Meet Jim Heinigner

Jim Heininger is The Rebrand Man. He leads the efforts of The Rebranding Experts, which he founded in 2017, after 30 years of business and brand strategy experience for P&G, McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch and others.

Rebranding Experts was purposefully designed to be the only agency with the comprehensive services necessary to rebrand organizations. It starts from a fundamentally different viewpoint than traditional branding firms that see rebranding as a marketing strategy. His team believes rebranding should be a strategic growth accelerator, creating a forward-facing organization ready to grasp new opportunities. It’s a jetpack to your success.

Jim has designed the methodology used by the firm and merged the many disciplines necessary for successful rebranding, including research, brand strategy and planning, creative naming, design/identity, corporate and leadership communications, change

management, employee engagement and internal marketing, customer experience design and marketing/public relations.

Jim coaches CEOs through the rebranding process, aligning their executive team, and helping to execute complete name changes and new customer promises. He regularly speaks at national conferences and is a frequent contributor to Forbes.com on the topic of rebranding.

Highlights

00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast

01:21 Introducing Today's Guest: Jim Heininger, The Rebrand Man

02:23 The Art and Strategy of Rebranding

05:05 Current Trends in Rebranding

08:03 Learning from Twitter's Rebranding to X

10:44 Personal and Professional Growth Advice

14:07 Engaging in Professional Networks for Success

14:53 How to Connect with Jim and Closing Thoughts

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jim@rebrandingexperts.com

Meet Bobbi Baehne

Bobbi Baehne is the founder and CEO of Think Big Go Local, a digital marketing agency that helps small businesses succeed in their local communities by leveraging the power of online marketing. With over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship, marketing, and small business development, Bobbi has a passion for helping small businesses grow and thrive, and has worked with hundreds of clients to develop successful marketing strategies. In her current role, Bobbi leads a team of digital marketing experts who provide personalized support to small businesses. She has done a TedX talk, has been featured in Inc. Magazine, Huffington Post, and more, and is a regular speaker at conferences and events, sharing her expertise and insights with audiences around the country.

What are the top three trends that small business owners should consider integrating into their marketing mix right now? 

So there are so many things and so many trends we could talk about, but there are a few that I think are top of the list.

So first is something we're hearing so much about, and that's artificial intelligence, right? How to use AI effectively. That that is definitely one of the things small businesses need to keep top of mind, because one of the challenges I hear so frequently from my customers is the bandwidth to do all the things that need to be done in their business.

And as a small business owner, sometimes you don't have a team built yet. And so figuring out how to make the most effective use of your time so that you can run your business and market it effectively is kind of top of the list for me. 

The second thing, which has been a thing for a while, but it's just not going away is video. For a while, we were all talking a lot about short-form video, reels, TikTok, and those are so relevant. But I also think business owners need to step back and notice a couple of things. 

There's still so many small businesses not leveraging the power of YouTube. And we're finding that a lot of people we talk to are using YouTube in such different ways that you have such a larger opportunity to leverage that. I can go to YouTube and get the small sound bites for the things I want to know and that I'm looking to learn so quickly, and it's opened up an entire new market for YouTube content. 

For a while there, we were talking about really short videos. So a TikTok video, eight to 15 seconds, right? These platforms are starting to incentivize creators to do longer videos, a minute or more. So in 2024, we're going to start to see the length of those shorter vertical videos start to shift a little more. Small business owners should be paying attention to those kinds of changes so they can kind of get in the favor of those algorithms, and just be putting out more content that the platforms wanna show to more people.

And then finally, a place that many small businesses aren't leveraging, and that's paid promotion. It is so difficult for a small business that doesn't have a ton of name recognition or brand recognition yet to get their content seen. Facebook doesn't show anything on a business page to anybody if they can help it. They're in the game of wanting a business to pay for that type of attention.

