The “Dark” Art of Branding With Michael Baldwin

Founder and CEO of MICHAEL BALDWIN INC – Michael Baldwin

Here’s what you’ll learn about The “Dark” Art of Branding:

– Why do you need branding and what to do if you’re just starting out.

– The core pieces of an outstanding brand.

– The three “magic” words you should always measure your brand against.

– Two questions you must ask yourself before you even start thinking about branding.

– How to come up with a brand with just a whiteboard and a room full of “right” people.

– What is a “360 degree branding rule” and how it can help you keep your brand consistent.

– The brick & mortar of a killer brand.

Michael’s Website:

Baldwin.com – Michael Baldwin Executive Coaching | Be better

Transcript: Download

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services.

Jaime Masters:	Welcome to Eventual Millionaire, I'm Jaime Masters and on the show today we have Michael Baldwin. He's CEO of baldwin.com and they also do corporate branding. He also has an amazing book called Just Add Water, if you can see that right there, all about PowerPoint presentations and how to make them not suck, because most of them do. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Michael!

Michael Baldwin:	Thank you for having me.

Jaime Masters:	And we've tried two, three other - this is the third times a charm, right? Fingers crossed all goes well in the world. Can you explain the branding corporate strategy side? I know you do personal stuff, too. What are the - why do we need this at all and what are the core pieces of what you look at when you come in for working on a brand?

Michael Baldwin:	I would say that the people who are traditionally tasked with branding and advertising try to convince the world that it's a dark art that is best left to the experts. I personally think that they make it way more complicated than it needs to be. A lot of the work I do with corporate clients has to do with discovering, with them, the essence of what their brand is and then the most compelling way to express it.

Jaime Masters:	How do they figure that - I feel like even small business owners have a heck of a time trying to figure out the "Who they are" part. What are some of those uncovering things that you do to try and figure that out?

Michael Baldwin:	One of the things actually I've found that works really well, this happens before everyone gets in the room, is asking each one of them - in a lot of cases it's board members - what makes them get up in the morning and go to that place? What is driving them to do that versus any other jobs they could possibly do? That's when you get to a more authentic connection with each individual about the brand and the mission of the brand.

Jaime Masters:	Which is so funny because usually when you think of corporate you're like, "No, we just designed it out of thin air," but you actually go and talk to the person and figure out what that is. Why do you do that? Why does it have to align with who they are as people?

Michael Baldwin: 	Because a brand is like a person. The easiest way I could discuss this in terms of branding - which is an often used word misunderstood like marketing is an often used word and misunderstood - a brand is like you or like me. If I know you I know that you wouldn't wear a certain piece of clothing, or I knew you wouldn't live a certain kind of a house, or drive a certain kind of a car. A brand needs to be that specific in people's minds so that you can start to build equity in a consistent way. My three latest words are simplicity, consistency, and durability.

Jaime Masters:	Is this for you specifically or in general? Should we be coming up with three words of our own to try and figure out what these pieces are? How do we define what our brand is?

Michael Baldwin:	Well, those - just to go back to those three words. Those three words I proselytize in terms of branding. Your message needs to be simple. Everything you do that is supported in the context of branding should be consistent. It needs to be durable, which means you need to spend the time it takes to get it right first so you don't - that old rule of, "There's never time to do it right but there's always time to do it over."

Jaime Masters: 	Yes! I love these. Can we walk through walking through a small business owner? I don't think we take enough time to go through the foundational stuff. Literally, people think branding are like, "Oh, it's my logo and colors and go!" What you do is insane for corporations. How can we as small business owners, who don't have a lot of time, really make sure that when we're going into this it is durable like you said. We do the foundational p[piece so that way we don't have to change it, so that way it can take hold. Walk us through sort of a quick step - well, as quick as we can - a step-by-step process of uncovery for somebody that is a small business owner that really wants to hone in on who they are as a brand.

