When I first started in financial services, I was focused on building a client base, making enough money to pay my bills and eventually being successful enough to qualify for MDRT. And I was lucky! My hard work paid off, and I built a successful practice.

But then I decided that building a practice wasn’t good enough; it was time to build a business.

While there are a lot of components to building a business, one of the components is deciding on who you are as a company and building your brand based on who you are.

When I rebranded my business, it came from a time of upheaval. I was separating from a business partner, and instead of focusing on what I might lose or what it might cost me, I focused on what opportunities were out there. I decided that this was a time to rebuild based on my values and focus on who I wanted as clients.

A company’s brand is the company’s image. It includes the name and the logo, but it is much more than that. How do your clients see you? What do they say about you? And, most importantly, is their message the same message that you are putting out to the world?

When I rebranded a few years ago, I did so in two stages. In the first stage, I drafted my mission and company values and redesigned my logo and website. In the second stage, I better defined the values that were important to me and better identified who I wanted my clients to be.

We all have a brand — a message to our clients and prospects. At some point, it may make sense to rebrand as to tell the story your way.

Why should you rebrand?

Maybe you don’t love your logo, or perhaps your aesthetics need to be modernized, or your business scope has changed — there are many reasons to rebrand. The driving factor for me was that I wanted a brand that did a better job of differentiating me from my peers in the marketplace. Rebranding is an opportunity to stand out from your competition; it allows you to tell your story the way that you want to tell it.

You may also want to rebrand when your business changes. Perhaps you have shifted from insurance to wealth management, or created a tax practice inside of your firm, or you’ve moved to a new location. When you shift who you want to attract, you should also consider your messaging to the world.

Who are you?

A rebrand should always revolve around your mission and values. This is who you are at your core, and who your firm is.

Your mission is your reason for being. Mission statements are short and answer the “why”: why you exist and what makes you different. Mission statements should be concise, have an eye toward longevity, not be too limiting and be adaptable. Just like the world changes, so can your mission statements.

Possibly more significant than the mission statement are the core values of your company. Your values add meat to the bones of your mission. Your core values will guide you, will represent who you are on your best day and will set you apart.

Where are you going?

Creating a vision is sometimes overlooked when you rebrand. The vision should be based on:

• What does your business look like if you close your eyes and imagine the future?
• How many team members do you have?
• What does your office space look like?
• What are the common traits of your clients?

If you are an architect building a house, you design blueprints to share with the builders and designers. In the same way, the vision is the blueprint of your practice. The vision builds on the mission.

Some advisors do short-term visions of one to three years; others do longer term visions of 10 to 25 years or more. I first started with my three-year vision, which included how I designed my new office space and what clients I wanted to spend more time working with. Our favorite clients are those people who wake up every day and want to make the world a better place. Our rebrand had to include communicating that messaging out to the world so that we could bring more of those clients to us.

Pulling it all together

Once you know who you are and where you are going, then we can work on how to live your mission and values and how to communicate them.

Are you still happy with your company name? How about your logo, your website and other marketing materials? My rebrand has occurred in two stages (so far). My rebrand part two isn’t remaking part one; it is simply taking it to the next level.

In my initial rebrand, I came up with a new company name and, of course, a new logo. I always say that coming up with a good company name is the hardest thing I’ve done in business! I wanted my name to be optimistic and action focused, and, thus, Dream Big Wealth Strategies came to be.

I remember one piece of advice I received as I was narrowing down my business logo: When you are down to your final three logo designs, put each of them on the center of a page with a number of your competitors’ logos — the same size, all in black and white. See which one stands out. Instantly, I noticed that one of my final logos looked sad among the others. This violated the core value that we hold of optimism, and so we removed this as a finalist. When there were two of our final logos left, and we were comparing them in a group of our peers, our final decision was easy.

It is important that your entire messaging reflects your core values — having consistency across different marketing mediums of message and the image. And equally important is living the values that you say you will.