Small Business Interview with Mike Pile of Uppercase Branding – Small Business Show Episode 110

The Small Business show. Episode number 110 for Wednesday, March 15th. The ides of March 2017. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business Show. The show by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Concord, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, Dave?

I'm good, man. How are you?

That's good. I think we're not only we at opposite parts of the country, but we are opposite spectrums of the weather. You know, it's about 80 out here today, and I imagine it's a little colder, colder out there.

I mean, it's not terrible here. It's in the 30s, but we got about 2ft of snow yesterday into last night.

Nice.

Yeah.

That's awesome. That's cool. Well, hey, you know, and I love talking about the weather because I'm getting older, of course, but I want to welcome to the show Mike Pyle today from Uppercase Branding. Welcome to the show, Mike.

Hello, guys. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Thanks for coming, hanging out with us, talking about your business and talking about branding and naming. We're looking forward to getting some tips. So we always like to start the show by just talking a little bit about the history of your business and the impetus for starting. So give us some background when you started Uppercase and what pushed you out of the corporate nest, if you will, to go out on your own.

Sure. Just a little bit about us to start. Uppercase Branding is a verbal identity consultancy. And what we do is we create brand names. It's sort of an odd niche business, but there's actually many, many people who do what we do. So we create brand names for companies, products and features. And I have a long background in corporate and marketing. And the answer to your question is what sort of pushed or pulled me out was a confluence of events. I had come across a company that we had worked with through a client that developed brand names, and I thought that that was one extraordinarily odd. And then the more I got into it, I found it extraordinarily interesting. And guys, everyone talks about their passion, right? And it only took, you know, me about 45, 50 years to find my passion, but I truly did, and that's what pulled me out. The idea of one sort of controlling my own fate of dealing with folks at a more senior level, as well as a focus on stories. And I mean, we're essentially a creative services business. So stories, narratives, creating identities that helps our clients engage their customers is something that interests me. And is where my skill set lies. And in the previous world, you know, advertising and corporate marketing sort of veered away from storytelling and more to crunching numbers and data and information. And while that's important, it's just. It's not as interesting to me. So that's. That's sort of how I made the leap.

That's awesome. That's fascinating. I can see that. You know, your focus on storytelling and bringing out that message, that's. It is really powerful. We talk a lot about it here on the show. So you made this transition to go out on your own.

What was the.

Avery, we all have different expectations when we got started. You know, what surprised you the most about when you left and got going and, you know, started getting clients? Talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, sure, sure. You know, the transition actually was not that great a leap. There is a sort of a misperception that the corporate world has a lot of resources and abundant resources. But my experiences were always lean and mean. It was, you know, Mike, do more for less and operating your own business, especially when you're the one cutting the checks, it's the same. But I guess if there was any surpr, it was not about the sheer amount of work in ramping up the business, starting the business, managing it day to day. But I think the big difference is there is so much to do. That the skill and the discipline of prioritizing the tasks, prioritizing the projects is, I think, one of the toughest because you don't have the luxury of a boss telling you what to do. They don't say, focus on client X or do project number two. It's, you know, of the 400 things I need to do today, what am I going to do? And so how I do it is it's the very first thing on my to do list is make a to do list. And then I can scratch that off and feel and feel.

I like that.

Yeah, there's something to be said about scratching it off. But this is. This is perhaps one of the best, most concise descriptions of the stark difference between working for yourself versus working for someone else. Because, like you said, all the work still needs to get done. You still need to do lots of work in order to be profitable and successful and all of that. But there's that one difference that you don't have someone sort of breathing down your neck, and not necessarily in a negative way, but someone telling you what to do. And that can be a scary thing. I can obviously be a very liberating thing, too. But it can be a very scary thing for some people and even just for any of us. On some days, it's like, whoa, crap, what do I do today?

I think it's both liberating and scary. And if you can, I mean, I spend the first 30 minutes every morning with my coffee going, all right, these are the three things I need to do. And if I get to four and five, that's great. And the other thing is, you gotta be able to knock off at the end of the day, too. And my bank book doesn't really like that I knock off, but my brain and emotional state does.

Yeah, well, I can imagine, especially in a creative field, you could easily just run yourself down where you're not kicking out those kinds of ideas and those kinds of things. You gotta be able to disconnect, I think.

