FROM ESSENCE TO EXPRESSION

ATTRACTING INVESTORS AND PARTNERS Branding your business, creates an asset that is unique to you in the market. If it is robust enough, that asset can be worth a lot of money. A well-conceived and well-constructed brand offers instant scalability, because you have the principles and processes in place, systematized, locked down and ready to be replicated. This positions you well in the eyes of bigger brands in your industry that potentially want to buy you out. A brand, done properly, is highly attractive for investors and buyers. Your brand will also enable you to attract the right people with whom to partner. When you elevate the status of your business through your branding, you project yourself as an organization worth doing business with. In turn it deters those who you probably wouldn’t want to do business with – who aren’t concerned about how they project themselves to the market. Businesses without strong, well-considered branding rock up to the negotiating table stark naked. AUTHORITY Picture this: You click with someone at a trade show and immediately feel they are knowledgeable, smart and worth getting to know better. And they have the product you’ve been looking for! They seem like the perfect person to do business with. At what stage would you start to lose confidence in this person and their business? When you find out they don’t have a business card? When you see that they don’t have a brochure? When you look them up on the Internet and find out they don’t even have a website? What if it’s you who doesn’t have those basic elements in place? At the most fundamental level, branding gets you in the game and allows you to participate on a professional level. It enables you to look established right from the get go, giving your target audience a cushion of trust from which to start the relationship. You have to see branding as a performance stage that you have built for yourself (with your graphic designer) from which to sing your message.