Branding Strategy and the Brand Doctor with Unique Designz' Henry Kaminski

0:00
Welcome to the thoughtful entrepreneur Show. I'm Josh Elledge, founder and CEO of up my influence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. stick around to the end of the show, we're all reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let's go. And with us right now, we've got Henri Kaminski, Henry, you are known as the brand doctor, you've you've achieved quite the notoriety in the industry. You've had some great awards, for example, winning the two comma club award on kind of the clickfunnels world so congratulations on that and you are the founder and CEO of Unique Designz and that is on the web at Uniquedesignz, with a Z, .net, thank you so much for joining us,

1:05
Josh. Thanks for having me, buddy. I really appreciate it. I'm excited for today.

1:09
So Henry, why branding? So this is something that you got into how long ago Oh

1:14
my god. So I started as a freelance designer, graphic designer 13 years ago, kind of by accident, I was working at a local hospital. And it was funny, I was cleaning coffee pots when I first got out of college there, you know, I got anything that I possibly could right out of school because I wanted to work I have a strong work ethic. So I got I got a real base level job at a local hospital and worked up the ranks there and started working in the Children's Hospital at the sudden infant death syndrome center. And my responsibility there was to create fundraising events for the families in New Jersey, that lost a baby to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. So it was very rewarding, but it's a very sad case. So Every event that i would i would create, I would need marketing materials for right one day. I cold emailed Danielle, Danielle Mineiro from z 101. The biggest radio stations.

2:14
Yeah, no kidding. I'm familiar.

2:16
And she freakin responded. And she was like, I would be more than happy to help you with this. So she brings me and one of the doctors into the studio into the station and she interviews us and she comes to the event and she was helping us promote it. And so one of my buddies at the time was a nightclub promoter. So we wanted to do this event at one of his establishments that he promotes. So he was a graphic designer at the same time. So he helped me develop all the designs on there, forget it. It was a Sunday morning early, I go over to his house. He sits me down in front of his computer, we start mapping out this design, and I just got bit by that design bug. Hmm. And ever since then, it was Was my calling. And I always knew I was going to help people my story and we won't have to go. We don't have to go back that far. But I always knew I was going to help people. I just didn't know how. And it just so happens that I have this this God given gift for design and I for design and branding. And I took it and ran with it. And so 13 years later, I built the multimillion dollar design agency literally out of my house. I've never owned a piece of commercial real estate or rented a piece of commercial real estate in my life. And it's been a fantastic journey. Not to say that it wasn't bumpy along the way. But why branding? About five years into my business, I almost went bankrupt. You know, I started to get burnt out. I didn't have a lot of Financial Intelligence growing up. So every all the money that I made, I spent and I realized if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, business owner, you got to re invest. You got to see you Gotta make sure that you're putting money back into the business. And I wasn't I was putting more money into me, you know, into vanity than I was actually growing and scaling the business. So that's where I find Click Funnels, and Russell Brunson. And so I was at close to bankruptcy. And I had a hail mary pass. I had no money, but I had credit. That was one thing my father taught me. He's like, have good credit, right? So I reached out to Russell's camp, and I asked them about his coaching program. And he said, you know, it's a $25,000 investment. I was like, you might as well told me that right? Exactly. Right at the time. So I said, Is there anything else you know, that you could offer and so at the time he had this program was small, it was $10,000. And I said, You know what, if you if you let me pay five now and five over the next couple of months of jumping in, if this works, it's Wednesday. This works. Yeah. And so I jumped in and it was crazy him and I have our first call. And we're both hysterical crying. 20 minutes into the conversation. I tell him my whole story. Yeah. And right then in there, he hires me on the spot to help him with his first book, calm secrets.

5:18
Oh, wow. What did you do with it? So

5:20
I didn't do the cover design. Right. But I helped him promote it. So all the Facebook ads, all the behind the scenes marketing design that went into that book. That was all me.

5:33
Wow, well, you're the guy. You know. So that's, that's absolutely one of the books that I recommend a lot. I mean, it's it was really, really helpful, fantastic book.

