Episode 304: Why and how we re-branded
In this episode, Fiona shares the importance of understanding the "why" behind a rebranding decision. She also talks about how rebranding isn't just about changing surface-level aspects like a name or website, but about discovering a deeper purpose and how it will impact both the business owner and their team, as well as their clients or customers. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Rebranding from My Daily Business Coach to My Daily Business
How Fiona started her business
Transitioning from corporate consulting to working full-time with creative small business owners
The creation of My Daily Business, a coaching and mindset work platform
The brand brief and design process for My Daily Business
People who helped Fiona Killackey with the rebranding
Preparing for a rebrand: why it's necessary and what needs to change (vision, offers, audience, etc.).
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
I have gone through lots of different things in life that have changed who I am and changed what's important to me. I had to look at all of that, and I think that's so important when you're rebranding to not just think of, I want to have a different name, or I want to have a new colour palette or a different website, or whatever it is. There has to be a deeper sense of why you are doing this, what is behind it? How is it going to change things, not just for your clients or customers, but for you as the person running the business and for anyone that works in the business as well?
Welcome to episode 304 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today it is a coaching episode, and as you would've heard just now when I said My Daily Business, not My Daily Business Coach, we have rebranded. Today's coaching session is all about why we have done that, how we have done that, and the steps that we took to do it. If you're interested in that or if you've ever thought about changing your brand name or even just starting a brand, then this is going to be interesting for you. Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful Land on which I record this podcast. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
Secondly, with rebranding comes a new URL, and a new Instagram handle. If you are looking for anything you can find podcasts, podcasts courses, show notes, shops, how-to-do coaching, and everything over at mydailybusiness.com, and you can find everything on Instagram @mydailybusiness_. Let's get into today's episode.
This is a big episode and I think it's a big episode in terms of, there's so much that I want to portray and talk about in this episode, and I don't know if I'm going to get through it all in an hour or 45 minutes, but I'll do my best. Rebranding or branding is just a huge topic with so many layers. It is so much more than just a logo and a colour palette and typography, and that is just the tip of the iceberg or the tiniest part that we can all see of a brand. But there's so much other stuff that goes on, it's virtually impossible to get through all of that in one episode. But I will do my best to convey the highlight points and things that I think are most important.
I have just written a couple of notes here. I don't have some bullet points with some words attached. Other than that, I don't have a whole lot scripted or anything else. I will just speak freely about why we've rebranded and the steps that we talk. If I go off on tangents just forgive me and if you've been reading this for a while, I'm sure you understand how I roll. The first thing I guess to get clear on is what we have done. We have rebranded from My Daily Business Coach to My Daily Business. It's just a word change. However, it is a huge change for us, and I say us because I am lucky enough to have people who work with me and we've done this together.
But I want to go back to why we have done this and why spend so much time, so much money on something so simple. A lot of people may well think, why would you bother? Like why would you bother? You haven't completely changed the name, and that was intentional, but I have to go right back to when I started my business to give you some context around this. I started this business, I quit my full-time job. I was head of marketing for Mimco, which is a large Australian brand. I decided to quit in mid-2015. However, I didn't quit until the end towards the end of 2015. I spent roughly about five or six months working on my exit strategy, working on building up a business so that I could go from one job into my own business that was going to pay me money from day one.
I didn't have a trust fund to fall back on. I didn't have multiple investment properties or any investment properties. We had just bought our first house. My husband and I had one child at the time, but we knew we wanted to have a second child. It wasn't an ideal time to start a business and to cut my salary in half, which is what I had estimated, I'd run my numbers and thought, “Okay, if I can get half of what I'm currently on, we should be okay.” And thankfully I have a very supportive husband who was like “Yep, go for it,” but I still need to bring him in money. It wasn't a situation where you can just go do whatever you like and if it makes money, it makes money. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
It wasn't that at all. I had to start from that point. That was almost eight years ago. When I made that decision to quit, I registered the business because my accountant at the time had said, “You should start as day one, a company proprietary limited, what are you going to call it?” I didn't know exactly what I would be doing. I had been having lots of interviews with people who I thought I could help. I thought, I'm going to be a consultant, why don't I call myself Fiona Killackey Consulting? And that is still the overarching company name, Fiona Killackey Consulting Proprietary Limited. I went out with that name and I had a website, Fiona FionaKillackey.com, that was my email address and I didn't know what I was doing.
