Podcasts about brandtwist

Minter Dialogue Episode #406Julie Cottineau is an author, a brand passionista, who is founder and CEO of BrandTwist brand consultancy. In this conversation, we discuss the origin of her Brand Tattoo Test, her work at and lessons learned while working as head of brand for Virgin USA, the evolution of branding, the power of purpose and Julie's work at BrandTwist, which is also the name of her best selling book.If you've got comments or questions you'd like to see answered, send your email or audio file to nminterdial@gmail.com; or you can find the show notes and comment on minterdial.com. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate/review the show on RateThisPodcast. Otherwise, you can find me @mdial on Twitter.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/minterdial)

Julie Cottineau from BrandTwist on building your unique personal brand.This episode was broadcast as a livestream on September 4, 2020. It has been edited from its original format.***Follow Christine Gritmon on Twitter: @cgritmon and join her each Tuesday for the #ChatAboutBrand Twitter chatSubscribe to the Let's Talk About Brand Newsletter that goes out every Monday to ensure you don't miss a beat!Listen to Let's Talk About Brand on your favorite podcast platform!You can listen and subscribe to all of Adweek's podcasts by visiting adweek.com/podcasts.Stay updated on all things Adweek Podcast Network by following us on Twitter: @adweekpodcasts.And if you have a question or suggestions for the show, send us an email at podcast@adweek.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is your message being buried in the noise? Do you sound like every other professional in your market? And do you notice eyes glazing over when you talk about your business? Learn how to stand out in a crowded market and twist your brand to be more relevant now than ever before with our special guest, Brandtwist founder, Julie Cottineau.

For today it's Isolation Therapy Episode #14 with Julie Cottineau of BrandTwist. Find out how Julie proposes to Twist uncertainty into opportunity! Julie honed her branding chops working with Richard Branson and the iconic Virgin Media brand. Worth a listen!

  How to Put a "Twist" in Your Brand with Julie Cottineau (Archive) Julie Cottineau is the Founder and CEO of BrandTwist, a brand consultancy group that helps entrepreneurs and corporations build stronger, more profitable brands. Prior to launching her own business, she was the VP of Brand at Richard Branson's Virgin Group, overseeing branding strategy for new and established Virgin companies in North America. About the Interview: Ever wonder how Richard Branson manages to shake things up every time, in so many different industries? Julie Cottineau, spent 5 years as the VP of Brand for Virgin in North America helping to grow this iconic brand. Now the best-selling author of TWIST: How Fresh Perspectives Build Breakthrough Brands (Panoma Press 2016), Founder & CEO of BrandTwist will show you how TWIST your non profit's brand  for maximum impact. Fresh ideas come from looking at old problems from new perspectives. In this podcast, Julie will teach you how to: Go beyond “me-too” marketing, and get stand out Make the most of every brand touch-point – large and small Connect with target more deeply to create loyal brand ambassadors Walk away with tangible new ideas for your organization Why nonprofits should care about brand A unique, compelling brand can make or break even the strongest, most worthy enterprise. Once you understand the true nature of your brand, you achieve clarity and focus. You are in a much better position to serve the cause and the people you're really passionate about. Literally, it can change a life. Your charity, church or synagogue needs a strong brand – one with a TWIST. The TWIST is your unique story that will help you stand out, get the attention your good work deserves and build a loyal community of followers, donors, and volunteers.   Read the Interview Transcript Hugh Ballou: Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. It's Hugh Ballou and Russell David Dennis. Russell, how are you out there in Denver, mile high Colorado? Russell Dennis: The sun is shining, but you step outside and it's very cold. I'm having Northern Maine flashbacks with these single digit temperatures here. Hugh: We are recording in the wintertime. People listen at all places. It might be warm in the other hemisphere, and it might be summer in the northern hemisphere when you listen to it. But the message is that we give you the techniques and strategies and information. It doesn't have a season. It's stuff you can use any time. This is a real important topic today, like all of them, but we tend to skip over this thing of branding. We tend to think it's a picture, a logo. We got a brand, we got a logo. We are going to explore the different facets of branding and give you a top level view of what it looks like and what it is. One of the best people I know has this great book out called Twist. Julie Cottineau. Did I say it right, Julie? Julie Cottineau: Close enough. Hugh: I have a good memory, but it's short. Thank you for being our guest today. Tell the people listening a little bit about you and a little bit about brand twist. Julie: I think I have been branding since I was eight years old. When I was a little girl growing up in Massachusetts, my parents wouldn't let me have a pet because my brother was allergic. I went out in my garden and took a rock and put it in a Cool Whip container. I poked holes in it so it would be able to breathe. I invented the pet rock. Two years later, some guy named Gary Dahl in San Francisco invented the official pet rock because he was also fed up with regular pets. He was in a bar after work, he worked in advertising, and all his friends were leaving to feed their cats and walk their dogs. He said there has to be a pet with no hassle, so he created the official pet rock for no hassle. I created the non-allergic pet rock. Ever since then, I have been creating solutions with a twist from a different angle. Hugh: Twist. How did that name come about? Julie: That's another story. I was working as a branding consultant for Interbrand, a large branding agency. I was traveling all over the country. I was at Newark Airport one day. I looked out of the window and saw this 747 with these golden arches on the tailspin. I stopped in my tracks and thought, That would be a really interesting airline. It would be different than all these other airlines that had the same color seats and stewardesses and the same experience. A McDonalds airline, maybe I could buy a regular economy seat and supersize it to a premium seat. I looked up again and realized that it was a mirage. It was actually the reflection of the food court sign on the window, and there happened to be a plane. You following me? It was a hallucination. But it started me thinking, if you are in the airline business and want to break through, stop worrying about your other airline competitors and twist with other brands. Find brands that you admire that are doing cool things outside of your category, and twist those lessons with your brand. That started it all. Hugh: We put a snazzy title for this. The top mistakes. What are some of the things that people do that you wish they wouldn't do? Julie: We put the top three mistakes; it was hard to keep it to three. Hugh: I'll bet. Julie: You can grow to four. These were mistakes nonprofits are making. The first one is what we were just talking about: not really understanding what a brand is. In fact, confusing your branding with your marketing. That is a big mistake. Your marketing is how you get your message out there, but your branding is your fundamental story. What are you about? Why should people care? All great stories, if we think about our favorite movies and books, they have a twist. They have something unexpected in the plot. The number one mistake is stop saying if I only had ten times the marketing budget, I could build my nonprofit. Well, I could throw 20 times the marketing budget at you, but if your brand isn't in shape, your fundamental story of who you are, who you serve, and what's different about you, then it's a waste of money. Hugh: It's a waste of money. What happens when- I guess one of the fundamental branding issues with a nonprofit is the word “nonprofit.” It really puts us in a negative twist of scarcity thinking and nonprofit, we gotta have profit to be able to run this church or synagogue or community charity. How do we start out on this journey of creating our brand? Talk about brand image, brand promise, brand identity. There is a lot of facets to this besides the logo. Julie: Your brand is not your logo. Your brand is fundamentally your story, and your logo and name should help reflect that. I think a very unique challenge of nonprofits is the second mistake. They really try to welcome everybody. People who work in the nonprofit world are attracted to it because there is this inclusive instinct. Branding is actually about choices. If you have a page of your website that tries to tell everybody about everything that you do, you will connect with no one. It's like the twist on AT&T: reach out and touch someone. It's like reach out and touch no one. What I say the most important thing about branding is be clear on who you want to serve and the issues you want to promote. Be very choiceful. Narrow them down. Most nonprofit websites look like someone threw spaghetti up on the website and wanted to see what sticks. Branding is like an onion. Just tell me a little bit for me to get to know you, and then I will keep peeling the layers back to continue to get to know you. Less is more. Particularly in nonprofit branding. Hugh: Russell, we see lots of funky things, don't we? Russell: Yeah, it gets really interesting. If your target is everyone, you're marketing to no one. What it's about is really having people understand what it is that you do. A confused mind always says no. From a perspective of nonprofit, what is it precisely that a brand should do for a nonprofit? What is that main benefit that they get? I don't think people always understand the benefit in taking time to actually build a brand. What is that main benefit, and how does that really empower nonprofits? Julie: The main benefit is your brand promise. Getting clear on your brand promise. Getting specific on your brand promise. It's not we want to help people, or we want to make everyone feel included, or we want to make life better. Those brand promises are not gonna stick because not that they're not valid, but they're just so overused. It's like when Charlie Brown hears the teacher talk, and all he hears is “wah wah wah.” When I work with nonprofit clients, what problem are we trying to solve? Can we get really specific on that problem? Not that we want to give people shelter or help homeless people, but keep digging deeper. We want to help people feel at home. We want to help people feel that they can realize who they are in their minds versus how other people are seeing them. We keep digging. We get to one brand promise. The main thing we do with that brand promise is we don't validate it by looking at all the other nonprofits in our space, and we don't create it by committee, which is hard for nonprofits. Nonprofits love committees. What we try to do is say if there is a leader of the nonprofit, whether it's the president of the board or head of marketing, they need to own the brand. Everybody else can contribute their ideas, but at some point, someone needs