5:44
But what happened was, I realized that design was becoming quite the commodity. Yeah, Fiverr came out, disrupted the marketplace. I realized that if I didn't level up the value that I delivered to my audience and to my client, Aha, I would be washed up. And what happened was, I didn't move as fast as I wanted. And I said, you know, what if I can't beat him, I'll join them. I actually became a fiber designer, because I No kidding. I was in such dire straits. Just keep the lights on. Yes. Right. And I'll never forget it. There's this woman. God bless her soul. She dragged me, she paid five bucks for a double sided business card design. Yeah, I spent six hours on that project. Oh, my gosh. And that was it. That was my life lesson. And I said, I will never be here again. No offense to fiber designers Listen, right. Everybody's doing their guy start somewhere, right? You got to start somewhere. But right then in there, I said, this will never happen again. And so I studied branding for years. And eventually, I linked up with a strategist, worked with him sort of as an apprentice and learned the strategic side of branding and then said, you know But I'm gonna I could do this, I have the design background. Now I have the marketing background, I have the funnel background, I have the branding background. Let's scale up. So I built that my team. And now I just focus on strategy and building client building content for the company. And my team actually executes all the brand development

7:22
of course, yeah, so. So, branding is a term that gets thrown around a lot. And I think that the first thing that people go immediately to it's like, Okay, well, I'm going to redesign my logo and maybe you know, my colors and that they think that that's the brand right? But go ahead and kind of give us get school us give us give us like a 60 to 92nd lesson on what branding is, if you could is maybe doesn't even need that long. You don't actually you don't you

7:55
know I got there's a lot of definitions floating around there some very complicated At some very simple, I like to go to simple route. But I've read tons of Marty new Meyers books, and the way and Marty neumayer is a as a icon in the branding space. And the way he defines branding is what I resonate with the most. And it's that gut feeling people get when they interact with you. And your business.

8:22
Yeah, that's it. And, and so I think a lot of people will start, like, let's say, they're just they're scraping total bootstrap, they get into whatever they're doing as a freelancer. And then eventually, they they work their way and they develop a SaaS product or, you know, maybe they build out an agency or something of that nature. And I think a lot of us when we get started, it's, you know, everything is MVP, minimum viable product, including our logo. And so at how can branding and I boy, I've got some great answers on this myself. But how can branding impact our ability to grow our business. Okay?

9:06
So very great question. By the way, the way I break down branding with my clients is a three step process. And this is where I got the brand name from as well, so much like a awesome physician, they will diagnose the issue first prescribe a solution and then apply that solution as needed. So what I like to do when I'm creating a brand for my clients is discover a few things. Okay, who was their ideal client? Why is their product or service a best fit for them? Right? Are they articulating the value of what it is that they offer to the point of differentiation? So you're not looking like everybody else and you have a clear sort of section in the market that you own? How do we generate the most revenue? How do we Create the relationship between the business and the customers. So I like to look at that as like a two prong approach. So first, we need to understand them. So I take them through the brand accelerator program, and I show them how to do that. But we also need to appreciate them. And so how do we do that? Well, we need to create an amazing user experience for them, so that they remember us. So I saw this question the other day in the clickfunnels. community, and I sort of chuckled as I responded, and somebody said, What's better? An ugly designed funnel, or one that's really well put together? Yeah. And everybody started chime in and people said, I've seen ugly funnels outperform great funnels. I've seen great funnels, you know, outperform ugly funnels. My question to the man was this. How do you want to be perceived by your audience? Mm hmm. I think End of the day, that's what it comes down to be. Do you want to look and there were some really good answers in that thread. One of the men, one of the guys said, you know, when I see a ugly funnel, if you will, I feel like that particular person that owns that funnel did not put in the effort needed. And I am already skeptical as to Yeah. Is that service or product really going to give me the result that I'm looking for? Are they just as lazy with their deliverable? as they were putting together that funnel?

