Perhaps the first thing they do is design a logo, pick out their ‘brand colours’ or design a website. They’ll focus on keeping themselves as the value in the business (keeping them busy, productive, in permanent ‘doing-mode’) rather than actually building a brand/business that’s bigger than them.

Branding isn’t about fonts and design, it’s about a high-value personal brand. It’s easy and fun to think about your imagery, what your website looks like, or your logo, but all of that should be based on a brand strategy. What space are you claiming? How are you going to claim it?

The problem is that for many founders, a personal brand like this can feel like something reserved for other people, who are braver, have a financial safety net or are further along in their journey.

A brand is really only a set of associations that helps people position you (whether a personal brand or a business one). Everything you do communicates something and so you have a brand whether you actively create one or not!

So what’s a high value brand?

High-value startups have a clear ambition, a clear (and stretchy) mission in the world, they’re built around a core, disruptive idea that sets out their stall and EVERYTHING they do and every way someone touches their brand, lands it. It covers everything. Business model and services, Marketing and Messaging, Partnerships & Associations, Visual and Verbal Brand, Customer Experience, Pricing, Company Culture, Founder Personal Brand, through to the Intellectual Property and Assets they create.

You don’t build billion dollar brands by  building a business based on the service you provide, or even with you as the practitioner, or by following ‘marketing 101’ advice like ‘get visible and be authentic’.

Instead, you need to claim your high value space in your category (with big ideas and disruptive thinking) rather than waiting until your startup has reached a certain level of success, once you’ve done more training or won more awards. This is the biggest mindset shift and it can happen from day one in your business if you position yourself right.

Why your branding needs to be disruptive

High value businesses and even personal brands, are disruptive by their nature.  They have a core point of view that runs like a red thread through them and their business. It’s what draws in their people; whether customers, category peers, the media, investors. They stand for something and it elevates everything.

The problem is that many female-founders of startups aren’t conditioned to disrupt, it’s uncomfortable, exposing and we’re either waiting to be corrected or have a fear of being called out or disagreed with.

My mission behind The Wild Ones is about blowing that wide open and starting a stampede of female unicorns instead. A true high value brand needs to be disruptive in its thinking.

Let’s think bigger than your business

Most startup founders outgrow their businesses in their original form. They’ll reach a stage of wanting their personal stretch and uplevel and that requires a bigger perspective on what they stand for and the spaces they might move into.

Maybe it leads to a brand new business idea, a significant evolution, or just a stretchier set of experiences for you personally.  If you’re only ever thinking about the mile-wide corner of the industry your business is in, you’ll miss these opportunities completely.  It requires a more expansive imagining of the spaces you move in. Your brand becomes your big, guiding mission in the world, and the way you want to disrupt your entire  industry. 

At every level of your startup journey, your personal brand is a superpower to be leveraged with absolute strategic precision. So step into your high value brand today.

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