And yet so many business owners either aren't doing it or they're not doing it right because they've only extended their knowledge base to how to hit that blue button and boost a post versus getting into ad manager and learning to develop a variety of different types of campaigns, leverage different types of audiences and all the tools that Meta is offering.

What social media platform do you plan on using more right now? 

So, I have never been a big fan of LinkedIn. When it came out, I'd been doing this digital marketing thing for quite a while and it just was no fun. That was just the way it was. And I was having so much fun on the other platforms. And it's ridiculous, and shame on me, because I am a B2B organization. So that should be my place, but I just never enjoyed it. And over the last couple of years, it has expanded to be such a phenomenal platform with so many fantastic tools. Things like events and live streaming.

So, I tried to jump in a little bit last year and get more active, but this is the year I'm going all in on our LinkedIn marketing and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. My audience lives there and that's where we need to be. So we're going to be leveraging some of those great new tools that they've launched over the past couple of years and spending a lot more time there.

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Meet Eugene Marshall

Eugene Marshall is the Founder and CEO of Magnolia Tax Services. He is an Enrolled Agent (EA). Eugene is federally authorized to represent taxpayers before the IRS and, like CPAs and attorneys, has unlimited representation rights. He specializes in advanced tax strategies to reduce his client’s tax liability through effective tax planning. Eugene has several years of tax experience, including preparing taxes for individuals and small businesses.

Eugene is also an avid real estate investor. He owns a real estate investing company that acquires multi-family properties within the inner city of Chicago and has recently expanded to the Milwaukee market. Eugene believes owning real estate and having a small business is the cornerstone of building wealth.

What sets Magnolia Tax Services apart from other tax firms? 

Magnolia Tax Services is a tax advisory practice that ultimately specializes in tax planning, tax preparation, tax debt resolution for individuals or small businesses that need assistance with solving a tax problem, and accounting and bookkeeping. What separates us from the average tax practices is that we're actively meeting with our clients periodically throughout the year and most of our client book is all small businesses.

I want to say maybe 90 to 95 percent is all small businesses. We do have some individuals that don't own a business, but have the desire to pick up some rental properties. We do bring them on as clients.

And we also assist and consult them on how to analyze deals, source those deals as well and get the capital to fund those deals, and it creates an opportunity for us to also educate our clients on how to be strategic in markets like today, where the interest rates are higher than they have been.

Fortunately, we're starting to see things climb down a bit. Still, we do introduce other topics such as seller financing, subject to a contract with the seller, wrap-around mortgages, and all these other creative ways to acquire properties that could ultimately benefit our client's tax position. So what separates us apart in short, is that we are actively looking at our client's financial position, and coming up with strategies to ultimately assist them with minimizing their tax bill.

This gives us the opportunities for that business owner to reinvest those savings either back into the business, back into themselves or personal professional development and or into their future.

Can you explain what the difference is between an enrolled agent and a certified public accountant?

Absolutely. So when we look at the tax space, the tax industry as a whole, there's four types of people. You have your tax preparers that do not have to be licensed at all. This could be someone who just understands how to file taxes using a particular software. Don't need a license, do not need a degree, just need to be able to file taxes.

And then we have tax attorneys. And then we have certified public accounts. And then after certified public accounts, we have folks like myself, which are enrolled agents. And so the primary difference between an enrolled agent and a certified public accountant is our specialty is tax. And we get our designation directly from the department of treasury, which houses the Internal Revenue Service. Certified public accountants that get their designation, their license from state boards.

And we actually partner with a ton of certified public accountants because they don't have an interest in tax. And some of them don't know tax. And many of them, their focus is on the accounting portion. And a lot of folks stay co associate accounting with taxes when accounting is nothing more, nothing less, but understanding and being able to read and produce financial statements. 

P and L's, balance sheets, cashflow projections, not more so taxes. Now there are a ton of CPAs, of course, that do get a master in tax or do get a focus in tax, but for us, that's our specialty. We're solely designated here to niche down in the tax space.

