Category: Leadership

Posted on December 23rd, 2021

How to Use Your Personal Story for Brand Building

  • Brand
  • Business
  • Business Growth
  • Community
  • Entrepreneur
  • Leadership
  • Personal Story
  • storytelling
  • Strategy

Stories can make your brand stand out in a saturated market. 

Don’t think you’re interesting enough? You are. All your trials and errors and all your experiences create a unique story you can share with your prospects. 

Authentic stories are relatable and gain empathy from your target audience, helping you connect with them. 

Here are five ways you can tap into your story to build up your brand image.

 

Understand your personal story

Who are you? What do you do? Who is your audience? Why does your brand exist? 

The answers to these questions should be a story. You can tell all sorts of stories. They can be entertaining and/or inspirational. 

Have a clear vision of the story you want to tell, and make it meaningful so people can feel personally connected to it. 

Explore the things you’ve done. Whether it’s sports, your job, your hobbies, or any other activities一these things can add to your personal story and enhance your brand.

A remarkable brand story connects to your own story and manages to be real and relatable enough so it can also be your customer’s story. 

For example, if you have a diverse background, use it to connect with more audiences. 

 

Articulate the story

Storytelling is a big piece of marketing you can add to your website or content. Yet, it’s a huge opportunity often underutilized by entrepreneurs who tend to focus on the features and solutions they offer.  

People love stories. And they crave a genuine connection with brands. It’s like making new friends or having a new family. Think of your favorite restaurant or bank branch: people know your name, your favorites, your birthday… and you love it. The reason for that is the human connection. 

Think about how you convey your story to form that human connection. 

Once you piece your story together, see where your offering fits into the story. Know the purpose of the brand, and make sure it supports your mission. If you want a powerful brand story, form a sense of purpose beyond what you offer. 

 

Tell your why

Stories are impactful and memorable. According to cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, we are 22 times more likely to remember a fact when it’s in a story. 

Use your story to share information about your brand or your offerings with your customers.

For example, product description pages simply describe the product and materials. However, customers want to see why the products will matter to them. 

Why are your products designed the way they are designed? 

Why are you trying to solve this specific problem with your tool or service?

Your “why” can be inspired by your personal experiences. When customers have associated your products with your brand’s values and your motives to theirs, they are more likely to connect with you and choose you over your competitors. 

 

Base your product on your story

Use storytelling to your advantage. Digitally native brands are crushing it these days because they know their stories. They didn’t build the products for the sake of building products. They built the products around their stories.

Use the story to advance your ultimate goal, but don’t get stuck in the story. Keep providing real value to your customers. 

Find out about the customers you are selling to. What makes them tick, and what can you say—along with what you do—to connect with them? 

 

What’s your brand story?

Stories are powerful. It’s how we evolved as a civilization – through story-telling. Stories remain a big part of digital marketing today. Your story sets your brand apart. If you can identify the “why” of the product, it will be easier to integrate and create the “what” and “how.”

In the end, it’s not simply about selling to the customer. It’s reassuring your customers through your story that the products or services you offer can contribute to their lives in a positive way and solve their problems.

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Posted on May 27th, 2021

Don’t Miss These 5 Red Flags of Crappy Prospective Clients

  • #transform
  • Business
  • Business Goals
  • Business Growth
  • Entrepreneur
  • Goals
  • Leadership
  • LinkedIn
  • Mindset
  • Strategy

Do you encounter crappy clients? If yes, welcome to the club.

That’s one ugly aspect of business hardly anyone ever talks about – the crappy clients! Forgive the foul language, but I’d rather be precise with my terms than polite. The term is a really good way to describe those clients who make your life difficult.

We see the glamorous lifestyle many entrepreneurs flaunt on social media. It’s all Lamborghinis and Teslas and enthusiasm everywhere. But that’s not an accurate picture of business. Business can be tough and ugly.

I’ve had my share of experiences with crappy clients in my journey as an entrepreneur in the last eight years. I’m sure you all can relate to this because you have also experienced it yourself.

What I learned is you need to recognize those crappy clients as soon as possible and let them go.

