Karen Tiber Leland founded Sterling Marketing Group and helps Google, Twitter and others build stronger brands. She’s the author of The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build and Accelerate Your Brand.

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Resources

Your Big Idea: Successful Entrepreneurs have One Big Idea. Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer Karen’s small business resource

Man’s Search for Meaning – Karen’s Top Business Book

The Brand Mapping Strategy: Design, Build, and Accelerate Your Brand – Karen’s book

Karen’s website

Connect with Karen on Sterling Marketing Group

EOFire – Check out JLD’s 5 FREE Courses for you!

The Mastery Journal – Master Productivity, Discipline, and Focus in 100 days!

3 Value Bombs

1) You don’t need to do everything and be everywhere to build your brand — just pick, at most, 3 strategies and go deep there.

2) When in doubt, go back to your basic principles.

3) Everything comes in systems.

Sponsors

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Show Notes

(click the time stamp to jump directly to that point in the episode.)

[00:58] – Karen is a branding and marketing strategist who lives in NYC

[01:04] – She’s an artist, a photographer and an actor for fun

[01:31] – Share something we don’t know about your area of expertise that as Entrepreneurs, we probably should: You have to do a lot less to build your brand and market your business than people think — just do 1, 2, or 3 deep tactics to build your brand

[02:47] – Worst Entrepreneurial Moment: Karen had a management consulting firm before she founded Sterling Marketing Group. They were incredibly successful doing about $2M per year. The economy suddenly hit a snag that affected most of their clients – who were mostly in the financial and tech space. They initially had over $1M in contracts for the year, until they received calls from clients backing out — they were left with $75K on the books in a week.

[03:27] – Karen was standing in the grocery store when all of a sudden she realized she couldn’t afford to buy everything in her cart

[04:15] – “You just have to go back to principles”

[04:40] – Principles never go out of style

[05:03] – Regardless of what had happened, Karen realized she still had her skills

[06:26] – Entrepreneurial AH-HA Moment: As a management consultant, Karen did big system-wide organizational change projects. When she first started working in marketing, it drove her insane! There were too many things without systems. She took a year off from doing any heavy work to do research on how she could make branding and marketing an integrated system. Her big ah-ha moment was when she came up with the brand mapping strategy process

[08:16] – Nothing stands alone — look at all elements involved in what you’ll do and connect those pieces together

[09:22] – What is the one thing you are most FIRED up about today? “I have an idea for my next book”

[11:05] – The Lightning Round

• What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur? – “Fear of the uncertain future”
• What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? – “The only attitude you should have towards this whole thing is gratitude”
• What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success? – “My time management habits are really a huge part of what contributes to my success”
• Share an internet resource, like Evernote, with Fire Nation – CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
• If you could recommend one book to our listeners, what would it be and why? – Man’s Search for Meaning – “it’s a really profound book about the meaning we bring things”

[14:28] – Connect with Karen on her website or on Sterling Marketing Group

[14:39] – “Choose carefully the branding strategy that you use for your organization or your business”

Killer Resources!

1) Free Podcast Course: Learn from JLD how to create and launch your podcast!

2) Your Big Idea: Follow JLD’s FREE training & you’ll discover Your Big Idea in less than an hour!

3) Funnel On Fire: Learn how to create a funnel that converts!

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