EntreLeadership - Should We Rebrand Our Legacy Business?

Starting point is 00:00:07 From the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, this is Entree Leadership. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host with over 30 years of experience leading in the trenches right alongside you. If you got a question you want to ask, click the link in the description. Sean is in Buffalo, Wyoming. Hi, Sean, how are you? I'm doing great, Dave. How are you doing today? Better than I deserve.

Starting point is 00:00:28 What's up in your world? Well, I'm a co-owner of a commercial roofing company in Wyoming. Actually, my family and I recently acquired the business. It's been around for over 40 years. We have about 25 employees and a three-year average revenue of 6.3 million. And we started to think about investing in marketing to expand and diversify, and that kind of brought us to our logo, possibly updating it. So my question is, is it wise to rebrand the logo of an established business?

Starting point is 00:00:57 And if so, how do we do that without losing the trust that's already there? I doubt that a roofing company logo is carrying your marketing on its back. I mean, you're not Coca-Cola. And so, in other words, your marketing is the reputation of the company you bought, the name of the company you bought. Now, if you're going to change the name of the company, that's a whole, that I would hesitate on. Okay? Right.

Starting point is 00:01:30 No, yeah, I fully want to keep, I want to keep the name. And it's just that logo is very recognized locally. And so I just didn't want to have this perception that, you know, new owners, new leadership, we're changing how this company operates. We're sticking with how it was done. We're still really involved with the previous owners. Why would you want, why would you update the logo? What's the upside?

Starting point is 00:01:57 Well, I guess, well, we were thinking about updating, you know, all the internet stuff and marketing things. things and the logo's been around since the mid-90s. It's slightly dated, but it's a fine logo, but we're just thinking about modernizing it a little bit. You know, the founder's name is part of the name of the company and part of the logo. But like you said, we want to keep the name, and so we're fine keeping that in there. But we just thought about maybe just updating a little bit so it's not so 90s-ish. Okay, here's what I would do to test the idea then. And we've done this with a bunch of our different brands here. We've got several different brands.

Starting point is 00:02:35 Entree leadership's one as an example. Okay. We, I would have a graphic artist develop me five to ten options of new logos with this instruction. When you do the new logo,

Starting point is 00:02:55 I need to be able to see, and the customer needs to be able to see a tie between the old one and the new one. Oh, yeah. And the second part of that is, if we're going to change the color, we have to give the color a nod in some way or another for the same reason. We have to say, we don't go so far astray from the old one that we lose all recognition of the old one. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:25 And if they put five or ten in front of you and you look at them, you may go, yeah, we'll stay with the old one. Or you may go, well, we'll just change the color. Or you may go this or that. So we went through all of ours because we were having a problem internally. I'll share it with you about, it did it. It's probably 15 years ago now, between 10 and 15 years, something like that, that a lot of our brands were functioning in the market and people didn't know they were Ramsey.

Starting point is 00:03:58 They were standalone. Entree leadership being one of them, okay, that you could say, entree leadership, I don't know that had anything to do with the Dave Ramsey show, which was what it was called back then. I didn't know that had anything to do with that money guy, you know, or I didn't know what had anything to do with that. I just knew it was a small business brand, right? And so we went through all of our brands and all of our look-tone feel,

Starting point is 00:04:20 which is the font that is used, the colors that are used, and those kinds of things, and revamped all of them to where there was a connection visually between all of them. And so all of our brands are recognizable sitting beside each other as having something to do with each other and not siloed off. And so that was a different goal than you have, but we kind of had to go at it with the same thing. We don't want to lose the existing part of it.

