Lakshmi Rebecca: How to Build a Profitable Personal Brand & Scale a Global Creative Agency | Be Yourself Podcast

Lakshmi Rebecca

Founder of Makers Advertising Agency — on personal brand visibility, AI discoverability, why most creators don't make money, and building a business that scales beyond you

Watch on YouTube Lakshmi's LinkedIn
40 minutes
Personal Brand · Agency Business · Content Strategy · Discoverability

Listen to this Episode

About the Guest

Lakshmi Rebecca — Founder of Makers Advertising Agency, Podcast Host

One of India's early YouTubers, creating content since 2011 — over five years she built 150+ episodes interviewing impact entrepreneurs, anchored major business events, and became a brand ambassador, all before "creator economy" was a phrase

She used that visibility to raise angel funding and start Makers, a global B2B creative agency on three pillars: an in-house team, a global collaborative, and a proprietary tech platform; now she's returned to podcasting with the Lakshmi Rebecca Show

Podcast
The Lakshmi Rebecca Show — conversations on entrepreneurship, business and visibility, restarted after a 4-year hiatus with a global scope and global guests
Agency
Makers — a tech-enabled global creative agency for B2B enterprises, on a three-pillar model: in-house team, global collaborative, and a proprietary technology platform
Background
educational books at 18, BBC and Discovery documentaries, early YouTube in India (2011), 150 episodes, brand ambassador, then angel-funded agency founder
Why She Took a Break
she paused content for 4–5 years to prove the Makers model and build the technology, returning only when the systems could hold everything else

Key Quotes

“

I can go interview a thousand entrepreneurs on their stories and learnings and that is me leaning into what I love doing. And I can do this for the next 10, 20 years and not be paid just for sheer love. Well, I'll do it and I think I'll get paid because I'll be so good at it. I will get paid.

Lakshmi Rebecca
“

Gone are the days where we could just create content for the joy of creating content. We have to create content that helps us be discoverable. What's going to help clients and the world discover us for the reasons that we want to be discovered?

Lakshmi Rebecca
“

You might work 6 months on bagging a big account but if that big account can stay with you and grow with you for the next 10 years you've hit a gold mine. And you take that model and you replicate that.

Lakshmi Rebecca

Episode Chapters

0:00 Episode Teaser & Intro 1:34 Why We Should Be Visible Online 4:10 Best Discoverability Methods 7:02 Respecting Social Platforms 9:32 Lakshmi's Business Evolution 18:35 Creating a Meaningful Life 23:38 Earning From a Personal Brand 33:17 Strategic Content Creation 37:40 Sticky Revenue

