When building your marketing strategy, it’s important to incorporate your branding into everything you do. “Small Business Stacey” interviews Emily Soccorsy and Justin Foster of Root + River to share how to connect culture and marketing to create a relevant brand. #SmallBusinessSuccessStories

Episode Transcript

Welcome everybody, “Small Business Stacey” here with another episode of Small Business Marketing Success Interviews. Today I have two special guests with me. I have Emily Soccorsy and Justin Foster from Root + River. Root + River helps companies get to the “root” – pun intended of their brand so they can be an authentic monument to all they believe. Welcome to the show, Justin and Emily.

Thank you for having us, Stacey.

Okay, Emily, let’s start with you. What is your backstory and tell a little bit about yourself?

Sure. So I grew up in the desert of Arizona. My family is originally from the Midwest. I started my career in journalism and during those eight and a half years, I was a journalist, I really learned the foundation and the beauty and the magic of storytelling and getting inside of people’s stories and understanding them and then relating them and sparking conversations and the importance to the sort of a core idea that really holds a story together. And after I finished with journalism, I went on to do PR, corporate communications and marketing and have this great mix of a variety of different experiences. And then I was working as the VP of corporate communication for a human behavioral research company and really sort of everything that I’d begun in journalism bubbling back up and I would see companies just really struggling to articulate who they are. At the surface level they were doing that, Stacey, they were telling people, you know what they did, but there was this deeper, soulful, spiritual truth about the company that was really nestled deeply in the heart of the leadership that was not being articulated. And it was at this point of frustration and concern over this that I met Justin and he kind of enters my story there and together we have this meeting of the minds, but I’ll let him pick it up from there.

All right, Justin, how about you?

Yeah, a couple of key highlights I suppose of my time on this planet as I grew up on a cattle ranch in Eastern Oregon. So my cheesy dad joke is I’ve been in branding my whole life.

Oh good.

Growing up on a ranch is a great privilege, and really taught me work ethic and entrepreneurism and a lot of things. And I knew very early on in life I was going to be an entrepreneur. And after about an eight-year career in corporate sales technology sales, I’m working my way up to the VP of sales position at a couple of companies. I started another startup, start on my own with self-employment way back in 2003 way before all of these trends. Now that marketers and branders are, you know, where you go and you talk about social and you’re talking about culture and you talk about brand. So things like brand and social and culture all meant different things. 15, 17 years ago. And as, as Emily said, we met five and a half, almost six years ago at a conference. And, we like to say it was a little bit maybe like when McCartney met Lennon, you know, there were like instant creative energy and she was a client of mine for a little bit and then I asked if she’d like to do a project with me with a new client I had and she said sure. And then we’re like, that was fun. Let’s make it a company. And so, yeah, we’ve been at this together, unofficially, four years, but really five years.

Congratulations. All right, so now we know about the professional you, but my audience really wants to know about the real you. All right, so we’ll start with Justin. Let’s say you’re walking or working out. Would you rather listen to music or podcasts?

It depends. If I’m walking I’ll listen to nothing.

You like nature, huh?

Yeah, the walking meditation model which is a fairly new practice for me, but I find it to be very replenishing. In the gym. If I’m doing light workouts, I’ll listen to podcasts. If I’m doing a heavy day, like powerlifting, I’ll listen to music.

There you go. So all around little of everything.

Sometimes when I’m doing powerlifting, I do listen to Jocko Willink. I don’t know if you know Jocko, but he has the Jocko podcast and it’s very motivating to listen to him. So sometimes I do that instead of music, but generally music.

Okay. Well, another one to add to my list. Thanks for the recommendation. All right. Trick question for you. Emily couch or recliner?

Couch.

Easy answer for you. Huh?

You’d see I love me some couch cause I can spread out and if I’m just hanging there for a while, I get my books, my papers, I got my sketchpad next to me. And there’s just plenty of real estate.

Yeah. All right. Love it. Well one more for each of you. Justin. Nice car or nice house?

Hmm. I’ll go with nice truck.

I’m a truck person myself. Actually I have one.

I live in a walkable community, but that would be my answer. Yeah,

Fair enough. Fair enough. And Emily, bring it home. Coffee cup or thermos?

Thermos. If I’m going to be out and about, because I’m a super slow drinker. It takes me a while to drink a cup of anything. So I love when it’s super hot, but I live in Arizona, so usually it’s super cold at least this time of year.

Branding – What’s It All About?

