Branding any small business requires you to build the brand into your very bones. I talk to my clients about getting  “fluent” in the language of their own business. Their value rolls off their tongues, and powerful positioning statements are easily improvised. Creative choices are easily weighed and decided upon, and networking opportunities come into Continue Reading

In the last installment, I emphasized that competition is largely in your mind. Still, you need to prove yourself worthy of a customer’s business in some way. What I’ve seen to complicate this, is that the sole proprietor him/herself is often the company’s harshest critic. In order to be a bright, shining brand that captures Continue Reading

Branding has standard principles that are the same for any industry. And yet, every industry has peculiarities that pose challenges. After helping more than a dozen coaches brand and differentiate themselves, I have become intimately familiar with the particular challenges involved. One of the more convoluted aspects of this industry is tackling competition, which has Continue Reading

#2 What do you do? This is another early question a coach gets asked, usually preceding a sweaty pause, and a deer-in-headlights stare. Okay, you know that has to end before you can have any success, right? The answer to that question must flow out of you as easily as your full name and the Continue Reading

Marketing advisor Harry Beckwith summed up the challenge of marketing services with the title of his book, Selling The Invisible. If you can’t see it, touch it, feel it, how will you know what it is? This is the first challenge of branding a coach, and it’s certainly not the only one. Coaches, more than Continue Reading

Answering the question, where does creativity come from? can become quickly heady as well as trite. I prefer to take a functional look at creativity, rather than consider it a mystical enigma. What I’ve found is that a creativity is a natural state of the human mind, and the way one sets their mind taps Continue Reading

Being the guardian of a brand requires being vocal. Every company has a lot riding on creative decisions. Executives have the knowledge and strong opinions required to keep the company financially stable, and they require their creative staff to be equally as knowledgeable and vocal about creative decisions. Every creative person does the company a Continue Reading

WHY UPGRADE? This latest version of Creative Director is going to produce results, and everybody’s going to have fun along the way. That can be a very valuable promise, when you’ve had to make compromises in the name of creative talent. More than anything, I love to direct creative teams beyond the expectations of a Continue Reading

How possible is it to approach a creative project with passion, without ego also coming along for the ride? We all know the phrase, “clash of egos,” when it comes to creative projects. It is clear that creativity free of ego has benefits: speeding up output, letting new ideas flow, and having a generally better Continue Reading