Founder of Debbie Pro | Executive Brand Advisor | Fractional CBO | Personal Branding Consultant | Social Media Specialist | Executive Coach | Public Speaker
Ask a CEO with a seven figure business why they have no presence online and you will hear about the calendar. Debora Prossomariti does not accept the answer. Nobody builds that kind of company by being careless with their own time, she argues, so the calendar is partially a cover story. The real reason sits somewhere less comfortable, and she says it out loud to people who pay her to say it.
The Fractional Officer Leaders Call Before They Post Anything
Debora Prossomariti is the founder of Personal Branding Atelier LLC, known as Debbie Pro, and operates as a Fractional Chief Brand Officer to CEOs from her base in Dubai. She works with a deliberately small number of principals at a time, most of them mid-market and enterprise leaders whose authority goes unquestioned in a boardroom and unnoticed everywhere else.
She Points to Something Most CEOs Don’t Name
“What’s stopping you often has less to do with time, marketing skills or the platform. You know how to learn new skills, or delegate. But when it comes to your own visibility? That hits differently.
- First, the associations. Being visible can bring up fears of looking performative, trying too hard, or doing ‘too much marketing.’ For a private, low-key person, those can look contradictory. This is especially true if your industry is old-fashioned or secretive and executives tend to stay quiet. It can be harder to deviate from what your peers do. But standing out also means being willing to do something most people are too scared to do.
- Second, prioritization. You know you want to build a stronger public executive presence. But the stakes feel too high to risk. So you default to ‘I don’t have time.’
- Third, being a beginner. Building online is often new. When you hold a high-status role, looking like a newbie can feel threatening to your identity as a CEO. Ego also plays a role in this.”
In her view, “I don’t have time” is often a cover story executives tell themselves to avoid discomfort.
A Client Portfolio of $1M in Monthly Ad Spend and What It Taught Her About Silence
She did not arrive at this work through public relations or brand consultancy. She arrived through the auction.
Prossomariti grew up in Italy, studied at a linguistic high school, took a bachelor’s degree in business administration at Università degli Studi di Pavia, then added an international master’s at Católica Lisbon and study at IÉSEG in Paris. Her early roles were unglamorous and useful. A family furniture business. An export consortium in Northern Italy, keeping twelve member companies engaged. Eight months in Glasgow at McCrea Financial Services, a leading financial company, that got then acquired by One Four Nine Group, where she wrote more than forty recommendation letters and sat in on client meetings, learning what people actually sound like when money is on the table.
Then came Meta. Between 2020 and 2021 she managed a portfolio that grew to roughly $1M in monthly advertising spend across retail, travel and education, ranking in the top one percent of her program across EMEA from her first quarter. One client saw a twentyfold return on ad spend. Another grew campaign revenue by 400 percent year over year. She moved to Pinterest next, cutting one advertiser’s cost per acquisition in half while lifting return on ad spend by 135 percent, and pushing a luxury jewelry client’s cost per click below five cents.
Performance advertising is a brutal teacher. It removes taste from the conversation and replaces it with evidence. Ideas that feel sophisticated die quietly. Ideas that feel almost too plain convert.
“What I learned is that clarity and simplicity are king.”
That lesson turned out to transfer directly to executives, who are among the worst offenders. They write like the board is reading, because in their minds it always is. In October 2022 she left the platforms and built her own practice around fixing exactly that.
Ninety Days, Zero Footprint, and a Pipeline That Showed Up Anyway
One case makes the point cleanly. A high-profile technology founder in California had an enterprise reputation and no digital presence at all. No profile worth reading, no public narrative, nothing for an investor to find. Prossomariti did not begin where most advisers begin.
“I did not start with the question of what they should post about. I started with the founder’s goals, objectives and values.”
Within ninety days the founder’s platform was converting private authority into inbound interest, with institutional investors and enterprise partners reaching out directly. Speaking invitations followed from venues that mattered. Some conversations began because of a single post. The measure she cares about was never impressions for the sake of it.
The Canadian case is the emotional one. A deeply established communications industry leader, respected offline, was caught in start-stop cycles and quiet dread every time he tried to publish.
“He was overpolishing articles, deleting drafts, and wasting hours overthinking how he could show up.”
Prossomariti puts a number on that habit, and it is the number that makes executives sit forward. Decision paralysis at his level burns thousands of dollars a week in opportunity cost. She advised the company and coached him personally, because the block was behavioral before it was strategic. Within months he had scaled his platform past 20,000 engaged industry professionals, ranked among the top voices in his field, and turned into a paid international keynote speaker.
Her own results run on the same logic. Favikon ranks Debora Prossomariti the number one Italian content creator in her category, with more than thirty million views, features in Business Insider and LinkedIn News, and five-figure months inside her first six months of building intentionally. “Being seen means being known, and being known means being judged on something other than your company and its results.”
That sentence explains the entire client list. These are people who have been graded on revenue for twenty years and have never once been graded on themselves.
The Cost of the Version You Edited Down
The excuse was never the calendar. It was the quiet calculation that staying unreadable is safer than being misread, and Prossomariti’s answer is that the calculation is wrong at this level of career. She is careful about the promise. Discomfort is expected, she says, because the brain is built to keep you safe rather than to make you grow. What she refuses is the idea that the only alternative is performance.
“It’s possible to build a brand you’re proud of and that doesn’t sound like someone else.”
Debora Prossomariti, M.Sc., is the founder of Personal Branding Atelier LLC (Debbie Pro) and a Fractional Chief Brand Officer to CEOs, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She works with a select group of mid-market and enterprise leaders who want to build digital legacy, establish a stronger reputation online and drive revenue from their executive presence. To connect with Debora or learn more, visit www.debbie.pro or find her on LinkedIn.