All right, well let’s get into business here. We’re talking about branding today and I think you know the name of your company. Root + River is very interesting. Is one of you known as root and one have you known as river? You probably get asked that a lot, right?

Yeah, it depends on the day. So it’s actually, it’s Root and River. Root and River it’s a collective name and it really symbolizes our belief. We believe that every great brand, it’s a spiritual experience, but in order to really uncover, to articulate that experience, what it’s made up of, you have to get into the root system and articulate and know that root system and make that a part of your everyday practice of branding. And once you get into the roots, eventually the root system actually goes deep enough where it taps into a water level, which is an interior river and whether it’s the water table underneath grabbing underneath the ground, and that’s feeding the roots or it’s a river that’s running nearby. When you have that root system established, you’re marketing your business, development, your culture, it runs more organically, like a river out to the market. That’s really what the name symbolizes for us. All together we call this practice of branding. Intrinsic branding comes, it goes from the inside out.

Okay.

I love that because you know, small business owners, when they think of branding, they’re thinking, “Oh that’s my logo, right? That’s my brand.”

Right. Justin, what would you say to that?

Well, they’re partially right. I mean that still matters. A visual still matters, but it’s only one-third of what a brand is in order for it be a spiritual experience. Yes, it needs to have visual appeal. But it needs to have other things too. It needs a mission. It needs a reason for existing or what Simon Sinek refers to as a why deeper to this idea that if you’re called to be an entrepreneur or a small business owner, you’re an artist and all artists are called to something. And so even if on the surface you don’t know what your mission is or you think you have a mission for your business, and it’s a mission statement, which is a good starting point. That’s the second piece that you need in order to have a deep and authentic brand. And the, and the third one is you have to have a message that speaks to the soul of your audience.

In order to speak to the soul of your audience, you’ve got to know your own soul. And a lot of the work that we do is inner work. And I’m like, well, what do I believe in and what is important to me and what are my talents? Especially when we’re working with small business owners or your brand and your business and your life. It’s all integrated. Sometimes it’s messily integrated, but it’s all integrated. And so when you get those three things humming and then what happens is that it becomes what we, our definition of a brand, a brand is how other people experience what you feel, what you believe. Excuse me, how other people experience what you believe. And, and it’s as Emily said, it’s organic, it’s natural. It’s like a flywheel or the laws of physics kick in of inertia and force and symmetry.

That’s a great way to explain it. And you know, small business owners really are the story. You know, whether you’re starting in your garage or have this amazing idea. I mean, even the big businesses all started as a small business. And so I found a statement that you had on your website, very insightful. It said brand is a verb, not a noun. So I would love to hear your insights on that.

So building on what you said, Stacey, like a lot of small business owners think, Oh, I have a logo I’m done with branding. Right? We say it’s just a piece of what you are. And so people think, Oh, I checked that box, right?  I’ve got my brand, I sent out my newsletter once a week, you know, or once a month it’s done.

And what we try to infuse into people’s understanding is that branding is a practice. So brands begin and conversations which you have ongoing, like please keep having conversations. As a small business owner,  you have to have that. But brand should be infused into everything. And it should be an ongoing practice rather than a moment in time or to do on your list of things. And I think a lot of times people may work on a mission or they may do some inner work about who they are as a business owner, but most often they do not translate that into how they’re expressing their brand and everyday conversations. Our mission is to inspire leaders to go inward and we use that mission and conversation, whether it’s business development, it’s partnership opportunities, it’s potential clients because it’s true, it’s real, it powers us, it moves us and it’s something that we do regularly and we encourage business owners to think of branding in that dynamic way.

Yeah, that can be really hard because you know, small business owners I talk to when they approached me to start working with them, I ask them to tell me about themselves and they’re like so proud. It’s the chest-beating and they put this on their website. I, I, I, we, we, we. We’ve been in business since 1492. Is that how you tell a brand story?

Justin, what do you think about that?

No, I mean, yes, there’s some level of longevity or you know, the chest-beating, but this is kind of an old-world mindset. I think there’s three realities that small business owners find themselves in and that maybe they’re not aware of. One is that their talent is a commodity. Now, whether you’re a plumber or a marketing expert or a dentist, whatever your talent is, there’s a lot of places to buy it, which means that nobody’s sitting around waiting to hear from you. Number one. Number two is how you market is more important than what you market. So we call it the marketing golden rule, which is don’t market to other people like you wouldn’t want to be marketed to. And then the third reality of this is sameness is the enemy.

