Brand Power: Maximizing Your Brand's Potential for Funding Success with Fred Cary Ep. 605

howdy welcome back to the unknown secrets of internet marketing my name is matt bertram i'm your host today uh today i actually have a special guest um that we're going to bring on but first i wanted to tell you a little bit about uh how google is deleting reviews um so right now you're on a little bit of a treadmill and uh google is deleting reviews for a number of reasons i was going to read you a review and google actually deleted it and i think the reason google deleted it is because the language in the review wasn't specific to a service we were offering and it was talking about overall branding um restructuring that we did combined with their team but it wasn't very clear uh i'm going to be digging into this further because i was going to read that review uh as we were jumping on here today um and so uh you know be looking out for that now uh on our last podcast if you listen to it uh we had a fractional vp of sales on talking about adding a uh sales team and if you haven't heard that i would go back and let's do it and today to kind of continue that theme forward i have fred carey with ideapros.com uh who's actually was just telling me in the pre interview that he's gotten a couple companies funded out in silicon valley recently and we're going to be talking about um the power of getting your brand ready to fund maybe your company within any market conditions so there's a lot that kind of goes into fundraising and i thought it would be an interesting topic as it combined with uh branding positioning um well you know digital marketing all that i think this is a topic that we haven't covered a lot and i think it'd be really valuable for a lot of people that are in their business uh and maybe looking to exit or raise some money at any time so fred welcome to

the podcast uh thank you it's really great to be here i'm looking forward to having a nice talk with you awesome well um you know i i thought it was really interesting um some of the stuff that you've done recently maybe you could just introduce yourself and a little bit of your background and then we can start to maybe jump into at a high level the things that you're looking at from a branding standpoint when you evaluate companies yeah um thanks i will um i have been raising money most of my adult life i've raised over two billion dollars with a b uh and uh even in the last year we've we've raised a ton of money for a lot of our companies uh idea pros which is my company has um about 400 companies under us that we helped launch and that we are minority holders in so i'm constantly out there raising capital and because of that i really know how investors think and they don't think like you believe they think and so the uh the key to getting money is being able to understand the investor mindset what they're really looking for how you can hook them in and how you can leave with a check and hopefully you'll learn all that stuff today oh fantastic so okay so a lot of uh the listeners know how to you know do do top of mind branding um you know generate leads uh top line revenue growth um stuff like that right but really there might be another set of metrics that investors and private equity venture capital uh people that are looking to give money are looking for in a brand so like let's try to dive into their their their mindset like when they evaluate a company i'm assuming they go to the website right first they look at the social media i mean you tell me yeah and and evaluating a company takes place after you've gotten their interest right so there there's an element of getting them to

go and evaluate you but there's a critical element before that because if you can't get them interested you can't get them to go to your website you can't get them to look through your whole pitch deck you can't get them to look at financials and that's where everybody's really and rightfully focuses these are the financial numbers this is the growth this is how we're going to get somewhere and that's all important but before that you have to hook them and you have to hook them with a story you have to hook them with that story within the first 15-20 seconds of when you're talking to them and uh i'll give you a couple of examples as perfect okay do you you want me to give examples yeah i want to i want to hear some some some examples i i think a lot of people can take uh you know what what what you're saying and maybe try to apply it to their situation yeah so um i didn't want to hog the show so i was i was pausing to see if you had anything else here here's one good example and this is a company that never pitched anywhere to anyone much less venture capitalists up in silicon valley uh i brought them up a couple of months ago and the name of the company is olive and coop you can see them oliveandcoop.com olive and coop is basically airbnb meets match.com and the combination of elder people want to stay home maybe they're fragile but they still have their facilities they don't want to go to a nursing home or assisted living or live with their with their kids they want to stay in place they want to stay where their memories are and younger people as uh any of you younger folks that are listening know that rents have gotten insane uh higher and higher it's it's really hard to to to get a place near where you're going to school near where you work and uh it's created these two

sets of problems and olive and coop put these two together where we're vetting college students and and people in their 20s against older people that just really need some help around the house like help with laundry or help with the kitchen or help with groceries or just company and and we've combined those two forces together when we left that pitch a very prominent vc and we pitched about 50 vcs a very prominent vc said this was the most amazing pitch i've seen in years now these are people the first time ever pitching they had all their numbers together they had all the details together but they started the conversation like this i want to tell you about the day that i thought my father died that was the first line now is there anybody in the audience knock knock that doesn't want to hear what happened after that so write one sentence and you have people hooked in because the one thing we forget about with investors is they're human and humans love stories and if you can't weave your story through your pitch deck even with all the best numbers and everything you're not going to maintain their attention they're going to be looking on their phone answering emails and listening to you go through the same this is a problem this is the solution this is how we're different this is our management team this is how much money we need and and and so on you're not going to get to those things if you can't tell your story and so her story was really based upon the fact that her dad was laying in the kitchen floor for two days in his home before he was found uh and he uh had to go to the hospital and he was in there a long period of time and when he was in the recovery phase they brought that brought him to to their home and his very first sentences were i wanted to just want to go home i want to

go home to his home right and so that's what got her thinking about olive and coop and so we put the story of olive and coop in this event right through the entire pitch deck and our last slide was not uh hey here's my name thanks for watching and here's here's my contact info the last slide was a picture of her dad out in this big field in montana uh at his ranch with his arms folded looking cool as hell um and that was the last slide and everybody stayed attentive throughout the whole thing because we're able to tell a story that's the key element in being able to have a good pitch you have to find your story what was that moment in time that you decided screw it i'm not going to work nine to five anymore i'm going to start my own thing i know it's crazy my wife's going to hate me or my husband's going to think i'm an idiot but i'm going to do it you got to find that moment in time and weave that through your story so so yeah i i've i've read a number of things around this and and even in in the book that i wrote build your brand mania that's really uh some of the effort that you need to do is you need to bring people up you need to get people to hook and buy into it emotionally it's through like brand storytelling but you need to get them to understand your viewpoint of the world bring them up to that moment and then share with them what uh what how you see the world and and they see it from your eyes right and and that's the key to to getting someone to buy in because if they're coming from a different world perspective they might not know so you got to get get them to your point and then you need to show them that i think that's a very powerful example of how to do that even

when you talk about copywriting i mean 80 of the time is spent on figuring out the hook because no one's going to read the rest of it unless they're interested in reading that and there's a hit with a lot of things and i think uh uh from a pitch standpoint i can absolutely see that as you get them invested in the story and then they're attentive all the way through and then and then there's this emotional connection to it at the end i think i think that's brilliant i think that's um something that everybody should be striving to do yeah and you and you're not going to get that downloading the standard pitch deck form from y combinator or any of the rest of them yeah and god bless them i mean they're amazing my combinator airbnb uber name a company they went through y combinator but they teach you the very technical elements of it and again investors are human beings especially friends and family rounds too that's going to be really really important for them to understand the why behind what you're doing but it's an element that carries forward through all of your marketing efforts not just the pitch part of it the more authentic that you are the more authentic you are as a brand the more people are going to respond to you in a bigger way than just being your customer uh and and that is something that you really need to to lead with all the time you have a unique story regardless of what industry you're in you have a unique story find that story embrace it and make it part of how you push your brand forward can you maybe give a couple more uh maybe even high level examples we don't have to go into as much detail of like when you're looking at well even companies that are approaching you or that companies that you might want to work with or companies you think that maybe you can help fundraise you're probably looking for

that unique kind of hook or that that that that storytelling to to say okay is this solving a need but like how are they doing it and and how powerful is that message and you and i i've had a number of companies come to us that are like all right i've talked to investors they want to give me the money but i need a website like in the next two weeks because my website just doesn't represent my brand yeah in any way and then it's like rush rush rush because they're waiting on the check but you know if you're building that brand and you're looking at fundraising or you know doing an exit or something like that in the future i mean what are the tenants is there is there a checklist in your mind or is there any kind of even high level thing of what you want to look for before you would accept a company or a company's ready quote unquote to to do fundraising or or to exit that there's probably some kind of criteria how would how would you evaluate that yeah and mind you my flagship product it's just a guy or a girl and an idea most of the time they don't have a name or anything but now as we've been getting more and more into this pitch side of things um you really need to look for people who are open to being challenged uh that don't mind having everything that they built ripped apart and reassembled if it needs to be and uh and are evolved enough to be able to get emotional or even better create emotion in the people they talk to um because that's the fundamental fundamental element so um can i do that with just about any type of business yeah there's a story in almost every single type of business the story may be three steps away from exactly why you started but the story is in there and so i look first for um especially on the pitching side

the ability of somebody to stand up and authentically tell what's going on with them why they started this company why they're different why they're going to grow and what they're going to do with the capital but telling it in a way different way than than we're used to is uh our how important are visuals like the deck um the quality of the deck um you know their social media their website um you know if someone's doing fundraising where do these things fall on a priority level what's like the absolute critical to have and then like what are the tertiary things that help support that yeah you need a really clean deck with a few bullet points that are easy to absorb you don't want to be reading what you're showing people and i've seen so many decks where you can't even hardly see the font is so small uh you just need a bullet point uh you know i i had a slide uh in when i was doing and i do this a couple times a month i have a what's called pitch craft it's a it's a workshop and by the way if you go pitch.ideapros.com you could sign up for the next one we have a couple of them a month and it's completely free but i've had slides where i'd go up and um the slide would say look at this slide and that's all it would say and and my point was this is how much attention you need to have on your slide uh get people interested have them look at the slide and then give them the details use this use the slide as your talking point um so why am i saying look at this slide i'm saying look at this slide because we write too much when we do our pitch decks way too much there's too much information and people are going to be reading instead of looking at you you're not going to be able to make eye contact you're not going to get

your message across look at the slide for one second and then look at me and and so that's the way that that i have all of my companies do things and and minimalistic you know we want to have all these designs and moving graphics and those things are distractions you want people to focus on you the story you're telling and use these things only as highlights if you have an app maybe you show one or two screens of your app so they can visualize what it's about you know hey olive and coop this is our journey that we went this is where grandma signed up for it this is this is where we find younger people to work together with us and how we make the marriage of these folks you know just as a demonstration but never read 12 slides i'm going to read every word on every slide you're going to be boring as hell and nobody's going to give you a penny so okay i get so i think decks decks are really important the the cleanness of the deck um you know use it using as a tool okay well let's say okay you've decided your business and you're like hey i need i need business i need some money to maybe grow right so maybe i'm not a startup and i'm not um you know trying to go into silicon valley maybe i just want some additional capital to to grow right you could always go get a loan you could get a line of credit you could do that sort of thing but maybe you want some like strategic help or some investors or something like that um you know we were talking in the pre-interview too about acquisition entrepreneurship so you know there's a lot of opportunities of businesses that maybe utilize the old way to generate leads or referrals or something like that and they need to update their business they need to optimize uh their growth and there might be other issues with the business to

grow not just just the marketing component but like what are the things from the marketing standpoint that need to have the boxes checked if you're going to start approaching investors for money i mean certainly the pnl is there but what what else well yeah i think the most important thing is to have a credible powerful distinguishable brand you know and and i can't tell you and god it's probably even worse for you uh but i i can't tell you the number of times that people say well it's just a name and logo uh you know we we can do that uh we can have ai create something um the essence of your brand is going to be the foundation of every single thing that you do and it's going to be how people look at you and the more powerful and consistent your brand is the bigger exit you're going to have and the more investors you're going to have likely to want to give you money because they see the value that you've built in that thing nike and the swoosh right he spent 85 for that swoosh and hated it in fact he hated the name nike it used to be called blue ribbon sports and it took a year for the marketing team to convince him to change it to nike because he thought blue ribbon sports was a great name because it's very descriptive and and so you want to have brands that stand out because once you stand out you the imagination runs apple if i tell you tomorrow apple's releasing an electric toothbrush for the first time in history you're going to know everything about what that toothbrush does because of the essence and power of that brand and so as an investor i want to see a brand that has the ability not just to do well with the products or services that they have now but can do well with additional products because audiences are more loyal to brands that focus on their brand essence and consistency

and power because now as an investor i can look at it wow look at these people the lifetime customer value of these people is off the charts and i know that now if we invest in this company we introduce 10 new products we have a built-in audience that's going to buy all of them because they love this brand so much that's how important it is because you can let investors see the future based on how you're performing today so so what if you're a 10 million or a 20 million dollar company and you're you're not at the level of nike yet and you're you're looking to do some brand building right um when you're when you're looking at it through investor eyes uh and you're seeing that potential value and and where that brand could go and and you know what the opportunity is right to have that that big exit what are probably the things going through your head on the criteria to to say this is a good brand right like how are you what what like is there there's probably some kind of algorithmic thing you have in your mind that you don't even know you're doing that you're identifying does it do this does it do this do this from a checklist standpoint if if you were to just boil it down to some actionable steps yeah i think i think the brands that end up performing the best are the brands that are um disruptive that uh cause you to think and apple again is a is a great example you know what the hell is that you know can you imagine if if when they were going to name it they sat in front of a thousand people and this little skinny guy in a black t-shirt goes on stage and says hey i have this new company i want to compete against ibm and microsoft and digital equipment and 10 other industrial names and i want to call it apple there'd be nobody in that audience who'd raise

their hand and said yeah that's a great name but those are the most powerful names because they evoke right you need to have evocative names evocative positioning set yourself out from the rest because now people are buying a relationship from you rather than buying your commodity so it doesn't matter you could have you could put an apple product and and an android product side by side an android product may cost less but may have a bigger hard drive may have a better resolution on the phone and you're going to pay almost twice as much for the apple device because you're not buying the brand you're buying the essence of the brand right so you're not buying the stuff so that's what what i really look for and that's what investors look for will people give a value to the relationship right a value to the relationship rather than a value to the commodity and if you can get it you can get in anywhere at any size company if people are buying into the relationship if you're making them feel something then that's from an investment standpoint that's a really really good thing okay so so if you're starting a company it's a provocative name that's like you know blank canvas blue ocean strategy you kind of build that equity in that brand um we've done this with with businesses that are launching like a new product line in a saturated market uh rename it something else put all your marketing towards that and then you can easier track the revenue growth and there's not as much um you know cannibalization right so i've seen some of that what if you have an established brand um does it make sense to change change your name uh if that that name built a lot of equity in that or um you know what what if what if yeah you you've been you you're taking over maybe a parent's business or you're buying a business and it already has some kind of equity in that brand maybe

it's a commoditized name where it's a exact match domain or something like that but like do you change it all or like if if the if you just see a company that's established that's fundraising i know the focus is on i guess ideas but if you were just to look at um just remove yourself from the startup mode and go okay i'm looking at established companies their name is their name their logos maybe their logo maybe they need a new logo right like maybe there's like uh you know but but but there's a cost right there's a there's a cost to changing that name of people identifying you for a certain number of years or if you have that name and you're happy with the name and maybe it needs to change maybe it doesn't and and you want to go to investors with that like if you're evaluating a maybe a established name that has a brand equity some kind of brand equity to it how are you evaluating how much brand equity that has uh if if we're not clean clean canvas situation yeah and that's a good point um but you know there are multi-billion dollar multinational companies accenture for example that changed their name uh i don't even remember what the hell their name was before um but they were already in a hundred countries and uh multi-billion dollars in revenue so there are i would say don't change your name if you have really good momentum you have really great customers you're really growing your business and things are amazing um if you have your 10 million dollar company and last year you were doing 10 million dollars and three years ago you were doing 10 million dollars there's something wrong and you need a restart and sometimes as hard as it is that restart happens by completely rebranding yourself but rebranding is not it's not just skin uh you know it's it goes all the way to your guts uh your identity right yeah very very much so it's

just like with us we can sit around talk have a beer cappuccino whatever speak for half an hour we'll get a good understanding of fundamentally what we're kind of about you don't have that with a company right there's no veneer that you can really see what a company is about so if you're going to go through a branding exercise at any stage make sure that that goes with the new core of what you're going to be about so that company that example that 10 million dollars a year and not growing at all they have a commodity they don't have a brand that they can go somewhere so when you're going through the essence of it definitely rebranding is a component of it but looking at what you're doing how am i going to position myself differently how am i going to get my customers to recognize what i have is more than just these widgets uh that that i'm trying to sell to them so in that type of in that type of instance this complete rebirth if you will uh i think is fundamental to getting to the next level no i i really like that and i i think that existing businesses i've seen so many uh new businesses that come to us that haven't put any kind of effort into their about us page or their core value their brand identity um and well that's the most looked at page besides the home page on a website right as who are you who am i doing business with this the first entree to get to notice somebody so i think that it is incredibly important and i like that idea if you're if you're flat you might need some kind of restart right and um you know there's there's a lot that goes into it right you gotta change all your socials you gotta change all your collateral you gotta change your branding like from an investment standpoint quite a big investment and so uh having a strategy to put that together

we even have um a large oil and gas company that uh i think that their product strategy is wrong and their channel strategy is is actually wrong it's not so much their marketing and and branding right like i think you know from a messaging standpoint they're unhappy with their existing um agency and and they're looking to to move to us and it's like i i don't know if you switch if you switch like that top line veneer if it's going to do anything because you gotta you gotta get down to who you really are and how you're solving this problem and you being different than somebody else so um you know some of the other i think this is really good um uh to start thinking about this from a brand standpoint i i want to take the the next maybe a segment here and uh start talking about like maybe mna strategies or creating partnerships or or or kind of starting to go a little bit outside that marketing box so everybody that listens to this you know i think has is more educated than most on on a lot of these digital marketing strategies but there's other things that need to happen to make a business grow i mean many times we have businesses um that get too many leads and don't know what to do with them right or they can't scale there's operational efficiencies that need to improve and like even adding like a sales structure it's more of a business planning operation to figure out um how you're going to handle this capacity and and what you need and so you touch on a lot of these other areas so i'd love to take the conversation maybe some of these other directions and kind of just lightly uh touch on some other things that you think are important well if let's focus for a minute on the opportunity to to grow by acquisition um most mergers fail and they fail because the same stuff that we're talking about right now

fail because you're trying to marry two different cultures that don't fit well together now from a business operational standpoint they may be perfect it may be wow i can go i can go horizontally all the way across here and i have these seven new things i can give my customer base but the the way that the company thinks the way that their employees are uh trained and and how they react to customers may be completely different than what you do as an organization so fundamentally to to eliminate the the possibility of this high failure rate of mergers you really need to start at the essence of the companies what do you guys stand for does this other company stand for something similar can you see the synergies in the way that both companies treat their customers and the way they value things and and if you can then that's one of the first steps and that's why it's so important that with the type of work that you're doing and and and what i'm doing to try to get people to really hone in on their essence that's why it's so important because if you don't know who you are uh then you're going to fall into an opportunity that looks good on the surface but will end up destroying everything because you're going to put two opposite forces together and and and uh the acrimony that takes place afterwards is going to be intolerable and will affect your sales in a negative way so that's one element um that that i would talk about um the the other you know there's a lot of companies that that uh at some point the founder wants to consider an exit and and it may not be uh a company that's necessarily a venture capital backed type entity it could it could be a local regional even national business and maybe it's not so sexy that uh venture capital wants to get involved in it but even then you know it's you know how presidents always look

better in a box with a with a bow around them and uh and a nice personal message it's the same thing with your business i mean your business has to operate really well your employees have to be very motivated you have to have systems in place to kind of keep them happy and keep them with you uh you have to have lots of repeat customers and all those things happen by you having consistency in your brand uh again some people think it's a name and a tagline no the brand is the essence of who you are and so if you build everything out and are very very mindful that everything you do is not opportunistic but is in furtherance of the brand then when it becomes time for you to to have that exit by by an acquisition you're going to be a lot more likely to pull it off um let me i'll just give you one random stupid example maybe um the board of directors of starbucks um may uh be given uh a thought that hey you know we did we did a survey and we found out that if we have kind of big 7 11 99 cent coffees available as one of the many items that we offer we could increase our revenue by 20 percent on the surface that looks like a great deal but it's completely against the essence of what that company is all about you know elevated situation you can come here you can work here you can have your coffee 78 different ways that they would kill you in italy if you try to order or anything like that uh and and that's the essence of who they are and so even if there's revenue growth opportunities if it's not consistent with the essence of your brand those are things to be avoided and so as you build this consistency and brand identity people buy that i mean how much would you pay for the apple logo how much would you pay for nike swoosh

just that one little logo is probably worth a billion dollars a trillion dollars and it's worth that because the essence of their brand is so powerful that that little tagline that little logo is something that carries a great amount of weight same thing when you're being acquired fantastic right i i think that that is just awesome i think there's tremendous value and really thinking about the brand and and doing bound building and i think it's where you you start you start at that fundamental level and then everything builds into that um i know that there's a lot of other things that you have experience with to talk about on you know organizational structure building efficiencies growth we we didn't even really get into m&a and funding got to have you back on uh to talk more about that stuff i know we got a hard stop coming up so i wanted to uh be uh respectful of that um we are launching a uh small business coaching program uh it's funny we have a domain where we we've collected a lot of domains over the last 23 years uh and um i was going to use the i'll ask you this on on air let's see what you think okay so uh essentially that to be truthful yeah yeah no i want i want a real answer because uh it's it's time i can change it but we have an old domain uh it was called instant leads guaranteed okay and it was it was a program we launched literally when adwords was starting and everything was you know cents per click right uh and no one knew what ppc or um anything like that was we've just held on to the domain and i was about to go through the the thought exercise of establishing like a small business coaching program because i got people beating down my door that said hey we're learning how to do this we want to dyi it we need heavy lifting sometimes we'd love to be part of

community we want coaching i i started doing some agency coaching and i thought it was going to be for a month or two now we're like eight nine months going i got other agencies asking me and so you know gonna launch a a small business coaching program and i just i i didn't i guess i wasn't ready to put in the the effort to do a whole whiteboarding session and really figure it out and certainly the commoditized hey small business coaching whatever is a way to go so you don't have to build a lot of brand equity but then i started thinking about it i started going you know instantly it's guaranteed a lot of small business owners that's typically what they're looking for i do think it's like what's next after that but i thought that might be a a provocative name for a small business coaching program uh instant leads guaranteed want to get your thoughts on that because i'm building it on a dev server right now i haven't launched it yet um you know what what are your thoughts on that give me uh some some uh uh sage advice if you could and then we'll get out of here all right well i think that would make a great tagline um so not every small business is gonna hit when you name i don't think it's good name all right but okay all right there we go here's the reason it's completely descriptive right so it does address what people would love to have instant leads guaranteed yeah but it might be delivering a promise that you can't keep number one uh and and number two it's so descriptive that it's hard to protect i would i would really study like what is it that the small business owner really needs and that i can deliver to them that they don't have it's probably more than leads uh and um you know things like when i when i think about it when i had my mba years ago when the

internet was just starting the title of my uh my thesis was born global and it was the argument that any company of any size can launch all over the world with the internet starting starting to grow and i think you need to find that same kind of sweet spot like what can i deliver to small business owners that is really going to change their life uh around uh and uh and i think ai can help you but but ai i think it suffers a little bit on on being fanciful and evocative uh you really got to train it to to do something like that but i i always opine for powerful impactful names that leave people guessing a little bit you you went kind of the opposite on that you're like all right these people need leads i'm going to get them damn leads uh and that could be great you know this this is uh you know matt's company and whatever insert name uh instant leads guaranteed is one of the bullet points you know and you find the top three or four bullet points of what you how you're going to change their small business and maybe they don't even want to hear that it's a small business uh but i i think a more evocative name would be more powerful i can help you offline awesome well thank you i think uh everybody will we're going through this journey together um uh fred i really appreciate all the advice what's the best way for someone to reach out to you and uh get in contact with you yeah um well ideapros.com if you go to ideapros.com the very first thing that you can see there is uh become an insider it's all free we give you tons of tips we have a newsletter every week we have live workshops two or three times a month again everything is 100% free uh you go on there and become a member and and and get that stuff number one uh number two you can

go to pitch.ideapros.com and sign up for for my next pitch craft uh to go in depth on how you can go out there and get capital and uh and number three uh instagram official fred carry c-a-r-y i have about a half a million followers right now let's help me get to a million and uh finally fred at ideapros.com if you have a great idea if you have a business that's struggling or or you're growing too fast you don't know what the hell to do um just write to me and i'll respond whether i can help you or direct you well awesome guys you see how important that fundamental work is i'm trying to shortcut it i got to do the actual workshop really work through it um getting some advice getting some help you can see it you need to do that so go check out idea pros uh check out fred uh thank you for listening if you want to grow your business with the largest most powerful tool on the planet which is the internet uh reach out to us at ewrdigital.com and uh we'll help connect you with the right person or help you ourselves if we can so thanks so much fred for being on and thank you all for listening thanks man really appreciate you bye bye for now