Bold Branding & Charging Your Worth

Speaker 1: [Music] confidence is key when it comes to selling your services building a business because you're going to have to do a lot of things that you're unsure about and most people aren't willing to do things without a clear sure outcome if they don't have any confidence in their their own abilities to execute or their own abilities to get back up if they get knocked down so I don't know how someone builds a business without leaning into building their confidence because you need it to be successful I'm Melanie bar welcome back to the shilp podcast your go-to place to empower you to live the life and business that you crave I'm here to talk about everything from Having the courage to make life and career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation I'm here to celebrate your wins and navigate through your challenges I live in the city now but I grew up in a town of a thousand people I've navigated major life leaps a senior level corporate career worked in professional sports and now as a successful entrepreneur who loves business technology family and making meaningful connections with you and the Sheil it Community I also love a good workout and dose of self-care magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so turn up the audio open your favorite Notes app grab your favorite drink and here we go welcome to the Shila podcast thank you for joining us P share with us the moment that you realized the traditional branding agency model didn't align with your vision and what sparked the creation of worst of all design they were two completely separate experiences so worst of all design started because my then boyfriend and fiance was a graphic designer and an artist and he was getting freelance work and he was not doing a great job at actually finding and managing the work but he was brilliant at actually delivering so at some point I just said you know what I think I could go find you the clients and I could manage the projects and that way you could do what you do best and I feel like I would be better at this part of it so that's what started worst of all design we just said you know what we want to work for ourselves I was doing gig work to begin with so I said well I might as well just find clients for you and then we can keep all of the money so that's how we started worst of all design and the name comes from my married name his last name is wval it's dutch so it's a it was his nickname as a stoner artist in college did I pronounce it wrong wasall no no no it'sall but our company is worst of all design okay all of a sudden I thought did I say worst of all I used to have clients like they'd work with us for a while and they'd come in and then it would it would click for them and go oh my gosh is it worst of all because of waser ball and like yes they like oh my gosh I just got it and I just loved the look on their face when they put it all together so we would just let people figure that out so that's how we started the business how I realized the way we were doing it the old default agency model was not for us I wish I could say I had some sort of Revelation on my own but it was really because we found ourselves in $40,000 of debt and totally maxed out on our credit cards and we we're trying to figure out we're working so hard our work is really good our clients are really happy and we're actually generating a lot of income so why are we in debt and struggling to pay our bills and overworked and that's when I realized something about this is not working of course I wasn't so calm cool and collected all the time I was sobbing on the kitchen floor going oh my God this doesn't work but that's where that Revelation came from it's great that the two of you can come together and that you have different skill sets because so often people come together and they have the same ones and it seems like you have a really good balance in that way yeah it has worked out especially because in those moments I have a very business-minded often black and white thinking right like there's a right way to do this I'm very goal oriented and in that moment I thought this isn't working and the whole thing needs to burn to the ground and he was like we're actually doing a really good job like it's just not working this way maybe we should just look at different other options for ourselves and that's how we ended up figuring out that this intensive model that we do was way more profitable way more enjoyable and and ended up being not only the way that we succeeded in that agency but ended up being the core reason that I have the training company I have now to teach this very specific model to other people so having that creative brain in my corner saying hey P all is not lost and you don't need to shut your whole business down because something didn't work is really crucial for me your tagline is bold and Unapologetic what does that philosophy mean to you and how has it shaped the way you approach branding for your clients and share with us how you work with your clients yeah the way that we work with our branding clients is we do entire branding and website projects and we deliver them only in this intensives model so we'll do an entire brand website the strategy the copy the messaging the identity materials and we'll work with the client over a one or two day period and that's it for that we charge 40 to $60,000 and the way we're able to do that is because we have this step before that called a branch shank people pay us to interview them understand everything about their business understand where they are now where they want to go and give them a clear strategic plan on how to go from A to B and through that process we build a ton of trust we get to the heart of what their issue is and then we give them a super clear solution that we can then execute in this intensive so because of this two-step process and the kind of relationship we develop through it we essentially do the whole project ahead of time so that we spend that 2day intensive getting them on board showing them work making tweaks in real time and and such that the whole thing is done by 6 p.m. at the end of day two so that's how we work it's very specific it's pretty unique and when I say bold and Unapologetic I mean I had to learn to be bold and Unapologetic when I went out into the