Ep. 13: How Rich Kozak Scaled His Customer’s Local Brand into a Global Phenomenon

Transcript

This episode is brought to you by Equilibria, Inc. Equilibria provides training to assist fast-growing companies in documenting and improving their key processes for maximum operational performance. Visit EQBsystems.com to stop the chaos of fast growth and start flowing today! EQBsystems.com.

Welcome to Scale Tales – the business storytelling podcast where entrepreneurs, executives and experts share firsthand accounts of those magical moments when they achieved something bigger than they could have imagined.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre, host and producer of Scale Tales and I’m so excited about this next tale. It involves a journey of our next guest and his customer, Mary, and the transformative work they did together to, literally, put her brand on the map.

This is Ep. 13: How Rich Kozak Scaled His Customer’s Local Brand into a Global Phenomenon

I’m Rich Kozak, CEO and founder of Rich Brands and Impact Driven Publishing. And this is my scale tale.

It started about six years ago. I got a phone call from someone in my referral network who said,

“Hey, I was told about you and what you’re doing and the way you evolve and relanguage brands. You’re the one to call. And I’m interested. Tell me about what you do.”

The result of that phone call put Mary and me into a relationship where we were focused on what her brand is today and what it can become. The brand that she will become is what she thought. We’re all a product of our environment. Mary was no different. I’m speaking to you because you’re listening to this right now and it’s very possible, and I’m saying that with a twinkle in my eye, that your understanding of what your business’s brand is or your personal brand, if your brand is you, is a function of what you’ve heard about branding or what you’ve read about it or what you think it is or whatever.

And it’s been heavily weighted by the use of the word “branding” by marketing service sellers all around the world who want to sell you stuff that is good for your “branding” according to them. But it’s not really clear to many people.

Your brand is a perception, but it’s not your perception. You see, it’s a perception in the mind of that individual or that company or that industry or that group or those leaders that you most want to impact with your business, with your work, with your gift, however you feel about what you do. Your brand is a perception, but it’s not your perception.

Mary was very smart. She’s a PhD and she listened to that, and it was new to her. We’re not talking about some brand that you hear on TV. We’re talking about someone you’ve never heard of whose gift is to help make an impact on other people. So, I think it would help you if you understood that she is a healer of sorts in the area specifically of breath therapy.

Are you aware that the way you feel is directly a function or result of the way you breathe? You might need to think about that for a moment and say, I haven’t really thought of that before, and most people don’t, but it is true, and for a lot of reasons, and I don’t need to go into them here. So, what’s important is, just like in your business, there is a barrier that prevents people from letting your brand in first impression.

You know, they first hear about you or see your business card, or hear you speak or meet you at a networking meeting, or someone tells about them, they hear a testimonial or an endorsement, or they go on the website, homepage, whatever they see for the first time, whichever entry portal they see, it doesn’t land on them, they don’t get inspired, it doesn’t transfer energy, and they don’t go, “Whoa, whoa, I want that! What is that?” It doesn’t come alive for them. It’s more like, “Oh, that’s nice.” You see, most brands fall flat.

And Mary, because of what she does and the misunderstanding or misperception, or not understanding or just not being aware made the probability that her brand falls flat on first impression pretty high. And frankly, all of our businesses have a high probability of falling flat on first impression. And we can increase that probability of falling flat by being inconsistent, by not defining our language or creating language that transfers energy, because that’s two of the things that make the brand come alive.

There are four. Mary didn’t know them when I first talked with her. For 47 years, I have taught the process, the steps of what it means to define and language a brand and how you do that for an individual. For 20 years, I worked with large companies. I ran what you might call a high-tech ad agency or integrated marketing communications firm that was part of a partnership that was global. I had partners in 21 countries. I became certified as a global branding consultant and served on global brand teams, moving brands from country to country.

I loved it so much. Frankly, I think I was addicted to it. Literally at 50 years old, I decided to resign that career. And it wasn’t until after I realized, helping some individuals that I get to do this work and that I was created to do it, that I came back and now I work only with individuals.

Rich clearly knows how to magnify brands for companies as well as individuals. Now, back to his story with Mary. I don’t know about you, but I definitely want to know more about his process for re-branding.

The first thing she would do would be to come to a half day event where we talk about what’s the difference between defining and languaging a brand very clearly and what happens when you do that.

