Our 500th Millionaire: Master Your Branding + Find out Your Archetype with Jen Kem

I’m honored to have my friend, Jennifer “Jen” Kem, as my 500th millionaire guest for my show.

Jen is a San Francisco Bay Area-based branding and marketing expert who gets entrepreneurs seen, heard, and paid – for being themselves. She’s the creator of the Master Brand Method: a framework to develop powerful brand archetypes that win customers’ hearts, leveraging Jennifer’s 17 years of corporate experience and her launching of multiple companies.

Jen serves up straight talk wrapped in love, because she understands entrepreneurs’ challenges: She built a retail business and became a millionaire at 32, only to lose it all in the recession two years later. She is now the successful owner of three million-dollar brand-building businesses and the mother of three children.

“One of the principles of our company is ‘Structure creates freedom.’” – Jen Kem

Episode Highlights:

Jen talks about her legacy projects, Femmefluence and Master Brand Method
Jen explains her brand archetypes under Master Brand Method
How to implement your dominant brand archetype to your marketing
How to discern and focus on the right hard things

Websites:

JenniferKem.com
Brand Archetype Quiz
Femmefluence
Master Brand Method

Connect with Jen:

Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Youtube
Pinterest

Transcript: Download

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I’m Jaime Masters, and I am so excited to have my friend, Jennifer Kem. You can check her out at jenniferkem.com. I feel like she’s already been on the show because I should have asked her probably 100 episodes ago. But she created the Master Brand Method and Femmefluence, which is her legacy project which I’m gonna talk about in just a second because I was literally at the chiropractor the other day and he was asking me all about the shirt that I was wearing for Femmefluence. So, thank you for coming on the show today, Jen. And tell us more about Femmefluence.

Jennifer: Oh my gosh, Jaime. I’m so excited that we got to connect in this way. I mean we are truly, for you listeners, friends in real life and that’s kind of rare sometimes on these internet streets. So, I’m super excited to be invited to have this chat. And in terms of Femmefluence, really it’s a platform that I built that has one simple mission and that is to connect ambitious women or people who identify as women to gather and grow together. And it’s a simple concept.

Basically, I live in the San Francisco Bay area so every month I host this gathering dinner of local leaders. And because I live in Silicon Valley, obviously there’s a lot of high-tech people, founders, etc. But when I travel to awesome places like Austin, Texas or like Atlanta, Georgia, or New York City or wherever I go, I try to gather local leaders together. And it’s become this traveling sisterhood if you will. And it really is in support of what my other businesses do.

But being an introvert that poses as an extrovert, it’s a great way for my introverted self to connect in a deeper way with other people. So, that’s what Femmefluence is about. And I also have my own podcast called Femmefluence Radio and we’re working on Season Two right now, so I’m very excited about that.

Jaime: So, everybody go check that out right now. And I have to say, when you came to Austin for the Femmefluence table, it was people I had never met before, and I’m supposed to be a connector. I didn’t know anybody in the room. And so, I was like legit impressed with all the people in the room that you brought in.

Jennifer: Yeah. I consider Jaime a super connector. I didn’t even know that you didn’t know anybody there. So, that makes me feel kinda better about my own little hiding places that I tend to creep in.

Jaime: You do well. You do well. Yeah. It was really cool. I was like, “Wow. This is ridiculously impressive.” So, that means you’re getting out into all these different lives and influences and being able to bring people together that never in a million years would have been able to come together before. Because I look for them. I look, and I couldn’t find these people before. So, tell us a little bit more about Master Brand Method. Because that’s sort of the overarching piece that you really do for all these entrepreneurs.

Jennifer: Yeah. So, I mean I like to give context because I’m a big context or content person. And the Master Brand Method is a process that I’ve evolved over the last 20 plus years. I always like to tell people I’m not a spring chicken. I’m a seasoned chicken. And I spent the first part of my career in the corporate world, and I left the corporate world as a VP of marketing at one of the biggest companies in the world, Verizon, to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams.

And I really started becoming first a brand consultant, a go-to-market expert and actually Verizon was my first client after I left the corporate world. And that evolved, it did very well because I had this very strong bench and expertise in that area. And I always have invested in my personal and professional development because when I was in the corporate world I always had a coach, both one that I invested in personally, but I was always assigned an executive coach when I became a director level and up.

And so, even when I left the corporate world I knew that was something that I needed. And at the time I was working with this coach who told me that – I was working with her, and I was talking about my stuff and then she was so curious about how I did my business because I had a highly profitable business, lean team. And even though she was coaching me, she was curious, like “How are you doing that?”

