Scaling With People
Tired of spinning your startup wheels but never gaining traction? Buckle up, founders and CEOs, because this podcast is your rocket fuel to profitability! Every week, we ignite explosive conversations with bold-faced founders, brainy experts, and even a few out-of-this-world vendors. Get ready to crack the code on growth, master employee engagement, and blast through your scaling goals. We’re talking real-world strategies, actionable tips, and perspectives that’ll make your business do a cosmic dance. So, strap in and prepare for lift-off!
Scaling With People
Uncovering Your Company's Unique Identity for Exponential Growth
What makes your company truly different from every competitor in your market? Not just surface-level distinctions, but the fundamental DNA that shapes how you operate, what you value, and why customers are magnetically drawn to your brand.
Melissa Richards-Person, founder of Third Arm Consulting and former marketing executive for Starbucks, KFC, and Papa John's, reveals the transformative power of uncovering and activating your brand's unique DNA. After decades helping major brands and startups achieve exponential growth, Melissa shares her proven methodology for mining the authentic characteristics that can fuel your company's expansion while maintaining its soul.
This conversation takes us beyond tired corporate buzzwords and generic attributes. Melissa demonstrates how techniques like "forced association" and bringing together "outsider insiders" can reveal profound insights about what truly makes a company special. She challenges leaders to dig deeper than descriptors like "friendly" or "innovative" to discover the genuine emotional connections that drive customer loyalty and team alignment.
The discussion explores practical applications of brand DNA through the five Ps of marketing—product, place, price, promotion, and people—showing how companies can leverage their unique attributes to respond authentically to market challenges. Particularly fascinating is Melissa's perspective on "employer branding" as a misnomer, arguing that your brand is simply expressed to and through your employees rather than being a separate entity.
Whether you're a founder struggling to articulate what makes your company special, a marketer seeking authentic differentiation, or a people operations leader trying to attract aligned talent, this episode provides a roadmap for turning your distinctive identity into measurable action and sustainable growth. By the end, you'll understand why beginning with your DNA is the surest path to scaling without losing what makes you special in the first place.
Welcome everyone to today's Scaling with People podcast. I'm Gwenda Dirk-Curry, your host and founder and CEO, to Guide to HR. So do you know what your company's DNA is? This is the unique makeup that fuels your growth, shapes your strategy and drives your success. So today's guest will help us uncover what that DNA is and turn it into real, measurable action. I'm super excited to have Melissa Richards-Person with us today. Melissa, welcome and tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Thanks, quinavera, I'm so excited to be here today.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, my name is Melissa Richards-Person and, after 20 years in corporate marketing for organizations like Starbucks and Olive Garden and KFC and Papa John's and Make me hungry, yeah, it's a job hazard, unfortunately and a number of startup companies, I founded my own strategic consultancy called Third Arm Consulting, and what we do is we create exponential growth for companies by mining and activating and unlocking that unique DNA that is inherent and differentiating to your brand and then create from that a roadmap for growth.
Speaker 2:It could be products and services, it could be service and customer experience, it could be content, it could be strategies and programs, but whatever it is, it is inspired by what makes you unique, and we do strategic planning sessions, we do business planning. I will jump in as a strategic advisor or a fractional chief marketing officer, or sometimes I say, if you have a marketing person, I'll help them clone themselves and hit another strategic priority. But it's all really rooted in what makes you unique and differentiated and it's amazing, when you unlock that, how much growth you can achieve because you're tighter with your core customer, you are continuing to press your advantage in the marketplace and you're doing things that feel very comfortable and very natural for you and natural to your consumers and to your customers. But yet you're finding new ways to grow.
Speaker 1:So what if you don't know what is unique about you and or like have?
Speaker 2:you ever had a client who?