What benefits accrue to the business that help you grow, that help you literally attract those people you most want to impact, those people whose perception is your brand. How do you do that? We spend a half day talking about what happens when you do and what happens when you don’t. The six bad consequences, the confusion and misinformation, what makes you really outstanding, you just don’t get credit.

According to Rich, there are six bad consequences that happen when we don’t clearly define the language of our brand. One of those consequences is not getting credit for your expertise.

Mary wasn’t getting credit for the powerful results that her business was creating in people’s lives, not the credit she should. The language is inconsistent and people didn’t know how to trust it because they weren’t familiar with what she did. I said to Mary, that in order to get credit, you have to take credit.

Now, I’m telling you these things for a reason, because part of the scale tale is the learning, the aha moments that go on in your head about what it means to define and language your brand so consistently across the board that you don’t fall flat, that you do get credit for exactly what makes you outstanding. And it’s crafted to say it in ways that only you say it and you create a look and a feel that’s consistently positive and people remember it. And there is unique language that transfers energy.

We’re all here for a reason, and all of us have the same opportunity, each of us as individuals, to make the most significant impact on the lives of others whose lives we touch.

And that could be on organizations and it could be on countries. We all have the opportunity to make the most significant contribution on those whose lives we touch with the gifts that we have been given. We all have that in common. I asked Mary what her story was. She was born in Ireland. She came to the United States to do a doctorate degree in food science. She happened to have a child who has special needs.

And she was busy. Really busy as a mom, busy as a wife and as a hostess, and she says,

“One day I was walking with a neighbor and I didn’t even know her that well. And she said, ‘You seem like you’re just kind of going through the motions a little bit. You might want to try out breath therapy.’”

Mary said she was offended, but she did it anyway. And she told me the first time. She got some amazing clarity. She had a spiritual experience that transformed her…

“I understand now that I’m a perfect child of God and I get to live my life knowing that. And you know what? I want to do this for a living.”

And she became a therapist. So when she and I met, she had been doing it for a few years and had built a local constituency. She was doing sessions locally out in the desert area where she lived, and she’s pretty expansive thinker and very bright, but my understanding was she felt kind of like she was at the gate to the next level of what she gets to become. But the gate was locked. She didn’t understand how to build the stairs to the next level of the house.

This takes us back to that moment when Mary decided she wanted to work with Rich to rebrand her company. The process for doing that took about three months.

She understood, listened carefully, realized what happens when you really define and language your brand consistently and what happens when you don’t. And chose to say, Let’s move on with this.” We went through all seven steps of this impact driven branding process and she understands it, she’s conceptually strong.

And she wrote them down, we wrote down the levels of impact she sees. We ask what characteristics the brand must become to make those impacts. And then we ask what categories of expertise must the brand become and get credit for. What’s the first one?

What’s the next one, what’s the next one? And those things, when written down, enabled us to do competitor searches, to analyze whom she’s going to be compared with and create a solid, unique and defensible positioning statement and create a brand name. A brand name that was intriguing and that would make people who were in her target audience who really needed relief or really needed to get their joy back because of a loss.

They were just overwhelmed and they absolutely needed relief from the overwhelm or something had happened in their life. They needed joy and they didn’t understand this was a path.

And this is where the magic happened. Now that Mary was clear on her impact and the language she should use to describe her brand, the next step was to create a new website that included her brand’s new, global look.

We take everything she has, which has her own parochial look on it, and turn it into the desired brands language.

Women worldwide with faces and joy from all regions and colors, just in a marvelous display that anyone from anywhere could look and say, This feels so good. And she is doing free sessions on Zoom worldwide and she’s sharing her testimonials. A woman in Frankfurt says, “Oh, I heard her on a podcast and I decided I would try one of her sessions and this problem went away and my heart settled down and I became more at peace.” The testimonials were remarkable.

She was worldwide quality, but she wasn’t worldwide. But once we finished the work to put her desired brand on the first impression management tools, the language was consistent, it was very intriguing. Her brand is called The Breath of New Life. Relief Today. Transformation Forever. And she begins the process of gathering testimonials from all over the world and you can see them on her website. It is phenomenal.

And getting speaking engagements because of the clarity with which her brand speaks. Remember, it’s consistent across the board. And now she not just is doing sessions that she’s charging money for in her local region, she is global, she is worldwide. The brand takes credit for being worldwide and it gets credit for being worldwide. And now she can touch as many lives as she’s made to touch because she has the platform to step into her purpose.