Because a lot of people that she had either coached with or got specialists in, especially in the marketing realm, she felt like she wasn’t getting the support she needed and there was always a big promise but not a lot of things to back that up. And so, she encouraged me to start helping entrepreneurs with this method called Master Brand Method which my company at the time had developed to support corporate companies.

Anyway, I told her flatly, “No, thank you. I love you, but I don’t wanna do that.” Because I’m very good at focusing on what I want and because I have this saying, “Yes, we all can do hard things, but I’m really good at working on the right hard things.” Because I like the freedom on the other side of that. So, anyway she literally begged me. “If you won’t do it for anybody else, would you do it for me?” And her company at the time was about a million-dollar business. And I said, “Look, if we can just do this quietly, because I don’t even know if this is gonna work on you. I have no idea and I like my clients to get results.”

So, I said, “As long as you don’t get mad at me if this process doesn’t fit your business, I’m happy to test it and play with you.” And she was like, “I will do anything to grow my business and get in front of more people.” So, we started working together. This was eight years ago. And let’s just put it this way: her business went from a $1 million business to a $10 million business in 18 months.

And just through the power of understanding that you need to hire brand echo system, which is what the Master Brand Method is. It’s both the business and the brand together. And I rightsized it for small business owners and entrepreneurs who wanna get seen, heard, and paid more without working harder and hiring the right people to elevate the brand.

So, that’s the origin story of the Master Brand Method in the entrepreneur, small business founder space. It’s not even supposed to be here, but it is here and now for the past eight years it’s been incredible. Our company has grown tremendously and so now I run two companies, KemComm and the Master Brand Institute, using this method, just rightsized for the market that it’s serving. So, that’s the long answer to your question.

Jaime: Well, it’s really impressive that you can take something from corporate. Like it was so good that it could work with entrepreneurs also because normally corporate just has big budgets and they can kinda do whatever they want. And to have it be able to map onto entrepreneurs – and I know your testimonials and your success stories. It’s not just that one. It’s kinda ridiculous how they go, right? The fact that it could do that and help so many people is ridiculously impressive. What do you think is the root of it? Why does it work for both sides?

Jennifer: Well, I think the main thing is that it’s rightsized for it. You touched on something really important. Small business owners, including me, because my business is a small business based on what the SBA, Small Business Administration, calls a small business, right? But I believe that the structures and the processes in corporate can serve entrepreneurs really well. The difference is that we don’t have, to your point, the budget. We have a harder time acquiring the type of talent that corporations can attract because they’re offering big benefits, structure, a perception of safety, all the things that come with that.

But when it comes down to it, there’s a difference between a successful business owner and someone who’s really trying to be but is struggling and hustling too hard, and that is treating your business like a freaking business, right? And in corporate, in my job if I didn’t do my job, I’d get fired, right? In the entrepreneurial world, especially if you have a founder, if you fire yourself you gotta find something to do, right? And then you’re dealing with talent or you’re trying to get talent. Or even when you’re first starting on your path to a millionaire, your contractors and fractional help.

And actually, corporate structures like writing job descriptions, like having a go-to-market strategy, like having launch plans, these are basics that are done in corporate and should be applied in small businesses. And I think something that’s – I call it like a trauma thing or ex patriate corporate people, like I’m a corporate ex patriate. I always say that part of why we left is because we wanted more freedom or some activating event happened in our life that made us realize we wanna go and do our own thing.

We don’t go into entrepreneurship because it’s easier, right? That’s crap. That’s not how it works. But something doesn’t shift in our mind when we leave the corporate world. Because we think, “Oh, freedom means lack of structure.” And one of the principles of our company is structure creates freedom. And so, to answer your question about how is this method being able to rightsize for the two sizes, because the base of it is strategy and structure, and every business whatever size you are needs a level of that.

I think the flip side is small businesses sometimes overstructure. You don’t want a lot of red tape in your small business, whereas in the big business lots of red tape, lots of politics, lotta bullshit, right? So, over here you have to know what are the key structures and strategies you need to implement. But the basics, the best practices, the unsexy stuff, that stuff is what makes you money and makes you impact.

So, to me what I learned in corporate and why I was able to focus on building my company first and then at the same time getting results for clients, I had to prove out that that theory was true. And I’ve been doing it now for 15 years. So, that’s part of it, too. I don’t think you find out right away. Jaime, 15 years ago I didn’t know if this was gonna work in small business and I had to figure it out and rightsize it and architect it so that it did.

