#090 Branding – Jay Wilkinson P2 (20:57)

In the second part of their conversation with Firespring CEO, Jay Wilkinson (www.Firespring.com), the QSR Nation crew discusses the finer points of marketing and then some great tips for the beginning entrepreneurs out there.

ANTHONY PIERCE:  And we’re back as we finish our conversation with Jay Wilkinson.

ANTHONY PIERCE:  Well, and then that leads us into the next question which is if you have a business that’s struggling with generating positive sales, what are some of the marketing tips and things that you would tell them to look for that can drive growth? Obviously, we don’t want artwork at this point, we want marketing strategies, so what would be something you could say if you’re struggling, these are some of the things that you need to be kind of gut-checking?

JAY WILKINSON:  Well, there are so many different tactics that people can use. One of my favorite resources or one of my favorite books of the last say ten years is the book called Traction, I don’t know if you’ve read that book, but in the book Traction they lay out 19 different channels that a business can use to get traction. Now, a lot of the channels are oriented towards online or technology businesses, so it talks a lot about blogs and search engine marketing and social and that kind of stuff, but there are a lot of channels that traditional companies overlook because they’re not a technology or an online company and they don’t think it’s for them, so there are some things, and I think the channel I’m trying to remember from my memory here, but I think they call it “unconventional PR.”

You’ve also heard it as “guerrilla marketing” and other things like that, but there are so many things that even a small business, a small franchise can do to create TOMA or top-of-mind-awareness about the organization, about the business, and the good thing is that most of these things don’t cost a lot of money. We sometimes think of them as publicity stunts or things like that, but they can be as simple as like sending hand-written notes to customers for a week and have everybody do it, or ask every customer that comes in, offer them a free high-five if they accept one, but of course some people are uncomfortable with that. It’s a more comfortable way of offering a hug, I guess.

BETH OUTZ:  A free hug with every purchase.

JAY WILKINSON:  Yeah, a free hug with every purchase, and there are people who would eat that up and take advantage of it, as long as there’s consent, it’s always good, but there are so many other kinds of things that people… I’ve seen franchises elevate awareness in their community by getting involved in speaking engagements at colleges and maybe high schools around town, where they put together a program.

There was a friend of mind that had a sushi restaurant in Austin, Texas, and he came up with a free sushi class that he offered as a lunch-and-learn for companies, and he offered it to Home Ec programs in schools, and they went out and it was crazy. His business grew like 30% in the year following when he started just doing that public outreach because he was connected with the community. He was educating the community in an area where he had expertise and where his business was known for, and it’s very simple, it’s just building community, and the best franchises that I see across the country are franchises that have a community connection.

Maybe they’re doing a coat drive once a year, and the newspaper can’t help themselves but do a little article about how they collected a thousand coats at this particular franchise restaurant, but they find a way to align themselves with a cause or a mission or a purpose that they’re passionate about, and then they just double or triple down on that and it creates awareness, and those kind of things, again, don’t cost money typically. It’s community engagement and finding ways to connect your product or service to the community, like the example of the free sushi rolling class, in a way that excites people about your brand or your product.

JOSH ANDERSON:  And how much brand loyalty does that build when someone is able to say, “Yes, I know that owner” or “I got to learn how to make sushi in this kitchen,” when they have friends come to town, they want to take them there because they feel not just educated on something that they were interested in before, but now they feel like they’re a part of that business? I mean the brand loyalty would just be through the roof, I would think, on a program like that.

JAY WILKINSON:  Yeah, it is. Again, it elevates, and I believe that one of the most important things, especially in the franchising space, is just building TOMA, that top-of-mind awareness. When people are at that critical point, which we all are every day, when you’re having a discussion with people around you, “Ah, what should I have for lunch today” or “where should I got today?”

My wife and I have this thing, we just kind of take turns, we rotate, one narrows and the other chooses, so we’ll say, “Is it your turn to narrow or choose?” Okay, I’m narrowing, so I’m picking three, three places that I know that I would like, and then she has to choose the one that she most wants to go to from my list. It expedites decision-making really quickly, which is really important.

ANTHONY PIERCE:  Yeah, I’m arguing with my wife all the time.

JAY WILKINSON:  Because if you just say, “Where should we go,” and you leave it at that, ten minutes later you’re still trying to figure it out.

ANTHONY PIERCE:  Oh, it doesn’t matter to me, you pick.

JAY WILKINSON:  Yeah, and there’s always that, and I preach on this, I believe that the most underrated characteristic is that of one who is willing to make a decision. It’s the most underrated characteristic of a good leader. So I taught my kids when they were really young, when someone says, “Where are we going for lunch,” drop anchor, make a suggestion.

JOSH ANDERSON:  Good advice.

