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Traits of a Great Founder – Being Your Own Brand Evangelist

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By Tim Brown

One of the most important traits of a great founder is learning how to be a brand evangelist. Not only is this vital when you are growing a new business and trying to attract customers, but it’s also crucial once you start looking for funding or liquidity events with investors.

At all points throughout your business journey, you will need to ignore the naysayers and continue to trump the benefits of your company which is why you must be an evangelist. If not, you will struggle to attract new customers, the talent for your workforce or investors to fund your dreams.

What is a Brand Evangelist?

An evangelist is somebody who believes in everything that your company stands for and who is willing to dedicate their time to helping your mission without any personal gain. Therefore, by being your brand evangelist, you should be vividly telling everybody possible about your business and trying to further your progress.

How to Be a Brand Evangelist

The first step in being a brand evangelist is dedicating yourself to sales and marketing. You don’t have to be engaging in minuscule campaigns actively, but you should be focussing your time on figuring out how to further your reach through sales and marketing.

Most of the great founders of our time have been extremely involved in marketing, and that’s what’s allowed them to succeed. In many cases, the sole reason why customers choose to buy from the brand was that they believed in the evangelist and their mission.

Creating Something Truly Brilliant

However, if you’re going to learn how to be a brand evangelist, then you must entirely buy into your own business and your mission. But to do this, you must create something that is truly brilliant because it’s impossible to buy into something entirely if it’s low quality.

After all, there’s only so much you can do to convince people to follow you if you’re leading them in a terrible direction. Instead, part of being a brand evangelist is being exceedingly obsessed with the quality of your products and services, so that you create something beautiful so that it’s easy to be an evangelist.

Telling a Great Story

Thirdly, you must learn how to tell a great story, the same way that the mystical Steve Jobs did. Perhaps his best skill was his ability to tell a compelling story that made people attached to Apple, making them want to join in with his mission which was far greater than just his company.

As a business founder, you will have to convince everybody that you meet to join your mission and the only way that you can achieve this is by learning to story tell.

In most cases, the best way for a small business to tell a story is by identifying a mission that is far greater than just the reach of a company. Steve Jobs did this with Apple; he would often talk about bringing fantastic design and software to the world, he wasn’t only interested in growing his sales revenue.

Then, you must learn the basics of public speaking so that you can craft your story and tell it in an efficient and compelling way that keeps people enthralled and amplifies its effect. Most likely your business idea isn’t that exciting to most people, but that’s only because of the way that you are telling it and the direction in which it is spun.

Building Your Audience

Unless you are already famous, then it’s vital that you build up your audience so that once you know how to be a brand evangelist it has an impact on others. You could tell everybody around you about your company, but if that’s only ten people, the effect will be tiny.

In this day and age, there is no excuse to have a reach less than a thousand people. Networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make it easy to build a following, people who will listen to you and who in-turn could become brand evangelists of their own.

Why Must a Great Founder Be an Evangelist?

It’s easy to hire salespeople, and it’s often not difficult to find competent CMO either, so, why is it vital that a great founder must be an evangelist? Primarily, all organizations take the lead from the person at the top and if you as a founder aren’t energetically and passionately telling every person about your company, nobody else will, and you won’t attract the right customers, employees or investors.

Being an evangelist is critical in the early stage of your company when you have little to no capital and must convince people to take the risk of joining your rocket ship. This statement includes customers who will often have a more established alternative and who are taking a chance by purchasing from you instead.

Every step in the right direction will be difficult, you will have to force people to do everything, and unless you are an inspiring evangelist, this will never change. If you look at Steve Jobs, the greatest brand evangelist of all time, people chose to move across the world to work for him, they paid more for his products and investors fell over themselves to join in.

Why? He told a compelling story about an incredible story to his growing audience that got them excited about his mission and the vision that they could be a part of.

About the Author: Tim Brown is the owner of Hook Agency- Web Design Minneapolis, and is a web designer and SEO Specialist out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tweet him at @hookagency

Featured image: Photo by Marcos Luiz Photograph on Unsplash

Self Improvement for Dummies

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Are you in self improvement hyperdrive at the end of 2017?

Have you bought a new planner, gone over your successes and failures from this year, anxious to do better in 2018?

Once the champagne from New Year’s Eve is digested, you’ll be an energetic, resolution-achieving machine.

Or not.

Or maybe just through Februaryish.

I have a radical suggestion.

Let’s take a break from self improvement, just for a little while.

