E02: Business, Brand and Lifestyle

Business, brand, lifestyle, where do you want to get better, where do you want to start?

What is up Remote Start Nation! My name is Jim Doyon your host and I want to welcome you to another episode of remote start. In this episode, we're going to be reviewing the three main pillars, that will act as the foundation of this podcast, but before we get into the thick of it, if you didn't get a chance to listen to episode 1, I invite you to go back and do so, just so you know, it's under 20 minutes, gives a little bit of background, so you know what you can expect on this journey. And in addition, I give you three key takeaways to help that I wish I would’ve know when I first started. So, for those first time listeners, I just want you to know the mission of remote start, is to help entrepreneurs, start a business, build a brand, and create a desired lifestyle, and they're all different.  However, all three are key when embarking on your entrepreneurial journey. And furthermore, when all three can seamlessly come together as one, we're your team, your customer and you are all moving forward in one study flow. You really have the opportunity to add value to your community and see professional and personal success. So let's get into it.

The three pillars, lifestyle, starting a business, and building a brand.

They will constantly evolve and they'll need tweaking as you grow to new stages of development on your entrepreneurial Journey. New challenges will arise, new opportunities will present themselves, but if you can remember your why, why is it important to you, why are you doing what you're doing, why is your business out there in the first place, why do you want the lifestyle that you want to live?If you can remember that and always stay true to that, stay true to your roots, you're going to have much greater success than if you didn't. And I'm going to do a whole another episode on your why and trying to understand it, and we're going to do some other things and even interview a couple people on that exact subject down the road. But it's where everything should start. So I just want to bring that up to your attention before we continue on. It could be looked at is your mission, your reason, but really, it's your why. So, all right, let's talk about lifestyle first.

Lifestyle, focuses on you, right? It's aligning your mission and understanding yourself, it's overcoming your fears communicating what you want in life, and in business, understanding what you want as a lifestyle is super important. Because with that, you're going to be happier and the people around you are going to be happier, and you're going to get to achieve things, that normally you wouldn't want to do. It's making sure that your business matches with your personal mission. For me, if you've listened to episode 1 already, you know I'm on a personal Journey right now, I'm traveling the country with my family, I'm in an RV, we're getting to see all kinds of cool stuff. I'm not working as many hours as I used to work. I have a lot more free time and I'm traveling the country visiting a lot of people I want to visit. That's the lifestyle I want to live right now and again, like I already mentioned, like things are going to change, things will be different in six months from now, a year from now. I might have a change of focus here in a week, who knows? But all my goals and everything I've set up our live, my lifestyle, the way I want to live it right now and that's traveling the country with my family. So as we go through life style and we discuss the different what that means, just know, to me and what I'm trying to share with you, the remote start nation is how to live your desired lifestyle, you want a yacht, you want sweet cars, you want all that good stuff, that's awesome, have it, it's not necessarily my style, my style is the time I'm spending with my family and being on the road, but either way, I hope to help you to live your best life style and to make an influence where you can go out and be happy and make others around you happy, because I've seen it too often and tell me if I'm wrong but too many times were unhappy living in our day-to-day and doing what we do whether that's we own a business or not, because in the end, we're not living the life that we want to live living it for someone else. So our pillar of lifestyle and what you'll see as we go forward with this podcast and a lot of other things that I bring you, it's trying to get you to live that desired life that you want to live.

So then we have business. You know if you look at business, it's a broad term people use it in a lot of different ways. It's actually defined by Wikipedia, as the activity of making one's living, or making money by producing, or buying, and selling products, or services. The word business can also be interchanged with company. Really, when you look at it, like, even from a more defined perspective, company is normally looked at is the legal structure, but a lot of times again, they're intertwined. Personally, when I think of my business, and how all this, guess it, throughout the Journey of this podcast. I think of it as a whole, right? I think of it as an overarching process, like, what brings everything together to form my business, right? The systems, the key elements, I already see the processes, the foundation, the finances, Marketing sales, leadership, customer service management, growing a team, it's all these things. It also can Define the creation of your product, the pricing, go-to-market strategy. So there's a lot of different pieces or elements that as a whole can define your business, and my goal through this, what I want people to understand is, it's very easy, when you think about starting a business or building your business to get really stuck on all these different elements. So we're going to focus on some of the most important ones, the things that you should do to get started, really you want to start a business, it's as easy as picking up the phone and making calls to connections who understand you provide value. But then it's putting all those other things in place. So that's what I want to go forward with, that's what I want to discuss with you and really try to help, to understand that, yes, if you look at businesses is all these things, you're going to get confused or it might not make sense or you might get stuck. So we're going to help, try to break that down in smaller pieces that we can digest and move forward.

So if your business is your foundation, Then I like to look at it as your brand being what your customers see, what people see out there in the world and how they interact with your brand, and this doesn't have to be black and white, in fact, there's a lot of crossover, there's a lot of gray between business and brand. So I look at branding, I something that you're going to constantly evolve. It's always going to be changing, right? But again, it goes back to that, why? And if you understand why your business is there, what you're doing, how you're serving your clients. Your mission, looking at your brand and staying true to that is going to really help you grow. I feel it's very important in trying to scale your business by building your brand, so, if you've been in business for five years, ten years, whatever it might be, and you want to get to that next level, a lot of times that's as simple as looking back at your brand and trying to understand how your customer, your current customer and the customers you need to grow your business, how they're currently looking at your brand and your business and what you can do to change that. So here's an example about brand. When I first started my business, the brand was me or if it was one of my businesses with my business partner, Nathan, then it was us. We're the ones calling the customers going face-to-face, delivering our product a lot of times, we are the ones answering customer service calls, so we was always our personalities that the customer saw. So starting off, I didn't necessarily need that incredible logo or that solid brand Identity or you know, some of the things that I really focus on now with bigger clients or clients that are already past that that starting phase, because when my customers thought of my business, they thought of me or they thought of us, it was what they can, It's what came to mind first, If they don't like something about my product, they called, they understood us. Hopefully, we made an impression that stuck with him, that then they went and spread the message more, but what happened was as we tried to step out of that role and focus on growing, scaling and not working so hard in the business, without a strong brand identity, without a strong mission statement, without our voice ,our brand guidelines, it made it really difficult and a lot of the things that we were really good at our customers loved became easy to lose. So I want you to keep that in mind. Don't not launch a business because you don't have the perfect logo or you don't have the perfect mission statement or whatever, that might be, right. Go out and get a sale, go out and try to point your product to market your service, to Market and then you can always come back and fine-tuned. I can promise you a Nike started, you know, no one knew who it was, but as they evolved and people became familiar with the brand, became an iconic symbol, and now everybody knows who Nike is. So through each stage as your business, grows, your brand's going to evolve, it'll change, it will adapt, you'll face brand challenges, which with launching new products, hiring new staff going after new markets, so I'll reiterate it again in this podcast, what I want to help you with is I want you to understand that building a strong brand is important when trying to scale, you don't have to start there, but as you start to get going, it's very important you remember the things that make your brand, what it is, what is your first impression that people are going to think of, when they see you, talk to you, see you on social, what is their impression going to be? How are you going to as you grow, how are you going to have your staff and your contract workers, and whoever else is helping you, to speak the same as you, just carry on the same message, that's what your branding is all about. You know, and as you get to another level and you're really trying to scale, but you're scaling is more on building a company culture and building your brand from within, that's just as important just in different ways.

So business, branding, lifestyle, they're all different. However, they all go together to form one solid foundation. We all think differently, your approach might be different than mine, but what I hope you get out of this remote start nation is I hope you start to break apart all three of these areas and start to understand that if we can approach all three areas, and we can cross it off the list and continue to grow those three areas, business, brand and lifestyle, there's going to be a really good chance we're going to succeed. So this is why Remote Start was started, this is how it would be delivered, as I interviewed guests, do solo episodes, I'll try to constantly focus on these three pillars and I want everything to be broken up into these three different areas, however, you're going to see they're going to be a lot of crossover.

So Remote Start Nation, I want to leave you with that. I want to thank you for joining me on this journey, I urge you to go start something, start it today, start a business, build your brand and go start living your desired lifestyle.