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.
Resources Mentioned:
- Audible – Get a FREE Audiobook & 30 day trial if you’re not currently a member!
- 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:
- You don’t need to do everything and be everywhere to build your brand — just pick, at most, 3 strategies and go deep there.
- When in doubt, go back to your basic principles.
- 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) The Freedom Journal: Accomplish your #1 goal in 100 days!
2) The Mastery Journal: Master productivity, discipline and focus in 100 days!
3) Free Podcast Course: Create, Grow and monetize YOUR Podcast!
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