world selling worst of all design when I had no idea what I was selling because I inherited this nickname from my husband I was just like trying to find my way in the world and I learned over time how valuable it was to to be bold and to own it and say actually I had a lot of people when I would network say why would you want to be worst of all and shouldn't you be best of all and I started to learn how much this was getting attention it was getting people to engage with me and they would see our work and be like oh my God this is amazing and then it would all come together they'd go oh wow you really caught my attention you really stood out and you did all of that without saying we help you stand out and so the whole thing just clicked so I learned through personal experience just how powerful it is to be bold and to be something that some people aren't going to get or aren't going to like because it naturally magnetically attracted our ideal clients and those people are so fun to work with give us a an example of one of your clients and how you took them through a process yeah she was one of our first brandup clients ever and we just rebranded her 10 years later three months ago so they are a financial services company called stash wealth and when they first came to us in 2014 they were saying they were different and they wanted to be this financial services firm for young 30 somethings but they came from Merl Lynch and their brand and their messaging was just very Merl Lynch with a little bit of an edge and so at the time I said you're saying you're different but nothing about this is different because you're not willing to go out on a limb and so at the time we implemented all kinds of language like get your financial together which at the time when she said that she literally had mentors and colleagues calling her saying you can't say that in our industry no one's going to take you seriously and I was in her Corner going you've got to say it because this is how you're showing that you're actually different instead of just saying we're different on a gray and blue Merl Lynch looking website but saying we're different we're different so she really ran with it she was incred successful with it and 10 years later it was time to update the messaging and so we went from she used to talk about how she worked with high earners not rich yet and talking to people who didn't have their financial together but it's evolved the landscape has evolved the clientele has evolved she has 10 years of data now so we actually rebranded to make it more sophisticated and speak to 30s somethings who are who actually have their together and they just want want to do this right they want to be smart about it they want to have their cake and eat it too they want to be know that they're invested for the future in their retirement but they also want to live well now they want to travel they want to buy houses they want to do all of these things and they want to do it without stressing that's a different take on the same messaging both worked at different times for different audiences and it evolved and you have a book share with us about the book and what do you want your readers to take away from it so I wrote a book called badass your brand it's all about how you need to Zig when everyone else zags right I say if you tell people you think outside the box you don't think outside the box so how can you be unapologetically yourself how can you repel some people so you can magnetically attract others how can you as a business this is specifically for turning expertise into profit so anybody who is selling their expertise or Services how can you simplify your business and really own the things that you do and do them very very well systematize it so that it's very profitable so that you're repeating the framework even if you're doing custom work within your framework that's the key to scaling up your profit and your freedom and your ease without necessarily hiring a team of employees I love that you say repel some to bring others to you because it's so true and we get stuck in this cycle of thinking about the things that we need to do and have to do from a t iCal standpoint that we don't always Infuse that element of surprise in the way that we should absolutely and also a lot of us are people Pleasers so it it doesn't feel good when somebody says to you that they don't like something or they don't get it or you should say something different I love telling my students you know what that says to me they're just not your client and that's okay in fact we actually want people to not be our clients it's how we know we're doing it well because as long as some people can say I would never hire you that allows the other people to say you are my person I couldn't hire anybody else when scaling an agency from $30 to $50,000 months while reducing workload by 80% what's one unexpected mindset shift or system you teach that often surprises your community and clients the most it comes down to first of all selling from the very beginning so one thing that I I suggest to anybody selling expertise is to not write free proposal I find that that is common practice but it actually sets the relationship up with the wrong power dynamics from the very beginning if you're truly an expert and somebody wants to hire you and the first thing you do is say well let me go do a bunch of free work and hopefully be flashy enough or impress you enough then maybe you'll hire me that's not an expert Authority position to come from so instead what I recommend is when you're super clear on exactly who you can help the most and you're super clear on your value instead sell something I call a lead product it's this first step to working with you it should be a no-brainer price but it should help start to solve their problem so I usually recommend people start selling this somewhere between $250 and $1,000 you sell the lead product it's an interview you understand everything about their situation so you're not just taking what they say at face value you know in in my industry some people will come to and say I just need a logo if you ask a bunch of questions you're going to find out that's never the case a logo is not going to solve their problem they may not even need a new logo they need something that's going to find them clients and a logo is not going