to make a decision and get everybody on board. Versus we need a direction that everybody can live with, but no one hates. That is the definition of weak branding, when you go to the lowest common denominator. Hugh: She has good sound bites here, doesn't she, Russ? Russell: Brilliant. It's quite a field. I have done some marketing myself. I started out working in market research and sold some advertising on television and in print. But that doesn't really speak to brand. I was just fascinated by why people do some things. Describe to us what attracted you to the career of helping others build brands. How did that particular piece of marketing expertise jump out at you? Julie: I've always liked storytelling. I studied communications and creative writing. When I was little, my rockstar was Judy Bloom. I won a contest at the library to go hear her speak. To me, that was winning the Super Bowl. I was so excited by it. I've always been interested in storytelling. Branding is a very unique way to tell your story. I am in my office. I like to use all the different tools that I have. My brand is purple because it's the twist of red and blue. I tell my story not just in words, but also in images. You will never see me on stage without some purple on. The walls of the office are purple. The cover on my book is a twist of pink and purple. Nonprofits, one of the mistakes I see them making is they use stock photography because it's cheap, and I understand that. But they build websites. Don't invest a lot of money in them, but build them with a lot of images. The minute they set up their nonprofit, they are saying we're just like everybody else. There are inexpensive ways to take stock photography but frame it differently, treat it with a different color. We learn those lessons by looking at brands like Tiffany's. Tiffany's is a great brand to twist with. If someone gives you a blue Tiffany's box, I say to my husband, it almost doesn't matter what's in the box. The blue is their brand. Tiffany's robin egg blue. It sets up this expectation of an experience. I think that nonprofits should look at things like that, like owning a color. As soon as you see the red Target ad, you know right away, even if you don't hear the name and only see a slice of the logo, you know right away it's a Target ad. Hugh: It's funny you bring that up. They are changing their colors in Lynchburg to white. I don't know where I am. I was so into the red. The doors are still red, and people still wear the red and khaki. You were vice president of Richard Branson's Virgin. What are some of the important things you learned from that experience? That's powerful. Julie: It was an amazing experience. I think the biggest thing that I learned from Richard is not to be afraid to fail. He has an expression, “Fail harder.” Another one he has that is hopefully ok for this podcast, and is the title of one of his books is, “Screw it, let's do it.” If you have a good idea, and it feels like it's going to make an impact, don't test it to death, don't run it through 10 different committees, just try it. It might be successful, and it might not be. We know that we learn the most from the things that go wrong. It really opened me up to being more adventurous. I came home from my corporate job. I had been there five years, and I was having a great time. I said to my husband, “Screw it, let's do it. I am going to start my own company.” He said, “I don't think that's what that means. We have two children to put through college.” I said, “No, that's exactly what that means. I have an idea to create a branding consultancy and a book and a learning program, and I'm going to do it. If it's successful, great. If it's not, I am going to learn a lot.” That's what I did seven years ago actually. Hugh: Wow, you're still there doing it. Your book is called Twist: How Fresh Perspectives Build Breakthrough Brands. I remember you kindly sent me a copy to preview it. I think I did a respectable interview a couple years ago on the Orchestrating Success podcast for business leaders. This is a wholly different focus today. Really it's not. Good branding, good leadership, good marketing is probably the same. We do have a lot of hang-ups when we are working for a nonprofit that we shouldn't have. Where can people get your book? Julie: You can get it on Amazon. The easiest place. Hugh: And the color makes it stand out. I was amazed, Russell, that she finds a way to twist that word “twist” into pretty much every page of that book. It's phenomenal how this plays out. Before Russ goes into another question, I want to ask you. You do board retreats. There is a tension between different perspectives and an apparent contrast. When you have this side and this side, when you start looking at the intersection, there is some real finite truth or wisdom. We have a different outcome, but we also have ownership at some level. When you do a board retreat, I would assume it's a branding retreat, talk about the dynamics of how the board plays into the decision and how it goes from the retreat to the final decision. That is where a lot of us get stuck. Julie: Board retreats are interesting dynamics. The first thing I do is get everybody out of whatever the location is, whether it's the church or synagogue, into a relaxed atmosphere where they can think differently, to use the apple. I also get them to start thinking about other brands. We don't think about our organization as a brand, as a story, as something unique. We get bogged down into that won't work, we tried that, I'm not sure about that. We have to remember that the people we are trying to engage, whether it's members, donors, or volunteers, they don't live in this box with only our brand. They live in the wider world with a wider brandscape. I ask the board members ahead of time, “What brands do you admire, and why?” If you admire Starbucks because it customizes your order or Nike because it motivates you or Uber because it helps you get around when you are on a business trip, why wouldn't you bring some of those qualities to your organization? Why wouldn't you twist some of those things? Why shouldn't our church or synagogue or nonprofit also be customized and seamless to use and have clever impactful messaging? When I get them to think beyond their nonprofit to his larger brandscape and twist those ideas, then it breaks through. We come up in a short amount of time with solutions we hadn't had for months and months of board meetings. The second part of your question is the trickier part, which is how do you move it forward? That is where I would say it shouldn't be a democracy. The president of the board or the head of the nonprofit should get the input of everybody. If they are in a position of leadership, they have to take the leadership and say, “I have listened to everybody. This is what we're going to do. You don't have to agree with it 100%, but you have to understand why we're doing it and help us tell the story to a larger group.” Russell: That's an interesting perspective. There is a tricky balance to strike as far as getting by it. Obviously, you want your people to go with that. Who exactly is brand twisting for? With nonprofits, you have multiple audiences. You have multiple constituencies. You have your board, volunteers, donors, other people who fund your work, staff. How do you make that marriage work for all of those different audiences? Who is twisting specifically for? How do you do that? Julie: I like to work in brand development committees. I just rebranded a school system. We created a brand development committee that had the superintendent as the leader. Ultimately, she is the leader of that brand. She had to buy into it. We had two members of the board represented, not all 12, just two. We had a few practitioners represented, so some principals and teachers. We had some staff, the people, if we were going to change the website, on a daily basis, who are going to have to program it, and things like that. We had a committee of about 8 or 10 people. We worked in that committee and got through surveys and other strategic planning input from the community, parents and students. You can pull in input as data points, but don't make your committee 30 people sitting around a table. You're not going to get anything done. The 8-10 people worked on the branding solutions. We led them through the process. We committed as a group with the superintendent's opinion counting the most to the one recommendation we were going to go back to the school board and make, with a lot of great rationale of how we got through the journey. It worked because we had a process. We had representation. Ultimately, we went with a recommendation and a clear rationale on that recommendation. Russell: When it comes to communication, eight people is about the span of control. Once you get beyond eight, the wheels start to come off the wagon. Julie: What we did was when we rebranded, we didn't ask everybody, “Do you like this?” Branding is like naming your kids. You never tell anybody your intended names until the birth announcement comes out because all those opinions won't be helpful. It's your opinion as the parent that really counts. We named the new logo and gave it a story. We created a video that explained the change. We launched internally first so all the teachers beyond the committee got the preview first. Then we went out to the larger group. It wasn't like the brand launch was overnight. It wasn't just throwing up a logo and saying, “What do you think?” It was a really carefully crafted story that we told over and over for about a year until everybody understood it and got it and got behind it. Russell: One of the things that you mentioned in the book is that people have blinders on around branding. What is it that you mean by blinders? How do we work around these? Julie: It's like a horse, if you're trying to lead a racehorse out and put the blinders on so they can't see anything beyond them, it keeps them going forward. But the downside of that in branding is we work in nonprofit that has to do with cancer. We spend all our time looking at nonprofits that have to do with cancer and we worry about being seen as legitimate. Because we worry about being seen as legitimate, we end up being very safe but also using the same words and images as everybody else. That is what I mean by brand blinders, is only thinking in your category. If you lift your head up, I mean honestly your next board meeting, have it in a Starbucks. That would be a good use of everybody's time, or your favorite restaurant, or your favorite brand experience. Say, Look around. Why are we spending twice as much on a coup of coffee? Why is this an experience that we all come to? Why is everybody else hanging out here? What are they doing? Look how they are naming the baristas. Look how they are using the color green. Look how they are creating an atmosphere of welcome. What are the specific things that they're doing to make us feel like this is not just a cup of coffee, but an engaging experience? How can we twist those with our nonprofit? Russell: What do you think are some of the more common mistakes that nonprofit leaders have? I imagine that these blinders have a lot to do with it. But what are the most common ones? Julie: Sticking within the category is a really common one. Another thing is taking too much input, trying to do too many things, like I mentioned. Most nonprofit websites, the front page will give you a headache because they are talking about everything. Setting a clear vision and using that as a funnel. I would say