Connect with Eugene!

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marshall@magnoliataxservices.com

Office: (414)285-2446

Meet Lisa Apolinski

Lisa Apolinski, CMC is the CEO of 3 Dog Write. She is a content coach, teaching business owners how to use their content to attract more right-fit clients so that they experience the positive ROI on marketing and business development investments.

She has written several books, including Persuade With A Digital Content Story, named one of the top content marketing books in the world and most recently as a co-author on The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever, an Amazon #1 new release.

She has been featured in Forbes and The New York Times for her expertise on digital storytelling and has been dubbed “America’s Digital Content Futurist”.

What do you think are the biggest mistakes you see businesses make with their content when they're trying to focus on that trust factor? 

I actually had a conversation with a client today about this some feedback she was getting from her mentor who is heavily into sales. And I'm not saying that sales is bad. They're simply different ways of being.

He was pushing her to put all sorts of call to actions and you don't have a call to action in your posts on social media. And I said, well, hold on a second. What are you creating your content for if you don't have clarity around what it is that you are hoping your content will do besides drive revenue?

Because we all know the content really should be helping you to make more money, but how do you get there is the question. If you're constantly pushing calls to action or take this next step or sign up now or click on this link. It feels very sell-y and it feels very icky.   

People know how social media posts work. People know how websites work. People know how the internet works. It can be a lot more subtle, where people are engaging with you through your content and learning about you, and then from there, allowing them to decide how they want to take the next step.

Do they visit your website? Do they do a Google search on you? Do they attend a webinar you're in or a podcast? Do they sign up for your newsletter? Let them decide. Don't shove call to actions in their face where it's unnecessary. You can certainly guide them. 

Mark Schaefer talked about this. The customer is the marketer now. The customer is deciding the path. And if you think you're in charge of their digital path, that thought process and that ability has absolutely gone by the wayside because there are so many ways for people to engage with you and your content.

So if I would drill it down into one big issue that I see people making now as a mistake is trying to control the digital journey versus allowing your audience, who's very savvy to discover you in a way that's right for them. And that allowance of letting them have control that absolutely builds that trust factor that we talked about.

What is one thing that businesses can work on in their content today to help improve these relationships with prospects? 

Add in stories. People are hardwired for stories.

I don't know if you noticed, but I've told you three stories so far. They don't have to be long, but it helps to share information. Show how it's relevant. Because people are hardwired for stories, they absorb that information a lot faster and they hold onto it a lot longer. So if you have information that you need to provide on how the journey would be to work with you, put it in a story format. Talk about a former customer or client who is similar in their journey and how they made it to the finish line.

And in my “Persuade With A Digital Content Story,” I actually give you a six-step formula to create persuasive stories within your content. You're not selling, you're not pushing features and benefits, and you're making it relevant to your audience. Again, it has value to your audience because it's the information that they want, not the information that you think you need to push.

So when you add in stories, it also makes the conversation more enjoyable to consume. And with all the content that's available today, having storytelling is, to me, the fastest way to get your content read and to get it out of that content noise and actually show up for your audience.

Connect with Lisa!

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3 Dog Write

Meet Frank King

I am a Suicide Prevention Speaker and Comedian, was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years, a full-time speaker and comedian for 37. I’ve worked with Jeff Foxworthy, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Steve Harvey, Rosie, Ellen, The Beach Boys, Neil Sedaka, Randy Travis, and Lou Rawls. I’ve fought a lifetime battle with Depression and Chronic Suicidality, turning that long dark journey of the soul into 11 TEDx Talks, one SPEAK Event, and sharing my lifesaving insights on Mental Health with colleges, corporations and associations. I’ve survived 2 aortic valve replacements, a double bypass, a heart attack, 3 stents, losing to a puppet on the Original Star Search and lived to joke about all of it.

A comedian who speaks on depression and suicide. How does that work? 