First of all, you’re beautiful just the way you are. Second, constant focus on self improvement is actually constant focus on yourself. It might be nice to turn that gaze outward once in a while. Third, how much disposable income have you spent on books, courses, athletic gear, bullet journals, etc.?

I’m not suggesting that we’re all perfect. I’m just saying let’s take a brief breather from calling ourselves names (fat, lazy, dummy) and just enjoy life. Every time you buy one of those books “for Dummies,” you’re shredding a tiny piece of your soul.

It’s good to aspire to be better, but when it manifests as constant self criticism, it’s not healthy.

My idea is that we all take the first quarter of 2018 and be a source of joy to others. That’s it. The more joy you spread, the more you’ve achieved.

If I catch you surfing Amazon right now, looking for a book about “how to spread joy,” you’re in big trouble.

Just live. No diet, no crazy exercise regime, no elaborate resolutions.

You can still set up goals for your business and plan your fiscal year. That’s outward-focused activity that’s fruitful. What I’m calling “time” on is the idea that you can’t eat a piece of chocolate cake without feeling guilty. Go ahead and make a chocolate cake for someone else as a surprise, and have a slice with them.

Make your children happy by playing tag with them instead of hopping on the treadmill.

That’s your task. Spread joy for Q1. I’ll bet we all love it so much that we forget to make resolutions for Q2.

What do you think, are you on board?

 

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

The long and short of successful blogging

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Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write the world’s shortest novel. He did it in six searing words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

I share this factoid as an illustration that the length of your blog post doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is that you effectively get your point across. After all, Hemingway is also famous for the extreme length of his sentences!

Successful Long-Form Blogging

If you’re approaching a difficult topic, you may need thousands of words.

Take, for example, the amazing deep-dive posts of Tim Urban at Wait But Why. He has half a million subscribers, and his posts often run into the tens of thousands of words. He also doesn’t follow the oft-prescribed “write consistently” advice. His posts are published when they’re ready, and when he has something to say. (Warning, some of his content is NSFW.)

Another great example of long-form, successful blogging is Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor. When you read his detailed posts on analytics and digital marketing, you’re essentially getting a free college level course in the subject. I often read his posts with notepad on hand, so I can go back and use the suggestions.

On the corporate blogging side, you have the professional team at Buffer’s blog, who have been publishing fantastic long-form content for several years. I often envision them as a team of thousands, researching, editing, and uploading blog posts like a highly efficient Borg. (Just kidding, I’ve met some of their team and they’re actually human and very nice.)

Do long form blog posts work? Yes, if you’re delivering exceptional value with high quality content, according to TheNextWeb.

Successful Short-Form Blogging

Let’s talk about some of the short post publishers.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t first mention Seth Godin, the godfather of the pithy post. He’s also a rule-breaker because he doesn’t even really promote his posts…his Twitter account is set up to Tweet out the link when it’s published, but he’s not active on Twitter at all. However, if you subscribe to the email notifications for his content, you can easily reach him by replying to the email. For real, I’ve done it, and he’s responded.

Another very popular use of short-form is listicles and ranking posts. This fascinating interview on the Kellogg Insight podcast describes how lists and short bursts of information help us remember better, and help us cope with the massive amounts of data coming at us every day. We might mock the Buzzfeed-style, “10 ways to groom your dog with a toothbrush” article, but we’re still clicking on those headlines.

One of the most recommended Medium blog posts of 2017 is a five-minute read. Why is it so short, but so effective? It packs a powerful emotional punch, peppered with supporting stats. It’s intensely shareable.

Looking at those three short-form examples, if you want your brief posts to perform well, follow your own muse, say something useful, and make a strong emotional impact.

Finally, remember that you don’t have to stick to one side or the other. Plenty of successful bloggers alternate long-form and short-form articles.

What is your blogging style? Have you mixed it up lately?

 

 

Featured Image by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash

The Balancing Act: Succeeding at a Full-Time Job and Starting a New Business

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Many entrepreneurs choose to keep their full-time job as they work to get their own businesses off the ground. Some business consultants even encourage the idea of keeping a side gig to diversify your income stream. Nevertheless, it’s a tall order that requires a lot of prioritization to make it work successfully. The challenge is giving your employer your best efforts during the workday and still having enough energy for nurturing your business after work.

In a recent Q&A session with entrepreneur and Shark Tank judge Barbara Corcoran, chef Latisha Sohai asked, “Any suggestions on staying focused and motivated on my business, while working a 9-to-5? I’m a wife, mother of two, and love what I do, but I had to take on a 9-to-5 position to help at home.” It seemed like a pretty common question—and Barbara’s advice was valuable.