I went into it thinking that I would work for corporate, I would go in, I would consult, and I would mainly make my money from corporate consulting. I would have a side part of the business that was working with small business owners. The reason that I thought that was because I think when you are in an environment such as a corporate place where I'd been working and before that as well, you can have your blinders on and think, that's how I'm going to make my money. It would be nice if I could work with creative small business owners, but let's be real, the money and the security and all of that is going to come from big corporate jobs. I started doing that and it quickly became apparent that I didn't like doing that.
I was lucky that I got a significant contract with a small business owner that was roughly about two days of work, and then I would do corporate consulting the other times, and then I started doing workshops, public workshops for small business owners. I realized that was what I loved doing. I loved working with small business owners because I felt like every dollar they were spending, whether it was $35 for a general assembly workshop ticket to how to get published, which was a two-hour class in the evening for how to get your work out there, your written work out there, or whether they were spending $180 on all-day marketing for your small business workshop, that that price was put out by General Assembly. I just realized that they took it seriously. They took every dollar that they were spending as a, “I need to get everything out of this and I'm going to make the changes in my business based on what I've learned from working with Fiona.”
Whereas corporate, they do make changes and everything else, but a lot of the time you are working with people who, it's not their money that they're spending. A lot of the time I felt like people were in a boardroom. It's not to say I would never work with corporates again, for sure. I have worked with some and I'm happy to work with certain ones, but I felt like sometimes I would be in a boardroom and people didn't want to be there. They were on their phones, everyone was wearing suits. It was just not who I felt at my call that I wanted to work with long-term. I called myself Fiona Killackey Consulting, which didn't tell you what I did. I could have been a consultant doctor, maybe not, but I could have been consulting in any type of thing.
It wasn't telling people what I did, it wasn't conveying that I worked with small businesses. Even my website, I remember getting it done cheaply. It was bad. I think I used an image of a surfboard on the contact page. I am not a surfer at all, I think that was a little bit of an, “I'm a bit creative and idea coming through,” but I called it Fiona Killackey Consulting, and I always wanted to change the name, but I didn't know exactly what I would change it to. I thought, it's me, so may as well just put my name behind it. I think I was also probably influenced by other people that I was like friends with and going out with, and they had their names on their businesses and I looked up to them.
That's what I started with. That's 2016. Then in 2017, my mother passed away and before she had passed away, I had decided to change the business name. I decided to just do a trading ad. I didn't change the company name, but I started trading as My Daily Business Coach. I started that name and put it out there, firstly through Instagram. I didn't have a website. I thought I'm going to test this. What I want to do is speak to that creative small business owner that appears to be coming more and more to my workshops, and that is booking in for one-off business coaching. And that I feel like I can help and I can see them making changes as we are working together. Whereas sometimes with corporates, you may work with them for like a six-month contract, but those changes may not be implemented for two years down the track.
Sometimes you work with people for ages and then those people move on to another job. All that work that you've done is shelved, whereas when you're working with a small business owner, they are staying in that business for as long as they can. They're taking on board what you're saying and even if it's a little bit down the track that they implement it, you can see that they're implementing it. I think is validating for somebody who works in a service-based business, seeing that the stuff that you have worked on with people, the answers that you've pulled out of them, the ideas that you've all come up with, and the creativity is being realized. I started My Daily Business Coach on Instagram, and I know I give Instagram a lot of flack, but it's also an incredible platform to launch things on.
