SPEAKER_01 0:01

Our job is to remove the distance between an organization and the people who matter to it. All the agency work, we do everything you'd expect a full service agency to do. But for us, that that focus is really on, you know, that sort of like human truth and building like meaningful strategy around that.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Founders and leaders across Manitoba are building meaningful things, often quietly and without much attention. I'm Nathan Martin. On the Building Manitoba podcast, I sit down with local founders and leaders to go beyond the surface. We talk about the values that drove them, the decisions that mattered, and the lessons they learned along the way. This podcast is for people who care about building something meaningful in Manitoba. Today on the Building Manitoba podcast, I'm talking with Lee Walton, managing partner at Brandish Agency, the Winnipeg creative shop behind several prominent local and national brands. In this episode, we unpack both the successes and the setbacks in Brandish's growth journey and how those challenges shifted Lee's focus from chasing top-line numbers to putting people and sustainability first. We also dig into Brandish's move to a four-day work week and the impact it's had on the business. Finally, Lee lays out his formula for building a brand, showing why it's far more important than just a logo, and explains why getting it right is no longer optional in today's market. If you want to sharpen your brand so it drives real growth without burning out your team, you'll enjoy this episode. Let's get into it. Lee, welcome to the Building Manitoba podcast. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate you having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

I want to start out in asking you when you and Derek started Brandish, what gap did you see in the market that you believed other agencies weren't filling at the time?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

So just maybe a little bit of background, background on me. I've spent my entire working career in marketing now, and almost all of that has been spent in agencies. We've been building Brandish here now for the last 10 years in Winnipeg. And for us, you know, the pull to start Brandish, I think the feeling was really that marketing had become really good at doing doing some things, but from our perspective, you know, not necessarily good at doing the right things. So prior to Brandish, I was working in a what I would call like a digital first full service agency. And this was sort of around peak, like SEO, SEM, paid media, conversion optimization, and around that time, and having done that for you know five or six years at that point, it was just like living in spreadsheets, you know, reverse engineering data, everything seemed to be very tactical, very performance-driven, and we would be optimizing campaigns, but I think the big feeling was that we weren't always stepping back and asking, does this actually make sense for the business? And who are the people on the other side of this spreadsheet or on the other side of this data? You know, interestingly enough, uh, that agency had had a brand project and had assembled the team and hadn't really done that work previously, like in a meaningful way, and had assembled the team internally to do that work. And so we we started to kind of like do some research and navigate, you know, naively at that point, not really having done this work before our way in. We we bought a book, you know, Brand Strategy by Alita Wheeler to help guide us. And so we started to work through, we did a lot of stakeholder interviews, we did we started to figure out positioning and value proposition, and we started to work through messaging and even identity, and it just felt like something clicked at that point. Like this was a lot closer to the work that I felt like we wanted to be doing. And previously it felt like you know, a lot of that tactical work, you're helping companies do do more marketing, but maybe not necessarily better marketing. So the kind of aha moment or the moment of clarity was this inflection point, was this brand project. It was it was like people focused and just just that process. It was uh I think a moment for us like this is the work we want to be doing. We want to be thinking about strategy from this perspective. And I think some of that like experience, yeah, it laid the groundwork for ultimately I think where a little bit of a philosophy for for what became brand is, like simplifying things, you know, moving closer to people, understanding people, having uh a clear point of view, and uh you know, post that project. And that project went really well and smooth. And I think you know, looking back, it was just this this clarity around like we knew we couldn't keep working that old way.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

So, what was your first step after that then? Did you quit your job and start your own firm then jump into that? Did you kind of dip your toes in the water and you know take on a project on the side? What was that next step to really you know moving away from agency life to brandish as a standalone project or company?

SPEAKER_01 5:54

I I didn't quit my job right away. It was a few months after that. Maybe maybe quiet quitting, as they call it today, is the appropriate term. But there was a a period of time where I think you know, a couple of us who ended up leaving and starting Brandish, I think at this company we we were at previously, tried to, you know, champion more of that type of work internally and champion maybe some of the the thinking that we were starting to kind of explore and some of the learning that we were doing. And you know, I I feel you know it was just there wasn't really a motivation to kind of uh move in in that direction or maybe think in sort of the same way. So yeah, at that time I was 30, I didn't have any kids, and it just was like if I'm going to try to do this, this seems like the most sort of appropriate moment. And that ultimately led me to quitting my job in October of 2015, and we launched Brandish January 2016.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Oh, that's really cool. Can you talk a little bit about kind of that the early days, kind of moving from that, you know, you have a new company, you quit your job, you started Brandish, you know, moving from survival mode to more of that growth mode and stability and really kind of getting the flywheel going, the momentum going. Can you talk about kind of what made that switch for you or how you built that momentum?

