Founder of LAR Media | Copywriter | Personal Brand Manager | Business Consultant | Copywriter | Freelancer | Social Media Content Writer
A little over a year ago, Lizzie Rands was pulling pints at a local venue in Denby Dale, Yorkshire, quietly convinced that everyone around her had life sorted and she was the only one still working it out. She had a business degree, a handful of internships, and enough self-doubt to fill a notebook. What she did not have was a plan. What happened next is the part the personal branding industry would rather you did not notice: she turned the uncertainty itself into the strategy, and it worked better than any polished, expert-led approach she had ever seen.
Not the Expert. The Honest One.
Lizzie Rands is the founder of LAR Media, a personal branding and content agency she launched four days after her 23rd birthday, built on a single conviction that most marketing firms quietly contradict with every piece of content they produce. Rands believes that people do not connect with brands because they look impressive. They connect because they feel real.
From the Bar to the Brief
The career that built her does not follow a straight line, and that is precisely the point. Rands studied Business Management and Marketing at the University of Hull, graduating in 2024 into the kind of post-university moment that nobody really prepares you for. The job she wanted was not yet there. So she went home, picked up bartending shifts at the Pie Hall in Denby Dale, and started looking for ways to stay sharp while she figured out the next step.
She did not wait long before creating her own opening. Noticing that the Pie Hall had almost no meaningful social media presence, she offered to take it over. The results were immediate and measurable. Monthly views grew from 11,000 in October 2024 to 56,000 by the end of November, a 509% increase, and continued climbing to 162,000 by January 2025. She was not working from a proven playbook. She was working from instinct, consistency, and a close attention to what the local community actually responded to.
That instinct carried her into her first internships, at Hype3 Media, UK STEM, and an earlier university project with F&T Vending Co., where she scored the highest grade in her course, 88%, and earned a direct presentation to the Director and General Manager. Each role added something the next one required. Client communication. Content strategy. The ability to make something feel specific to a single person or organisation rather than generic to an entire industry. By the time she joined BlocMarket as an Account Manager in May 2025, managing over 15 company and personal brands on LinkedIn, she had already developed a clear sense of what good content felt like and what it did not.
The agency world sharpened her further. In her first six months at BlocMarket, she helped deliver a 600% increase in engagement and impressions for a construction company client through personal storytelling, 50,000 impressions for a mortgage broker’s personal brand in a single month, and 22,000 impressions for a second construction client. The numbers were strong. But something else was forming alongside them, a growing conviction about what the work was really for and what it was consistently getting wrong.
The Moment the Notes Stopped Coming Back
LAR Media launched in September 2025, and Lizzie Rands made a decision early on that most people in her position would not have made. She did not position herself as the expert who had already figured everything out. She positioned herself as someone who was building in real time, sharing the unpolished version, the doubt, the caffeine, the overthinking, the small wins that did not look like wins yet.
“I realised pretty quickly that positioning myself as a real, relatable person who didn’t have all the answers was probably the best thing I could do for my business,” she says. “People want to buy from people, and I think the more real you are, the more people trust you.”
That honesty drove her own LinkedIn from zero to over 5,000 followers in under seven months, without paid promotion and without performing a version of herself she did not recognise.
The same philosophy runs through every client engagement. Rands grew a holistic therapies business from an empty diary to fully booked. She built a dog waste company’s entire brand from scratch, including the logo, and generated 15,000 views in their first month on social media. She increased a client’s Facebook views by 3.5 times organically. For each of these, the starting point was the same: not a questionnaire, not a content calendar template, but a conversation.
The work she describes most readily is the mortgage broker she supported for nearly a year at BlocMarket. They started with nothing and built to 50,000 impressions in a single month through consistent LinkedIn content rooted in his real expertise and personality. But the result she returns to is not the number.
“About four months in, the notes and corrections just stopped,” she says. “Every content email I sent would come back with, ‘Perfect, thanks.’ That was when I knew I’d actually nailed his tone of voice.”
That is the bar she sets for herself. Not content that performs. Content that sounds so completely like the person it was written for that they stop needing to change it.
The Business She Actually Wants
There is a version of this story where Lizzie Rands announces she is building the next great marketing agency, scaling to a team of twenty, chasing a headline number. She is not telling that version.
What she describes instead is deliberate and, in its own way, more considered than the usual founder ambition narrative. LAR Media exists because she wanted to build a working life she did not dread. She wanted freedom, good clients, and work she was genuinely proud of. She is not dismissing growth. She is just refusing to chase it for its own sake.
That refusal is not a small thing. In an industry that constantly sells the idea of more, bigger, faster, Rands built her reputation by doing the opposite: slowing down enough to hear how a person actually speaks before writing a single word on their behalf. The founders who work with her are not getting a content package. They are getting someone who will sit them in front of a camera, ask them questions, and listen, really listen, until the words on the page finally sound like them.
She built 5,000 followers and a growing client base by admitting she did not have all the answers. It turns out that was the answer all along.
Lizzie Rands is the Founder of LAR Media, based in Huddersfield, England. She works with founders and small businesses to build personal brands and social media presences that sound like the people behind them, not like a social media manager wrote them. To connect with Lizzie or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile or email lizzie.larmedia@gmail.com.
