Local Market Monopoly

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Daniel Blaho: We've got our idea here. Now we need to propagate it out to each one of these things. What's our messaging strategy going to be? What's our go-to market strategy going to be? How does it tie back to the brand? How are we going to manage the brand internally? What's our brand management strategy? How's that going to be communicated to stakeholders and employees? All of those things, that communication plan, all of those things are important to kind of line out tactically how you're going to do that.

Intro: You are listening to Local Market Monopoly with Clarence Fisher uncovering the tools, tactics, and strategies the most successful small businesses use to dominate their local market and own the block.

Clarence Fisher: Alright, welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. Clarence Fisher, your host, of course, and my guest today I had to reach out to because I keep getting these questions about things that I don't really know much about. And what I like to do is what I'm thinking about doing a podcast episode. This is how it goes. This is how it goes. I'm sitting, I am dreaming what would help you, our listener here. And then I'm like, yeah, I do a podcast about that. Oh yeah, and a podcast about that. And then the next question, this is when it gets, you wouldn't think that a person would do this, but I go, am I really the best person to talk to you about this? Normally people would be like, yeah, I know everything, but I don't. So I bring in people who know more about what I feel like will help you than I do. And that's why we brought in when we're talking about branding here today, brought in my buddy Daniel Blaho. Daniel, say hello.

Daniel Blaho: Hello. Thank you so much for having me on. This is exciting to get on this show with you. We recorded one years ago and I'm excited to be back.

Clarence Fisher: And what's so crazy, man is, I was trying to think, we met just a second. I'm going to ask you to let everybody know a bit about you, your background and all that stuff. But going back to that, it always strips me out when I passed the building downtown where I met you 14, I don't know, 14 years ago we were at a booth and we happened to be like the career fair. It was a career fair for community college. Remember it was TCC, something like career college and it was downtown. And I remember I was like, it was a free event. We did it for free. We were there to answer questions for very new people. And I remember, I don't want to do a free event. Anyway, I went and they had us all set up and my little table, they had two of us to a table and you were my neighbor.

Daniel Blaho: Yep. Yeah, I was there representing the Bridge Coworking at the time. Yeah, we were like, I think what may have been maybe not, I don't know.

Clarence Fisher: I thought you were representing you and the websites and all that stuff

Daniel Blaho: That may have been have been the case. Yeah, I think it was a job fair or for entrepreneurs or something like that. New entrepreneurs. Yeah. We had all the vendors out there

Clarence Fisher: And they were supposed to come.

Daniel Blaho: I was there talking

Clarence Fisher: About, yeah, yeah. They were supposed to come by and ask us questions and back then I was not the free giving spirit that am now. I know somebody's listening, like he said he wasn't going to a free event. Now I give away almost everything. So I did kind of change and leave, but at that point I wrongfully did just, I don't know. But I met you that day. And I remember also when I left, I don't know why this happened, but it was downtown and it was like, this is before they widened the streets and somebody had clipped my mirror off my car. It was ridiculous. So it was beyond free for me. It cost me 500 bucks.

Daniel Blaho: It cost you money to get there,

Clarence Fisher: But we've been cool since that time and you've held it solid. When I went to the bridge and had the whiteboard room and all this stuff, it was just really cool. So I know firsthand how totally awesome you are with branding and with websites, but could you share a little bit about you, where you're from? How do you get to where you are now? Right now? What do you do?

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, so for me, the path was always going to be something creative. I was the kid in the back of the classroom playing with markers when I was supposed to be doing my English exercises, surely English or whatever it was at the time. I was sitting there drawing 'em, doodling and stuff like that. Always was creative, the creative person and art classes, music classes. And so when it came time to decide what I wanted to do with my life and what I was going to go into, architecture was actually my first path. I have this weird mix of technical brain with creativity and it was like, okay, cool, architecture sounds like the plan. That wasn't the plan. But wound up finding my way into graphic design from in my college path, got a degree in visual communications and came out as a freelance graphic designer.
And one of the first things I noticed whenever somebody would come to me for the graphic design project or a logo for that, I'm like, tell me about your company. What does it do? And having that conversation, especially with small business owners, sparked something in me because these people like, well, we have this product and this is what we do and we serve these types of people. It's like, cool, can you give me a little bit more to that? What's the story behind this? How am I going to tie this visual to what people do? And so it was at that point, I was 23 years old or something like that would've been 13, 14 years ago or something. I started kind of developing my own exercises when I would get a logo project to help people develop their story behind what they were doing. And I didn't even realize what I was doing was putting together a branding process. And then once I kind of started to figure that out, and as I developed my skills as far as marketing and websites and things like that, it always came back to that brand first approach. So it all started with just design and logos for people and trying to get as much information out of 'em as I could to make the end product better. But then it all comes back to that messaging at the start.