Jaime: Yeah. Fifteen years is a long time, especially in internet world.

Jennifer: For real. Two years is long in internet world. Oh my gosh.

Jaime: No kidding. Unfortunately, or fortunately? I don’t know which one.

Jennifer: Right.

Jaime: So, tell me a little bit more about Master Brand, especially your brand archetypes, because I was literally talking to somebody the other day and was gushing about you and gave her all the links to all your things. And so, you can explain it better so I’m just gonna point her to this interview. So, tell me a little bit more about that.

Jennifer: Well, okay. So, the archetypes – let me just kind of bring it up a level. The process for Master Brand Method is a five-part process. So, it’s based on archetypes, audience, aesthetics, activation, and amplification. So, those are the five As of the framework. And archetypes are the first part of the framework, and what they are – I didn’t make up the term “archetypes.” Some of you listening might recognize the word and it’s used in a lot of different contexts.

But in the context of branding and building a brand, architect is coined by Carl Jung, J-U-N-G. He was a psychosociologist. His hypothesis was that humans love not just stories, but we love and get attached to characters, and that when we align ourselves with a character that it signals what attracts us to certain personality types. And so, in the most simplistic form, archetypes are characters in a story that are personalities. And so, when I was working – I wanna give you this story, the origin story of how archetypes became such an important part of my method. My first job out of college way back in the old days –

Jaime: You look like you’re 30 so this is why it’s so –

Jennifer: I know. I will take it. I tell people, “I’m still a female and my mother gave me some pretty good genes and Asian don’t raisin.” That’s one of our things.

Jaime: I’ve never heard that.

Jennifer: Okay. So, but I was 22 years old, had just gotten my bachelor’s degree in marketing, and I got a job as a junior copywriter at Ogilvy, which for those who may know they’re the biggest ad agency in the world and founded by the king or the godfather of marketing himself, David Ogilvy. Now, I didn’t work for David Ogilvy. He was already dead back then.

But I worked in the San Francisco office and when you’re a junior copywriter you’re not really even writing. You’re really getting coffee on Montgomery Street in San Francisco to the account executives. And what happened is I knew as a young, hungry, ambitious person that my main thing to do there was to listen and to learn. And I would bring coffee in, and the account executives would be dueling to accounts with each other. It was super exciting.

And at the time Ogilvy had the Coca-Cola account. And at the time, this was way back when, Coca-Cola’s advertising budget just for print and TV was $1 billion. $1 billion. Okay? So, can you imagine having a marketing budget that big and – anyway, it’s kinda fascinating. And here I was young, hungry, as I said, and they were dueling, Coca-Cola versus Pepsi. And what it was was they started using the word “archetypes.” They started saying, “Coca-Cola’s a muse archetype and Pepsi is a ruler archetype and how could we be stronger in our messaging, in our adverting, to retain the dominance Coca-Cola has.”

Because still to this date Coca-Cola is dominant over Pepsi, but Pepsi’s people are very niche. It’s kinda like Apple versus Microsoft. It’s kinda like Pepsi people are very particular about their thing. So, anywhere this is where I was introduced to archetypes. That’s my point. That’s the origin story of me understanding it and seeing how influential to get mass appeal around a brand. And so, I took what I learned at Ogilvy as I moved away from advertising because I actually didn’t like it that much. I loved it in practice, but I didn’t like how cut-throat it was frankly.

And so, I lived in Silicon Valley, so I started working in high-tech, right? I worked at Oracle. I worked at, it’s no longer here anymore because it was bought out, but I worked for Pupilsoft then Oracle and then finally at Microsoft in this area. And anyway, I started learning about software development, obviously, and how you sell software. How do you sell vaporware to companies and people? Because ultimately that’s what software is. And how to build a brand around that. And how to become dominant.

And so, I started bringing the concept of archetyping into our meetings and they hadn’t heard about it. And so, it started to become this thing all throughout my career that I became this internal expert on. And anyway, when I left the corporate world it became one of the pillars of my work because as a founder you have your archetype and you don’t have just one archetype, you have three. You have a dominant archetype, an intrinsic archetype, and an intuitive archetype.

And I like to describe it as the dominant archetype is the most important archetype of all three. It’s your main business voice in your messaging and in the way that you communicate with all the stakeholders in your busines. But it’s also like the lead singer. So, I like to think of your archetype mix – we call it the archetype influence mix or the AIM. We always tell people, “AIM, ready, fire” instead of “ready, aim, fire.”