Wow, that’s incredible and impressive. Are you or your company getting the credit you deserve for all the amazing things you’re doing? Don’t go anywhere. We’re going to take a break and when we come back, you’ll hear more about Rich’s rebranding process and how you can apply it to scale your brand’s impact!

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We’re back and before the break, branding maestro Rich Kozak told us about Mary, a breath the erapist who needed life breathed into her own brand. Rich helped her successfully scale it from a local, obscure brand to a globally recognized one. Listen as he shares more details about how they did it.

Our businesses are a vehicle. They’re a vehicle for us to make a living, but they’re not necessarily why we’re here. But when we use branding the right way to get credit for what makes us outstanding for those gifts, for those strengths, and we play that as beautifully and consistently as we can, we create a platform from which it is much, much easier and much quicker to step into why we’re here.

Our purpose. Think of it in however you wish. We here say our divine purpose because we’re all made by the same God. So, imagine evolving your personal brand with deep clarity about what’s next and what’s more, and a way to say that umbrella not just for what you do really well, but for what is possible when you are at your highest level of impact and doing that work, enjoy for more decades. So you get longevity and being, having that feeling that you’re in divine purpose.

I am very fortunate because that’s the feeling I have. You can tell I enjoy it. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like love. And that’s one of the two reasons we’re here. Mary’s business went from very, very small and very, very local, regional, parochial even. Like I said, it had this kind of, you know, girl next door in a unique area kind of feel to it. And now it’s global.

I wondered, now that Mary’s brand is global, if the scale she achieved meant having to add more people to her team.

The whole process of her going through the trainings, the brand development work, and then all the projects, creating all the pages and for the website, it was about a year until. The brand opened its mouth and launched The Breath of New Life. Relief Today. Transformation Forever. But once that was out there, she started getting speaking engagements and posting new testimonials.

Mary had never really verbalized she wanted a big organization, so I never expected her to build a big organization. She can do what she’s doing with a couple of VAs, and she had people who had worked with her before on website things, on market things before. So she has a small, small team. But in the global, let’s call it virtual event space.

That business is highly profitable, and you can run a business with very few people. However, she is young, she has decades. So she really is just in the throes of hitting stride where she can pick different levels that she thinks will bring her joyous.

With a solid brand under her, there’s something else Rich says that Mary can do to scale her impact even more.

A book or a series of books. Mary and I talked about books when we did the brand development. We named some books that are on her timeline that, when she chooses to write them or have them conceived and outlined and have somebody work with her and get them out, will really cross a stake in the ground that moves the brand strategically forward to another level and gets her the opportunity to be a paid speaker or to speak at major conferences, or to participate in high end masterminds or to create them for herself.

So I can say for her, we’ll see, because some of it is up to her choice of what brings her joy. She still has a family, and as long as she wants to spend time with her family. The last thing she’s going to do is make herself busier versus spending time with her family. But her work is her joy, and it’s her gift, and it is healing, and she is global now. So just like all of us, she gets to answer the question, What do I clearly see?

How do I clearly see impacting other people’s lives when I’m thriving? And if she closes her eyes and sees thriving as running retreats in multiple exotic locations throughout the world, she’ll do it. If she sees thriving as speaking a major conference, she can do it. If she sees thriving at using her voice, which is delightful.

She has this cute Irish accent, so she can speak anywhere. People listen to her. They’re intrigued by her. It’s her choice. And anyone who’s listening to this as an individual or someone who owns a business, who’s growing a business, is growing a team, it’s always your choice. But today is the day to define the brand you will become.

But which comes first? Defining your brand or developing your strategic plan or even your marketing plan? As entrepreneurs, we’re often told we need to have those plans in place, so I asked Rich his thoughts about where his branding work fits in relation to those plans. And…what’s the difference between branding and marketing anyway?

Your marketing, when it’s at its best, is the execution of an excellent branding strategy.

What that means is branding comes first. Matter of fact, one of the things I do every month is a free masterclass called brandfirstordie.com. There are people out there who’ve been doing things for 20, 30 years, but they know there’s more. But they don’t know how to get through that locked gate to the next level. And they think it’s about getting credit for what they’re already known for, there might be an umbrella brand that stands what their biggest gift that they have to give, but they’re known for something else. They don’t know how to do that.