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Yeah, certainly. I think brick by brick, very, very slowly. I anecdotes that we hear in in business, like you know, you just need to start. I think when you when you've been doing this for for a decade and you've you've had a a bit of a journey and you've had some some experience, it sort of the the context kind of changes, and I think you understand the anecdotes perhaps like from a different perspective. And to me, that particular anecdote now is you know, you need to start because this is gonna be you know a journey of many, many, many steps. And yeah, so we started out of my son room in uh in a condo that I was living in with no real business plan. I think we had got like a very small future for neuralone at that time, and it was a grind. We we didn't really have even any connections, we knew people, but we didn't leave with a client or anything like that. We we actually started you know from ground zero. And uh we needed to, you know, even just like building our website and building our own brand and some of that. We hadn't necessarily thought all of that through prior to to starting. But yeah, it was it was a lot of work. It was it was exciting, of course. I think you know, you almost again naively come into this and you have a lot of motivation and it's very exciting, but we learned pretty quickly that it was going to be a lot of work for us.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah, absolutely. And since that time, you've grown a lot, and you've grown not just in Winnipeg, but across Canada to some extent as well, too. And can you talk about you know some of the decisions you made around expansion? And I know you had expanded to Toronto kind of organically more so, but then also through a merger with Red and Edmonton. So can you talk about what led you to those opportunities? Why did you decide to expand? Why organically in one case, why through a merger in another? And give us some of your your thought process behind that.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Yeah, so from 2016 to 2019, we experienced significant growth. We got really lucky and very fortunate to work with some really great clients and had a lot of momentum. As our team grew and as the work that we were doing, the scope of these projects grew, and some of the briefs and the client work that we were doing, um, it was bigger work. As just a part of growing our team, we needed to look beyond Winnipeg for talent. We're an advertising, we're a creative agency. So there's always the pull of Toronto that is sort of like the mecca for advertising in our country. Uh there's there's always kind of the Toronto gravity in our industry is is strong. Um, but we hired out there, so we hired a few team members um in Toronto. We also had a team member that moved there. So we didn't kind of go to Toronto from a business development first perspective. It was really just like we were building our team, we hired people there, and we landed a couple clients in in that market, or we had clients that had teams and offices and did business out of Toronto. So we started to around 2019, after the pandemic, start to think about kind of growing in that market from a business development perspective a little bit more intentionally. That was a journey. You know, we tried incredibly hard to to go there and to you know be active in the business community and go to all the networking events and go to all the industry events, and we met a lot of people and we participated in a lot of pitches. But I think for us, one of the things that we learned being from Winnipeg and proudly from Winnipeg, I might add, is that at least our experience was that it was very difficult to break into that Toronto market if you're not from there. It was very, very challenging for us. And also the level of competition was another huge hurdle for us. You know, we're talking about the the biggest and brightest agencies and organizations in our industry in the space, and we were having a a a really tough time competing at that scale. You know, we're a small agency from the prairies. Long story short, we did that for you know about a year and a half and started to realize like this isn't gonna be viable for us. This isn't necessarily gonna work the way that we think it's gonna work, reflecting in terms of like where do we go from here and what type of company do we want to be? We were just having a discussion one day, and we were like, why not the prairies? Like everybody in our space wants to go to the big city and wants to go to Toronto or wants to go to Vancouver. What about everything in between Toronto and Vancouver? And then, you know, we started to think about that more meaningfully and became became really bullish on on this idea of the prairies. And we had I had a mentor at at the time that was you know from the advertising space, and we had a series of discussions, and and the long and short of it was like Lee, why are you why are you trying to almost hide the fact that you're from Winnipeg in some of these situations? I think you need to embrace where you're from and who you are, sort of your DNA as a as a company, and like that's your strength. You're viewing it almost as a weakness, and I think you need to flip this around. And you know, that that sort of became the plan for us. And I think the experience in Toronto, in terms of like all of that work, like going into a market and going to the networking events and follow-up meetings and coffees and and really kind of boots on the ground, sort of you know, in in the trenches, if you will, trying to go and build a market. We just realized that it took a lot of work, and so we started to think about MA and can we find a partner or can we find an organization that wants to merge or is ready for an acquisition to become kind of part of Randish. And we dipped our toe into that idea and and met some really great people. Uh, one of those was Lori Billy, who founded Red Agency, um, and ran that business very successfully in Edmonton for you know 30 years, and was at a stage where um you know she was looking for something different in terms of the day-to-day of her business. And I think philosophically it was we just clicked, then very, very quickly that became a thing. It was either the end of 2023 or mid-2024 that we we put ink to paper on on that merger and uh Red and Brandish merged, and uh now we are operating out of Winnipeg and Minton. And it's been fantastic. I mean, uh all of the challenges that we had in Toronto, feeling like an outsider, feeling culturally different, dealing with companies that felt unfamiliar, dealing with competitors that felt unfamiliar, just really feeling out of our comfort zone, if you will. We felt uh out of place. Edmonton is completely different. Edmonton feels familiar, feels a lot like Winnipeg. It's culturally very similar to Winnipeg. Calgary, same thing. And the companies that we're doing business with, uh, our clients there feel familiar and similar. Our competitors feel similar to the companies and we compete with here in Winnipeg. And uh it's just been better than we expected. It's been fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

No, it's really cool. And a couple things I want to just kind of unpack a little bit more out of that. So it sounds like the experience in Toronto really helped to like sharpen and clarify really the identity of Brandish as a firm, and then also who your ideal client is as well that you're that you're targeting, and and really that prairie ethos, if you will. And and can you speak a little bit more about what strengths you feel that you have as a firm and as people, just based on you know where you are here and the culture and the the people and the talent that you have here on the prairies?

