The NEW Magazine for Speakers, Trainers, Authors, Coaches & Infopreneurs
October 15, 2012
‘MILLION DOLLAR BRAND’ Magazine
There’s a Lot to Get Done, But Who Says You’ve Got to Do It? We interviewed a top performer a few months ago, someone with a $1 million plus per year income, and we do have to admit, this is one of the perks of what we do – learning success secrets and philosophies from the best of the best. And, as usual, there was a nugget of an idea (among the many) that stood out.
“If you’re going to build a successful business, there’s a lot to do – but who says you’ve got to do it?” At first we assumed she was suggesting that there were some tasks that were too small or too distasteful to engage in, and that such things should simply be ignored. But as she elaborated, we realized that wasn’t what she meant at all. Because she went on to say: “When I first started, I was pretty broke, and I had two small children, and I had no business starting a business because I had such little time to devote to my family as it stood. So I did the only rational thing I could think of; I hired a housecleaner.” She then went on to say that she figured that cleaning the house was absolutely the ‘lowest value activity’ she could do with the limited time she had.
“I decided that if I was going to be in business, I was going to treat it as a business; I was going to take it seriously. I wasn’t going to simply ‘flirt’ with it, dance around the edges and do it as a hobby. And every successful business owner I had ever seen focused their time on ownerlevel tasks, not employee-level tasks. They determine the value of their time and only engage in activities that are worth that value per hour or higher, and contract out the rest.” Yes, building a Million Dollar Brand speaking/writing/coaching involves a plethora of tasks, large and small. But who says that you’ve got to do them? -R&A
Andrea Waltz & Richard Fenton, Publishers/Editors
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Disclaimer Statement: Our definition of a ‘Million Dollar Brand’ is any brand that has generated one million dollars (or more) in gross revenue. Additionally, while this publication is made FREE to subscribers, please be aware that we do maintain affiliate relationships with many of the advertisers and content contributors contained within, from which we may receive monetary compensation. However, we only recommend products that we've either personally checked out ourselves, or that come from people we know and trust. With this said, neither we as publishers, nor Courage Crafters, Inc., are responsible for the success or failure of any investment and/or purchase decision any subscribe elects to engage in with affiliates Or advertisers.
The comment she made that caught our attention in this case was the statement:
It was clear that she wasn’t saying that there are some jobs that should be ignored; she was saying there were some jobs that someone else should be doing… just not her. The she continued by saying:
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This Week’s Publishers Page with Richard Fenton & Andrea Waltz
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Sarah Robinson Builds Her ‘Fierce Loyalty’ Brand
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In This Issue…
How Randy Gage Turned ‘Prosperity’ into a Personal Brand Million Dollar Brand ‘Hall of Fame’ Voting Starts Soon!
‘Behind the Brand’ with Tori Johnson’s Spark & Hustle® A Look at the Bestsellers Lists, Our Million Dollar Rolodex, and more!
‘Millionaire Messiah’ Randy Gage
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Creating ‘Fierce Loyalty’ Andrea Waltz / Million Dollar Brand: Let’s talk about the Fierce Loyalty brand. What’s the premise; what does Fierce Loyalty mean? Sarah Robinson: Fierce Loyalty is that thing that customers, clients, people, give to an organization that becomes unshakable; they are loyal through thick and thin, they’re the volunteers who show up in the rain, they’re the customers who stay with you through hard times, they’re the ones who are so fiercely loyal that being associated with your brand has become a part of who they are. MDB: From a pull the curtain back, “behind the brand” standpoint, what’s the path been like for you? It’s a great title, but obviously you had a journey to get to this point and to write the book. Sarah Robinson: Well, it’s been very circuitous; it’s been full of unexpected turns, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. As you know, I also have a blog called Escaping Mediocrity, which was, it still is very important to me, but it was my sole brand online for a while, and that’s where I really started testing some ideas about Fierce Loyalty. I wasn’t calling it that yet, but just the idea of communities and how they worked.
