Join the QSR Nation crew (minus Grant) as they talk to founder and CEO of Firespring (www.Firespring.com), Jay Wilkinson about branding and building a brand storyline. Books referenced: Traction by Geno Wickman and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.
JOSH ANDERSON: Hey everybody, welcome back to QSR Nation. As always, we have Josh, Beth, and Tony in the QSR Nation national headquarters or PFSbrands national headquarters in Holts Summit, Missouri. Grant is out today but he’ll be back next week. Today we’re honored to have Jay Wilkinson, the CEO and founder of Firespring. Jay, welcome to the podcast.
JAY WILKINSON: It’s my pleasure to be here, thanks for the invitation.
JOSH ANDERSON: Great, great. Now, do you just kind of want to tell us a little about your background and how you got to be where you’re at now?
JAY WILKINSON: Sure. I am a lifelong entrepreneur. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, like a lot of us weird people that think it’s cool to go out and fail over and over again. I started several companies, I think about eight companies by the time I graduated from college, and I finally settled on something that worked and it grew pretty fast. I moved to New York City and published a magazine there for several years, then I moved back to Nebraska.
I grew up in farm and ranch country in central Nebraska. My great-grandfather actually was a good friend of Buffalo Bill, that’s how far back we go there on the plains in Nebraska. Then I’ve been building ever since then, a software-as-a-service business and an interactive agency that helps mostly for-profit companies that are more focused on their why their than their what, impact or purpose-driven businesses, and then also large non-profit organizations. That’s where we focus.
JOSH ANDERSON: Awesome, so obviously Firespring is based in central Oklahoma then?
JAY WILKINSON: We are in…
JOSH ANDERSON: Oh sorry, Nebraska, sorry about that.
JAY WILKINSON: Lincoln, Nebraska, no, but central Oklahoma is like our arch nemesis in football for over a hundred years, so the best way to get right at it is to claim we’re Oklahomans.
JOSH ANDERSON: I’m glad I could do that to start the show.
BETH OUTZ: Yeah, now we’ve got everyone at ease, we’re good to go.
JOSH ANDERSON: So I know you’re doing a lot of work with businesses, like you said, in both non-profit and for-profits. One of the key things, obviously, for any business to be strong in is to have solid branding. Where do you think that you can give help to customers to know like where they need to take their branding to, how they need to build it from the ground up, and why it’s important to have solid branding for any business?
JAY WILKINSON: Yeah, I kind of see this as a core foundational exercise in who you are and what you stand for and why you are who you are as the first step to really establishing a compelling brand, and a brand that in 2018 and beyond people want to align themselves with, so what I’m talking about there is companies – again, going back to what I started with – companies that exist more for their why than their what, and it’s not something that you can just one day say, “Hey what, let’s come up with a brand that makes us look like we give tons back to the community or we care about the environment,” while you’re spewing sewage into the canal behind the business. It doesn’t work that way.
In today’s world with Glassdoor and everything else that exists for employees and for potential customers, tools like Yelp and others, you can’t hide. We’re all in glass houses. So in my opinion, the first step to establishing a solid brand is to start by looking in and starting from the inside-out, and making sure that we start by establishing a truly genuine and sincere principle that we’re here to make a difference, whatever that means for your brand or for your business, whether it’s in the lives of your employees or in the lives of the customers you serve or by elevating humanity in some way, whatever it is.
However your business product or brand helps the communities that you serve, we start there. I always believe that whenever we’re talking with someone about the process of branding and building a brand and a brand story, it always starts from the inside-out without question, and then and only then can you start to do the work on how to elevate that.
ANTHONY PIERCE: Well, that’s exactly point-on because if you really understand what your purpose is, not only can you build a stronger and better business but you build one that has longevity in mind and also one that attracts talent that want to be a part of that purpose.
JAY WILKINSON: Yes, absolutely, absolutely, and there are so many ways to do that. You can invite your customers and the advocates of your brand or your business to become part of your story, you can connect with them about the things that they care about and you can tell stories about the people you serve. There are so many ways to pull the important customers and the brand advocates into your brand story and so many ways you can do that, but it always starts with the why.
