How to Build a Brand That Scales to 7-Figures (And Beyond)

what does it take to build a brand that sticks in your customers minds mike andy's built augusta lawn care into a multi-million dollar brand with more than 60 locations across u.s canada and today you guys he's going to share his branding secrets and hacks with our viewers [Music] my candies is a familiar face for our regular viewers we've talked to him about how he started augusta lawn care as a teenager and grew it into a seven-figure year business by the age of 24 what would be some cheap free ways to start building a brand the goal of branding is how do i bring my customer acquisition costs down and one of the most powerful parts for a small business your brand has to evolve with you as you grow in this interview we're going to go in depth with mike about why branding is so important for small businesses he's also going to talk about the steps he took to build his incredible brand and his advice to other business owners looking to establish a strong brand identity what makes a brand scalable what colors evoke certain emotions we wrap up marketing and advertising into branding when they're completely separate things people buy from the people that they know like and trust these are all free things you can do to actually grow your top line and bottom line revenue in your small business all right you guys take it second like this video subscribe to our channel hit that bell and let's go talk to mike about building a strong brand identity mike's always working we always find him at the computer hey mike hey good to see you again oh good to see you brother [Music] so for our viewers that haven't seen uh previous episodes with you tell them a little bit about you your background your company and so forth you know i started mowing lawns when i was 11 years old and did that basically pay my way through college at the age of 18 i started augusta lawn care changed my course kind of going instead of medical went to the business side of things got my mba and i've been growing augusta since then yeah you're now at what 60 locations u.s canada 65 locations now yeah wow okay awesome so we're here to talk about building a strong brand identity and i want to hone in on some specifics let's talk about how important is a name when choosing for your company in terms of strong branding i think sometimes when it comes to branding when you're a really small business a micro business typically under 500 000 in annual revenue we actually overthink that part too much in terms of starting out and so for viewers who are just getting started don't allow that to be the thing that keeps you from starting but definitely as you start to think beyond that point in terms of revenue and scaling the business it definitely starts to play a big component of how do i reduce my customer acquisition cost and that's a lot of times through branding through branding okay so specifically choosing a name what would your advice be to people struggling with choosing a name to start their company and start working on their brand i think if you can think ahead at the beginning when you're choosing your name is extremely important so don't put you know jim's accounting or mike's mowing right might seem catchy but well the problem is now if i'm gonna ever sell my business or even pass along down to my kids one day the the first question every customer asks well where's mike i have a i have a problem with my bill i want to talk to mike i want to talk to mike about the estimate right putting your name inside the business is sometimes uh putting your own personal name in the business name is a lot of times one of the biggest mistakes i see a new business uh using when they get started mike what's the first step for small businesses that haven't considered building a brand they want to start now i think good exercise is to actually walk through how a customer is going to interact with your brand so whether you are online or you're in person it's like if i was a customer what does it look like when i show up at my website what does it look like when i or feel like when i give a call into my call center what does it feel like when i get a job accepted that is extremely important because at every single one of those point in junctures and touches with a customer that's branding so i think to give yourself a call your office sometimes walk in as a customer go to your website and buy something see how long it takes to get shipped to you all of those points is going to keep in contact with all the touch points that you're going to have with customers how did you define from the start augusta lawn care services we always do we stood for professionalism you know and our goal or the why of augusta is that we would raise the level of professionalism in this industry so that's the benchmark by which everything has to be when i look at our brand and i ask when we answer the phone when we send an estimator to a property when we have a franchisee we're doing training is it all centered around that one thing and that's professionalism and so that is the importance of knowing that brand and what we stand for and then therefore building all the components around in your business around that singular thing [Music] for companies that don't have a large advertising budget what would be some cheap free ways to start building a brand a lot of times for a small business the best way to create a brand is around your area of expertise your industry and be known as the expert in that particular domain for example landscaping i could definitely start making content the cheapest form of branding is create content and create content around the domain that i'm really good at so if i'm a landscaper i should create content around how to do my lawn how to trim a bush how to pull weeds that's all so free and now it's extremely simple all