It’s like Bon Jovi, if you guys are familiar with the band Bon Jovi, right? There’s Jon. There’s Richie Sambora, who’s really hot, married Heather Locklear and now he’s no longer married to her. And then there’s a third guy and nobody knows his name, but they wouldn’t have that Bon Jovi sound without him. And so, your three archetypes come together in our messaging to allow you to communicate and signal these characters that your audience will be attracted.

And that’s what I mean when we talked about Coca-Cola versus Pepsi at the time. Coca-Cola being a muse archetype, Pepsi being a ruler archetype. If you look at Coca-Cola, muse means “childlike nostalgia.” Okay. That’s the type of thing that they do. So, this is where people think that Coca-Cola, because it’s such a dominant brand, is the kinda brand that would be a ruler. And actually, they’ve become so dominant because they’re really good at harkening that part of us that has a memory.

In fact, by the way parents or people who are worried that your young people will hear this recording, this is the time to turn the sound down because one that a lot of people don’t know – I’m about to ruin a lot of people’s lives right here, is that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus. Okay. Santa Claus is a jolly white man with a red and white outfit and that is a subconscious cue. He’s a character. He’s an archetype that makes us associate Coca-Cola with something joyful, okay?

So, this is the power of branding. This is the power of subconscious influence. And they use the archaic versus Pepsi. Who represents Pepsi? Celebrities. Right? They have a lot of glitz and glamour. Britney Spears, Madonna, Michael Jackson. Now they’re doing all these YouTube stars in their advertising. It’s on purpose because the ruler archetype, their dominant behavior in their messaging is really like, “We’re the best. Look at us. You wanna be a part of the in crowd.” It’s like the kings and queens of the world. And so, they’re really good at doing that.

And when I came to the small business world – I know this is a long story but I wanna explain archetypes. I realized that big businesses use this concept extremely well, but small businesses were not. And I always like to remind people that every big business started exactly where all of us started – across a kitchen table or in a diner or in a garage talking someone’s ear off about our big dream or our idea.

And although most of us, because if you value freedom or autonomy like I do, I don’t wanna build the next Apple or Coca-Cola, but I do want my company to be recognized, profitable, and impactful. And so, you would be remiss not to use this archetype model not to better establish your authority in the marketplace. So, that’s the long answer to your short question.

Jaime: I love long answers. And then one quick thing: can you pull out your microphone because it’s rubbing against your shirt? Random side note. So, the thing that I find, I interview a lot of people and a lot of marketers, and I know a lot of marketers, and literally none of them talk about archetypes like you do. Like it’s kind of surprising, you know what I mean? So, is it more innate if you’re a thought leadership brand or a coach or influencer? Do you just pick out what you already are for an archetype, or do you decide? Tell me more about how the heck you figure that out.

Jennifer: Well, archetype establishment or identification is definitely a geeky marketing psychological thing. Okay? So, if you’re a marketer and you understand the concept of archetypes, you can probably pick and choose what you wanna be and choose that path. But I’ve made it easy. After I left corporate back to trying to solve a problem for the small business world, I realized that it needed a diagnostic of some type so that founders and small business owners could assess themselves based on the differences in the archetypes.

There are 12 archetypes. Okay? And again, you are three dominants of the 12. What’s interesting, you’re all 12. All of us are all 12. Just like if you’re into horoscopes, or zodiac, they say we’re all 12. It’s just that you are dominant in your sun, moon, and rising sign, right? It’s same idea. Okay? From a psychological perspective, but not woo. Okay? It’s actually – and we should try.

Jaime: So, people accept it more. Yeah. Exactly.

Jennifer: But anyway, I had to create a diagnostic. So, nine years ago I partnered with the University of Monterey to help me create a diagnostic to help founders specifically figure out what their first, second, and third archetype are, which is again dominant, intrinsic, and intuitive. And so, I have an assessment. So, you could point your people towards the assessment that I have. It’s called the Brand Archetype Quiz. It’s literally brandarchetypequiz.com. And it will tell you what your dominant archetype is.

And I will say this: people are always – it’s not a clickbaity-type of quiz. It’s not your Disney princess quiz. Okay? So that I can target you to buy stuff for your kids. It’s actually a real psychological assessment. So, when you take it, sometimes I get messages, or when I say “me” my team gets messages like, “Why is this thing so long? This is a dumb quiz.” I’m like, “It’s not some clickbait quiz. It’s a real psychological assessment.” It will take you 20 minutes, but it will get you what your dominant archetype is, and it will give you the reports of how to use it in your messaging.