Clarence Fisher: That's very interesting. Have you read the book Built to Sale by John Warlow? Are you familiar with that book?

Daniel Blaho: I'm trying to think if I started that book. I have not read it all the way through. I think it's on my bookshelf. It has been on my reading list for a while,

Clarence Fisher: But well, most entrepreneurs, I mean we got books everywhere. I've got books on an ice stand, there's everywhere.

Daniel Blaho: Books given to us.

Clarence Fisher: Yeah, recommended. Yeah. But in that it's a fictitious story and those who have not read it, I recommend that you go get it and read a chapter or two and then you can put it down like everybody else does. No, but read the book. It's a really good book. And the premise of it is always have your business ready to sell even if you don't want to sell. But it's making these processes and he makes the point that you can even have a process for a creative type business. And in that, the fictitious company is a business that does logos and he walks through how to do that. And I bring that up just because you are like the real life, have already done it and have this brand, like you say, brand first approach, but also the process and how to get the thoughts, which is just super incredible to me. And it's why we stopped doing websites is because I was not very good at getting the thought out of a client's head and then formulated and onto the page age. Right. But that's what you have figured out.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, and it's funny that you mention it that way because I would say that's probably, I hate talking about myself like this, but it's probably my best gift is to be able to take my brain works in the abstract. That's just how I think I'm always, but I'm very good at taking those abstract concepts and building constructs around it, building processes and systems around those abstract ideas. And a lot of that comes with that of ideas from a client and asking the right questions and walking 'em through a process. And it's a process that I developed.

Clarence Fisher: So what would you say, what advice would you give someone who's brand new to saying that to develop their brand or they want to say rebrand or their product or service? What's the first thing that we need to do here

Daniel Blaho: To put it really basically, you can always go back to visit Simon Sinek. Start with why. Start with you do something. But that's pretty ominous for a lot of business owners. I don't to make money. Why do I do what I do? So it's really about bringing storytelling and empathy into what you do, giving purpose behind what you do. So what happens a lot of times is business owners aren't thinking about why is that I do what I do and it can be selfish intent myself. I really like freedom. I like being out on my own and finding my own stability, and that's what it is for that. That's my driving force. So really trying to figure out those values behind the person. So think about your core values of what really do you stand for? What's your purpose? And not only that, but what makes you different?
I mean, of course, that's also a very hard question to answer for a lot of people is you're a carpenter and you've got six other options in town that are hitting your same price point. How and why are you different? A lot of people will go to, it's all about giving the best service. And it's like, well, that's great. It is good to give good service and that can be a brand pillar, but what kind of, why is your service better? So we're always going back to that why question, just dig down and dig down. And what I've found is a lot of business owners will kind of discover something about themselves through that process. They'll say, well, I didn't ever think about it that way, but yeah, that is why I do this.

Clarence Fisher: How long does that take?

Daniel Blaho: So I've done, it normally comes down to how many stakeholders there are. For instance, I've done a brandy project for local credit union, and that one took I think six months for us to go through the whole branding process. And we were doing multiple full day workshops and things like that. But then just going through some simple frameworks and questionnaires with single business owners or sole proprietors, that can be a two hour, four hour workshop. And we have a lot of clarity coming out of that. Typically, normally some homework, it's normally a two-parter. But yeah, getting in and workshopping these things, whiteboarding them out, helping them walk through, what is it? What's your secret sauce that makes you, doesn't even necessarily need to make it better because you can't sell to everybody, and we just want to know what's going to get people to connect with you specifically. And then that leads into marketing messaging and all that kind of stuff.

