You Are Building a Reputation Inside Someone Else’s Company. Susan Hannam Explains What Happens When It Disappears.

Your title, your access and your credibility are on loan. Here is what to build while you still have them.

In the three years to the end of 2025, ¹3.3 million Americans lost jobs they had held for at least three years. In nearly half of those cases the position or shift was abolished. Of the people who found full-time work again, ²only about half are earning as much as they did before.

Susan Hannam was one of them. She was made redundant in January 2025, six months after moving to Hong Kong, having spent more than 25 years building brands and cultures for other people. She had made that call about other people herself, from the other side of the desk. “I knew perfectly well it wasn’t personal,” she says. “Unfortunately nobody had passed that information on to my ego, because it felt incredibly personal.”

The people who still have their jobs are not necessarily in better shape. Gallup’s most recent global survey put ³employee engagement at 20%, its lowest level since 2020, with manager engagement falling from 27% to 22% in a single year. Capable, senior, apparently fine.

What Hannam has spent the time since working out is not a comeback story. It is a harder question about where your reputation is actually stored, who owns the building, and what it takes to move out.

The Platform You Are Standing On Belongs to Someone Else

Hannam’s first corporate job was at Coca-Cola, and she has written that she has never drunk a Pepsi since. Heineken followed, where she was Senior Regional Brand Manager for the region out of Dubai.

So she is not guessing about how brands get built. Her point is that she was building the wrong one.

We tell creators all the time not to build their entire business on Instagram or LinkedIn because they don’t own the platform or the audience. The algorithm changes tomorrow and you’re screwed. Yet we don’t really talk about careers in the same way.

The parallel is exact, and almost nobody draws it. “You can spend 20 years building your reputation inside a company, but ultimately they still own the platform you’re standing on,” she says. “Your title, your email address, your access, the logo giving you credibility.” Then, flatly: “And then one day they don’t. I learned that one the hard way.”

The algorithm changes tomorrow and you’re screwed.

I remember thinking, hang on, I’ve spent my entire career building other people’s brands, businesses, teams and reputations, and somebody else can still wake up one morning and make a decision that completely changes my life. I don’t want that anymore. I want to build something for myself.

I remember thinking, hang on, I’ve spent my entire career building other people’s brands, businesses, teams and reputations, and somebody else can still wake up one morning and make a decision that completely changes my life. I don’t want that anymore. I want to build something for myself.

Nobody Gets Promoted for Saying They Are Exhausted

She spent the following decade on the other side of the problem, running culture and engagement for Emirates Group and then people experience at Unifonic. Which is to say she has read the engagement data, and she has sat in the rooms where people explain themselves to their employer.

Her diagnosis is not that the work is too hard. It is that the performance works.

“I think we get trapped in the performance because we’re rewarded for being good at it,” she says. “Nobody gives you a promotion for saying, ‘Actually, I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m exhausted and I’m starting to wonder whether I even want this life.’”

Nobody gives you a promotion for saying, ‘Actually, I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m exhausted and I’m starting to wonder whether I even want this life.’

Then success itself becomes the argument for not changing anything. “And the more successful you become, the harder it can be to question it because now you’ve got evidence. The title, the salary, the house, the LinkedIn announcement everyone congratulated you on.”

She knows the shape of it from the inside. She has written about squeezing family summers into two weeks of annual leave while still answering emails from a sun lounger, which is not a scheduling problem. It is what the performance costs.

She works, as she puts it on her profile, with people who look successful on paper but feel quietly offended by their own lives.

The Question She Asks Instead of “What Do You Want?”

Most career advice starts by asking people what they want. Hannam thinks that question is too easy to answer dishonestly.

“One of the questions I’m slightly obsessed with at the moment is, ‘What are you pretending not to know?’” she says. “Because I think most of us know far more than we admit.”

What are you pretending not to know?

You know when you dread Sunday night. You know when you’ve stopped liking the person you’re married to. You know when the promotion you thought would make you happy hasn’t. You know when you’re lonely despite having 600 contacts in your phone.