Michael Baldwin:	Logistically speaking, unless a small business owner works by him or her self, there's probably a group of people - founders or board members - and you need those people in the room. The first question - the first two questions I ask each person are: What, in your opinion if you had to pick, one word that captures the essence of the brand, what would that one word be? And 2.) What, in a phrase or a sentence, is the mission of the brand? In an example I use lately as one of the most simple examples of simple and clear branding is the TED brand, for TED Talks. The two words they use are "Spreading Ideas," which is so simple and anyone can understand that. If you understand TED at all, it makes perfect sense.

	Somehow, someway they spent probably a day in a room with the people involved with founding TED and said, "How do you wanna express what it is our mission is and what we really stand for?" Spreading ideas is what they came up with.

Jaime Masters:	I think it's genius, also.

Michael Baldwin:	They wouldn't need to hire me because you put your finger on it and just make sure that you are consistent with how you express it to all touch points with consumers.

Jaime Masters:	So, you give a thumbs up for them, that's great. What's interesting about them I think is the TED name, who picks TED for a name of a talk, right? Yet, it still works really, really well.

Michael Baldwin:	It stands for, I think, technology, education, and design - I'm pretty sure. It's an acronym, I think those are the three words. 

Jaime Masters:	To me, what's interesting is that because it's become its own brand, we don't even know what the three words are. And, they expand way past - I think way past all of those things. They've got some crazy TED talks that I - even ones I share with the kiddos where I'm like, "Wow! This is something I never would have thought about before." It's less about the word they use for the thing but more about what we think of, right? That's sort of the whole point of branding.

	So, if we ask those two questions, let's say they're all over the place -

Michael Baldwin:	Which they will.

Jaime Masters:	What do you do then?

Michael Baldwin: 	That's when you kind of start the day! It's a very non-linear, associative process where each person contributes. But, there's no real path that you follow, it's just a matter of having a facilitator - in this case, it would be me - having plenty of either whiteboard space or I love those little 3M easels you can rip off and stick to the -

Jaime Masters:	I literally have like seven of them over there in the corner of my house. Yup.

Michael Baldwin: 	These days I tell the client, "I need a room with the right people and a whiteboard and that's all I need." What happens is funny things happen. You'll say something or someone will make a remark, or someone will [inaudible] [00:11:39] and then all of a sudden it makes a lot of sense. There's no specific time frame on how it works or linear process on how it works. You start with the right people in the right room with those two questions, and you don't leave until you get it. 

Jaime Masters: 	This is why it's called dark arts! This is why you said that at the beginning, you're like "Wait, there's no ?." How do you know when you get it? Even if you're spitballing ideas and having fun and writing stuff on the board, how do you know when you're like "Oh my gosh, this is it!" and you can actually leave the room?

Michael Baldwin:	I would say two reasons. Because 1.) If it inherently feels right to the people - again, the people in the room are the ones usually - I wanna keep saying board members - they're clearly invested in the company and the brand. They have a knowledge of it and a commitment to it. They're gonna have some kind of instinct about whether something is right or wrong. 2.) You bench test by saying, "Does that work for this? Does that really work if we're gonna be doing this?" For Uber, if we're basically cars, how can we have a tag line that's only about transportation if we're getting into food delivery? 	

	You just kick the tires until you feel like okay, this makes sense. The classic story with naming - this is kind of an overused story - Steve Jobs, who was a client of mine for many years, he said that if we can't come up with a better name than Apple by 5:00, we're calling the company Apple. We have way too much work to do to spend more time on it. 

Jaime Masters:	I have not actually heard that story, so I am so glad you shared it.

Michael Baldwin:	You're kidding?

Jaime Masters: 	No, that's weird! I have every Apple product that exists, also, by the way. Hilarious that I've never heard it. Getting children to decide on the same dinner is difficult, how do you get a bunch of people to actually go all in and feel that it's right? Especially logical, data driven, "Well, what about - I don't know if that's gonna be exactly what I want." Do they just go, "That's good enough" like Steve did? In general, do you get everybody going, "That is the right thing, I feel that, we're raring and ready to go."