Full Transcript

BTW: This episode of the Be Yourself Podcast is produced by Beverly Media. Also on the show:
Maureen Wiley Clough — Aging Out of Corporate, Career Reinvention After 40 & Why Honesty Comes at a Price →
0:00 Episode Teaser & Intro
Lakshmi I can go interview a thousand entrepreneurs on their stories and learnings and that is me leaning into what I love doing. And I can do this for the next 10 20 years and not be paid just for sheer love. Yeah. Well, I'll do it and I think I'll get paid because I'll be so good at it. I will get paid.
Lakshmi Gone are the days where we could just create content for the joy of creating content. We have to create content that helps us be discoverable.
Lakshmi There's a way that you need to write to feed AI the data that it wants for you to rank in an AI search engine or AI search result.
Lakshmi It's always an intersection of not only what you love, but also what you're good at.
Lakshmi And let's talk about money. Okay. Very important.
Sergey Hey everyone, welcome to the Be Yourself podcast. The podcast on expressing our true selves. Today my guest is Lakshmi Rebecca who is a host of her own podcast called Lakshmi Rebecca show where she helps people to show up better, be visible. She's a creative founder of makers advertising agency. She's a motivational speaker and a consultant to customer experience officers, help them to build public voice. Lakshmi, welcome to the show.
Lakshmi Thank you.
1:34 Why We Should Be Visible Online
Sergey The first thing I want to ask you is about the problem of visibility that you have outlined. So in terms of attaining visibility, what small businesses, small agencies and solopreneurs still don't get or do wrong nowadays in your view?
Lakshmi So you know I was doing some research on this recently. If you look at global data, 90% of all businesses are small and medium businesses. And then if you look at data in the US around agencies there are close to 100,000 small creative agencies or boutique agencies. Now when we look at... if you step outside of the US, if you look at a country like India which is where I'm talking to you from today, in a developing country it's often a price war. I'm guessing you have a bit of a similar problem too where sometimes you know it's quality and price and there's always this tug of war. Whereas in a developed country you may not be fighting over price but more about creative excellence and innovation. Whatever market you are in, there are a few things that all of us need to do to stand out because otherwise there is so much competition and the world is so online today and there are so many ways that customers identify their agencies. Trust me when I say this — the number one way is still word of mouth. It's still referral, but at the same time, if you want to be remembered, you have to be online or you have to be in a more traditional sense maybe winning awards. One way or another, visibility matters. Either awards get you that visibility or you create content and you're posting online or like you, you're doing this podcast, something that keeps you top of mind and also helps in terms of both SEO and discoverability. I think that's very important.
Lakshmi Gone are the days where we could just create content for the joy of creating content. We have to create content that helps us be discoverable. I think that's the key word. What's going to help clients and the world discover us for the reasons that we want to be discovered? And SEO and AEO matter a lot.
4:10 Best Discoverability Methods
Sergey For the reasons that we want to be discovered — and what are the new venues because the artificial intelligence search engine is becoming big. So what are the new ways, the new discoverability path that people should take into account?
Lakshmi Okay. So we worked with an SEO and AEO agency recently for our agency. And we commissioned about 50 different blog posts. So they would do their SEO strategy and AEO strategy, come up with the keywords, discuss the topics with us, and then they would write these really long form, detailed structured blog posts. And they're written in such a way that they feed the AI search engine. And that's important. There's a way that you need to write to feed AI the data that it wants for you to rank in an AI search engine or AI search result. So that's the first thing. You got to learn that. And I'm sure if we do a little bit of search around this — use maybe a Gemini or a ChatGPT Pro — you'll get the structure that you need. And then you'll need an SEO tool to look at the keywords that you need and then you map it all together and look at topics that you want to be ranking for. What are people searching for and how to translate the keywords that people are searching for to topics that are relevant to you, and then write those blog posts in a manner that's suitable to your agency.
Lakshmi So that's for you if you're an agency right now. If you're an individual — LinkedIn is big these days and so is Instagram. I would say for example for you as an individual Sergey and for me as an individual — for us to land more clients, we need to be putting out material on LinkedIn because that's where the clients will discover us the most. Having said that, we might also need to be equally present on Instagram because sometimes marketers are just scrolling through content and finding interesting things, discovering creative people on Instagram too. So both of these channels would matter. On YouTube — I think YouTube is great for discovering solutions and services and information, like how something is done. But if you wanted to get more leads and business perhaps the other two platforms are better.
7:02 Respecting Social Platforms
Sergey And I feel that people on LinkedIn — in a way some people are even haters of Instagram. And what Chris Do told you on your show with him — that he was able to be in high ranking positions all across social media, which is a very very rare breed. So what do you think? By understanding our business, we can pick one or two communication channels that fit the most and not spread around everybody?
Lakshmi Yeah, absolutely. Because even Chris talks about it. No one can start by being fully active on YouTube, on Twitter, on TikTok, and Instagram, and LinkedIn like that — you're just going to kill yourself trying to do that. So you got to start small. Start with one or two platforms and really go deep with that. And here's something that I've been noticing a lot of good creators do. When you create a post for Instagram, remember that you're talking to an individual buyer more. So how you write something or how you package something for Instagram may be very different to how you take that same topic and rephrase it and repackage it for LinkedIn. For example, you mentioned the episode with Chris — that's the latest on my podcast. For that one episode which is almost a two-hour conversation we have about six reels, two carousels, one key takeaways carousel and two mids. All the shots and reels go on YouTube, all the shots all the reels go on Instagram, but only some of the reels go on LinkedIn.