11:35
Yeah. here's, here's my observation on that. And that is, is that if, if you if your branding, is that on a scale from one to 10, is that a level two? And you're looking to attract level one and two type clients? No problem is probably gonna work out. Okay. But I guess my rule of thumb is that You know, and again, by the way, this has nothing to do with someone's value or whatever, it's just where they are in business, right. And what I've noticed about myself is, you know, now that you know, our company's, you know, we're doing very well very busy, we've got a big team, you know, I have to be very, very, I have to really discriminate in terms of like, who I invest my time with. And so one thing I've learned is if I go to someone's website, and there's issues and they're using, like, you know, that same old stock photo model like that you see everywhere, and they haven't invested in original photography, they're, you know, just it just doesn't feel like it's really ready for primetime their copyright still says 2018. Like, it's like these are all little poker tells. And it's it's these poker tells that I think most people if I if I look at consumer behavior, consumers have never been more savvy than they are today. And they're looking for these things. And because we're so quick protective of our time, because we've all we listen, we're inundated with offers, we're inundated with companies shouting at us saying we could solve your problem we could give you you know, this is, you know, this is gonna make you happy. And so as a result, you know, we kind of look at everything with a, you know, a Spock, you know, kind of turned up eyebrow. And so we're just looking for stuff that doesn't add up or doesn't make sense, or it's like, yeah, maybe not yet. And so. So if you're, if you're at a two and you're trying to attract fives, it's going to be really difficult. Your conversion rate is going to be tiny in my opinion. Now in the argument of ugly funnels, work some, you know, it's like, you may have a higher conversion, opt in, but I think that the quality if you look at the quality of who that is, if you're selling a $9 thing, yeah, probably doesn't matter a whole lot. You're gonna you know, you just survive on ones and twos because there's a lot of ones and twos out there in business. Matter of fact, that's probably I would guess, maybe like a 70% 80% of the market are ones that do. There are people that are just kicking the tires on the saying wanting to know if this is gonna work for him or not. So there's a lot of those people. But if you're truly I think if you're trying to work with Henry, if someone's trying to, you know, if you're interested in possibly working with someone, you're probably mentally gonna put them through the ringers. kind of see, can they solve your problem?

14:22
Yeah. My question is this, Josh, and I have this as my headline on my website. Hmm. The quality of your brand will determine the quality of your client.

14:34
Oh, gosh, yeah.

14:35
So my clients really appreciate and value time, way more than they actually value money itself. And they want to create an experience for their clients that is everlasting. And those folks are really serious about their brand, their reputation, how they're how they're going to be. be spoken about behind closed doors. These are the folks that want to reinvest in themselves. Because that statement that I just made, you can actually take it a little bit further. So the quality of your brand determines the quality of your clients, the quality of your clients. Determined determine the quality of your life.

15:22
Yeah. Sir Henry, I'm standing up and I'm applauding for you right now. Because that's just so absolutely true. When you know, when you're getting started, you kind of maybe don't really know this, or you don't know what it takes to attract those higher level clients. And I just had a conversation with someone about this. And it's like, I get it at the beginning. You're like, you know, and I would hear this right about, like, you know, how important it is to work with a high quality client. And I'm like, well, that's great for you. I don't know how to get them. And so, um, you know, what, again, I think our you know, our thesis for today is, I think I think a lot of that is based on you know, obviously you got to be doing a lot of hustle and stuff but I'm just telling you if you have a great brand at your back, and that's, that's what represents you online and brand being inclusive of everything from your headshot to what your your social media cover art looks like to, you know, to even your bio, does it resonate with your your why and your mission, your purpose and your values? Does it look like this is all kind of a cohesive statement? Is it? Is it easy to figure out who you are? If you've got that?

16:36
Yeah, I can just tell you from experience, Henry, it's just a lot easier to do business. You just, it's like you'll feel like you took the Harry Potter lucky juice right? You drank the guilty punch or whatever that stuff is right? Someone someone is listening to us right now knows exactly what that stuff is called. I don't know what it's called. But I just remember that scene in you know, like Harry Potter like seven or more whatever movie it was and It was just like he was just everything was just charmed for him. It was incredible.