“You have a lot on your plate. Holding a full-time job while being a mother of two is hard enough, never mind adding the tremendous challenge of building a business! We all do better with less time if we’re extremely careful about what we focus on. With moms, kids always come first. I use a rating system to prioritize the many things I must attend to at work and home.

“I rate my items A, B, or C (A being the most important) and try to make sure to get all of my As and a few of my Bs done each day. This sort of organization and daily practice helps me stay focused and move my business ahead while still doing a good job as a mom. Last, think about getting another mom as a partner, ideally someone with an opposite skill set to help you build your business. I had my partner Esther and could never have had my family without her.”

Barbara’s prioritization advice is a good place to start—but I wouldn’t stop there. It’s likely that because of the challenges of being a parent, starting a new business, and working a full-time job, there will be some things you just won’t be able to do. After all, there are only so many hours in the day. And, as Barbara suggests, for a mother in this situation, your children will likely be priority No. 1. After that, what comes next?

As you prioritize, here are some additional things you’ll need to consider:

Is there a conflict of interest?

Depending upon the company you work for, the nature of your business, and whether or not there are any perceived (or maybe real) potential conflicts, you may need to rethink your current job while at the same time running your own business. By that I mean, if your employer perceives a conflict with your business (remember, perception will be reality so far as your current employer is concerned), they will likely not look upon your personal business efforts favorably—especially if it’s in the same, or a related, industry.

Early in my career, I had an employer so opposed to splitting attention that a colleague who was a former college basketball player was counseled to discontinue refereeing high school basketball games after work. He did it out of his love for the game, and the paltry amount of money he made doing it didn’t even really pay for the gas it took to drive to the games. Nevertheless, our boss deemed it a distraction from his job and wanted his employees focused on the job he was paying them to do. Had it been his own business, he would have probably been fired.

Granted, this may be an extreme example, but it’s not uncommon for employers to look negatively on an employee who might not be completely focused on their work. Additionally, it’s usually not a good idea to keep it a secret—those kinds of secrets always seem to be discovered. If you need to keep your side gig a secret, you will likely lose your job if it’s ever discovered.

Some employers will allow the occasional consulting gig, but if it’s something that will likely compete with your time during regular working hours, it might be safe to expect your current employer to oppose your extracurricular activities. This is a topic that may even be addressed in an employee manual if one exists. Otherwise, you may want to consider discussing the topic with your boss. He or she might even offer some encouragement or advice.

Can you compartmentalize?

We normally hear of this term being used as a negative, but the ability to compartmentalize isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this case. I’d suggest if you’re going to run your own business while working a full-time job, you need to be adept at compartmentalizing. In other words, when you’re at your 9-to-5, are you all in?

This could be a challenge, and it’s a legitimate question you should ask yourself—because your employer will probably be asking. When you’re at work, you need to give your employer your full attention and your best efforts. What’s more, you’ll need to turn off thoughts of your own business and what you should be doing to build your business until after hours. For some people, it’s relatively easy to focus on two potentially competing priorities, but for others it’s a real challenge.

For example, several years ago I worked with a computer programmer who was running two small online retail outlets at the same time he was working a full-time job as a front-end web developer. Because of the nature of his businesses, his personality, and how he designed his online stores to work without his constant attention, he was content to let them quietly work in the background while he was at work. In the evenings he would review the orders and prepare any shipments, which he would drop off on his way to work in the morning. If there were any changes he needed to make to one of the online stores, he would do that on the weekend.

Because he was able to successfully compartmentalize, this worked for him. His online businesses were in a totally unrelated industry to where he worked 9 to 5, and his employer didn’t mind. He made it a point to share lessons he learned in his online business’ front-end design with his employer—so ultimately it was a win/win. He’s been doing this for 15 years, that I’m aware of, and still works for the same company he was at when I first met him. He is able to compartmentalize like a pro while building a side business that provides a bit of extra income.

How much sleep do you really need?

There are only so many hours in the day, so it’s important to think about when you will be running your business. Working your own business after hours will likely eat into sleep time. Depending upon what you need to do to run your household, your day job and your business, seven or eight hours of sleep might turn into five or six—maybe even less. Because you’ll need to function at your best at home, at work and in your own business, you’ll need to be at the top of your game for more hours of the day on less sleep. Are you up to it?