Clarence Fisher: Very cool. And that to me, when you're saying that, I'm imagining y'all at the bridge workspace where he's at, there was this whiteboard room. Is there still the whiteboard room there

Daniel Blaho: Or Yeah, the strategy room. Yeah,

Daniel Blaho: Strategy room. Still everyone's favorite.

Clarence Fisher: Love it. It's like whiteboards everywhere.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah.

Clarence Fisher: And is it okay that I shared your location?

Daniel Blaho: Oh yeah, sure.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. Alright, cool. I can take that out, which is nice.

Daniel Blaho: I mean, I'm not here every day, so it's not like don't drop in

Clarence Fisher: All of a sudden. Helicopters are, we got him. We got him,

Daniel Blaho: Got, that's funny.

Clarence Fisher: All right. Collect my reward,

Daniel Blaho: Right?

Clarence Fisher: All right, so we've got to start with you didn't know it was going to be nuts today. I know all. So start with why, and then, alright, and then we've got that. You're digging into that and we're like, Hey man, I did not even know that about myself and my wife says I did. But then we go to number two. What is that? What's the next step?

Daniel Blaho: So once you kind of get that foundation of like, okay, this is really what I stand for, why I do things, whether that be a committee, a board, in the case of that credit union I was talking about, or a solo business owner, we establish what do we stand for? What are we wanting to develop, where are we going? We start with that vision, that basis, and then we typically expand into other parts. So I've got this brand map that I bust out in these workshops and it kind of has all the different parts that would be your brand. Of course you've got the visual side, your logo, your branded material, the patterns you use, the textures you use, make sure the colors that you use are all standardized and defining those. So really it's about starting with that why the philosophy behind what you do.
And then it's building is documenting the tangibles around it. Okay, we've got our idea here. Now we need to propagate it out to each one of these things. What's our messaging strategy going to be? What's our go-to-market strategy going to be? How does it tie back to the brand? How are we going to manage the brand internally? What's our brand management strategy? How's that going to be communicated to stakeholders and employees? All of those things, a communication plan, all of those things are important to kind of line out tactically how you're going to do that. And of course that's a lot more important to get that detailed on a larger organization. A solo business owner could kind of do that through time focusing on, okay, I've got enough money to start to get a website going and do some online advertising. And so they were want to make sure that their brand is baked into their product offering or their service offering to form a messaging strategy that's only going to help people convert on a website better. It's going to raise your conversion rates across the board whenever you have a really good offering. And that I'm sure,

Clarence Fisher: Well, just

Daniel Blaho: How important that cost is,

Clarence Fisher: It helps. But I also know that the majority of us do not take the time to do this. Me included. We started Local Market Monopoly, I don't know, years ago, and it started picking up traction, like the podcast and all that stuff started picking up traction. And it's still like, I know we need to brand, I know we need to go back and get things together, but if you look at an email and then you look at an ad or you look at this, then it could be different. You can find a different L at the front of Local Market. You know what I mean? Local Market Monopoly, depending on how I felt that day, and it should not be that way really, everything should be the same, but I just feel like a lot of super and quick starts like myself, we quick starts and we're off, we're gone. And to say, Hey, pull back and let's start with why. And then let's think. Do you run into any pushback on super entrepreneurs that are like, dude, let's just go make some money. Sales sale, sale.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, absolutely. And I've taken those projects on before where it's especially with an entrepreneur, like a startup or something like that, which is full transparency, not my specialty, the entrepreneurial, the startup community for this reason, a lot of times they've got a certain amount of money. It's like we have to build a website and get this going. We don't have time to get bogged down in the messaging and stuff like that. So a lot of times what I would stress in those cases go simple, then keep it as simple as possible with a buyer. Be future thinking because you're going to have to revamp this at some point without a go-to market strategy in place and a messaging strategy. You're going to have to revisit some of these things at some point.

