations and marketing, just like journalism, are about being right and factual about storytelling. It just comes from a different lens.

Can you share a transformative moment or campaign in your career where you significantly altered the personal brand of a leader, and what was the impact of that change?

I once had a client who was having trouble appearing comfortable on television. She was a smart, successful financial-services executive who was charming, knowledgeable, and on-point in meetings and one-on-one conversations. She innately knew how to connect with audiences. But, when she was on camera, she froze. At the time, I did a lot of media training, based on my own on-air career, but I decided to go beyond traditional training and really dig deeply into why she seemed so uncomfortable. We ended up just talking for about an hour about her own personal and professional journey and about how that journey led her to worry about how she was perceived. Over time, we worked on ways to show more of her own confidence. Today, she is a regular guest on financial media and CEO of her own firm. Best of all, she has become a friend.

How do you navigate the balance between a leader’s authentic self and the public persona you craft for them in their branding strategy?

It’s an interesting question because there shouldn’t be a balance. Your public persona should be your authentic self. If it’s not, people are not going to trust you. They can see through it. I laugh when I see some people on LinkedIn or online preach about the need for more authenticity and then post AI-generated headshots of themselves. We are who we are. When I coach people through a crisis or in building their personal brand, it starts with an examination of who you are. For most people, they have become successful based on who they are. So why change? Work with what you have and embrace who you are. That creates an authentic brand.

What are the most common misconceptions leaders have about personal branding, and how do you address these in your work?

As I just mentioned, leaders sometimes think they have to try to act like someone else to be successful, not realizing that it isn’t an act. One of my pet peeves is seeing this inauthenticity in writing. Some leaders wordsmith everything to death and the result is an incoherent word salad of jargon that no one would ever say and certainly no one wants to read. I am a big fan of preaching the benefits of being direct and being real. Your personal brand is you. You are both the messenger and the message.