Build a Brand Around Your Dream Life (Not Just Another Business)
Some people use entrepreneurship as a way to create the life they’ve always dreamed of. For most, it’s the one dream that keeps them up at night. Not because the dream is too big or unattainable but mainly because it’s one that doesn’t often come with a step-by-step roadmap. It’s no secret that building and running a brand is hard. Especially when you are funding the dream alone.
For us, creating the life we’ve always dreamed of meant building a brand that we could be more creative, help other people build their brand so they know they don’t have to do it alone, set our own hours, and work with people that get our creative juices flowing - for us that is other creatives.
Taking a wild guess, but we assume that some of the same reasons that we started building our brand may be the same for you.
One thing that we like to say up front is that just like the last five years, building a brand doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of long nights and early mornings if you choose to maintain every aspect of the business, even the parts that you don’t like. Here we will share how you can start to build a brand around your dream life (not just another business):
Don’t Leave Success Undefined
When we first started building Rose Genius the creative agency, we found it difficult, as two young women working in corporate to find clients, specifically ones that had the time after we all clocking out of our daily 9-to-5 jobs. The idea of Rose Genius was not so much about wanting to own something we could call our own, but more about being able to give ourselves the flexibility that we hadn’t been able to find anywhere else. Our goal was to create flexibility to truly be able to spend time enjoying our lives outside of the blurred lines of a traditional work-life balance and to be able to be ourselves without having to conform to what someone in a “corporate” role should look and act like.
Our advice for anyone working towards building a brand or thinking about it, give yourself grace and the time to transition from working a 9-to-5 to running your business full-time. We all have that moment when we feel like we are up and that it’s time to officially clock out from our 9-to-5. By all means, if you have planned and prepared go for it! But if you haven’t, consider working your brand after hours so that you can build it up to a place where you are making sales consistently and it can figuratively operate on it’s own should you need to take a break.
Establish your company culture
One of the best things that you can do when you start building your brand is figure out who you are and how you would like to be seen. Remember, even if your brand has it’s own positioning your company culture should match. There is nothing worse than sending two different messages and ending up with a confused audience.
For us, we took a couple pages out of the book of some of the most iconic brands in the world, specifically Virgil Abloh. Building our brand meant that we wanted our values at the core, and not have to bend to fit somebody else’s ideals. The goal is to make Rose Genius a place where people enjoy working and they don’t feel like they have to pretend.
With a small and mighty team, we are focusing finding new ways to create those experiences for our team and our customers, by exploring new opportunities to celebrate the team’s wins and support our growing community.
As you work out the logistics of your company culture, ask yourself, how do we want to show up? Who do we want to be?
Give yourself grace
We’ve heard the phrase “give yourself grace” so long a lot of us don’t even know what that means anymore. So we are here to sum it up for. Giving yourself grace is the action of allowing yourself to empathize with ourselves. It’s making the choice to interact with the world – and yourself – with goodwill and kindness.
We may not always hit our mark but what we can always do is show up, do our best, answer questions as they come, and see what happens. The truth is, running a business does not always feel good, and that's okay. The best the we can do, is the best that we can do.
That might look like hiring help or putting more focus on the things that ARE working right.
One of the best ways to realign yourself with your business is to take the break you need. Pour a glass of wine, binge-watch the same TV show you've seen a hundred times, and come back ready to kill it the next day. Take those breaks to remind yourself how good it feels to have freedom and flexibility because that's probably why you started your business in the first place. Don't forget to take full advantage of it.
Take that step back, rest, and remember that tomorrow will be a better day. Because here's the truth: we don't always have to be moving and changing. This is hard as a creative, but it can feel really good to put a little pause on movement and audit what is already working for you.
If you've ever questioned everything, you're not alone. Being a service provider is hard AF, but we wouldn't trade this for anything.
You got it, friends!
If you aren't sure what is truly working in your business and think you need support, we got you covered. To learn more about our service, whether you are looking to fine tune your current strategy or your need creative direction contact us to get started.
We want to help you build a brand that you can create the flexibility you need to create the life you’ve always dreamed of in a way that feels good to you!