I did it on there because I thought, I'm going to test this. I don't know the direction that I'm going with this. I had sat down and obviously, I have a background in branding and marketing. I'd sat down and I'd pulled together my ideal audience, I'd pulled together a business plan, I'd pulled together my revenue streams, my money mapping, and what I was going to offer my competitor analysis. But even in the competitor analysis, I didn't know who other business coaches were particularly in Melbourne and Sydney, where predominantly that's who I was working with when I started the business. People in those two areas of Australia. Now I work globally. But I started that thinking, “Okay, I will give this a go.” And I think I also got it ready in time for a big event that I was doing so that I could talk about it at this event and talk about it to people in that creative tech space.
Again, I started this, put it out on Instagram and just felt my way around. I used these four words on my Instagram bio at the time, which were motivation, inspiration, and education. I didn't even say who for, I didn't say for small business owners, for creative small businesses. I don't know what I was thinking. I just did this very vague Instagram bio and I quickly realized that I don't know who I'm talking to. I don’t know why I just put that. I should at least make it clear what my offers are, who I work with, that thing. I changed my Instagram bio and I made a conscious effort that on the My Daily Business Coach Instagram, I was never going to quote Richard Branson. I was never going to quote Tim Ferris.
I was never going to just be the stock standard business coach. Here are some quotes from American mainly white men Richard Branson, who is not American, but I just told myself if I'm going to put quotes out or if I'm going to start talking about different business owners that I think are interesting, they have to be interesting, they have to be different from the people that everyone else is talking about. I did that and I started doing little tests on there. I used to do this thing called Brand Watch Wednesday, and every Wednesday I would put a brand that I thought was doing cool things and why I thought they were doing cool things. I would just make up all these hashtags for myself, like brand watch Wednesday, and different things.
I used hashtags a lot and I think that helped this is back in the day and I was posting quite a bit on Instagram, but what I did then also was to create a URL in Instagram with a platform that I don't know if it still exists, it was called TinyLetter. If you didn't have a website and you didn't have a way of capturing emails, you could put this TinyLetter URL in your Instagram bio and you could get people to sign up to your email that way. I got people to sign up. I think there were nine people that I started with, nine people on my email list, and I started sending a Sunday email and I still send a Sunday email, and there are thousands of people on that list now, but I started with nine.
I was testing this idea of whether can I go from corporate consulting to working full-time with small business owners, and particularly with creative small business owners. Now around that same time, I was working with The Design Files, which is an incredible design blog here in Australia. Even the word blog feels like it's too small, it's a media empire, it's an incredible publication founded by Lucy Feagins. I was writing about Australian homes for them and then started writing a small business column. It was incredible for me to have that platform so generously working with Lucy, who was so generous to allow me to have that. I started to connect with more and more and more people in that creative space, also in the home and interior space.
Before all of this, I had worked at Amazon in the UK and I had headed up their kitchen and home category. I did have a good understanding of homeware and interiors and e-commerce and retail. that's really where I started and I started getting more and more inquiries for people who wanted longer business coaching, six-month business coaching. I started building up that business. My Daily Business Coach as a name, I had come up with all sorts of different names, but I thought, “No, this is the name that clearly says what I do.” It is not some name like Apple that if we didn't have the associations that we have now, it's like, “What do they do?” It was very clear. However, I never felt incredibly comfortable with the term business coach, and it's never 10000% been a comfortable thing that I have had in my business name.
I'm being transparent here, there'd be times when I used to have to say my email address and I'd like to whisper the business coach part, but I decided, this is the name, and this is what I've chosen. I created a whole brand strategy around that brand and what were our revenue streams, the resource, and who are our key partners. All the things. And decided that's it. I've put a fork in the ground, and this is the name now, in 2020 Hardie Grant publishes published my first book, Passion Purpose Profit. That was written in 2019. just before the pandemic and everything else, I wrote that. At the time, I remember having lots of conversations with a couple of friends thinking, “Should I change my business name now?”
Because once it goes out and it's in that book and it's out there in print you have to keep standing behind it. I thought, “No, I don't have the headspace right now.” 2019 was a bit of a tough year. I had a child, and I had my second child who was amazing and he needed surgery. He had surgery at five months old, which was pretty hard. And then my father passed away 10 days after his surgery. 2019 wasn't the best year. My other son also started school, that's a huge transition year for a lot of people. I just knew that I didn't have the head space to go into a rebrand, to sit down and think about where I wanted to change things. I thought, I'm going to stick with My Daily Business Coach and it'll go into the book.