Over the course of that journey I met a woman named Janet Goldstein who is friends with a very good friend of mine, Elizabeth Marshall. I started
“Without social media, the brand wouldn’t Mediocrity or Fierce Loyalty. Social m like-minded people who are intere working with them on really honing the message, conversations that you know, what is it, what’s my message that I want to put out in the world? And as we walked through what I’d been doing for the past, since I was in college, it was Janet Goldstein who said, “you’ve been building communities; you’ve been building communities for over 20 years.” I guess I have. So starting with that premise we started exploring the idea of communities and what really makes a standout community. When I started thinking about what is it that everybody wants? What everybody wants is fierce
–Sar
Creat
with Sarah Robinson loyalty. We want to feel fierce loyalty and we have to have fiercely loyal people in our lives and in our businesses. That’s what led to the research and the writing of this book. MDB: I’m curious about the elements of this kind of emerging brand, and by the way, I’m glad you brought up Escaping Mediocrity, because it’s a great blog. So, tell us the elements of the brand. You’ve got the book, where are you going with this brand? Sarah Robinson: I’ve got my book, I have my website, which is www.Fierce-Loyalty.com, and everybody’s like, you just love hyphens in your website don’t you? Because I just got Escaping Mediocrity without a hyphen in it, and at that website I’m building out my consulting practice, my speaking practice all around this idea of fierce loyalty. My inkling is, and goodness knows I could be wrong, but my inkling is that for me this is the brand, this is it. This is the thing that I will be writing, speaking, and consulting about for a very long time. I think people, businesses, whether it’s a mom and pop or one man shop all the way through Fortune 100 companies, are coming to understand that to survive, not just survive, but thrive in this tumultuous market that’s not going anywhere anytime soon… they’ve got to figure out how to establish and foster communities. And not just any community, because community is a great ‘marketing’ thing we’re seeing right now, we’re seeing it everywhere, so everybody’s going to have one. You want a “stand apart” community, a fiercely loyal community, and I think businesses are starting to figure that out, and so we need to have lots and lots of conversations about how to make that happen. So that’s where I’m going with it.
exist; neither brand would exist, Escaping media for me has allowed me to find ested in having the same kinds of I wanted to have.”
Robinson
MDB: We love the name Escaping Mediocrity! What have been a couple things that have made the difference for you in building your own tribe? Sarah Robinson: I talk about Escaping Mediocrity in the book because the tribe taught me so much. When I first started Escaping Mediocrity… and thank you for the complement on the name, that name was an evolution. It started out as The Maverick Mom and then that just wasn’t going to work, that’s another conversation to be had. (continued on Page 8)
‘Fierce Loyalty’ with Sarah Robinson (continued) Escaping Mediocrity is what I landed on because it was for me the thing that was most…the idea of settling for mediocrity was so repellent! So that’s what I named the blog. I started writing about the things that I wanted to talk about in business and in life. The kinds of conversations that I had early on at Escaping Mediocrity weren’t being had at other places. People were still trying to control what they looked like, and control the image, and: “I’m so successful” when they couldn’t pay their grocery bill. They were trying to control all of that and I wanted to have conversations about what it was really like, what it really felt like, what it really looked like. I knew I had three people who were going to read it for sure, wasn’t sure about any of the rest of it, but I knew that it was something that I had to say. If I was just writing for me and three other people that was going to be O.K. because I couldn’t not have those conversations out loud anymore, and so I think that that’s one of the reasons that people were so drawn to Escaping Mediocrity, because I was having transparent conversations and I was encouraging other people to have them too. I didn’t want to be the center of Escaping Mediocrity; I never designed it to be my personality-driven blog. I designed it to be a blog where I held the space and I put topics out, but the real stars of the show if you will, were going to be the people who showed up and participated in the conversation. You’ve probably seen me say this, and I say it often, the comments, the conversations that happen after I write a post, make the post so much smarter than it ever was when I first conceived it and wrote it down. I think it’s that kind of engagement and that kind of willingness to not have to control it, not have to be at the center of it, really fueled it and continues to fuel it. Right now that blog’s not particularly active because my attention’s been at Fierce Loyalty, but I’m watching that. I see that community, they talk on Facebook, they talk on Twitter, they’re all doing stuff
and having conversations that I’m not a part of and nothing could make me happier. MDB: What role has social media played in the brand? Sarah Robinson: Huge. Without social media the brand wouldn’t exist, neither brand would exist, Escaping Mediocrity or Fierce Loyalty. Social media for me has allowed me to find likeminded people, people who are interested in having the same kinds of conversations that I wanted to have. And then with the book - the people who are helping me and supporting me in this book launch I met via social media. It’s where I met you. I met so many people who are now I consider friends, and colleagues, and part of my close team. Social media’s completely responsible for that. MDB: Is Twitter your main platform? Sarah Robinson: It is my main platform. I’m having relationship problems with Twitter at the moment. I’m evaluating my relationship with Twitter only because it’s becoming such a push (continued on Page 9)
‘Fierce Loyalty’ (continued) channel and that’s not what Twitter originally was.