of us have it in our pocket to create that type of brand image whereas years ago that took tens of thousands of dollars to get all the equipment and all the the back end infrastructure and now it's extremely cheap if not free to create that content which leads to a great brand so similar examples like youtube channel whatever just start videotaping and showing yourself as an expert of xyz marcus sheridan wrote a great book called uh they ask you answer and it's basically what are the questions your customer's going to have for you and then how can you answer those questions and become the domain expert in their mind that's owning real estate in the mind of the customer but how do i create the answers to their questions that's also great for seo these are all free things you can do to actually grow your top line and bottom line revenue in your small business awesome that's great advice [Music] so what's the end goal and benefit of branding in a business environment in a capitalistic society i think the end goal of any business transaction or or plan is to make more money like that's just be honest and so i think the goal of branding is how do i bring my customer acquisition cost down because if i know my customer acquisition cost i know the lifetime value of my customer i can infinitely scale that business because theoretically if my customer acquisition cost is five dollars and my lifetime value is ten dollars i should just build keep pumping money into customer acquisition and doubling my money so the goal with branding is how do i be able to continue marketing but reduce my customer acquisition costs because i already own the real estate in the mind of the customer and i don't have to market to them as much and have to spend as many as much money on ads so that's why it's a long term game the goal is to reduce customer acquisition cost when you spend money on ads and branding is the number one way to do that but it's the long-term game it's not easy to do right away so break it down for us 101 branding marketing what is the main difference between the two because i thought at one point marketing is the same thing as branding i think the easy way to distinguish which is probably not the most accurate but definitely easy to wrap your head around is marketing sales advertising is short-term and transactional branding is long-term and it's building a relationship and it's trying to own that real estate in the mind of the customer through an attribution of emotion two very different things and completely different strategies when you look at bigger companies they actually have different roles and different teams and employees for marketing versus brand strategy totally different domains once you've created a brand how do you protect it from others to steal from it duplicate it etc yeah the thing that's so difficult is when you create a brand it's really successful and other people rip it off and they actually take your ideas and the strong brand imaging that you've created and they start ripping it off and using it and for their own gain and so what you can do is create what's called a trademark and what that's going to do is take a mark your logo your brand your mascot your slogan and actually make it where it is intellectual property of your business and it's a great way to make sure that no one else can use that name no one else can use that mascot no one can use the likeness of your logo and your brand okay well on that note you guys thousands of business owners have lost their brand because they did not trademark it the right way and it could happen to you if you don't do it the right way soon enough so today's sponsor is trademark factory a one-stop shop for trademark registration services so for a fixed fee a licensed attorney is going to file your trademark from filing to registration and if it does not get approved you get your money back now that's a guaranteed result with a guaranteed budget you will not find it anywhere else so click the link in the description below for more details and find out how trademar factory can help you secure the right brand [Music] is the company's brand identity the same thing as branding typically it kind of just comes down to semantics but how you can kind of break it down is how do i identify the brand you just give me more tangible things for example the font the logo things that are more tangible we can see the colors whereas a brand is something you cannot put in a box it's the personality of the business and that can be described but it cannot be created and put and given to somebody whereas typically the identifying remarks or identifying marks of a brand is the things that we can see in a more tangible what would be advice on choosing the right name looking forward like you said what tools can you use what can you say on that yeah keeping in mind that a business's name is something that is going to be said many times it's going to be the brand identity it's going to be the thing that people think about and so you want to convey the type of emotions that you want affiliated with your business for example augusta comes from augustus it also comes from the month august so these are the type of things i was thinking about like augustus that was like royalty it was professional it was empirical and so that was a type of images or thoughts or emotions that were affiliated with that name so if i'm trying to get into a cleaning business i don't want to be having you know dirty cleaning as my name i don't want any sort of dirt or uh that type of emotions or cognitive connections with my brand name and so uh that's something extremely important what emotions do i want to evoke with just the name of my business okay what emotions interesting so augusta really has nothing to do with lawn care per se right yeah so that doesn't matter it doesn't have to associate itself with the