I was also launching my podcast, this podcast that you're reading. I also thought about changing the name of the podcast. I thought, if I have a podcast, maybe I don't call it the My Daily Business Coach podcast, maybe I'll call it something else. But I just thought, “No, for consistency, I'm going to have it called the My Daily Business Coach podcast.” The brand name is called My Daily Business Coach. And that is going to be mentioned throughout the first book, Passion Purpose Profit. Fast forward, we get into 2020 and I thought, I'm just going to stand behind this name. Even though I had moments where I would find myself on Pinterest, pulling together different ideas, I decided to, I think it was 2020, just do a refresh of the actual design of the brand. I worked with somebody in Spain who I found through Pinterest because I'd seen her designs and I contacted her and she was willing to work with me, despite us being on other sides of the world.
She did a bit of a refresh. She made it look a bit more professional, and properly designed, everything else that had gone from me just pulling it together in Canva, which I have to say, I'm surrounded by graphic designers and art directors. One of my best friends, Paul lives in New Zealand, he runs Bemodern, and he's an incredible designer and artist. My husband is an art director and graphic designer. My other best friend in Amsterdam, Marre Smit runs Smit Club. I'm surrounded by people in that space. I don't know why I did it myself to start with, but I think a lot of small business owners just do their visual branding. In 2020 I decided I'll stick behind all of this, but I will make it look a bit better visually.
I went back and revisited the vision for the business, the mission, the values, and what we were doing as a business. I introduced group coaching. I thought I'm going to stick with My Daily Business coach. However, in 2021, I got sick of the name. Also in 2021, I had gone through 12 months or maybe 18 months of being accredited for business coaching. There are no regulations about business coaching. What I had seen was just more and more people coming onto this scene that had this International Coaching Federation tick of approval. And with my book coming out in 2020, I was convinced wrongly, that somebody would pick up that I wasn't an accredited business coach and would say, “You don't have the tick of approval from the International Coaching Federation.”
I went and researched different courses that I could do, and I found one, it was about 7,000 Australian dollars, or maybe it was more, I can't remember. It took months and I hated it. I have to say I'm not going to out the name of the institution, but it was just such a crock, For one of a better word, for somebody who has been in this space in marketing and brand and content and systems and has worked for some of the biggest and most innovative companies, and then is taking that knowledge and sharing it with small business owners. I found this course restrictive. It was a cut-and-paste, ask this question, don't veer from the script and treat people like robots. If they say this, then you say this. I couldn't stand it. I complained to them a few times saying, “Does anyone who writes this content work with small business owners?”
I felt like that a lot of it was geared towards organizational coaching for corporates. It was geared towards big companies where there is a huge amount of resources and a big HR team and everything else. Even though they had told me, “No, this is business coaching and it's perfect for small business owners,” it wasn't. I went through that and it turned me off the idea of the business coach. I'm still a business coach and I will proudly say I'm a business coach, but the whole concept of going and getting this regulation stamp that says you are now an accredited business coach and asking the same questions and reading the same books and using the same frameworks as every other person who's gone through this, it just didn't sit right with me. In 2021, I decided I would change the business name.
In September 2021, I sat down and did a full brand strategy for my brand. I didn't fully confirm what the name would be, but I knew that I wanted to change it. And not just because it had a business coach and the title, but because I felt like it was restrictive in terms of what else I might want to put into the business. Maybe I wanted to sell products, maybe I wanted to manufacture things, maybe I wanted to bring in different items and possibilities. I felt like I was a little restricted by the name that I had. It was great for so long, but I wanted to expand and I wanted to grow and do different things. I wanted to have a name that allowed for that.