JAY WILKINSON:  But that’s getting on a side point there, but the point with that is that especially in a restaurant or a product or a service, there has to be TOMA, top-of-mind awareness built, so that at the point when people are considering options, your business or your product comes to mind, and so I think there has to be so much work done in continually elevating the name of the organization, the name of the restaurant in the community, and these are the kinds of things, you know, getting out into the community and building it, and if it’s an option, building thought leadership around something.

I know a restaurant owner in California, in the Fresno area, that actually started a blog where he was going around to all of the – he didn’t do any in his own category, I think he was like a Tex-Mex restaurant, so he didn’t do others in his category – but he went around and started a blog essentially writing about his experience in other restaurants all around the community, and it became the most popular, I think it might still be the most popular blog in the community that people read when they’re thinking about food options, and it’s from a guy that owned a restaurant. So he obviously doesn’t talk about his own restaurant in his blog but everyone knows that he’s the owner of that restaurant, and his business, again, has gone through the roof because he’s built thought leadership around the food space in his community.

JOSH ANDERSON:  Right, that’s awesome, and that happen overnight for sure. It definitely takes time to do something like that.

JAY WILKINSON:  Yeah, it sure does, it would be essentially one year of at least one post a week to get there.

JOSH ANDERSON:  Yeah, wow, for sure. So now we’re getting towards the end here, I just came up with two questions off the top of my head so I’m going off script here, so I hope that’s okay with you. So for the upcoming year, what’s one marketing trend that you foresee is going to be coming down the line?

JAY WILKINSON:  One marketing trend for the next year, I think there’s going to be more clarity around… in fact, I’ve seen a lot of this happening already with businesses that are starting to gain more clarity around their marketing strategy through personas, and personas have been around for a long time. I’ve been doing them for more than a decade. So essentially it’s saying you’re going to take your marketing strategy, so you define your target market, your demographics and the psychographics of who it is that buys your products or service, be as clear as possible about that, and then look at your own customer base and just do a qualitative and quantitative analysis of who buys your product or service, and using that data put together anywhere from one to five personas and name them.

So, you know, this is Miguel. Miguel visits our restaurant four times a week typically over the lunch hour. Miguel has four kids at home and he’s typically doing takeout because his wife works two jobs, whatever. So you basically define and create a persona behind the ideal customers, the customers that are most likely to be attracted to the brand, because it’s so much easier now to build marketing and be focused on what it is that you’re doing with your marketing when you’re appealing to a persona as opposed to trying to appeal to all of your prospects. I’ve seen a growing trend in that, and I think it’s going to continue to escalate over the next year, really identifying the archetypes of a brand and the personas that those archetypes serve.

JOSH ANDERSON:  I think that’s awesome. I can definitely see that coming or being very popular or important on the upcoming year. Alright, and the last question I have for you, can you give us one book recommendation, it can be about anything, but what has really helped shape your marketing knowledge and your philosophy?

JAY WILKINSON:  Gosh, there are so many, hard to give one! In my mind, again, I mentioned this already, marketing to me is a story with strategy, and there are so many books that help really focus on the foundational element. You mentioned Simon Sinek earlier, his book Start With Why I think is a really important thing to read in getting that foundational element laid down, and there are so many books that are coming to mind that aren’t even marketing books that are just really understanding where the world is going right now and the massive changes that are coming down the pipeline, so like Bold by Peter Diamandis is a great read to really get a broad picture of where things are going, but specifically in the marketing area, I do think that the book that I just mentioned, it’s a book called Traction.

The name of the author is escaping, so my apologies, I don’t remember the author’s name. Now there are two books called Traction, and I’m a huge fan of both of them. One of them is a marketing book that I mentioned already that really reviews the 19 different channels you can use to get traction in your business, that’s the whole point behind it, and I think that book is just really modern. It really outlines the modern tactics that people are using. But then there’s another book called Traction, same exact name, by Gino Wickman, and that book is about creating the framework by which you can run or manage your business or franchise, and that book has probably been – I’ll drop the “probably” – that has been the most influential book that I’ve ever read in terms of allowing my business as an entrepreneur to grow and scale because it gave me the guiderails by which to manage a company as marketing focused company and it helped me understand the marketing strategy, again what I’m talking about with the demographics and the psychographics, the three uniques that really make us and our brand different.

You know, all of our competitors will probably have one of those three, some of them might have two of the three, but no competitor has all three, and by saying these are the three things that make us unique and then we apply those to our brand and marketing strategy, it’s brilliant, but it goes much deeper. The book Traction by Gino Wickman is a whole system for managing your company from the ground-up.

JOSH ANDERSON:  That’s great.

JAY WILKINSON:  Both of the books Traction, I think those are the ones I’ll go with.

JOSH ANDERSON:  Yeah, we’ll include that in the description of this podcast too, and I’ll look up the other author and I’ll include Gino in there as well.

ANTHONY PIERCE:  I just have another question for you in closing, unless anyone has something else, sorry. What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs – and when I say young, I’m not talking about their age, I’m talking about just getting into becoming an entrepreneur, like they’re taking that leap of faith, they’re going out and believing in themselves – what is your advice that if you just had someone sitting in front of you, what would you tell them?