Speaker 1:literally, is stuck trying to figure this out, or may even be like there's nothing unique about us. How do we figure out what we should add to make ourselves unique? Have you ever been in that kind of situation? Because I feel like that's probably a general situation that some of us have been in in the past or currently.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I do sessions that I call brand DNA mining with organizations and one of the things that I find is typically people do know what makes them different. They've just never really thought inwardly enough or focused on it enough to unlock it and to uncover it. And the way that I do that is and it depends on the organization but always bringing different perspectives around the table. So sometimes it's a founder, and I was working with a couple, a married couple that had a nascent spirits brand that they were getting ready to found, and I said bring a group of what I call outsider insiders. They're people who know you or people who you know from the industry but maybe aren't immediately immersed in your brand and what you're doing. And I use a couple of different techniques, but one of the ones that seems to work really well is then you sit those people down and you tell your story, tell the problem you are solving, put them in the middle of where you were when you came up with the idea, talk about the struggles, talk about the thrills, talk about the feedback that you received and why you're there. And I asked the people around the table to sit and just start jotting notes. After that's over. We go around the room and we have people read back what we heard and, in the case of this particular client, one of the things they realized was that the reason they were doing this particular brand and the reason they had the approach that they were taking is because of how they grew up, and they told a story on how they grew up in the environment and who they met while going to work with their dad and how this product was really born out of their childhood. And we realized that there were beautiful connections between their married name and the category that they were in and the way that they grew up and what they were exposed to. That made them passionate about this business in this category. And so, just out of a couple of hours session, we completely renamed the brand. Wow. We prioritized what their flagship product was going to be and in what order they were going to create new products and why they changed the name of the company. Like I said, they changed the name of the brand and they had an idea that they wanted to call it and we rooted that idea and, instead of making it the brand name, we rooted it in their purpose and my recommendation was create a foundation, that a portion of the proceeds from every sale is going to go into this foundation. You're going to call this foundation by that name because it roots in your purpose. That way, if you ever sell the brand or you reach a distribution partnership, you've already baked this purpose and this reason why into the proposition.
Speaker 2:So, just out of that technique of telling the founder stories, sometimes we can also have a lot of fun with just going around the room and having people talk about their impressions of what makes them different. And I have a stack of photographs and I do this thing that I call forced association. And it's photographs like there's a cookie with a bite out of it, there's a roller coaster where they're at the top of the roller coaster and everybody's got their arms up and you can just tell they're ready to go. Woo, everybody's got their arms up and you can just tell they're ready to go. And I ask people to pick an image that represents what they think or feel about the brand or what makes them different. And when you force someone to make an association, you actually get much different answers, much deeper, much more emotional and much more novel answers. I jokingly tell people words like friendly. I cannot stand friendly in a brand personality. Why? Because everybody's friendly, most people are nice, most people are kind. I want to know what specifically it is that's making you feel a certain way, or that customers are just absolutely magnetically drawn to something. Drawn to something. So when you force people to draw an association that they weren't necessarily planning on making or wouldn't ordinarily make, you get really deep and rich insights. And then we list everything up on the wall and we start to think about okay, what really is that element that we believe, that we think, that we feel how we act? That makes us truly different.
Speaker 2:And I joke that if I don't make somebody want to throw things at me, then I'm not asking enough questions, because once we get a list up on the wall, I'll say okay, what about? That is uniquely? You Are we sure that this competitor can't do it? Are we sure that competitor can't do it? And at some point people want to throw things at me. They're like, yes, yes, that really is what we do. And I'll say are you sure? And push just a little harder. And that's part of the reason that it's good to have an outside perspective working you through this, because you're sometimes so close to it that you think, well, of course, this is us. But then when you get forced to look at it on a piece of paper, on a whiteboard or on a screen, you think, well, okay, but it's this way that I do it.
Speaker 2:And so you get to these things that ultimately, that DNA is about what you think, what you feel and how you behave. And then we look at things like what are the hallmarks of that? How does that show up? And that's the other way that we tie it back is somebody will say, oh, my product is really unique because it's got a really interesting honeycomb shape. And I'll say, okay, what was that honeycomb shape rooted in? And does it tie back to something that's part of your DNA? And can we use that honeycomb shape to start creating? You know, do we call it the honeycombs locked service plan? And it's got the sides of a honeycomb. You know, you start to immediately springboard into the things that take those elements that make you unique and start to make them real for a customer and do things that vault you ahead of your competition or put you further ahead of your competition or maybe get you a better price premium or create a new source of revenue.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's so fun and just great examples. What about have you ever come into a customer where it's obvious they already know it but they don't know how to deal? Like take that DNA, understanding that what is special about them and how they can actually go out and use that as their growth like trajectory?
Speaker 2:That's where brainstorming comes in. You know, you start to think about this element of DNA and you start to talk about, well, how does that show up now to do something adjacent or try to do something that they see a trend out there and they say, well, how can I make myself fit that trend? And it feels either forced or it doesn't work, or it flops. So the first thing is to say, okay, if this is something that is part of my DNA, I always give somebody a little bit, something extra. I just can't help it. I love giving people more than they expect. Well, what's a way that that shows up right now in your business? How does it show up in a product of yours? How does it show up in the way that you treat a customer? How does it show up in something that you do in social media for content or problems that you solve? And then we think, okay, well, what if you took that and you built a new product for it? What would that look like? Or if there's something that you do where you have a really interesting color of your chairs you sell chairs and you have a really interesting color, well then, is there something going on right now with Pinterest trends, where you can center that share in a Pinterest trend and start showing your customers different ways to use or style that share. That you've never thought about. So it's all about taking that thing and looking at how it shows up now and saying is this something that I could push even further on to make it a little bit more distinctive? It also can be creative and competitive analysis and competitive research is something that I think not enough companies do on a consistent basis. So once you've said this is something that's unique or this is a way that my DNA shows up, step back and look at your competitors and audit everything that your competitors are doing. Right now, I like to use the five Ps of marketing to do my audit, because it helps me sort of root in how my customer might see my competitor.
Speaker 2:So the five Ps of marketing, if you're not familiar with them, are product, what you make, what you sell, what you trade value on place where are you showing website, are you selling in a live situation or place can also be where do people encounter you and do you create a unique place for that encounter to happen? There's price, and price can be not just a deal or something, but it's how you articulate your value. Promotion, which, again, people confuse price and promotion. But promotion is any means by which you're going to make that offer compelling. You're going to make people aware of it. You're going to make that offer compelling, you're going to make people aware of it, you're going to make it interesting. So promotion could be buy one, get one free. But promotion could also be I'm going to partner with this business down the street and together we're going to give a special deal to one another's customers, or we're going to combine to create something that's unique for a limited time, and then people and people can be the people who sell your product. They can be you as the founder, you as the employees. People can be those who are advocating for your product. So influencers or people who are just passionate customers. So product place, price, promotion and people.
Speaker 2:If you look at your competitors from those lenses and start thinking about how are they positioning themselves? What are they doing, then you can step back. You put that all out on a chart and you say, okay, what of my DNA? What of the things that are really good indicators of how my DNA is showing up? Where could I learn from my competitors and either use my strength to offset a weakness or if we're both facing some unique business challenge. Right now, I think about eggs and egg prices, and I think about how different breakfast places right now are trying to figure out what to do with eggs. Everybody if you're a breakfast restaurant, everybody's facing the problem with egg charges. So how do I, as another broken egg cafe, for instance, look at what Waffle House is doing with a quote egg surcharge and what do I potentially do differently that might be based on my DNA, maybe my strength is that I've got some vegan customers who are incredibly passionate about my tofu scramble, and my tofu scramble is an alternative to scrambled eggs and to egg scrambles.
Speaker 2:So maybe I lean in with the vegan influencers and we together talk about how great tofu scrambles are and how affordable they are as an alternative for egg scrambles for instance so it's a good example of something that okay if everyone in my category is facing it, but I know who I am uniquely and how things show up, and I know about the people that surround my brand, or I know about the place or the ways that I market my brand. I can be nimble but still feel very, very true to me, and that's where I think you can meet a lot of trends and you can meet a lot of moments head on. Yeah that's so true.
Speaker 1:And so my head was spinning with that, all the different Ps, but of course I'm going to lean into the people one because I'm in people operations and also branding right, like employer branding, employer branding to me is two different things. It's the brand of the company and what you're selling and growing. It's also the employer like from the employee side. How do I sell this? Company to get more people to apply, get the highest best talent possible through the door, et cetera. Company to get more people to apply, get the highest best talent possible through the door, et cetera. I love your take on employer brand because I think you've got a fun little twist that is going to blow people's minds.
Speaker 2:Oh, you are speaking my language. I always say to people the phrase employer brand is a misnomer. It's just not the right way to think about it. Brand is every interaction that someone can have with your business, with your entity. It is the sum total of all of those interactions. So it's your product, it's your partnerships, it's your services and it's your people, and so it's simply the expression of your brand to and through your employees. Your brand is your brand, is your brand? Your employer brand isn't your employer. It's not a different thing.
Speaker 1:Not different.
Speaker 2:Nope, an expression of your brand to and through your employees. Are you serving your employees? I think it was Wynn Resorts and Steve Wynn used to have a terrific phrase he used, which was our customer's experience can be no better than our employee's experience, because he was in a service business. He's not serving his employees, they're going to serve the customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, happy, thrilled, exuding, knowing what it means to live that Wynn Resorts brand, then they're not going to deliver it to a customer in a way that they feel, hey, when I go to a Wynn Resorts property, I feel different. When I make a reservation at a Wynn Resorts property, I feel different. It's a consistency all the way through it. And you know, when I was at Papa John's, the QSR industry is notorious for turnover and we always have such a hard time competing for employees, just as an industry, and there's notoriously lots of turnover, notoriously lots of turnover.
Speaker 2:And the franchisees used to say make the brand cool, make the brand cool. And I'd say, okay, what we need to be showing is we are better ingredients, better pizza, how are we better for them? How are we better every day? And we brainstormed about things that we could do on a marketing side. We created a really cool apparel line so that, instead of uniforms, they could wear some really cool t-shirts that maybe were fun and different. But also the franchisees came up with some things that might truly be better in the way that we paid people or the way that we offered benefits like college tuition and the ability to have college tuition as you're working full time. So you know, it's about that expression of how your brand is serving your employees and how you're teaching your employees to live the DNA of that brand as well, every day.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, I was just going to say, and that all ties back into who you are. What is that core foundation, your DNA? And that does come from the founder, the starter, the people who are building this business from scratch, and what do they want that to look like and be? So, so many good things you've brought to the table as a wrap up. Is there any? I mean gosh, you brought so many I don't even know if I want to ask this question Any last tidbits or thoughts that you want to share with the audience as we wrap up today?
Speaker 2:The most important thing. I had a CEO that I worked with for a long time who used to say begin with the end in mind. And while you're starting your business, it can feel as if it will always just be you or you will always have your hand in everything. But if you're trying to scale, and in particular, if you're trying to scale through and with people, you've got to be able to know where you're going to start putting the building blocks in place that are going to take you there, and I like to say your brand DNA is a way to ensure that you scale without losing the soul of your business and the soul of what connected you to do what you did in the first place. And you're preparing to scale in a way that's going to feel true to you and that's going to be able to have people pick up and carry that torch for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes so much sense. Well, Melissa, it was so great having you on. I learned a bunch. I hope the audience did as well. Even the five Ps. That was great. I don't know that. I've heard it from that perspective. On the marketing front, Lots of great takeaways. But really, as you're thinking about building your business and growing it, what is your DNA and how can you sit on that as you grow and that be your fuel and really probably also your guiding light in some of your darker times too, like you're stuck somewhere.
Speaker 1:Let's go back to your DNA and figure out how do you, how can you get unstuck? From that perspective, I think that could be a good tool as well. Well, thanks everyone and appreciate it. Melissa, I hope those listening have a wonderful rest of your day and we'll see you on the next podcast. Have a great one, everyone. Bye.