I went through a series of names and there are lots of different naming exercises you can do. I sat down first and thought about what is it that I'm trying to give people through this business. What am I trying to offer to people? Who is the ideal person that I'm going to work with? Where do I sit in the landscape with competitor and analysis, not just here in Australia, but overseas as well, and looking at all of that? And also as a person looking at my values and where do I want to be in like 10, 15 years? Or how do I want this business to evolve alongside my lifestyle? Since I started this business, I've had another child. I've unfortunately lost both my parents. I have gone through lots of different things in life that have changed who I am and changed what's important to me.
I had to look at all of that. And I think that's so important when you're rebranding to not just think of, I want to have a different name, or I want to have a new colour palette or a different website or whatever it is. There has to be a deeper sense of why you are doing this, what is behind it, and how is it going to change things, not just for your clients or customers, but for you as the person running the business and for anyone that works in the business as well. I had gone through a whole lot of ideas and come up with this strategy, and I had come up with three names. There were three different names on the table and I talked to a few friends I looked at all the different scenarios and I kept coming back to the fact that I loved the first part of my name.
I loved my daily, I loved the idea of doing things daily. It's very anti-hustle, it's not like, every day you have to be rising and grind. I'm anti-hustle, I always have been. But I like the idea of small steps adding up to doing something daily, even if it's 10 minutes you're doing something that is working towards a better outcome overall. That daily doesn't have to be business coaching or, or working out your systems. It might be a meditation that you do to keep your mental health strong as a business owner. It could be getting out into nature, it could be all sorts of things. I liked that idea. I had that. And then I contemplated all sorts of things from, let's just call it my daily.
For every idea that I had, I did a lot of research. I looked at things like URLs, is the URL available? Is the handle available now with my daily, I had a funny story where I thought, let me just look into that. I found the URL was taken, but I found a broker willing to talk to me in New York about this. We went back and forth on a few emails, the time difference between New York, and Melbourne, it's not great for phone calls. I ended up having a chat with the broker about it. They said, look, “I'm going to send you some information about it and you can tell me if you're still keen.” He sent me some information I wrote back, and then he said, okay, what's your opening bid now?
I thought, “Okay, I'm going to try for maybe I'll spend a thousand US dollars on this name, I'm going to put in 500.” I said, 500 US dollars. He wrote back saying, “Is this correct or have you missed something?” I said, “No, that's correct.” He's like, “I'm sorry, but we are looking at a minimum of $50,000.” And I was like “What?” And we went back and forth a few more times and I thought, “No, he is sticking to that, this isn't a joke.” I wiped that. I could have called it My Daily.XYZ or anything at the end, but I wanted .com, I just wanted it, I'm old school, I wanted.com.
I went back and I had a look at a few more things and I just kept coming back to My Daily Business. I just kept coming back to a bigger anything that could be part of your business that you could do coaching, but you could also do mindset work. You could do meditations, you could do journaling, you could do all sorts of things that can fit under the umbrella term of My Daily Business. That is what I settled on. In 2021, around November, I went back to the designer that I'd worked with and told her all of this, and gave a strong brand brief that went into detail about all of this. We'd also had a lot of conversations. She presented the first round. Now this took three months between the brand brief and the first round, which is a long time.
She was going through a lot of stuff. She was getting married, there was it's a pandemic, and trying to get married, it's very difficult. We're on other sides of the world and Melbourne's in and out of lockdowns. It wasn't this ideal smooth sailing. But in the end, it took about eight months to get to a point where she was delivering the actual assets and the graphic design to me and the style guide and everything else. When it came through, I just didn't love it. There was something about it that just felt off. It just felt like this isn't an elevated it's not going where I want it to go. I just sat there, the work sat there and I felt like an idiot because I had talked about this with clients, I had talked about it with friends, I had probably talked about it on this podcast and it just sat there because I didn't love it.
I thought I'm, I don't know if it's worth doing all this work because a rebrand is a huge amount of work. You're not just changing the URL, you are changing thousands of links and things that are out there and just the admin part of it. We are, we're in the process of changing the admin stuff at the moment. I have to say, it is so tedious when you think about things like if you've got a Google Drive attached to your Google Drive like workspace that you're using Gmail for, which we had under My Daily Business Coach, we have thousands of documents in there that need to then be transferred to somewhere else, another Google Drive, and if you have them as two separate organizations, you can't change ownership. There's a lot of tedious stuff that comes with this.