Michael Baldwin:	I would say the last thing you ever wanna hear is, "That's good enough," you wanna feel like that's right. In Steve's case -

Jaime Masters:	Especially when they've hired you, I'm sure they're like, "No, we wanna hear the best right, part two."

Michael Baldwin:	That's where it really gets interesting because you're going to an environment where - one was recently Rice Business School, a new client. We started with about eight people in the room and we spent a day together. We arrived at a place that they are all from very different disciplines at the business school, felt that that was what it was. I think - as I said before, part of it is a non-linear sort of associative process. When you get to a point where it's interesting, people react instinctively about what it is you're talking. Again, they're already invested in the business school, so they have an understanding about why they're there and what the mission of the business school is. When you help them get at a place that really concentrates and is very specific about what the brand wants to be and what it stands for, people get excited.

Jaime Masters:	You can probably see it, especially if you're in the room with them where they're like, "I'm actually more engaged!" 

Michael Baldwin:	Yeah!

Jaime Masters:	That's awesome. If somebody - again, hire somebody who's better at this to facilitate because I'm sure you sitting around with yourself, trying to pull things out from yourself and mediating the whole thing is probably way more difficult than having an outsider come in. That being said, let's say we have a really good thing - whatever the words are, whatever the piece are, whatever that feels right piece - what do you do from there? It's more than just that, it's the holistic rest of the brand, also, which does involve colors and other things, too. How do you come up with that stuff?

Michael Baldwin: 	Having just done this with another client, that opens up to a kind of a broader scope which involves a designer. That is the person who's charged with bringing it to life from a graphic standpoint. The traditional rule which is seldom adhered to is called 360-degree branding, which was an Ogilvy & Mather rule. I spent seven years at Ogilvy & Mather in New York. That rule wants to say that for every degree in the 360 degrees of exposure to customers or clients or consumers, you wanna be 100 percent consistent - which is the consistency point of the three words I said earlier - about how the brand is expressed. 

	In other words, if the brand is about cool, like Apple - whether it's an in-store experience, whether it's a website, whether it's a package, whether it's what the iPod feels like in my hand, it's all gotta serve that mission of "This is cool," otherwise it's off. People like to say all the time, "It's off brand."

Jaime Masters: 	That's the funny thing, how do you determine what those things - I know you're amazing at this. How does the layperson or somebody that's not as good as you are, determine what this is? There's probably - there's 360, right - different potential aspects and ways that you can do this. How in-depth do you think a small business owner should go in trying to really have this brand holistic and 360?

Michael Baldwin:	The building blocks I would say - kind of headline are actually the name of the company and you can go to I think they're called coin names - Google I think is called a coin name because Google meant nothing before it means what it means to us now. Or, the name can actually refer to - what's coming to mind is youSENDit, which is now Hightail, youSENDit was the name of the company. It was about large file transfer over the internet and the little logo was a paper airplane. 

 	Obviously, you start with the name of the company and beyond that, if you wanna explore a tagline for the company, like Spreading Ideas for TED. Then, the brick and mortar for anything from a brand standpoint, in my opinion, are visuals or imagery and typography. That's kind of the brick and mortar of branding. That is the domain of a designer, in my opinion. There are great ones, I work with an incredible designer named Kristen Haff. She has an incredible sensibility, irrespective of what category the client is in. She's the one that sort of takes it from that point and says say - kind of headline are actually the name of the company and you can go to I think they're called coin names - Google I think is called a coin name because Google meant nothing before it means what it means to us now. Or, the name can actually refer to - what'ot good enough, but that works.