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Yeah. You know, we're we're a small independent agency. And I think around that time, like going to to Toronto, we were very caught up in and and we had been in 2016 to 2019 to 2020, we had had 150% growth year over year, a lot of wins, a lot of momentum. I think just as like a company, and even myself as a business like owner, you know, managing partner, like we became almost fixated on growth. And I think for admittedly, like, you know, looking at the wrong things, looking at like headcount and comparing ourselves to competitors based on how many team members we have. And we kind of got lost in that a little bit. So that was also a a big takeaway for us was that like we're a business and we need to grow, of course, and you know, but that growth needs to be for the right reasons. And I think now our our sort of like KPI, if you will, is sustainability. We want to grow, we want to be sustainable. So we've sort of embraced the fact that we're a small firm. Um, that's a strength of ours. And I think we always wanted to kind of be big, you know, candidly. So I think that was a a big shift in perspective was just embracing small. And I mean, another like important lesson for us in that journey through some of that growth was that we're pretty value-based organization, things like the four-day work week, uh, you know, uh a lot of like high like autonomy like amongst our team. Um, we don't bill by the hour, we just do do things different. And when we got to 40, you know, close to 50 people at that time, uh I would say that was the period where those values and the way that we wanted to operate our business and the way that we wanted to collaborate as a team and just be as a company were were really tested. So I think like for us, like that is kind of like a big, a big piece. Like we're we're small, we're independent, the way that we we work is incredibly important to us, and the way that we collaborate with our clients is incredibly important. You know, we as an agency have a pretty diverse portfolio of of work. We don't have a particular niche, like we're not focused on one sector or or one industry. You know, most of the organizations that we work with, I would say, are like mid to large organizations. But the kind of like key, I would say, piece is they're navigating some type of change. They're at some sort of inflection point, whether that's driven by growth, whether that's you know modernization, they're looking to learn more about their audience. There's a disconnect there or a misalignment, or it's an internal alignment that seems to be kind of the sweet spot for us. Uh we we say at Brandish a lot, it's about people, and I think that is become a ethos or like a philosophy for us, and not only in how we manage our business as business owners and people running a company and team members in a company, but also I think how we do our work as a creative agency. Um, because everything that we we do, we try our best to start that with understanding the human experience. Um the way that we look at our job is is pretty simple. Like, you know, our job is to remove the distance between an organization and the people who matter to it, whether that's customers, stakeholders, team members, employees, and all the agency work. We do everything you'd expect a full service agency to do. Research, strategy, we help with go-to-market and all the kind of like nuanced activity that falls within those buckets. That's kind of the mechanics around all of that. But for us, that that focus is really on you know, that sort of like human truth and and building like meaningful strategy around that.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

No, that's great. And there's lots of I think lots of little nuggets in there too, and just even just the comments around you know, your KPIs and what you're focusing on now or optimizing for now and sustainability, and I guess not just in terms of sustainability and can we keep up the business development at this pace, but the sustainability of your core values and the people and making sure that kind of what made you special in terms of the people and the values that you bring isn't getting lost in you know in a growth for growth sake type approach as you're as you're growing. So I think I think there's a lot of really good insights within that there. Now that you've reached, I guess, a kind of more of a prairies level scale, I guess what are the bottlenecks or challenges that you're finding you're having to solve for at this scale?

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Yeah, I mean we run a team that's distributed across multiple cities. So we've got a team here in Winnipeg, we've got a team in Edmonton, we have a team member in Calgary, and then we have a team of two people in Toronto. So, you know, managing a distributed team is always a challenge. And I think that you know, we need to be thinking about how do we keep people engaged and connected, and when we're planning something like a team activity for You know, the group in Winnipeg, how do we make sure that we're thinking about our team members that are in these other places? There's also like even just like managing a business and trying to grow a business in multiple markets, I would say, is kind of uh a bit of a challenge. I mean, candidly, like operationally, we're pretty optimized. You know, I I feel the pandemic forced us to really dig into our operations as an organization and become really clear across the company, building the right systems, building the right methodologies, systems of scale, and systems to manage the organization. And you know, those three or four years, we did a lot to optimize the operations. We also have a really incredible director of operations, her name is Justine, who does a really, really amazing job of running the organization from an operational perspective. I would say that our biggest challenge right now, actually, candidly, is keeping up with the pace of change of the industry, but also the world, you know, broadly. So advertising, marketing has always been something that has moved pretty quickly and has always been something that you know you need to stay on top of to you know stay plugged into the trends and what is happening in the space, new tools, new technology. But what I find now is that is moving at a pace that is just unbelievable. And I think managing that is I'd say like our biggest challenge, because we have things that we need to manage and consider and stay on top of as a business from an operational perspective. But then then we're also like in the work. So we have clients that are coming to us with big important questions about like how should what should I be thinking about as an organization when it comes to AI or help me with some of these big bets. And um, so we we find ourselves it's just a very kind of like intense environment, and with everything that is happening now, from you know, the the technology is moving really quick, culture is changing very quickly, there's a lot of societal cultural change, geopolitical, like the world is intense. So I'd I'd say that that is probably our biggest challenge. We need to make sure that we are doing RD and you know, amidst all of that intensity in the client work and delivering on those expectations and trying to grow our business, that you know, we stay motivated and we stay driven to understand how all of that that I just explained is shifting and shaping people's needs, wants, and and perceptions. Because if we lose sight of that, I feel we start to take steps back in terms of our ability to deliver great work.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

Yeah, no great answer to that. I wanted to dive into and you referenced it just briefly, but the shift that Brandish made to a four-day work week, and I think it you know really reflects on, like you mentioned, it uh it being all about people, but I think I'd like to hear it from you. And why did you decide to test a four-day work week in the beginning? And was there a particular hypothesis or question that you were trying to answer when you started testing that out?