JOSH ANDERSON Yeah, that’s very Simon Sinek-y as well, he always talks about the why as well. I 100% agree. I also think, though, if you are a young entrepreneur starting up or you’re starting a new business, you’d better have that passion, that why behind you, because if you’re just focused on the what’s or the money at the end of the rainbow, you’re never going to stick through it through all those failures.
JAY WILKINSON: Yeah, I think despite what Mr. Wonderful says on Shark Tank, it is not all about the money and it’s not all about the profit, and I think the minute any client/ customer feels that your brand or your business is all about that, they are going to go another direction, and it’s becoming more and more evident every year that goes by.
I’m not a huge fan of making all the millennial distinctions, I think that we’re all humans, we all make decisions and have differences just based on where we grow up and the conditions we grow up in and all of those things, so I don’t say this is a millennial thing but again, every single year that goes by, we see this continue to elevate over and over and over again, the importance of companies and brands making sure that they are aligned with the positive outcomes that the people that they serve want to see.
JOSH ANDERSON: Well, we talked about in an earlier podcast a couple weeks back, we were kind of giving our predictions for 2019, and one thing we all talked about was authenticity, the strength and the power that that conveys with consumers as well as potential franchisees, but having that true purpose and that authentic approach to where you’re not just out there in it for the money because people, like you said, they sniff that out and then you lose brand loyalty, you lose consumers, and then people feel like they’re being used versus being a part of something.
JAY WILKINSON: Yeah, absolutely, and it’s kind of sad. I feel almost that the word “authenticity” has become so inundated in so many articles and discussions that it’s become more of a buzz word lately, and it’s sad because the concept or the essence behind what we mean by authenticity, it’s absolutely dead-on.
BETH OUTZ: So what are some of the pivotal aspects of building a brand storyline?
JAY WILKINSON: Well, the first aspect of building a brand storyline is being really clear as to what your foundational elements are. I’m a huge believer in the B Corporation movement, Conscious Capitalism, 1% for the Planet, the different types of alignments, because what that does is it helps from a consumer perspective identify the aspects of your brand that is in alignment with what they’re looking for, and so whether or not a company or an organization becomes a member of the Conscious Capitalism movement or 1% for the Planet or becomes a B Corp isn’t the important part.
It’s about the foundational elements of what those different movements stand for. So the first part of it to me is having a foundational story that makes it possible for people to really clearly identify what’s important to you, and then decide whether or not that’s in alignment with what they want. I’ll going you an example. You know, we’ve all heard about the TOMS Shoes example, “Buy one to give one,” we’ve all heard about all of the different aspects that businesses do where they give back to the community, whatever. Here at Firespring, our purpose as a business is to leverage our people, our products, and our profit as a force for good, and we do that by giving 1% of our profit, and actually we take 1% of our top-line revenue and we give it back to the Firespring Foundation which then supports nonprofits throughout our region; we give 2% of our products away by supporting at a very, very high level three – we call it our Power Three Program – three nonprofit organizations where we give hundreds of thousands dollars’ worth of support and marketing each year for those three, so we’re hyper focused on them; and then 3% of our people, and that’s done by having every single employee in our business, more than 200 of us at our headquarters, all, every one of them go out into the community and volunteer one full day every month to an organization that aligns with their personal mission, so we don’t tell them who to volunteer for, they go choose something that aligns with them personally.
But the point behind that is we have a story and a starting point where we can share our Power Three and it’s going to resonate with certain people, with the clients we serve, and it gives us a framework and the guiderails by which we can take that story and elevate it in so many directions, so many different ways. So I think having a foundational description of the purpose of the business or the organization that’s expressed in a way that is easy to understand, and then all of the other things that we do for marketing and extending awareness about our products and services to others is going to obviously incorporate that baseline foundational element of our purpose.
BETH OUTZ: You know, I think one thing that is very important just to mention is that not only should the entrepreneur have that mission in mind and knowing exactly what they want to do and bring back to the community, but making sure that you’re bringing onboard all of the people that are going to support that mission, because not only is the owner going to be the whole visibility of what that mission is, but you need to have all the other voices that are going to be able to support you and be able to get that message out as well, because a lot of times they’re going to be the ones that are going to be out in the community, they’re going to be the ones that are going to be talking about your brand. So you have to make sure that you do find those brand advocates that are going to be helping you in the future, and just like you said earlier about the glass door, making sure that everyone understands what that core purpose is.
