Jeff Stephens » Being an entrepreneur

Refined Positioning Leads CBC to Launch New Website

Jeff Stephens — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:55:35 +0000

Positioning is everything. At CBC, I obviously preach the virtues of good brand positioning to my bank and credit union clients. So when it comes to marketing ourselves as a company, I obviously try to practice what I preach. It’s always tougher to see your own situation, though. The cobbler’s children often have no shoes, as they say.

This year I’ve attended two conferences/seminars from ReCourses, a management consulting firm specializing in small creative services companies like us. Hearing their content about brand positioning for small agencies not only helped me think about CBC’s own positioning in a fresher way, it has actually even given me some cool new ways to articulate my philosophies to my bank and credit union clients as well. It’s given me lots of great food for thought. That’s one of the things I love about business and entrepreneurship. When you leanr about new things, you find many ways to apply it all over your life and business.

To reflect our newly refined positioning, we’ve developed a new site, still at www.creative-brand.com. It was a lot of work for my team, and for me personally, but I’m excited about it.

Our primary goal with the site is to better distribute our unique educational content about our one-of-a-kind expertise in experiential brand development, multi-sensory marketing and word of mouth marketing for entrepreneurial banks and credit unions.

Our second goal is to give our prospective clients a good sense for what it’s like to work with CBC, so we’ve developed a New Client Orientation Guide (which was particularly fun to write).

This year I’ve attended two conferences/seminars from ReCourses, a management consulting firm specializing in small creative services companies like us. Hearing their content about brand positioning for small agencies not only helped me think about CBC’s own positioning in a fresher way, it has actually even given me some cool new ways to articulate my philosophies to my bank and credit union clients as well. It’s given me lots of great food for thought. That’s one of the things I love about business and entrepreneurship. When you learn about new things, you find many ways to apply it all over your life and business.

To reflect our newly refined positioning, we’ve developed a new site, still at www.creative-brand.com. It was a lot of work for my team, and for me personally, but I’m excited about it.

Our second goal is to give our prospective clients a good sense for what it’s like to work with CBC, so we’ve developed a New Client Orientation Guide (which was particularly fun to write).

Tweet This Post

Entrepreneurial New Year’s Resolutions

Jeff Stephens — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:55:55 +0000

As I look at 2010, I’m extremely optimistic. I think our country and economy is gaining momentum. And in my world, my companies are gaining momentum as well. Perhaps most importantly for me personally, I feel a sense of clarity and focus. All of these things lead to my believe that 2010 will be a prosperous year. To start with a bang, I’ve written a few resolutions for myself, which I thought I’d share with you:

Post More Often. Not just writing more posts here at www.jeff-stephens.com, but I mean truly being totally engaged in all my social communities. 2009 really showed me that social media is not an optional marketing channel, it is just another required part of doing business successfully. Just like a phone or email, it’s a tool we can no longer live without.

Live the Getting Things Done Lifestyle. If you haven’t read Getting Things Done, by David Allen, you need to. He’s the master of personal productivity. GTD is brilliantly simple but truly transformative…if you give yourself to it. So far I’ve dabbled heavily in GTD, but haven’t completely given myself to it like I want to and need to. My current tool of choice for GTD software is OmniFocus, so my goal is to really lean on it as hard as I can and make it part of my lifestyle. This leads me to…

Start Each Week, and Each Day, With Focus. I have said before that I believe that each day, the world conspires against you to prevent you from getting the stuff done that you want to get done. More realistically, though, I think it’s that we don’t start each day with the level of focus and clarity we really need. I will start each day and week not with a list of “to-do” items, but with a list of accomplishments I want to achieve.

Get Coached. I’m proud to say I am pretty much always learning new things, but it’s usually mostly on my own. This year I’m reaching out for help that will provide structure, accountability and a fresh perspective. I’ve started working with Mark Shapiro from Emergent Business, am attending a seminar through David Baker’s ReCourses, am signing up for guitar lessons and am even considering a personal trainer to help whip me into better physical shape. Plus, of course I’ll continue my both-feet-in participation in EO.