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Yeah. Again, not really like a big real intentional plan or real intentional strategy. It wasn't something we thought about. Actually, actually, we we probably tripped and fell into the four-day work week, quite candidly. This was around, again, bad with dates, but we were like well into the pandemic. So this was around the time where everybody was doing like Salesforce, Nike, Bumble, like all the big companies were doing like the HubSpot, like the global week of rest, um, getting time back to their team. And we saw it in our team. People were burnt out. That was hard. A hard thing to work through. You know, we've got you know, myself at a baby, a new baby during that time, and it was tough. So we could certainly see that on our team. So we knew we had to do something. We knew we had to give some some type of time back, or we needed to give our team a break in some way. Again, naively, we thought that giving our entire team a week off all at once would would be a bad idea, and that you know, it might damage our our business. Uh, I don't think that way today necessarily. But at that time we were a little bit bigger of a team, and it just seemed like that wasn't going to be something that we were we were gonna be able to make happen at Brandish. So what we we did instead was one of our team members was it was around the time, it was like summer. So one of our team members at the time, she had proposed the idea of like, why don't we just give the team Fridays off for the rest of the summer, you know, for the next like three months, July, August, September, and give not one long weekend, but every weekend for the next three months is a long weekend, and even a couple long, long weekends in there. So we were like, Yeah, cool, let's let's do that. And I think like very quickly we realized that the team loved it. We started to kind of get feedback that this was a really great thing, and I think like you know, a few weeks in we started to talk about like maybe we should just do this like permanently, and maybe back to my point earlier about like how we look at the business from the lens of sustainability. This was one of those things. So you you give your team a week off once a year, and then what you go back to that intensity, and you go back to that kind of you know, you're you're in accounting, you know, right? It's an intense industry, so you go back to that, and then you gotta work now a whole year to basically get that week off. So I think what we started to look at it from like, well, this this kind of like rest and recharge, if we do it this way, then it's built in every week, and it seems to be something that would be more more sustainable. And that's what I mean by tripped and fell. We then started to look at the four-day work week and we're like, oh, this is like a thing. They're doing it in like Iceland. And look, there's these other companies that are are experimenting with this, and and this is kind of a thing that companies and people are doing. So end of September, we sent an email to our team saying that this was going to be a permanent shift. We didn't change anybody's salaries, it wasn't like you needed to work a compressed schedule, it was just four working days. You know, the the maybe the one caveat was that let's just try to be as productive as we can. Like we're working less time. Like this whole experiment probably doesn't work if we have like a big drop in productivity. So what we have today is is essentially Brandish works on a still on a four-day work week. I think it's been three or four years now that we've been doing this, just part of like who we are and what we do. People work Fridays, of course. Uh, I work Fridays, and it's it's now less, uh, Nathan, about four-day work week. It's probably more about like flex culture. You know, Friday is a day off at the agency, but someone's in the office working, we don't discourage that. It's not like a hard sort of rule, but if you work a Friday, then take your time back in like another way. We have a very a lot of uh uh accountability and a lot of autonomy built into into the culture here. Like we hire people and bring people in that work well within kind of that framework and know how to manage things for themselves in that way. It just works. It works great.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

