Out of all the services I have in my consultant toolkit, the most common request is for an audit. It’s the second pair of eyes to balance concerns, comfortably nudge an idea forward, or definitively strike something off the plan altogether. For clients, most who’ve been building their businesses at home in isolation, it’s the first time they’ve verbalized the identity and purpose of a brand that has only lived between them, their brain, and their laptop. It’s having access to a pragmatic POV from someone who is unattached to the emotions, labor, and sacrifice of their brand building. It’s guidance in the process and habit mapping needed to move an idea into a business, and a business into a brand.
It’s an exercise in compartmentalization, decision-making, and critical thinking, and for someone in the novice stage of brand stewardship, it’s conditioning the brain for decisiveness. Even as Plan As fail or pivots happen, the same audit cycle that we learn during this stage is what we run our Plan Bs and Plan Cs, and our scale and exit decisions through.
If we're talking about a business, it's auditing. If we're talking about ourselves, it's self-reflection. But the habits are the same. I am constantly reevaluating the interactions I've had and the routes that I've taken throughout my career to see just which ones I would recycle for the next stage of it. I've been working for nearly twenty years, with and for nearly every major brand, which means I have hundreds of proven routes to choose from. The only real trick is to remember to re-use them. Not everything needs to be built from scratch.
On that note, here are some steps I could've skipped, and some routes I could’ve avoided, while still ending up exactly where I am today.