service you provide or anything there's two things right like i mentioned about august it really comes from augustus in terms of roman that kind of empirical but also augusta has a lot of affiliation with augusta national which is a golf course in georgia where they play the masters the professional golf tournament and so when people watch that a lot of times people non-golfers will watch that tournament because it's beautiful and the rolling green hills the beautiful manicured lawns and bushes and plants and that affiliation is what we want to tap into is hey we're your personal greenskeeper that's our slogan and we want to make that kind of atmosphere and that sanctuary that you see at augusta national and the masters golf tournament in your own backyard [Music] mike how much research did you do on the industry your competitors you know in terms of market analysis how important is it to establish a strong brand presence i think what's so cool now with everyone being online and on social media is it's actually pretty easy to look at your competition see what they're doing for their branding and i think the main point of emphasis i would make is what brand is your sort of idealistic or where you're shooting for in terms of size of business in terms of scope in terms of their geographical location where are where do you want to be what do you aspire to be look at those brands don't compare yourself to your competition locally if you're trying to go national don't compare yourself to a different industry when you're in a completely different segment of the population go after those aspirational brands that you look to be like and then look at their website huge identification of like what fonts are what colors what is their branding look at those things and then compare yourself to that not against just your local competition okay that's great advice and you guys if you are looking for more solid advice like you're hearing from mike please check out our podcast upflip.com podcast we meet and interview people like mike we dive in we ask more concrete specific questions all for you so check it out upflip.com

forward slash podcast [Music] so lots of people talk about the importance of brand but what is branding what what makes up a company's brand i think a lot of times we think about a logo we think about colors we think about the name of the business but really a brand and branding is all of that combined everything it's the intangibles as well i can't give you a brand i might give you a piece or an element of a brand but i am not going to be able to give you a physical object it's the emotions that are invoked by having a brand and one of the most powerful parts for a small business and something we so often forget is that each of us have a personal brand it's one of the most powerful things you can do for your business is grow your personal brand to expand your business okay well why don't we elaborate on that later on in the video and leave that with you guys as a hack so keep on watching mike let's talk about logos does every company need one and how would i go about creating the right one i think getting the right one when you're first getting started is not necessary okay like get started right you could literally do a free one there literally just type in logo generator where you type in words and it starts creating some fonts for you that's probably where you should get started because it's more important to get started then make it perfect and make it exactly what you need but it is extremely important you must have one and i think it's just be flexible because as your business grows you're going to learn a lot about your business about what you want your brand identity to be and the probably the most important part of brand identity again a tangible thing that i can see is your logo and then as far as hiring professionals would you go that route and if so uh who would you use a great starting point is something online like freelancer.com 99 designs these are all online marketplaces where you can hire people all around the world that are designers and good at photoshop and all the rest of it i think if you want to take it to the next level you potentially could have a team and do something more local but these they're just so much online that you get these great skilled uh designers and people with photoshop to be able to create your your logo and have contests where you have literally 50 or 100 different options and you choose the best one where do you see other businesses failing when it comes to their branding i think a lot of times we wrap up marketing and advertising into branding when they're completely separate things especially when it comes to small businesses because most small businesses should when they're first getting started focus on direct marketing and sales and advertising those are not branding now they might use components of your brand like your logo and your colors but a brand is an emotion there's no thing a brand is not an object and so to create a brand it's much more difficult because you actually have to gain real estate in the mind of the consumer it can't be like hey i wanna you know buy one get one free if i give you that that's a direct marketing you're gonna now call now or contact us at our website or give us a phone call that's all marketing that's all advertising that's very different than branding i think most small businesses because we think more short term and i want the immediate sale i'd much rather give you the buy one get one free when if i step back and say what if i did a project in my community and for example for landscaping i completely redeveloped an air that's overgrown and then maybe i just put a sign out front that says augusta no service by augusta lawn care maintained by augusta lawn care that's a branding play okay because it cost me money the same