JAY WILKINSON: Um-hum, absolutely, absolutely.
ANTHONY PIERCE: So how do you take that model then and transfer that into say like a franchise branding to where you can feel like whether it’s a Champs Chicken or McDonalds or a Taco Bell, like in our industry of the foodservice side, how do we convey how we are supporting our mission, our purpose to the consumer so that they can really feel like they are a part of something greater than just a purchase?
JAY WILKINSON: I think far too often – by the way, I own franchises and it was how I got my start with the business we’re in now, I owned printing franchises through Alphagrahics – and I will tell you, the number one thing that I did that separated my franchise from the pack, so to speak, from a marketing perspective is I’m a huge believer in the concept of R&D, which obviously stands for Rip-off and Duplicate, and I’ll share with you, when I started up my franchise, this is all the way back in the nineties, and I’m saying that for context, it was before the internet or before Al Gore made it what it is today, and I was out and I got in my car and I traveled all across the United States and I visited more than a hundred fellow franchise owners in my system, all people that were part of the Alphagraphics network at the time.
I walked in cold, I didn’t tell them I was coming, I just walked in and said, “Is the owner or manager around,” and I introduced myself. Every single place where I went all around the country over the course of about two months, took a meeting, they all gave me half an hour of their time, and I just asked, them, “What’s the best thing you’ve done? What’s worked and what hasn’t?” And then just going through that process of what hasn’t worked. “If you could go back to the beginning and start over, what would you do differently?” So I did all this, and this was in the three months leading up to my opening as a store. My business, my Alphagraphics store ended up being the fastest-growing Alphagraphics franchise in history.
It hit a million dollars in recurring or in annualized revenue I should say faster than any store in that franchise’s history – I’m sure it’s been beaten by now, this was a lot time ago – but I attribute 100% of that to the fact, like my grandmother used to say, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason, listen.” And this whole prospect of just learning best practices from others, I think too many of us think, well, we need to innovate, we need to create something out of thin air, we need to make something up, and I don’t believe that that’s necessary. So fast forward to what I do today with the franchises that I still have, my brothers and I have several restaurant franchises, Taco Bell and KFC and some brands like that, and we can differentiate our stores number one by making a very deliberate effort to change the customer experience inside the store, number one, make sure that every single team member feels pride in being part of that store, and we are constantly trying to compare ourselves to how other stores in our system are doing so that our team members know that they stand head and shoulders above the examples set in other areas, and just think if an entire franchise network had that kind of alignment, and there are some that do.
You can go to Chick-fil-A and get a really good example of how the vast majority of their franchisees elevate the employee experience which in turn elevates the customer experience, and it doesn’t cost that much more money to do it but just the in-store feeling that people have when they walk into a place where the team members really care about the work that they’re doing rather than just punching the clock and over on their phone in the corner are trying to play Minecraft or something. It’s fascinating how much strong leadership will do, so I always go back to operational issues first being marketing because that’s the foundation of good marketing is starting with what happens with the experience inside.
JOSH ANDERSON: I think that’s great advice, and this is kind of off topic, but it comes back to the leadership. I’m currently reading Extreme Ownership right now, and it’s amazing how much leadership can really drive those employees to be better just through watching you be a great leader.
JAY WILKINSON: Yeah, and another thing too is I think that – going back to that concept of the brand story – but making customers the hero of the story rather than making yourself the hero of the story is a key component of a good brand strategy, so that means that we make clients and customers that buy our products and services, we figure out in our marketing efforts how to make them the hero because that’s what appeals to them, rather than trying to make us or our business or our people on our end the hero, and there’s a lot of lessons because people, it resonates with them and they can put themselves in those shoes.
I would say that story without strategy is art, and story with strategy is marketing, so if you’re thinking about telling stories and you have a strategy behind it, that’s what marketing is, it’s exactly what marketing is. It becomes an art piece or a movie or something if you don’t have strategy behind it, but once you put strategy behind the story, that’s what marketing is.
JOSH ANDERSON: Join us next week as we finish our conversation with Jay Wilkinson.
Listen to Part 2.