Yeah, well, that's really true. And that's one of the great things about being in a creative field. Be it, I don't know, making wine or making music or whatever is you can intensively focus on it, and then if you're capable, you can turn it off, but it never really goes off. It just sort of compartmentalizes and marinates in another part of your brain. So when you're out on a jog or mountain biking or taking a shower or unwinding, at the end of the day, something clicks and you go, oh, wow, I got. I got my new lyric, I got a new riff, I got a new name.

Yeah. And so how often does that kind of thing happen with your workflow? I imagine sitting down and going over all kinds of naming and branding ideas, but then just out of the blue, as you're kind of peripherally thinking about it, things come in and you have that aha moment. Is that more common than not?

It's quite common, but I'll clarify just a bit and put a little context around it, because we've actually blogged about this, about how to be creative, and there is a common misperception that you kick back and your feet on your chair and you stare at the stars and muse and an idea comes to you, and that's not really the way it works. Or at least that's not the way we work at. At uppercase. We use a lot of stimuli, since we're in the business of words and creating words and creating names. We use a lot of dictionaries and thesauri and Google, of course. And so there's a very, very intense focus on adding fuel to the creative fire to ignite it. And then your Point is well taken, which is okay, the returns start to diminish. I need to back. But all that information and stimulus is still in there. So an idea will come to you while you're driving your kids to school or something. And you think it came out of nowhere, but in fact it really didn't. It was marinating and percolating with the very concrete effort that you put in earlier.

You know, this is interesting, because we talk about this a lot on the show, is you need to sort of intentionally create that downtime. And you said driving the kids, but that's one of them. But I always say, for a long time I've had my office is on the same property as the house, so I don't get that commute time. But I find taking a shower or whatever, just that sort of that time when you let your brain sort of freely associate and just do whatever it needs to do. Yeah, it's good.

Yeah, that is great. And we talk about driving. Dave and I have had this conversation over the years many times about, oh, I got this big long drive in front of me. It's going to be great because it's very creative, you know, and can be very stimulating. That's great. So let's talk about marketing. I mean, from an outside view, from a layman's view, my view, I look at this naming and branding. It's another form of marketing and getting the names out there. What about marketing for uppercase? How did you market your business and get it started out there and get your name out there?

Yeah, good question. A little bit of background is that my team and I all have backgrounds in marketing and generating demand. So we had a bit of a head start, as opposed to maybe a chef who's looking to start their own restaurant or a person with a retail background. But we believe that any marketing effort really begins with understanding who your prospect is or your customer. And they're actually two different people. Right. And work back from there. And so there are many ways to do this and this is probably a topic for. For a whole nother show. But you really need to understand who you're speaking to, what their pain points are, what their purchase decision process is, and segment those folks into manageable groups. You can't sell everything to everybody. And that's really marketing 101. We're a business to business company. And in the naming world, our challenge is you never know when a company is going to need a new brand name for their product or feature or even if they're renaming their company the Way Anderson Consulting did with Accenture. So by the time we hear about it, they've already got a name, it's already in the news. There's no seasonality, there's no predictable purchase cycle. There's no single decision maker. And so any of the normal marketing metrics you would depend on didn't work. And furthermore, we just started, right? We weren't on anybody's radar. So what we did look to a market segment that already had an installed base of client prospects. In that case, it was advertising agencies. So the business of naming is fun and creative, but many people find it extraordinarily painful. It's fun for about 20 minutes and then the lawyers get involved and the boss goes, you know, that sounds like the name of my mother in law. We happen to relish that challenge. And so given those two points, we zigged where the others zagged. We undertook a lot of direct mail. We built a database from scratch of advertising agencies and wrote a snail mail to them. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds to each of those and says, hey, introducing us. We're in the business of naming. We know that sometimes it's a real pain. We know that you might not enjoy it. We know that you might not do it profitably. If you have a client who has a naming need, we are here to help and we can help you behind the scenes. We would love to have a referral. We can work along side by side. And that built our business and that gave us the base for some referrals, for some repeat business. So even in this day of LinkedIn and Facebook and social media and electronic marketing, we built our business on direct mail and it was really successful, actually.

That's really interesting. Yeah. And this was, I mean, just started in the last, what, six or seven years, right?