Starting point is 00:04:51 But entree leadership in those days was all yellow. I mean, like crazy yellow. It was like yellow to where we were sick of yellow. and you know but and we still kept some nods to that color but it's not our primary and our singular color anymore and it ties back across some of the and we pick up some blues and things that picks up some of the ramsie blues like the background behind me right now is blue okay as an example and that's the ramsie blue that's also on the sign of ramsie solutions out front so there's these cross ties now you're not trying to accomplish that but what you are

Starting point is 00:05:24 trying to accomplish is a tie back to the old logo And that's the visual, which includes the look, tone, feel, color, but also the design itself, if they're really good, if a graphic artist is really good, could give you a nod to the current. And that's the only way I would change it. If it completely abandons everything that's there and it's not recognizable as being tied to the old company at all, then I wouldn't do it. You run a business so you already know that bad information leads to bad decisions. And everyone is talking about AI, but AI is only as good as the data behind it. The best AI is built on the best data. That's why I recommend NetSuite.

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Starting point is 00:07:00 If your revenue is at least seven figures, go to NetSuite.com slash Ramsey for a free product tour. That's netsuite.com slash Ramsey. Yeah, that's really helpful because, yeah, you nailed where I was going with it. I mean, there's some loyalty and there's some trust around that, and it's such a recognizable logo in the community. I want to stay with how, you know, we're recognized there. But I also was thinking, well, maybe if I'm going to update and kind of make this push with marketing, should I do that?

Starting point is 00:07:32 But I really like that. Yeah, I can't think of an example, but I have seen some stuff, and you probably just could Google it and find it, of companies' logos that have evolved over the years. Right. And I think you'll find them sticking with the convention that we just talked about, that there's always a nod to the last one so you don't lose all the brand equity. but it also is a modernization of, you know, like in the 70s, you remember everything was lime. You don't remember. You're too young. But in the 70s, everything was lime puke green.

Starting point is 00:08:00 Oh, yeah. Yeah, like parachute pants and stuff, right, and whatever, you know. And everybody thought that was a cool color. Well, now that's retro and it's somewhat come back, but it's still a very dated color scheme. And so if you had a very 70s color scheme, you know, it'd be like having three-inch shagged carpet in your living room, right? And so you got to update it, but we still have to use the same floor that the carpet sits on. So, yeah, that's a really cool question. And you're being very wise to think through this critically rather than just go, oh, we're changing it.

Starting point is 00:08:34 Because a lot of entrepreneurs, they just throw stuff against the wall and see what works. And yeah, I like the idea of changing it gradually and letting it evolve. I would also, I'll add back to that, get the five different ones with them, give the graphic designer those instructions. and then I would also look up some other brands and watch there that have done logo evolutions over the years. There's some 50 or 100 year brands that are out there and you can watch them change and grow as they go along without losing the nod to the past, without losing the tie-in to the credibility that brought them there. So, hey, that's a cool question. Good question, Sean.

Starting point is 00:09:14 I don't know if I've ever had one like that here. That's a different one. I like it, though. It's fun to brainstorm it with you. So a good rule of thumb is, number one, to recap, number one, what you're looking at is with logos, you never want, never's a lot. Small business people, listen to this. Very few, like 99.9% of your small business people, your logo is not going to make or break you. So if Sean totally screws this up but runs the business well, he's going to be just fine.

Starting point is 00:09:48 The logo is not going to like cut sales. We lost 50% of our sales because of the logo changed. Nah, not going to happen. It's not that sensitive in that situation. Where a logo would be that sensitive is if you have built a brand, a visual recognition that's international and millions of millions of millions of eyeballs, right? Like Nike swoosh. You go screwing around with that, you know, you got a problem.

Starting point is 00:10:13 Okay, you go screwing around with some of the basic things like that. You know, you can't do that. And that's why you can trademark a logo. And the Ramsey R, the block R on the side of our building and on a bunch of our Ramsey stuff in the background is trademark, federally trademarked. And so, but because we need to protect the visual of that and it becomes recognizable. And it is the thing that ties all those products together that we're talking about. So if you're going to change and you're a small business owner, number one, you probably don't have to sweat.

Starting point is 00:10:48 it too much. But it's fun to put a little bit of burn some brain calories on it and try to do it right. And that would be let the color, the font, the look tone feel, and the actual design give you a nod to the past. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to like, share, and subscribe for real world leadership content. I'm your host Dave Ramsey. This is Andre Leadership.

EntreLeadership - Should We Rebrand Our Legacy Business?

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