Well, depression and suicide run in my family. It's called generational depression and suicide. My grandmother died by suicide. My mom found her. Nine years later, my great aunt died by suicide. My mom and I found her. I was four years old. I screamed for days. In 2010, after filing a Chapter Seven bankruptcy in April, I came very close to suicide. Close enough, I can tell you what the barrel of my gun tastes like. Spoiler alert. I did not pull the trigger. A friend of mine came up at a keynote recently. He goes, “Hey man, how come you didn't pull the trigger?”

I go, “Hey, man, could you try to sound slightly less disappointed?” So that's where the humor is in the topic. It's not jokes. It's just funny, personal anecdotes.  That's why. And I myself live with two mental illnesses, major depressive disorder and chronic suicidal ideation, major depressive disorder, relatively common. Chronic suicidal ideation, far more rare. It means for people in my tribe, the option of suicide's always on the menu as a solution for problems large and small. And when I say small, my car broke down a couple years ago. I had three thoughts unbidden. One, get it fixed, two buy new, and three, I could just kill myself.

That's chronic suicidal ideation. 

You have 11 Tedx Talks. How did you land all of those? 

Well, the only person who had five was the guy in England. He passed away. That's the most I've been able to find anybody else has gotten.  In 2014, I applied. It was a Tedx in British Columbia. And I got it on my first try, which is unusual. And then two TEDx events reached out to me after that said, do you have any more mental health ideas to talk about? And I did. So I did two more at their request. 

The next seven I applied for and got. And I've got a really big social media footprint on LinkedIn. And an event in India, in the state of Assam, reached out and said, we like your take on mental health. Would you be willing to do a TEDx force virtually? I said, absolutely. 

So I got invited to as well. So, it's just a matter of applying, it's a bit of a numbers game.  I got my first one on the first try, but the other ones took 20, 30, 40 applications before I got the audition and got asked to do it.

Connect with Frank!

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thementalhealthcomedian.com  

Meet Alane Boyd

Alane Boyd is the Co-Founder of BGBO Co., an operations and growth strategy agency utilizing AI and automation to improve efficiency for their clients. In 2022, her company launched Arvo, an AI-powered visual documentation software for creating standard operating procedures, training documents, and company knowledge. Alane has been written and featured in Entrepreneur, HuffPost, South by Southwest (SXSW), PBS, FemFounder, and many more.

How do you start positioning yourself as an expert or a credible resource in your industry? 

I really struggled with this for a long time because I was looking at the work we were doing. We are doing such amazing things and our customers love us. I finally realized we weren't telling anybody about it. Even when we would do these big case studies, we weren't sending them out in a bite sized piece.

No one's gonna know that you're an expert unless you're telling them, and you're not gonna be credible just because you say you know how to do something. You have to tell stories and do them short, where people's attention span can still follow along with it.And also very clear. 

You can do that so easily now with social media. And I have found that has really turned a 180 for me. I was just going, Hey, I'm an expert. I'm over here. People are coming to me because they see me as an expert.

I would love to hear more about your AI software. 

We launched that for companies to create internal process stocks, SOPs, training manuals for their team, and it's all digital.

We were looking at it from a perspective of stuff out there, a lot of platforms, they look like glorified text documents. We just thought nobody wants to learn like that.  Everything is meant to suck you in longer and also for short attention span.

So that's why we built Arvo, to be really digitally appealing. And then we added AI earlier this year and we've got a couple of new AI features coming out too. We thought, what a great use of AI to help write processes. If you could have AI write 90% of a process for you, and then you tweak it for your business, that could be saving you hours of work. We've got some things coming down the line that I'm really excited about with AI too.

Connect with Alane!

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Meet Ross Keating

Ross Keating believes all businesses, regardless of their size, can be more successful, including yours. When you are successful it not only helps you and your customers, but it also helps your employees, your suppliers, the community around you, AND your family.