What are your resolutions? I’d love to hear. Plus, if you put them on the Internet like I did, you have to follow through or else the whole world will know!

Tweet This Post

5 Great #Entrepreneur Tweeps I’m Digging

Jeff Stephens — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:12:54 +0000

Twitter is so vast. I’m constantly amazed by how much great stuff there is out there: great people to follow, great brands and campaigns to track, and great links and posts to read. It’s downright overwhelming! As I was reading Six Pixels of Separation recently, I was struck by the comment: “welcome to the era of snackable content.” How true, how true. You can’t possibly keep up with it all these days, so you just have to settle for doing your best to consume what content you can.

I thought I’d share a few of my favorite #entrepreneur people/companies I’m following on Twitter. You might want to check these out:

@EconomyHeroes: ”Tweets for our Economy’s Heroes – entrepreneurs and executives of emerging businesses and those that advise them.”

@Unstrappd: ”How Gen-Y Does Business. Quoted as Mashable meets Entrepreneur magazine”

@IncMagazine: ”The magazine for entrepreneurs. Broadcasting live from New York City.”

@JaredOToole: “Stop doing sh*t you hate!”

@WhenGrowthStall: “CEO, BusinessWeek.com columnist, and author of When Growth Stalls: How It Happens, Why You’re Stuck, and What to Do About It.”

Enjoy these great Tweeps…but good luck keeping up with all their content.

// E4RQ7ZDRGTQ2

Tweet This Post

Richard Branson: Finally an Entrepreneur in Banking

Jeff Stephens — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:01:35 +0000

One of the things you should know about me early-on is that Richard Branson (Virgin Group) is my entrepreneurial hero. I am more or less obsessed with studying his career, his moves, and perhaps most importantly, his outlook and attitude toward business. He wrote a book, whose title I really relate to: Screw It, Let’s Do It.

Branson and Virgin have already been in the banking space to a certain extent with Virgin Money (in the US, Virgin Money helps formalize lending between friends and family; in the UK and a couple other regions, it provides broader financial services). Now, Virgin has applied for a full banking license, to become a complete full-service banking company.

Watch out bankers. There’s finally a real entrepreneur in banking. That should make you very nervous.

That’s because entrepreneurs don’t think like bankers. Bankers think like bankers. But entrepreneurs think about applying business principles and scrappiness to creating and building businesses. They don’t focus on running businesses–that’s for managers. Entrepreneurs, instead, focus on starting and growing…architecting dynamic organizations that shake things up from the traditional.

You can bet I’ll be following Sir Richard’s efforts very closely…and cheering them on.

Tweet This Post

Hi. It’s me. Jeff. Jeff Stephens.

Jeff Stephens — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:16:29 +0000

Um, hi. Nice of you to stop by here. If you can’t tell, this is my first post on my brand new blog. I’m excited to start this thing–I’ve been considering it for a while and decided it’s finally time to put some Jeff-think out there. The wheels of my mind are turning all the time, much of the time about my family, friends and life, but also much of the time about business. Here’s what we’ll be talking about in this blog:

being an entrepreneur
business philosophies
banking
“innovation”
making people give a damn about what you do
many combinations of the above, and surely a few random ingredients tossed in for good measure

Specifically, if I had to state the the thesis of this blog, it would be this.

I get fired up about injecting some entrepreneurialism and business thinking into banking. Today’s banks are run by bankers, not business people or entrepreneurs–and the industry needs a dose of outside, ballsy business thinking worse than anything else.

You may disagree with me already. I kinda hope so–now you’ve got a reason to keep reading.

Just so you know, in case you follow my other endeavors at all, this blog will not be redundant to the blogs run by my companies (http://creative-brand.com/thestory and http://psstmarketing.wordpress.com). This blog will be broader, more personal and more, well, me.

Tweet This Post