Clarence Fisher: Yeah, I think we did that too. Went super simple with the white, the block letters and then the circle around it or rectangle around it and like, okay, go with that. We'll come back later. And I know that on a local level, we should have earthy tones and stuff that connects more with community and we stand for grassroots marketing and all that stuff. See, I'm telling you right now, probably after this we need to get together so then we can just go ahead and make this happen. But, and so it really amazes me how when you say the tactical things and the textures and all that stuff, again, how you can translate the why into those. I'm just amazed at how you're able to do that. And so now that we've had that going where you take us next,

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, so I think, and I probably missed a little bit of a step with the why, but also formulating a brand promise. What is your promise to your clients that you're doing? Sometimes that can come out of the first exploration of like, okay, we know why we do. This is what we're stand for now. What's our promise to our market? What's the itch we're scratching? How are we going to fulfill? Because the fastest way to build brand loyalty is fulfilling a promise. The fastest way to break brand loyalty and lose customers is to break brand promise. So really standing by that goes back to what you stand for. And then with that brand promise, then building copy and marketing content and all that kind of stuff around it starts to become more fluid. You have something guiding what's the ideas, the thoughts behind it, this is what we stand for, this is our brand. Now that makes one of the main things that people always struggle with is writing copy for the website. I don't know how to write website content.
How do you even start here? And self-promotion is always hard. I struggle with it. And having this construct behind it will always help produce better results at the end as far as content goes. And then it's all about propagating it out to all of your marketing channels at that point, including it in a marketing plan. I'm shocked at how many businesses do not have a written marketing plan. No one always crazy me or a budget, a marketing budget. So you get into these things and that those brain nuts need to be existing in the marketing strategy. And a lot of companies will put it into their culture strategy. This is what we stand for, and we also want to communicate that to our employees because we're culture and operations and marketing all overlap. That's your brand right there in the center of it. So it's who you are.

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I understand now what you meant earlier when you said you had these workshops and they are multiple days workshops, because when you said that, I was thinking, really, but now I get it. You have to have that in order to get all of this stuff out.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, I mean, sure, I can develop a logo for somebody that can look great, but will it match who they are and who they're going for? So at the very least, I would do a discovery, an hour or two long discovery to really understand who they're talking to. If I don't know who I'm showing this logo to, at the end of the day, I don't know what it looks like. And then we're just going off of subjective preferences at that point, and we want to make it as we're trying to take something very abstract and creative and make it as objective as possible through this process essentially.

Clarence Fisher: So does the logo, when you get the logo done, does that give you the basis of rolling into what the brochures and the ads and all of that stuff's going to look like?

Daniel Blaho: Oh yeah. Typically that's what I would include in the branding package or something like that if they need it. So if it's a brand new company, yeah, sure, you need some business cards and we can design layout your email signature, all your basic stuff. But that has gone all the way through preparing multiple brochures and overviews of what these businesses do all the way through. We're doing a logo and we're doing these brochures and we're doing the website, helping them manage that rebrand all the way through or a new brand all the way through. I've forgotten what your original question was. It was, well,

Clarence Fisher: That website rolls. I mean that logo and you answered it, that logo rolls into, I'm always curious how the art actually gets done. And I know you've been doing this before AI became as big as it is now, and clearly we're still at the beginning of AI, but when you have these images and you're telling mid Journey or something to create these images, they still look very AIish. Are you using Photoshop or how do you get the images together?

Daniel Blaho: So a lot of times it just starts with hand sketches. So we're going all the way back to the basics, and I'll sit there with a sketch pad and just doodle ideas for say, an hour. I'll just force myself to sit and doodle for an hour around these ideas. From there, then it goes into Illustrator. We always want to have a vector version of your logo illustrator. And so yeah, I take that into Illustrator and I typically design in black and white, unless we've already got a color palette, but typically I would want to get the visual of the logo done before we really get into color theory and all that kind of stuff. But a lot of times these brands already have established colors. We just need to make sure that they're documented and consistent. And so that's the case a lot of times. Sometimes I'll make a recommendation for new color to bring in as an accent or something like that. And I think going back to the why, starting with why there always has to be purpose behind these things. Why does it look the way it does? Why are we using this color? So just because it's popular in industry or does that actually mean something to your brand? Can it mean something to your brand? Can we tie it to something?
Giving purpose and intentionality behind everything you do is only going to help the end brand visually, especially.

Clarence Fisher: What do you feel like are some of the pitfalls or mistakes that people make when it comes to creating either their logos or their brand? I know one is not starting with the why. What other biggest mistakes do you think people make?

