Melanie Borden

The working method is a peer map.

• Identify five to ten people whose visibility you want, chosen because your ideal customers already follow, trust and learn from them, explicitly not because they have large audiences; study their topics, posting frequency, tone, engagement, speaking, partnerships and relationships for patterns rather than content to copy; then enter those environments in four escalating phases — consistent real comments, two LinkedIn posts a week, a monthly newsletter, and one relevant podcast appearance per quarter.
• Borden says the exercise came from 18 months of study while writing the book Theatre of the Mind and hundreds of conversations with founders and teams.

The four-phase ladder, published as a checklist readers are asked to save: phase one is leaving genuine comments, and Borden states they should not be AI-generated.

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The intake step is a scan of how other leaders in the same sector present themselves.

• What Borden finds, and says still surprises them, is profiles that reshare company announcements, use corporate jargon, or repeat someone else's take, which makes experienced people look interchangeable.
• Borden frames the cost as a disconnect: customers, investors, potential hires and business partners research executives before meeting them and do not find the person behind the title.
• The stated goal is not simply to get executives posting, but to help people understand who they are, what they know, and why their perspective matters.

The first pass needs no writing at all. It compares a leadership team's profiles and posts against peers in their own sector, so the gap is visible to the executives before any content work starts.

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Six years into building an online presence, Borden still hears the same objections from employers: it is a waste of time, a distraction, personal brands are not a thing, only the CEO can be visible, marketing already handles it — and says the result is no support, resentment and frustration.

• The recommended counter has three parts.
• Build the business case by tying presence to qualified inbound traffic and brand trust.
• Systemize it as an operating rhythm: share and engage weekly, analyze and refine monthly, evolve positioning quarterly, expand channels annually.
• Then translate it into the language boards and investors already use — reach, recruiting, relationships — and present visibility as a measurable business function rather than a marketing budget line.

The annual expansion step and the pitch to set budgets before the new year, which Borden ties to a direct call to book a call ahead of the next budget cycle.

Borden notes that what was true when they started has "improved slightly," but that many companies still hesitate — the objections have softened in tone without disappearing.

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Six weeks into building the first version of the Dirty Hippie marketplace, the code kept reverting to iterations that had already been fixed, functionality Borden thought was ready was not, and a November closed pilot was approaching.

• The post names the experience plainly — overwhelmed, drinking from a firehose, questioning nearly every decision, a migraine — and admits to hesitating about posting any of it because the risk of falling flat on her face felt real.
• The stated lesson is that asking for help does not mean you cannot figure it out yourself; it means you do not have to do it the hard way.

A one-hour call with another founder from her incubator, whom Borden credits with the tactics that stopped the reverts and effectively supplied a blueprint for getting over the hump.

• Borden then set up a weighted memory system and an ongoing reflection and improvement routine to manage the overwhelm.
• The founder's guidance is attributed to her, not presented as Borden's own method.

Borden contrasts the early days of The Borden Group, when the determination was to figure everything out alone, with this build, where advisors and a founder community are treated as part of the work rather than a fallback.

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Borden calls that good news for material drawn from real client work and made the entire eBook collection in The Borden Group's creator store free, plus additional free tools. The library is organized around specific situations rather than topics: executives seeking board seats, professionals navigating a career chapter, founders building visibility, people who want to show up on LinkedIn but are unsure what to say, introverts who find personal branding uncomfortable, and professionals seeking stronger relationships and a wider network.

The free creator store itself, which Borden invites readers to use and to critique, asking what else should be in it.

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The argument is backed by the record Borden describes — bartending, waitressing, retail, a real estate license and advertising phone sales in the early 2000s, a decade in the car business from age 23 across sales and marketing roles with vendors, consultants and dealerships, that chapter closed in 2021 to start a business, and a fashion degree now applied to garment technology more than 20 years later.

Borden's own account of meeting a career friend through a LinkedIn connection and ending up at a spa together — the networking point being that you never know who is on the other side of a connection request.