That's right, yeah.

Huh. So DM still works. Direct mail still works.

Yeah. And that's what, you know, when I'd get responses, I jump for joy. I mean, as any new small business owner knows, those first sales are really, really cool. And that was exactly my response. Look, direct mail still works. And here's thinking on it is that, is that, you know, one, an email is very easy to delete. Any email that you get from somebody you don't know is almost always spam and always a sales pitch. But when you get a letter that looks like a letter, not obvious junk mail or bulk mail, you know, we think it's a gift, it's a little gift in the mail. And it is really hard to throw that out without opening it, you know, human curiosity is such that, look, it's. I can open this up and I'll find out in a nanosecond whether it appeals to me. Right. Or not.

Yeah, it's okay.

I love that idea.

You're almost, almost leveraging the fact that email exists and is more, you know, more widespread as the reason that your direct mail sales worked or your direct mail marketing worked, I should say.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, in any direct response, you know, the list is really important. And in our business sector, that was really key. But I think we also had a compelling, a compelling pitch. And then, and then, and then a fun little thing is we followed up with that with a direct mail premium. Right. A little, a little gadget widget. And in this case, we had shot glasses made with our logo on it. Sent them out to all the people who didn't respond the first time with a little note that said, hey, give us a shot.

Nice.

And we got five or six pieces of significant business from that. And everyone who said, they said, boy, that's really neat. That's really neat. And it sort of works the way we think names ought to work, which is there is a metaphorical reinforcement of it. Shot glass. Give us a chance. A little pedestrian, but boy, did it work.

I'm totally going to steal that idea.

I was just going to say, these are. We always say, you know, I always say I learned the most on the show, and I love that. And we had a, a tool guy on the show running a tool business and they sent out little screwdriver tips in the, they'll go into like a drill or something that the contractors use. And it was like, here's a tip from Casey Tool. And he had a little tip. Their little tool thing, I'll say that's another, you know, you're recognizing of that. Hey, how that, that, you know, plays into that marketing, that cognizant awareness, that's really powerful.

I'm stealing that one.

Yeah, see, there you go.

You got it. I love it. And the, and you're right. Everyone is so inundated with either pitches via the phone, where, you know, our phone rings here all day long with people trying to sell stuff, or the email, which is, you know, nobody pays attention to that. Getting something in the mail, whether it's that, you know, initial pitch or a thank you card, thank you letter, you know, that it's powerful and often ignored. Often ignored. That's true. So sounds like somebody was going to.

Have no, I'M just, my mind is blown. This is awesome.

I love it.

Mike. Yeah, we're not finished, but I'm going to say thank you. This is great. But I am actually curious, you know, how I'm curious about your creative process. Right. Because every business is. It requires some level of creativity. Yours is very much like that's your product is rooted in that. But you talked a little bit about it where you said you sort of seed these ideas, but more intentionally than you might in another business. And I feel like people that don't run necessarily creative driven businesses could learn something about doing like being intentional about your seeding that creativity. And so I'm just curious to hear a little more about what you do with that there.

Yeah, absolutely. And this you can't steal. But your point is really well taken that, you know, our end product is a solution like anybody else's, but it is much more creatively driven. But you know, even your tool guy, if he or she is faced with a problem or a challenge, seemingly intractable, applying creative techniques, very specific creative techniques, not necessarily brainstorming, we think that's a waste of time. But specific creative techniques that stimulate ideas is one, really fun and two, can be very, very successful. And so in our process, it is akin to any marketing communication process. And in any large corporation there will be marketing people and marketing communication people. And one of the very first steps is. And they all have different formats and different processes. But the very first step is to document a roadmap. A creative brief could even be a miniature business plan, whatever it is, but it's a documented, a roadmap that articulates who you're talking to, the challenge, the background, why you're here, everything you know about what you're trying to do, description of the product, description of your, of your prospect. You know, it's basically seven questions that, that need to be answered. In our particular case, because we're trying to generate an idea for a word or an invented word that will eventually turn into a brand name, we go a little bit deeper than that, but that's the very first step. So it's. So we have the strategy discovery session and we have a meeting of the minds on what we're trying to achieve, what the objective is, how that objective will be measured. And then as I say, we go a little bit deeper into, you know, if your brand or brand to be was a superhero, what, who might it be? If it was a celebrity, how might that celebrity go about solving this problem? So we peel the onion a little bit More. And so we want to. It's really a distillation process because we're not producing a television commercial or a set of direct mail pieces. We're trying to get all of the customer's value proposition into a single word.

