Why (and what) freelancers need to be giant slayers

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Jack rushed down the beanstalk. The angry giant was hot on his little heels. Filled with anxiety Jack knew he had to get to the axe first, but for fear of letting go of the golden goose and the gold coins, Jack couldn’t descend any faster. There was a mighty thud, and Jack knew it was over.

The giant had made it to the bottom of the beanstalk first. Jack felt the axe slice through his body and he was helpless as he watched the giant grab the goose and the golden coins and buggered off back up the beanstalk. As well as losing several pints of blood, Jack also lost faith in fighting giants. After his long recovery, Jack gave up being a freelancer.

He never lived happily-ever-after and he never attended a lovely Cowork Crew in Northampton ever again. The end. Thank you for coming to my talk. Now, that is clearly not the version of the story that we all know and love, but it’s a story that happens a little too often to all of us every day in business.

And I’m going to prove it. How many of you have lost business to a competitor? Put your hands up. Lost business to a competitor? Yeah, I’m going to put my hand up as well. Exactly. Because as freelancers, solopreneurs, you know, small to medium business owners, whatever you want to call us, there’s another name for us. Jacks. We are the Jacks of this world.

And it doesn’t matter how big or small they are, our competitors are our giants. So let me ask you another question. Who here wants to win bigger and better clients? Who wants to win bigger and better P.O’s? I’m going to put my hand up as well. Exactly. And this is the point. Every new client that you want, every single project that you want, it’s a proverbial golden goose.

And for each one, there is a giant that you need to beat. Now your giants will range in all different shapes and sizes. So when I say giants, I’m not talking about the true sense of the word. So take Jo and Penni, for example. Their giants range from other web developers, other solo designers, but also small and medium studios and agencies.

That’s your giants, right? You’re nodding, yeah. So regardless of your giant size, if you don’t beat them, you don’t get the golden coins. It really is that simple. So what I want to talk to you about today, this kind of gives it away, that does. Is that in order to gain the attention of bigger and better clients, in order to win their confidence, and in order to win the bigger and better P.O’s, we need to be giant slayers.

But what do we really need to be giant slayers? And what I mean by that is I’m not going to stand up here today and talk about tactics. I want to talk about strategy because as freelancers and entrepreneurs and so on, we’re so quick to jump to tactics and we miss the strategic first step. Everything in my opinion,

and I’m going to give you some good examples. Everything should hang from a strategic hook because most freelancers are often tactically reactive and not strategically proactive. Can anybody relate to that? Got some nodding heads. Great. So I’m going to say the word strategic, strategically quite a lot throughout this talk. So I just thought it’d be interesting just to kind of give you what I think my definition of strategy is.

So it’s being strategically positioned to solve your prospects’ problems. It’s where your visual and your verbal brand and your comms are completely joined up, strategically joined up for this ultimate aim of always strategically differentiating yourself. And I’m going to put some meat on the bones. I’m not just going to stand up and I do strategy. I’m going to give you some kind of tips and tricks and a formula

actually, more importantly. So how your brand can ooze your value proposition, can your logo ooze your benefits, etc.? Because strategic positioning, strategic branding, strategic end to end, it kills giants. It’s not only how I win business, but it’s what I do. Now I’m a creative director. I’m the founder of Bravo creative.

I’ll put my teeth in. And I’m really honest with my clients that Bravo is just me. I’m a giant killer to work with some of these brands. So I also operate, I’m a one man band, but I also operate the associate model. So I’ll bring on board the developers, the designers, the writers, the photographers, as and when the big jobs and the bigger P.O’s come up.

But I’ve strategically positioned myself as a giant slayer. I’ve strategically positioned myself as a one man band agency, and it’s one of the reasons why Bravo stands for Baz Richardson And Various Others. Just this acronym helps me slay my giants. Now, I’ve worked with some of the big brands of the world, and I differentiate them through campaigns, through branding, TV ads, etc. ultimately, I’m helping them defeat their giants.

And I’ll give you a couple of examples. So I worked on the pitch, and this was the winning pitch for The Tottenham Experience. And The Tottenham Experience is Tottenham’s new stadium. This is fighting their giants. You’ve got Arsenal around the corner. You can do a stadium tour there. You’ve got the Chelsea stadium around the corner as well.