I’ve identified five red flags you need to look for when considering working with a client. Once you recognize these red flags, you can cut all ties, nip things in the bud – insert any idiom you wish here to stop your suffering – and never deal with them again.

These red flags are gold! If you see these, make sure to hit the road.

1. Disorganized clients

If a business or a person seems disorganized and can’t plan ahead, that’s a big NO for business!

What is a sign of a disorganized client?

If you encounter a prospective client that needs to get stuff done yesterday, that’s a red flag.

Some clients are notorious for doing this. They’re always late! For everything! They need to get things done now because they hadn’t planned any of it and are now scrambling. This haphazard approach would take them nowhere and would sink you too.

If you say yes to them, you will be caught in their chaos, and your business will suffer.

2. Disorganized business

That leads me to red flag #2 – disorganization in your client’s business.

What are the signs of a disorganized business?

The red flags are: lack of clear strategy, no clarity on the makeup of the team, not clear who is responsible for hiring, and lack of clarity about their operations.

Typically, this means they don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re involving you in the process of not knowing what they’re doing. At the end, it will all fall to pieces.

3. Not knowing the what, where, and how’s of the business

Red flag #3 is not knowing what’s going on in the company. It echoes point #2, but it reflects the state of disarray inside the business – not knowing where things are.

For example, a crappy client I just fired didn’t know where their Google Analytics was. Google Analytics should be an easy thing to set up and monitor on a regular basis. They didn’t even know if they had set up Google Analytics. In fact, nobody in the company knew. Not the marketing person, not even the leader of the company.

If you see the client has trouble answering the basic questions about their business, you have both flags #2 and #3.

4. Passing the responsibility on to another

Red flag #4 is passing the buck. By that, I mean when the client blames someone else for their failures. This is a very bad quality in businesses, and I see this all the time.

“Well, I don’t know about that because the person who set this up is no longer here, and they didn’t tell me about it.”

If you see this in a client, don’t engage.

The responsible person should have figured it out by then. It’s their responsibility to their business. Even if they outsourced or delegated the setup, they should have figured things out. It’s part of being an entrepreneur and doing your job well.

5. Beating up vendors!

Red flag #5 is being cheap toward and bad-mouthing those who help the business. In other words, beating up vendors. I hate that. That’s one of the most not just annoying but venomous things a company can do to its vendors.

Vendors help the company and the brand. And beating them up is one of the worst things clients can do. If they speak badly about the tools, platforms and other agencies they use, blaming them as described in red flag #4, you can bet they’ll do the same to you. Most likely, they’ll lowball you and not appreciate your work.

“Well, I don’t know… Am I really getting everything I need for what I paid?”

Don’t take that crap. Run the other way.

Listen to your gut

When choosing your clients, keep in mind the five red flags described in the article.

If you see any of them, stop engaging with the client. Bad clients can trigger negative thoughts about your worth and value.

If you feel your current or prospective client isn’t the right fit for you, don’t go through the rigmarole and the negativity. Avoid constantly thinking about this unfit client whose problems are keeping you up at night.

You may start feeling as if you were drained by a vampire, once you start losing your sleep and peace of mind. Crappy clients suck the life out of you. That may lead to you doubting yourself, thinking you’re not at your optimal speed and competency, even questioning whether or not you are cut out to be an entrepreneur.

You don’t need that in your business. You should be growing and looking for new clients.

 

You’re an entrepreneur, and you deserve getting back what you put into your business and your clients. Don’t let other people mess it over for you.

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Posted on April 19th, 2021

Get A Team: How Mine Grew From 0 to 10 Employees

  • #transform
  • Business
  • Business Goals
  • Business Growth
  • Entrepreneur
  • Goals
  • Leadership
  • Mindset
  • Strategy

So many entrepreneurs are solopreneurs. They don’t have a team. With this blog post, I hope to encourage you to consider getting a team. 

I’ll share my story. 

I recently hired a personal assistant to help me with the day-to-day things: my email, scheduling, and some of my social media. 

I already had a team of 10 people who took care of a lot of my business’ operations, but this personal assistant was more for the personal things that I needed help with items such as inbox management, scheduling and travel arrangements. 