I have friends who require much more sleep than I do. I have other friends who can survive on a couple hours a night. Tackling the challenges of working a full-time job and running your own business may require you to evaluate your personal stamina and ability to perform with less rest. I have to admit, I’ve occasionally been able to function on 20 to 30 percent less sleep for short periods of time, but in the long run I start to exhibit the signs of burnout and exhaustion. It just doesn’t work for me.

Are you organized? Really organized?

This last piece of advice fits nicely with Barbara’s suggestion. Prioritization and organization are related, and I’ve found it difficult to do one without the other. Whether you use some kind of online calendar (which I personally like) or an old-school paper calendar, you need to keep your schedule up to date and your prioritized task list organized to make sure nothing falls between the cracks. This is a challenge for many people trying to juggle all the responsibilities of one job—let alone run a business at the same time.

Fortunately, smartphones and tablets make it easier than ever to stay on top of things with apps that follow you everywhere and can be accessed anywhere there’s an Internet connection. The world of online productivity tools is readily available with something that will likely meet your needs, will be inexpensive or maybe even free, and easy to use.

I admire those who can successfully pull off running a business while working a full-time job. Knowing the amount of time I’ve spent with my businesses, I know it can be a real challenge. To be honest, the compartmentalizing thing is what gets me. I’m a jump-in-with-both-feet sort of guy and can’t seem to focus on two competing priorities at once. That being said, I have a number of friends who are very successful at it—you could be one of them.

Some people do it temporarily to get their businesses off the ground, while others use their small business as a way to express their entrepreneurial ambitions and make a little extra money while they choose to stay in their current role. Understanding your personal objectives and what that means to you is a critical first step.

What are your priorities?

 

About the Author: Ty Kiisel is a contributing author focusing on small business financing at OnDeck, a technology company solving small business’s biggest challenge: access to capital. With over 25 years of experience in the trenches of small business, Ty shares personal experiences and valuable tips to help small business owners become more financially responsible. OnDeck can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Featured image via Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/hOj3-0lTK8E

Let your dreams and inspiration pour out

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I have a bad habit of using Amazon’s “swipe to buy” tool from my iPhone. It’s downright dangerous, because when I’m reading something online, and a favorite writer recommends a great book…

SWIPE

A package arrives in a couple of days, or I see it pop up in my Kindle app.

I’m at a conference, and the speaker says something is a must-read…

SWIPE

The magic genie delivers a new book to my doorstep.

A few weeks ago, my swiping brought me the most magical book. I’m 20 years late to this party, but I finally got around to reading “The Artist’s Way,” by Julia Cameron.

Don’t roll your eyes at me. I’ve been busy.

The key to the Artist’s Way is the “morning pages.” This is three long-hand written pages, preferably in the morning, full of whatever random junk is in your brain. The morning pages are not intended to be read by anyone, even yourself. You can even write about how dumb morning pages are!

Something about channeling your dreams and inspiration onto a blank page first thing in the morning is magical.

You may not even realize you have dreams. You may be in dire need of inspiration. And stream of consciousness writing will elicit both from the depths of your frenzied brain.

All day long, you are having an inner dialogue. Sometimes you’re a best friend, sometimes a coach, often a big meanie. Pulling that dialogue out of your silent recesses and getting it on paper is so freeing, so wonderful that it can change your life.

Here’s my story, briefly.

I’ll start by saying I’m NOT a morning person. So the idea of morning pages wasn’t really appealing from the start. However, after reading the first couple of chapters, I set an alarm for 6am (1 hour earlier than usual), wrote my three pages, and then exercised for 30 minutes.

That may not seem earth-shattering, but I’ve been trying to coax myself to do those very things for YEARS. I’ve tried reward systems, multiple alarms, punishments, everything. I felt so great that whole day that I did it again the next day.

Three weeks later, I’m still getting up at 6am and doing my writing and exercise for an hour, and even more things are falling into place. It’s like the cobwebs were cleared out and I can see things from a different angle now.

This small ritual has affected my demeanor so much that my son (not knowing what I’m up to) said the other day, “Mommy, you’re acting weird.” That’s my badge of honor. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Creative people need an outlet. If you’ve been stuffing your creative self into a corner in your brain, or just “trying to focus on work,” I’d strongly encourage you to check out The Artist’s Way. There’s a reason it’s been a global phenomenon for decades.

For those of you who have already been doing morning pages for years, what has been your experience over time?

 

Featured Image via Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/y02jEX_B0O0

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee