[JOE SANOK]
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 632.

Welcome to Practice of the Practice podcast. I am Joe Sanok, your host and today we’re going to be talking all about a really important question, about branding. But don’t forget that Next Level Practice is open right now. This is our membership community that is for you from that moment that you say to yourself, I want to start a private practice all the way until you’re making your first hire. I mean, we see such crazy results within this community of people leveling up their practice, of getting the clients that they want, getting the infrastructure built, and then quickly moving into Group Practice Launch and Group Practice Boss to grow group practices, oftentimes within six to 12 months of starting their practice. Of course those results are not guaranteed, my attorney makes sure I say that, but now we see it all the time. So if you want to join and read more, go over to practiceofthepractice.com/invite, or if you are just ready to sign up, go to practiceofthepractice.com/door, and you’ll sign up for that 99 bucks a month, and you are going to get access to our full e-course library. You’re going to get Ask the Expert, our small groups, all sorts of great things.

So today our question comes from Sabina Fisher and Sabina asks the question of how do you develop and maintain your company image brand and quality? How do you develop and maintain your company image brand and quality? Such a great question. Let’s just start with how most people do it. Most people throw a website up there. They don’t give much thought to their practice. Oftentimes those websites look as much like a funeral home as it does a counseling practice.

There’s a tree with a river going by it. It says, there’s hope for your family. Let’s just start with that. Your branding should be a reflection of who you are, of the excitement you have for therapy, of the outcomes you give. You should be able to through your branding, have a sense of who you are. My hope is that through Practice of the Practice or Thursday is the New Friday or all these other brands that in naming things in thinking about things it’s in a way that helps me to show that I’m different. By having events called Slow Down School or Killin’It Camp, it’s saying like, I’m not just your typical boring consultant. I would hope that’s the case. I don’t know for sure if that’s how you actually feel about it.

So when we think about branding there’s a couple things we want to think about first. We want to think about logo, design and color. So what is the aesthetic scene that you’re creating? Typically on your website and your branding you want to have mostly neutral colors. So pick, is that going to be sort of like the light gray, white, black neutral colors, or is it going to be sort of a little off white, like a hint of tan? Then in that you want to have one pop color that you use frequently. So with Thursday is the New Friday, we have sort of a salmon type color. With the Leave to Find podcast, we had sort of a, like light green that had a little mustard to it. With Practice of the Practice we have this teal color. So using that same color, you can look on color wheels and have the actual HTML code to pick your color that you’re always going to use.

So when you’re doing branding on your business cards, on your website, throughout, you want to try to have that be a consistent color. For me, that light blue of Practice of the Practice, I just love that color. So even my helmet for my bike is that color. Behind my podcasting wall of foam is that color. So it’s something that even though it’s not always on screen it’s something that I’m seeing regularly, because it’s just a color that I like, but it’s a color that pops as well.
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[JOE SANOK]
So also you want to think about even just the name of your practice or the overall image quality of your practice. So there’s a couple practices that come to mind that have really good branding. So Blue Boat Counseling down in Ohio, Andy and his wife created that. The story behind it is that Andy loves and loved the color blue as a child so much so that if he was at like the county fair, there’d be that little ride with the boats going around in a circle and if he were in line and the red boat was next, he would wait for the blue boat because he loved it that much. So the idea is that through counseling and our work going after those things that we absolutely love.

Or this guy Cortland has a practice called Little Red Telescope Counseling. He had a little red telescope when he was a kid and he would look at the stars and that idea of wonder and expanse comes into his practice. So finding things like that, that either in the name of your practice or in the story of your practice, that it can boost that branding is again, kind of at the beginning of what you’re thinking about when you’re developing your company image brand and quality.

So then you also want to have a few other things in regards to marketing your practice; having consistent font that you use across the board. So what’s the bold font that you’re going to use? What’s the non-bold font that you’re going to use, making sure that you’re very clear on your font package and on the color package and the images that you use. Do you usually have rounded corners on business cards or sharp corners on business cards? So having a sense of consistency across the board and even maybe having a Google folder that you can share with your whole team, just say, here are the fonts we use, here are the colors that we use. If anyone’s putting anything out into the community in regards to media, we have consistency here.

Also then if you have contractors that you’re contracting for your marketing in your social media, you can say here, here’s all the things that we’ve already decided in regards to our image and our fonts and our colors. So then it’s a matter of on an ongoing basis, making sure that there’s some quality control. So even recently I remember there was something that one of our consultants put out on Instagram and it didn’t match the image or branding that we typically do. I took a screenshot of it and I just asked Sam, our chief marketing person, did you design this? This looks way different than our typical design.

And we have a saying at Practice of the Practice to proceed until apprehended. I want people to lead with creativity and moving forward and knowing that I’d rather you get things done and not overthink it or worry about Joe being mad at about something being wrong and that we can always go back and change it if we need to move forward. So what had happened is Sam, getting ready for her maternity leave had a lot on her plate and this individual wanted to get some social media out there. That person then put it out there and did the best they could and we had a conversation about how we have specific fonts and specific colors and that if we can go through Sam, let’s go through Sam.

So that feedback side should be a regular part of your conversation because if it’s not, then it becomes a big sit down where it’s like, “Oh, I screwed up. You got to get feedback from Joe.” No, you want that to be a regular thing where you’re learning together. The idea is that we’re evolving and changing and getting smarter as both a company and as individuals. And when we take out just the ego side of that feedback and say it sounds like you were doing your best, it sounds like you wanted to get this image and promotion out there, sounds like Sam wasn’t available, sounds like you just did your very best. You proceeded until apprehended. I’m not apprehending you . I’m saying, here’s what we need to make sure.

If we’re going to be doing our own promotion of things, let’s use these fonts. Let’s use these colors. Let’s use, you know we have Canva templates for a million different things. Let’s give you access to those sorts of things so that if you need to last minute to create something, it can still match our brand. So to me, being gentle as much as we can and assuming positive intent from people while also setting clear boundaries around, you know we can’t put out crappy images over and over. Otherwise our brand is going to be affected as well.

So there’s a push and pull there that it’s just part of getting smarter. It’s not that anybody did it wrong. Every everyone’s pretty much for the most part in life trying our very best. So if we’re looking at overall having good quality control around our branding, more times than not it’s not going to be a ton of front end, front loading of here’s all the things we need to have around branding, but it’s going to be okay, we’re 80% of the way there. I’ve tried my best to make sure that you have all the information you need to do the branding for our practice, and we’re going to learn as we go, because we don’t want to be paralyzed by perfection and be so accurate that we’re not getting anything done.

We want to value that speed over accuracy that we know from our internal inclinations, because you’ve all obviously read Thursday is the new Friday. That whole chapter is about how speed over implementation or sorry, speed over accuracy, is where we want to be. So that is how you are going to do it when it comes to your branding and all of that.

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And we’ve got, actually in our next session tomorrow, I’m so excited, we have another Profit First professional. We’re going to be talking to Rocky about Profit First. So we’re talking money super deep. This, I remember this interview so amazing. Then after that, we’re talking with Gen Morley who grew 10 times in two years. Gen is an amazing person who’s been involved in Next Level Practice and Slow Down School, involved in Group Practice Boss. She’s been so invested in our community and has just absolutely exploded. So we’ve got some amazing shows coming up for you. Make sure you check those out.

I will talk to you soon. Thank you for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a good day.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.