So, I think that also, frankly, Jaime, out there when it comes to brand archetypes or business archetypes, I actually see a lot of clickbaity things, because it’s sexy. Everybody wants to know what type of person they are, right? We wanna know our MBTI. We want our strengths finder. We love personality tests. But this goes deeper than a personality test. This is actually something that can help you grow your business and make you a better marketer of your business frankly because you’ll start to learn how to use the language of a muse or a ruler or an explorer or an alchemist. Whatever you end up testing out as.

Jaime: So, that’s what I – that link I sent to that friend that I was chatting with on the phone because the fact, like you said, and this is why I love you. I think I said that like 1,000 times in this, but you did it with integrity instead of – and I have friends that have done it, too, so I can’t really say anything, but create quizzes where they’re like, “Let’s randomly ask questions that will get them to buy more things.” You know?

And to make something that legitimately helps small business owners without necessarily – I mean I’m sure it goes into a funnel, don’t get me wrong. I’m not poopooing that. But the fact that they can get what they need as if they were to work with you is kinda huge.

Jennifer: That’s the goal, because there’s only one of me, right? And actually, in my mind, to your point, there aren’t a lot of specialists in this work, at least in the small business world. I will tell you in the ads world, like in the big agencies, there are many specialists. But they don’t wanna work in our space. They have no desire to be over here, right? This is not where the big, big, big money is, right? So, they don’t want to deal with us.

So, I feel like I’m a good resource in the small business world for that that you couldn’t ever afford if you tried to go to Ogilvy and be like, “Can you run my advertising?” They’re like, “Here’s a bill for $5 million for one campaign.” You know what I mean? So, that’s kind of the way it works.

Jaime: Thank you for bringing it down to the common folk. Appreciate it. So, once you take the quiz, because we’re gonna link to it and everyone’s gonna take it because they’re excited to know what they are – we like quizzes anyway. I mean I’ll take every assessment known to man. What do we do with that in our marketing, especially if you already have marketing that’s going? How do we implement it and use it?

Jennifer: Well, I think the main thing is, the cool thing is when you take the quiz you get this entire report. Imagine a 30-page report about your dominant archetype. So, inside of it, it will tell you better signaling words you could be using in your copy. It will give you examples of models to study. So, I’m a big teacher and proponent of, for small business owners, you shouldn’t be modeling your competitors. That’s a waste of your time. You should be modeling the models in the mainstream market that actually are doing things that have already influenced the mainstream market to decide things.
A great example of that is Amazon Prime. Now, if somebody tells you you have to pay for shipping you are like, “I’m not paying for shipping. Are you archaic? You don’t have . . .” And on one hand it sucks for the small business owner, right, that Jeff Bezos did this to all of us. But we can’t deny that that has happened, and if we try to fight it we’re just gonna lose. So, instead what the archetypes do is allow you to set your voice apart from not just your competition but to sound like a bigger model.

So, for example, Disney is a creator archetype, okay? And let’s say I’m a creator archetype but I’m a coach, right? Instead of looking at another – let’s say health coach – another health coach’s stuff, I’m gonna study Disney and the way that they market and translate that into small business words. And the reports that I give you in the Brand Archetype Quiz help you translate that in a deeper way.

And that’s one of the tricks of how some small business – when you learn marketing and copywriting online I think it’s funny because you mentioned something that drives me bananas, and that is not just clickbait but what they call black hat marketing. Right? It's basically using influence and manipulation in a way that doesn’t really promise something real but speaks to desires that can honestly never be met either, right? And I do believe there’s a place for high integrity marketing. And I do believe – I mean, trust me I’m a marketer. I could be Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader any given moment. Marketing is like that.

And so, how you use the archetypes is – it develops your brand voice to be more authentic, deeper. You’ll also feel more excited talking about your stuff because a lot of us have been taught a certain way. A certain way to market, a certain way to communicate our value. Brand archetypes allow you to truly own your voice and trust it because that’s actually what you are. Instead of being like someone else, you’re actually being who you are. And the reports will be obvious. Once you guys all take the quiz you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Jaime: Well, what’s so interesting is when, especially when I started way back when, right? Like many, many, in a land far, far away. They were like, “Take six months to find your voice online.” And you’re like, “Oh, but I can tell you what your voice is” before you have to wait. Because waiting six months and sort of going like this and not really knowing. I mean there’s this ambiguousness. Especially if you don’t have a lot of followers to know which sort of way to go, if my “marketing” is working, if they’re not getting a ridiculous amount of results.