Because I didn't love graphic design, which is a huge part of how people perceive the brand visually in the first instance, I just didn't feel like I wanted to put all that effort in. That brand sat there just not being changed. It was just this resentment building up inside me where I was like, I wanted to change this. I did all this work and now I can't bring it to life. What happened is that I met, and I'd already been in touch with this person prior, but Ashley Simonetto, who is an incredible graphic designer, also runs a business with her partner Nick. They run an incredible brand strategy and website design agency called New Opening Studio. She is a designer, Nick is also a designer and website developer. They came together to create New Opening Studio.
Ashley had contacted me about coaching and I just thought, "I'm just going to ask her if she would be open to doing the rebrand and to look at what has been done and fixing it. " I didn't know exactly how she'd fix it. We had a few conversations back and forth. I explained what I was doing and she was just so lovely. She took it and she tried and then she said to me, “I think it's going to be easier if I start from scratch than trying to change this other person's design to a point that you're happy with.” That is smart. I have to give Ashley total props because I didn't know what I didn't like. I would find it very difficult to be a graphic designer. Shout out to any graphic designers reading this because the design is so subjective.
I didn't know exactly what I didn't like about it, but I just knew that I didn't like it. I was trying to explain that to Ashley and I think I used words that perhaps weren't great. I thought I kept saying, it's not polished enough, it's not elevated enough. She came back with this beautiful design, but that was too polished. And I was like, that feels too polished. That feels too high-end and like a luxury furniture brand or perfume company or something. Like it was too beautiful. I said I need it to come back. I like the colours that we have been using. Also, I have to keep in mind Passion Purpose Profit is always going to be part of my marketing.
The colours can't clash with that. There's a lot to consider. Ashley again said, “No worries, leave it with me.” Works very quickly I have to say. And just had an exceptional level of detail and attention to detail and customer care, just an all-around great experience. She came back with this design and I loved it. I was looking at it on my screen and I was just smiling. My whole body was lighting up. She hasn't nailed it. I just thought, this is it, this is great. And now it's going to come to life. Again, underestimated how long the other stuff would take. The other stuff is getting a website done and to a level that you're happy with. The other stuff. Also being moving things across from one website where you have 500 plus pages and a lot of those things are linking to other pages and you've got all this internal linking and SEO stuff going on and taking all of that and moving to a new site.
I worked with Ashley Simonetto on the design, which I love and we've had so much feedback already that people love it shout out. If you're interested in chatting with Ashley or chatting with Ashley and Nick, you can find all of their information in the show notes, but also over at ashleysimonetto.com. You can also find Ashley and Nick's business New Opening Studio at newopening. studio. They're very cool. These young kids with the studio, but newopening. studio. I'd worked with them on the visuals, then it was time to bring it all to life. I have always worked with Squarespace, which is my preferred website builder. I've used it for my sites, I've used it for lots of sites, I've built for people. I've used it for charities that I've helped people with, my sister's website, and a whole bunch of things.
I think Squarespace is such an easy tool to use. I also am not selling hundreds of products, in which case I probably would go to something bigger like Shopify, Squarespace has commerce and they do a decent job at that. But I just love the way that Squarespace works. I love how easy it is. It's a drag-and-drop website design. I started building my website and went back to, what am I trying to do here? What are my offers? How am I trying to relate to the ideal audience that I'm going after? What are the testimonials that I need? All sorts of things to guide people through that buyer cycle that I talk about a lot. It got to a point where I was happy enough with it, but I just felt like I'm not a website designer and it could be polished and look a bit better.