Now, if you come from the old world, and we would say that the old world really ended about 2005. We still see remnants and shadows of it, especially in large companies. But even they get it. Even they know that there’s this massive shift happening. They have that old world mindset of longevity, sameness. We’re like everyone else, we’re solid. Nobody cares. Nobody cares except for the elderly. And so that’s why we believe so strongly, Stacey, in this idea that if you establish the root system of your brand, which we would say your root system and your beliefs, your standards and your mission and your message. Then when they work with someone that’s a marketing implementer, a marketing tactician, those can evolve. So maybe lead magnets and click funnels work for a couple of years and they can switch to something else. But if you organize your brand around your marketing tactics, you’re waiting to be made obsolete because the tactics as you know and what you do, the tactics change frequently.

How Your Brand Can Differentiate You

Yeah, that’s a great point because I was actually just reading something where there really is no new information out there. Everybody’s a commodity, right? It’s how you put your spin on it that makes you different. What you know. I’ve heard you guys say this and I say it as well. All business is H to H. Human to human, right? No B2B, no B to C, all businesses H to H. So where then can a small business owner start in trying to figure out one, what is their brand and two, how do they start telling their story? How do they be something for someone?

So two things. First they have to remove the idea of separateness. And this is huge. We kind of touched on it at the beginning of the show. Like give us your professional story into who’s the real, you and me. We’re all part of this same whole human right? And it’s all integrated and messy. But we as human beings, we’re trying to organize this. So we put up a lot of barriers between my business self and my real self. But they’re fake. They’re not real. These silos don’t truly exist. So first thing is to give yourself permission to knock down that wall. So who you are as a person. And what you are placed on this earth to do as a human being is the same or is very deeply connected to what you’re doing. Your business as some people will say, well wait, I just own a chocolate shop. I’m just running a business. That’s just what I’m doing. Again, stop for a second. Just give yourself air and room and space to maybe say, maybe this chocolate shop is an iteration of something that I am deeply committed to at a soulful level.

So that’s the first thing. So let those barriers down a little bit. The second thing that I would say, I would say start with mission. It’s a good place to begin and we’re not looking for a mission statement here. You don’t want a boring run-on sentence that you’ve tried to cram too many ideas into. Our definition of mission is what you are here to do, that only you can do. And that means you with your education, with your background, the time in which you live, the place in which you live, the passion that you have for whatever it is. It’s the thing that you’re here to do. That only you can do. It’s usually something very simple. Three to six words typically, and just like ours to inspire leaders to go inward. Once you find it, it serves as a true North and it’s connected both to your soul and what you do in your personal life and what you do in your professional life. And the reason this is so important is something I mentioned earlier. It becomes when you uncover it, a source of eternal energy and focus for you so you can balance opportunities off of it. You can gauge against is this really serving the mission or not? It also opens up other creative ways of expressing yourself and your brand. So two good places to start.

Wow. Thanks for sharing. So I’m curious because let’s see, how do I say you’ve given a lot of great information, technical theory. I think people now get what a brand is and to not be a commodity. But do you have an example you could share, let’s say of a small business or somebody that you’ve worked within the before state and then now how working with you has really helped clarify their brand?

Yeah, absolutely. Justin you want to talk about maybe Mike’s story? That’s what jumps to mind,

So we have a client here in Austin. I live in Austin. Emily’s in Scottsdale. And his name is Michael Crant. He has a killer TED talk. If you go to the TED YouTube page Mike is a like an old furniture guy. And, 12 years ago he had this project to start capturing the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs of families, especially family business and family businesses. And it turned into a nice business for him. Mike is pretty typical of everyone that comes to us. He’s a wonderful human being. To start with just like the type of person that you’d want by your side in a foxhole and combat type of person. The second thing that Mike had was that he had a great product. His work was excellent. We find that with any client that comes to us, so they generally are good people that do great work. But the third thing is the thing that he did not know how to articulate what made him different. And so we took him through our process.

I add here real quickly, and this is typical of our clients since they don’t know what makes them different. They’re always trying to market on their products and their services and then they get into the commodity game where they’re like, should I slash my prices. I offer this special and they’re just chasing their tails. And that’s kind of what he had been doing and was really unable to raise the value of what he wanted to charge and just wasn’t getting there. Because he had no messaging infrastructure.