But this is fighting those giants. This is saying don’t just go and do a stadium tour, go to the museum, do the Harry Hotspur to Harry Kane experience The Tottenham experience, also host the NFL. There’s a glass roof that you can abseil off the roof as well. So you’ve got the “Mum don’t look down” experience as well. So this is fighting their giants.

Then we’ve got Shearings, who knows Shearings, the big travel company. Yeah. So I’ve just recently rebranded them, repositioned them. Now Shearings is a bit of an anomaly because these are the biggest in their industry. They are the giant. They have other giants, other big travel companies that are clawing at their heels. So this was all about repositioning them.

And you can see this is what they were doing before. They were essentially selling the product. And this is what I’ve turned them into, where they’re selling a promise, a promise of hassle free holidays, huge shift for them. And essentially I’m helping them remain a giant, if you will. And then a few years ago, I worked with Fever-Tree and this was a project where they were, they were breaking into America, they’d never been in the American market before.

So they were fighting their own giants. They were fighting all the incumbents in America. So this was about trying to steal market share. So this was a, this also helped kill death by PowerPoint because they had sales toolkits. They had onboarding tools, and we brought it all together in an interactive e-book, gave it a magazine feel, and it was so successful that we rolled it

out in different languages, it’s been used around the world. But again, this was helping to, kill their giants specifically in the American market. But as well as working with some of the big giants of the world, I work with the jacks of the world as well, and I love working with the small and medium enterprises. The James’ is of the world, just absolutely love working with them.

So I help them kill their giants because ultimately, most freelancers and small to medium businesses that I work with, they don’t have a strategic driven brand. They don’t have a competition killing value proposition, and they don’t have true differentiation in their market. Can any of you relate with some of those? Yeah, I thought you would, because most freelancers and SMBs do.

So when you first started out, and be really honest here, who began with a really long and considered strategic piece? Exactly. I thought that would be. That was going to be a short talk. Oh no we all did it. Yeah. So who did a few quick tactics, who did a quick logo, quick website just to get up and running as quickly as possible?

Lots of nods, exactly. And this is what, you know, most freelancers, most solo entrepreneurs and SMBs do. And then they lie to themselves. Oh yeah, as soon as the money’s coming in. Yeah, yeah. No, we’ll, we’ll get the specialists in. Yeah. We’ve got the strategy, we’ll do the brand. They lie to themselves. Absolutely,

sit on a throne of lies. Anyway.

And being completely honest, it’s a brutal and honest truth, but not being strategically joined up is probably one of the biggest reasons why you’re losing business.

It’s another brutal and honest truth. I almost didn’t say this, but your giants don’t have this. So as soon as you have a strategic driven brand, as soon as you have a competition killing value proposition, you’ll have differentiation in your market. You will have that advantage. You have a strategic advantage. So if you think that being strategic and running the formula that I’m about to kind of share with you is going to slow things down, it’s vital because your competitors don’t have it.

Now let’s talk about your larger giants. Let’s talk about maybe some of the bigger agencies that you find yourself up against. You might find that they have a big office. They might have 10, 20 people. You can’t out-people them at all, but you can out-belief them and strategy builds belief. I’m a great believer that as soon as you have everything joined up, and I’m going to show you how to do that, as soon as you have everything joined up, you start building belief, because your client, your decision maker, also has a decision maker.

So your job, your brandings job, your value propositions, you’ve got to use that to influence your decision makers, decision maker. Now I have, I’ve got loads of clients, but I have one specific client and her name’s Jane. She’s a Communications and Marketing Director for a huge FTSE 100 company. And she says to me on far too many occasions, thank you for making me look good.

And it warms my heart. Sorry I’ve just punched the microphone. It warms my heart when she says that. She is reporting into the CEO. Into the Managing Director. I’m helping her look good. But the thing is, is that she’s got big agencies that she can use. She’s got a big SEO agency. She’s got a big, web agency.

She’s got a big media buying agency as well. But she comes to little old one-man band Baz for her creative, for her campaigns, for her strategic thinking. And I’d like to think it’s because I’ve not only built belief, but I’ve built it because I’ve got a strategy driven brand. Because I’ve got everything joined up. Now, this isn’t me bragging, I promise

this isn’t me bragging. But Restore is the FTSE 100 company. They have a 280 million turnover. Ledger Shearings Group, so they spent 3.5 million pounds on a TV ad that I wrote for them. And just this Shearings part of the business has a 45-million-pound annual turnover. And they came to little old me for their rebrand, for their reposition. I’m killing a lot of giants to have a seat at these tables.