I found a guy on Upwork. People might be thinking, why don't you just get someone to design your website? I love building websites. I think in another life I would've loved to have been a website designer. I find it enjoyable. I find it quite therapeutic. It's like painting. I feel like you've gotta concentrate on what you're doing. You are creating this artwork that's digital that lives and breathes and is live and you can change it at any point. I also like to be able to edit my stuff and not feel like I don't know how to edit that and I don’t know how to do it. Also, I'd gone from using Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 and I wanted to have a test around with that new 7.1. I thought I'm going to build it myself and I'm going to enjoy doing that.
The other thing is to this point, we had already spent quite a significant amount of money on the URL My Daily Business. That was one of the most expensive things that we bought initially, the quote that I was given was 12,000 US dollars for that URL. I negotiated down, down, down, to a lot less than that, but still a significant amount. I'd also spent money on the first designer I'd worked with. I'd spent money on the second designer I'd worked with. I had spent a whole bunch of money on other things, tone of voice, looking through stuff, auditing the current website, like a whole bunch of things. I decided I want to build this myself and also just enjoy doing that. But it got to a point where I needed help.
I went to Upwork. I often go to Upwork for small jobs like this and I looked for somebody who's a Squarespace designer, a web developer who could help me just with the final tweaks of it. I found this incredible guy called Andrew Levine. He is just awesome, funny, and lovely. Based in LA, an actor from New York but also from Geneva, an interesting guy. He was willing to do it like that weekend, he's like, “Sure, okay.” And then he was like, “I understand everything.” We had a Zoom call, he was lovely and he worked straight away on it. I think I booked him on Friday Australian time, which was Thursday, American time, LA time. He had stuff done by Monday and I was like, “This is awesome.” And then I said to him, “I trust what you're doing.”
I trust you as a person. Could we get to a point where I'm just working with you quarterly on things that need to be updated on the site? He's like, “Yep, for sure.” He has helped significantly with this rebrand and with changing things from My Daily Business coach to My Daily Business. There's just so much. I had issues with GoDaddy, I had issues with things not transferring properly, like redirects and a whole bunch of problems. Andrew has just been so helpful. Also worked with Yricka, who's my assistant. She has been instrumental in getting everything up to speed because it's not just the website and the pretty colours and everything else. There are so many other things you think about all of the freebies that we have, all of them had to be redesigned and shout out to Sunny Sunday's Designs, my old VA Nezi who worked on updating those things, putting them into the new rebrand.
There were just so many elements that you think like all of the images, oh the images haven't even talked about that. In December last year, I knew that I was rebranding and I wanted images that reflected me. I booked a photo shoot with the amazing Hilary Walker. You can find out all about her at hilarywalkerphotography.com. She's the sister of Sophie Walker, who many of you'll know as the founder of Australian Birth Stories. Sophie is a client and a friend and we've been talking about this and I said to her, I'm choosing between all these different photographers. She was like, “Why don't you check out my sister's work?” And I was like, “Yes.” It just seemed natural. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do, but I pulled together a full mood board and a full shot list.
I had it all very prepared. I even got my son to take photos of me in different spots. I had an idea of what they'd look like. I presented all of that to Hilary and she was just fantastic to work with. I'm not somebody who loves getting their photo taken, as many people are. And I just felt like she was just so wonderful to work with. She was so down to earth. She came and did this at my house. She did it in about half a day, got so many photos, many options, and was lovely. She would say to me to fix things as you're not going to get those photos that I think, “Why didn't the photographer tell me that?” There was hair across my face or whatever it is.
She was just fantastic to work with and captured exactly how I wanted to come across in the brand. That is how we've come to this point. And the next part of this is rolling out the things that I've been working on internally, like the values and different offers that we're going to be putting out, different products that we're going to be putting out in the next 12 months, but doing it in a way that is making sure that this brand aligns with our values, where we're going, the bigger vision for the business and also for the clients and the people that are on this journey with us, which is many of you reading. Thank you so much. But I guess if I was to recap the key points of a rebrand, and I know this is a very long story and maybe I've gone off on different tangents and it's not even coherent, I guess the first thing to figure out is why are you doing this?
