Think Your Entrepreneurial Business Has Nothing In Common With Google or P&G? Think Again.
I’ve been straddling the corporate and entrepreneurial worlds for over 11 years now. As a leader, a business owner, and a consumer.
I think if you live in just one or the other, they seem very very different. But when you have your hands in both pots, do you see how many similarities there truly are, and how many lessons there are to be learned and shared between the two.
Many years ago when Google and the tech industry were newly emerging as power houses, Procter & Gamble, which is the venerated, world leader of brand building excellence, began to do an employee exchange between Google employees and P&G employees. The idea was that P&G employees could learn from this agile, innovative forward, thinking organization. And that Google employees could learn from the structure, process and proven methodical frameworks that had been built at a company like P&G.
Interestingly enough what happened in the exchange was certainly fruitful, but the dynamics of the two organizations were not nearly as different as it had appeared on the surface. Both organizations were ultimately driven by the quality of their leadership, by the intentional culture that was built, by a focus on winning yet still doing the right thing, and on understanding the power of innovation to continually make a positive impact on the world.
Sure one made bottles of Tide laundry detergent, and one made the world’s most used search engine, but the skills necessary to succeed, and to make the work fulfilling, were very very similar.
When I look at what happens in entrepreneurial businesses versus what happens in big corporate organizations, here too I see a lot of similarities.
One of the biggest comes in the importance of knowing your Purpose and having a crystal clear Brand strategy. This means clarity on WHY you do what you do, WHO you serve, WHAT it is that you offer to them, and HOW you do it better than anyone else.
Whether you’re running a team of one or a team of ten thousand, this strategic guidebook is critical to make everything else work seamlessly. The lack of this kind of strategy essentially makes everything more complicated — you’re an unmoored ship floating about your industry of choice, just trying to hook the next sale.
When you get the strategy right, it starts to become clear how to talk to your ideal client, or who you should partner with. It starts to become clear how you might brief a design agency or a web development partner. You can easily see what kind of offerings you should be developing and you can easefully define the value your company delivers – and how you can price it to clients and customers.
In entrepreneurial and high-growth businesses, we’re often so focused on the execution and selling of the thing and making our numbers, that we don’t realize how much pain we’re actually creating for ourselves by staying focused on the little wins without zooming out to get our strategic ducks in a row.
That’s why I’m so passionate about helping people get these strategies in place. Entrepreneurs have a vision of the impact that we want to make on the world – and a clear brand growth strategy is an accelerant for realizing that vision.
When it comes to my own mission and vision - I’m here to help good people do big things.
I’ll be hosting a masterclass this Thursday on “Building your Breakthrough Brand.” In this free course I’ll be guiding you from my Part Heart, Part Smart methodology, combining my 20+ years experience in running and advising some of the world’s best known brands at P&G and the like, with my intuitive and empathetic gifts as a yoga teacher and tarot guide. My intent is to provide a backbone for entrepreneurs to be able to realize their Purpose through the expression of their Brand.
I hope that you’ll join me. RSVP here: https://www.partheartpartsmart.com/build-your-breakthrough-brand-masterclass)
Here’s to our success.