And it’s a great feeling, but I have to keep killing my giants to remain at these tables and to also keep working with other clients as well. So this is the big myth buster, most people think strategy is really slow and it’s really expensive. If you want it to be it can be slow and it can be expensive. But I’m about to share with you a formula that can speed it up and can actually make it relatively cheap.

And that formula is this, now write this down, I will test on it later. DxS=iT. This is what it stands for. Diagnosis multiplied by Strategy equals informed Tactics. And I’m going to go into a bit more detail about why it’s informed tactics. But it’s not just the only ‘i’, as soon as you’re doing your DxS your tactics become informed, your tactics become integrated, your tactics become improved tenfold, probably a hundred-fold.

So just quickly, let’s dive into each one. And I’m going to give you the framework. This isn’t even giving you the kind of the gold coins or the golden goose. This is giving you the crown jewels, right? Because I use this for big campaigns. So when you’re first looking at the D for diagnosis, the framework to use is P.I.E.S.

So let me tell you what P.I.E.S stands for. What is the client’s big problem? What’s the human problem behind the business problem? And that’s key. What’s the human problem behind the business problem? Once you’ve identified what the real problem is, and you really do have to get to the real problem, keep asking that question over and over again ‘til you get to the real crux of the problem.

What’s the insight that you have on their problem? What’s that fresh curveball thought where you go actually, that is the insight on that problem. And again I’m going to give you some examples. Then, what is your competitive edge over your giants? What’s the one thing that you have that your competitors don’t? And if again this is you going up against the 20, 30 agencies, is it that you’re more nimble?

Is it that you are Two Women, No Middlemen. Right. It’s it’s your competition killer. And then once you’ve got your P, your I, and your E, you’re starting to get close to the S, which is solution or strategy. Essentially. To show you how effective this is, who knows the ‘you’re not yourself when you’re hungry’ campaign from Snickers. Yeah this was built on this framework.

So the problem, people see chocolate bars as empty purposeless calories, which is true. So what’s the insight? Will people act differently when their hangry? We do. The edge is that Snickers are more substantial than other chocolate bars. They’ve got peanuts in, I mean it’s a stretch, but it’s got peanuts in, it’s got protein in. It’s a bit more kind of nutritional than a Twix or a Flake or whatever.

So then all of that, add all of that up and you start to get to this strategy, ‘eat Snickers to make you feel more like yourself’. And then it’s a not a long hop, skip and a jump to go from this to ‘you’re not you when you’re hungry’. And it’s a really successful campaign, they’re still running it I believe. This is also, this is a slide from the Shearings deck.

I used P.I.E.S to build their reposition, to build their strategy and obviously it informed, not even just the tagline, but the friendly nature of the brand because it was looking a bit corporate and so on. So even the visual aspect, not just the verbal aspect, was all driven from P.I.E.S. So let’s move on to the S, Strategy, I’m mixing more metaphors here, right?

We’re starting off with P.I.E.S and now we’ve got a S.T.A.R. But who who can tell me what S.T.A.R stands for?

Anybody?

No, far simpler than that. Something they’ll always remember.

So as soon as you’ve done your P.I.E.S, you’ve done your diagnosis. How can, again, it’s like kind of jumping from this, to the campaign. This is the S.T.A.R. You’re not you when you’re hungry. That was the S.T.A.R of that campaign. So what’s the something they’ll always remember? Compare the Meercats. It does what it says on the tin. I’m loving it.

I’m trying to think of other ones. Just do it. These are all S.T.A.Rs. Something they’ll always remember. Your decision makers probably won’t make, I’m talking about your, you know, your clients, but they might not make a decision to use you straight away. It might take a week. It might take two months. Think about the conversation that your decision maker is having with their decision maker.

What’s that one little bit of gray matter that you can own, that your value proposition can sit in their brain rent free and they go, I’m using, you know, Kabo because it’s Two Women, No Middlemen. But we don’t get that from our other agency. Exactly. That’s why we’re going to use them. It’s your competition killer? It’s your giant slayer.

So once you have your S.T.A.R, it can start to infiltrate all of your assets. And again, I’m going to show you some examples of how it can infiltrate your brand name, your logo, tagline, value proposition, and so on. So now we’re getting into the tactics. But basically this is where the mixed metaphors really go out the window, run your P.I.E.S, driven S.T.A.R through your entire comms like lettering through a stick of rock.

