“If you think of your business like a journey, your mission is the car, and your vision is the destination.”

Ola Kowalska

On 9 September 2023, we hosted our first ELTA-Rhine event with the vivacious Ola Kowalska on Building a Personal Teaching Branding. Clearly, the topic found high resonance amongst our members, who for the largest part, are freelance trainers having to market themselves to sustain a regular client base. After only a few weeks of advertising the event, Laura Edwards, our events co-ordinator had to close the registration, due to its high interest.

Branding is a term not many English trainers have associated themselves with. Ola’s bold, refreshing and encouraging approach for trainers to step out of their stale comfort zone can be seen as a challenging essential to moving onto a higher income scale. This is what she says about branding yourself:

“Your personal teaching brand should be the foundation of everything you say, do, create and post in your business. It encapsulates your skills, personality, beliefs, mission and vision. It influences how you show up and want the world to see you.”

“It’s also how you can attract attention from your ideal students and get them interested in buying from you. A big part of building a personal brand as a teacher is deciding how you want to show up. Do you want to be your fabulous, authentic self? Or would you prefer to show up in a different way?”

According to Ola, a very strong prerequisite for successful branding, is to be clear on your personal value system, and to visibly communicate this outwards to attract the right client match and impact your subsequent sales. This is what she emphasised:

“A recent study showed that 82% of customers prefer to buy from businesses they feel aligned with, and 39% said they would stop buying from a brand altogether if their values don’t match.” “Crazy, right!? I suggest coming up with 3-4 core values that represent what you stand for as a teacher and a business owner. Then think about how these already (or can) show up in your classes, your messaging and your actions. Your values should underpin your tone of voice because they are what your brand stands for, and there’s no better way to show that than through what you say and how you say it.”

We received very positive and enthusiastic feedback from the event, and participants appreciated Ola’s authentic and unabashed approach to marketing your skills and talents, a topic most trainers shy away from.

For more on Ola, and her many delightful useful insights, click on the links below, to be directed to her website: Here is her podcast episode and blog post

By Johanna Furgoll