there is some overlooked brand touchpoints that nonprofits should think about. In my book, I talk about these vomit bag moments, which came from Virgin Atlantic, which was one of the brands that I looked after as part of Virgin Management. Virgin Atlantic did a very clever thing. They had these air sickness bags, which they had to provide anyway. It's an FAA requirement. They have to be in every seat pocket for every flight over six hours, I think. Most airlines, well, what color are they for most airlines? Hugh: White? Julie: White, plain, no message. What Virgin Atlantic did was brand them. They made them red, which was the brand color, and they wrote a little story on them about how flying used to be fun, people used to get dressed up, and what happened to flying in terms of taking away all the peanuts. They twisted it back to a story about on how Virgin Atlantic, you will always feel great flying. I say to for-profit and nonprofit clients is: What are your vomit bag moments? What are the things you're doing anyway as part of your brand experience, but you could add a twist? Whether it's an invoice that you send, whether it's a thank-you note, whether it's a gift, on-hold music. If you have a phone calling as part of your nonprofit. Those are the little moments where you could add something that supports the brand and stands out. Hugh: When did this word “twist” come in your present thinking? How did that get so deeply embedded in your being? Julie: I think it was that airline experience. The McDonalds airline, I needed to look in a different way. I needed to look at things from a different angle. The more I started using it, the more people played it back to me as something that was helpful to them. Hugh: I like how she uses it instead of other words and twisting ideas into something that is unique. Part of what you all are talking about is back when you started this interview today, who do we serve? It's our avatar, so to speak. Russell talked about marketing. We have to have a target. We want to attract certain people. We tend to think everyone needs us. How do you help your clients narrow down to that specific person that they want to attract? Julie: We create brand avatars. We look at up to three targets, and we create personas for each of them. Instead of saying, if you're a medical nonprofit, it's health care practitioners, we will say it's Dr. Bob, and we will give Bob a backstory, and what keeps him up at night, and who lives in his household, creating a character in a novel. We will do that up to three times. What we're looking for though is to turn this target into real people with real problems we can help solve. Hugh: When we're talking to a specific person, we're talking to the person who is sitting in the community nonprofit trying to figure out how to attract donors and volunteers and the next board member. Russell hit on it earlier, he says a confused mind says no. How many times have we had people ask for donations and board and all they get is excuses because all that person sees is I'm going to get sucked into this vortex? Russell: Endless time commitment and bottomless blank checks. People aren't clear. The brand is important. The one question I have about brand is is a brand what you make it, is a brand forever? Are there appropriate times to look at it to see what you have is outdated or not working? Julie: That's a great question. I think you do need to update your story every once in a while, or at least take a look at it. I do a lot of rebranding, if organizations merge, when there are major changes in the segment that organization serves, when there is new leadership. I think it's a very worthwhile exercise every five years or so to check in and say, “Is that story we're telling now relevant to the people we're trying to serve? Is it relevant to who we are at this moment? Have we become something different?” Even if you go through one of those exercises and don't change anything with the outwardly facing part of your brand, you will have validation that you're telling the right story. I think that's a really important exercise to do. I would say if you look at great brands in the for-profit world, like Coca-Cola for example, their core brand promise has always been about happiness. But every once in a while, they will update their advertising. “We'd like to teach the world to sing,” or “Open a Coke and a smile,” or “Happiness.” The fundamentals are there, but there is a bit of a refresh. People get excited about the refresh. People pay attention to brand refreshes or rebranding. It's a great opportunity to get out in front of your targets and your donors and say, “Let us tell you what's new. You might have noticed we made some changes. It's not because we just needed cosmetic changes, but our vision is evolving. We wanted the brand to reflect that vision.” Hugh: We've talked around these terms. Let's clarify. You've used the phrase “brand promise” a few times. There is a brand image, brand identity, brand promise. There are different facets. How do you segment the different parts of a brand? Julie: Your brand identity is everything. It's the way you show up, the way you present yourself to the world, not just in your logo and website, but in the way your people behave, etc. I look at it as a house. The brand promise is the roof. That is the main thing you stand for. There is a diagram in my book of the roof of a house. That is what you enable. If you look at Nike, for example, they sell sneakers, but their brand promise is “Just do it.” Supporting that roof, you have three brand pillars. Those are your values. Why should I believe that you're someone who can help me just do it? You have three pillars that support that. Hugh: When we're doing strategy, we nail down the problem we're solving. Why do we exist? What is our solution? What is our unique value proposition? What do we do that's different from others? Is that the building block to a brand? How does that fit into the branding that you do? Julie: Yeah, I think your unique value proposition is your brand twist. That is your brand promise. When I do it, I like to make them succinct and easy to remember. I'm not a big believer in mission, vision, values, 10 layers of the brand. When I do it, I answer four questions. The first is “Who are we trying to serve?” and dig into that psychographic. What are we promising them? That is your brand promise or your unique value proposition. Why should they believe us? That is your brand values. Who, what, why? The last question I answer is how, how do I bring it to life? What is my website? What is my tagline? What is the way I dress? What are the cuts of people I hire? One of the biggest mistakes I see for nonprofits and for-profits is they say, “We want to update our website.” If you are creating a new nonprofit, they are creating a new website. They go right to the how, how are we going to bring this to life? But they don't do the who, what, and why. They don't have a strategy. They spend hours and hours on versions of websites and logos, and they waste a ton of money. They think they'll just know it when I see it. It's not a great way to create a brand. You have to have a strategy. Once you have a strategy, the execution is actually pretty easy. Hugh: That's so common. Russ and I see that a lot. We had David Corbin on here a while back. David has a book called Brand Slaughter. We have seen that happen with another airline; we won't mention their name, but their initials are United. That one person destroyed the brand. It's happened a few times. But there are other companies where one person acted in a way that violated the way the company wanted to represent their value proposition and brand identity. What we do, we do values and principles. Part of that is how do we behave in the culture? How do we make decisions? Talk a minute about taking this brand promise we have and how to get people who are volunteers, board members, committee members represent that brand. We can violate that brand with our behavior, can't we? Julie: Yeah. You asked me what I learned from Richard Branson. That's the second biggest lesson besides taking chances. Your employees are the ambassadors of your brand. They bring the brand to life in their behavior. I do a lot of internal brand activation, meaning I train employees on the brand. I train them how to behave based on the brand. If our brand stands for teamwork, we actually look at all of our systems and evaluate where we are acting as a team and where we are breaking down. I had one client who was standing for teamwork, but we realized their office had an open plan with lots of cubicles. There were no nameplates. Somebody new to the team, it was taking them months to learn everybody's name. That's not a way to create a team. They'd see each other in the cafeteria, and they were embarrassed because they didn't know each other's names. Something as little as that. Definitely hiring. I use my brand values, even if I am hiring an intern. I ask them questions. Tell me a time that you twisted. Tell me about a time that you solved a problem from a different angle. Hiring, training, and rewarding on brand. Don't keep your brand values in a notebook somewhere. People will start really paying attention to them if they know their compensation or advancement is tied to them. Hugh: I just remembered when I was in high school, the twist was a dance. Russell, rescue me, will you? Russell: Thank god for the power of good video editors and sound editors. The first couple of months, I was co-hosting. This is Hugh, and old what's-his-name in Colorado somewhere. But it's important for people in the organization to have all the tools. If your organization is firing on all cylinders, even the person that comes in and sweeps the floor at night can talk to you about what that organization does and how it works. We have had good discussions. The brands that stick out in our minds are large, a lot of them larger than life. A lot of small nonprofits are resource-starved. They are listening to this, thinking, this is all well and good if you have 100 grand to throw at your marketing. But if you are like us, you're small and don't have a lot of resources, how do we build a brand? How do we bring this about with limited resources? Julie: Having a strong brand is even more important if you have limited resources. If you have limited resources, you can't afford to have things that don't tell a really tight story. I work with a lot of small businesses and nonprofits, 1-3-people sized companies. We spend that time on the brand promise and the brand pillars because that allows you to use every tool in the toolbox to tell the same story. Branding is harder, but more important, when you're smaller. It allows everything to work together. When I worked at Virgin, we actually spent way less than all of our competition on advertising. Way less. Virgin Atlantic spends way less than British Airways. But those ads would stand out, and they would create a loyal following. They would punch above their weight because they were very clear about who they were going after. The twist was very clear. What was different about the experience was very clear. Russell: What are some of the tools as a bare minimum that someone in the nonprofit should have to be able to talk about their organization in a compelling way? Are there one or two tools that you would say are absolutely essential? How important is it that these are simple and easy to use? Julie: I think your website is probably the biggest tool. For good or for bad, people come in, even if they are