Lakshmi And what we write on LinkedIn to support them is very different to what we write for Instagram or for YouTube. The carousels — one or two might work very well on LinkedIn. They may not work as well on Instagram. So if you're talking from a business lens, LinkedIn may be better. If you're talking to an individual, Instagram may be better. Small businesses are on Instagram too. So that works. But if you're talking to a CXO — a CEO or a CMO — then LinkedIn is better.
9:32 Lakshmi's Business Evolution
Sergey We're going to come back to the business talk towards the end of the conversation, but right now I want to transition a little bit to you and your story. You mentioned your YouTube and obviously the latest release, but I actually checked that your prior episode before the Chris Do episode was like four years ago and I think you were mainly talking to Indian people in India. So can you tell me a little bit — through the lenses of your show — how did it evolve? Who are you going to invite now? And maybe something about your personal journey and why it was like that before and it is like this now.
Lakshmi I'll talk about the show and the business first and then I'll talk about my personal life journey a little. When I started creating content on YouTube back in 2011 — so 15 years ago — I was one of the early YouTubers in India. The first five years I was very very active. I crafted about 150 episodes all on impact entrepreneurs from across India. Now my revenue wasn't primarily from YouTube and from the content. My revenue came from two other sources that the YouTube channel supported me on. My revenue came from me anchoring events — I was a business anchor. And number two, I had a production house. A lot of clients got in touch with me because of the content and the great quality storytelling that I did on my YouTube channel. I was even hired to run brand YouTube channels end to end. So those were my two revenue channels.
Lakshmi At one point I was also a brand ambassador for a brand called Vaia which basically sells lunch boxes and water bottles and things like that. And they signed me up. You know Christo talks about how he made $120,000 for one post. And what did I get paid? I got paid about $300,000–$400,000 for about 5 days of work in a year. But it finally got there after putting in work for 5 years.
Lakshmi Then I thought to myself — okay, do I want to do something bigger? Do I want to just always be the face of something or do I want to do something else? What would happen if I built something that was bigger than me where I wasn't always at the center of it? Because of the network that the show had built for me and the visibility that my content and personal branding efforts had built for me, I was able to raise a small amount of money and start an angel-funded creative agency which is what Makers is today.
Lakshmi Our vision was that working with large B2B enterprises globally, we should be able to deliver for them whatever they need wherever in the world without necessarily having teams everywhere. Our business is a three-pillar model. The first pillar is the in-house creative team that does all the thinking and the crafting and the strategizing, the design, the copy, maybe even the post-production. The second pillar is something called a collaborative — we work with people like you and a thousand other people across the world to do any on-ground production required or expanded team when required. And the third pillar that brings all of these two pieces together and our clients together is technology. We built our own platform — a technology platform that we own. So everything — our clients, all our collaborators, all our projects, the creative processes, the schedules, the costs, the margins — everything is on the cloud. We as a team of 20 or 30 people can do what would otherwise take 60 people. And I'm hoping that at some point I can make this technology available to other agencies as well.
Lakshmi So I took a complete four to five year break from content because I just wanted to build this business, build this technology, and I wanted to prove that this model, this idea that I had would really work. Now I'm in a place where my tech is almost fully built. We know it works. I've got good clients. We've got a great team. And that's very important because if I didn't have a great team, I wouldn't actually get back out there to create content again.
Lakshmi One of the things — and this is something I want to talk about in the future — small and medium businesses always struggle with handing off. The founders and owners always struggle with handing off. How do I get other people to do this at the same quality that I do the work so that I can step back from this and focus on something else, otherwise this business doesn't grow. The one thing that I've learned to do in this agency is: build processes, train, hire, train, retrain if needed, ensure that this can run with minimal intervention from me.
Sergey I have this thing — I feel like for most of the things that I do on the business front, I want the business to grow so that I'm not necessary. And most people are afraid of that. Most people are afraid — what am I going to do if I don't do this?
Lakshmi For me, I feel like my interests also keep evolving. Like now I'm back to doing my podcast and I want to do it at a global scale with global guests also because my clients are global. Our work is global. The majority of my team is in India but our work is global. And so I want to do the content globally to show clients — hey we could also do something like this for you. And of course I enjoy doing the podcast.
Lakshmi In the next 3 months we're probably doing about 20–30 different shoots in different countries across the world. I'm not involved in any of those shoots. Not in the crew curation, not in the quality checks. There are systems. The producers are experienced. They do it. As founders, as owners, if we want to grow — and I always want to grow, I'm always hungry to grow — we can't grow if we can't put the systems and the training in place that allows us to grow.
18:35 Creating a Meaningful Life
Sergey With you I sent you a small survey before the conversation. You said something on several occasions along the lines that once you stop having fun, it's not worth it. So can you tell us — how important do you think it is to have fun and to make decisions based on your gut feeling? And how has it worked for you?