Before your evolved brand opens its mouth, before you might have been making impacts for years. But if you’re going to take it to the next level, remember we said your brand is a perception, that perception must evolve. The perception in the mind of those whose lives, whose businesses you most clearly see impacting, that you most want to impact – they need to perceive the brand for what you’re going to do.

So you must evolve that perception. If you want to turn a life of impacts into a story of legacy, branding comes first. Marketing is execution. Most people get it confused. People say, ”Yeah, we don’t have time to do the branding right now, we just need some leads.” You’ve heard it and what happens is the six bad consequences.

You hire a third party marketer and they use whatever language they know works, but it’s not congruent with your heart, it’s not congruent with the brand, what it stands for, because the marketers haven’t been given guidelines and so they just use their own guidelines. It creates confusion, and misinformation. You won’t get credit for what makes you outstanding.

You waste a ton of money on marketing and you think the marketing doesn’t work. It’s not the marketing that doesn’t work, it’s the lack of clarity in the definition and languaging of the brand. Here’s how powerful that is. When this work is done, when the definition, languaging are done and you have what you can use for years and you will, and it’ll take you to those higher levels of impacts.

People, when the brand speaks, when the brand shows up, it shows up so consistently, the clarity is always there, they feel it. That clarity is palpable and it’s missing in most brands, but when it’s there, people sense it.

When your brand clearly articulates what it sees for those individuals, those target audiences that it most wants to impact, those people in whose mind the brand of the perception lives. When you paint that clear picture, you are a magnet.

And in case you’re wondering how strategy relates to branding and marketing, consider this…

You know, the word strategy is a very powerful word. Strategy just means the way of doing things. You know, kind of the roadmap, the choices you make. It’s directionality, it’s decisions. Branding is specific steps and marketing is executional. In order to succeed at the branding strategy, what marketing do we need? What media do we need, what products and services? How do we price it, how do we distribute it?

Those are marketing questions. And I use one word for marketing. It’s execution. It all begins with who are we? Whom do we clearly see impacting, and what are those impacts? And how do we say to them? Here’s what we see for you. You do that with a handful of target audiences, and even people that aren’t in those target audiences are going to feel the clarity and be attracted.

And trust me, that’s a great feeling to have! Before this scale tale ends, Rich has some resources to share with you.

I do a master class called brandfirstordie.com, twice a month. And the one that will really shift and help you understand what it means to define and language your brand and what happens when you do and what happens when you don’t – we do a half day event every month, and that’s either on a Thursday or a Saturday morning for 4 hours.

But I’ll tell you the easiest thing, and the freest thing…if you go to our website, right on the homepage it says, Talk to Rich for 30 Minutes. I am not going to talk to you. I’m going to listen to you. And then we’ll talk about possibilities for the brand you will become and how to deal with what’s challenging.

Paint a picture for me of the impacts you clearly see making or the struggles you’re having. Just talk to me. I’ve been there. I’ve been through it all.

Take Rich up on his offer and tap into his 45+ years of branding expertise. Because scaling a business is heavily driven by operations, I’d like to add to Rich’s definitions. If strategy is directional, and Marketing is execution, then Operations is customer delivery.

Amen on that!

And with that said, here’s a recap highlighting lessons learned from Rich and his scale
tale about taking Mary’s brand global:
1. Be consistent in language.
2. Understand what a brand is. It is your customer’s perception.
3. Take credit. Get credit.
4. Combined, it gives you the platform to scale/expand your reach.
5. What impact do you have or are you possible of?
6. Scale doesn’t mean more people, but more money, more exposure.
7. Write a book is one way to increase exposure.

Oh, how I wish I could bottle up Rich’s energy, but unfortunately I can’t. However, we can settle on signing up for his free 30-minute session as well as his free masterclasses.

Thank you, Rich Kozak for extending those offers to us and for sharing your scale tale with us. Find out what the four things are needed to make a brand come alive as well as the six bad consequences of improper branding by visiting us on our website at ScaleTalesPodcast.com. While there, you can also access links to other resources mentioned in this episode’s show notes. Again, that’s ScaleTalesPodcast.com.

Thank you for listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re listening.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films. Show notes by Erika Ve Revilla.

You’ve been listening to Scale Tales, a podcast by Equilibria, Inc.