So Lee, I wanted to ask you a little bit more. Like when you made that change to the four-day work week, were you worried about client reactions around only being available four days? Or and then also you mentioned you were asking your team to try to stay productive, but how did you really see the results of your productivity shift? Like, did you notice the decline? Did you notice that things kind of um stayed productive for a while and then declined once people kind of got used to it? Or what was the results of that? I guess not experiment, but really just kind of that that shift to the four-day work week.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Yeah, no, I think that for us it was it was actually relatively simple, probably challenging for the organizations that in our industry that work by the billable hour. We're focused on outcomes, we're not focused on hours in that same way. So uh that sort of shift, we didn't necessarily look at like a loss of billable hours or revenue for that time. We're simply focused on outcomes by a certain date. So uh it it actually makes it really, really simple. When you you focus on outcomes, like it doesn't really matter how many hours a team member works in a given week. You give them the autonomy to basically manage their schedule and work towards those outcomes. Like we are focused on doing the best work we possibly can in the most sustainable way over time. Sometimes that work is less, sometimes people need more of a break, sometimes we gotta go all in and we gotta focus, and sometimes that's more. But I think what we've sort of seen now is that everybody just is consistently working towards the best possible outcome, period. So we we do get asked, you know, in when we first did this, I had a lot of interviews, a lot of interests. We would always get asked about coverage and like client reaction. Clients have no issue about it because again, we're focused on outcomes, so we never have an hour's conversation with clients, it's literally we are paid to deliver these outcomes and do this type of work, and that really fundamentally doesn't change coverage, is something we need to think about, but you know, that was also a very like easy thing to think about because naturally, as a consultancy or an agency and managing ad accounts and advertising and campaigns and large kind of media spans for our client brands, and the nature of that work in of itself means we need to plan for coverage over the weekends. Like if something goes wrong on the weekend, we need to have a contingency or a holiday to make sure that we are able to respond to that or you know, take care of something if there's a break fix issue. We manage websites and different things, and it is basically just that same framework, and we just do that now on Fridays as well. And in that way, our clients already they already knew what to expect from Brownish in terms of when they need someone, we're here regardless of day of week or time. It's not like we turn kind of, you know, we don't go into airplane mode um on Fridays or on the weekends. So yeah, it's actually been really, really simple for us and straightforward.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Have you noticed a difference on the like on the talent attraction and retention side of things? Or um like I know you mentioned one of the reasons you went to Toronto was the talent question or you know, attracting and keeping good talent. So I'm curious if you've noticed a difference on the talent side of things in terms of who you're able to attract and retain, or if there's other benefits you've seen just from having a team that has that flexibility, the autonomy, the ability to kind of not burn out, or hopefully not burn out as much as maybe they would otherwise under the pressure and the flux of demands.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Yeah, I mean, what a great benefit, right? You now get 52 days of baked-in time away from work. Uh and yeah, I mean, who wouldn't love that? So to me, it makes sense for for everyone. You know, the obvious I have three kids, you have kids, it gives me a ton of flexibility to be with my family. And sometimes I work on Friday, but you know what that means? When I work on Friday, I don't have to work on Saturday. And that's sort of the way that that I look at it. And that work is always very different because we've created the expectation with our clients, with our team, you know, the work I can get done after going to the gym, coming in to work at 9 or 10, and leave at 1 o'clock is you know, with no distraction. It's it is like you're in flow state and it's super productive. I mean, for parents, like it's obvious, it it is great. You every weekend is a long weekend uh for the most part. But then everyone else, if you have kids or not, if you're at a certain age or you're new in your career, you are able to now use this time in kind of like however you want to use that. So we've got team members that use these days for personal and professional development. You know, we have somebody right now that is uh working through like uh a P and P, different designations. We have team members that use it to catch up on work. We have team members that hang out together and go golfing in the summer, uh spend time with family, catch up on life admin. So I think that is where this really works. And what we see actually from that perspective is some of that stuff then defaults to Friday. Like Friday is my day when I can go to the doctor, do my errands, like take care of like these family things, and uh we start to see less of that, you know, not that we care, but less of that Monday to Thursday. And that's cool. You know, so it's been we've been doing this now, like I said, you know, three, four years, and we'll we'll never change it. It's just it's been really neat to see how the team makes it work for them. Probably one of the best things we've done as a business and as an organization, and it's been one of the biggest learning lessons for us as well.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

So that's really cool. I want to shift the conversation a little bit and talk about kind of branding and the value of brand and just taking like the perspective of a Manitoba-based business owner, that small to medium range, maybe like two million to twenty million in revenue. How should they think about brand? Like, is it a luxury to focus on branding? Is it you know essential from a leverage standpoint? Like, what should they be thinking about in terms of brand?

SPEAKER_01 37:09

Yeah, I mean, I definitely just to maybe address that point, I I certainly don't think it's a luxury. Whether you have a large budget or whether you have a small budget, whether you have a a large amount of resources or you're just a solopreneur, you you have a brand, right? If you've got customers, if you've got an audience, if you are hosting a podcast, and uh if you are you know communicating externally, you have a brand, whether you're intentional uh about that or not. So, you know, my kind of thinking on this is that it is something that every business, every entrepreneur, every organization needs to be thinking about. Like there's the classic uh anecdote that is a brand is not what you say you are, but sort of what kind of your audience, or I've butchered that quote, but what people sort of say you are. And I think that is like that is true. So the the way I sort of think about it is like, why not be intentional about these things and why not shape your brand and control your narrative and think about your value proposition and the value that you bring to your audience in like a more meaningful way. Um and I and from that perspective, I actually feel it's one of the most underrated business marketing strategies is thinking about brand. You know, we have a really great product, and we're gonna like slap together a website and we're gonna like try to like be in business, or we've started this like you know, landscaping company, and you know, we just we just do this, and and and we you also see it in enterprise. Those examples were just you know small businesses, but we see that often in the enterprise space. You know, we're in market and we do a lot of business, and but we have like never for 20 years, 30 years thought about our brand or who we are or our positioning, what makes us different, why people choose us, who our audience is, what do they care about, what are they struggling with. They're not thinking about those things in an intentional way. So to me, it's probably and now, like in the world we we live in and the rate of of how fast things are moving, and not to get too kind of like deep into it, but how easy it is. It's a very like, you know, with all the technology and all the information that's available, it's the barrier to entry to start a business or to start something and to communicate and to put things into the world is a lot lower. So there's a s where we exist in a sea of sameness is a term I uh saw uh a couple weeks ago. So you need to do the work. I think it's it's not a luxury, it's actually almost a strategic imperative. And probably one of the things you can do that will differentiate you or give you the ability to be differentiated or be more meaningful, more clear, have more clarity, be more focused in your marketing strategy is thinking about brand and brand strategy.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Can you talk about where branding fits into the sequencing of other aspects of marketing? Because I think when someone comes in as an outsider or they're just you know running a business and they're not someone who's been deep in the world of marketing, like brand just seems like one of those things on a list of everything that they should be doing. But can you talk about the sequencing? Like, when is the right time to really invest seriously in brand as opposed to I need to generate leads or I need to convert attention into sales? Like, how do you think about that from a sequencing standpoint?

SPEAKER_01 40:55

When you start a business and you've mentioned you need to generate leads and you need to be you need to be scrappy, you need to have like motion and you need to like do things and you need to go out there and and the way maybe I look at that, small, medium enterprise, same, same, same for for for all of it. There's like low-hanging fruit, and there's sort of like or short-term things that you you don't need to do, but you probably want to do. Like you want to probably go and try to get as many leads as you can and experiment. And and I'm certainly not advocating for you know spend three to six months building a brand before you do any of the things that fall in that sort of, you know, go to a networking event, go meet people, go start talking about your business or your organization, start workshopping some of these things that I'm kind of like even talking through here with people, of course. But any of the other stuff that sort of comes downstream, so marketing, like any of the kind of like, you know, we're building a strategy even. Like I need to build a marketing strategy, a content strategy, I need to think about social media, I need to think about um all my sales enablement materials that I need to put together to be able to deliver a pitch or give people flyers and posters and do all of that, facilitate all that go-to-market activity, all of that is going to be maybe the best way to frame this is brand is a force multiplier for all of that. So if you think about your audience and you have a clear position, and you you sort of think about what makes you different, and you can in a very clear way articulate your value proposition to people, and you really think about your messaging, and you think about your identity and you know what your materials look like and how all of that comes together, you're gonna have better marketing. It's gonna only be a force multiplier for your strategy and unlock a lot of things for you. Go to market, and the amount of leads ultimately that you're gonna be able to generate, I feel, are going to only be enhanced and improved by doing those things.

SPEAKER_00 43:13

Oh, that's great. Can you break down for people like what is branding? Like, I think you've touched on it in a few different ways here, but really like the essence of what's kind of coming through is really clarity in terms of what is your business, what's the value that you bring, what do you stand for, and how are you going to go about delivering that? Can you break down that in a little bit more detail? Like, what does branding actually mean? And you know, what's the process that people go through to clarify that or really establish that for their for their companies?

SPEAKER_01 43:42

Yeah, I think that when we talk about branding, a lot of people assume that we are talking about a logo or we're talking about the visual elements of a brand, like we are talking about the identity. But when we at brand A lot of the brand work that we are doing, we are helping organizations figure out and achieve clarity around like brand positioning. So where you sit in the market, if you will, or the space that you want to own in your customer's mind. We do a lot of work around value proposition. So why should somebody choose you? What is the clear reason somebody should choose you over your competitors? And how are you different? And messaging. So those two pieces, sorry, are like the big important pieces, I think, of a lot of the brand work that we do and where we see a lot of misalignment. What is the positioning and what is the value proposition? And then how do you take those things and communicate them, which is messaging? See it all the time. Small, uh, medium enterprise. Like we're just making up messaging on the fly, and things become very fragmented because if you're in a big organization and you've got a marketing team of 50 people, and they all have different roles, and they're all interpreting a messaging document, maybe that's not clear and structured in the right way, you can see how the messaging becomes very fragmented as that gets executed month after month, year after year. So the words, the tone, the stories, important, important part, the narrative that you use to express that positioning and value proposition is how I like to think about messaging. You know, in some cases, we need to think about other elements like a brand story, or they really come out of these three, the big three, we'll call them. That's cheesy, but like the these are you know, positioning, value prop, and messaging. And in some cases, depending on again, what that inflection point is or why we're coming in or what our job, the job that we need to do with this organization, sometimes we need to help that company articulate mission, vision. You know, they need to be thinking about like their brand personality. Uh, we need to build experience principles uh for them, even just bespoke pieces that are you know unique to their organizational objectives that we need to think of, which are usually some derivative of messaging, but to me that's the way I I sort of think about brand work. And then, of course, you know, the fourth piece that rounds that out is is identity. So once we've gone in and we've figured out that position and we've figured out the value proposition and we've built our messaging, now we can go and build an identity based on those things. And I and in that way, maybe this is a bit of a hot take, or people won't agree, but I almost see visual identity as like it reinforces positioning, actually, in my mind. So you're taking that positioning and building on it.

SPEAKER_00 47:13

You're talking about branding and uh you know developing a position and a lot of the work that has to go into the value proposition side of things. And it really sounds like there's a lot of crossover almost with the strategic planning side of things. And I'm curious in your work around value proposition, do you find companies are are sometimes not just changing the words or the messaging out to clients, but also reevaluating the services that they're offering, you know, changing the services or how they deliver those services to better align with a clear value proposition and make sure that they're they're aligned in terms of what customers actually want. Is there a bit of that process that goes on too, besides just the outward communication of what they do?