17:04
Yeah. Let me give you a couple real life examples. So, to show you how important brand is one example. So, Russell Brunson a couple years back hired me and my team to take care of Click Funnels branding, from top to bottom, making sure everything stayed consistent. And so I remember working with him during a phase where the Click Funnels servers went down. Hmm. And people were there was like hundreds of millions of dollars of ad spend being ran to funnel pages and Click Funnels servers go down so people are just like burning money. All that while clickfunnels is down. Right. So what does Russell do? He doesn't go and hide under a rock and tell his support team handle it. Yeah. He comes out and makes like a Press Conference, Facebook live inside of the clickfunnels group and explains to the entire community like the President of the United States, what's going on what they're doing to fix it, how they're going to fix it, and the estimated time that it's going to come back up. Yep. That to me, Josh, that is brand. That is a that is Russell's personal brand coming to the forefront and showcasing how he is a leader and how he is taking responsibility for his business. That went a long way. Now some people you know, they were had the pitchforks out, you're gonna get that it's 100,000 people use it right so you get it, but I can tell you I didn't go anywhere. I didn't go switch to another platform. I didn't jump ship. And this happened not once Josh while we were working together, but twice and he followed the Same protocol. And man when I tell you, he that's where he builds up his reputation and, and and and his his personal brand now, I'll give you a real life example of me. So I got into video and social media marketing probably about a good solid eight years ago I was horrible though when I first started. God I was cringing when I saw myself on video. So we all have to start somewhere, but I started, okay. And I would just go out there and I would put out my personal stories I would put out where I'm hurting where I'm doing well and, and I did this religiously for three, four years. I get this client who just wasn't a good fit. Okay. I don't want to put all the blame on him because at the time my processes and systems inside of my business could have used a tune up or two. Okay. This particular project goes to hell in a handbasket. And he decides to now this guy's got a pretty big following. He decides to go to social media and do like a trash campaign. Not only does he take it there, but he goes a step further and you can still get you could still buy these bots to go on your social media and give you like positive or negative reviews. Right? Well, he took these bots and he went across all of my social media channels and completely smeared him with negative comments, negative reviews. So we wake up my wife and I wake up one morning to dozens of text messages and and men and Facebook messages. Hey, Henry, I just got this message on my Facebook. It looks like this person is from I don't know, like a third world country but they're saying that you're a fraud. In that you stole money from this person and, and my wife was getting them too. So I'm like, Holy moly, like what do I do? So I'm not the best writer that's why I have great copywriters on my team. But my wife was a fantastic my and still is a fantastic writer. She's in the marketing space too. So she says we need to make a statement. So we go and she puts out this statement, I might be half. And we actually do some digging on this person who did it who did all of this. Come to find out he embezzled $1.2 million dollars out of the senior citizens out of Vegas and winds up was in jail for a couple of years. It was unbelievable. Now I knew nothing of this. point of the story is this. I walk away from social media for the day, because I said if I read all of this nonsense, I'm going to blow my tap.

21:58
I come back around seven o'clock at night. Night. And I got like 200 something messages on my Facebook feed from that statement that my wife posted on my behalf. And it was hundreds of people supporting me. Hundreds. And they actually dug up the headlines of this guy and posted it, posted it in the thread and completely aired this guy out. And I and I was like in tears reading everything. Because if I had not built up my personal brand over the past couple of years at that time, that one moment could have buried my business forever.

22:45
Yeah, yeah. So you know, part of your brand was that and here's the thing too. You have a business. I think the lesson here is don't be so transactional like it's it's you know, in any business that We do, you know, we're at a new place where I think it's more important than ever to be transparent with our audiences be authentic. And I think be willing to be vulnerable. When I'm, you know, hey, I'm a business owner. And if you work b2b, I'm a business owner just like you. And, you know, I think today, you know, folks, if you've done right by them, and you've always had that practice of being authentic with them, like, people will give you a lot of leeway. I know I certainly would. Because Hey, Ben there, done that. Yeah, one of us every perfect. Yeah. So what would be a great first way for people to begin engaging with you to kind of get to know your work. I know you've got a great podcast. What are some what is that and maybe some of the other ways that people can get to know the brand, doctor? Sure. So I'm everywhere

24:00
So you can't really get away from me once you come into my world but so my largest platform where I have the most influence is Instagram, we have 142,000 people following us over there and real strong community. And the the, the handle is at the brand, Dr. m, then YouTube, I'm really trying to build up my YouTube platform this year are going on,

24:24
you've got some great videos, I was just

24:25
not great videos. It's just a hard platform to grow. It's not growing as fast as I want. And so I got to stay patient. But if you just type in the brand doctor on YouTube, you'll you'll come to my page and you'll see you know, hundreds of videos of branding and personal branding and funnel design and build and so there's that and then you can just directly go to my website, which is unique designs with a Z at the end, not an S dotnet. And there you'll find the brand doctor podcast. We're getting over 65,000 downloads a month now. So it's great for all those that may be listening To the show, and to me as be already listening to the podcast, thank you so much for your support. I can't thank you guys, I would never thought in a million years, we'd get it to that level and it's growing very, very rapidly. So those are a few spots you can find me.

25:13
Well, Henry Kaminski, you are the brand doctor and you're found on the web at Unique Designz, with a Z, .net. And of course, you could just search for the brand doctor in your podcast player that you're listening to right now. Or if you're watching this on YouTube or watching this wherever it may be, again, you could just you can find you can find Henry there. Just search for the brand doctor or again, all that is linked up at Uniquedesignz.net. Henry, thank you so much for joining us, Josh. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

25:44
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