 Hello and welcome to BrandBrain, your monthly online business growth resource, jam-packed full of the very latest tools, techniques, ideas and inspiration to take you from zero visibility to magnetic credibility. So let me ask you a question. What is it that you really want to get out of building your brand? How do you know that the marketing you're doing to build your brand is right for your business? After all, you aren't building a business just so that it can run your life, are you? Although it may feel like that sometimes. I'm guessing that you're building a business to give you and your family the lifestyle that you want to live, right? I'm also guessing that the reason you're here is because you want more, you want more customers and you want to know the quickest, easiest, cheapest ways to get them, yes or no? Well, you know that marketing is important to your business, right? But things are changing so fast now. Marketing isn't what it used to be. So where is the best place to start? What marketing activities should you be focusing on first to get what you really want out of your business? And how will you know if what you are doing is really working? How do you know whether you're wasting money on the marketing that you're doing and how can you really be sure that the time and money you are spending on your marketing is going to make a genuine difference to your life, to your family and to your business and everyone around you? And I don't just mean in a financial way because it is important that your business allows you the time freedom to enjoy what you want to do too. As I briefly mentioned a few moments ago, the internet is moving so fast with its latest inventions, updates, additions and social media channels. Boy, I mean they're growing really fast. People's buying behavior now is very, very different to the way that they used to make purchases. In the last year, let alone in the last five years or ten years ago, with so many interruptions competing for not just your attention but also for your customer's attention every minute of every day, the way your customers are searching for what you have to buy or what you have to offer is constantly evolving as are their expectations of you along with it and you might have noticed that it used to take on average seven to ten interactions with a prospect in face-to-face meetings and phone calls to convert a prospect into a customer. Well, now you can go from being a complete stranger to a lifetime customer within three or four clicks when you get it right. The point is that marketing is changing. What used to work really, really well may now only get you a mediocre result at best and you might have noticed that. Now, marketing your business can be a minefield if you aren't up to date on what is working right now. So how can you best keep up with what's working when things are changing and moving and evolving so quickly? Well, these are some of the questions that are very valid questions and we get them asked a lot and interestingly, most people in business can answer them. Why not? Well, each business owner has a different story and a different reason for going into business just as your own story is completely unique to you. Perhaps you are an established business with a very clear, crystal clear in fact, outcome as to what you want to achieve and by when. Maybe you fell into running your own business through either inheriting the business or through redundancy, for example, which is far more reactionary. And you feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights where it comes to marketing. And if you do feel like that, then don't worry, you're not alone. Or maybe you are starting a new business and you want to get it right first time. Well, whatever your reason for being here, if it is to grow your business and to attract far more new customers who regularly spend money with you and you can increase your prices, BrandBrain can and will help you. Now, Miles and I created BrandBrain Magazine because, well, if you know us, you know, we just absolutely love what we do. In fact, we worked out the other day that just over the last 10 years alone, and we've been doing this nearly 20 years now, we've spent more than 40,000 hours on marketing activities just in the last 10 years. And that's based on working on eight hours a day, five days a week for 48 weeks of the year. Now, the reality is that we actually spent more like 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week all year round, making that a total of more than 50,000 hours. Now, do you think in that time we might have learned a thing or two about marketing? Well, our clients are certainly happy with the results that we get for them. So I suggest yes. Now, is it possible that we made some mistakes along the way? You bet. In fact, some painful mistakes and we lost over 15,000 at the beginning of this year just by outsourcing our social media to somebody who turned out to be a complete mismatch for our business. You can certainly learn a thing or two, not just about social media, but about outsourcing as well. When you get burned in that way, I can tell you, did we get the result we wanted to every time? No, of course not. But we certainly learned very quickly about what works and what doesn't work because we now know how to track and measure our marketing. And we've been doing that for many years. Now, we can focus only on spending our money, our time, our energy on the things that really work because we've been doing this for so long. Could we share that with you? Absolutely we could. Could it also be possible that we learn a lot of shortcuts along the way? Shortcuts that we could share with you? Well, of course we can. Did we find lots of low cost and no cost marketing methods that can get great results that will help your business to move forward? Yes, we did. Is it possible that we could share all of that knowledge with you without you commissioning our time at £5,000 a day to find out? And believe me, you can talk to people that pay us that amount to work with them one-on-one. Yes, you can get access to that information. And guess what? You could do it all through BrandBrain. Now, BrandBrain is not a quick win, though. We don't believe in, wham, bam, thank you, Sam, type approaches to marketing. So if you do like quick, quick, quick, then BrandBrain is there to build relationships. Now, when we rolled out a poll to over 2,000 business owners on LinkedIn last year, the number one thing that people said they were looking for when they were buying a product of service is trust. So trying to marry your customers on a first date is just not a strategy that we can recommend. Sometimes it will work, but I wouldn't recommend building your whole strategy on it. So instead, we focus on helping you to build a brand that not only is built on trust, but that also is built on great value as well, and we will show you how. You see, when you build a brand on value, you start to become magnetic. You start to find that it takes you less and less energy and money to attract new customers. Now, when you become visible through being credible like we have, you can enjoy the fruits of your labor and give your family and your friends both the fully present time that they deserve from you, as well as the financial freedom that you want them to have, as well as having it for yourself. Now, would that be good for you? Does it make sense to you that to get to, well, from wanting to live that way, to actually living that way, you need to implement a new strategy. You need to do some new things to get that, because doing the same things you're doing now is only going to get you what you already have. Now, to achieve something different, you need to be doing something different. And what got you here won't necessarily get you there, that's where you want to be. So you must adopt a new strategy. Now, the reason I know so much about this is because my old strategy didn't work for me. In fact, it didn't work for me at all. And I cringe now looking back on it. You see, as an employee, I always told the line, I was a good student at school. I didn't like getting told off. And so I always did what I was told. I believed my art teacher when she told me that I was too different to the other students that I would never get anywhere because I was too different from them. Now, apparently, and I still think about this now, I was too commercial in my way of thinking. And apparently that would never get me anywhere in life. Well, now I completely beg to differ. She practically screwed up my work and my self-worth dropped through the floor. So what did I do? Did I rebel? No. Did I tell her to take a hike? No. I've quite easily done that a few times. So what did I do then? Well, I just tried harder to fit in and like magnolia just to fit in with the rest of the class. So it became more important to me to be liked than it did for me to be the true me and to give what I was really capable of giving. And well, I just basically held myself back for the next 10 years, always wanting to stand out but being afraid to. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you look at things, it was right up until the time that I got made redundant just before Christmas 2002. Now, I was absolutely gutted when the company I was working for made 16 of us redundant and closed down the design side of the business. Not a nice thing to happen just before Christmas. But fortunately, I'd been headhunted by a big design agency who had, well, they'd been after me for quite some time. In fact, they'd been trying to niggle me to go and work with them for two years. But I was towing the line. I've been a good girl in my existing job. Fortunately, getting another job was not a problem because I went straight to work for that company. But when 63 of us at this time got called into the big border in six days before Christmas, just a year later in 2003, to be told that the company had been over-trading. It was being forced to close. Well, absolutely devastating news, especially two Christmases in a row. And I loved working there. I thought, oh, God, how on earth am I going to go back and tell my husband that another Christmas is going to be ruined? Let alone face my family. But this is just what the design industry is like, though. You know, the agencies, they take on lots of people when they would be with... I can't speak. The agencies take on lots of people when they win big contracts and spend all the money before they've delivered the contract. Now, I know that's not just in the design industry. That's all over. But then, of course, you become surplus to requirements. And they don't hang around about, you know, in doing what they have to do to look after themselves. Of course, you know, others left without a job. Again, have you ever found yourself in this position? Really challenging, isn't it? Really wanting to please and trust others at the expense of your own financial security. Well, by then, I had built up a very good personal brand for myself. And again, it didn't take me very long to get another job, which now I know stands for just overbroke. But this was becoming tedious. And I realized that I was being snapped up so quickly because, well, just like you, quite frankly, I'm bloody good at what I do. Although I had been an employee, I had started to build my own brand within the companies that I worked for. And I always, always kept head of the game outside of the business. So I knew what all of the competitors were doing, more so than the businesses that I was working for. So I toyed with the idea of starting my own business. But I just didn't have the confidence to do it yet. Have you ever felt like that? Well, that was about to change because what happened the next Christmas, you got it. Again, redundancies were on the horizon. And this time I took the ball by the horns and I decided that no longer was I going to allow someone else to control my future. Now it was time to do it for myself. Now, looking back in those first inexperienced days, having now built six of our own businesses and helped thousands of other businesses and perhaps even you, to build theirs. Well, looking back on that now, I cringe a little bit. If only I could go back and advise myself now, eh? Well, I made every mistake in the book, but the worst mistake I ever made was clinging to familiarity. Now I clung to the network of people