to do that so you interview them you really get to know them and then you write out exactly what your plan is for them with authority and expertise and what I find is that when you execute this well not only does the client feel so heard and understood but they get so much Clarity around what their actual needs are and they build so much trust with you because they see you as the expert who helped them see that so when they get to the end of this plan and you say for me to execute it it's going to be $6,000 they're much more primed and open and willing and trusting to say yes to that and I've actually found people have come to me with I only have $2,000 and I only need a logo and purchased a $20,000 package from me because they really needed all of these other things and once I had that trust and I could show them how much they needed it was a no-brainer yes your Ted Talk on cultivating confidence resonates with so many how does confidence play a role in building a successful brand and how can entrepreneurs build it authentically confidence is something I think everybody wants more of and there's no quick path to confidence something that's built over time through doing things things that frankly are scary and you don't want to do and a lot of people are not willing to put themselves in that discomfort but I do find that the more often you try things that you might be worried about might be fearful of and see that you live to tell the tale that you're okay that even if the worst thing happens you're still okay it makes it a little easier to do it the next time and if you just keep doing that you will build that confidence and confidence is key key when it comes to selling your services building a business because you're going to have to do a lot of things that you're unsure about and most people aren't willing to do things without a clear sure outcome if they don't have any confidence in their their own abilities to execute or their own abilities to get back up if they get knocked down so I don't know how someone builds a business without leaning into building their confidence because you need it to be successful I also developed this process because I hated Sal and I hated I hated the moment when I would be on a conversation with a prospect and they would ask me about the price I would get all sweaty palms and so uncomfortable this is the moment where I could lose it because I say the wrong price or I scare them away I don't even know what the price is yet because I don't know what they need so either I would tell them it depends or I would ask them what their budget was neither of which are good answers by the way and then I would usually try to push it off and say tell me more about your budget and tell me more about what you need and then let me go write a proposal just to buy myself time and then even when I sent the proposal i' be like oh my God I hope it's not too much all of this sucked all of this feels so stressful and I hated it so this lead product took all of that pressure off of my shoulders because now it's just we're on a fit call if you're a good fit I'm like great you're the perfect fit you're exactly who we work with this is the next step this is the price take it or leave it I'm not here to sell you anything if you see the value you'll buy it and it actually people are so much more willing to buy when it's so clear I developed that kind of out of a necessity and out of my own fear of sales to be perfectly honest it's good that you kept going and you kept pushing forward and you kept saying okay how can I do it differently next time to where you found this model of success yep it was purely trial and error but to your point how could I make this a little bit better okay like I don't like this part how can I tweak it to work better for me and believe me in retrospect it sounds like a really elegant process when you're doing it it's hard and challenging right as we all know in business hard sounds really lovely in retrospect but at the time it was so much struggling but I knew that I I wanted this to work because I knew I was never going to go work for someone else so it was this or die and and I finally figured it out for someone listening who is the perfect client for you for my agency and we really only take a couple clients a year now it's one to three person service businesses it's experts who are really really good at what they do but their brand and their online presence doesn't reflect it and they aren't getting paid what they deserve they aren't getting paid what they should it's probably because of how they're positioning their brand and how they're marketing themselves but uh these days most of my time is spent training other one to two person branding agencies on how to implement this intensives model so that they can be more profitable have more freedom scale up in terms of revenue and profit without necessarily hiring a team by being more efficient so anybody who's a one to two person branding agency who finds that those long drawn out projects are just running them ragged they don't feel like they have control over their business and that also might be their brand so we we handle all of those things but those are the people who I I'm most excited to work with right now and how do you work with them do you have a coaching program yes I have a program called nobs agency Mastery it's specifically for one to two person branding agencies who want want to scale up to 3040 $50,000 months without employees and it's all about scaling down and simplifying your offers and how you run your business and your projects in order to scale up that profitability thank you so much for joining us today share with us how and where we can find you so you can come follow me on Instagram I'm p lovesyou bizb i I'm also on LinkedIn a lot Pia Silva and I brought your list listeners a little gift I actually took the exclusive rights of my Audi book back from Audible and I put it up on a free feed so if you want to grab that you can go to nobs agencies.com sheb built it and you can grab the audiobook and you kind of hear the specifics of how we went from $40,000 in debt to $500,000 in Revenue Just the Two of Us using this model thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello she .c on our Sheil it website or at Sheil it on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave