Brainstorm Your Business for Brilliant Branding

Welcome to Your Business, Accelerated! Digitally remastered with AI, Your Business, Accelerated! is the go-to podcast for entrepreneurs ready to scale smart. Hosted by Attorney Shaune B. Arnold, it delivers strategic business insights, legal frameworks, and real-world solutions to help you operate with clarity and confidence. Get actionable guidance to protect, grow, and optimize your business…one smart move at a time.

Before you brand, you must build. In this week’s episode, Attorney Shaune breaks down how to conceptualize your business from the inside out. Discover how to infuse your values into operations, fix dysfunction fast, and align your team for scalable success. Because culture isn’t a logo—it’s your foundation. 

Transcript

Hello everyone! and welcome. Welcome to your business Accelerated! I am your host attorney Shaune B Arnold, and I am, …as always …reminding you to maximize your competence to get the confidence you need to succeed. Well, when we last got together, we talked about some general business issues. That is something we do every week on your business accelerated.

I want to welcome you and thank you so much for joining me this week and every week because this is all about you and your business. And it's just so cool.

I want to assure you that you are in the right place this evening if you find yourself frustrated. You’re working really, really hard and things are either on an even keel and you are having difficulty getting past that, or you're one of the millions of people that have been chewed up and spit out in this economy and you're finding yourself sort of sitting by the side of life’s road.

If any of these things are happening to you, I want to assure you that you are indeed in the right place. This is the place where you are going to get the confidence to take that step to build that amazing business of yours; that thing you've been dying to do.

You are in the right place because we are going to get you moving on your dream. I also want to invite you to join me on my other podcast, Legal Biz Café. That is where you get more of the tips, triggers and red flags that you need to know about as an entrepreneur. It will help you with your mindset.

I'm going to talk more about that today as well. So, again, I invite you to follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook. So those are all the ways that you can find me. And in the coming weeks. I'm going to have some very exciting news to share with you and it's going to allow us to work more closely and more fully together on your business. I'm really excited about that. I hope you're excited about it too. So stay tuned for further developments in that regard.

Tonight, we are talking about conceptualizing your business so you can accelerate your business. What do I mean by conceptualizing your business? Well, this is a step that comes way before branding. Branding is a really sexy topic right now. A lot of people are spending a lot of time thinking about their message and their audience, and they definitely should be doing that.

The challenge arises when they start spending a lot of money constructing an image and you know my suggestion to you if you're struggling with the notion of branding is let your message grow organically. Let your message create your branding.

We're dealing with those issues on legal biz Cafe and on your business accelerated. You’ll note, that's part of the way that my message is finding its way to you. It’s how I’ve chosen to serve you the best way that I can when we haven’t met yet.

So, LegalBiz Café and Your Business Accelerated are part of my message, and part of branding. Tonight, I want to give you some tips on constructing your actual message and conceptualizing your business. What I mean by this is actually infusing your passion and your personality into the systems of your business, so that as it grows, you get a Southwest Airlines, which is a company that makes money in bad economies and everybody wants to work for them. 

That is an experience that’s as opposed to, say, and Arthur Andersen, who I worked for right as they imploded; so I know. It was horrible what happened. People lost their livelihoods that had absolutely nothing to do with the scandal. I tell you, that was probably the only business I ever worked for where I just quit, a week before Christmas, without having another job or school to attend or anything like that. The corporate culture there was so toxic that I just couldn’t stand it. It was cliquish and oppressive. It was the kind of corporate environment that you really want to avoid.

So, I get it and I'm going to give you some tips this evening on how to actually keep your business from becoming that kind of enterprise. I believe the first thing you want to do is get eye to eye with your mastermind group or with your board of directors. And if you don't have a mastermind group and you don't have a board of directors, then I encourage you to create one just as soon as you can.

You want to get people in your mastermind group that are strong in areas where you're weak. If you don't know about marketing, you want somebody who's strong in marketing. If you don't know about law, you want somebody who's strong in law. If you don't know about taxes, you want a CPA on your mastermind or on your board of directors.

Last week, I was talking to a client of mine. We'll call her Shelly. Shelly wants to create a particular male-oriented business that caters to women. We discussed whether women would feel comfortable going to her business as a woman-focused business. She is right in the beginning stages where she has a potential investor that thinks her idea is really hot and she was trying to figure out how to get herself going.

In addition we are creating a revenue model for her. This requires her to dig really deep on structuring her business and strategizing her entry into, and penetration of, the marketplace. She is required to fully understand her business model, industry and market.

As we brainstormed on her business, Shelly began to realize that there was a huge teaching component that she wants to deliver to women and we identified the fact that this teaching component would be easily housed in a nonprofit. If her business were a 501(c)3, Shelly could also get the community where she lives to donate property to the 501(c)3. That way she doesn't have to worry so much about either leasing or buying a going concern.

This nonprofit component is an option for Shelly that she would not have come across had we not been masterminding her business. So, it is extremely important for you to pull your mastermind group together and visit the value aspects of your company.

Now, the value aspects of your company are certain pillars that are going to make your business successful. These include things like accounting, accounts receivable, marketing, and inventory control. You may be a manufacturing business. So there's a whole product development, pricing and distribution chain that can be handled in the company.

I encourage you to bring all of your mastermind group together. Layout on a large post-it note on the conference room table all of the various moving parts of your business. Include everything that makes your business what it is. Then have everybody who's sitting around that table to privately rank all of those moving parts in terms of their importance to them. When everybody is through ranking them, you want you to make known to everybody around the table what those rankings are.

You’re probably going to find that everybody values, say, payroll. And there are going to be some other aspects of your business that uniformly get low value scores. People don't think it's very important. I can almost guarantee you that those are the areas where you're going to find your biggest opportunities to fix and grow your business, to align your business with your vision and your mission, and to make sure that everybody is on the same page.

Elevate the importance of those individual moving parts so that all of the aspects of your business are getting the proper attention from your board of directors or from your mastermind group. You really want to make sure that this is an all-hands effort.

I think you're going to be really surprised at what this reveals to you about your business. You'll be surprised at the opportunities for growth that it lays out in front of you in a very, very clear fashion.

So, what if your business is a going concern? If you have people problems, like employees that do a lot of grousing or that are coming late. Just seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. On every occasion. You know, I had a client like this. She had a manager named Bob. He was really good at certain aspects of the business, like following up on inventory control and a lot of the nuts and bolts that kept her business afloat. Bob kept everyone focused on the bottom line.

Now, the challenge was, this manager just hated people and he had to deal with the customers. The Manager was getting a lot of complaints about him, and she was losing business. She was losing customers. And she was about to fire him.

Well, instead was put him through a battery of personality tests where we were able to determine. That he is not a people person, that he was a very, very valuable asset to her business, but that he simply didn't belong at the front of the House handling customers because he just was not suited to handle customer care. So, she shifted his position to a different area of the business, rather than fire him.

She found her business then went through the roof because she was able to hire a people person who really enjoyed when people walked through the door and those little bells tinkled this. This new manager got a smile on the owner’s face. When you are conceptualizing your business, or if you've already started your business and you find that there's some dysfunction in your business, I implore you to fix that dysfunction as quickly as you can, because if you don't, what happens is it becomes a cancer in your business. That cancer grows and grows and grows, and good people will not stay. Only the people who can survive eating the cancerous energy in the enterprise are the only people that are going to be left. Then you're going to wind up with an Arthur Anderson.

Honestly, they had 5,000 offices worldwide. I thought they were too big to fail. I was amazed when that company did implode. How many people were on the street talking to reporters about how unfair it was that they should be losing their job? But these were the same people who created such an oppressive atmosphere that I just quit my job. I was really astounded by that.

So, I want to bring that up and and just lay it on the table for you to consider this evening to understand that your corporate culture, ultimately, is everything in your business and it's very much a part of your branding. It affects your internal workings and it affects your customer care.

Ladies and gentlemen, I really want to thank you for joining me on this week's episode of Your Business Accelerated. I am your host, attorney, Shaune B Arnold. I invite you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. My moniker in all of those places is Shaune dot Arnold. In the meantime, and in between time, I’m reminding you ...as always ...to MAXIMIZE your COMPETENCE to get the CONFIDENCE YOU NEED to succeed.

I’ll see you right back here next week, on Your Business Accelerated! …Bye-bye, friends!