JAY WILKINSON:  You know, it’s a tough life we choose as entrepreneurs, it’s not easy, and the truth of the matter is as an entrepreneur, you’re not in business for yourself, you’re not your own boss. All of a sudden, how many customers do you have and how many employees do you have, that’s how many bosses you have if you’re doing it right. It’s a mentality, as a leader of an entrepreneurial-led company, your people don’t serve you, you serve them, and starting with that framework that you are there to facilitate and empower and embolden the people around you to rise to the occasion.

I’ve seen that Steve Jobs’ quote flying all over the internet just in the last year, for some reason, the one about “I don’t hire smart people and tell them what to do, I hire smart so they can tell me what to do,” and that mentality of being a leader that is open and malleable and vulnerable to the world around you so that you can constantly learn and grow is critical. If I had to choose one word, I would use that word again that I mentioned earlier which is “vulnerability.” As an entrepreneur, the only way to build a brand, a business, a company in today’s world and to do it in the right way is to be vulnerable, is to be open and honest about your mistakes, to be willing to say “I’m sorry” when you mess up, to pull your team together when you’ve guided them or pushed them down the wrong path and say “I was wrong,” and just be willing constantly to regroup and refocus, but you do that with confidence and swagger.

You don’t do it with your tail between your legs and constantly saying “I’m sorry,” but it’s a combination of those factors, of confidence and swagger and vulnerability that makes an entrepreneur work in mind in today’s world.

ANTHONY PIERCE:  Awesome, yeah, great advice.

BETH OUTZ:  My question is kind of very similar to Anthony’s but it was basically if you had one piece of advice for those businesses who are struggling and those owners who are kind of at their wit’s end, and they don’t really know what they want to do but they know that they need to change their marketing tactics and figure out a new direction for their business and possibly go into that cause marketing and everything, what would be your suggestion for them to change their story brand line and just making sure that they get that message out there that they aren’t what they used to be but they are trying to go into a whole new direction for their future?

JAY WILKINSON:  Yeah, that’s a really, really important question, and I think it starts with just being willing to ask for help. I know a lot of business owners, in the past and even currently, who have struggled and are struggling and they’re just so proud, prideful people, they don’t want to admit they’re struggling, and I know so many of them that wow, they just went out of business, and these are people that I knew and I had no idea, and every time I would see them and say “how are things going,” they’d say “everything’s great, thanks.” I think there’s an important starting point in just being willing to ask for help.

The world will come to your aid if you’re open and honest about your situation, again, going back to the vulnerability thing, but ask for help is the starting point and then just be open to input, ideas, advice, direction. My experience, I’ve been at these places way back – this is a story for another discussion down the road – but way back in 2001 right after 9/11, my business just about folded up, I mean we should have closed down. Any sane person would have given up. I was actually fired as the CEO of my own company by my board of directors at the time because I had raised a bunch of money and then we couldn’t sell anything because the economy just went into the dumpster, and the thing that made it possible for me to rise up from the ashes in ’16 is because I pulled my team, all the people around me and I said, “Look, guys, we’re in a world of hurt here, we may not make it, and I’m just going to ask you openly and honestly for your help.”

We sat down over a period of several hours, several days, and strategized together, not just me telling them what to do but together coming up with a game plan and then slowly, month over month, we worked up and made it work and clawed back and recovered, and within three years we were wildly profitable and had bought the venture capitalists out, and it just changed my whole world to think about this concept that we’re all in this together, and the people that I work with in business, my follow team members, I don’t see them, again, as people here to serve me, I’m here to serve them, and anything that I can do to facilitate that, I focus on it every day. That’s the key to getting out of any position or hold that a business is in, in my opinion.

JOSH ANDERSON:  Powerful advice for sure.

BETH OUTZ:  Yeah.

ANTHONY PIERCE:  Absolutely.

JOSH ANDERSON:  Well, have you guys got anything else for Jay?

JOSH ANDERSON:  No, I just want to thank you for taking the time out of your very busy day to speak with us and so we can share this with the world and hopefully impact businesses everywhere, so thank you again for your time.

ANTHONY PIERCE:  Yeah, thank you.

JOSH ANDERSON:  For calling in from Nebraska and not Oklahoma.

JAY WILKINSON:  You’re very welcome.

JOSH ANDERSON:  And you guys can find Jay’s contact information, or at least his website, we’ll put that in the description, Firespring, so they can reach out to you there if they do have any questions, is that okay?

JAY WILKINSON:  That is fantastic, I appreciate it.

JOSH ANDERSON:  Well Jay, once again, thanks a lot, and for everybody listening to QSR Nation, from Josh, Beth, and Tony, and Grant next week, we’ll talk to you soon.

Listen to Part 1.

#089 Branding – Jay Wilkinson P1 (19:16)

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.