Lakshmi I think I have made some very bad decisions from time to time and I think that's because I haven't listened to my gut all the time. And I think everybody will probably nod their head in agreement when I say this — sometimes it is so hard to listen to your intuition, to really listen to that inner voice that tells you, hey, this is what I really want or this is what I think is going to work. It is so hard because there's so much pressure. There's so much information, cues, guidance and advice and ideas being thrown at us every day. It is so hard to shut all of that. And somebody recently gave me this advice saying solitude is important. And rest is important. Because if you don't have a bit of solitude and you don't have a bit of rest you're not going to make the best decisions or the right decisions. You're not going to be quiet enough to make the better choices.
Lakshmi Fun — I think that's very very important. I've been building this agency for nine years now. I've been doing content. And for a long time even before I started the YouTube show — when I was 18 or 19 I was working on educational books for school children and then I worked on documentary films for BBC and Discovery. I've been involved in content and communications one way or another for 20 years now and I love it. I know what's my mojo. I know that I can wake up and do this and I love it. And it's so interesting that every year, every conversation, every project, you learn something new and you build on that and you keep building on that — and that's the fun, the learning and the building. If I had to do the same thing in the same way for a long time, I'd probably get bored. But you can keep building, you can keep tweaking. So that's fun.
Sergey I had Chris's friend Mark Pard on the show recently. He's a brand strategist and he said that his favorite author and the book that really made a difference in his life is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. And he said that meaning is nothing more than something you manufacture from day to day — you create it daily. It's something that animates you, makes you want to get up, makes you want to pour your energy into something. When we are creating something, it almost always fills us up. Especially when we're in service to other people and when other people give us feedback — that's the best thing in the world. All these vanity metrics — views, subscribers — it doesn't matter when you compare to a real influence or real impact that you make on human lives. I'm sure when people just reach out to you and say Lakshmi thank you so much, it makes all the difference in the world.
Lakshmi I think it does. I think it's important to have meaning. Coming from the documentary filmmaking background that I do and the first six to seven years of my YouTube channel being all about impact entrepreneurs and social enterprises — I found a lot of meaning in that. But I also realized something over the course of doing that: I love talking about entrepreneurship and business. I love learning about business. And therefore also the stronger B2B leaning for me personally — although there are people on my team who are much more fantastic with consumer brands — the B2B space is where I lean to naturally.
23:38 Earning From a Personal Brand
Sergey Let's talk a little bit about personal branding because you and Chris touched on something interesting. You said in your opening of your show that only 10 to 12% make $40–50K per year. And there's a lot of content creators — millions and millions of people haven't seen a dime. Chris said something interesting — that the wealth and the results are not distributed fairly. It is almost as if people who do succeed were able to craft a formula that works for them. He said you almost definitely need to be passionate, you need to be yourself, you need to be authentic, charismatic. But he couldn't articulate what exactly the formulas or the key points are. So what do you think is necessary for us to stand out and to create a personal brand that will help us in business, in hiring, in finding customers, even finding the love of our lives? What are these pillars that you think are necessary?
Lakshmi I think the first and the hardest thing to discover is what works for you. Whether it's the life partner or the work — there was something I read recently, a very interesting quote: don't chase an opportunity, chase your talent. That's very powerful. If you see Chris's trajectory — he was great at design, he knew how to make money, and he realized that what a lot of other creative agencies and independent creative folks don't have is they might have the creative skill but they don't know how to make the money. So he's like — let me teach you what I know. And he was also a good educator. So that sweet spot — he leaned into his talent, he leaned into what he was good at. I can go interview a thousand entrepreneurs on their stories and learnings and that is me leaning into what I love doing. And I can do this for the next 10 20 years and not be paid just for sheer love. Well, I'll do it and I think I'll get paid because I'll be so good at it. I will get paid.
Sergey I think that's the secret. You just said it.
Lakshmi Yes. Do what you love and keep doing it. But here's something else. I launched my new show just last month. About 14 months before that, I started doing my research on what I wanted the new show to be about. Like a year ago. We did a lot of research. And I had different people from the team get involved as well because I was like — listen, if I'm going to do this, and I know this is a minimum of a 10-year commitment. And you know for the first couple of years, you're just going to be putting in the work, building the community up again. I have 36,000 followers on YouTube — subscribers on YouTube — but I'll have to build it up. I've got nothing on Instagram, very little on LinkedIn. So how are you going to build this up? What are other influencers doing? What are other content creators doing? What are the topics we want to talk about?
Lakshmi One of the key things — we're still 100 years away from equality for women. Do I want to focus on equality for women? Do I want to focus completely on that because I'm so passionate about that? But I realized that while I could talk about it, I've had a very nonconformist life. I have just gone and done the things I wanted to do even if it upset my parents and people around me. And that's the reason I'm here today. How is someone who's such a nonconformist going to go talk to millions of women who have much more of a conformist life and encourage them? I don't have children, you know. Oprah managed to talk about family and motherhood in a very strong manner. I was like — I don't think I would be able to do such an authentic job of it. I don't think I have the depth and the knowledge. So it took me a few months of research and discovery and soul-searching to realize — okay maybe not that.