going to meet you in person, they will look at your website. Your brand walks in the room for you, and it sticks around after you're gone. I think having a smaller website, one or two pages, that are just super clear and really visually engaging, is important. The same thing for business cards. As you said, a confused mind doesn't remember anything. Keep it really simple, really streamlined. Your website, your business card, and your presentation. You can do a lot with live presentations. But talk on your elevator pitch. Have your elevator pitch be concise. Help people understand what you do in three floors, not in 35 floors. That comes from being clear on your brand and practicing it. I was telling Hugh at the beginning that I have done a lot of work lately with personal branding. I am teaching a class at Stanford with Tyra Banks who has built a huge personal brand as an entrepreneur and model. I think that nonprofit leaders need to embody their personal brands, and show up as their brands, whether that is wearing a color, a tie, or a pin. Don't go around saying your nonprofit is caring or innovative and not acting that way. One reason Richard Branson has been so successful is his business brand is about shaking things up, but his personal brand is about shaking things up. He spends a lot of time- he is the most followed executive on Twitter. He tweets about business and also life. He is frustrated about things, and is finding new ways to solve old problems. Russell: I follow Richard Branson on LinkedIn. He has a lot of interesting things to say. A lot of people think about them. I think most of us have interesting things to say. A lot of people who may not be clear on how interesting the stuff they have to say is, or how to put it together. We talked about the people of stories. How do you work with people who are having difficulty finding their voice, what it is they stand for, what it is they want to communicate? Julie: The first thing I do is offer brand health checks. These are the best place to start. You wouldn't go into your doctor and say, hey, help me fix everything. You go in once a year and say, “These are the things I feel good about. Here are some of the things I think need attention.” We offer these brand health checks through the website. What we do is spend some time asking you some questions. We look at your materials, whether it is your LinkedIn profile or your website. We will triage: What are the areas you need to look at? Maybe your brand promise is pretty good, but you are not expressing it right. Maybe your targeting is all over the place. Maybe you need to use social media in a slightly different way, or colors in a slightly different way. These brand health checks are a great place to start. Hugh: In your book, you talk about brand blinders. Can you say more about that? Julie: Sure. Those are when you are looking in your category and not outside of your category for inspiration. Taking off your brand blinders means that you are looking beyond your segment to the larger world for inspiration. Hugh: We want to make sure you highlight this offer. You say you work with a lot of individuals on personal branding, small businesses, and nonprofits. We have probably a mixture of all of those that follow us and listen to us and watch this. Where do they go first off for this brand checkup? Julie: We have two diagnostic products. One is a brand health check. That is 60 minutes. That is if you want to talk about your overall nonprofit. Go to BrandTwist.com. Get Started. Brand Health Check. If you are interested just in your personal brand, we have a personal brand plan call. That is half an hour. That is very similar, but we will ask you more personal questions. That is great for people who want help with their leadership, who are changing careers, who are job seekers. We talk a lot to recent graduates who want to get into the nonprofit or another space. That is for people who want to focus on their personal brand. But all roads lead to BrandTwist.com. We will have a special promotion for your listeners. Hugh: You are? Behind your head, it says Brand School. What is that? Julie: Brand School is our online school that we offer a few times a year for small businesses and nonprofits. It's a 10-week program. We get you all of the consulting that a big company would get, but we do it in groups of 10-12 students at a time. More heavy lifting on your side. It becomes more affordable and also creates a community of entrepreneurs. Hugh: Do you have a blog or podcast or anything people can tune into to get more of Julie? Julie: Yeah. If you go to BrandTwist.com, we have a blog that we update all the time. I am pretty active on Twitter as well. @JCottin on Twitter. You can Google Twist. We have good branding. There is lots of information that comes up. Hugh: Yay. Russell, why don't you have another question? He's got one cooking, I'm sure. Russell: All those wrinkles in my forehead are just common creases. They don't have any particular significance. For those of you who are watching this now, there is a branding twist school coming up. A semester in a couple weeks. If this is something of interest to you, look at it. One of the things I saw as I was looking through this website, which has a wealth of information, there were some things we didn't talk about. Julie says there are three mission-critical reasons why you should have a twist. I'd like for her to share those if she could. Julie: The first is a twist will help you stand out. I think it's really hard to stand out today in the competition. The second is bringing a twist to your business means you will have more fun. It's hard work. We should be having fun and doing things differently. I would say the third thing is think about your personal twist. Many of us will change careers or work for different nonprofits over the course of our lives. Paying attention to your personal and professional twists will always serve you. A lot of us are serial entrepreneurs or serial nonprofit professionals. You want to build not just a reputation for your nonprofit, but also your own reputation. Hugh: We talked about the symphony a little bit. There is a composite here. Maybe that's the wrong word. But you have the symphony, which needs a brand. We have 750 orchestras in this country. I bet you most of them want to play classics, so they want people to come. They complain they are not attracting millennials at all. There is a real interest in millennials for authentic historical church and culture. The orchestra has its identity, but the conductor also has an identity. That is the person that shapes the sound of the orchestra and is the figurehead for the orchestra, even though there is a huge culture. Is that a contrast or a conflict? Is there a synergy? There are lots of examples, but I tend to know a little bit about this one. Julie: I think there should be a synergy. I think it's great that you have an organization that has its identity. They don't have to be identical, but there should be a synergy between the face of the organization and the group. The other thing I would say is that orchestra who is looking to attract millennials, this is a great example. Take off your brand blinders. Stop looking at what other orchestras are doing. Look at brands that are attracting millennials. Twist those lessons. Hugh: Whoa. What do you think of that, Russ? Russell: I think that she is absolutely spot-on. Only Virgin Airways can be Virgin Airways. Everybody can't be exactly the same. When you are focused on what everybody else is doing, you are probably leaving your own unique talents on the table. It helps to go through a process. We lead people through a process with our own success framework, and brand twisting will help you do that as well. It's looking through that unique lens of what you bring to the table. Hugh: Our SynerVision brand is based on creating synergy through the common vision. We know who we are. We know where we're going. We know who we want to influence. It not only builds the synergy on our team, but it's building the synergistic interaction with our audience, our supporters. *Sponsor message from SynerVision's Community for Community Builders* We are going to let Julie give you a final thought or challenge or tip as we close out this really helpful interview. Julie, thank you for such great information. Julie: My pleasure. I would say if you feel that your brand isn't as healthy as it should be because you should build the brand that your business deserves, then I'd love to talk to anybody listening to this. You can go to BrandTwist.com and look at our brand health check or personal brand plan. If you put in the code SVLF, then you will get 15% off any of our products, and you will go to the top of the queue in getting something scheduled. I would love to check up your health and support your community however I can. My final thought is your brand is your business, whether your business is for-profit or nonprofit. You can't separate the two. You can't say, I'm working on building the business over here, and the brand over there. Strong brands are connected. Your brand is your business. Make it a priority. Russell: Great. If you haven't visited this website, go check it out. BrandTwist.com. There are cool tools here. Don't think you have to trip over half a million dollars to do something about your brand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Nonprofit Exchange Book Reviews Watch the Episode [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kcnaut1Sb4[/embed] Read the Episode Hugh Ballou: Greetings, we're back with The Nonprofit Exchange. This time, Russell and I have been wrestling with this for a while. We have had so many great guests that it's hard for us to find a spot to do this. We wanted to, at least once or twice a year, highlight some great books. Some are from our guests, and some are not. We have six books for you today. The top five, and a bonus book. Greetings, Russell. I will say hi first. Russell Dennis: Greetings. Welcome, all of our friends out there on Facebook and everywhere. Thank you for joining us. It's a great day. I am just moved by all the birthday messages that have come in for me today. Hugh: Today? Russell: Today is the day. I wanted to give a shout-out to all the people—business associates, family, friends. Thank you very much. It's been a great journey, but it's better because of you. And all the people who join us every week to support The Nonprofit Exchange. Hugh: Congratulations. We'll try not to embarrass you today. So you have three books, and I have three books. We will share a bit about each book in a brief synopsis. It's not meant to be a thorough book review. It's Hugh and Russ lifting out reasons why you should read this book. While we are queuing up, we are talking about leaders reading. Do you want to say more about that? Russell: That is part of a growing organization and transformational leaders always evolve. They set the table so that people who are in the organizations can evolve. Personal development is one of the reasons that people might volunteer with you or serve on your board because you're either growing or going backward. Some would go as far as to say you're either growing or dying. It's important to increase that knowledge base. What I've discovered as I grow is that I don't know more every day, but that's perfectly all right. We want to bring you these resources. We'd like to make it a regular segment. Many of our guests have come on with books. We want to talk to them. Oprah Winfrey did it well with her book club. Maybe