Over the last 15 years or so his clients have been in industries such as industrial equipment sales, pet grooming, civil construction, fitness, lighting and motor systems, house construction, mining, animal welfare, tourism, and pest control.

Many of Ross’ clients have 2x and 3x their revenue and profits yet become more relaxed and able to have more focus to “work on the business”. The result is their business continues to grow. These clients say they have also been able to achieve personal and lifestyle goals as a result of working with Ross.

He has managed the development, implementation and sales of customer relationship management strategies and software internationally. He has held management responsibility for 40,000+ customers, and $36 million in sales. Ross is a certified by Codebreaker Technologies as a B.A.N.K.TM IOS Coach.

What are the two of the biggest problems that you see business owners and executives have? 

The key is that they're frustrated with the lack of results they're getting in the business. The teams are working all hours under the sun. They are trying to throw all their resources at it, but the business still doesn't meet their expectations. 

And they started saying, “We've got to get more sales and generate more leads.” That's what becomes a real focus on those numbers. Sales is not a numbers game, sales and business. It's a people game now. No longer can you just go for selling. People don't like to be sold to.

So I say business and sales is not a numbers game. It's a people game.

Talk about the Codebreaker Technology Program?

Codebreaker Technologies was founded by Cheri Tree and is the only methodology that has been scientifically validated by independent studies to predict buyer behavior in less than 90 seconds. It doesn’t take a huge amount of time and a lot of brain power to go through the test.

It's been scientifically valid that you've got that prediction, but also to increase sales and influence by up to 300%. And the red, that 300 percent is because you're talking to different personalities.

So by doing that, when we know our methodology all of a sudden you can talk to people in the language and the phrases and the behaviors that you like. And it's not just in business; it's in your personal life because you're trying to influence people.

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Meet Matt Nettleton

Since 2003, Matt Nettleton has coached more than 175 companies in a wide variety of industries. He has helped multiple companies grow from $1 million to more than $10 million in annual revenue and has helped clients close more than $3.2 billion in new sales.

Why do you believe sales is an honorable profession? 

People have this idea about sales and sales people and what sales people do and how, but they forget that there is not a company that has ever existed without revenue. And that revenue never shows up magically. And those people that create the relationships and manage the relationships that generate revenue, they're salespeople who are probably the most honest traders out there. Because the salesperson tells people up front, “Hey, listen. I'm here to see if I can get you to buy something from me. You give me money and I give you a product or service.” And the more honest they are, and the more they do the right thing, the more likely they are to succeed.

So why do you believe business is honorable? 

This is kind of an extension of why sales is honorable, but a lot of my clients are family owned businesses, two to 50 million in revenue. And when I talk to them, whether they're first generation, second generation, third generation, one of the things that they'll talk about is the people's lives that they've impacted.

One of my clients was talking about how they hired their third employee right when he graduated from college and here they are 25 years later. They just celebrated that employee's son graduating from college. That business is not just that service that they provide. They actually provide meaning and livelihood for their employees. They provide sustenance for their families. They allow kids to grow up in great homes. They create a fabric and a tapestry of a community. I think we lose sight of the fact that salespeople are doing good work and that companies and business owners are almost what I like to think about is an almost heroic mission to impact their employees, their customers and their communities.

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Meet Scott Flood

Scott Flood established Scott Flood Writing in 1995 after 13 years with advertising agencies in Chicago and Indianapolis. The Chicago native is a frequent author on copywriting and marketing topics for business websites and publications, has authored two books of local interest, and is also the author of 100 Years: The Story of the Western States Machine Company.

An active community volunteer, Scott has served on the School Board for the Plainfield Community School Corporation since 2000, was honored as Indiana’s outstanding local school board member in 2021, and named Hendricks County Leader of the Year in 2007 by Leadership Hendricks County. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Communications & Theatre Arts from St. Joseph’s College.

Isn't business writing supposed to be grammatical?  