Michael Baldwin:	Yeah, because in the Apple story, I think Steve really loved the idea of calling a computer company a non-computer name, namely Apple. He just didn't want to burn a lot of cycles as a start-up on that, he wanted - let's make a decision. If there's a better name, fine, otherwise we're gonna call it Apple. I'm kind of a fan of two things - either an actual name or a contraction that does actually refer to the essence of what it is you do, or something that's kind of unusual and incredibly easy to remember like, "Pop" or "Wow" or "FedEx". The easier it is to say and remember, the better.

	The perfect scenario, in my opinion, is when the name actually has an immediate association that everyone can understand that has to do with what it is you're doing.

Jaime Masters:	That way it automatically comes to mind, so you don't have to explain anything to them. Especially for Google way back when, when we didn't use it as a verb. It's like what the heck is that? Oh, it's a search engine, awesome - then you have to go from there. How do you determine that though, based on especially trying to get the gosh darn domain name when naming it.
Michael Baldwin: 	I was just gonna say the same thing. I work with a lot of technology start-ups and that is now the bugaboo. The funny story I have about that is - in 1994, because I spent 25 years in advertising and only on technology accounts, that's why Steve was my client when he was running Next. In 1994, I had a bet with Bob Metcalf, who was kind of the father of Ethernet as to who could get their surname registered as a domain name first. In 1994, I won the bet and I got baldwin.com.

Jaime Masters:	I was impressed when I saw that, by the way.

Michael Baldwin:	The funny thing was I couldn't put two and two together! I could have had any domain name I wanted. No one knew anything about - I could have had sex.com, business.com, lasvegas.com, mcdonalds.com, coke.com. No one knew anything. So, what do I do? I technically walk into this electronic store, I get baldwin.com and I walk out. In answer to your question, that is a trick. I try to work with clients where they can stick in the .com realm because there's still a little - not stigma, but when you start going to other suffixes, you somehow lose a little steam from a perception standpoint.

	That is really a tough thing now. What people end up doing is they'll go baldwincompany.com, or michaelbaldwin.com, baldwininnewyork.com. There are ways to get around it now, but unfortunately, you're having to expand because it's just literally - not only are things taken, but you know there's all those brokers out there who just buy up names.

Jaime Masters:	I used to work for an internet company in '97 and I remember being like, "Why didn't I do this back ?" it was so - my last name's Masters. I want masters.com, that would have been awesome!

Michael Baldwin:	I'm talking about 1994!

Jaime Masters:	I know, go you. I just got my first computer in like '92, so I can't really say anything. When we're looking at the suffix, do you think there's more that are coming out that are better from a branding standpoint? I'll have people go, "I'll try and get the .u ?" not the .us. But, they have the weird ones nowadays, is there any ones -

Michael Baldwin:	.ed, .ai -

Jaime Masters:	Yeah! Do you think any of those are up and coming and we're not gonna have the stigma on .com later?

Michael Baldwin: 	Yeah! I think we're still kind of early stages as far as that goes. We'll probably transcend suffixes at some point anyway. I think the mental logistics associated with websites are - I think the Pavlovian behavior is fill-in-the-blank.com. So, if I know your name and I go to .com and you're not there and you're not being redirected, it's gonna be harder for me to find you. That's why .com is always nice to have.

	I think we're kind of coming out of that. The fact of the matter is, even with these 20-something startups, they all want .com URLs, so what they're doing instead of going to an alternate suffix, they'll say - Summits, Inc. is a startup where they can help you connect with the people who you're mostly likely to do business with at a business conference, so summitsinccompany.com. That's like the plan, the path to your URL.

Jaime Masters:	So, for now, until we get past our bias, which makes sense. Nobody uses .net anymore. Remember .net? Nobody even talks about that one anymore.

Michael Baldwin:	I actually have one .net, it's getconnected.net, which AT&T uses in their stores. You go in, they always talk about get connected. I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for them to come and buy it.

Jaime Masters:	Like, come on, baby!

Michael Baldwin:	Yeah!