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The exercise can be completed in an afternoon, which makes it the fastest way to judge whether her method suits you.

Borden argues that visibility advice usually skips a step: believing you deserve the attention.

• She says she spent 18 months studying the subject while writing her book Theatre of the Mind and had hundreds of conversations with founders and teams about it.
• The post then gives a working exercise.
• Identify five to ten people who have the kind of visibility you want, filtered by whether your ideal customers already follow, trust, and learn from them rather than by audience size.
• Study their topics, posting frequency, tone, where they speak, who they partner with, and how they build relationships off LinkedIn, looking for patterns rather than content to copy.
• Then enter the same environments in four escalating phases: leave real, non-AI comments consistently; publish two LinkedIn posts a week; start a monthly newsletter on LinkedIn, Substack, or Kit; pursue one relevant podcast appearance per quarter.

For brands planning a campaign

For a leadership workshop this is the most runnable module. The phased ladder gives facilitators a scoped starting point for executives who have never posted, and the "people your customers already trust" filter is a testable rule for choosing who to watch.

Written from six years of building her own brand online, this post addresses the internal sell rather than the posting itself.

• Borden lists the objections she still hears from employers — that it is a waste of time, a distraction, that personal brands are not a thing, that only the CEO can be visible, that marketing handles it — and the result she says those produce: no support, resentment, frustration.
• Her answer has three parts.
• Build the business case by tying presence to qualified inbound traffic and brand trust.
• Systemize it as an operating rhythm: weekly share and engage, monthly analyze and refine, quarterly evolve positioning, annually expand channels.
• Translate visibility into value by tracking reach, recruiting, and relationships and presenting it as a measurable business function.
• She closes by inviting readers to book a call ahead of 2027 budget planning.

For brands planning a campaign

This is the piece to hand a skeptical executive sponsor before a workshop.

• It frames the program as cadence and measurement rather than a marketing line item, which is the argument a B2B professional services firm needs internally.
• The post also doubles as her own sales motion, ending in a direct call to action, so a buyer can see how she approaches engagements.

Borden names the biggest mistake she sees executive teams make: their online presence does not reflect their actual work and depth of knowledge.

• She describes her own intake step — looking at how other leaders in a client's space show up on LinkedIn — and says she is still surprised by what she finds.
• Most profiles she reviews reshare company posts, use corporate jargon, or repeat what someone else said, so that experienced people with valuable perspectives look interchangeable.
• She frames the cost as a disconnect, because customers, investors, potential hires, and business partners research executives before meeting them.
• The post is tied to her interest in CommaCon: Social Season, presented by storyarb, running November 2–5 with four free virtual sessions, and it is labeled a paid partnership with storyarb.

For brands planning a campaign

Use it as the framing for a leadership workshop: the diagnosis is audience-facing, not vanity-facing. It also records a live partnership between Borden and storyarb through CommaCon, which is a brand relationship fact rather than evidence of what a paid engagement with her would look like.

Borden's own account of her career arc: early 2000s jobs in bars, waiting tables, retail, a real estate license, and advertising sales on the phones.

• She entered the car business at 23 and spent those years in sales and marketing leadership as a vendor, a consultant, and in retail, calling it the best formative experience of her life, and closed that chapter in 2021 to start her own business.
• Today she names The Borden Group, which helps executives and companies build visibility and authority through personal brands; Visible Leader, her personal-brand app; two books, Our Mommy Works with Cars and Theatre of the Mind, published through her imprint House of Lola; and Dirty Hippie, a laundry, dry-cleaning, and garment-care marketplace.
• She also says she guest podcasts and speaks, graduated from FIT, and moved back to the small New Jersey town where she grew up.

For brands planning a campaign

The years running sales and marketing in the car business, plus her current role as a founder building a startup, are the operator part of her credibility. If a workshop audience is skeptical of a pure branding consultant, this is the evidence that she has carried a number and run teams, and that she is currently a client-type as well as an advisor.

Borden announces that the eBooks in The Borden Group's creator store are now free.

