Being named an Inc Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, alongside Richard Branson, Brene Brown, and John C Maxwell, along with winning CIO Prime Views Top Influential Business Leader 2020 award, and author of a #1 bestseller, Bobby Umar, once belonged to a small town on the east coast of Canada. However, he soon realized that living in a small town was not an ideal situation for him. So he went off to attend McGill University in Montreal. Over here, Bobby initially decided to get into the field of engineering, but after working for Bombardier he soon got bored and decided to shift his focus. As a result, he explored many different career paths including musical theatre, marketing, singing and dancing, before finally landing on personal branding and leadership development, which to date, he has carried on with.
Even though the beginning of Bobby’s journey was difficult, as he had started his business right when the recession hit, he still never felt the need to give up. In addition to that, during that time, he and his wife were also trying to start a family. Bobby had a lot on his plate for the first few entrepreneurship years, because while dedicating his time to his business, he also had to be a devoted dad. However, when he did his first TEDx talk in March 2011, his social media strategy also slowly started to get momentum. Bobby invested 6 complete months into building his social media presence, after which he soon started getting speaking gigs based on his leadership content. Within 18 months, he passed 100,000 followers. After seeing his strong social digital presence, Bobby knew that now was the best time to start building opportunities through his speaker agent and on his own by traveling around the world to speak. In 2013, he launched the DYPB (Discover Your Personal Brand) movement and organized the largest personal branding conference for 5 years in a row. Bobby also owns Raeallan, where he provides transformational speaking and training services, and through which he has done 5 TEDx talks and more recently won the ‘Most Outstanding Leadership Development Training Provider’ award in Canada in The 2021 Global Business Insight Awards.
Today, the person who once belonged to a small town and always felt lost or stuck in his career holds expertise in multiple areas including thought leadership, personal branding, public speaking, storytelling, building meaningful relationships, confidence/mindset, digital influence, and content creation. Consequently, Bobby hopes that with his expertise one day he will be able to achieve his goal of getting his 1 millionth social media follower, along with also getting the chance to get on the TED.com stage to share his story and message.