Jaime Masters:	What about changing your name? What if we did - when we started we sort of threw something around and we're like, "This is pretty good," and now you feel like you've evolved as a company and need to change your name. What do you suggest for people doing that?

Michael Baldwin:	I just did that with a client. A startup real estate company that is now up to over 100 employees. The founders are in their 20's, both went to Yale. I had been telling them that I hated their name for about two years, and they finally got to the point where they were willing to bring me in. I spent - with the founders and the key people, I think we had five meetings. They were - the name was suitey.com and now they're called triplemint.com. They're in the real estate business so in the real estate vernacular, the property is "mint", but if it's super amazing, it's "triple mint." So, it's using the vernacular of the industry that they're in .com. They were able to buy the URL.

Jaime Masters:	It's amazing! So TripleMint, you can see what you did there. I love it! Not that it wasn't cool that they had the .com before then. What makes a bad name? How do we know if we have a bad name or not?

Michael Baldwin:	I think a bad name - it's sort of like if the name - if you can't - let's put it this way: if I can't connect the dots between what I know it is that you do and the name that you've created - or worse, the name that you've created will never have a trajectory to what it is that you do, I think that's a bad name. However, if you're going coined -

Jaime Masters:	Which is different -

Michael Baldwin:	- then it could be anything! Obviously, it makes a difference. If the choice were mine, I always like to try to come up with a name that is a telescopic, immediate, giveaway as to what it is that you do.

Jaime Masters:	I love that. Don't make us think too much, please, right?

Michael Baldwin:	Exactly.

Jaime Masters: 	Because most people won't. So, once you start trying to pay attention to - I'm assuming most people here will hire a designer, just like we were talking about beforehand. I don't do my own PowerPoints, so how do I explain to a designer exactly what we want. Besides the fact that you have an amazing designer that probably gets it. If we don't have somebody as good as you, how do we really try and show them or tell them to create what we want, so that way we can direct them in the right way so we don't have to go through 17 iterations before we find something that we like?

Michael Baldwin: 	I'm gonna go back to my two building blocks, the brick and mortar of branding, for lack of a better word. For example, typography and imagery. If you were a client and we had arrived at a name for you and we decided whether or not we wanted a tagline for ? you already have one at Eventual Millionaire - then the question would be okay let's now engage the designer who's gonna say, "Okay, this is the fontography or the font, I think that's perfect for what it is you're doing." Fonts are like wine, or like clothing - fonts are incredibly expressive. Font, and then imagery is unbelievable expressive. So, when you pick both and you're consistent, then over time, you have this incredible miracle that takes place, which is you start to occupy the same place in consumer's minds.

 	Where do brands live? They live in the minds of the consumer. You get consistency over time, which is why 40 years after the "Ultimate driving machine", people know the badge - the BMW badge and they know that line because they're still using it. I would say before you ventured out to do a deck, for example, in Keynote and PowerPoint, you would be providing that person with your font library - mine's Gotham - and a primer on the images that you like. Are the humans in pictures or humans not in pictures? Is it modern? Is it black and white? Someone would have done that work so all the person who is doing the deck view - those two gigantic things are already done for them.

Jaime Masters: 	See, I love that. We spent thousands - with the new website redesign, we spent thousands on typography. I came from art and tech, so I know the importance. This guy was so obsessed with typography and I was so happy because most people don't get that at all, that that makes a huge thing with your entire website. I'm so glad you brought that up because I didn't even realize how big of a deal it was before I was in art. Even my logo is more about the periodic table of how things are going - we went like all heck into the branding side of it. 

	But, it's like where do you stop? Especially if you don't have somebody that really knows their - I mean, these people do $30,000, $40,000, $125,000 websites, they know the stuff really, really well. Small business owners can't afford that much, usually, for their website. So, how much do we direct versus how much we don't? Are we just like, "That looks good enough, I really like that." As long as the owner likes it, is that on brand? Or, is it that we just don't know our stuff, so we don't know?