Hiring my new personal assistant made me recall my experience in building the team I have now. 

I’ve had my business for seven years. Two years in, I started thinking I needed someone to help me. 

If you want to scale, you need to hire

Back when I made my first hire, I went to local colleges where I live in Denver and hired a couple of interns. One of them actually stayed with me for several years. 

In order to scale, move forward, gain more clients, free myself from having to do the day-to-day operations in my business, and most importantly, to be happy with what I do, I realized that I needed people who can help me with all of these projects. 

With all the background tasks taken care of, I can focus on the big picture: finding new clients, being the face of the company, business development, speaking engagements, strategy, new projects, and new businesses. 

For a proficient team, use a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

But to scale your team, you first need to train your team. And training requires a process.

I use a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) in my business so all tasks are documented and all new staff go through the SOP before working on any projects.

Our Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) posted in Trello. That’s also been a critical point in growing my team, because before I had standard operating procedures, I couldn’t really train people or do it very effectively.

A lot of entrepreneurs don’t have standard operating procedures, which makes it very difficult to train new hires. 

Without an SOP, you have to take time out of your schedule to individually train each and every new hire. With an SOP, it’s so easy to onboard someone. Everything’s spelled out in one cohesive source. They can get started immediately and just consult the SOP when they run into a question they need answered.  

Your SOP can be a document or a collection of videos and demos that serve as instructions for the new person to reference with regarding their new role or tasks.

SOPs are very useful when your team is growing, people leave or you have to hire a new person.

Be intentional about delegating

Delegating is not, “Oh, let’s delegate because I don’t really feel like doing stuff.” 

It’s more about what you want to do and how you want your day to look. This gives you insight on what to delegate. 

Ask yourself these questions:

  • What do you want to do?
  • Where do you want to take your business?
  • How can you make it all happen? 
  • And on which parts of that process do you want to personally focus?
  • What drains your energy?
  • Where do you see yourself, and also what are the things you wish you had more time for? 

That’s what it was for me. I decided that I don’t want to be doing the day-to-day operations of my business. I wanted to be doing more podcasts, strategic projects, and bringing in new clients. I wanted to focus on sales and business development. I wanted to do speaking engagements and creating content and courses. 

These are the tasks that I decided I wanted to do. This is how I wanted my day to look.

So if you want to scale, start with hiring a team!

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Posted on March 31st, 2021

The LinkedIn Strategy That Will Grow Your Business With Rhonda Sher

  • #transform
  • Business
  • Business Goals
  • Business Growth
  • Entrepreneur
  • Goals
  • Leadership
  • LinkedIn
  • Mindset
  • Strategy

The advent of Linkedin allowed professionals the world over to network in a new way. LinkedIn offers unprecedented access to key decision-makers, movers and shakers, potential business partners, service providers and clients. You find someone you like on the platform, and if you want to get to know them, you connect with them and have a call. Sometimes that leads to you joining groups, getting speaking engagements, or invitations to join podcasts.

In one of my podcast episodes, I got the chance to talk with Rhonda Sher, a LinkedIn expert. She’s been helping entrepreneurs, professionals, and businesses create visibility, credibility, and profitability on LinkedIn. She is also the author of the book The ABC’s of LinkedIn, Get LinkedIn or Get Left Out. 

rhonda-sher-portraithttps://www.rhondasher.com/

Rhonda shared some of her proven LinkedIn strategies that can help you grow your business, and I am sharing them with you.

Professional banner

The banner on your LinkedIn profile is one of the first things people see. As you know, first impressions are everything. The banner is the blue space above the rest of your profile. Make sure your banner reflects your message and your brand. Using Canva.com, you can create a banner consistent with your brand.

jean-ginzburg's-linkedin-banner-and-headshothttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanginzburg/

Professional headshot

Your headshot is just as important as your banner. According to Rhonda, people are 16 times more likely to interact with you if you have a professional photo. Don’t be cute with your headshot, and don’t ignore it. A picture of your pet or an avatar will not make you look legitimate in the eyes of a potential client or business partner. Rhonda sees such profiles all the time. Some don’t have any picture at all — Make sure you are not one of them.

