As the new year unfolds ahead of us, every business owner wants this year to be better than last year. More customers, better customers, more revenue, lower costs - whatever your metric, the idea is simple: you want to get more from your business without investing more time or money into it (two things that always seem to be in short supply).
How do you get your business to work for you without having to babysit the day-to-day operations?
Simple: think of it less as a business and more like a brand.
Businesses are basic and straightforward. Sell a product or service to someone and then, ideally, report it on your taxes. Repeat this process for as long as you can stand it. Every day thousands of businesses are started all over the world.
But a brand? A brand is how a business transitions into long-term thinking. Truly great and memorable brands are a rarity. They can be difficult to establish and require a completely different way of thinking about how you do business. Additionally, your audience is starved for brands they can connect to - you owe it to them!
Over the years, BAM has worked with our clients to turn their businesses into brands. Along the way, we have seen consistent results from all of them. If you haven’t established a brand with us yet, here is what you’re missing out on:
Don’t react; just act. Businesses fail because they spread themselves too thin reacting to everything that happens within their market. Some try to make every customer happy, while others jump on social media trends hoping they will “go viral.” Their actions aren’t usually “on brand.”
When you have a brand, you know exactly where your resources need to go. This is the biggest surprise our clients get: their brand doesn’t just tell the world what they do, but it reminds the business what it needs to do. Your brand reminds you of what you’re here to do for the audience that needs you the most.
There will always be the scum of the earth who decides to start a dropshipping company (thanks, Tim!), effectively making them the lazy liaison between customers and creators. Most of these “companies” fail because they are entirely focused on building a brand around a product they want to arbitrage. What they fail to realize is that people don’t want products; they want solutions.
Above all, your brand delivers a solution. How the solution is delivered is a part of the brand - maybe it’s a product, maybe it’s a service, maybe it is something else - it really doesn’t matter so long as your audience solves their problem. When you think of a brand in terms of a solution, your business is far more flexible about the products it can deliver. You no longer have to worry about your relationship with the factory or the price of shipping because your solution is no longer dependent on it.
Every business that comes to us is thinking about how they are going to pay their bills next month. How will they keep the lights on this month to drive more sales and keep the lights on next month? And so on and so on. You can see how this gets exhausting. Burnout is inevitable.
A brand lets you think years into the future. We’re still trying to figure out the exact science behind this (maybe it’s what they mean when they say ‘see the forest for the trees’?), but your brand helps you think about your business from one year to the next, instead of focusing on the month ahead of you. Solutions, unlike products, have no expiration date, and good things come with age.
Open up any social media app, and you will find someone asking for a like, follow, comment, or subscription. It is pure cringe. A brand ensures you don’t have to ask or beg for an audience or followers. The people you’re after show up because they want to be a part of what you’re doing. They like, follow, comment, and buy because they love what you do. Better yet, they love the idea of your brand so much they will gladly tell their colleagues all about you.
In other lights, this might remind you of the “1,000 True Fans” philosophy - the people who show up and buy everything no matter what. Audiences rarely do this for businesses, but they definitely do it for brands they love.
Your business may one day end, but the brand might not have to. If you were to exit your business today, who would buy it? Not just your product but the entirety of your business? Take a look at just about any business stat, and you’ll see that less than 8% of businesses are successfully sold by the owner. This means 92% of owners work their entire lives building a business, thinking it is their retirement nest egg, but finding out that no one wants to buy what they have.
Businesses might not be worth much, but brands can be worth their weight in gold. Consider the Filson brand - from 1919 the outfitter built a brand around the idea of “the American frontier.” The owner died in the 1970s and his family carried on the brand. The value of the brand and its solutions would result in the company being sold numerous times between 1990 and today - all the while maintaining the rugged, outdoorsy ethos it had developed over a century.
You might not be thinking of your exit from your business today, but when the time comes, you can bet potential buyers will be far more interested in the brand than the business.
This could be the year your business becomes a brand. A brand is where your customers become your acolytes and you have no question that your revenue will grow over the next several months. It can all start now. Reach out to our team directly, or get curious about the archetype behind your brand-to-be with our free analysis.