
The Subtle Art of Showing Off: Lessons in Mastering Your Personal Brand from Patrice Poltzer
Unfinished BusinessShow Notes
In today’s hyperconnected world, the boundaries between you and your company’s brand are few and far between — gone are the days when founders could remain comfortably behind the scenes while your product did the talking. Now, getting ahead of the game means **getting in front of the lens. But embracing your brand isn’t about showing up flawless — it’s just about showing up.
Welcome to Unfinished Business, the podcast where we dig into the whys, hows, and WTFs of building and thriving in business — hosted by longtime founder friends Alex Schinasi and Lee Rotenberg. Every week, we’ll invite industry leaders and fellow entrepreneurs to candidly share their wins, truths, and lessons (and laugh while doing it).
This week, Patrice Poltzer helps us unpack the art of self-promotion — how to connect with your audience, ease the self-pressure, and get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Whether you’re building your first company or scaling your next, keep reading for your five-step guide to mastering your personal brand.
More from Unfinished Business
Hulken made millions on Black Friday 2025, and Alex and Lee are already planning 2026 differently. Their best campaign last year went only to existing customers, and the Black Friday email that beat their Cyber Monday send had no design at all.
Kevin Chen (sells a red light therapy helmet that can cost more than a thousand dollars, takes months to buy, and takes six months to show results. Every DTC playbook says to start with a $30 impulse buy. Kevin went the other way, and he'll be the first to tell you he wouldn't recommend it. It started with his dad's quit-smoking laser clinic, a business where helping customers meant never seeing them again, and a last-ditch pivot into hair loss with the family business one bad bet away from shutting down.
Hulken pays Structured $8,500 a month. In Q4 last year, the email and SMS channel Structured runs for them drove more than $3.3 million. Even in a dead summer month with barely any inventory, it still brought in over $540,000.
Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar posted about a pickle company every day for months before they had a single jar to sell. The first videos were trends, and the trends flopped in the way that matters: views came in, followers didn't.
For most of their careers, Alex and Lee believed a bigger team meant a stronger company. Now they believe the opposite, and they've got the receipts: $50M in revenue last year with seven full-time employees and payroll running at just 4%. In this solo episode, they make the case that in the AI era, headcount has flipped from a status symbol into a warning sign.