Michael Baldwin: 	I would, again, caution against any expression or attitude that has to do with "good enough" because that's just - what's the point? If you're not gonna do it right, why do it? I would say if you wanna be - I mean, these days there's Wix, there's WordPress, there's lots of really easy, templated website packages out there. The differentiation comes - if we both used Wix, for example, my typography is not gonna look like yours, my imagery is not gonna look like yours, and I'm probably not going to - if we were side-by-side blindfolded or separated, I'm probably not gonna pick the same template you might pick. 

	So, if you imagine in the context of the website, which I like to think of more as an electronic business card these days, that the person who goes there - if you think about the typography exposure and the imagery exposure they're gonna get, provided in this case, they're using a template, one of the many that Wix offers, for example. That's 95 percent of the experience of what your company is and who you are.

Jaime Masters: 	So thankful! I used to build websites back in '97, so thankful we have that nowadays. The amount of tech trying to make it design worthy was ridiculously horrible back then. We are so lucky nowadays.

Michael Baldwin:	I think those are also very, very different sensibilities and skill sets. A web designer or a person who's a programmer - let's face it, in the program languages with CSS and HTML, that's a moving target, but that's a technology skill set. The designer skill set is a totally different sensibility, that's why you usually have both.

Jaime Masters:	That's why usually they have to give me two different - I was voted Most Artistic in high school and I was a programmer. That is so rare, you can't - everybody says that they can do both, nobody can! I can't even and I have still have those skill sets and I still can't do either as good as one on each. I really appreciate that. I do definitely want to talk about your book for just a second, because I love the pieces of this, especially because I'm speaking twice in the next week coming up -

Michael Baldwin:	Oh, great!

Jaime Masters:	- maybe you can give me some tips in general. In the book, it talks not only about the imagery, but also to try and simplify, like you were saying at the beginning. So, can you just give us toward the end some hardcore tips on what makes a really good presentation that's simple and easy to understand from an audience point of view?

Michael Baldwin:	I would say two things right out of the box: to not skip over the step which has to do with who your audience is and what the collective mindset of the audience is, and in particular, what can you anticipate the resistance in that audience might be to what it is you're talking about. Everyone wants to skip that, "Well, it's just the Junior League," or "It's just Vietnam Veterans," or "It's just housewives." It's the first mistake people make. The assume, in this generalized way without even really thinking about it that much, what the mindset of the audience is - if they're even thinking about the mindset of the audience or just choose to give a label. That's the first thing.

 	Secondly, and this is the most important one, is you have to figure out what I call your crystal clear objective is, and the way I teach and when I'm working with clients, that phrase always begins with the same two words, "To convince." To convince an audience of something. Every audience - in the book - the organizing principle of the book is a presentation is no more complicated, metaphorically speaking, than putting an audience in a car and you're driving them from point A to point B. So, figure out what the two words you want to be. Point A might be they don't know Jaime, they don't know you at all, they know nothing about what you do. Point B wants to be they want to have you come speak at their conference, they're very excited, they're very motivated, inspired.

	Your job is to make sure you get them from point A to point B. That's where the presentation opportunity is.

Jaime Masters: 	Yes, which is why everyone should get the book because we can't go through all the pieces of it. In that example that you had, that's more the inspiration/motivation. Sometimes you're teaching though, right? Sometimes point B is I need them to understand these things in teaching. The problem that I see with speaking in general, or with speakers, is that the amalgam of the audience, especially at specific events or something like that, can be very different. It isn't like housewives, or it isn't one specific thing. How can you figure out what the whole is? 

	I ask questions before I speak, but it's still disjointed, usually - "Some people have this level of experience, and some people have this level, and it's kind of like this." It's hard to get that holistic, one message that's gonna be great for all of them because you have to simplify it and dumb it down. I just wrote a post on this, as you can tell, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Tell me how we can do that better.