Yeah, I mean, you're really distilling all of that down to this one essence. Right?

I mean, that's, that's right. That's right. So you, you know, there's a lot, you separate the, the wheat from the, from the chafe and, and, and then from, from there. It, it sometimes will work together with the client doing creative work. Other times and mostly they'll go, hey, that's what, you know, you're the experts. We're going to stick to our knitting and do our business and we're going to let you do your business. And then so I get together with our team and we div. Call sandboxes and there may be, say if it's a conservancy for the environment, a non profit or something. There's a lot of sandboxes you can work with. You could work with the idea of sustainability and conservancy and look at the source dictionary, things like that. You could look at, okay, there's flora and there's fauna. So we have a library full of dictionaries of flora and fauna. And it may be we come across the California live oak and that happens to be a particularly exceptionally strong solution for this. Or it may be that there's a Latin derivative of the California live oak, or that maybe the cousin of the California live oak is the Bristlecone pine. And maybe the Bristlecone pine is situated in Joshua Tree. And all of a sudden Joshua starts making a lot of sense for the name.

You really do go into pro. It's an intentional process of this sort of free association just to get yourself a foundation of what you're going to do for your client.

Absolutely, absolutely. And then from that foundation, that's then when, you know, sometimes you put it aside and you know, some idea that you hadn't heretofore made the connection percolates up.

Okay, so that's how you're doing that seeding, so to speak. And I realized, of course, we started talking about trees.

That's right. Well, what's interesting. There you go. I love that, you know, you're starting to pull this thread and see where it takes you.

You.

And so let's say for the average small business owner that's listening to this show, what would you say is the most important Aspect when they're trying to come up, even just with a name for their company, some simple tips that they need to take into account when working on that.

Well, you got to understand that a great name won't help a bad business model.

That's really. Let's just back up because, you know, we talk about great ideas, you know, don't build a business either. Execution does. So that is a very, very important thing to get out there. I love it.

Right. You know, so I was gonna say, you know, Theranos or Theranos. I still don't know how to pronounce it. Oh, yeah, Great name. We love that one. Everyone in my business loves that one. But bad business model.

Yeah, that's sort of the epitome of a bad business model, isn't it?

Is. So a great name won't help it, and a bad name, it won't kill your business, but it can be a distraction, and sometimes that distraction is good. But a bad name will get people scratching their heads too much. We like it when people scratch their heads when they hear the name. There's an advantage to that, but not too much. We don't want to put too big a question mark between the name and the company. And you really only get one chance to make a first impression. So no other part of your business is going to be used more frequently and wider than the brand name. Right. So however you go about doing it, take your time and do it. So we have a number of clients who have a name in mind, and it just came to them why ever. And it. And it may be particularly strong. They may have. May have some meaning to it. You know, when you're a small business owner or business owner, you're doing that you want. However, you know, they want to make sure that there isn't a better alternative. So that's the bar that's set. And we look very hard at a whole bunch of other ideas. And nine times out of 10, you know, we don't come back and say, your baby's ugly. We say, here's some alternatives. Here's why they work. And they generally go with the. With the name that they originally came up with. However, their degree of confidence with selecting that name and building a brand around that and building their entire company around that is extraordinarily high because they've done their due diligence and they've. And they. And there's. They're much more confident that. That this name is. Has the legs to carry them across.

Yeah, it's been vetted if you will. Right?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. That's great. I like that. Huh? That's co. So, okay. You know, we talk about stories a lot and, you know, pulling stories out of these company names and brands and everything. If you could share, you know, a great success story or a failure, you know, when working with teams and you don't have to mention the name, actually, if, you know, we have it out there, but, you know, certainly love to get some, you know, background on something like that.

Sure, sure. You know, it's funny you should. Should ask that. You know, we just. We. We just launched our very first Norman Awards. And the Norman Awards are like the Oscars or the Grammys or the Clio. So our Norman Awards are for winners for the great new brand names of. Of 2016. So we looked at a bunch of submissions, evaluated them, and then awarded the Norman. And if you're interested, I'll tell you how the Norman Award or how the name Norman came.