SPEAKER_01 48:00

Absolutely. And this is where you can start to see why that work becomes, especially in a larger organization, a lot of work ends up when you start to make decisions around why somebody should choose you, and uh you start to answer some of those questions like what do we do? Who is it for? Why does this matter? What is the promise that we make to the customer? You know inherently need to start thinking about, you need to start thinking about like how do we deliver on that promise? And then what do we need to do within our organization to be able to deliver on that promise? Uh and in some cases that might be we actually need new products or services, or we need to think about delivery and the way that we deliver these services. So if you look at an organization like the Virtual Automotive Group, who we've done a lot of work for here locally, when we make a promise to the customer that experience is everything to our organization, you can imagine, you know, we've got 30 dealerships, we've got fixed operations, we've got, you know, a thousand employees plus that we need to essentially start considering. Like you need to look at now that sort of you know the customer journey and that brand experience map. And you need to, this is part of the work that we did for them, but you need to start thinking through what does all of that look like? And where are the challenges and opportunities there? Where are we gonna fall short on that promise? What do we need to do to fix that? And where are we positioned really well, and where can we take what we learned there and apply that through in these other places? And that's a multi-year type of project, but you need to map all of that out. In that case, with that organization, you know, we had some of the you know really amazing kind of like internal team and operators that we collaborate very closely with to work on all of that strategy and work through all of that change management. But yeah, the answer is like absolutely a thousand percent.

SPEAKER_00 50:06

We hear a lot nowadays about personal brand. And I'm curious to get your thoughts too on and a lot of the work that you do is around you know the brands for corporations and companies and organizations, but where's the connection or what's the interplay around personal branding? Are you finding that that's uh connected to the work that you do? Is that becoming more important in the world and the environment that we're in today? And uh what are your thoughts around the value of that to uh to branding for an organization as well?

SPEAKER_01 50:36

Yeah, I feel that it is an important consideration. Like we're all building personal brands, and I think it's kind of the same, the same rules apply. Like, you know, how do people experience you, Lee, and what is your personal brand? It's probably that sort of consistent like impression that people have of you based on how you show up, how you communicate, what your reputation is sort of like over time. So yeah, I I'm like a big advocate of of you know thinking intentionally about your personal brand, especially if you're in business or you're you're managing a podcast. I think that those things are important. Like, what do people associate with you? What do you stand for? You know, what do people sort of expect from you? What do people say about you when you're like not in the room? What is your philosophy? How do you what do you believe? How do you show up? How do you express yourself? These things I think are important. And I think you know, if you're in an organization, like if you're the CEO and the leader of a larger organization, or you're the leader of a small business in like the community, it's important. I think it's important to think about those things. My my probably my caveat is, and this is something that is like maybe you can relate to this, maybe people that are listening can relate to this, is balancing balancing that like intention with authenticity. I've had the experience of trying to show up on LinkedIn and communicate like in a in a very like inauthentic way because I thought that was the right thing to do, and this is how I go and build my audience, and it doesn't work. It burns you out. It becomes really hard to do that because you're kind of having to like make those things up, and it isn't authentic, so it kind of like creates friction in like how that's executed. So that same mentor actually uh that I mentioned earlier that sort of gave me that clarity about the prairies and Winnipeg, it was that same discussion. I'm in like marketing and branding, and I need to like talk about these things about like brand strategy, and you know, here's what a good brand is, here's what a bad brand is. I was using all these like LinkedIn templates because that was all the rage, and like that was like the thing to do, but it was exhausting, it wasn't like rewarding, it wasn't really working. And this gentleman, his name is Mark, and he was just like, Do you do any of that like in the day-to-day work? You know, you've sat here and talked to me for like two hours about all these things. Like, why don't you just talk about that on LinkedIn? And when I did that, it became I just made that shift. I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna like just be me and talk about the things I'm actually working through. Less of this like rigid, templated sort of like, you know, check marks and red X's structure and just more what am I actually working through? And it made a huge difference. It was easier for me, it was m more rewarding for me to kind of like create this, and from like a you know, the perspective of like how does my LinkedIn perform and how do people engage with that, it it like it shot through the roof. It was like night and day, and it never had so many messages and never had so many people come up to me and say, like, yeah, that was like a really great post, and that like resonated with me. So I I think that is the the thing when it comes to personal brand, or at least a lesson for what it's worth that that I've learned is that you gotta think about those things about what people think about you and how you want to show up and what you believe and how you express that, but I think you've also gotta try to do that in a very authentic way.

SPEAKER_00 54:35

Yeah. No, it's great advice there, and yeah, definitely attention, I think, for lots of people, and you're trying to show up, and the tension between what you think you should be showing up as and how your work life, so to speak, versus kind of your you know, authentic what are your values and how do you actually operate? It's it's definitely not an easy thing for a lot of people to navigate. Wanted to talk a little bit about too. You touched on it earlier just a couple of times, just everything changing in in the world so quickly and AI being one of those those pieces too. And can you talk about, you know, I guess the impacts of AI on marketing in general? I think just maybe starting with branding. I know a lot of the the focus is on you know, maybe the more tactical side of marketing, and maybe that's where things are shifting even more quickly in terms of how are all of the the tactics executed on the marketing side, but just how are you seeing things shifting on branding first and then also uh you know flowing through to the other elements of marketing after that?