That's one of the great misconceptions. Let me step back and say that I absolutely love and adore English teachers. They're amazing people and anybody who can get bored sophomores to get interested in literature and poetry deserves my praise. But one of the unfortunate things that comes out of English class is that people learn a particular way to write. They learn the highly grammatical academic style of writing, which is used nowhere but the academic world. When you get out into the business world, really what's far more effective is to communicate in a more informal way, particularly a very conversational way. So I always advocate for conversational copy.

Is there a simple way to tell that something I've written is conversational? 

I think the easiest way to do it is to read it out loud. Once we get out of grade school, we don't often read what we write out loud. But it's good practice because if you pick up something that you've written and you read it out loud, or even let's just say it's a paragraph from you're writing a blog post and you're not sure if it's doing a good job, read that paragraph out loud. 

If you find it's easy to read it out loud, if you find that everything comes easily, you've probably done it great. But if you find yourself stumbling or pausing or running out of breath, you probably need to rewrite. It's probably too complex for the situation. That's the easiest trick I can give people.

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The Smarter Strategy for Selecting Suppliers

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Meet Carol Clegg

Carol Clegg is a small business coach specializing in mindset and accountability, partnering with midlife women. Carol's passion lies in cultivating business balance and establishing realistic goals with an effective accountability structure. A maverick entrepreneur at heart, she founded Classic Exec Marketing a decade ago, embarking on a journey to empower small business owners to share their gifts and expertise.

At present Carol integrates the transformative tools of Positive Intelligence, elevating overall well-being and contentment across all spheres of life. Her ultimate mission is to empower clients to create lifestyle businesses that include flexibility and balance, enabling them to operate from any corner of the globe. With her origins in South Africa and her current base in the USA, Carol extends her guidance globally, transforming aspirations into achievements, one step at a time.

Sometimes it seems like [a four day workweek with themes for each day of the week] works for me at least for about 60 days. And then I kind of start to go off track.  Any advice on that? 

Absolutely. It's just time to reframe it. I felt that as well. I was like, “Oh, hang on a minute. This is getting a little boring.”  So, just change it up. Okay, do something different on Mondays or simplify it, because sometimes you want to get into all the nitty gritty and like break it down into so many steps. And then that's overwhelming. So just change it up.

How do you use positive intelligence for wellbeing?  

Well, positive intelligence is something that has been on the outskirts for about two or three years, watching other people using it. Curiosity. And you know how timing sometimes is just when you're ready, you're ready?

So, I started the training with them at the beginning of the year. And it has been absolutely life changing. It's a training system and it's developed by Shirzad Chamine. He's written a book on Positive Intelligence. And there've been thousands of coaches who've now gone through the system, but it's life changing.

And the simplicity of it is it's just a three muscle operating system. What you're doing is you are looking at your negative thought patterns and needing to learn how to intercept that to say, stop, shift. And how can I look at this as a gift and bring in a different component? So it's much more complex than that, but the beauty of it is that not only do you get more calm in your own life, so that's been for the sense of well being, but then it spills out. So as I grow myself and become more calm and cope better with situations, I feel that I'm passing that on. And the instrumental thing, which is something called a PQ rep. And so this is something as short as 10 seconds.

It could be as long as five minutes. There is an association with meditation, but you're being single mindedly focused on stopping the negative thought pattern and just bringing in a sense of touch. So you could just rub your fingers gently together and just immerse yourself in that. So if you and I were sitting here now before going into a meeting, we could just be feeling our fingers getting ourselves grounded, feeling our feet, bringing ourselves back to center, and then stepping into our conversation. And then it's with a loving, joyful, happiness, as opposed to judge and feeling negative. So, there's just so much about it. I am super excited to be now sort of focusing my coaching completely on this and bringing it into the accountability side. But it's a system that you can stay with for life. So it's something that you can use.

Connect with Carol!

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carolclegg.com

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