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** EDITION — 002

Hey, I’m Jared Henriques. You are receiving this because you signed up for my weekly newsletter. If you didn’t do that, it means someone else signed you up. Sorry about that.

** What is brand therapy?

As I was sitting and writing this week's newsletter, I noticed I was often referring to the concept of brand therapy. I would like to get more into the specifics of our process behind certain projects but I believe that there is a matter of context to be given first. A few months ago I wrote a blog on the Renga website, about what that means to us and why we call ourselves a brand therapy group:

Hopefully you have noticed that we refer to ourselves as a “brand therapy group.” We realize that this isn’t a common way to describe what we do; but it is very intentional. One thing that we’ve noticed is how many businesses out there have a fractured brand identity. Saying fractured doesn’t mean that we think their logo or name is weak; but rather the business they intended to be is not what they are now presenting to the world. This is usually caused when a company chases short term goals, such as revenue, without a thought for how it might impact the business a few years from now. It is important to understand that all the micro decisions build what your brand will become.

So then the question we set out to explore was, how can a company build a healthy brand identity? To answer this, we decided to think about what it means to build a healthy self identity. Anyone who has attempted self-growth will admit that it can be very difficult to begin to look at oneself objectively and ask the tough questions that are required to bring it all together. This is why therapy works so well. Well, it’s the same for trying to build a healthy business. It requires someone to collaboratively listen to your story and ask the right tough questions. Of course we could give you generalized feedback, but so can google. What you need to be healthy is knowing what YOUR business should do, not what ANY business should do. The only way to get to this, is to start by listening. This is why we take all of our clients through a brand discovery workshop before we get started on projects. This allows us to create out of a strong understanding of who you are as well as your intentions and goals.

Now, we believe that this workshop alone will bring you lots of value; but just like therapy, the real magic happens over time. We want to commit to working with every one of our clients on an ongoing basis. This requires trust. Us understanding the why behind your business and you understanding the why behind our process helps us get there. When we are both aligned it allows us to do great work that you can continue to build off of.

A healthy brand identity is one that lasts. It becomes a compass for you as you make business decisions; such as who your next right hire is, what new products or services you should launch, partnerships, and many more. If the decision compromises your core brand identity or values then the answer should probably be no - even when the short term looks promising.

** FIND OF THE WEEK

This week I fell back in love with a tool. At Renga we were reevaluating all of our tools, because we are doing a “remote only” April. We had been trying to find a CRM (customer relationship management) software. We wanted to use this software to track all of our leads, current clients and past clients. Sometimes things can get lost in the weeds and we wanted a quick way to visualize where contracts were at. After googling “best lightweight CRMs” and searching for way too long, we couldn’t find one we liked.

Then I thought about try ing to make one in Airtable (https://airtable.com/) . Airtable is a fully customizable database tool. You can view all of your data in grid view (which looks like a spreadsheet), Kanban view (think Trello) and more that I haven’t even explored.

It’s hard to explain how much you can do with Airtable, so you should just check out their Universe (https://airtable.com/universe) , where people have shared what they are creating with Airtable. If you’re a developer, you can get API documentation specific to each base you have, because of this some people have used Airtable as a lightweight CMS (Content Management System).

Once you start getting comfortable with Airtable you can take it to the next level with Zapier, a tool that connects all your other tools. For example when someone submits an entry from the contact forms on the Renga website. It imports them to an “Action required” tab on our Sales CRM base in Airtable. It simultaneously notifies our sales channel on Slack.

Oh right I forgot to mention… Airtable is free. I am confident you can make something awesome with it, let me know what you make. Thanks for reading, you're neat

Jared

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