// brand foundations

WEEK 1

This week is all about getting under the skin of your business; getting some clarity on where you are now, where you want to get to, and identifying the gaps we need to address to get you there as swiftly as possible.

Homework

Ideal working week

This is an exercise to determine what an ideal working week would look like for you, then we can work backwards from there.

Take a fresh piece of paper and decide what your ideal week looks like, this is what we are aiming for - it doesn’t need to reflect where you are right now. In an ideal world…

How many hours a week would you like to work?

How many a month?

Is there anything else you would like to factor into your week - would you like to be able to offer some pro bono work for example?

How fixed / flexible do you want to be in your week? Would you prefer to have specific weekly slots for things, or do you prefer to be able to be more flexible (so you can work around the family for example, possibly weekend and evenings?)

Income

What do you need to earn per month/ week?

What do you currently earn? What is the current breakdown of your income - clients, sales, services etc.

What would you like to earn? Think big!

What is the most profitable service you offer?

Is there anything you could offer that you don’t currently that you would like to and would increase your income? Do you need to up-skill in order for this to happen? If so, what are the skills you need?

Are you limited by the number of hours you have - do you sell time for money?

Is there another business model that would enable you to create some form of passive income that you don’t currently have?

What has to happen for your income to get to the ‘like to earn’ level?

Competitors

This will take some research. We want to find out who else is offering something similar to you in the current market. This is a case of doing some google searches and asking questions of people you know. If they were looking for a business like yours what where would they look? How would they go about finding someone? What are they googling?

Once you have spent some time researching it’s time to make a list of the top 10 other businesses that you have found that are offering something similar. We need their website addresses, with a little bit of info of how you perceive them to be different / better/worse that your business.

Whilst you are doing this research, if you find any other websites that you really like (even if they are not in your field) please start another running list of sites you like and why, we want to build up a picture of the styles that resonate with you and why. We will work on this more in the coming weeks.

Brand seasons words

Please download the attached pdf of brand words - we are going to start working with words first before any visuals. We need to get to the heart of your business and start choosing a brand season.

Please cross out the words that don’t feel right for your brand.

Remember this is not about your personal taste, but it’s about asking the question “do I want my business to be perceived as…(insert the word from the list)”

and “is that right for my brand?”

Once you have crossed out those that instinctively feel wrong, go back through the list again looking more closely at the remaining words and try to narrow these down further to around 10 - 20 words.