Right. And so the kind of the before and after with his company life story, is that his brand became the feeling and the promise in the story that was uncovered in our process with him, what we call a root session, which is this day-long immersion that’s part like boot camp, part therapy. And in that, he uncovered what we call a root belief. So root belief kind of springs from the seed of mission and the root belief that is your story. It’s your one-sentence story that everything else springs from. And so his root belief was, I believe people die. Stories don’t, and stories don’t have to. And which is very provocative, you know, when you’re talking, cause Americans in particular don’t like talking about death. And so he was like, he knew it was right, but he was a little scared or nervous to share it. We started sharing it and then he got invited to give a TED talk and that was his opening line. And now he speaks around the country about this idea that people die. But just because you’re gonna die, your story doesn’t have to, and it’s no more about videography and documentary practices and all that. I mean, that’s all part of what his business model is, but his story is his root belief lived out again and again. Again, with each experience with him, even if you never become a client of his.

So on a practical level, he was able to raise the visibility of his brand. He was able to raise his prices and he was able to engage in different conversations. So no more was he sending out emails into the black hole, but people started responding because the messaging was so crisp and consistent across the website and across other content.

It probably made him feel better too about the mission, sort of what he does now. He’s kind of had some clarity around it.

People do want clarity, but really underneath that, they say clarity. What they mean really is confidence because a lot of our clients have been in business for more than five years. I mean we do work with some startups, but most of our clients have been in business five to 20 years and they’ve carried around this kind of deep-seated insecurity about how to talk about their brand in a way that wasn’t chest pounding. That was confident. And when you find this place that your brand and your mission are basically the same thing, and then you have the words to use, it’s like one of these kids that goes on those shows that, and it doesn’t makeover so they can ask a girl out in high school like it, they, they, they find out that they have worth and value and they don’t have to struggle with this anymore. And that burst of confidence stays with you forever and ever and ever because it’s coming from a source of basically endless energy, which is inspiration. That’s where it’s coming from. Inspiration, inspiration meets conviction. You build a brand.

Where To Start In Building Your Brand

Oh, love it. Okay. So a small business owner, they want to start getting clarity or confidence as you call it. And you had sort of said, well here’s where you start. You start with the statement, I believe dot, dot, dot. Is that where they should start or, or is there a next step? Like if a small business owner is really excited after listening to this, where do they start?

Definitely you start with that mission question. What are you here to do that only you can do next? If you want to start trying to find that message. Here’s another question that kind of helps sometimes. That sentence that fill in the blank is really tough to get at. So for message is what does your heart have to say to the world and what is it that you believe in so deeply that you would get arrested for it?

Ooh.

And what have you always known to be true and lived your life accordingly, but maybe, and also on that one, it’s something that nobody ever taught you. So those are questions that if you sit down and journal or you know, set aside time to really maybe get out of the office one day, take these questions with you, go somewhere that you find inspiring and just, just write on those and then look at how any of those might be an I believe statement.

I think another area to dig into as a starting point. And these are kind of sequential one, you know, one leading to the other as far as discovery. Cause it’s all inside of you. We’re not prescriptive. Every brand is different. There’s no formula. There’s a methodology, but that methodology is ancient. It’s a contemplative practice essentially to go inward. But you have to know what makes you different. That’s again, we use this phrase a lot. Humility is a wonderful, unnecessary leadership trade, but it’s a terrible strategy. And so you have to know what makes you different and not different in a sort of shiny puppies, puffery sort of way. But for real, what makes you different. And the second is, you’re going to have to deal with what Steven Pressfield calls the resistance, which is that interference to not tell, not speak the full truth. So in that exercise of finding your message, we say go over the edge. When you’re imagining go over there. Just don’t start wordsmithing and to make it nice, say what you really want to say. Or where sometimes we say it after two shots of tequila.

Right?

People want the truth. They do want the truth and your story, the resonance that authenticity that people crave comes from telling the truth from the very beginning of your brand. And so it’s a fun thing to do is, you know, maybe sit down with a couple of shots of tequila and go, what do I really want to say? We would also say in your private time, you can be negative. You can be like, I want to kick the ass on my competitors. We don’t recommend you ever go negative with your brand. But anger or righteous indignation is still a good starting point for an emotion because that’s what you’re trying to get to is what do you really feel.

