The Guiding Northstar - Fabian Geyrhalter - The Revenue Maze - Episode #027

Today’s guest launched a product startup Toneoptic in 2022. All three of his books became International Amazon Bestsellers. Fabian Geyrhalter is the Principal at FINIEN. Fabian is also the host of the “Hitting the Mark” podcast. Fabian joins the host Valerie Cobb to talk about the importance of everyone working together in a company and shares his tips on how to increase your revenue.

Takeaways:

  • It’s important to rethink your brand strategy on a yearly basis. Take the time to get the core C-Suite together and for about half the day think about your goals as a company and review the last year.
  • There needs to be someone who has an outside perspective on the brand and is able to see the big picture. The CEO is way too deep in it to see it from the outside so it can be helpful to bring in an outside perspective.
  • When it comes to running your business, you want everyone in the company to be on the same page. If everyone works together and does the roles that they are assigned and it all works, then you start branching out and making the company bigger and get more clients.
  • Bringing someone in from the outside is a great idea as they can help push you and motivate you to be responsible for what the goals are going forward.
  • From a young age, Fabian was obsessed with logos, and he found a passion for helping brands establish themselves in a world cluttered with so much competition.
  • There is a large need for thinking outside the box. Too many companies stick with the status quo and that makes them less likely to innovate and expand on their brand.
  • When you are rebranding, don’t be afraid to go with a company that is different than yours because they could help push you in a new direction that can be beneficial to your company.

Quote of the Show:

7:34 “You have to create the word before you spread the gospel.”

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0789FBDJS/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1734939702/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2

Ways to Tune In:

The Revenue Maze is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/.

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The Guiding Northstar – Fabian Geyrhalter – The Revenue Maze

I am super excited about this fun guest. We have a great time talking to each other. Like anything else, he’s an innovative industry leader, but what is cool is all three of his books become international Amazon best sellers. I’m super excited about that. He launched a product startup, Toneoptic in 2022, and he is a Principal at FINIEN. I’d like to welcome Fabian Geyrhalter.

It’s so good to be here. Thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to this.

I am too. I want to hear all about the amazing books and all the great things that you’re doing, but you always have to answer my question and it’s the game we play.

It’s a good game you play. You’ve got a thing going there.

What is one thing that you can tell readers that they can do to get out of the revenue maze?

This is overall advice. Rethink your brand strategy on a yearly basis. Usually, you sit down and you do these branding exercises. You don’t think logo and all of that, but you think about what the positioning is. What market are we in? What are our values? How do we connect to our target audience? It’s all of these things. You usually do that when there’s a huge transformation. It’s CEO shift, CMO shift, or product changes. Suddenly, you go in digital geographic expansions.

There are all of these reasons where you bring in an expert and you sit down and you do this big powwow about, “How are we positioned from a brand perspective? I found that if you do this, not whenever it’s necessary and there’s fire and you need to put the fire out. If you do this and you “sit on a rock” once a year with the core C-Suite. Everyone’s like, “When would that ever happen?” If companies can do retreats, they can do that.

If you spend a good four hours to a half day together and you think about, “Based on the last several months, how are we positioned in the marketplace? What did we learn from a brand perspective? Is our audience shrinking? Is it expanding? Should we shrink it? Are we going more niche? Where are we going and where’s our audience? How do we meet them in the middle?” To me, that is the beauty of brand strategy.

It’s combining product vision, marketing vision, sales, and everything under one hat. It directly relates to how the company is doing from a culture perspective. How are people getting along? Are we having difficulties hiring? Are our values internally clear and are they representative of the values of our audience, whatever that audience is? Does it sync up with our offering?

This whole overarching idea of sitting down and thinking about your brand positioning once a year is more of like a chiropractor. You don’t have to go to the hospital. You’re like, “Let’s crack that. Let’s see where it hurts, and let’s spend time uncovering that why again.” Quite frankly, it’s like you have this big why and you’re like, “This is our vision. This is our North star.”

You can call it any of these jargons. Where are we heading? Usually, I even to have one word that’s your brand DNA. What’s your brand DNA? There should be one word, but that word can change. That vision can change, and often, it ends up being a sales vision, a product vision, or whatever. It’s not an overarching brand vision like, “What’s our why?”

Given the news of Patagonia, there has always been a North star for the company and they’ve been pushing it through and keep pushing it through. That is rare. Most other firms usually pivot around and change a little bit based on the environment that they’re in, their audience, and the sales. I finished my monologue there, but that’s my one advice to kickstart revenue again and uncover something.

I love it. I don’t know if you’ve read Ed Catmull’s book, Creativity Inc. but having that offsite, you could totally add 4 to 6 hours to that whole executive retreat. He called it something else, but it’s a debrief. “What are we doing?” It’s interesting that it’s so difficult for a group to get together to talk about that once a year.

You think about NASCAR drivers. They are perfect at the debrief. What is working, what is not working, and what do we need to change? It’s simple. Every time they finish a race, that’s exactly what they do to improve by 1% or something. Why wouldn’t they look at brand positioning? Why wouldn’t they look at that holistically?

When you think about a NASCAR driver, there are specialists looking at every detail on the car and making sure that everything works perfectly. That’s what everyone in the C-Suite does all the time. Marketing constantly looks at KPIs. Sales constantly looks at where we are at. Product looks at innovation, but what no one looks at is what’s happening as a whole. The CEO/Founder, whoever is in the reins, they have a pretty good idea, but they have not the right perspective from afar because they’re way too deep in it.

They either push through a vision that they had years ago that had to be adjusted two years ago, but no one told them or they’re going way too visionary where it’s not even connecting with the audience yet. The goal of this is to have this holistic overview of a brand where everything from inside to the outside is in sync and everyone is singing the same song. I said this one time and I keep quoting myself on the show while I’m talking. I said this thing, and it fits so perfectly into this. You have to create the word before you spread the gospel. That’s the thing. It’s everyone has to come together again and figure out, “What is that word that we keep spreading?” That’s how you connect.

TRM 27 | Brand Strategy

Brand Strategy: You have to create the word before you spread the gospel. Everyone has to come together and figure out what the word is that you need to keep spreading.

It’s so true. We’re laughing a little bit about that, but what you’re talking about is so prevalent. I’m dealing with somebody and you would think that they take a step back and go but it’s like, “I’ve got this great idea.” Therefore, it goes out to market. We call it a hero in our own mind. Everybody should know what I’m talking about immediately

It’s the next big thing. It’s the next exciting thing that’s sizzling. I know a lot of CMOs. They come back from a conference, from a meeting, from a vacation, and they read something or they got some information. They’re like, “Hey team, we’re doing this now.” It might totally not be aligned with the rest of the big picture, but this is the hot new thing. Realignment is important to get real and say, “Where are we at? What are the opportunities? Why are we all doing this?” and create excitement again for everyone.

It helps also because when you were talking about the cultural aspect, getting that alignment, but also that visibility is so important. It’s so funny how off North, you keep talking about North star, which believe it or not, is part of my company name. Can we talk about that? Talk about alignment. It’s so interesting how far off true North we get even in a week. “I can’t remember. My brain is blank. Come on, memory. The father of memory, you probably know who I’m talking about.”

Anyways, how quickly we forget certain aspects. Within 30 days, we only remember like 10% or something of what we heard. It’s ridiculous that you wouldn’t have a regular cadence setup to say, “Let’s get us back to true North every single time because you can’t even remember after 30 days.”

When I work with startups, I tell them, “Here is who you are now. Print it out, put it on your monitor, and every time you write a piece of content, every time you put something out there, know that this is you and everything else is not you. You have to make sure this is you.” As I work more with Fortune 500s now and Fortune 5000s, so I’m like, “You all should do that. You need to do this. You need to be reminded who you are and why you do this.”

It gets out of hand. As you said, it’s you already forgot something that happened several days ago. If you’re constantly thinking about campaigns and about meeting sales goals, KPIs, and the new product launch, your brain is always going right around this tiny little piece in a big company, in a big brand. For that to connect to the big why and to the bigger company, that’s what so many companies get wrong.

It’s mind-blowing when you think about it because it’s the simplest thing. It’s like, “Here’s the brand and here are all the products and the offerings.” It all needs to go right up there. It’s simple, but it’s difficult. I’m not even blaming anyone. I’m saying that this is something that if everyone has that continuous reminder and that reset at every 12 months or so, we would have much more successful brands out there that continue walking on a path that even though it course corrects, it never has to pivot like crazy because everyone talks about where they’re at.

It’s another study. Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey, they all talk about every 90 days. Psychologically, you have to come back to it. You’re saying bare minimum a year. Some companies aren’t even doing it.

I’m thinking a big exercise where you rewrite your positioning statement. You rethink your values. Even though some of them might change ever so slightly, that’s what I’m talking about where it’s a big session to realign but I agree. Everyone constantly needs to keep it. It’s chiropractor. You might need the real session once a year and then you go for your 15 minutes or whatever it is.

There’s an alignment that we call high-involvement planning. It’s an annual thing and it takes a lot of time and resources to get it done, but it is so worth it because the entire company is then back in laser focus for the following year. We all know the Coke story about them trying to release Coke in India, and how they thought, “We’ll release we normally release.” All of a sudden, it went over like mud and then they had to do a reassessment.

We’re talking about a massive company. Most of my audience, as we know, is small business. I cater to small business and try to learn those best practices. One of the things that I liked in what you said is you’re dealing with these Fortune 500s that are even struggling with this. If they are even struggling remembering to do this, then what tips can you give? I find if things are in bite size, it’s not so overwhelming for people. Once a year, you have this big meeting, but it doesn’t have to feel that daunting. I’m sure you’ve got some tips on how that can be done with the smaller businesses that maybe do not have the bandwidth of a Fortune 500 and those kinds of things.

As a small business, so many things in your life are so much more difficult. That is not one of them. Fortune 500 realigning the entire company in the heads of all divisions, you have it easy. If you’re lucky, you have a C-Suite of two handfuls of people. Finding time from them, to sit together and go through a structured approach. Either bring someone in from the outside and I would always say, “Bring someone in from the outside because it is so good for someone to push you.” Look at it from a big picture and then, all you have to do is sit back and relax. Have a coffee in the beginning. Have a glass of wine at the end.

Bring someone in from the outside because it’s good for someone to push you and look at things from a big picture.

Seriously, it’s sitting together, talking about business and talking about the brand and how you can make it better. You fill out these statements as a group as you go. There doesn’t need to be a copywriter involved. There doesn’t need to be marketing involved. You fill in a couple of words in a template that you reuse year after year. Every year you started from scratch. It’s this typical positioning statement. It’s to this audience and the audience shifts. It might have been like 45 to 55 or 23 to 43. It shifts pretty much every year.

Your category might have been disrupted. You might fall into a different category. What a game-changer to think about that. “We released these other two products in 2022, did our entire category shift?” It’s things like that, so it sounds like this esoteric branding exercise, but in the end, this is serious business positioning and then, all the benefits. How have the benefits changed that you provide now that you have this different suite of services or that you get rid of some services or products and you added some more?

In the end, I always to end it with, “Because.” To this audience, we fit into this category, we have these benefits, and that’s a typical positioning statement. I love to end it with Simon Sinek’s Why. What’s the because? Why would you care? Why would your employees care? Why would your audience care? Why do you exist as a brand? That’s the moment when you usually shift from coffee to wine. You’re like, “Now, what?”

That is why as a founder, it might have been different in the first 12 months, than it is now that you have a small business. You’ve got 10, 20, 30, or 50 employees. It’s a different why and it’s also a shared why. Now you share the why with your audience and your employees. Those exercises, and even if it’s just that one sentence, finding the time to rethink that sentence once a year can have an amazing ripple effect on the entire company.

When you see that happen, it is mind-blowing. Let’s talk about startups. Let’s start there. You are this founder, has this great idea and we all know the segue model that they were ahead of the curve and there were a lot of issues. Ideally in a lot of complex environment, a lot of times on the front edge of the curve for what people even understand. Human capacity to understand something, that’s why we also have Ai. We talk about the human capacity to catch up with technology and you brought up something interesting too. We’ll go back a little bit, but years ago, take fashion trends. They used to change maybe every 100 years.

You’re that old.

I’m that old. looking at the historical aspect of it, because history of costume, even in paintings and art, you can tell the era by what they’re wearing. Anyways, as you start looking at that, fashion trends started changing in the ’70s. It was every 10 years. It had sped up. It was then every 5, then it was every 2, and now, it’s every 1. To elaborate the point, if you have a product that at first is something that hits the market, but it’s an education piece where people don’t understand it, they don’t even have the capacity to understand what you’re offering yet.

You’re doing this education piece. You’re why it will be completely different than four years down the road when everybody understands it. Think of Apple and all that stuff. They start to understand it. I had to explain computer hardware to somebody. They were like, “I don’t understand this,” because it was not even in their frame of reference and the evolution going through that. What you’re talking about is, “Stay on that, because that is going to change from year to year. If you don’t, down the road, you’re going to start to lose following because you’re so off-North that you can’t even get back.” I think what you’re talking about is so important.

Usually, you know because you start feeling uncomfortable. There’s a certain discomfort where you’re like, “Something is off but I don’t know what.” Sometimes it’s all these little things that are off. You have to massage all of them and suddenly, you’re re-energized. Let’s move. Your analogy about fast fashion, by the way is crazy. The idea of fast fashion is fascinating because on the one hand you’re like, “This is completely crazy for the environment and for everything.” On the other hand, since it changes every year, you know exactly what you have in your closet from years ago. It’s going to be fashionable again in two years.

You can recirculate.

From an innovative point of view, I don’t know how much innovation there is or I would go in through this much faster. That analogy shows you how things are moving extremely fast. The strange thing is, it used to be only D2C. It used to be because it’s not like we had D2C for so long. It used to be B2C, and then, now it’s D2C, but it’s in B2B too because there are so many disruptors coming in. You don’t even know about them in the first couple of months and they’re already amassing these audiences. Recalibrating from a brand point of view is extremely important.

TRM 27 | Brand Strategy

Brand Strategy: Things are moving extremely fast. Recalibrating from a brand point of view is extremely important.

I think of the competition as the wolf at everybody’s tail all the time. That is always like this. I think what you’re doing and explaining to these guys is digestible, honestly, if they would get it on their calendar and know they are going to do it.

What was the big post recently? Everybody is in budgeting and they have no budget. We used to talk about that all the time too. Everybody’s in budgeting anonymous and that’s why we pay three times the price of our home in a mortgage to borrow what we want to borrow. At the end of the day, it’s where you’re going to laser focus and make sure that you’re staying on track for what you’re doing by sticking in on the calendar.

Talking about budgeting, not in your way, but in the way of a lot of the founders and a lot of the CEOs reading, they’re like, “We didn’t budget for that exercise.” This should not be a marketing exercise. You take a tiny piece from every department because that’s what that is. This is sales. This is product development. This is everything. It’s not going to hurt. You have that money. What is it going to cost? It’s going to cost a salary of the people plus a facilitator.

The return on investment is amazing because when you go into it and you cannot afford to not do this. Exactly. You will have no budget because there will be no company.

That is a bigger problem.

I love your quote behind you. For people who are reading, it says, “Branding is a layer of insurance for your company. You’re investing in it as a strategy so you don’t have to compete on price and can gain a loyal tribe that participates in your brand and not your offering alone.” What I love about that quote is most find themselves in the commodity zone, which is price. If they don’t do this, if they don’t pay attention to this, this is where they’re going to be. Again, I’m not a CMO, so we’re talking from a holistic revenue standpoint. That is your investment. That is what you’re doing.

Branding is a layer of insurance for your company. You’re investing in it as a strategy so you don’t have to compete on price and can gain a loyal tribe that participates in your brand and not your offering alone.

If you’re a commodity product or service, which you said many are, may it be by how they position themselves competing on price, or may it be another brand of water or whatever. If you’re a commodity, brand becomes the most important thing. It’s not price, it’s brand. If you play the brand game well, you don’t have to play the price game in a bad way where you constantly compete. You see that on credit unions. Credit unions constantly is all about loans. it’s all about pushing the price down. When you think about it, A) It’s a crazy game, and B) This is not the brand of a credit union.

A credit union is an organization. It’s a nonprofit. It’s for you, off you, it’s community. There are stories to be told, but every credit union has big banners saying, “We have the lowest auto loan and that’s it.” From the outside looking in, it’s mind-blowing. That’s why I describing branding as a layer of insurance, because that’s what it is. If people love what you stand for and what the vibe is, you’re part of that, everyone knows that with consumer brands. Everyone has some brands that they love. You follow them on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They buy their product and it’s a subliminal thing that keeps going on year after year.

You recommend them, you talk about them, “Their products are good.” They better be good. Without a product, you can’t have a brand. First thing’s first. It’s all about them having gained your trust and them being special, different, or interesting to you. Maybe not to someone else, but to you. If they screw up or if suddenly a product doesn’t work out well or whatever, you will come to the rescue instead of dropping them. That is that layer of insurance.

If you build this brand where people love you as a brand, you can charge a little more. You can have more flexibility of doing something wrong. I see this with amazing startups these days, day in, day out, where they can be completely transparent. They can be super honest. You see the founders talking on TikTok. It’s super transparent, which is not right for a lot of people, but the ones that do it in the right way, it’s amazing. The amount of trust that people have in them because we haven’t seen that from a company in a long time. You compete with them. Most companies compete with those companies and they’re going to grow quickly.

You are summarizing some, and we’ll get into your books in a minute, but Jim Collins’ Good to Great, what are the good to great companies? Even though I love Simon Sinek, he wasn’t the first person for the Golden Why but he was very evangelistic with it so awesome.

He invented the Why, don’t forget.

At the end of the day, people, by purpose, buy solving their problems. They buy for their reasons. When I’m training sales team members, I always ask the question, “Why do people buy?” They all give a blank stare, and it is their reason. That is it. You do not know their reason. When you’re branding in companies, they have to be able to see that alignment of their reason within that brand.

They will put up with a lot of things because of that emotional buy-in of the why. That’s the whole point. A lot of them have to get to that point. You’re buying that capital for the future. When you’re talking to a startup about even doing PR and stuff like that, first, it’s like you are buying your credibility when you’re doing PR.

You’re getting that trust out there, that story of your brand out there, first and foremost. From there, that makes it easier for marketing to go out to the world and then, sales team members or whoever to talk about it. If I walk through the door and say, “I am a VP at Coca-Cola,” guess what? I stand up. If you are a VP of Who, that’s hard for sales. That’s such a hard thing. A lot of times, that’s an expense and we can’t afford it. You can’t afford not to. What you’re saying is you can’t afford not to work on this. It’s got to become part of your DNA.

I totally 100% agree.

I love everything that you’re doing. How did you get to this point? Seriously, you’ve written three books that are best international sellers. I can only dream to have one book out as an international seller, maybe even just a book.

First, these words are thrown around quite a bit. It is not that difficult, to be honest. In the end, it’s the same thing as branding. You need to know your audience and you need to give them something that they haven’t received before or they haven’t received it from someone like you and they trust you and that’s it. If you’re perfectly positioned to be that person that talks about that one thing, and they hopefully understand that one thing pretty well, and then they release a book and they already have some tribe, and it’s this whole thing. I’m sure a book is coming up soon from you at some point. It’s going to happen.

TRM 27 | Brand Strategy

Brand Strategy: You need to know your audience and give them something they haven’t received before.

It totally is.

With a young family, it’s like first the dog, then the baby. For you, there’s the podcast and then, there’s the book. It’s a natural progression.

It’s in the works. As there’s always a but, there are competing priorities at this time in my life. I would love to hear more about your story with it, and they would too. Tell us a couple of your books and how did you get to that point seriously? Obviously, there was an a-ha moment that it was like, “Here is my calling.”

Weirdly enough, or maybe not so weirdly enough, but my calling was pretty early on. As a kid, I was fascinated with logos. It was strange. As a five-year-old, I would see cars on the road, and I see the tires and I’m like, “BMW,” and I’m at this event. My parents are like, “Something’s wrong with this kid.” You got to go into it and go deeper into it. I went to ArtCenter College of Design which is a design school that was in Switzerland. I’m from Austria. That’s where my accent comes from. I was in Austria, I moved to Switzerland, went to design school to study communication design, which I love the way that they called it communication design.

It’s not graphic design where people think you do nice stuff like art, but it’s communication. It needs to communicate a purpose. There’s something there. I started communication design and then always on a focus on logo and branding. Afterward, when I started my career, I started as a Creative Director for a pharmaceutical focused company. Very dry stuff, right out of school but I loved that I’m corporate. I’m like, “This is exciting.” I worked with Pfizer, Lilly ICOS, and those pharmaceutical companies.

Afterwards, I went to work in the automotive industry for Acura, doing a lot of digital work as a creative fleet. The minute my green card came in, I started my agency. I’m like, “This is it.” Everyone knew it too. “Wait until the green card hits in. We’re going to lose him.” Sure enough, I walked out. I then ran in a small agency. We were up to 18 people, including freelancers. I ran that agency for twelve years. Lot of brand projects. Anything goes.

It was like no focus. Anything goes, any client, and then, years ago, I found complete focus of, “This is what I need to do. I need to do consulting. I only want to transform companies. I want to work with founders and C-Suite directly, get things done, get them done in a couple of weeks instead of 6 months to 12 months. Small, normal budgets. Don’t do the agency thing. Come in and fix problems.” I loved it.

Along the way, I wrote those three books. The first one is called How to Launch a Brand, which was much when I transitioned into an agency where from the agency to the consultancy where I’m like, “How should you launch a brand? What does it take?” That was much a how-to book. The second book is called Bigger Than This. It’s my not-so-secret favorite because I loved writing it. I realized that there are so many startup brands that are complete commodities.

It’s the same stuff, no tech innovation, no design, innovation, nothing. There’s only brand strategy. I suddenly thought, “I can connect to an audience because we are Shinola. We are in Detroit, and it’s all about Detroit. Otherwise, we do the same old stuff. We do vintage watches for everyone. It’s not design innovation. It’s just that. We are popping and we say, “All of this stationary that you have on your work desk, now we do it in 15 different colors or 30 different colors. Wouldn’t it be great that if you like pink, you can have a pink staple instead the typical gray stapler?”

It’s these simple ideas that change nothing on the product but, “Let’s put it in different colors because why wouldn’t people have a happy work life? Why can’t we bring a little bit delight there?’ Think about Liquid Death. Liquid Death is water. It’s spring water and it’s called Liquid Death. It was this guy who started the company because he said, “People in bars, all they do is drink at concerts. Wouldn’t it be cool to design a can water that looks cool? It looks like beer. People would start drinking it at rock concerts and wouldn’t feel bad about drinking water. Why don’t we save all of this plastic and make it in cans?” It’s called Liquid Death. it’s now in every Whole Foods. It’s in every 7/11. It’s everywhere.

He said, “This is going to be a good-for-you product that’s good-for-the-planet, and I’m not going-to-market it in a good-for-you, a good-for-the-planet manner. Because of that, people are going to like it, and I’m going to make a bigger impact on people and the planet.” It’s that reverse thinking that is beyond genius to me. When you apply this thinking to a lot of commodity companies, not everyone’s going to be a Liquid Death. It’s that same thinking of, “Everyone has always been doing it the same way, and they all have the exact same offering. What can we do to be different?” Usually, it goes thinking about a niche audience, understanding them, and then saying, “They would do it totally differently.”

You have to think about what you can do to be different. Usually, it involves thinking about a niche audience and really understanding them.

They would love something that’s totally different. If you go to a punk rock show and you drink water, you don’t want to have a Dasani in your hand. You have something cool. It’s a simple thing. That takes off. It’s amazing. That book talks about, “What are those eight traits that I saw in these startups that you can use for your company?” You don’t use all of them, but you use 1 or 2. Some of them are transparency and authenticity and some of these buzzwords.

I go into them deeply, and I study brands that solely because they applied it well like radical transparency in the apparel industry. There’s a company called Everlane® and that’s what they do. You go to the website. You see exactly each garment. You see how much it cost them to create, where it was created, and how much they sell it to you for. it’s the simplest things. The problem is that any company that has a significant amount of employees, they can’t do those things anymore because they’re scared.

I was coming up with taglines. It’s like this therapeutic session for me. I’m like, “Hmm-hmm.” Maybe that is a good name for my book. I love it. I am going to go buy that one.

It’s funny because we haven’t talked about my third book, but it’s called The Brand Therapy Book. This was brand therapy already.

It is. There are some cool things out there that I want to connect you immediately with that I know out of my network, thinking about it, because of the need that is so much out there right at this time for thinking outside the box. There is a lot out there that’ll say, “We’re the branding agent. We’re the this and that kind of thing.”

One of the things that I talk to people about in the rise of the need for a B2B sales team, again, is the digital deluge. It’s hard to differentiate, especially in startups or resurrections, all of a sudden, your differentiation is gone in a resurrection. If you’re transforming, it could be because the product has so many competitors now that you’re not differentiating. It could be your messaging, it could be so many things. You can’t always pinpoint one single thing in there, but you’re thinking in the light of a mirror image or the anti or whatever it is.

This would be cool too. We talked about this once a year. “Let’s do it half a year.” It doesn’t matter. That idea, sitting down and do this exercise with the entire team. If we were a startup all of us here, we might be a 50-people company. We might be successful or we might be a legacy company but we’re all here. If you would work for a startup, we would be this startup, and we could do anything because we have budget, we can do anything. What would you do now? This can be positioning, advertising, product, campaign, copy, or whatever you come up with. Half an hour, everyone sticks their idea to post-it here.

What would you do if we were a startup and start from scratch? How cool would that be? Suddenly, you see, “Everyone is somewhere totally different than where this company is.” Isn’t that scary? Doesn’t this allow us to take an opportunity and say, “A lot of people go into this one direction. They might know the market better than us because their salespeople or their product and they’re deep inside of it.” It’s scary and it’s also a scary, good opportunity if you force yourself to lean into this all the time instead of being like, “Competition and marketplace, keep moving forward. Keep pushing.”

It would be super exciting. I’ll tell you the original title of my book, because it’s funny.

Now everyone knows that.

I had told several people, but my original title is I Can’t Help You. The entire thing is about looking under the hood and being able to debrief and figure out what is happening but so many won’t do that. If you sat down and asked the question, “If we were a startup and you had all the money, all of your knowledge and all of those things, what would you do? Now that you’re a legacy or whatever, what would you do?”

A lot of people won’t even get to that question. If they can’t get to that question, then I can’t help them. You cannot help them if they will not get to that question. In thinking of so many people that could use your books, your consulting, and all of that, some of that turns into that, “We’ll get to that another day. That’s not important.”

I often think, when you’re saying brand therapy, sometimes what it does boil down to is going, “If you were to go to a therapeutic session, what would they start to do? They would peel what’s going wrong and ask the question. Many people will not ask the question because they’re afraid of the response which is so weird because they want that answer.

It is and the thing is I have plenty of empathy with founders in the C-Suite of why they are afraid. There’s already enough other stuff they got to fix. It’s like we have enough going on. If you now suddenly open that lid, it’s like going to your physical once a year. If you don’t do it for a couple of years, you might have a major life event. Something might go majorly wrong. With the company, it’s the same thing. There are major events. Suddenly, the competitor does something huge and you’re pretty much out of business. You got to figure stuff out.

Suddenly, 20% of the workforce drops because you screwed up from a culture perspective or they’re all of these things. If you align and keep aligning but I totally agree. I love that idea of the way that you quickly positioned your book where it’s I Can’t Help You and here’s why instead of, every other consultant of, “Five ways to do this and this.” You say, “I can’t help you.” When you read the book, it’s like, “If I would change my mindset, people could help me.”

There are plenty of people out there who say, “Here are the five ways to do X,” but you can’t even get there because of your mindset. In the end, there’s only one thing that always gets everyone not to achieve any of the dreams. It’s fear. That’s for everyone. That’s for a little kid that goes to school or doesn’t. That’s for someone going on a podcast, and for someone saying, “I’m going to completely flip this company around, because if we don’t do it now, someone will in the next couple of months who does not have the fear.”

TRM 27 | Brand Strategy

Brand Strategy: Fear always keeps everyone from achieving any of their dreams.

It can stop you from everything, all of your dreams. My mom used to always say, “You might as well shoot for the stars and miss versus shooting for a pile of manure and hitting.”

That’s exactly right. It worked. That’s exactly it. This is a verbal commitment in front of the entire audience that you’re going to get your book written in the next several months.

It’s a verbal commitment.

There we go. It has been said. It has been recorded unless you cut this out, but you can’t cut that out.

You talked about loving logos since you were five. What do you love to do in your free time? What is your passion other than what you’re doing? How do you decompress?

I don’t brand for fun. It’s not like I do it. I do love what I do. Most founders or consultants are going to say the same thing. “Get out in nature, do things to decompress and all of that.” I have other passions. The problem is most of my passions, I like turning into a business.

Another passion of mine is music. I’m big into music. My father was a big violinist in Vienna. It’s this typical Vienna upbringing. His office was the big Musik for rent in Vienna and all of that. I grew up with music and I love music. I started collecting records a long time ago. I’ve got 1,800 records like vinyl, old school. It’s coming back. During the pandemic, I’m like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could read the spines of records in your bookcase and you could push it and it turns out 90 degrees and you can flip through it and push it back?”

sure enough, I went all in and hired an engineer. I hired a designer, I created a product. Now I’m $50,000 in. We have a prototype out there. We’re completely redoing it. That’s the other thing that I’m doing next to the other things. Usually, when you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and you advise entrepreneurs and you understand that branding has a lot of power, it’s hard not to turn into your own entrepreneurial ventures. It would be a missed opportunity. Who knows what’s going to happen with that, but it’s pretty exciting. That’s one of my passion. Now it’s hopefully turning into a business.