Clear and concise headline

LinkedIn will default to giving you your job title in place of your headline. Instead, customize it, using the 220 allowed characters. Use the headline to attract the right prospects. In the headline, tell people what you do, whom you serve, and what problem you solve.

Clear contact information

If you don’t have clear contact information, how do you expect people to get in touch with you? Make sure you list your website, email address, and/or phone number. Not having any contact details is like going to a black-tie event in your running clothes. You are not dressed for the party, and you can’t connect with people the way you would in proper attire. 

Touch 10 people before 10 AM

One of the ways you can increase the efficiency of your time on LinkedIn is by employing Rhonda’s 10 before 10 method. Rhonda asks her clients to make a habit of engaging with at least 10 people before 10 AM. The results might surprise you. For instance, one of her clients gained a 30% increase in business because of this system.

LinkedIn is a platform for serving, not selling

To utilize LinkedIn effectively, first you need to understand what it’s for. It’s not a selling platform. It’s a networking platform, where you can connect with prospects so you can build relationships with them, eventually benefiting from those connections. To help her clients get the most out of the platform, Rhonda teaches them the 3Ps: present, prospect, and profit. It’s a simple system she shares with her clients to generate appointments, share content, interact with other people’s content, engage with prospects, foster connections and profit from them.

 

Connect with Rhonda Sher if you want to learn more about her LinkedIn trade secrets.

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Posted on March 22nd, 2021

Retire or Not Retire: That Is the Question

  • #transform
  • Business
  • Business Goals
  • Business Growth
  • Entrepreneur
  • Goals
  • Leadership
  • Mindset
  • Strategy

For a long time, retirement has been regarded as the ultimate goal of a person’s work life. You work so you can retire in comfort. Typically, that would involve a pension and maybe a golden watch from the company you worked for. That is not my situation or the situation of many modern workers. When I think of retirement, I begin to puzzle. At what age? For what reason?

How? Where?

What are the reasons you would want to retire? I came up with these three:

  1. You don’t want to work anymore
  2. You are of age when working is hard
  3. You want to do what you have always wanted to do but postponed till retirement

I’ve tried on these reasons for size and realized that none of them fit me. What about you?

Read on, and let me know how you think of yourself at the typical retirement age and what you would want for yourself.

Reason #1: You don’t want to work anymore

Being an entrepreneur, I cannot wrap my head around the traditional views on retirement. I can’t imagine myself not doing what I love because I turn 65. How would that work? At 64, I am happy to be running a business, helping other entrepreneurs, and at 65, I would stop enjoying it? It doesn’t make sense to me that the age – a number – would dictate when I would stop working.

If you are not enjoying what you are doing, why are you doing it in the first place? It’s not for nothing people keep repeating this quote, attributed to Mark Twain: “Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

If you don’t want to stop doing what you love just because you hit a certain age, what else may make you want to retire?

Reason #2: You are of age when working is hard

The age of 65 has long been regarded as the retirement age. I am sure governments had very good reasons for establishing it. The fact that we do age and our capacity to perform diminishes with age has to be accounted for. But here is where I turn to people such as Dr. David Sinclair for a different perspective. His book Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To is a hot commodity these days. It challenges the notion that by 65 most of us walk around with broken bodies and dull minds. Peter Diamandis’ conference Abundance 360 highlights the same message – we are living longer and healthier lives. If that’s the case, why would we not work longer, enjoying doing what we are doing?

By 65, you will have amassed incredible experience; you are still full of energy and vigor; and now you are wise too. I think it would be amazing to see what we can be when we are at the top of our game and still have a long way to go before we feel the need to slow down, whatever our mission.

Once you address the question of needing to retire at 65 because of old age or poor health, since neither may be true for you, what’s left?

Reason #3: You get to do what you always wanted but couldn’t

The final argument is you want to retire so you can finally do the things you want to do! Let me ask you this, then: why are you putting off doing all the things you want to do??? I want to travel now. And I do (minus the COVID situation, of course). If you want to take up a hobby, why wait? What’s stopping you from pursuing the things you want to do? True, maybe you don’t have the time to do everything you want to do right this moment, but if you plan it out over the course of some years, surely you can manage to have the experiences you crave to have before you hit 65.