some of these people we can bring back to talk about their books because there is so much fascinating literature out there. We have six pretty good picks to talk about today, don't we, Hugh? Hugh: We do. The other part about leaders read is I listen to a lot of podcasts. Our friend Ken Courtright has one called Grow Your Business Today. He says he reads a book with a highlighter. When he goes back and reads it again, he uses a different color highlighter. He highlights different things because he is ready to learn the next thing. I find that to be so very true. There are a lot of challenges. We will highlight six. Maybe in a few months, depending on comments from our listeners, we will highlight a few more. Let's list the books to get our listeners' interests up. What are your three? Then I will share my three. Russell: I have three great ones. The first one is Asking Rights by Tom Ralser. He wrote a book before that called Return on Investment for Nonprofits. The second book is The Guide to Proposal Writing from The Foundation Center. It is a classic. It is a staple. It is the book on writing grants. There are a lot out there, but this one is pretty powerful. And because everyone loves numbers so much, I have a wonderful book by Mark Mullen called The Nonprofit Budget Builder Toolkit. Everyone just loves those numbers so much. Hugh: That is awesome. Mine are more generic. We teach nonprofit leaders to install really good business practices in their organization. The first one is Twist by Julie Cottineau, who we had as a guest a while back. That's about who we are, our identity, and our promise to people. It's good for nonprofits to think about that. I don't guess many do that I have ever known. The second one is a good book by my leadership coach who has been our guest, Roberta Gilbert. The whole leadership methodology by psychiatrist Murray Bowen, M.D. It's called Extraordinary Relationships. It's the anchor for us knowing ourselves. The third one, and I live in Virginia, and up the road from me is where Napoleon Hill grew up. The Napoleon Hill Foundation. A couple years ago, we had Don Green, who is the executive director of the Napoleon Hill Foundation. I don't know about you Russell, but I find over and over again that nonprofit leaders have not heard of the work of Napoleon Hill, who interviewed 500 of the top leaders in the world and created this methodology. Those are the three. Which one do you want to start with? Pick one of those awesome books. Russell: I am going to jump right into Asking Rights by Tom Ralsin. One of the questions that people should answer in that: Why should I give you money? It was posed to him early in his career. It's that view of how do you view the people that fund you? Tom's premise is that what you really have are investors. I know a lot of people think of donors. Donors are investors. They are partnering with you to make an impact. When you look at monies that people contribute to you, or talent—there is time, talent, and treasure—when people contribute one of these three things or a combination of them, they are making an investment in you and betting on your team. What can you do? You have different groups of investors. Donors are just one type of investor. You have different funders. It could be pure investors or people funding you through grants or sponsors or memberships. Those are people who invest in you. When it comes to funding a nonprofit, what matters is not what the nonprofit themselves thinks. It's what it is that people are getting. What do the people who are writing the checks think about what it is that you're doing? They're investing in you. What are people who are getting the services think? It's not about us. We always have to have an eye toward whether we are making a profit. I know profit sounds like a dirty word, but Tom talks of it as a return on investment. That's what people who are banking on us are looking at. They are looking at the return. They contribute to help us keep our doors open as nonprofits. This book is about more how to successfully fund a nonprofit. He is talking about a lot of different areas. He is talking about sustainable funding. It's important to capture the ideas of what value means to the different audiences that you have. From this perspective, it's about the people who invest in you. How do you sustain that? What are different funding pathways? What are you open to in terms of learning, in terms of growing, and thinking about what's important to the people who are writing these checks? Look at the view from the other side of the desk. It doesn't matter if it's a corporation or a foundation. Everyone has their motivations. It's looking at that to figure out what's important. He spent a lot of time doing this. When he wrote ROI for Nonprofits, he looked at a lot of these areas. But from the point he wrote that book to the point he wrote this one, he made some other discoveries along the way in terms of what makes people fundraising-ready. He had criteria. He is a nonprofit consultant who helps people raise more money. He has a 20-question list of criteria he uses to determine if an organization is ready. If they can't check off on all 20 areas, he won't take their money. He will talk about which areas need to be shored up and go back to doing that. This book talks about those 20 areas, which are important to fundraisers and establishing that value that you bring. This is a very good book to read. I think when we sit down, we look at the value that we give people who are constituents of ours as a nonprofit. You have the people who directly get the benefits; you have those who write the checks to pay for them. That could be corporations, foundations, government entities, social entrepreneurs, donors. Each of these different groups have a different set of values or perspectives on what's important. What he is talking about here is understanding that and not changing who you are, but explaining in your own language how you are bringing value and incorporating what matters to them. It's not necessarily about us if we are doing services for people. This is a very good book. Take a few hours to read. This is one you get the highlighter for. There are lots of things to think about and consider. And periodically go back to it and look at some of these things to remind yourself what are some of the questions we should be asking. Are we going to the people that make sense? If someone says, “What gives you the right to ask us for money?” if you have the building blocks in place, it will be pretty clear. This book gives you loads of building blocks. Hugh: Russell is the funding guru. He asks the questions that other people don't ask. Some of what your methodology is is coming out through what you have picked out of this book. What do potential funders want to see? You take it to the board. What do board members want to get out of this? That is important. Share with us some of your disciplines for reading books. You have an extensive library. When I talk to you, you often quote books, even in these interviews. What is your discipline? Do you read every day, or a certain time a week? Russell: I don't know if you remember back when our auto industry started having hiccups. They were talking about the concept of just-in-time learning. I found all sorts of fascinating stuff on interest areas. I get a number of services. I'm always looking at books because it's really important to be open to learning on the fly. Increasing my knowledge base on nonprofits has always been important. New developments take place. Thinking shifts. I continue to collect books. I have library cards in two counties. Public libraries are the best investment running for our tax dollars. I am always on the lookout for new articles, new information, new books. A cross-pollination of ideas across different publications and books. I have run across great TED Talks. There is so much out there. The world is our oyster now thanks to technology, which is aggravating when it doesn't work, but a thing of beauty when it does. I am constantly learning. Readers lead, and I have my nose in a book. I can highlight on a computer. I read with pens and highlighters. A lot of notes in the margins of my hard copies. Some of them are a little dog-eared. I like to read a lot of books on learning. Those are some I can highlight, too. As we go along and we are building a resource area, we'd love to hear about what some of you folks out there who tune in are reading. All of you in the community, what are you reading? What do you want to know more about? We're always open to that, and finding new resources. That is what the community is all about. Sharing that knowledge base and all those wonderful resources that are all out there. Now there is so much information flying at us from all directions. Where do we start? People don't need new information. They need somebody to help us carve out the most important pieces and assemble it in a way that will help them get to where they need to go. That is one thing I pride myself on being able to do: a possibility engineer. Hugh: The possibility engineer. The podcast is supported by sponsors. The sponsor today is SynerVision's online community for community builders. *Sponsor message* We have interviewed Julie Cottineau. Her book is Twist. She is a branding specialist. She was in charge of North American branding for Virgin Airlines and a number of other big deals. Now she does her own brand. Her book is available on Amazon. The full name is Twist: How Fresh Perspectives Build Breakthrough Brands. She has this color theme that goes throughout it. Twist is mentioned on about every page of her book. Lots of color throughout. I asked her what are the top three branding mistakes that people make? She said it's hard to keep it to three. She said the mistakes that nonprofits are making. We talked about not really understanding what a brand is. Confusing your brand with your marketing. That's a big mistake. Your marketing is how you get your message out there, and your branding is your fundamental story. What are you about? Why should people care? If we think about our favorite movies and books, they have a twist. She develops this concept in the book. I couldn't put it down when I got it. You could build my nonprofit twist. That's what you want to do. If I only had 10 times the budget, people say. That's a big mistake. Stop saying that. I could throw 20 times the marketing budget at you, but if your brand isn't in shape, your fundamental story of who you are, who you serve, and what is different about you, then it's a waste of money. She goes on to say that your brand is not your logo. Your brand is your fundamental story. So many nonprofits will show me this logo as their brand. That is a representation of your brand. Your brand is represented by your logo. That is one way. But most importantly, your brand is your brand promise. Julie has what she calls Brand School. People go through her school, which is a live event, where you do the nuts and bolts of branding. On her website, BrandTwist.com, she has the Nike logo. It's not about sneakers. It's about their story. On the interview on the podcast, we talk about her points about branding. It's really a course on branding. When you go to her website, she offers you an evaluation of her brand. It's called BrandTwist.com. She will do an evaluation. But the book, it helped me understand all that stuff I was doing wrong, Russell. I have a good logo, but that's not my brand. The other part of brand we work with is the culture and leadership. Everyone on your