So, it seems like even if it just points you in the right direction to go, “Okay, it’s this way, even if you go slow you’re at least on a better track than you would be before.”

Jennifer: Agreed. I mean I think that’s the – there’s a lot of things to test in marketing: your product, whether it’s viable, whether your funnel’s working, whether your social media strategy’s working. But the cool thing is if you can get a strong voice out of the gate, that’s gonna make everything go faster, right?

And so, this is also really empowerment and confidence at the front end in your voice even if you’re not a big talker or a loud talker. Confidence is not about how loud you are. Confidence is how sure you are of what you know. And knowing your archetype is a great tool that supports that, and it reinforces your confidence in speaking what value that your company brings to people.

Jaime: Well, that’s one of the things that you really do is VIP days. And is says, “Taking these . . .” And I just sound like a commercial for you because I just love you so much but the VIP days sort of – we’ve talked about what you’ve done with other people. It shifts not only the branding and the archetypes because that’s definitely an important piece, but their products and services and what they can do in a short period of time. Like that’s what I’m so impressed – most of your things are like in 18 months. And you’re like, “Really? In 18 months?” How do you sort of squeeze that gap for people?

Jennifer: I think it goes back to something I said at the top is that I am a fighter and a defender of doing the right hard things. And when you do the right hard things, everything gets compressed in the right ways. But the key word is the hard part, right? I think that’s the other part of leaving corporate and coming to entrepreneur land is there’s a fantasy that is entrepreneurship should be easier. You’re creating freedom so why don’t I feel free? Why do I feel bogged down? Why am I getting imposter syndrome? Why am I lacking confidence to ask for that ask? All of that is because you’re focused on the wrong shit, okay? And there’s a lot of things you can try.

So, I understand the curiosity and the whatever. So, people really come to, I think, me and my company when they’re just sick of throwing spaghetti at the wall. And I do actually think there is a value in throwing at the wall because you’ve gotta create a risk tolerance for yourself. That’s important as a leader, as a founder. But not to the point where you bleed out and die, like literally your business or your own personal health. So, why I think we’re able to get such great results and what would be quicker, and I don’t like to say fast, because I think what I’m trying to do is cut down any wasteful activity, right?

And so, the Master Brand Method is a framework for helping to focus these efforts. And inside of the framework you get to be creative. You get to be yourself. You get to have your own stuff going on. But I really believe it puts – I like to think of those of us that are doing our best to make an impact, that we are like thoroughbred horses on a racetrack. And what I simply do, or our company does by building – thinking to build a brand versus just a business, is we’re your blinders so that you win the game. And you win the game first and that’s kind of that metaphor of 18 months or less.

I don’t guarantee those results obviously, but the people who get the results that work with us, and I think this is true – if you’re listening and you’re starting on your path to being a millionaire, I just wanna say that – I want you to think about how can you focus on the right hard things even in your structures that you teach your clients or the products that you sell, so that transformation can happen quicker for your clients. A lot of us are throwing yeast on bread that doesn’t need to rise anymore. Right? You’ve gotta stop throwing that yeast on that bread. You need to let the bread rise.

And so, I hope that answers your question, but I think that’s what it is. People are focusing on the wrong hard things. Because it’s already hard. So, I wanna work on the right hard. I don’t wanna work on the crappy hard. Because hard is hard. Because when you work on the right hard things, that’s called momentum and on the other side of it there’s freedom and autonomy and money and all the things. Right? So, that’s kinda how I – everybody has their own flow but that’s my flow and that’s the kind of flow that I think our clients are attracted to, if that makes sense.

Jaime: That totally makes sense. So, in the marketing realm we get it, Master Brand Method really sort of shows you that workflow and that framework. But there’s all the rest of that other stuff in business. And I know that’s not your thing, but I kinda think it’s your thing and I wanna talk about it. So, how do they discern not only just what they do and focus on for marketing but all the other systems and every other thing that they could make a decision on? How do you actually discern and focus on the right hard things?

Jennifer: Right. Thanks. So, that’s a great question. So, I wanna first define what “brand” means to me. So, the definition of brand because I think will answer the question. So, your brand isn’t marketing. Right? Your brand is how people perceive how you help them in all the ways. And that includes marketing, sales, customer service, finance, accounting. Brand is the hub of those roles in your business. So, it actually isn’t only marketing. So, I just wanna be clear on that. Okay?