Sure.

But I'll get to, you know, I'll tell you that now. So in the year 1066, William the Conqueror invaded Britain, which every high school student in Britain knows led the Normans, the Great Normandy invasion of Britain. So what the hell does that have to do with names?

Right?

Well, that was a significant event, if you're a linguistic nerd like we are, in that it expanded the English language from maybe 50,000 words to 250,000 words. And so the English language is really a great tool. There are more words meaning the same number of things in the English language than any other language around. So we named it the Norman Awards after that. So we had multiple winners and a couple of losers, but one of the ones that we liked was from Samsung, and Samsung had a feature to one of its washing machines, and they simply called the feature ad wash. All right, now, now that's not going to win a MacArthur genius award, but, you know, it appeals to anyone who has ever found a sock under the bed while the washing is going. And so I'm going to add this to the wash. So it's not particularly creative or clever per se, but it's extraordinarily powerful. So that one won a Norman Award for us. Yeah. And then. And then one that, that. That we don't think works so well, but. But, but we know it'll be a success anyway is there's a new hotel chain called Scion, all right? And it's been in. It's been in the press a lot lately. And Scion is designed to a people to. To the Millennials. Right. And. And we don't think that works very well because it is. Is so. It's such a bl. Hey, millennials, we know who you're about, and we know that you aspire to be rich and cool, and so we're gonna call this a scion. Well, you know, I don't. We don't think that works very well because, you know, I don't think anybody, anybody, anybody, anybody would love to be a scion. Right. You know, that. The offspring of a rich and wealthy person. But. But I don't think anyone goes around bragging about that. I don't think anyone goes around and says, says, you know, I, you know, I went to the scion, and boy, look, aren't I cool. It's just sort of. I think millennials, if anything, are sort of, you know, at least in their minds, are less consumer driven or less materialistic. They may not act that way. But something that says it's a defining characteristic.

That's right.

Yeah, absolutely. So this is about, you know, privilege and honored wealth and conspicuous consumption and living. That's something you want, but it's not something you're going to advertise.

That's right. That's cool.

That's.

That's great. So, okay, so now looking back, you know, we always, you know, we had the benefit of hindsight here. When you were first getting started, first launching uppercase back in 09, if you could go back and give yourself one critical piece of advice that could help you out a lot, what would you tell yourself?

Yeah, that's a really good question, and I have to think hard about that. But I think the answer is to you need two goals. I think maybe three, but you need two. One is a realistic one, and whether that's going to be this much revenue, these many clients, even just getting through the task list in 12 months or whatever it might be, you need to set a realistic goal, one you can achieve, so you can feel pretty satisfied at the end of the year, the end of the metaphorical day. The second goal, I think ought to be really big and hairy and audacious and call it a home run goal or a stretch goal or a grand slam goal. I think there is something that's to be said for reaching for the stars. You may not get any, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either. And so, and so we set a realistic goal, and, you know, we exceeded it by the middle of the third quarter, which was really, really appealing. And I just wonder if we would have set one twice that what might have happened.

Yeah, that is a really good insight in looking at that and I think that's valuable. Which is it? Is it the realistic one or the big hairy one? It's a tough one.

Well, that's why you have two. Right?

Yeah.

But don't sell yourself short on your stretch goal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

Yeah, that's for sure. So this is fascinating stuff and really, really good, I think, material. So if our listeners want to learn more about uppercase and get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Visit our website, uppercase branding.com or simply Mike P, as in pile@uppercase branding.com. so email and if they want to mail us a letter, we'd be happy.

To receive that, too. Or a shot glass. Right. I love that.

That's great.

Well, thanks for even better. A big fat check.

Yeah, there you go.

Those we do like mailbox money is something we hold in high regard here on the small business show.

That's what we do. Well, Mike, thanks for hanging out with us. Everyone has learned a lot, especially me, which is usually the most important. So that's fantastic. I really appreciate your time.

Our pleasure. Thank you, folks.

Thanks so much for listening. And visit us on Facebook@businessshow.co Facebook, where we have our small business support group. We'd love to see you over there between now and then, make sure you keep living that charmed life. We'll see you next time.

Significant.