When you talk to successful entrepreneurs, you understand that branding has a lot of power.

I have to ask you the question too. Do you play violin or you got the passion of music from Vienna and your father?

I have the passion for music, but I’m more on the outside of it. My dadhe felt the obligation to hand me a violin at a young age. He quickly understood. To quote him, he said, “No, he’s normal.” I don’t have the bug. I’m normal. I’m completely not talented whatsoever. I left the violin by the wayside. I’m still doing some music, some more modern music projects with a friend. We are releasing some stuff too. As I said, everything that I do for fun, I try to make it something professional because it brings more exciting into life.

It brings up so many memories of singing opera when you were talking about Vienna.

You sing in Vienna?

I did not sing in Vienna, but my favorite composer of all times is Mozart. I love any history around that. I didn’t sing in Vienna, but you can’t study any music without knowing about Vienna.

Growing up in Vienna, looking back now, I’ve been in the States for decades now. It’s bizarre because every day, you walk by the former home of Mozart or you sit in that old wine place. It’s where Mozart used to always be. It’s so mind-blowing because how many years are we talking? This is a long time ago. It’s a magnificent city.

I always say the contrast is my favorite band of all times is Oingo Boingo.

You’re going straight ’80s there.

We go from opera to Oingo Boingo, and their farewell tour before Danny Elfman started off. He had already started off in doing all the writing for the Tim Burtons and things like that. I grew up on Oingo Boingo and where everybody else was a Michael Jackson fan, I was in Oingo Boingo.

For me, it’s Depeche Mode.

Depeche Mode is another one.

We’re going in parallels here. I’m on 800 records of Depeche Mode at this point. That’s my vice. Whenever I travel for brand work, I always sneak out to a record shop in some point the hood.

Depeche Mode and all of that was also in the whole scheme. That was one of my favorites as well. Depeche mode came to me a few years later. I can’t tell the age, but I was listening to Ingle Boingo when I was quite young. I’m not going to give the farm away on that one. Oh

We’re not doing any of that. None of that talk here. Not now.

this has been so fun. I have thoroughly enjoyed this. Where is one place that the readers can get ahold of you?

Go to Finien.com. That’s written on my cup here.

They have to go to YouTube so they can see what that is written as.

That’s my consultancy. It’s Finien.com. You can get lost in social media. I have a pretty awesome podcast too called Hitting the Mark, where I talked to founders about how they got brand clarity. I talked to the Founder of Liquid Death, talked to the Founders of JetBlue and Happy Socks and some big companies. If you’re interested in that idea of brand clarity, jump right in.

I can see myself automatically going and subscribing to your podcast, buying your books, getting off my duff, and writing my book. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Thank you so much for being on this show, Fabian, and to all the readers, thank you again. This has been so much fun. Hopefully you like it, love it, and share it. Reach out to Fabian. Thanks for coming.

Thanks for having me. It was a blast.

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About Fabian Geyrhalter

Fabian Geyrhalter

Fabian Geyrhalter, an acclaimed Brand Strategist and Creative Director, is the Principal of Los Angeles-based brand consultancy FINIEN and a partner at Chameleon Collective, a business consultancy that in 2022 made the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies for the second year in a row.

Fabian understands that any venture can turn into an admired brand if developed in an intrinsic, holistic, and methodological manner. He has deep expertise in guiding organizations through their brand transformations and has been sought out by companies such as Marriott, Warner Brothers, Match, Honeywell, Kaplan, and Randstad. His thoughts on branding have appeared in publications like Inc., Forbes, Entrepreneur, and The Washington Post, and his creative direction has won over 50 international awards.

All three of his books became international Amazon Bestsellers and turned into go-to resources for entrepreneurs and marketers alike. From his Resonaid brand strategy workshops to the Hitting the Mark podcast, where he talks to some of today’s most prolific founders about brand strategy, Fabian is in a constant stimulation cycle, which is clearly visible when he advises clients or shares his insights with his followers or mentees. In 2022 he received the inaugural Global Startup Mentor Award for being the highest-rated mentor in the U.S. by Founder Institute, the world’s largest pre-seed accelerator.

Also in 2022, Fabian launched a product startup, Toneoptic, which brings innovation, coupled with his brand-thinking, to the vinyl record storage space.

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About The Author : Valerie Cobb

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