The question is not whether or not you have the time. The question is how to make it work today.

Conclusion

Once I ran through these three reasons for retirement, I saw that I am not planning on retiring at all. It’s true that life happens, and perhaps I will not be as healthy at 65 as I think I ought to be. But that only ups the stakes for the need to experience life now. By the time I get to that age, it might be too late. Today is all we have, and I don’t want to miss out on all it has to offer because I decided to wait till retirement

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Posted on January 8th, 2021

Driving Your Company Culture Through Your Leadership

  • Business
  • Entrepreneur
  • Leadership
  • Mindset
  • Strategy

I want to talk about company culture and leadership. It’s something you often see discussed in webinars, conferences, and TED Talks.

I’ve come to realize what culture and leadership are for my company. Both are very specific to each organization.

How do you define and drive your company culture?

Culture can be so broad and vague. Oftentimes, I get asked the question, “How do we even define company culture?”

You want to start with your core values, your mission and vision for your company.

Those are the components that drive your company culture, and are also what determines if your company culture works.

This is why we always hear success stories of founders creating the company vision, mission and values and applying them into hiring the right people to fill the seats they needed in order to help their company grow.

The right culture starts with the right people

Do you want a fun working environment? Then you should hire people who know how to balance work with fun and warm friendliness. Do you want a driven work culture? Then you should hire people who are hungry for achieving your current goals and beyond.

A huge part of cultivating your company culture does start in the hiring phase. You want to hire people who are the right culture fit for your company.

That is particularly important because if you hire someone who isn’t the best fit for your company’s culture, it can drive down all aspects of it, affecting productivity and outcomes.

You really want to be careful about what kind of people you are hiring because you want to make sure that you’re hiring people that mesh with your existing teams and add value to your company.

Hire the right people, fire the wrong ones

That sounds harsh, but think of it as being fiercely protective of your company culture. Give everyone a probation period, and if by the end of that period you really can’t see that the new hire has chemistry with your company culture, let them go. Don’t get stuck trying to make that new hire work out.

Nobody really likes to fire people— no matter who we are and what kind of business leaders we’ve grown to be. It sucks. That’s why I think you should do your best to make the right choices with the right candidates in the first place. But even then, ensure that you are assessing to see if they mesh well with your company culture.

Be the leader who drives company culture

Company leadership also drives culture.

You may just be getting started with your business and you’re playing all roles within your company. Or you may be a bit more advanced as a business owner and you’ve stepped away from the middle of things.

No matter what stage of entrepreneurship you are in, the onus is on you to be a leader. Leadership is your responsibility as you strive to grow as a startup, or as your company reaches that middle or advanced level of enterprise with a growing number of employees.

But really, company culture remains in your hands as the business leader. All of it is driven by you. Because you’re the person who created the company. You’re the one who created the mission, vision and values of the company and ultimately you are in charge of ensuring that they are met.

Over time as your business grows, you must continue to drive your company values. Your vision and mission might change a bit to accommodate your company as it grows, but the core tenets remain the same.

As a leader, it’s your job to make sure your company culture continues to dictate the current and future goals and environment of your company.

Don’t let up. Stay vigilant.

When the leader of a company neglects the company culture, when people start trickling in whose behaviors don’t align with your company values, it’s like cancer. It will spoil your work environment and outcomes. When you’re not fiercely protective of your culture, when you let in and keep people you should actually fire, that cancer spreads and it sickens your business.

Continue disseminating your culture to every single person in your company. Every single employee should be, should work, and should behave in line with your company values. That includes you. No one is exempt.

You shouldn’t keep employees who don’t adhere to your company culture. When you fire such people who create drama or disrupt your peace, you’re being a leader, you’re making the executive decision the rest of your company needs.

Protecting your company culture rests on you as the leader. It’s better for everyone’s morale.

This is how you drive your company culture through your leadership. First, by establishing a healthy culture, and second, by protecting it.

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