Think about a piece of rock from the seaside. It has got the same lettering at the top, the same lettering at the bottom. Think about that stick of rock as your funnel. Once you have a S.T.A.R that is driven by the diagnosis, it should be in your funnel top to bottom. And I’m going to show you some examples.

But if we actually just go back, I’m just going to have one more metaphor in here that I’ve already mentioned. Not only should it be like a lettering through a stick of rock, but this is what I mean by your strategy and your S.T.A.R becomes your hook. All of your tactics should hang off of your hook. I think, well, I certainly know that a lot of clients, they waste a lot of time on reinventing their tactics over and over again.

They might have an advert, start to run a campaign. There’s no consistency. They’ve had to brainstorm the ad and then brainstorm the campaign, they’re reinventing the tactics wheel over and over again. That’s timely. It’s expensive. And the reason why they’re doing it because they don’t have a hook. So once you have a strategy, that’s your hook that everything hangs off.

And this is what I’m going to show you. All three of these examples have hooks that the tactics hang off. And the first one is an accountant and he’s called General Ledger. I’ll show you exactly how it manifests itself. But this is a guy called James Hardy, and he didn’t want to be j h accounting.com.

Because that’s not giant slaying. That’s blending in with all of the Barry Richardson Accounting. Right? So we did a quick P.I.E.S. Small and medium businesses, one-man bands, we hate battling with our accounts, absolutely hate it. But this is the insight. This is a great example of the insight. We fear it getting it wrong. I hate the thought of my self-assessment

going wrong, on my VAT, on my tax, so I outsource it. It doesn’t go to him, unfortunately. Full transparency, this is my brother-in-law, that’s why he doesn’t do my accounts. My sister would love him to, but anyway, so basically this is the insight, we fear getting it wrong. So the S.T.A.R, I’m going to show you how his S.T.A.R infiltrates everything.

A general ledger is a book. It used to be an old book that everything would be written down in. So when I came up with the name General Ledger, it was anthropomorphizing the book. It was saying that he’s the general, you know, in the same way that the lieutenant, the general, and this is how I stylized him and did his website and so on.

But you can see that even with the term and the military kind of aspect, the two L’s putting together a really nice little military badge, tagline, military precision accounting, from the name, from the visuals, your bookkeeping battle is over. We’re keeping that theme going. Who dares wins? No. If you dare to do your self-assessment, you are going to lose.

He doesn’t just have services like other accountants, he has an artillery of services and it’s just got cut off at the bottom, his call to action is call in the cavalry. You can see that right from up here, from the fear of getting it wrong, they want it to be precise, the general ledger, that military theme is visual.

It is verbal. And it’s all the way through his funnel, even down to the call to action of calling the cavalry. So this is just one example where your character, your S.T.A.R, your strategy can be in your logo, it can be in your name. He’s definitely cutting through and killing some giants here. If we move on, who knows of Christopher, at Vibrant Colour.

I know you do. Of course. Anybody else know of Christopher at Vibrant Colour? So, yeah. Vibrant Colour is a merchandising company. They’re based up near Peterborough, and this was a tricky one because Christopher came to me and said, don’t change my name, don’t rebrand me, but solve my problem. Great. Okay. Brilliant. Perfect brief. So we did the formula.

So we looked at the problem. And if you’ve ever tried to buy merchandise, you know there is so much breadth, so much depth of choice. It is a merchandise minefield. And this is where I had to be really honest with Christopher. There’s no differentiation in the merchandise sector. And a good example of this is that all merchandise companies in the UK,

they all get their brochure from the same company. They just put a different cover on it and a different back cover. So you can get the same mugs from Christopher that you can get from a merchandise company around the corner. There’s no differentiation in there. So your differentiation, especially in this sector, comes through in your marketing, your branding, your strategic integration.

So we came up with this. This is a really good example actually. If you look at his old website, ‘promotional merchandise made easy’, in the presentation that I did to Christopher, I covered over his logo. I actually put his competitor’s logos on his website, and it’s that, that is such a good test. If you can put your competitor’s logo on your website and your message is transferable, you don’t have a USP, you don’t have a strategic proposition because you’re saying the same.

This is a great example of it. So to solve the problem, couldn’t rename him, couldn’t rebrand him. So I gave him an alter ego. ‘Master Your Merch’ solves the first problem with the ‘Masters of Merch’ solves the insight and I could wax lyrical about all of this case study. We came up with collective nouns and so on. But you cover that logo.