Well if you get to the angry place, you can just say, why? Why does that make me so angry? Why does what my competitor do to make me so angry and follow that trail. Cause there’s a lot of gold there usually about something that’s maybe more important to you more at the soul level or the belief level that they are violating. Yeah, that’s a good point. Because I myself, I know that’s true. By taking the antagonist route, by being angry, you know, I’m positioning myself as the small business champion and I will tell you, it really pisses me off that Small Business Saturdays are only one Saturday, a day after Black Friday, sponsored by American Express, the antithesis of small business. So I can be an antagonist. Right? Yeah, that’s it. And as long as you’re elevating on the way and you’re not staying in that negativity, it’s a great place to start

Branding is an art. Like we said, it’s a practice. It’s an art and all art offends. That’s how, you know it’s art. And we’ve been trained, especially gen Xers and boomers, we’ve been trained to make nice with everyone. And you don’t have to do that. Patagonia isn’t doing that. Nike’s not doing that. Chick-Fil-A is not doing that. They’re taking a stand for what they believe in. They’re organizing their brand around their belief systems. And that’s where we often say that the number one ingredient for becoming a brand is courage. You gotta be willing to be the antagonist, to be the provocateur in an authentic way, not in an a, you know, flame-throwing, hubris laden sort of way, but for real because that’s often how truth is. You gotta be willing to be, as one of our clients calls it, you’ve gotta be willing to be a heretic.

Hm.

All innovation comes from people going well I’m going to do it this way. And then being very stubborn about that.

Can I Create My Brand Myself?

Well, I guess, you know, a small business owner can approach this process in two ways. They can do it themselves and you’ve given a lot of great strategies of where to start and how to do it. And then there’s obviously the faster, more efficient way working with somebody, you know, outside who is a specialist. You help companies obviously get clear on who they are, who they want to be, how to bring that to life. When somebody works with an outside provider, what should they be looking for in that type of company? Who can help them get clarity on this?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So just an energetic match. I know that sounds a little bit whimsical, but it’s really important. You want to make sure that the people who you’re working with are energy positive for you. Now you don’t want to go too far over the edge where somebody who is not going to challenge you. Because what we find in doing this work is that you need to kind of breakthrough what people think they know. And we oftentimes, one of our agreements with our clients is we all agree to have a beginner’s mind about one another’s work and to challenge things and to test things. And so you want somebody who you feel is a positive force but also who can be a good critic for you. We also believe that this is, you do have all the answers inside of you.

So we’re not prescriptive. We don’t come up, we don’t come up with you know, punchy tagline for you to use. We are in a process of excavation with you. And so whether or not you know that’s appealing to you is fine. It’s up to you. There are people who will come in and prescribe and then go off and execute for you. And then there are also people like us who will guide you. We’ll uncover, we’ll articulate and then coach and you have to be clear on what you want. If you want just somebody to come in and fix it, tell you what to do, that’s fine. Just be clear on that and ask questions around that. And then finally I think another question to ask is, you know, what does it look like at the end of the engagement and how will my conversations be changed? How will my culture be changed and how will we have communicated this reinvigorated brand? So those are three really important things. I’ll highlight conversations because again, brands beginning conversations and if you’re not working with somebody who can give you language, who can work with you to uncover the language that you can use in business development as well as in marketing, you know, in partnerships as well as on social media, then you’re probably creating, again, like different of, of your business and it’s going to be very hard to manage.

Those are great. A couple just to add to that. One is picking up on the formula part that we talked about, which is, to, be aware, be cautious of people with formulas because what happens is the sameness ensues. This is the enemy of the brand. Now, not all formulas encourage sameness, but enough of them do that. It’s something where you want to know what you want if you’re going to work with someone, you want to make sure that they have a very diverse client mix of all different sizes and industries and phase of business. The second is you want to work with someone that doesn’t hate capitalism, that does understand business.

A lot of people in our space, a lot of branding people are, and I see this sort of half-jokingly or raging socialists, they don’t understand the business side of it. They view the business side of this sort of icky. And so you want someone that’s a business person that knows branding and marketing. Not just a branding person that doesn’t know anything about business and it’s, it’ll be a night and day difference on how they see, help you see your business because they will see that the engines of commerce turning not just for their benefit for you know, their business model but for yours and integrating that into integrating everything so that the brand and the business model and the lifestyle which are the big basically the three big things of being a small business owner, that those are fully integrated.

Okay. Well Justin, I’m so glad you sort of alluded to its branding plus marketing. And so I know like a question my audience always likes me to ask is when it comes to marketing, cause you guys are on the branding side, what’s working, what’s working in marketing for your business?