Daniel Blaho: Just going to Fiverr or 99 designs? No, I'm just kidding. You

Clarence Fisher: Can actually

Daniel Blaho: Get a decent product out of those kind of platforms I've found. But

Clarence Fisher: How we got to say, okay, but because

Daniel Blaho: You're not going to be the only one with that logo, somebody else is going to have your

Clarence Fisher: Same, okay, lemme tell you a quick story. You're going to laugh your butt off because for I can't a client, oh, this was years ago. I got a logo from Fiverr. Okay. I think it was a client, no, may have been us. Okay. Anyway, back when arbitrage was the thing, you and I, we've talked about how crazy the internet was in the very beginning, We discovered Fiverr before everybody else, the business owners knew about Fiverr, and so we're kind of arbitraging this stuff like, oh, you need a logo? All right, cool. Go to Fiverr. Anyway, purchase this logo. That's what it was. It was for us. It was for a project that we had that we launched, and the guy came back to me, Daniel, this is, I don't know, five years later, and he was trying to upsell me the license to use the logo that I paid for five years ago. And I'm like, dude, whatcha talking about I paid you so that I could use this logo? And he's like, oh, but you could use it only in one spot. Well, sorry, that project's not alive anymore, but he is trying to charge me a couple of hundred other dollars. I'm like, oh, this is so Fiverr.

Daniel Blaho: Heck? It's dirty. And I've heard of that happening on a larger scale too. So yeah, my proposals stated very clearly that this becomes your property upon final payment, because that happens in our industry. We're like, oh yeah, we didn't tell you about the licensing part of this, but

Clarence Fisher: It should be understood. I paid you for the work. And so I would get to where I would, it was so cheap that I would hire five different people because you get the logo where it's a stick figure and you're like, what the heck did they do? And this one looks like Ms. Pacman. I don't know. It was, I've got some fiber stories, but So you're saying that's a mistake. I can agree with

Daniel Blaho: You. Oh yeah. We're going back to pitfalls. Yeah,

Clarence Fisher: I can agree with you. I'm surprised you said 99 designs though, isn't that 99 designs, you get 50 or 60 designers working for you. Now, I do agree that you have to do a lot more work because you have to give remarks or comments on all these different designs, but what do you see the downfall of nine 99 designs?

Daniel Blaho: I mean, just for me, ethically, I have a problem with it of people taking advantage of designers like that where they're working for free most of the time until they get one of their designs picked up. But same case there, you may wind up because those people are just trying to churn out logos as fast as they possibly can. They're using icon libraries, and it's very possible that you wind up with a logo that looks very close to somebody else,

Clarence Fisher: And then you can get into a situation.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, and then the other pitfall I always make sure people are looking out with is try to be as objective as possible. I kind of mentioned this in the branding process as a whole, but it's not necessarily about what you like. It's about what's going to respond or what's going to get your market to respond, what's going to communicate well with your market, with your audience. It's so important to think about who you're talking to with any kind of, it doesn't even have to be marketing. It's not like you would go into a party and just start shouting things. You've got to warm that audience got to. You want a good first impression. We want to make sure that, I always tell clients you're building a brand whether you realize it or not. So it's probably good that you try to control it.

Clarence Fisher: That is good. Can you share one or two of your favorite resources, which is not Fiverr or Designs or not maybe?

Daniel Blaho: Yeah. I mean, if people are wanting to go to an online resource, they just maybe can't find anything that anybody locally or something like that to work with. I always suggest Upwork. I've used it for years on the employer side, finding talent and finding contractors. I think it's a great platform, and it's not taking advantage of the freelancers by any means. I mean, it kind of isn't from the financial side, but they've gotten a little bit better over the years. But yeah, I would say Upwork would probably be, it was formerly E-Lance way back in the day.

Clarence Fisher: Oh, Elancer, you're an og if you know about Elance.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, that's actually where I started freelancing was I started

Clarence Fisher: Really?

Daniel Blaho: Back in 2009, 2008. Wow. Somewhere in that.