way that my marketing plated to you but now it's not a direct marketing it's not sales it's a different transaction and it's a much more long-term game that you play and most small businesses don't think that long term okay you guys if you are enjoying this video please support our channel and mike by liking commenting and hitting that bell mike what role do employees play in building a company brand well a lot of times your employees especially the frontline employees are gonna be the first point of contact or the most contact with the customer and when you call a company and you're talking to someone on the phone that is part of the brand remember the brand is not a tangible thing so the experience the emotions that that customer has when they talk to other people on the phone or talk to someone at the cash register or talk to a sales associate all of that's part of the brand so if you stand for professionalism if you stand for accountability that needs to then be translated for the employee at the front line in connor with the customer and they feel that hey this is all congruent right from the sales message in marketing getting me in the door write down the front line employee i'm dealing with directly any specific tricks uh advice on training your employees to reinforce that brand i think the one thing like we talk about branding always changes right and i think part of that is the logo the marketing the uniforms the colors all that changes the one thing that can't change when it comes to getting your employees on board many times is what's the goal what's the vision why does this company exist that's got to stay congruent that's going to stay consistent and that's the goal getting there might change we change the color of our uniforms we change our pay structures whatever might be but i think that vision the goal and why the business exists needs to stay consistent for the employee to get on board with what is this brand what's the brand image i'm supposed to reflect and what does this identity the identity of this brand stand for mike did you make any early mistakes in terms of branding yeah we made several everything from the logo to even our uniforms and again a lot of times your branding mistakes are really revealed as you scale the business okay so at the very beginning because we wanted to use that emotion of around augusta national and golf we figured hey we're going to actually have our employees be in uniforms that caddies use at augusta national at the masters tournament which is a hundred percent white with their name on the back right which is great in theory it's a great branding move until you actually start to scale that out and realize that buying jumpsuits that are perfectly white that you have to bleach to get clean is extremely difficult in the landscape industry and so again just taking the branding almost too far and then just realizing that as we scale we can't do that for 10 employees but we have to buy new ones every couple weeks to get dirty right so sometimes you just got to realize that what works when you're one two employees is not gonna work at five ten fifteen employees down the road so with that mistake how did you reposition yourself uh at that moment what did you do exactly really it started to we had to evolve the whole branding look right so instead of using the caddy it's like what colors are we going to use well we're going to use yellow green and brown and again those colors are important so now the uniforms are yellow that's really what our the colors are all yellow that is the kind of the brand theme is the yellow but then we also have the green and the brown which again every color of your brand has certain emotions that are affiliated with them and you can really do a lot of research about what colors evoke certain emotions whether it be orange youthful vitality you're not going to see a tech company that is doing cyber security using orange because orange is more vibrant and young whereas if you're looking for enterprise level software and cyber security you're looking for dark blues like an ibm dark blue people even even come up with the word ibm blue it's that trust that is invoked by that color what makes a brand scalable i think you've got to ask yourself what do you want to scale is it geographical because that's going to have certain limitations is it platform wise am i going to go wanting to scale from online to in person and brick and mortar or vice versa or do i want to just address a different market do i want to go from younger audiences to older audiences every single time you expand your business it's going to require a brand change or thinking ahead what is my brand going to need to be what are the requirements of my brand when i get the business to the side i want to be at scaled to that size so it's part of the evolution for brand to sort of evolve change as you're scaling absolutely a hundred thousand dollar business brands and a completely different 100 million and so on and so forth and you're gonna have to make changes all along there is no fortune 500 your company you can look 50 years ago and say their branding's never changed change with technology change with consumer demand change with the age demographic they're going after and you have to be flexible to that so let's say someone's established but then realizes their name does not fit the brand how would they reposition without losing customers and creating confusion honestly i think for most small businesses we over emphasize and kind of have this inflated view of how much people think about us and our name and how important it is in our brand locally if you're doing under a million dollars in revenue most the time in your local market you don't have a big brand so you can change and you can pivot relatively easily it's a matter of sending an email to all of your customers and explaining