board, everyone in your organization, represents your brand. We have heard of airlines dragging people off seats. That one event by one person did enormous brand damage, as our guest David Corbin said. That was brand slaughter. Next time, we will review his book. It's out there, makes you think about it seriously. Brand slaughter is when people misbehave or act out of brand promise. They have damaged your brand. I recommend Twist. Russell, back to you. Russell: She said that twist is your most important tool. There is a lot in there. The questionnaire is brilliant. That is a great book to look at. The second book I was looking at was The Foundation Center's Guide to Proposal Writing. It's a staple for anybody that writes grants. They wrote the book on that. They are probably the best source bar none for information on foundations and corporate programs that are out there and what they are doing. They talk you through some strategies for working on your proposal and some activities outside of the proposal itself, things that you need to consider while you are putting these proposals together. The meat and potatoes of what they offer, and there are loads of examples of successful proposals that have been submitted, where they show you these particular areas of the proposal they are talking about. For grants, you want to make sure you have all of the parts. You want to have your credible programs. There are elements to show you are ready for funding that they address. You have the correct structures in place; you are clear on your mission, vision, and values. They roll into the various parts of the proposal, one being the executive summary. The executive summary is the highlight reel for your proposal. It's the piece that you would want to write last because it really drills down into what it is that you're doing, so you want to be clear on that. But it has different pieces in it. What you are looking at in the executive summary, you want to highlight the whole enchilada. What is the problem you are solving? Then describe your solution. How much you need, your organization's key assets and people. You write this last. That is the first piece. The statement of need comes next. It should be short and persuasive. As short and persuasive as you can make it without taking anything away from what you are trying to do. You provide information that supports your cause, your business case, any relevant information like business stats. You collect the best sources of information in that statement of need. What will help you make that case? What information are you gathering? Are you focused on numerical and quantitative stuff, or are you focused on qualitative? For building that need statement, find the most authoritative and recent sources of information you can find so that it adds strength to your proposal. The project description will be the longest piece of it. It is your approach to what you are going to do. What you keep in the project description is your objectives. What are the measurable targets you are trying to reach? What are the methods you are going to use to get there? What do you need in terms of staffing and administration? The next piece is evaluation. How do you know what you're doing is successful? Are you getting the work done? Finally, you address the sustainability piece. Is this going to be an ongoing project, or how are we going to be able to keep this project rolling after the funding piece is gone? The next piece is the evaluation. That really gets an area all to itself because this is where measures are important. The view that a lot of people take on the evaluation piece of the puzzle is that we have to check these boxes just to make the funder happy. It's a necessary evil. But the proper view in my estimation is to think of it as a way to figure out what is working, what is not working, how we can get better at what we do, what's going on out there, what have we learned based on research that has been done, and can we create our own measures? If you don't create your own, other people will create them for you. In being unique and doing something unique, the measures that you have in mind may not fit exactly. The other thing to keep in mind is can my people use them? Can we employ them in the field? Will they be useful in the field for people who are delivering services? That is a good place to collect information, if it makes sense. The key is it all depends on the funder. When you read a request for a proposal—this is the funding agency's description of what they want to accomplish with their investments—they set some standards and criteria. You want to see if it's in alignment with what you do. You determine a level and type of valuation that is needed. You determine whether the evaluation is on the project you create. Maybe you create a product or program that moves people to a different place. Or maybe it's a process. You have to decide if you are evaluating a program, process ,or both. Then there is quantitative data, numerical-based data. We have qualitative data that may be based on people through third-party evaluations or questionnaires. There should be linear when you talk about evaluation from start of the project to end of the project. The evaluation should take place all the way through. When you start off, you should have a vision for where you want people to go. The professional term is the theory of change. What is going to happen when people take advantage of this program we are offering? Where is it going to move them to? It's a question of funder preferences. You can do this evaluation in-house, or maybe you bring a third party on. A lot of things make sense. They also talk about the budget. Of course, your budget ought to be aligned with your objectives. It should be reasonable based on the work you do. There are a lot of expenses. You want to measure those expenses, whether they are new costs or ongoing costs, whether they are direct or indirect. What revenue sources do you have? Here, they talk more about other things because the proposal is to get revenue. When you make a budget, you want to think about revenue. Not only will you be addressing the budget for the project, but most of the time, when you write a proposal, they want to see the budget for the entire organization so they can see how your project fits in with the overall budget. Are they going to be the only people contributing money? How does the money that you're requesting fit in with the rest of your projects and programs and overall strategy? It's all about tying the strategy pieces together. That is critical. This is probably the only book you will ever need. Me being me, I read all sorts of things on this. But you would be hard-pressed to find a book better than this one that explains to you the process of writing grants. Hugh: Awesome. That is your sweet spot, your area of expertise, and experience. I teach transformational leadership, as I'm sure you do. There are two fundamental methodologies that we rally around at SynerVision. Transformational leadership is the culture of an orchestra or choir. It functions at a higher level. In order for that to happen, the leader must function up. The orchestra is a reflection of the conductor. The board and the organization we lead is a reflection of our leadership as a leader. Oftentimes, leaders complain about their boards not functioning in the matter they would expect them to, or how the board functions itself to function. I typically ask what is your role in that? People look at me like I'm crazy. No, you look in the mirror. If the conductor doesn't get the sound they want, they start looking at themselves. What they see is what I get. They respond to me as a conductor. To be an effective transformational leader, there are other books we can review by authors who are long dead, so we can't interview them. We will talk about Bowen systems. My coach is Roberta Gilbert. She has a number of books on Bowen systems. She is a psychiatrist and has written books about Bowen methodologies. It's called Bowen Family Systems, and there is a Bowen Institute at Georgetown University. It's a methodology still unfolding. People write papers and study it. Transformational leadership is dependent on the leader stepping up. Bowen systems is how leaders step up. Those systems are compatible. After 12 years, I still work with Roberta as my personal coach. I continue to read her books over and over. My wife and I have been through this together, and we share things and learn from each other. We learn from experiences. Learning something and living with it for a period of time has maximum impact. I would say if you are leading a church or nonprofit, you can't do it without this book, without this methodology. You cannot be the leader you were created to be without knowing yourself. It's studying ourselves from our family of origin. In the book, she talks about Bowen's heritage, what led him from family therapy to this leadership research. She talks about herself and her journey and her work as a colleague of Murray Bowen. Now she is a purist. She teaches exact Bowen theory. There are other people who have rewritten it for their purposes in their books. That's okay. I have rewritten transformational leadership in my books as a conductor. Ultimately, leaders transform cultures, transform themes. It begins with self-transformation. Extraordinary leadership helps you understand yourself. When I first started this, I had written my books, defined my methodology. Everything is working well. Why do I need to study something else? My wife said, “I'm going.” I guess I better go. Just find out what it's about. It took me a whole year to wrap my head around this. I am a slow learner, but I was too blind with what I was already doing. All of a sudden, it dawned on me that I would be a better leader if I would embrace this. I would be able to transform myself in a more appropriate and direct way. This is more permanent. Over time, we continue to learn. In her book, she talks about the eight concepts of Bowen systems. She starts out with triangles, the basic building block of human relationships of three people. They are neither bad nor good; they're neutral. If anxiety is present, it goes around the triangle. If there is a power play, one person takes a power position in the triangle. When you start seeing things out of balance, look at where the triangles are, and the overlapping triangles. The second one is differentiation of self. Who are we? Have we defined our principles for decision-making? Our principles define how we're going to make decisions. If I am in the face of conflict, I stay calm and approach the conflict open and directly. Stick to the facts. Before this, I avoided conflict, and it got worse. Basic self is adhering to our fundamental guiding principles. Pseudo-self is when we make a decision to please somebody, which is not a good choice. They are never pleased. It tends to irritate them and everybody else when you cave into what other people are pushing you to do. Differentiation of self is how we are not fused with our spouse, our best friend, our parents, our dead parents. We cease to be an individual. Fusion is how we act in a matter that we think the other person wants us to act, and we can't break out of that. There is the multi-generational transmission process. I am the son of a CPA who is the son of a CPA. I broke the thread. It's very linear: good/bad, left/right. Mom was not linear. What am I? I am a mixture of both. Rigid structure, got to be creative without breaking the rules. Multi-general transmission