This interview is with Libby Crossland, Co-founder at Leadership Visibility Co..

Libby Crossland, Co-founder, Leadership Visibility Co

Can you tell us about your journey into founder branding and leadership visibility? What led you to start The Leadership Visibility Co. after two decades of building executive brands?

I’ve been doing this work long before personal branding became a buzzword. My whole career has been built on helping people be seen clearly. Sometimes by accident, sometimes by necessity.I launched my first recruitment business at 19, then grew one of the UK’s first CV agencies into a global team before losing it in the financial crash. That taught me really valuable lessons about reputation, trust, and rebuilding. I moved into HR, marketing, and ultimately executive branding, where I spent years helping senior leaders shape their public presence and get recognised for the work they were already doing.

Across those two decades, I have worked with more than a thousand leaders, from founders to Fortune-level execs.

The shift into founder branding and leadership visibility happened naturally. The world changed. Trust changed. Online presence has changed. AI flattened corporate messaging. People started caring far more about who was leading than what the company did. And I realised the work wasn’t just about CVs or profiles anymore. It was about visibility as a business asset.

So I built The Leadership Visibility Co with my business partner, Suzie Thompson. Between us, we’ve lived every side of leadership, from running teams, carrying targets, fixing things under pressure, rebuilding careers, and navigating industries that don’t always make it easy for women to lead or be heard. We knew leaders needed a place where their voice actually landed and their story made sense in the market.

LVCo exists because strong work shouldn’t stay invisible. Leaders deserve to be understood. Teams deserve clarity. And companies grow faster when the humans at the top stop hiding behind logos and start communicating like… well, humans.

Everything we do now sits on that foundation. Evidence-led. Real experience over performance. Helping leaders show up in a way people trust.

You’ve worked with hundreds of C-level executives from around the world over the past twenty years. What patterns have you noticed in leaders who successfully build their personal brand versus those who struggle with visibility?

After twenty years of working with C-suite leaders, the gap between the ones who thrive with visibility and the ones who avoid it is rarely talent. It’s rarely confidence either. It usually comes down to three things: clarity, honesty, and consistency.

The leaders who build a strong personal brand know what they stand for. They can explain their thinking, their decisions, and the value of their work without sliding into jargon or performance mode. They don’t try to reinvent themselves online. They show the same judgment and steadiness they use in the boardroom.

They also don’t wait for a perfect moment. They share progress, context, lessons, and the real work behind the scenes. When something goes well, they talk about the people who made it happen. When something is hard, they explain the thinking behind the decision. That level of openness builds trust faster than any polished announcement.

The leaders who struggle often fall into the same traps. They underestimate how little people know about their role. They assume their results are obvious. They wait until something is finished, approved, or award-worthy before saying a word. By then, the moment’s gone and the story has no weight.

The ones who avoid it usually try to sound like LinkedIn. They overthink, hesitate, and worry about coming across as self-promotional. They’re brilliant in meetings but silent in public, which means the market fills in the blanks for them… and the blanks are rarely kind.

In your LinkedIn content, you’ve emphasized that honesty and showing ‘the messy parts’ has actually strengthened your results. Can you share a specific moment when being vulnerable about a mistake or challenge unexpectedly elevated your credibility as a leader?

One of the biggest jumps in my own visibility came from a post I nearly didn’t publish.

A few months ago, I talked openly about starting my first business at 19 and losing it to a rogue venture capitalist, which led to bankruptcy. I’d avoided telling that story for years because it felt like a failure stamped on my forehead. I thought people would judge.

The opposite happened.

That post brought in a wave of messages from founders, senior leaders, and people who’d been carrying their own version of that experience in silence. They didn’t care that the business fell apart. They cared that I rebuilt anyway. They cared that I knew what it felt like to have everything on the line and start again. It made the work I do now make far more sense to them. It showed the lived experience behind the expertise.

That moment taught me something I now repeat to every leader I work with: people don’t trust perfection. They trust someone who can talk plainly about what they’ve survived, what they’ve learned, and how that shapes the way they lead.

You mentioned that clarity is the most critical skill for leaders to master. When a founder comes to you feeling overwhelmed and unclear about their brand direction, what’s the first thing you help them strip back to rediscover what actually matters?

It sounds like a ChatGPT cliche, but the first thing I strip back is the noise. Most founders come to us overwhelmed because they’re carrying everyone else’s expectations: investors, clients, old colleagues, the internet. None of that tells you who you are or what you want to be known for.

So we start with the simplest question: what’s the real work you want people to know about? Not the job title. Not the positioning statement. The actual work. The thing you’d defend in a boardroom or build again from scratch if you had to.

Once we land that, everything else becomes easier. We get rid of the borrowed language. We ditch the content ideas that belong to someone else. We look at their career and find the thread that’s been there all along. For most leaders, that clarity has been sitting in front of them for years, they’ve just never said it out loud.

When a founder reconnects with that core. They stop trying to “be everything” and start showing up as themselves, which is the only version that ever works long term.

You’ve said that people come to you ‘already knowing what you’re about’ because of your transparent approach online. For a founder just starting to build their leadership visibility, what’s one practical thing they can do this week to help their audience understand who they are as a leader?

Pick a tiny, real moment from their week and talk about it the way they’d talk to a mate over coffee.

Not a leadership lesson, just… here’s what happened, here’s what I was thinking, here’s why I handled it the way I did.

Founders massively underestimate how useful that is. People don’t need grand speeches. They want to see how you think when you’re not on stage. That’s the stuff that helps someone understand you quickly.

Do that once, properly, and your audience will get a clearer picture of you as a leader than a month of curated professional updates.

You work specifically with founders and small business owners now. What differences do you see in how they need to approach leadership visibility compared to the C-level executives at larger corporations you’ve worked with in the past?

Founders don’t get the luxury of hiding behind a logo. That’s the biggest difference.

In big corporations, the brand does a lot of the heavy lifting. C-suite leaders still need to show up, but they’ve got whole teams shaping the message, smoothing the edges, and protecting the reputation. There’s a buffer for them. Founders don’t have that. People buy them first. Their judgment. Their energy. Their way of thinking. Before anyone looks at the product or the service, they look at the person building it.

Small business owners also can’t rely on big milestone comms. They don’t have quarterly reports, town halls, press releases, or investor decks to lean on. Their visibility has to come from the everyday work.

And because their audience is smaller and closer, any silence hits harder. One quiet month from a founder feels like the lights are off. One quiet month from a corporate exec is barely noticeable.

The other big shift is tone. Corporate leaders can hold a bit of distance. It’s almost expected. Founders can’t. Their audience wants a real human. Someone they’d trust enough to buy from, refer, or partner with. The bar for honesty is higher, and the impact of it is bigger.

So the approach changes. They need to let people see the person running the thing, not just the thing itself.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Just one thing. At The Leadership Visibility Co., we always say to our clients that visibility isn’t about trying to be a certain type of founder or leader. It’s about being understood. When people can see how you think, what you care about, and what you’re building, everything moves faster.

Most people overcomplicate it. They wait until they’ve figured out their brand before they say anything. You only get clarity by showing up and talking like a real person.

If there’s one message I’d leave people with, it’s this: you don’t need to become louder. You need to become clearer. And you don’t need permission to start.