Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of Enlightened Marketing and the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. Now in today's episode, we're going to be talking about a topic that I adore, which is branding. Branding your consulting business, deciding what do you want to be known for and what kind of promises do you want to make?

Now, when I began my business many years ago, I found working with very small businesses to be really jarring because nobody ever used the term brand to refer to any aspect of what they were doing in their business and that contrasted with when I was at the Coca-Cola Company, we would talk about Brand 40 times in a day and not just referring to specific individual brands, but actually do the job of what a brand was doing, whether it was communicating, whether this action we were taking was in alignment with the brand, and then when we use terms like that, that had a meaning to us, that I think it didn't have for many years for small business owners, they didn't feel like it was actionable, like something that I could actually do, to brand my business or that it was important for this to align with my brand or how was this communicating my brand. But things have changed a lot over the years, and one of the things that millennials have brought us is a generation of influencers. It's not only millennials that are influencers, but kind of before them, we didn't have so much of this kind of personal branding work.

I think Tom Peters first talked about it back in the 90s, the idea of a personal brand. So what you are known for and what you want to be known for and you taking charge of that to be able to build your career, and in this case, you can use that to build your consultancy. Now, I define Brand as the identity of any person, place, or thing. So if it's a noun, you can brand it. And what I would look at for you,is now for people a personal brand can be for your career, it can be for influencers, it can be pop stars, musicians. I've heard, you know, international cultures, you know, the nations of the world having kind of a brand identity, you know, so like, you can begin to know the culture of a certain country and that kind of becomes their brand and in addition, it can be definitely influencers, what they get to be known for now beyond companies, services, and products. I've also been a part of branding individuals who wanted to grow their careers, so personal brands but also kind of unusual brands like a city. What? How? What do they want to build in terms of that identity?

Churches which might seem kind of unusual because are kind of aren't all churches of a certain religion the same? Well, if you've been in more than one church for a certain religion, you know that they vary greatly in the experience that you have there and part of branding is communicating what kind of experience you're going to have before you partake of or experience a product, service or anything. I also have done events where we can say to people, here's why you should come to this event. It's going to be like this. So you can hear that the brand creates expectations of what that identity is going to be and the experience that you're going to have. Now, how does that apply to you as a consultant or building a consultancy? Well, the beautiful thing about a brand is that you can create it with intention. You can decide what you want your business identity to be and you can make that and then communicate it, and if you don't, it will be created anyway, accidentally, but you won't necessarily be able to control as well or influence what that identity will be. So you definitely want to take control and create your brand with intention.

So for the rest of this time, I'm going to talk to you about how to do that and give you some ideas about how that's done before. Some examples that might inspire you. The core question in creating your brand for your business is, what do you want to be known for or known as? How do you want to be referred to? So what I think is so exciting about this is, its so fun to me, people to talk to them to get to know them and as you do, you know they have this really interesting personality so it’s like the things that they are good at, their skills, their personal qualities and then you have more of their personalities aspect of it, all of those things are aspects of brands as well, so a personality for a person is like a brand will have a personality as well, a reputation for a person, a business will have a brand and that reputation is the thing that I was saying, what you are known for or known as? So some of the things that you can consider when you're deciding what you want to be known for or known as, a well fun game to play is to just think about brands that you know and then think about what comes to mind when you say them. So it's a classically we've always done you know, Nike is just doing it. Coca-Cola is refreshing. Volvo is safety. So there's a lot of that kind of old school brands that are like that. But I think a very fun exercise is to think of brands that come to mind, including individuals. You know, Kardassians, Martha Stewart and one that I want to talk more about a little bit later is Brené Brown. When you think about those brands and you bring them to mind, like, what are the words that you associate with them, or what are the experiences that you associate with them? So, for example, Martha Stewart, you know, she's known for hospitality, cooking,she's known for the expression, It's a good thing, things like that and there may be some negative associations as well. But what's really interesting is that if you have, if it's a brand that you prefer, then you probably hold more of the positive associations than the negative associations for them. And that says a lot about the goodwill of a brand because our preference for that brand means will forgive anything that may might seem kind of off-brand or not aligned like not a thing that we associate with them.

So you'll get a lot of goodwill from people who begin to know you, clients who work with you, people who are in your tribe who are familiar with you and your work. You'll get a pass on things that might be a little problematic sometimes if they feel like that's not really who she is or that's not really what I expect from her. As you begin to get known for the thing that you are known for.

So one of the ways that you can decide what you're going to be known for is by looking at perfect clients. So who are the perfect clients that you're going to work with? What are the problems that you want to get known for solving? What kind of solutions do you bring? Maybe the solutions you bring or specifically how you do that, how you bring those solutions are things that you want to be known for and what's really important is, is setting expectations. Your brand is a promise that the work you do fulfills. So you promise if you work with me, I will help you to X, and then the work that you do is actually delivering on that promise. It's fulfilling it.

We decide what we want people to expect from us and you create boundaries in your brand when you say, I don't want people to expect that from me. So, for example, if you have a phone number on your website, you're expecting phone calls and so if you get cranky because people are calling you as opposed to emailing you, you're conflicting expectations.