process. What happens at the graveyard in the little town my mom was in when I was born. The McPhersons, which is my middle name. I heard the stories of multiple generations, and I learned about myself. It's not bad or good. Just learning about self. There is the family generation process. There is a number of principles, concepts that Bowen identifies. He teaches the concepts. The last one is societal degeneration. We are seeing that one play out. He didn't finish writing that one. Sibling position. I am the oldest brother of brothers. He didn't start this, but he did more research on how we know ourselves based on our family of origins. There is the family generation process, and there is the differentiation of self, which is basically what it's all about. Who are we? How do we show up? We really show up like we did in our family of origin. So does everybody else. This helps us understand people. We don't correct other people. We don't type them. We don't categorize them. We try to understand them, and we observe behaviors. That helps us observe without getting it on you. A couple of Bowen quotes: “That which is created in a relationship can be fixed in a relationship.” “You have inherited a lifetime of tribulation. Everybody has inherited it. Take it over. Take the most of it. When you have decided that you know the right way, do the best you can with it.” I said the basic overfunctioning. I meet leaders that say here are the goals, here is how you get there, go to work. They tell people what to do. That is a form of overfunctioning. Never do what someone else can do for themselves. Oh, I always ought to be willing to do stuff that I ask other people to do. The key word is “willing.” Every time you do something, you rob a volunteer of an opportunity to do something they want to do. Back to Russell's premise earlier. Find out what people want. Let them do it. This is the antithesis of Freud. If you see a Freud therapist, he/she says, “How does that make you feel?” Bowen says, “It's okay to have empathy, but get out of it quickly.” Feeling decisions are faulty decisions. Thinking decisions are well-grounded, principle-based decisions. The goal is to rise up out of the emotional together to find what gathers us all. We need to calm down, be in control of ourselves, and be calm and present. He says, “In the history of calming down, has anyone ever calmed down by being told to calm down?” There is a lot of little gems. She quotes Bowen in every chapter. I have given you some concepts and some quotes. I think it is an essential book for leaders who want to step up their game and become a much better leader. Russell, what do you think of that? Russell: That is an essential part. I went through the transformational leadership program on my journey to becoming a WayFinder. I had never heard of Murray Bowen. When I read this book, it was an eye-opener. The idea that all of these inputs from the family and positioning, it was completely foreign to me. I had no idea. These are things that were driving behavior under the surface. Transformational leadership is an area, a course in itself. There are five types of behaviors and standards that transformational leaders set as attributes. They are charismatic in their behaviors; inspirational; intellectually stimulating, they love to teach and help people grow; considerate of individuals; and are real. Very authentic. Authenticity is that fifth piece. This is something that would be great for you to read. It will help you up your leadership game. Leading with influence. Leaders are influencers. They don't necessarily do everything, but they make sure that things get done. Hugh: What is your next book? Russell: Knowing as I said before how much people love numbers, the next book is The Nonprofit Budget Builder Toolkit by Mark Mullen. He wrote this book a few years ago. It talks about how to build the budget. What are some of the things you need to consider? It's not just about expenses. You have revenues. You have different types of budgets. It can be confusing to put together a budget for a nonprofit. A lot of people don't always understand what their costs are. This book will help walk you through the purpose of a budget, a great overview. Talk about the types of budgets. You can have a traditional or a zero-base budget. Zero-base will come from not having any history. They talk about the different categories of funding. You have discretionary, non-discretionary. You have restricted incomes, and others that are unrestricted. Every year, you will be looking at the process of budgeting. If you have a rolling budget, which is tied to your goals and your objectives, it helps build accountability. You're not just looking at the other things you are evaluating, but money comes into play, too. It shows people what they are getting for their investment. Sometimes, in a perfect world, you do the budget, and it stays the same. But sometimes things happen. So you have to revise it on the ground. The key is to have a process for working the budget. This book is very good at giving you a process for doing that. It will also talk about some of the work you need to do up front. If you have a good accountant. A lot of things are driven out of your chart of accounts. Your chart of accounts defines everything that comes in and goes out. Your chart of accounts is where you do this. They talk about general accounts. The types of accounts. Asset, liability, income, equity, and expense. There is a little bit of accounting around it. They talk about accounting methods and advantages and disadvantages of them. If you have an accountant on staff, that's great. But there are full-charge bookkeepers from CPAs to others that you can engage. Fractional CFOs. There are other ways to help you measure. It's important to keep track of everything. What is recommended in here is what we call a rolling budget. You have a projection for what you will have come in and the timing. Then there is what actually comes in and goes out. By building this history of what you project and what actually comes in and goes out, you start getting better. You start recognizing what can drive costs and revenue. You can start to assess your program performance. It's all about how you do it. There are a number of different types of revenue that go in to a nonprofit. Your programs, you have a block of programs. Some are profitable, and others are not. They talk about how to classify them. That's important. You have an operational budget, which is your forecast for your services and your operating expenses, your fundraising budget, and your budget statement of financial activities. Then you have the financial budget, which has your cash flow, debt service, investments, and budgeted statement of financial position, your balance sheet. These are the working pieces. This is a really good product because it explains briefly but in good detail what all of these items are, and how they fit into what you're doing. It also talks to you about how to create budgets for specific things. I built some of the models out of here into a fundraising course I put together. Having a good budget process is important. Having people on your board and on staff that understand budgeting is good. One of the items in here that people may have issue with is an operating reserve fund. It's a cash reserve. The common term for it is surplus. It's having money left over at the end of the year. This is a no-brainer for people that are running businesses. Nonprofit circles don't think about that. The business term for it is profit. It's great to have that. You need that rainy day fund. You want to try to work that in because things can shift, particularly if you are dealing with government funding. Even with corporate funding, the economy can change. You want to be prepared for any shifts that might take place and have some revenue to operate in in any unforseen circumstances. One that we have seen a lot is over the last couple of years is weather. You have a weather event that throws everything in your community off. How are you going to be able to reopen your doors? Having a surplus is important. What about long-term things? You may need to replace furniture equipment, vehicles. All of these things wear out. You want to have a capital budget for any large purchases that you're going to make, or repairs to your building. Getting equipment. You never know what sort of things you're going to need. This particular publication walks you through all of that. You prepare a master budget and program budgets. Everything needs to be tied into your strategic plan, so you have operating and financial budgets. This is a wonderful book because there are a lot of graphics in it. You have charts. Show, don't tell. You can see the flow. All of the information is easy to understand. If you have a financial professional accountant to help you through this process, that is even better. Your budget should be tied to all of your activities. Hugh: Wise words indeed. I find lots of deficits. We have a perfect amount of time for the last book. Here is the bonus book. We did interview Don Green at the Napoleon Hill Center. He is published some of Napoleon Hill's unpublished writings. There are quite a few of them. You and I have been at CEO Space where leadership guru Bob Proctor carries the book out and reads it every day. It's staying in tune with the philosophy. Jim Rohn said you have to have three books in the library: Think and Grow Rich, As a Man Thinketh, and The Bible. Collections of wisdom. Napoleon Hill is Think and Grow Rich. It's a collection of his philosophies of achievement, his laws of success. He lists the attributes of wealth, and money is the last one. I think there are 13 attributes because he said it's the least important. We put down money. We think of it as not necessary in the nonprofit world because of the word “nonprofit.” It's like trying to run a car with no gas. My analogy is the money is the gas for the car. We're not getting rich. We're building assets that are the backbone of our stability and our legacy. We're doing something that will last after we're gone. You read chapter two with the attributes for success: have a definite purpose; do something good that brings value to humankind; keep a positive mental attitude; and surround yourself with successful people. I find there are many people in the work of charities who have never heard of Napoleon Hill and his writings. He did a radio show for many years, and there is a book called Napoleon Hill on the Air that has recently been released. But you can get it on Audible, the audio recordings of him doing things. It is a transcription of his interviews. He is talking about the laws of success and giving him examples. The interviewer asked him pointed questions. Think and Grow Rich is chock-full of things. He met Andrew Carnegie, who gave him lessons of introduction to all of his successful friends like Ford, Wanamaker, Woolworth, five presidents, JP Morgan. There were lots and lots of people that Napoleon went in and interviewed. He developed these laws of success. He has some quotes throughout the book that are so important. “Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice. Never a result of selfishness.” “Desire is the starting point of all achievement. Not a hope, not a wish, but a keen, pulsating desire which transcends everything.” We worry about failing. He said, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.” As you were talking about strategy, “First comes thought. Then the organization of that thought into ideas and plans. Then the