hey this brand is now becoming this brand right and we're changing our name and here here's the improvement that's going to bring for you focusing on the customer what it's going to do for them i think it's a lot of times over emphasize how hard that is it's a matter of thinking down the road i don't want to change my brand 10 times if i can if i can at all think down the road like okay if i've built my business to a million now i need to make a change is this going to get me to 10 million is it going to mean 100 million thinking about your brand long term is always going to pay big dividends but just keep in mind most small businesses over emphasize the value and the brand awareness around their name in their local community so it sounds like mistakes are going to be unavoidable when it comes to starting at some point with branding and then it sort of evolves am i right in thinking that i think every healthy brand evolves and grows just like any organism or plant grows over time it has to change and evolve your brand has to evolve with you as you grow and in 10 15 years there's a good chance that augusta's brand looks totally different you have to constantly be evolving and changing and if you're not that's when a brand dies well take coca-cola for example i mean they've had i would say same branding for quite some time uh i'm just thinking what we could say to that versus you saying it could evolve you know it's it's an interesting topic well even like starbucks for example you take a brand that all of us know so well but yet constantly they are always changing whether it be their subscription model whether it be their loyalty program whether it be the different types of things they're standing for from a social standpoint these are all things that are constantly evolving and changing and now mobile and delivery these are things that are constantly changing and if you don't stay on that cutting edge eventually you become obsolete okay so that's all part of the brand in terms of the services that they extend and so forth absolutely and i think the more you protect your brand and the company going forward like a coca-cola for example who spends billions of dollars and they do things that are you know literally incredible in terms of hiring the people that are most influential and socially influence in the world the thing is they are protecting they're putting a moat around their products and services because the smaller guys can't do that and can't afford that level of brand awareness okay all right let's fly through some of these fun blitz questions uh what's your favorite business book uh currently it's uh from sam walton made in america okay uh great in terms of scaling a business and thinking completely outside the box what's the single most important factor for expanding any business i think honestly what we talked about today branding and thinking long term uh in terms of investing in branding that's probably the number one thing i would say awesome what's the one fact that changed your perspective on life forever probably when i went to africa for six weeks and did volunteer work there completely changed my perspective of life and value there that's awesome what's your favorite unnecessary thing or a device unnecessary thing advice that's tough one i would have to say probably my phone even though i don't know how unnecessary that is but i spend 12 hours a day on it probably so it's probably unnecessary what's the one thing you cannot start your day without except coffee uh say prayer right between if i can pray and exercise it every day usually i can i feel like i can do most of anything that's important how does one land commercial accounts property management this is from our viewers garrett uh stevenson uh i would say definitely thinking again to your brand is like how am i is my brand congruent with a commercial account which is going to be looking for that level of professionalism looking for someone to take things off their plate and typically your buyer is a property manager not an individual residential customer okay awesome what's uh what are your plans for the next five to ten years this is from mahad yeah we want to just keep growing the number of locations for augusta uh by doing so having an impact more on the industry we'd like to get over 500 locations for augusta lawn care uh within what time frame let's give it three years uh our goal is to get over a thousand at least though and then maybe one day take it public but we'll see about that wow nice okay last but from not least from adrian walker best part of being a business owner uh i would definitely say the impact you get to have on other people whether that be employees or in our case franchisees and seeing the difference that you can't you have the potential to make on their life is pretty pretty amazing that's awesome what are the crucial components of a company brand i think the number one thing you got to realize that that brand has to create a relationship with the customer or the end user or whoever you're trying to make that brand relevant to and so people buy from the people that they know like and trust so a brand needs to bring you closer to a trusting liking and knowing relationship with a customer okay and in terms of building a brand how long do you expect to build one can you give us advice on building it quickly if that's even a reality or what can you say on that i think for small businesses that are trying to grow in their infancy stage getting to 100 000 a year in revenue for example it's going to be direct marketing it's going to be an offer it's going to be more sales driven as time goes on it evolves into more branding you can spend money on a billboard or in a campaign that's really about demonstrating professionalism for example with augusta lawn care if i make a video and it's about professionalism i'm not going