Storytelling is working. I’m also peeling back the curtain to show people what’s going on culturally inside of the businesses, always working for us. And then asking great questions. Honestly, that doesn’t sound like a marketing strategy, but it really is how you choose to do that. Whether that’s on social or emails or indirect conversations, but understanding what are the questions that you can ask to your market to understand two things, how to improve your business and then how to tailor your whole experience of the brand to them.

Yeah, and I would say that the other things that we see are working are anything involving relationships, influence building, working with influencers, even though that’s sort of what we’re talking about, but actually building real relationships. It goes back to being energy positive. And so what we teach our clients is that everyone you meet, whether if it’s somebody sitting next to you on an airplane, the Lyft driver who knows? Everyone you meet is either a prospect or an influencer until they prove you otherwise. And that keeps your mind open and understands that you as the owner are the primary vessel of the brand. You are the marketing tactic that works the best. Number two is using social as an engagement platform, not a promotional platform. So using it to say, Hey there, what do you think?

Like Jim said about peeling back the curtain, use it as a reality show. I’m not an infomercial. And then the third is to really hone into the minutia of your human experience. So the experience of onboarding a new employee should be given the same weight as the experience of onboarding a new customer. And so in that we believe in these sort of, these little small feedback loops and feedback loops are marketing. They’re just touchpoints, whereas someone gets to tell you how they feel, which is that’s what marketing is. Some of our clients, you know, they’re, they the stuff like with click funnels or Facebook pixel or the Facebook pixel or lead magnets and tripwires and all that, some of that works for some of our clients. But most of it is just, and I’ll toss it over to Emily for this. It’s not rocket science. There’s a formula for it. This is the one thing that we do preach.

Keep Your Brand Messaging Consistent

We just often say, Stacey, that marketing is not rocket science. It’s clarity of message delivered consistently over time. And so those are the ingredients. If you can deliver this message over time in a very clear and consistent way, and it’s an emotional message, it’s an unexpected message and it’s, it’s something that’s very simple as well. So those three things, you’re going to be fine. Just keep the consistency at the center.

Okay. I think that those are great closing words – clarity, consistency, always staying front of mind. Cause in my book, “Small Business Marketing Made EZ”  I talk about an ACTION system and the T is for transactions, which are touchpoints because people buy when they’re ready to buy, not when you’re ready to sell to them. And so you very clearly articulated why and how you can use your brand to tell your story and build those relationships along the way. So in closing out today’s session, any parting words for the small business owner?

Yes. Just thank you for being a small business owner. We both are small business owners. We know how tough it can be. And also, just know that we’re here for you as a resource. We have a very open-door policy. I’m happy to answer questions via social media or through our website. And it always begins with a conversation. And if it’s small, if it’s a big query, whatever it is, where we’re open and available to you.

Stacey my advice would be to our fellow entrepreneurs, to practice self-care. Put yourself on the calendar, go to yoga, go to therapy, go to church, go anywhere, just go. Whatever you need to do in order to be a whole person because nothing clouds your business and your judgment, like fatigue or other issues that can creep in. And we as small business owners, especially if you’re a parent too, is we have a lot of output and very little input. And that’s because nobody’s coming to us and giving us input other than their opinion. So you have to be your own resource for input of energy. And even if that’s, five minutes of silence a day where you just sit and not do anything but self-care will transform your brand. If you practice it.

Those are good closing words. I know my audience is gonna want to reach out and learn more about each of you. Can you sort of share how they can do that?

Absolutely. So we invite everybody to come visit us at RootandRiver.com. Sign up for an amazing newsletter there and you can also reach me on social media.

We’re friends now so you can friend me on Facebook if you want or, or on LinkedIn. Where both of us are pretty find-able. And then I would say if you go to our website and there’s two things we would like you to click on. Here’s the two specific calls to action here. One is to click on our warning label. It’s a great model for how to offend if that’s what your strategy is. And number two is to check out our brand lab page. Our brand labs are these immersive experiences where we really hone in a lab environment, in a group environment, on elements of the brand and we’re super excited. In fact, Stacey, you’re one of the first people to know about this is we have an all-day brand lab in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday, October 4th. Scottsdale’s lovely in October. So even if you’re not in the area, it’s a good time to visit.

Great. Well Emily, Justin, thank you for coming on with me today, sharing your brilliance with my audience. I know that the information you’ve shared today is really going to help small business owners and entrepreneurs really get clarity on who they are, who they serve, and how to tell their story.

All right everybody, this is a wrap. This is “Small Business Stacey” – your Get It Done Marketing Specialist here to help you get your marketing into ACTION so that you can say hashtag Marketing Done!