SPEAKER_01 55:37

Yeah, this is obviously front and center for us now, as I'm sure it is for everybody. Like AI, it's the elephant in the room. We're all we're all thinking about it. It's changing everything. I actually posted on an experience that I had on LinkedIn uh yesterday or the day before about how it's changing for me. Like I had a project that I, you know, I'm responsible for delivering, and we we kind of like uh signed off on the project on the client side seven months ago, and I'm at the part now where I'm making this final deliverable, and the way that I'm going about the work, the way I'm looking at the deliverable, what I can do and how I can deliver this work has like fundamentally changed because of some of these tools now that I'm using in my day-to-day to basically kind of build the work. So, I mean, my perspective is that AI is changing kind of like everything from a brand and marketing perspective. Like, you know, what I see is unfortunately it's just not changing the way that people think. So I feel that you have this enormous opportunity to be able to move closer to your audience in ways that you couldn't two or three years ago, or to learn about them, or to build strategy and actually kind of you know do more meaningful work. But unfortunately, I think that our industry is going to look at this from the perspective of like we are just gonna be able to produce things easier and faster, but not necessarily better. Just AI all of that blog content and AI all of that website content, and maybe we're going to be able to build this brand now faster, cheaper. Uh, maybe we're gonna be able to now start thinking about messaging and content and strategy without necessarily doing some of that research or talking to actual customers and talking to people and slowing down in that sense. And I feel yeah, I feel like that is the the risk, and I think I've already started to see some of that, like this explosion of content, more sameness, and that is going to make it a lot more difficult to I think stand out and sort of differentiate. So to me, actually meaningful brand work becomes more important. It's gonna be a little bit more, I think, difficult just because of the environment. But I think when everyone has access to all of these tools in the way that we do now, the advantage is going to be how you think and not necessarily what you what you produce. So at least for us, we're thinking about it not from really like a production or a volume perspective, but we're thinking about like how can we use these tools to move closer to the customer? And how can we understand you know, in a more like meaningful way that that's sort of what's important for us.

SPEAKER_00 58:48

Because if you extrapolate out, you know, it becomes easier and easier. There's gonna be more and more content that all sounds the same. Like we're already at this point where attention is at a premium and you know it's so easy to tune things out. Like that almost seems like two years from now that's gonna be you know much worse than it is today in terms of trying to sift through the signal from the noise is gonna be even more challenging. So I love what you're what you're saying too, around you know, the need to move closer to the customer as well, too. And how do you go about doing that? How can you better understand your customer or use these tools that we have now to make the experience better for the customer versus just kind of pumping out more noise, if you will?

SPEAKER_01 59:31

Yeah, I mean simply uh just just don't do that. Um I don't know. It's like you know, one example that I talk about like often is just like there's so much data now. We all have so much data, and that data is so much easier to kind of like to capture, and you know, even like some of these things are a lot easier. Like going and doing a quantitative survey is like very easy. The tools are are a lot cheaper, and it's a lot easier. You can almost like a click of a button, you can go and get some more data like on an audience. But you know, someone that we we sort of reference a lot in our work is Marcus Collins, who works as a strategic consultant and done like a lot of really great work. He's got basically a kind of saying that he says like data doesn't necessarily mean intimacy. So, you know, all of this data doesn't really mean anything if you can't synthesize that and interpret it and leverage it like in the right way. And I I think if it's like same same sort of thing for basically you know the the tools, like you can have all these really great tools. Um and even that I I don't feel is like a huge shift. It's like you can have MailChimp, but that doesn't mean you're going to do a really like you're not gonna be best in class at email marketing. Like you still need to have strategy sort of around that, and that is important. And for us, it's that like North Star, which is that the the opportunity right now is that I feel all that busyness, all these new tools, all of this, all of these changes are going to make it easier for you to move further away, learning more about your audience, and put maybe more like friction, and you just go to market now based on like assumptions because we can do it a lot more more quickly, and that's the risk. I think the risk is like human connection still matters, and you you need to to build a strong value proposition like we talked about earlier, you need to truly understand what's valuable to people. So if we lose sight of that, you know, I I think that's the risk in all of this.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:48

Yeah, no, great points. And I think if we look at what doesn't change even with the changing environment, it's exactly that. Like looking at you know the essentials around that true north and that you know, North Star, if you will, around what actually matters and what are you focusing on and how do you meet the client needs best? Closing things off here with our conversation, Lee. I just wanted to ask you, what's next for Brandish? Like as you look ahead, where are you most focused on, or what what are you most excited about about the next few years ahead for Brandish?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:22

We are we're just excited to continue to do the things that we've been doing and to continue to do really great and exciting and meaningful work for the clients that trust us with their project and their briefs. We're excited to keep growing and keep learning as a team. And yeah, I I look at there's maybe some folks in our industry that look at some of these exciting things that are happening with the changes as maybe a bit of a threat, but uh I tend to think a little bit more optimistic and you know, using these these tools are like it's hard now actually, candidly, to think about what's the five-year plan. You know, I mentioned for us it's about sustainability, so we just want to keep kind of doing the same things that we've been doing. But yeah, I'm I'm excited about where our industry is going. I'm excited about these new tools, I'm excited about some of the the shifts and to see you know what Brandish does in this new environment and how all of that shapes you know the work that we do and and how we show up for our clients.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:39

Awesome. Well, I'm excited to watch from the outside as well and see where the future takes Brandish as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:46

Appreciate you, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:47

Thanks for being on the Building Manitoba Podcast, Lee. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:51

Thank you so much. This was really great.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:53

Thanks for listening to the Building Manitoba podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show and send it to someone you think would get value from it. And if there's a leader you think I should talk to next, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'll see you in the next episode.