• Her stated reason is that many people, over the last three years or more, Google what they need or ask AI instead of buying content.
• She describes the collection as drawn from client work with The Borden Group and lists the audiences it serves: executives seeking board seats, professionals navigating a career chapter, founders building visibility, people who want to show up on LinkedIn but are unsure what to say, introverts uncomfortable with personal branding, and professionals who want stronger relationships and a wider network.
• She points to additional free tools and asks readers to share the resources and suggest what else the store should hold.

For brands planning a campaign

Client-derived free resources are ready-made pre-work or leave-behinds for a workshop, and they set the price expectation for entry-level material. That matters when scoping a paid engagement: the buyer is comparing against a free library rather than an empty shelf.

Borden explains the origin of her app in a concrete moment: 100 pounds of laundry and a six-hour drive home from visiting her kids at camp.

• She could not find the solution she wanted, so she decided to build it.
• Dirty Hippie is described as an on-demand marketplace connecting consumers with local laundry, dry-cleaning, and specialty garment-care businesses, with pickup and delivery included — "DoorDash, but for your laundry."
• She recounts going door to door to recruit local businesses, acting as her own delivery driver to test the concept, and using AI and Codex to build the MVP as a nontechnical founder.
• The post promotes a podcast episode with Alan Blakeborough on Up Hill Both Ways.

For brands planning a campaign

For an executive visibility program this is proof she practices what she sells, which matters to clients who want an advisor who is currently building something. The subject matter itself is consumer garment care rather than B2B, so it works as credibility context, not as a content theme for a B2B campaign.

This is the most candid post in the set and the best evidence of how she talks about setbacks.

Borden describes six weeks building the Dirty Hippie MVP, with the build repeatedly reverting to iterations she had already fixed, jargon she does not know, and a November closed pilot approaching.

• She names the experience honestly: overwhelmed, drinking from a firehose, questioning nearly every decision, a migraine.
• The turn comes in a one-hour call with another founder from her incubator, who shared tactics to stop the reverts and effectively gave her a blueprint for getting over the hump; afterward she set up a weighted memory system and an ongoing reflection and improvement routine.
• She admits she was hesitant to document any of it publicly because the risk of falling flat on her face felt real, and contrasts this with the early days of The Borden Group when she was determined to figure everything out alone.
• Her lesson: asking for help does not mean she cannot figure it out herself, it means she does not have to do it the hard way.

For brands planning a campaign

This is the clearest demonstration of building in public, which is a content behavior a brand could ask her to model for its executives. It is also a caution for sponsors: her posting includes setbacks and personal detail, so a client expecting only polished output should say so up front.

She describes a common failure pattern: leaders who do post tend to reshare company announcements, use corporate jargon, or repost other people's commentary, so customers, investors, candidates, and partners researching them before a meeting find little that shows what they know.

• She says she usually begins an engagement by scanning how other leaders in the same space show up, then works from that gap.
• Her stated goal is not simply to get executives posting, but to help people understand who they are, what they know, and why their perspective matters.
• She also takes part in industry conversations on this theme, including CommaCon: Social Season, presented by storyarb, which her post labels a paid partnership.

Starts with a peer and competitor scan of how other leaders in the sector present themselves, then identifies what the leader's own profile is missing before any content work begins.

For brands planning a campaign

A leadership visibility workshop can open with an audit exercise rather than a writing exercise: have each participant compare their profile and posting against three or four respected peers in their sector and name the gap. Borden's diagnosis gives the session an evidence base and a reason for the work that executives can see for themselves.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Her answer is a three-part case.

• Build the business argument by tying presence to credibility, recruiting, and pipeline; systemize it into an operating rhythm that runs weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually; and report it in the language leadership already uses, tracking reach, recruiting, and relationships.
• She frames visibility as a measurable business function rather than a marketing line item, and points out that budget conversations happen in the months before the new year.

Turns visibility into a cadence with defined activities at each interval: share and engage weekly, analyze and refine monthly, evolve positioning quarterly, expand channels annually.