Clarence Fisher: So did you find it, I've always wondered what it's like to, because even some of the digital marketing gurus recommend, Hey, if you're just starting out, go jump on Elancer or something and offer your services that way. So from the other side, was it pretty simple, pretty fruitful?

Daniel Blaho: Yeah. I mean, from the freelancer side, it's very hard to get started. You just have to be diligent and just fire out as many proposals as possible. But we're not talking about the freelancer side. From the business side, I love it because I'll post a gig or a project or something up there and an hour later I've got 30 proposals, but I've got 30 people have applied to work for it. That's why it's hard from the freelancing side, but from the employer side, I've got portfolios to look at. I've got full blown proposal from each one of these people. I can do this for this price, and it's a good open market, and you control from the employer side you control. Do you want it to be a US-based talent? Do you want, what expertise level do you want to go for? What's your budget range? So the freelancers have an idea before they waste any time putting out a proposal, but they having a good job description in there of exactly what you're looking for, almost like you're prompting AI. I thought about this the other day, and I was like, it kind of feels like I'm prompting AI. That's really important part of it. It'll just get passed up by some of the better talent on Upwork if it's not well put together on the request.

Clarence Fisher: I think there's also too, I know someone's listening right now and they're saying, well, why would he share those resources? And just as a person who, I use Upwork as well, and we have people who are on the team, which is really cool. One of our team members been with me yesterday, we found out for seven years she's been with me. Yeah, crazy. But we also have people on Upwork. It just doesn't make sense to hire full-time for all of these positions that we need. But for the person that is saying, well, why would Daniel say that is, I still find that, as you said, you have to know what you're looking for on the platform and go through all of those proposals and also manage the talent. Once you decide on where you're going to take the chance, it's different than hiring you where you have the process already worked out. You know what I mean? There's still a major, major benefit on hiring you versus going to Upwork. The way I look at it's, if I go to Upwork, I've got an employee, I've got to try to get what I want. When I'm hiring the expert, I'm hiring you. I'm basically hiring you and I'm showing up for the workshop.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, I mean, a lot of times I always say that's a good resource for somebody that's specifically on a budget, maybe full transparency. I'm probably outside of some of that. My fees would probably be outside of budget for some of those people.

Clarence Fisher: Nothing wrong with that brother. Nothing wrong with that.

Daniel Blaho: I would say I'll probably get you a better end product, but is it always necessary for your business if you're like a solo electrician that's just out there running and gunning, do you really need a full branding process before you're even ready to hire? They are electricians and stuff. I'm like, no, probably not. It doesn't make sense to work with me at that point. Now, whenever you start wanting to scale and reach a larger audience and things like that, then yeah, it definitely makes more sense to work with somebody that can come in from a consultative approach.

Clarence Fisher: Or if you, you're launching a side service or something like that, that you're brand service. Yeah, you're experimenting with that would be good. So where do you think people need to be? I know you mentioned startups, and we don't work with startups anymore either. And the main point is, the main reason is because the pivot is so hard and so quick, and you just don't know what's happening from week to week. So where do you feel like a business needs to be before they can, the way that I feel about you, and this is not going to get mushy, bro, just because I said the way that I feel about you, but is you will help direct people in the right direction

Daniel Blaho: Absolutely.

Clarence Fisher: If they call you, right?

Daniel Blaho: Yeah.

Clarence Fisher: But when does it make sense for you to work with a company yourself?

Daniel Blaho: I think typically, I mean, it ranges all over the place. I don't know that I even know how to answer that. I mean, I've had clients come in where they're producing $200,000 a year, and they're like, they've got to get a brand together in a really competitive market. So I would think the competition level definitely dictates a lot of that. If you're in a highly competitive market and you have a lot of competition and you're trying to compete online, having a well put together brand is important at that point. But then you've got manufacturing companies even here in Tulsa that haven't done a bit of branding work or website work or anything, and they're multimillion dollar operations. So I think it really doesn't, isn't dictate as much by budget or price as it is by position in the market and what the market dictates.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. That makes sense. When you say 200, I mean, that's about where we're at too, is about 250 and not us, but what the client is bringing in, that's for done for you type stuff, but there's also products and stuff for people who aren't doing that. Okay. So that's cool. As we're closing out, what do you feel like, man, you've already given some resources there. We've gone through the process. Is there anything that we're missing from the process? I know there's a lot. Oh,