The instruction that follows is smaller than most people expect, and that is the point. “The first thing is simply to tell yourself the truth without immediately demanding a five-point action plan for fixing it.” No resignation letter. No move to Bali. One accurate sentence, said privately, and nothing else required of you that week.

Telling yourself the truth is also not the same as saying everything out loud, a distinction she credits to her mother, whose line she quoted in a post after deciding not to publish a rant she had already written and screenshotted: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing.”

“I’ve become much less interested in asking people what they want,” she says, “and much more interested in asking what they’re pretending not to know.”

The Case You Never Make for Yourself

There is a second gap, and it is the one that costs money. People who can audit a business in an afternoon have no working knowledge of their own value. As Hannam puts it: “We spend an extraordinary amount of time collecting evidence against ourselves and very little collecting evidence for ourselves.”

Her correction is an inventory, not an affirmation. What have I actually done? What am I really good at? What do people come to me for? What have I survived? Those are facts, and they are admissible.

The other thing I’ve realised is that your biggest unfair advantage is usually the thing nobody else can copy, which is you. That sounds horribly cheesy, but bear with me. There are thousands of people who know about branding. Thousands who can talk about careers, leadership or starting again. I can’t win by trying to be the cleverest person on the internet on any of those subjects.

The other thing I’ve realised is that your biggest unfair advantage is usually the thing nobody else can copy, which is you. That sounds horribly cheesy, but bear with me. There are thousands of people who know about branding. Thousands who can talk about careers, leadership or starting again. I can’t win by trying to be the cleverest person on the internet on any of those subjects.

Which turns the usual personal branding advice inside out. Polish is not the differentiator. “A lot of the things people respond to most in me now are things I spent years editing in corporate life,” she says. The humour. The sarcasm. Saying what she actually thinks.

She applies the same directness to money, including her own reluctance about it. She has written that asking people for money makes her want to crawl out of her own skin, which she notes is an excellent business model for going broke. She is done with the pretence: “I want to do work I love, build something I’m proud of, have an impact AND make serious money. Why are we pretending I have to pick three?”

Twenty-Five Years on Both Sides of the Table

The credentials are the argument for taking any of this seriously. More than 25 years across brand and culture, from Heineken to nearly eleven years at Emirates Group, then three years leading people experience at a fast-growing global technology company. An MSc in International Human Resources from Manchester Metropolitan University. Certification as a coach with the ICF, as a Gallup Strengths coach, and as a Personal Brand Strategist. Twelve recommendations on her profile from people who reported to her, one of whom wrote that she treats mistakes “as opportunities for growth rather than setbacks, creating a culture of trust and learning.”

Then there is the evidence from her own method, which is the only case study she can honestly claim right now.

Last month she posted a list of six things a 49-year-old woman is scared to admit: that rejection has knocked her confidence, that she cannot afford to retire, that she wants to make money and does not entirely know how yet. It drew more than 480 reactions and 174 comments. She had expected the response to skew female. It did not. “I probably get more men than women in my DMs when I write honestly about this stuff,” she says, and on that post “the comments were pretty evenly split between men and women.”

The unpolished version outperformed 25 years of the polished one.

Where Susan Is Now

She is in Hong Kong, writing, speaking, working with brands, finishing her next book and launching Susan Off Script, a podcast about ambition, money, ageing, work and the other things people think and rarely say.

Outside that: two teenagers, one now at university, one who ended a summer of her mother’s undivided attention by pointing out, “Mumma. We have literally hung out all summer.” A month off LinkedIn last year and no regrets about it. A brief appearance as an extra in the Bollywood film Happy New Year, which she describes as blink and you’ll miss me.

She is not promising a result yet, which is rather the point of the whole argument.

“Ask me again in 12 months. Hopefully I’ll have some receipts.”

Susan Hannam writes, speaks and makes Susan Off Script at susanhannam.com.