For brands planning a campaign

For a workshop inside a professional services firm, this is the internal-sell module. Participants leave with arguments and a reporting structure they can take to a partner, CFO, or board, which is often the step that decides whether a visibility program survives past the first quarter.

Examples: Source 1

She says she spent 18 months studying the topic while writing her book and has had hundreds of conversations with founders and teams about it, and that a strategist or agency cannot produce results if the client's self-image has not caught up with their actual career stage.

• Her recommended exercise has two parts.
• First, build a peer map of five to ten people whose visibility you want, chosen because your ideal customers already follow, trust, and learn from them rather than because they have large audiences.
• Then study their topics, posting frequency, tone, engagement, speaking, partnerships, and relationships for patterns, not for content to copy.
• Finally, move into those same environments in stages: consistent non-AI comments, two LinkedIn posts a week, a monthly newsletter on LinkedIn, Substack, or Kit, and one relevant podcast appearance each quarter.

Publishes the exercise as a numbered checklist readers can save, with the peer map as a written artifact and a staged cadence that starts with commenting before publishing.

For brands planning a campaign

This is a ready-made workshop module with a concrete take-home: each participant leaves with a named peer map and a four-phase cadence they could start the following week. The self-perception framing also gives the session an opening that does not feel like social media training.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

She describes six weeks building the first version of the product, code that kept reverting to older states, a migraine, and the feeling of drinking from a firehose.

• She describes speaking to another founder from her incubator, getting a blueprint for the immediate problem, then setting up a reflection and improvement process to manage the overwhelm.
• She is explicit that she was hesitant to share any of this because she was far outside her comfort zone and because the idea might fall flat.
• Elsewhere she describes going door to door to recruit local businesses, acting as her own delivery driver to test the concept, and a podcast conversation about taking a seemingly ridiculous idea seriously.

The building-in-public content is selective. She states plainly that she held back from posting the difficult parts at first, so the published record shows the struggles she chose to share, not a complete running account.

For brands planning a campaign

For brands that want a founder-voice contributor who can speak to what running a company actually feels like, this is the strongest thread in the material. It suits campaigns about perseverance, founder support, or small-business operations more than polished success stories.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

She writes that she has advisors but is learning most of it as she goes, does not know all the jargon, and uses AI and Codex to build her first working version.

• Her account records the practical failures of that approach, such as features reverting to older iterations, alongside the fixes other founders gave her.
• She has a closed pilot planned and has been working toward it while the product was still unstable.

For brands planning a campaign

This is the operator angle on AI in business rather than the vendor angle. It fits campaigns aimed at founders and small teams who are deciding whether they can build something themselves, and it gives a realistic picture of the friction rather than a tooling success story.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

She closed that chapter in 2021 to start her own company.

• She also notes she graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology and now works in garment technology more than 20 years later.
• Her stated lessons include that you can reinvent yourself as many times as you want and that you do not need everything figured out before starting.
• Her free resource library is written for several transition audiences at once: executives seeking board roles, professionals between jobs, founders, and introverts who find self-promotion uncomfortable.
• A separate post treats LinkedIn as a place where client, employee, and talent acquisition and genuine personal relationships all happen.

For brands planning a campaign

The career-change thread widens the audiences this creator can speak to. A workshop or content program aimed at people in transition, or at companies that want to encourage non-linear career paths internally, can lean on this part of her record rather than the executive-visibility material.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3

She has written two books, Our Mommy Works with Cars and Theatre of the Mind, published through her own imprint, House of Lola, and she says she spent 18 months studying the subject of the second one.

• She does guest podcasting and speaking because it lets her help people at scale, with appearances including The Chief Unsensored with Paul Essery and Up Hill Both Ways with Alan Blakeborough.
• She also made her entire eBook collection free inside The Borden Group's creator store, on the reasoning that people search or ask an AI instead of buying this kind of content, and framed the library around specific reader situations.

Publishes structured, list-driven posts that ask readers to save them, and repeats the same frameworks across formats, so a checklist in a post reappears in a book chapter or a speaking segment.