So, what does that mean then? In order to grow your business or using this word that I absolutely hate in small business but I’m gonna use it because people recognize it, is how to scale your business, because I think it’s very hard to scale something that doesn’t have momentum. But we don’t have the patience for that. I say the general “we.” I do because I like the right hard things.

Understanding that you’re building a brand, the business is the operator part of the business. That’s the operations. You need what I call people, process, and technology to support that. Right? So, that’s the ops side of the house. If you’re not making at least a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in your small business right now, honestly your number one goal is to get good at sales and marketing. And you focus on the systems, the people, process, and technology that support that, and you start to optimize that.

Once you start hitting run rate of let’s say a quarter million a year and you have a small team, fractional contractor, you can start investing in bigger things to sustainably scale your business. And that’s gonna create, first of all, business results on the profit side, but there’s a risk to break the brand experience. And if you break the brand experience or it causes a problem with your reputation because you can’t fulfill the promises as best you can, that affects the brand. So, it all affects the brand.

So, when we talk about very specific tactics to support you, again, it depends the stage you’re at – if you are making less than a quarter million a year, and that’s general, because again its different for everyone, invest your time, money, and energy on getting good at letting people know how you can help them, which is my definition of marketing.

Marketing is simply letting people know how you can help them and choosing one to two platforms to help you do it. If it’s email and one social media platform, awesome. Right? If you try to do five different things, unless you are superhuman, and if you are, you’re an outlier so you really can’t teach us anything. I love you, you’re a genius, but you can’t. Right? We should not model ourselves after outliers.

We need to model ourselves after proven stuff and also what we will actually freaking do because I can say I’d love to be on TikTok. Right? Maybe one day I will. Doubt it. Okay. Doubt it. But let’s say. It is a waste of my time to try a new platform when my current platform, YouTube, and LinkedIn, work so much better. It’s not that I’m not saying – I don’t wanna restrict anybody who’s listening who’s saying, “Oh, but it seems like it’s so much better.” Sure, have fun with it. If it delights you – and maybe you do TikToks around your cooking, but not your business. You know what I’m saying?

Do something that entertains other people and is helpful, but when it comes to business, I’m on LinkedIn because my clients are on LinkedIn. It’s not like I loved LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is a functional platform for me, and I think that that’s where a big thing is where – and I hope that’s helpful to people listening right now.

Choose one to two things and get really good at that on a marketing side and then systemize that. Get people, process, and technology under those marketing systems so that now you’ve got acquisition. People know who you are, brand awareness. And then work on the other things like, “Hey, I wanna optimize my fulfillment structures” or whatever.

And by the way, Jaime is such a genius at this. Like that’s her realm as a business coach. She’s so good at that. I prefer to think of it as like, “Please don’t screw up what I told people in the front end.” I think of the brand ops team as like, “Please don’t screw up. Make sure that the customer has an incredible experience once I hand them off to you.” Right? And that’s the echo system of branding. It is your business. Both sides play a role. Did I answer your question? I know I went off on a tangent. I know I went off on a – but I can’t help myself because I’m a process person.

Jaime: Yes, you did. Well, I think one of the things that I think is really important about what you said is skewing, like you said, to the things that really matter the most. But how did you pick LinkedIn and YouTube? Just to give somebody an idea because that’s the other piece. We’re bombarded with all the things that we’re supposed to be doing. TikTok is the thing right now with algorithms that are great for all of us. It’s so much easier than all of the rest of them. You know?

Jennifer: I don’t think it’s easier. I feel like unless you’re a natural creator, and I think if you are, I think TikTok could be a dream come true for you now. Because it wasn’t available five years ago, so you had to deal with Instagram and Facebook perhaps, and you were like, “I need something that’s more in alignment with me.” So, actually for you and you’re listening, jump to TikTok because you are dying to get creative.

So, why do I use LinkedIn and YouTube to answer your question? Well, first of all, YouTube obviously is not just the second most popular website in the world, it’s owned by the first most popular website in the world, Google. And people are searching for you instead of you poking them. It’s not even permission marketing, which is harder than search marketing.

So, I chose YouTube and through all of our testing – we used to be heavy on Facebook, and we still use Facebook, I don’t want you to think I don’t. But I use Facebook mainly to drive people to YouTube. That’s what we’re doing. We’re not trying to actively market. We want people to digest our content on YouTube because also it allows me to do what I love best which is, even though I’m an introverted person, I light up when I can teach and talk to people in an intimate, non-small talk kind of way. I fricking hate small talk. So, YouTube allows me to get that going.