Lakshmi I was traveling on a long flight in November and I had so much time to think and I thought to myself — what is it that I really enjoyed doing about the last show? It was meeting entrepreneurs and talking about entrepreneurship and business. And I was like — I can do that for the rest of my life because I'm an entrepreneur too. My husband is an entrepreneur too. We talk a lot about business, business models, revenue models, and it is so fascinating. I realize I will never get tired of it. And I can look at it and ask meaningful questions. I can do it. I would love to research things around business and entrepreneurship and different ways in which people can build either meaningful things or profitable things or both.
Lakshmi And here's another thing. If you do a little bit of research — let's assume for a second Sergey, you're going to go teach the world how to make great videos. You will have a huge following for that. People want to learn that. So for me, when I talk about entrepreneurship, when I think about small business owners and what they need, I see a revenue opportunity too. I can see the kind of sponsorships and brand dealings that will come. I can see the kind of community I could build and the knowledge I could share. I'm no longer in a phase of my life where I want to do social work. I will do some charity but I'm not spending 10 years doing social work. That's not my calling. I'm here to make money — for the business, for myself, for my family.
33:17 Strategic Content Creation
Sergey I think I think you're addressing an elephant in the room because I've always been creating for the sake of creating, but deep down I realized I always knew that I wanted to make money from it. And I think that people can oppose the fact that no, I'm not here to make money. But you'd like to make money. Be honest with us. It's cool to be like Chris — to get to the point where you actually get traction, you get inquiries from making content. Inbound calls. I've started my video production agency a year and a half ago and we're only getting clients from outreach basically or me doing this. Maybe you can give us a few points of encouragement in this world of oversaturated content creation. Is there still a life where we can make money being creators? And if so, what would be your words of encouragement?
Lakshmi I think you absolutely can — as a content creator you absolutely can make money. While yes, you're right in saying that there are so many content creators today, about 80% of content creators don't make enough. So the first thing is: what is it that you stand for? There's got to be a niche. What is it that you want to be talking about? What is it people know they can come to you for and trust you for? Let's say you're a beauty blogger — there's this doctor called Dr. Anita Ratan who talks about beauty and skincare for brown women. There's somebody else who talks about skincare for women over 50. There's a niche. Chris Do has a niche — he talks to creative companies and boutique agencies on how they can make money and keep money coming. We have to identify that niche.
Lakshmi If we're a generalist or we're just doing content for the sake of content without defining the niche, without defining what people can come to us for, then that's a lost game. Most creative people want to create for the joy of creativity. I think you still can. I have painted enough walls on my house — I have a huge mural in my house that took 6 months to make. I do it with my hands and I get on the ladder and do it. That's my joy. Nobody needs to pay me for it. It's just my joy. It's my stress therapy. But when it comes to content in the business, the intent is very different. We're here to make money. We have salaries to pay. We want to put profits away. We want to grow.
Lakshmi Once you know what your niche is, what you're good at and what you can talk about for the next 10 years, then it's very easy to identify who are those top five or 10 or 20 people in the world talking to the same people, how are they doing it, to do the competitive benchmarking and maybe even do better than what's out there. If you don't know who you're competing against, it's very hard to stand out. Second thing — separate out the revenue channels from the joy channels eventually. There are hobbies for that. We all still need hobbies. And so whatever you choose, whatever is that niche, whoever that audience is — the more you're able to relate to that audience and the problem that they're facing, you'll be able to talk about that authentically and you can talk about it for the next 10, 20 years. You'll just get better at it with time.
37:40 Sticky Revenue
Lakshmi Similarly on the clients — who is your ideal client? One of the lessons that I have and I've learned it the hard way and the easy way: you might work 6 months on bagging a big account but if that big account can stay with you and grow with you for the next 10 years you've hit a gold mine. And you take that model and you replicate that. If we're constantly having to hunt down clients and pitch for them, that's hard. That's really hard to do. And if it's going to be fragmented work — maybe I'll come to you for one project and maybe I'll come to you again next year — that's not enough money on the table. So where can you put in the smartest way to acquire and keep and grow clients? What is the service that's going to do that for you? What type of clients need your service enough that they'll keep coming back to you? I think these are the things — stickiness, revenue stickiness, both ways.
Sergey The way you think in terms of frameworks and systems — it just blows me away. It's so cool that you have a really systematic way of thinking about business. This is something that I lack. And I can confess that I'm still not there but I'm getting there — because all the creative people, we hate frameworks. We want to be artistic. But in business, if you want to grow, if you want to scale, there are pretty understandable and maybe even simple systems and frameworks that you should follow just to scale. And you should not reinvent the wheel. People have done it before us. And we can come to people who know that, like you, to help us do this. So I'm very thankful for this practical and deep conversation. Lakshmi, thank you.
Lakshmi You're welcome. You're welcome.