I've taken a very minuscule example there because I want to show you the difference between expectation and something you shouldn't promise, if you are saying that working with us on your organization's really stressful problems will be easy. Then when you get in there and it turns into a hard slog, your client is going to be surprised. So it's a matter of saying you want to be able to promise what things are going to be like when someone works with you and then deliver on that. So just make sure that those things are aligned.

Again, looking at who you want to work with, that is going to contribute a major part to your brand. What problems do you want to solve? Select those carefully again with intention, don't work on problems with any client that you don't want to work on. I have some clients who help who are, you know, financial CFOs or bookkeepers who work with companies and they may or may not choose to work with companies in financial distress. I've had many clients who are amazing in chaos. So they want to come into a chaotic situation because they thrive in those situations. If that's not you, you don't want to promise and you don't want to market to anybody with a chaotic problem or chaotic situation, emergencies, things like that. So set yourself up for success.

The outcomes that you get, the topics that you work on, the areas that you work, and those are all going to be aspects of your brand. Niche and specialty are another thing that we hear alot about in brands as well. So niche and specialty are also aspects of a brand that you can work with and incorporate it into your brand. Now I call it niche instead of a niche, because niche rhymes with rich and niche is those who you're going to serve and then specialty is that thing you do, which you're amazingly good at and it's a subset of all of the aspects of things that you could do. So, for example, if the universe of your gifts is PR like you work in the area, public relations or PR, that's a generalist. A generalist would be just a general PR person. A specialist would maybe work in crisis communications. So if you do crisis communications, then you already have a specialty. Now, the niche, meaning the audience that you would do that for, let's say, is food companies, food manufacturers. So if you are a crisis communications PR person for food companies, then you're going to specialize in a very specific niche. I highly recommend getting it down to this level in your work, because it makes it really easy for you to get known for that and you can see that you stand out from all the other PR people and who should call you is going to know exactly who they are. So maybe this consultant or consultancy is handling things like tainted food crises or any other sorts of trade, fair trade issues, labor issues, things like that that might happen to manufacturers. They're going to be very skilled in handling this kind of communication. So think of that for yourself. For me, I'm a marketing consultant or a business consultant very broadly and then I can narrow that down to the specific work that I do. I do business growth, biz dev, business growth for women consultants. So it's a lot easier for me to market exactly what I'm doing in that way. You can stay a generalist and work with a niche, or you can be a specialist who works with a broader audience than a specific niche. So there are all kinds of ways to work that.

I want to share one really funny example. I had a client, her name is Nora and she had grown up in her family's own businesses, and then she went to college and became a therapist and was a therapist for many years and as sometimes happens in that profession, got burned out and she wanted to expand and work with businesses and so when she came to me, she wanted to work on her brand, like what? Which should I be known for? How do I market myself so that marketing is easier than just being a general business coach? And so when I looked at her background, I said, oh, my gosh. When you came out of a family-owned business, it would make a lot of sense that you would be a business coach bringing those business skills to family own businesses, because to be honest, I think that a therapy background is going to really help because a lot of family-owned businesses have all of the same issues that families have and well she loved that idea, she didn't really feel excited about working with family-owned businesses in the family dynamic but she did remember during that time that she'd really enjoyed working with partners, businesses that had, you know, two partners or three partners. And like many of my clients who are consultants, you know, we usually sometimes there's a single consultant. Sometimes we come together with a partner or two and she loved working with those partnerships because, again, they had a lot of mixed-up interpersonal dynamics that her therapist part, her therapist self could help with and then she could help with the business aspects of it due to her having been self-employed for many years and also having grown up in family own business.

So you can hear that a story forms around, that answers the question why you? So if you're a business partnership and maybe you're struggling with either power dynamics, you're struggling to grow the business, you're struggling with succession planning, there are all kinds of things that they might be struggling with it, that, if they think, who should we turn to for that? Nora is the one who could be known for helping them. So that's an example of how you can look into your own background and look at your own skills, look at who you've loved helping in the past, and think about what you can do for them.

One of my favorite things about Brand is that your brand is you on your best day. A lot of us can rise and be amazing on certain occasions, but we can't really sustain that every single day and I thought there was a really good example of this. I was in a conversation with a friend of mine, she's a coach named Sue and sometimes when Sue and I get on the phone, we devolve into kind of gossip and it's unnecessarily sniping, horrible gossip but it's definitely, you know, like just enjoyable telling stories, enjoying talking about all kinds of things, not necessarily being our highest selves at that moment. So I think we'd been telling some stories and probably gossiping a bit and she referred to some work with a client that she was doing and she said, yeah, well you know, I'm really nonjudgmental and I think a casual observer might have heard our previously got to be a conversation and thought she's not judgmental but the truth is, as she said when she has her coach hat on, Sue is completely nonjudgmental. Now, when we're in other realms of our lives, we might be but when she has a coach hat on, that's how she's going to be.