Michael Baldwin:	I think you do have the luxury and the right to have a point of view about a topic. Not everyone's gonna agree with you and not everyone will be as fluent in that topic as you're gonna be. You have that right and that opportunity if you're speaking. I think what's incumbent upon the speaker at the same time, however, is to have an appreciation and empathy for varying levels of fluency regarding a topic, and for different points of view.

Jaime Masters:	It's okay, I can't hear them very well, don't worry about it.

Michael Baldwin: 	Having said that, what I find - I've been teaching now with my own practice for six years - my job always is to remove what I refer to as any points of cognitive friction. If I've presented concepts - let's say it was an hour with 50 people and three people in the group didn't get it, I make a point of understanding why they didn't get it, what about it they didn't get. When I go back the next time, I've removed those little bits of cognitive friction so that all 50 people get it.

 	My job, my deliverable is that not only will everyone in the room understand a concept, but they'll actually be actionably better on the topic walking out of the room. Even if it's just one hour. I was in Austin for the educational conference and I had about 165 people for an hour. My brief, my deliverable was to make sure that all 165 people, on the three things I covered - or four - could walk out if they had to do something the next day and be better at it.

Jaime Masters:	I love that you put that responsibility on you instead of blaming the audience. Because, no offense, people are like, "They just didn't get it," or, "Half of them didn't understand? They just weren't my people." They blame that even though it's your responsibility as the speaker to - I mean, that's the group they bring it. That's what makes really, really great speakers versus really, really not-so-great speakers as we're going. That responsibility is really impressive, also.

	I know we have to start wrapping up soon, darn! I'm so glad that we actually got a chance to do this interview after a few times.

Michael Baldwin:	Me too!

Jaime Masters:	I really, really appreciate it. Let me ask the last question, it's what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million.

Michael Baldwin:	I would say get absolute clarity about who you are and what your mission is. If you have things like the name of the company that are asynchronous or not aligned - I'll use that as a better word - is to as quickly as you can, make sure there's alignment between who you are, why you started the business you started, and what your mission is. To the extent that that is not 100 percent in alignment, you're gonna have a harder time getting to $1 million.

Jaime Masters:	One of my favorite words is alignment, this is all about the energy centers and alignment. My necklace, also - alignment, to me, is huge. Most of the time we won't pay attention to the foundational stuff because we just think that's, "Oh, we'll get to that eventually. That's working on the business. I gotta get the money and the revenue." You're like, "Well, it's way easier if you get that first part done first!" Then we can explain to customers, "So you don't have all the resistance."

	It saves you time in the long run. I'm so glad, working with corporations, it's not just about, "They can pay extra money for it," it's everybody that should do this. Thank you so much, Michael! Where - we already know that you got the domain name baldwin.com, is that where we should go to get your book and to find out more about you?

Michael Baldwin:	Yes! Baldwin.com is where you can find out about the book, about what I do. I work with individuals, I work with teams, it doesn't matter what business you're in. I work with startups. One big part of what I do for all my clients is what we just talked about. You might think that a Fortune 50 company has that alignment worked out, in many, many, many cases that's not the case at all.

Jaime Masters:	That makes us feel so much better, Michael! Thank you very much. We're like, "Oh, we don't have the resources," and those corporations actually have the resources and still aren't aligned? 

Michael Baldwin:	Yeah, exactly.

Jaime Masters: 	They're still making really great money. So, I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that first, I'm saying it's easier if you do it. Thank you so much. Everybody, of course, if it's aligned for you to hire Michael, go check him out. Even just check out his book because it will help you recreate your presentations and we need to change most people's presentations in this world.

Michael Baldwin:	Amen!

Jaime Masters:	Most of them suck.

Michael Baldwin:	Amen.

Jaime Masters:	Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Michael, I really appreciate it.

Michael Baldwin:	My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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