Full-Bodied? Or House Plonk?

Be into the wine, not the label.

I'm not much of a wine drinker. A social glass now and then, otherwise close to teetotal. So when I found myself listening to Gary Vaynerchuk talk through his early attempts at wine content, I wasn't expecting much.

He surprised me. The tasting notes ran through an entire small journey — fruit, then something sharper, then a flavour that vanished entirely partway through, replaced by something else altogether. One grape variety he described as genuinely incomparable to anything else out there.

"It's really its own animal." — Gary Vaynerchuk

That's the thing about wine description done properly. Layered, specific, willing to sit with contradiction — fruity and earthy in the same breath, familiar and completely unlike anything else at once.

Here's my question. If a ten-pound bottle of wine can earn that level of loving detail, in service of building a following of people who genuinely care, why do estate agents describe themselves in roughly four words? What we do. How we do it. How good we claim to be. That's usually the entire bouquet on offer, and it smells faintly of mediocrity dressed up as confidence. House wine, essentially, when it could be so much more.

One of the more interesting agents I've come across reads like that unclassifiable grape — genuinely unlike anyone else in the room. Strength and a kind of unbothered freedom. A strong sense of what's fair. Self-effacing and quietly boastful, sometimes in the same sentence. Determined not to fit in, comfortable admitting when he's wrong, defiant about doing what he actually believes is right regardless of who's watching. Put him in a corporate structure and he'd wither within a year, partly from the constraint, partly from having to watch the truth get quietly smoothed over.

There's a whole body of content sitting inside any agent willing to write like that about themselves. Competence is one thing. Character is an entirely different vintage.

If competence is genuinely your whole pitch, go for it. Compete with every other agent chasing the same title, aim for number one in your town, collect the trophy at the industry awards. There might be a real satisfaction in that. Vendors might even come running.

Or they might not. Some will clock the sameness underneath the polish and quietly file you as just another competent agent — plenty of upfront flavour, nothing underneath it. Others will find you overwhelming, too dense, too oak-aged for what they actually wanted, which was something reassuring rather than impressive. The Pinot Grigio of the estate agency world, easy and unchallenging, tends to outsell the complicated stuff more often than the industry likes to admit.

In that race to be "better," it's easy to forget how vendors actually choose. Character comes first. Do I like this person? Can I believe what they're telling me? Sometimes it's decided in a split second, over one throwaway comment — the moment I've started calling the "uh-oh moment," when they quietly decide you're not the one, and nothing that follows changes their mind. No valuation, no fee, no award, no script recovers from it.

Competence matters, obviously. But for most vendors, it's simply assumed — a baseline, not a differentiator. What they're actually hunting for is something far harder to fake: your character. So why do so many agents keep it so carefully hidden?

Is it fear of not being interesting enough? Fear of standing out and being judged for it? Whatever the reason, the retreat is always the same — hide behind the corporate name, lean entirely on competence, and hope that's sufficient. Good, but rarely good enough.

Competence gets disrupted by things entirely outside your control. There are plenty of highly competent agents on the industry scrapheap to prove it. Character, offered honestly and consistently, is the one asset that tends to survive whatever happens to the market.

In practical terms, The Brand Within opens doors competence alone never manages — vendors seeking you out rather than the reverse, opportunities finding you instead of the other way round. It's a living canvas, and like wine, it only gains complexity with age.

House plonk has its fans, and there's no shame in that — plenty will drink it without asking too many questions. But a full-bodied red has so much more to offer anyone actually paying attention. So I'm told.

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Originally published on LinkedIn.