I thought about this when I was working on the brand for a city. This city was growing economically and it wanted to attract all kinds of new people to come and live there but there had been some negative incidents, they wanted to nurture diversity, but they'd had some struggles with diversity, let's say.

Now, do the few struggles that they've had completely invalidate their promise that we are an inclusive place or we're welcoming. That's a decision that you have to make when you're working on a brand, like, what's the word that you can say that is truest to how you will be, what do you want to promise to be? What expectations do you want to set? But in this case, we felt like on its best day this city was welcoming.

So when you're working on your brand and you're thinking about the promise, the outcomes that you can promise and how you want to be as a brand, I want you to think about the best results you get when you work with perfect clients, not the times that sometimes things don't work out as well.

Sometimes you've accepted a less than perfect client to work with and that maybe didn't go that well. That's a lot of times when we're trying to make a big, bold promise with our brand, which is what I want you to do. Well, you just say if you are this kind of person or company or business or organization, if you're this kind and you have this problem or situation, my business can help you to achieve this big, bold outcome.

I want you to be able to make a big promise and you can feel in integrity with that promise because you have achieved those results before. So thinking about the biggest, boldest promise that you can make is you on your best day, you on your best day when you have been really rigorous about selecting a perfect client. That's a promise that you can make because, you know, you can deliver on.

So I wanted to share the example of Brené Brown as a brand because she's just launched a podcast. You might be hearing this some time in the future, but right now she's, I'm really enjoying hearing her podcast for many reasons, and one is just she's so authentically herself and so the podcast is brand new and it's a little crunchy and I love that because mine is brand new and a little crunchy and what I especially love, what is Brené Brown

known for? If you think about the words that immediately come to mind when you hear her name, you think vulnerability? Probably. I think of vulnerability. I think, researcher and I think Texas and those are the things that immediately come to mind and here's what's really interesting, is that the topic that she's known for, probably mostly because of her TED talk is vulnerability, researcher is her essential gift or skillset like she's an incredible qualitative researcher and having come from a corporate background where we looked at qualitative and quantitative research, and qualitative research is really, really time-consuming and important. She's done thousands and thousands of hours of that. So she professionally interviews people, which is why her podcast is great, she's amazing in asking questions and then Texan.

So we get a little brand personality in addition to her skillset or talents and in addition to that topic and that's, I want you to hear that because that's very often the way that your clients or those who begin to be familiar with your brand are going to know you.

What do you want to be known for or known as? Now, I don't know if that's the things that she would have said originally, but they're now on her Web site. So she knows that those are the things and it's important to her to put Texan up there. So there's that authenticity piece that she wants to bring forward and I think that's really important and part of the reason I wanted to share her as an example is to talk about on brand and off-brand, because when you've decided what you want to be known for and for example, what if it were those three things?

I think the Texas piece has a certain amount of authenticity and lack of compromise. She's just like, here's how I am, deal with it. And one of the stories I heard of her going, you know, she's a corporate consultant as well and one of the stories I heard of her going into corporations, they said to her, we want to come in and work with us because we want to really foster creativity and innovation and collaboration but don't talk about that vulnerability stuff and she said, there can be no creativity, innovation, and collaboration without vulnerability. So basically, no, I'm not going to do that, she also said I heard this another interview where she said this is where you can come in, but you can't cuss and you have to dress differently, we're professionals for an office, and she said, well, I'm not going to do that. So if you saw Brené using all kinds of euphemisms for her cuss words and dressed in some sort of corporate suit, that would be very jarring and very off-brand right? What's in alignment with her is for her to wear her eclectic outfits and for her to swear, as she's telling her stories and to also tell stories, many of which are unflattering to her, showing her in-process, authentic, real, wonderful, effective, endearing. So she has promised her brand promise is I may not be perfect. I don't know this. I'm telling you what I believe her brand promise to be. I may not be perfect, but I'm going to be real and I will always be real, in her podcast when the things that I noticed and she notes this intentionally is she said she wasn't going to do any ads except for things that she loved and so and she wouldn't read their copy, their marketing copy, she'll only deliver it herself.

Again, I'm interested in that to the extent that it helps you to create your brand. What are the things that people can expect from you, if you're Brené, they can expect that you're going to come in and talk about vulnerability, you can talk about things that make people uncomfortable, which helps them to get results. You're going to be dressed the way you dress and not the way everybody else is dressed, you're going to use language that makes it real. Keeps it real, whether that's going to be acceptable to everybody in the room or not. They should just expect it, and so what are your equivalents of that? What do you want to be known for or known as? How are you going to express that in your business? What clients and what problems do you want to address and what promises do you want to make to them? Big, bold promises, the biggest, boldest promise that you can make and still be telling the truth about what you on your best day can achieve. That's what I want you to look for.

So as you're putting this together, as you're thinking about these things, bring to mind brands that you love, bring to mind brands that maybe have triggered you or are not for you and what does that tell you about brands? So as you're working on this, I just want to let you know that I have a great hand out with some thought starters for you, some questions, some templates for you to fill in to help you to work on creating your brand for your consultancy, so you can find that in the show notes. And until next time, I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consultancy. Thanks for listening.