Most people think building a personal brand means picking a niche, posting consistently, and waiting for the algorithm to reward you.
That’s part of it. But it misses the deeper thing that actually makes a brand work.
I recently sat down with Michael Mott, a critically acclaimed composer, lyricist, and vocal producer with over 15 million streams across his platforms. Playbill named him one of the top musical theater songwriters you should know. I’ve known him for 20 years, going back to our days at Ithaca College, and watching how his career has grown is one of the better entrepreneurship case studies I’ve come across.
What he shared applies to any business, real estate included.
Know Who You Are Before You Try to Grow
Michael spent years trying to fit a mold that wasn’t his. He was working with a major record label, writing pop music, chasing what executives told him sounded current. The songs weren’t resonating. The album didn’t recoup.
Then he went back to writing musical theater, the thing he actually does best, and things clicked. Shows got picked up. Songs started moving.
His takeaway was simple: he was fitting a square peg into a round hole.
This is one of the most common places I see entrepreneurs get stuck. They see what’s working for someone else and try to copy the format without asking whether it actually fits who they are and what they do. It almost never works. The people whose brands grow and compound over time are the ones who’ve done the work of figuring out their lane and committed to it.
For me that meant leaning into Battery Park City when everyone else was chasing Manhattan’s bigger markets. I built 110 deals there in a single year not by being everywhere, but by going deeper in one place. That’s a brand.
Say Yes to the Unexpected
Michael wrote a song called “Don’t Stop Dancing.” He did not write it for show choirs. He wrote it because it felt right for the project he was working on at the time.
Then out of nowhere, a woman reached out asking if her show choir could perform it. He said yes. Then another choir. Then another. Today that song is one of the most performed show choir pieces in the country, and he gets royalties from performances in states he’s never visited, from kids who discovered him through their high school choir director.
Then those kids looked up the original recording. Then they found the sheet music. Then some of them wanted private lessons. A song became a revenue stream he never planned.
Michael borrows a term from improv for this mindset: yes and. In improv, you never shut down what your scene partner throws at you. You accept it and build on it. You say yes, and then you add to it. Saying no kills the scene.
The same thing happens in business. The people who build the most interesting careers are almost never the ones who stuck to the original plan. They’re the ones who stayed open and said yes to things that felt adjacent to what they were doing, even when the destination wasn’t clear yet.
I’ve experienced this too. The podcast started as something I wanted to do for myself. It’s turned into a platform that reaches agents, buyers, sellers, and entrepreneurs well beyond the NYC real estate market. I didn’t plan that. I just kept showing up.
Building a Brand on Social Media Before It Was Normal
Michael was early to social media in a real way. Not just posting, but actually building. He credits his cousin, who runs a social media agency, for pointing him toward platforms and audiences he was ignoring. But he did the work.
His early strategy was direct: get the biggest name possible to sing a song, put it out, and let people come for the name and stay for the music. It worked because it was built on substance. The content was good. The songs were real. The audience that found him stayed because there was something worth staying for.
That’s the thing people get backwards. They focus entirely on growth tactics before they’ve built anything worth finding. Followers you attract before you have real content don’t stick around. The sequence matters: know your brand, create something genuine, then amplify.
On the real estate side, this is why I’ve always said reviews, video content, and social presence aren’t optional anymore. Before a client sits down with me, they’ve already looked me up. The 137 Google reviews, the Hey Andy reels, the #KlimaChange content, all of that is doing work before I ever pick up the phone. That’s your brand operating for you while you’re focused on something else.
Your Brand Creates Income Streams You Didn’t Anticipate
Here’s the part of Michael’s story that I find genuinely fascinating from a business perspective.
He set out to write Broadway musicals. That’s his north star. Everything else, the show choir licensing, the sheet music sales, the vocal coaching, the album streams, grew out of staying consistent with that identity and saying yes when things came his way.
He didn’t sit down one day and map out a passive income strategy. He just kept creating, kept putting work into the world, and kept saying yes to things that felt aligned with who he is. The revenue streams followed.
This is what knowing your brand actually does for you. It creates a gravitational pull. The right people find you, and once they find you, they keep going deeper into what you’ve built. They buy the sheet music. They book the lesson. They refer a friend.
In real estate it works the same way. When buyers and sellers in Battery Park City want to work with someone who knows that market inside out, they don’t have to search hard to find me. The brand has already done the positioning. I’m not competing on every deal in every neighborhood. I’ve built something specific, and the right clients find it.
The Compound Effect of Showing Up
One thing Michael said that I keep coming back to: a little bit of effort every single day will lead to change.
Not a launch. Not a viral moment. Not one big deal. Just consistent effort, stacked over time, in the direction that feels true to who you are.
He’s been building for 20 years. I’ve been in New York City real estate for over a decade. Neither of us built anything overnight. But the brands we’ve built are real because we kept showing up, kept saying yes to the right things, and stayed clear on what we were actually trying to do.
If you’re working on building something, that’s the framework. Know your brand. Say yes. Keep going.
And if you’re looking to buy or sell in New York City and want someone who has been building in this market for over a decade, I’d love to connect.