transformation of those plans into the reality. The beginning as you observe is in your imagination.” Sometimes that is where we stop. Here is the famous one, “What the mind of a person can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” It all starts with a belief system. That's where it starts. That is one percent inspiration, 99% perspiration. We leverage with other people. I find people start out and don't have a team around them. That is so key. Definite purpose, very clear plan, like you said. Bring something that is valuable to the world. Have a positive mental attitude. Failure is not an option. Surround yourself with people better than you. What my friend Russell Dennis says is if you're the best person on the team, you better run because you are not going anywhere. Russell, you've given some great insights. These are great books. We'll list the books on the webpage. We encourage people to read them. There are a few pennies that benefit SynerVision if you buy on our portal through our Amazon Affiliate Program. Russell, thank you for pulling these books up and sharing some great wisdom today. Russell: Yes, it's been fun. We've been kicking this around. I'm glad we got it done. We'd love to hear more about what you're reading, what's important to you, what you've learned from these books. Think and Grow Rich is where the concept of the mastermind came from, by surrounding yourself with people that are very wise. If I'm the smartest guy in the room, I run and get into another room. I am in the wrong room. Thank you for joining us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ditch your stale branding, it's time to shake things up - This episode is dedicated to helping you discover fresh ideas and talent! Lovell Corporation CEO, Kelly Lovell, teaches you how to connect with Millennials and Generation Z through socially-conscious business opportunities. Then, Julie Cottineau, Founder and CEO of BrandTwist, helps you define your next game-changing marketing campaign by adding a distinctive, personal spin. [00:00:00] Kelly Lovell: Born to Be an Entrepreneur [00:05:50] Make an Impact to Create Real Change [00:11:30] Recruiting Guide for Millennials and Gen Z [00:18:21] Finding a Fresh Perspective with Julie Cottineau [00:27:57] Embrace Your Story and Get Emotional to Succeed [00:33:21] BrandTwist Safar and Free Strategy Session

Julie Cottineau is founder and CEO of BrandTwist, a brand consultancy, and creator of Brand School Online, a premier learning program that teaches small business owners, entrepreneurs and non-profits how to create more distinctive, more powerful and more profitable brands that break-through in crowded markets. Prior to launching her own business, she was vice president of brand at Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Cottineau also served as executive director of consumer branding at Interbrand, as well as a VP management supervisor at Grey Global in both the US and France, helping to build leading global brands in diverse categories such as Intel, Pantene, Virgin, Stolichnaya and Kool-Aid. She has been an adjunct professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Columbia and Cornell universities and a frequent commentator on brand strategy and innovation in top business media such as Forbes.com, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNN, and American Express Open for Small Business. For more information, visit BrandTwist.com and TheTwistBook.com

There's branding, and then there's branding with a twist! Find out how to get your brand to stand out in a competitive market. Take off your brand blinders and leave “me too” marketing behind. Today's episode is full of tremendous insight and is followed by a fantastic opportunity by a gifted brand expert. Julie Cottineau honed her branding chops at a series of high-level client and agency positions including Richard Branson's Virgin Management, Grey Global and Interbrand. She is the founder and CEO of BrandTwist brand consultancy and the dean and creator of Brand School by BrandTwist a unique and actionable online branding class for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and non-profits. Her own life has been full of magical TWISTS that have led her to reside in Westchester NY with her husband and two wonderful children. She is the author the best-selling book Twist: How Fresh Perspectives Build Breakthrough Brands and is a highly rated keynote speaker and a global authority on impactful and effective branding. Highlights - Your brand is your business Taking off your brand Blinders 3 Pillars to create lasting impact Leveraging industries outside your category The importance of a Brand Audit   Resources - Zoho Invoice helps small businesses and freelancers stay on top of getting paid fast. While you can never get rid of invoicing, you can do it faster, have it all organized in one place with Zoho online invoicing software. It is easy to use, saves you plenty of time doing less data entry and reduce invoicing errors. Visit zohoinvoice.com/warriors and for hassle-free invoicing. Sign up and get 3 months of free, unlimited access to all Zoho Invoice features. Inspyr Socks What keeps you going as an entrepreneur? Inspiration. One of my favorite ways to stayed inspired is with Inspyr socks. A constant reminder to stay empowered with a belief that anything is possible— where the message is purposely knitted into the back of the sock for others to read and get inspires as well. They're also excellent gifts! Check them out at inspyrsocks.com. Use Code Warrior to receive 10% off every order. Grammarly Getting your point across in business can be tricky. Grammarly uses a browser extension to check your text for spelling and grammatical errors anytime you write something online to help you avoid mistakes in comments, tweets, and status updates. Get access to your own personal editor 24/7!  Free Webinar: I'll be sharing how to leverage your creative side and use it as an advantage in business. Join me for my free webinar, How To Succeed In Business Marketing Yourself and Your Talent. Register here at cwwebinar.com  or text warrior to number 33444 to unleash your creative thinking to propel your business forward. Guest Contact - Website Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Book Twist: How Fresh Perspectives Build Breakthrough Brands Get you Free Brand Check Up Here!   Mentions - “Screw It Lets Do It.” Richard Branson Virgin Atlantic   Gift: As a special offer to our listeners, Julie Cottineau will provide a free Brand Health Check. This Brand Health Check is a 60-minute strategy session over the phone or Skype where Julie will review your current branding materials and challenges and provide strategic advice on how to create a Brand TWIST - your unique personal and professional brand message. This is a $350 value, offered as a free gift to qualified applicants from the Creative Warriors Community. Click here! 

Every industry is crowded, that's no reason to hold yourself back from jumping in. Today I'm talking with Julie Cottineau about how to make your brand stand out. She touches on why it's critical for you to establish a few key things to make all the branding decisions easier. Open your note app, or get the pen and paper ready because this one is full of some serious takeaways. I am so happy to know Julie and she is who I look to for insights on branding and really twisting what the big guys do and making them fit for my business. I'm also so excited to be a part of the Brand School Master Class Faculty and I invite you to learn more about it if you find yourself struggling to stand out in your market. A little about Julie… Julie is the Founder and CEO of BrandTwist, a brand consultancy that helps entrepreneurs and corporations build stronger, more profitable brands. Prior to launching her own business, she was the VP of Brand at Richard Branson’s Virgin Group overseeing branding strategy for new and established Virgin companies in North America. Julie also served as Executive Director of Consumer Branding at Interbrand as well as a VP Management Supervisor at Grey Worldwide in both the U.S. and France helping to build leading global brands in diverse categories such as Intel, Subaru, Pantene, Avon, Stolichnaya and Kool-Aid. She has been an Adjunct Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Columbia and Cornell universities and a frequent commentator on brand strategy and innovation in top business media such as Forbes.com, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNN, and American Express Open for Small Business. She also shares her insights, tools and tips on branding through her blog at BrandTwist.com, and on Twitter at @jcottin. Julie is the creator of Brand School Master Class, a premier learning program that teaches small business owners, entrepreneurs and not for profits how to create more distinctive and powerful brands that cut through in crowded markets. She is also the unofficial inventor of the Pet Rock (but that’s a story for another time). Julie lives in Westchester NY with her French husband and two wonderful children.   Resources Better Branding with Julie Cottineau Learn more about Brand School Know Brand School is right for you? Jump right to the application. Connect with Me Get YOUR question on a future episode Email me at hello@thestaceyharris.com Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes or Stitcher for a shoutout on a future show

If you're figuring out what your brand is this is a can't miss episode. If you have a brand but you're ready to take it from good to great, this is a can't miss episode. Julie gives us some actionable tips and great reminders to get our brand in better shape. Listen in and learn more about getting better branding. A bit about Julie... Julie is the Founder and CEO of BrandTwist, a brand consultancy that helps entrepreneurs and corporations build stronger, more profitable brands. Prior to launching her own business, she was the VP of Brand at Richard Branson’s Virgin Group overseeing branding strategy for new and established Virgin companies in North America. Julie also served as Executive Director of Consumer Branding at Interbrand as well as a VP Management Supervisor at Grey Worldwide in both the U.S. and France helping to build leading global brands in diverse categories such as Intel, Subaru, Pantene, Avon, Stolichnaya and Kool-Aid. She has been an Adjunct Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Columbia and Cornell universities and a frequent commentator on brand strategy and innovation in top business media such as Forbes.com, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNN, and American Express Open for Small Business. She also shares her insights, tools and tips on branding through her blog at BrandTwist.com, and on Twitter at @jcottin. Julie is the creator of Brand School Master Class, a premier learning program that teaches small business owners, entrepreneurs and not for profits how to create more distinctive and powerful brands that cut through in crowded markets. She is also the unofficial inventor of the Pet Rock (but that’s a story for another time). Julie lives in Westchester NY with her French husband and two wonderful children. Resources Get your FREE Brand Health Check with Julie Find out more about Brand School Get the Brand Like a Billionaire 5 Tips I learned from Richard Branson E-Book Get on the early list for Rock Star Guide to Google+ Connect with Me Email me at podcast@thestaceyharris.com Tweet with me and include #HittheMic Be sure to leave your review on iTunes for a shoutout on a future show