Daniel Blaho: Probably. Yes.
Yeah, I think there's a whole other part of this, of how branding pertains not just to marketing, but also operations and culture. Think it's just important to remember your brand as the personality of the business. If the business was a person, what would their personality be? And so I think it's important to look at it through that perspective or that lens, rather than saying, because it's very easy to dismiss branding as like, oh, that's just a way for marketers to make more money off of you. But whenever you see brand loyalty translate into dollars and cents, it's real stuff. I always caution people to maybe realign that perspective. A little bit of this branding is just marketing voodoo and doesn't result in anything. It's a long-term strategy. It's something that you're going to build on for years,

Clarence Fisher: But it's so awesome when people can see your brand and apps and connect with who you are immediately. That happens with M&Ms or FedEx or, I mean, you get that Coke, you can see it in any color, and you connect with it immediately. Like you said, what the brand promise is. That's the crazy thing, and I'm pulling that from this conversation as well, is I would love for people to be able to see the name and connect with what the promise is.

Daniel Blaho: Absolutely.

Clarence Fisher: I mean, you can't get better than that.

Daniel Blaho: No. If you can tell me what your promise is to your clients already. Oh, cool. We're way further down the process than some.

Clarence Fisher: You've got a, so wrap it up. What do you feel like people should do in the next, okay, next 90 days? How do I look into my brand here and see whether I need to do something about it or if I'm okay? Or is that just a conversation?

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, I think that's just a conversation at the end of the day. But there's so many resources out there, online blog posts and stuff that walk through some really decent branding processes and just exploring and educating yourself on what branding means, how to define your values and your brand purpose and your brand promise, and what's your strategy for building brand loyalty. And all those things can be done at different business levels from small businesses, of course, all the way to enterprise. We know the big brands, but applying those same methodologies to small, so to answer the question, researching kind of the methodologies behind branding, I think is get out there and educate yourself is a really good way to start to see, okay, well, I think I'm actually doing better than I thought. Or, Ooh, I might actually have some work to do on this brand. I've never even thought about it that way. If that kind of intuition or gut feel is coming to a business owner, then it might be time to have a conversation with somebody. But other than that, but back to your point, I just like helping people. So at the end of the day, even if I can't help 'em, I just want to be able to point them in the right direction.

Clarence Fisher: And I love that about you. You've been a help to me since 14 years ago that you can't even remember that day. And it has always stuck with me to the point, I didn't even know how I ended up at Bridge. It had to be you, but you were super helpful, even just that day, and we had a really great conversation about branding and websites. We didn't get into websites today, but it just amazes me how talented you are with that. And it's like, oh, I'll just whip this up. And I'm like, what the,

Daniel Blaho: My personal website that was like, Hey, I just put this together this week.

Clarence Fisher: I'm like, what? Again? It's stuff like that where I saw a clip the other day on Facebook where this fighter was going out to fight Mike Tyson, and after the first round, he went back to the corner and said, I'm not going back out. And his corner is like, what? You're making a fool out of yourself? Whatcha go after? And he was like, Nope, nope, nope, nope. That's you and me with websites. Right? It's like, I'm done. I'm not doing that anymore.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah. I love the puzzle. It's one of my favorite projects to work on is website.

Clarence Fisher: That's awesome. So how do people reach you?

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, DanielBlaho.com. Schedule a meeting with me if you're local. That also gives you an option for a virtual meeting. If you're not cell phone. All contact information is on there. Good contact form. Just has a brief overview of my resume, just highlighting what I've done, where I've come from. So that's always a good place to start and to get in touch with me. Very cool. Or connect with me on the,

Clarence Fisher: And for the people who are listening and not, I mean, we're going to have it in the show notes, but some folks don't go to the show notes and they're just listening. Can you spell out your name? Oh, oh, yeah.

Daniel Blaho: They probably will help. Daniel. D-A-N-I-E-L B-L-A-H-O.

Clarence Fisher: Awesome. Daniel, thank you. I hope you know how to spell.com all man. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it.

Daniel Blaho: Yeah, absolutely.

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