So, it fits with my strengths, and No. 2, it doesn’t make me have to poke people to – I don’t have to interrupt their feed. They’re searching for me in some kind of way. So, that’s why YouTube. And then LinkedIn, we work with a lot of small business owners and professionals who want to grow their businesses, and yes, they’re on Facebook, too.

But on LinkedIn you’ll tend to get a little bit of a more professional feel because people on LinkedIn are – I mean there’s a lot of quiet people in LinkedIn who wanna leave their jobs. And my personal story of leaving my corporate career and successfully building a business after it is very appealing to that professional. And so that is also why we’ve chosen that.

So, bottom line is when you’re thinking about what platforms to choose for you, think about where will you show up and shine the most consistently and with repetition, because repetition always trumps expertise. People don’t care how smart you are. People don’t care even – they don’t even care about your reputation. They just wanna trust you over time.

And then the second part is I really believe that interruption marketing is dead and is dying. And so, I really believe that if you’re not on a search engine-drivable platform – I think if you’re non-creative, LinkedIn and YouTube are great for you. If you’re creative, maker, product person, Pinterest, which is a search engine, and Instagram obviously because it’s visual, and TikTok, great for you. Okay. So, it’s really about that. And then everybody needs an email list. So, everybody should do email marketing. So, email marketing and something else kinda thing. That’s what my recommendation is.

Jaime: Thank you. It just helps everybody else go, “Oh, so much easier to pick knowing how you picked yours, too.” And we don’t have to do it all because we can’t do it all at once.

Jennifer: No.

Jaime: Only the hard right things. So, I know we have to start wrapping up, but I love you and next time we should do it in person at some point just so you know.

Jennifer: Absolutely. I have to get back to Austin soon. I miss Austin. It’s so fun there.

Jaime: I should come out there, too. But I just wanna hug you I think is really the whole thing. Again, but I ask the same last question every single time and it’s what’s one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Jennifer: Okay. I know this is gonna sound kinda salesy, but I hope now. I really think if you got any value or you’re curious at all about how you can be more effective in communicating what you do to the audience you’re trying to build and attract towards yourself, the Brand Archetype Quiz really is a supportive tool. We give you the full report. It’s a not a clickbait waste of time.

So, I just wanna encourage you to do it because I really feel that once you get the report there’s actually actions in the report like, “Take a look at your current social media profiles. Are they in your brand archetype dominant voice?” Right? And do you do this audit from it on your own and we don’t charge you for that. You have this actual plan of action of how to use it. And so, I really think that’s the first think I would encourage you.

And if I can just add a second, I wanna leap off of what we just talked about which is really edit where you’re expending time, energy, and money on your social platforms and even your email stuff. Maybe you’re sending something out like a weekly newsletter that frankly maybe you could edit down to a monthly newsletter. And you could free up some time to do other things that will grow the business. I’m not saying your newsletter doesn’t grow the business. Perhaps the fact that you have a weekly one is the reason you’re making money. If that’s the case, don’t edit it.

But it’s really, are you taking these checkpoints to edit what you’re working on and what’s consuming your time, energy, and money so that you can make better choices on the right hard things. So those are the two things that I would leave you with.

Jaime: Oh, I love it. I got a visual of all that spaghetti sort of sticking. They’re like, “Well, that one’s still sticking so we gotta keep doing it because it’s still sticking there and so it must be okay.” You know? And sometimes it’s not. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Tell me where we find – well, give me the archetype quiz again but also where we can find you on social and all the other places.

Jennifer: Yeah. So, go to brandarchetypequiz.com. It’ll probably be in the show notes, right, Jaime? So, you don’t misspell it. Even though I didn’t mention Instagram, I have my personal page at Instagram. I love having conversations over there. You can DM me. I’m @Jennifer.Kem. And then obviously I have a YouTube chancel. And you can go to jenniferkem.com as well which is my website. But I really feel like my YouTube channel and DMing me on Instagram are two of the best ways to get to know me and have a conversation.

Jaime: Yeah. Instagram you’ll be able to see her amazing fashion and all the crystals, and all the things and you’ll just love her from that. And then you’ll actually get her business from the other stuff so. Thank you so much for coming on today, Jen. I so appreciate and love you.

Jennifer: I love you so much, Jaime Masters. And thank you everyone for being here and supporting Jaime because she is the bomb.com. So, I am thrilled to be here and feel so lucky to have you in my life.

Jaime: All the hugs to you, too.

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