to get a direct call now it's not about that it's about how do i project myself as the professional that's a long-term game okay so more likely it's going to be a long-term game absolutely i think in the short term it's a matter of i'm committed to the long term but in the short term i've got to get sales and i've got drive revenue so i might allocate 50 of my budget towards direct marketing getting the sale making an offer and the other 50 to creating content to doing local acts of service that produce the brand image that i want awesome [Music] has your approach to branding changed since you started the franchising operation yeah like as you grow a business especially if you start moving outside your local area it is a challenge sometimes to make your brand work in all markets right so as we've grown and expanded the business we have to realize that when we put a picture up on social media it needs to work in everything from ontario where it snows for six months out of the year all the way down to texas and florida where they don't see snow ever and so it becomes more and more of a challenge you grow your business geographically to make sure your brand is consistent and that's the hard part when we come to franchising is how do we make it where when someone walks in the door of our of our business that they have the same experience the same brand the same identity is consistent throughout every location that's the difficult part about scaling with multi multiple locations and geographical much larger reach can you give us one clear example on how you personally dealt with that in terms of other locations versus bellingham and what changes you have to make yeah for us a big brand identity or mark that people think about is our yellow trucks with the decals on the side has max our mascot has the big logo and and all on the side of the truck and at first it was difficult because sometimes they can't find a local printer that can do the exact design that we want so we had to eventually find a printer that could ship out those decals for the truck we had to make sure that we standardized the color we can just say hey paint your truck yellow what is the code can i give you a color sample that needs to be consistent across every truck every location so if i move from here to texas it looks the same and so we had to make sure that we had those things in place in terms of color and the decals for the trucks because that was a big brand identification mark that we had to really solidify across the system this is the hack you guys let's go into it yes i think the number one thing you gotta remember when it comes to branding is yes we want to build our businesses brand but the thing that we all have is our personal brand your name your likeness your face as much as you might not like it it's your personal brand and that will follow you past the type of industry that you serve whether you're trying to philanthropic or business related type of awareness campaigns like people buy and give the people they know like and trust so build that personal brand give content and value to the people you want to reach and then down the road you might change a different business change with different cause that you're trying to support and you can channel that attention because attention is the thing you're after channel that towards whatever campaign you're trying to push people towards this is awesome thank you how do we uh identify and adjust any flaws in our brand identity yeah you look at an example i think the number one thing of small business owners is we have the ability to look at larger businesses and what they're doing you look at facebook for example right now they identified a flaw in their branding which is they have no privacy they're they're politically skewed there's people that have you can hack into their system amended and so they change it to meta just the name the brand of it's trying to change and i think for small businesses we don't have the luxury of having media people talking about us and did very quickly identify what is the perception of our brand what we can do is talk to friends talk to family talk to existing customers create a focus group you actually go hire focus groups to look at your branding and ask them hey where are the flaws what do you think of when you see my logo what do you think of when you see our colors in our uniforms and our website where are the flaws being open that advice and making appropriate changes to change those perceptions because remember it's not it's not a physical product these are emotions that sometimes you go to ask people outside third parties to identify the flaws in that brand image yeah focus groups are can can do a lot i heard absolutely have you personally gone through some focus groups and how did you use them i think the thing that you also are keeping your attune to is what are other competition what are people saying about your brand do people like for example us everyone recognizes the yellow trucks the yellow uniforms so are we going to change those things no like that's what we want to lean into that's what we want to highlight in our marketing our advertising and so listening whenever you hear a customer talk about your brand what do they bring up what are the things that they love what are the things that they don't enjoy or they might say hey that kind of you know i was confused by that i was confused by that font i was confused on your website are you what services do you do those things you got to keep your ears attuned to in order to make adjustments to your brand okay awesome well mike this has been great i trust our viewers have learned uh quite a lot about branding and brand identity and we appreciate you for that so thank you so much thanks paul always pleasure to collaborate

2021-12-11 05:12

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