Start-up Ace, a new DIY online branding course!
In the past few years, I’ve been doing alot of freelance brand consulting with start-up businesses as well as working with existing small businesses that needed to optimize and refocus their brands. And, I’ve also been thinking about teaching – there comes a point in time in your career when you start to think deeply about giving back and sharing your skill with the next generation. It turns out I wasn’t the only one pondering this, so was my longtime friend and fellow designer Polly Lockman. After lots of long conversations, we decided to team up and develop an online branding course to make our knowledge and expertise accessible to more entrepreneurs.
This was the crux of it all. Entrepreneurship is something we both believe in strongly, and feel that increasingly it is becoming more and more challenging for small start-ups to compete against the big behemoths that continue to gobble up small companies and dominate the marketplace – bigger, faster, cheaper, you know the drill. This doesn’t translate to a richer quality of life in my opinion. Today, just to enter the market, you have to be both brand and business savvy, as well as focused and strategic from the get-go. You need to know your market, understand your customer, and have a mission that dovetails precisely with their needs. And you need to create a brand that speaks your vision in volumes!
The barriers to entry are much less than they used to be, but to compete and be found, especially online, takes a level of sophistication that isn’t accessible to many small start-ups. So, we took our 40+ years of experience, rolled up our sleeves and spent 2023 creating a curriculum that is easy to follow, manageable, and fun, while also being informative, insightful and actionable. We distilled our brand and digital marketing strategies into 10 modules, delivered as on-demand videos no longer than 15 min each, that walk small business entrepreneurs through; developing their mission, vision, and value props; deeply understanding their audience; communicating their brand story; designing their identity; and leveraging the digital ecosystem.
Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve launch Start-up Ace! Our mission is to give SMB entrepreneurs a competitive edge by guiding them step-by-step in the creation of a strong brand strategy. It’s been amazing to work together on this project with Polly, and I’m excited to meet lot’s of new small business entrepreneurs and create an online community that is supportive and enriching.
Cheers to our new venture 🥂 (and yours)!