I had around me because I felt safe there, but they never encouraged me to progress further. You ever felt like that? Well, at the time, I didn't realize because even though I felt like there was an invisible barrier holding me back, I didn't know any different. You see, they didn't want me to be different. They didn't want me to outshine them. They didn't want me to be more successful than them. Like crabs in the barrel, they just kept wanting to pull me back down again. You know, they'd call me boring if I talked about my successes. You know, and this was coming from other business owners. I expected more support than that, but you know, I realized I was hanging around with people who ran mediocre businesses. And so guess what, that made my business. Guess what that made me? You are the sum of the people that you hang around with. So that made me mediocre too. Now, the reason they didn't want to talk about it was because they weren't doing very well in their business. And when I was progressing, it was making them feel bad and lazy if I challenged their thinking. Maybe you've got people around you like that too. So I politely and graciously moved away from that circle. And now I only spend my time with people that I love or would have over to my house in France for the weekend. And that includes our clients. I need to trust the people that I work with. Now, have you ever felt like that? Like you've suppressed some part of yourself, like some of your most valuable qualities have been suppressed because it served other people or even particularly someone else. Maybe you've done that in the past. Perhaps you're doing it now. Things can change in a heartbeat if you take action. But thinking back, you probably wasn't scared of trying new things as a child. You see, when you're a child, before you start to soak up other people's beliefs and fears and you take on all of their stuff, you're just you. You were the amazing you, the confident you, the perfect you, the you who is accepted by everyone. The you who won't take no for an answer and will throw a bloody tantrum on the floor if you can't get your way. The you who gets whatever you want and whatever you mean. The you who fell over a hundred times at eight months old and didn't say, well, that was shit. Not gonna try that again. You didn't. You fell over again and again and kept getting up and kept getting up until you got up and stayed up. Well, there's a surprising similarity between that and building your business. The difference is in the strategy that you could have now. The strategy that will help you to continue to do this and help you to step out of your comfort circle to embrace a new group of people. A group of people that you can learn from who have already done the falling over for you that have fallen over and got back up and fallen over and got back up again and they learned how to be great consistently. Now, you know, you've already invested thousands of pounds maybe in your business but these people have genuinely spent a lot of money falling down and standing back up and they are now really visible. Now, you know, they can help you to not only keep up with your competitors but excel them so much that they can't keep up with you. Now, if you want to stop swimming in the seat of sameness and go from zero visibility to magnetic credibility where there just aren't enough hours or people in the day to answer all the inquiries that come pouring in, then you need to get some help. Help from people who know what they are doing. Help from people who are just like you and share the same values as you. The only difference is they have a different skill set to you. A skill set that you need to enable you to plug that knowledge gap. The skill set that you might be missing in marketing and business growth enabling you to do what you are best at. Now, just one issue of BrandBrain Magazine is the equivalent of having 10 super successful marketing directors, brand strategy specialists, SEO experts, social media marketers, video marketing gurus, content writing, amazing people, mindset experts, business advisors, all these people helping you to grow your business and your brand in a way that is working in industry right now. Not 10 years ago, not even a year ago. This week, you know, that's thousands of pounds worth of information for less than the price of three star butt of coffees. Honestly, the experts at BrandBrain are the people that you need to start including in your network. Now, I guarantee you that if all you did was follow just one article a day from the magazine during the working week and you implemented what you learned into your business, you wouldn't know what to do with all of the customers that you've got coming to you in six months. Very nice problem to have. And the reason we know this is because we've tested it on other businesses including our own. Now, hey, listen, I could talk to you all day about BrandBrain Magazine because Miles and I are so passionate if you haven't guessed already about what it can do for your business. If you just put your trust in us and let us help you. Now, we've packed it with so much value that you're gonna absolutely love what we've created for you and we sincerely hope that you will want to continue that journey with us and subscribe to the monthly magazines because every day we're finding new things that we can share with you in next month's magazine. So I genuinely hope that you choose to buy BrandBrain and include us in your circle of influence. All you need to do is press one of the buy now buttons on this page and you'll know them because they're green. You'll be able to start reading the magazine with just a few minutes of signing up. It's sipples. So do let us know how you get on. Your progress is really important to us because the only way we can grow is when you grow. You share your results with other people and they'll ask you where you found out about this stuff and you can tell them that it was BrandBrain that helped you to do it and we want you to share this magazine with other people too because we know it can help so many people. So buy it now and I'll look very much forward to hearing your business growth success stories soon.