For brands planning a campaign

Borden is not limited to short posts. A campaign can request a written long-form piece, a recorded conversation, a workshop, or a gated resource built from the free-library model, which matters when a brief needs an asset rather than a post.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4 · Source 5

One post says the firm's eBook collection and creator store were made free to everyone, covering personal branding, board readiness, career moves, and LinkedIn content.

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Posts describe recruiting local businesses door to door, acting as their own delivery driver to test the concept, and building the app as a nontechnical founder with a closed pilot targeted for November.

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The post frames executive visibility as closing the gap between how leaders work and how they are perceived online.

Original disclosure

Paid partnership with storyarb.

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The post credits Launchpad with helping turn an idea into an actual business but does not state the terms of the relationship.

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Schramm explains what candidates look for in leaders before an interview; Borden focuses on making executives’ actual knowledge and work visible.

Schramm’s examples center on candidate research and recruiting; Borden also offers a peer-mapping exercise and a case for employer support of leaders’ visibility.

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Haralambous translates brand measures into commercial levers; Borden makes a business case for leadership visibility using credibility, recruiting and pipeline.

Haralambous focuses on B2B MarComms, board-level metrics and commercial outcomes, while Borden focuses on executive personal brands and practical visibility routines.

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Williams writes about leadership structures and how AI may interpret professional credibility; Borden writes about self-perception, visibility and communicating expertise.

Williams’ examples focus on organizational leadership and AI-mediated recognition; Borden’s focus is personal branding, executive visibility and founder experience.

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The two reviewed posts make the recruiting case directly: strong candidates check the company page and Glassdoor, and they look at the CEO on LinkedIn before they ever walk into an interview, then decide whether to lean in or move on.

• That argument names what employer-brand videos and culture posts cannot answer, which is how the leader actually thinks and what it would be like to work for them.
• For a professional services firm whose partners are invisible to the senior engineers, sales leaders, and specialists it needs to hire, this framing lands closer to the problem than a general personal-branding workshop would.

The tradeoff is scope.

• The reviewed posts make a case and outline an advantage; they do not show a workshop, a posting cadence, a peer-map exercise, or a way to keep a leadership team publishing after the kick-off.
• A firm that wants the visibility habit built across a group of partners would still be sourcing the teaching elsewhere.
• No speaking, workshop, fee, or availability evidence appears in the reviewed material, so anything booked would be arranged without published detail.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

The reviewed writing is built for the moment a visibility or brand programme has to survive a CFO's spreadsheet.

• It translates awareness into top-of-funnel efficiency, consideration into lower cost per acquisition, reputation into pricing power, and advocacy into retention and cross-sell, and it argues for giving marketing communications its own line in the P&L instead of burying it in general spend.
• If the professional services firm's board or finance lead has already dismissed executive visibility as a nice-to-have, this is the framing that answers the objection where it is raised.

The tradeoff is audience.

• These posts are addressed to marketing and communications leaders defending a function's budget, not to individual executives changing what their own profiles say.
• They do not cover profile reviews, peer maps, or a phased plan for what a leader posts and when, so a room of partners who need personal visibility work would have less to act on afterwards.
• The evidence base is also two posts from late 2025, which is a narrow basis for judging a full programme.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

One reviewed post describes an Authority Gap between the credibility someone has earned and the authority that AI can recognise, trust, and surface, written after their own inbound leads stopped and the first plausible explanations turned out to be wrong.

• The companion post puts numbers on what overstretched senior leaders cost through attrition and failed external hiring.
• A firm whose buyers now find experts through AI-mediated search and recommendation agents gets a sharper diagnosis from this pair than from a personal-branding cadence alone.

The tradeoff is that these are diagnoses, not a delivery method.

• Neither post sets out a workshop, an exercise, a posting rhythm, or a way to keep a leadership team visible across a quarter, so the firm would still need to buy the teaching.
• Both are single arguments rather than a body of work, and no speaking, advisory, fee, or availability evidence appears in the reviewed material.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2