Early on, Twitter is where you went to have conversations. There wasn’t a lot of push, and now because I guess more and more companies are discovering it it’s becoming this really loud push location and finding people who are actually there to have conversations with is becoming more difficult. At the moment there’s no better place for me. I enjoy Facebook, but it’s not… I’m an instant gratification girl; I want to have a conversation and I want to have it right now. And you can’t really do that very well on Facebook, so yes, Twitter is still my main hangout. MDB: How did you discover it? Sarah Robinson: Well, I knew about Twitter early because lots of people that I knew were on it, but I would go to the web version, like just, you know, www.Twitter.com, and all it was to me was just this streaming randomness and I couldn’t find the thread, right, how do you dump in on this, and then my friend Scott Stratten said, “Sarah, you need Tweet Deck. You need to get Tweet Deck so that you can sort these conversations, it will make so much more sense to you if you do that.” From the get-go, the day I setup Tweet Deck, I was like, oh my word, I have found… This was built for me! Twitter was built for me, yay! That’s how my relationship with Twitter developed.
Your Invisible Brand How the Brands You Use and Surround Yourself With Impact YOUR Brand (and Your
Chances for Success!)
MDB: So, what about networking? Does that play into your brand, do you get to local stuff, is that part of your marketing strategy? Sarah Robinson: I do get out to some local things. Most of my clients and most of my audience is not local. That’s not an intentional thing, it’s just the way that is. So rather than putting energy into local events, I do more regional and national events. For example, tomorrow I’m going to Atlanta to speak for an organization and I’ll be presenting the Fierce Loyalty model there. I’ve been to South by Southwest, and Blog World, (continued on Page 11)
Coming in the November 12th Issue of Million Dollar Brand!
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‘Fierce Loyalty’ with Sarah Robinson (continued) because I think it’s super important to take relationships offline. Online’s great for starting relationships and building relationships, but my ideal is to then take those relationships offline and make them face-to-face whether it’s with peers and colleagues or with people in the community. I think that face-to-face connection cannot be underestimated. MDB: So here’s kind of a tough question because you just wrapped this up, so maybe in six months you’ll have a different answer, but looking back on the process of writing the book, is there anything that you feel like you would do differently knowing what you know now about writing Fierce Loyalty?
Sarah Robinson: Well, it’s the writer’s dilemma, right, I always wish for more time. I wish for more time. There was a timeline we set from the beginning, and I think the book that I’ve written is the very best book I could have written… but if I could have invented more time, that would be the one thing that I would want to have had. MDB: What would you say to someone who is where you were, let’s say four years ago, five years ago, blogging, delving into the social media space with some kind of message or personal development brand that they’re trying to get out. Do you have a piece of advice, something that you’ve really learned in this
whole process? Sarah Robinson: Actually, yes. It’s the one thing I tell my clients when we first start these conversations, because they’re like, “we have this blog or this brand and it’s not resonating” and I’ll look at their language or I’ll look at the name of their brand and it’s just kind of eh, there’s no boldness to it. I think one of the reasons Escaping Mediocrity and Fierce Loyalty appeal so strongly and have such a powerful response is because there are heavy lines drawn in the sand. Escaping Mediocrity either resonates with you or it does not, there’s really no middle ground, right? Same with Fierce Loyalty; you either want more of that or you don’t, there’s no middle ground. In this really loud, crowded marketplace that we’re all functioning in right now there’s no room for lukewarm, there just isn’t – nobody’s going to pay attention to that, nobody’s going to hear that, nobody’s going to even make a decision one way or the other about that. So, the stronger stand your message and brand can take, the more and faster you will attract the people who want to hear about it. -MDB To check out Sara Robinson’s ‘Fierce Loyalty’ brand, visit: www.Fierce-Loyalty.com
In the Next Issue of Million Dollar Brand…
Is This Thing On? 10 Mistakes Beginning (and
Many Professional) Speakers Make…
and What to Do Instead!
Design Matters.
Looking for More Great Resources? The business profiled above is just one of the many product/service vendors we know of and highly recommend to others. To see a complete listing of hundreds of organizations ready and willing to help you grow your brand, check out the ‘Resource Section’ at:
www.MillionDollarBrand.com
He said all men were created equal. He never said anything about brands.
Links to take you where you want to go‌‌
November 5, 2012
We Believe... #16… That lighting our entire house with Sylvania Faisceau Large Halogene Capsylite® PAR 30LN 75W ‘Crisp & Brite’ spotlights was a mistake, as Home Depot® has decided to stop carrying them (now you know what to get us for Christmas)
#17… When God decided to create the perfect food, he came up with the idea for French fries (and then he rested)
#18… The most important ‘Success Trait’ for any speaker, trainer, author or coach looking to build a Million Dollar Brand is AUTHENTICITY. If you focus on being you, you will find people who will track you down and buy everything you produce, wherever you happen to be
And we REALLY believe that every American should support the Wounded Warrior Project® For more information or to donate, visit: www.WoundedWarriorProject.org
For Even More Great Content & Brand-Building Resources, Visit Us at: www.MillionDollarBrand.com