This is a good example. This is how he went to events on the left-hand side was how he was going to events. And again, I’m pretty sure that that event, that trade event was made up of a lot of stands that look like the left one, cover the logo, everybody’s the same, cover the Vibrant Colour logo here, and it’s ‘Master your merch with the Masters of merch’ because the strategy is there, because the hook is there.

Everything from the pens, the fliers, the brochures. He even started winning awards for best brochure of the year with ‘Master your merch with the Masters of merch’. It’s a really good way of introducing an alter ego brand, if you can’t change your brand name. And then there’s me, and I ummed and ahhed as to whether or not to put myself in this.

It’s not an ego thing. It’s not a pitch, I promise. But I’m a one-man band and I’m killing giants to work on huge campaigns, so I just thought I’d give you the insight on how I’m doing it. And yes, I took my own medicine, and I did the formula. And my clients have designers, but they lack creatives who can think conceptually.

They lack people who can come up with a TV ad, who can co-produce and co-direct shoots and come up with above the line through the line campaigns. But the insight is they can’t afford big agencies, or they don’t want to afford big agencies. Can’t work that one out yet. So as I said before, I’ve positioned myself as the strategic thinking one man band creative agency.

It’s why, you know, Baz Richardson And Various Others is a post rationalised acronym. But you can see with my logo it’s a thought bubble, which is nicely made up of the dot of the eye of creative. And the O of, I just had to put a white circle on the top of my logo, and it was done.

But you can also see I’m bringing to life the logo and the thought bubbles in distinctive assets. So we’ve got the screwed-up paper, we’ve got the bubbles over New York, slightly cliched light bulbs, but you can see what I’m doing there. On my website. That’s not a typo. That’s think backwards. And it’s what I do. I think backwards from what will move the needle, what will plant a S.T.A.R in prospects minds, in customers minds.

So the think joins up with the bubble, joins up with the visual assets. And this is an advert that I’m running in The Marketing Meetup conference program next Thursday because I’m a sponsor of the event. And you can see I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. My USP, my S.T.A.R is thinking, it’s how I think.

So it’s my brain. I’m just joining everything up. I’m. I’m giving away my brain, I must be mad. But you can see that my S.T.A.R is strategic thinking. So strategic thinking runs through everything top to bottom, like the stick of rock. So whether it’s General Ledger, Master Your Merch or these distinctive assets, if you’re rebranding, can your brand name,

can the logo, can the tagline, can it all strategically join up to communicate your benefit? Your prospects don’t have time to dig into all of your, you know, all of your whys and your features and your benefits. Can you get a benefit that screams straight away from five words General Ledger, military precision accounting. There’s a lot of work going on there.

If you’re not changing your brand name, can you introduce a strategic driven alter ego campaign like Vibrant Colour did. When you think about, what’s his name, Martin Lewis, he’s The Money Saving Expert. He hasn’t had to change his name. Could you do the same? Could you introduce that alter ego? And once you’ve got your logo and your USP and your whole value proposition, can you turn it into distinctive assets?

If I covered over the Bravo Creative logo, you’d still be able to tell this is Bravo Creative. So even in pitch decks, even on my website, those visuals are doing a lot of heavy lifting. I love this notion from Abraham Lincoln. Give me six hours to cut down a tree. Anybody know the punch line?

I’ll spend the first four sharpening my axe. And you can’t chop down a tree with a blunt axe. Your strategy is your axe. And if you’re going to market with a blunt axe, you can’t cut through. And ultimately, you can’t kill giants with a blunt axe. So having everything joined up works. It will cut through. I’m really kind of labouring this, but it will cut through.

It will cut through the noise of your competitors. It will help you kill your giants. So back to Jack. Bless him, Jack didn’t need to give up being a freelancer. All Jack needed to do was apply the formula. So let’s rewind. Let’s go back in time and let’s apply the formula to Jack’s branding. Jack has gone from being Virtual Assistant Jack, which has a very unfortunate acronym, I couldn’t resist that.

If we apply the formula, Jack could become Jack It. Jack of all, master of done. If you think virtual assistants are pointless, you don’t know Jack. Now the smile that you all have right now is what I call a smile in the mind. Can your branding, can your proposition create a smile in the mind? Because Jack’s now does.

And Jack is now living happily ever after. The end. Thank you so much for listening to my talk. Thank you.