Karen 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 Mentioned:

• 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 Key Points:

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.

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Time Stamped 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) Real Revenue: Follow JLD’s step-by-step system and turn ANY idea into a revenue generating MACHINE!

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