I told you a long story in the context because there, there was a long story to it and it wasn't an impulse decision to do. It was a thought-out decision to change this name. Even though it might seem like such a tiny change, it was a bigger decision and it took years of me going through things and testing things and figuring out what is going to work for me. The first thing to get very clear on is why are you doing this. What is the objective? Does it need to be done? And I think that's another thing that stopped me from doing it quickly because there wasn't any urgency to do it. It wasn't like my business is is failing or I got some bad reputation problem. It was that where you would need to maybe change your name.
There wasn't any massive need to do this except for myself. Except for where the business is going and where I wanted to build this brand and take it. The second thing is to figure out then if you know why you're doing what, then what needs to change? What needs to change? Is your vision going to stay the same? Is your vision changing? Are your offers going to stay the same? Is your audience different? Are your territory and defined area of operation changing? What does the competitor analysis look like now that you're changing? Is it the same industry? Is it new industries? There's so much to look at. What is the brand expression? What is the brand authority? Where are you going with this? Looking at that, what needs to change?
The third point is how is that going to change. I tried to create a timeline. I just had a Google sheet that I was putting things in and like, okay, so then this would happen, this would happen, this would happen. Then it's figuring out who else you need to help you bring this to life. I mentioned Hilary Walker, the incredible photographer, also Ashley Simonetto, the original first designer who I'm not going to name just because I wasn't that happy with the result and don't want to give them any bad reputation and they don't deserve that. They were going through a lot in their own life at that time as well. Also, Yricka, and Andrew Levine from LA. A whole bunch of people have helped with this. I had to be clear on where my limitations were for getting this thing done.
That brings me to the next point. It is never done. It is never set and forgotten. A brand is a living thing. A brand is the way that you are showing up every day and the way that you are being perceived by your audience every day. I know that the brand is a living thing. It'll always be having iterations, it'll always be changing. There are things that we are going to improve on and grow and build on and expand on in the years to come. I hope that whole conversation has helped you if you are considering a rebrand yourself or if you are even just considering building out your brand a little bit more, I hope that you know some of what I'm talking about today, firstly that it made sense and also that it gives you an idea for your own business and thinking about where are you going in the future and do you feel super proud of what you're building and your brand as a whole and how are you going out to market that and what does that look like from now?
But also for the next five, 10 years, where, where are you going with this? That is it for today. The coaching episode is all about how and why we rebranded from My Daily Business Coach to My Daily Business. As I said, we have changed the URL, it is MyDailyBusiness.com. You can find the shop there, you can find all the podcast show notes, you can find courses, testimonials, and a whole bunch of other things including some of our favourite tools. You can find that in the footer. Frequently asked questions, there's a whole lot of stuff there. And of course, it is a living thing. A website is digital, it's living and we are always going to be updating that and changing things and adding things. You can find us @mydailybusiness on TikTok. You can find us at My Daily Business on Instagram @mydailybusiness_ likewise with Pinterest at My Daily Business_.
That's another big thing about rebranding. You can't always get the handle that you want. I have to say, I should have mentioned this earlier, I would say that the hardest part of rebranding, apart from figuring out the websites from one website to the other is Instagram. Instagram has been one of the hardest things for rebranding Instagram. Do not make it easy to change your handle and keep or retain your existing one. You don't know if you can get the handle that you want until the second that you change it. When I went to change it, we'd had another handle that we wanted somebody had taken that and I don't know if they've taken it because they saw it. After all, we did have the website up for a few, like for a week before we went out live with it.
But it's weird because it's taken, you can't use it. However, if you go to that website, it's that name, it's like cannot be found. That is a big annoyance. But also I think what I was worried about, I still am to a point and we're trying to make it clear to everyone that we would never ask for your personal information. We would never ask you to pay us anything in the Instagram DMS that somebody would take the old Instagram handle and then clone stuff and then start asking people for money in the DMS. We will never do that. Please know that we would never ask you for money in a text message. We would never send you a link to pay. If you want to work with us, you can either buy it directly on a Squarespace website or you can email us and we will send you an invoice and you pay that way.
There's a lot of around social media that was scary with the rebrand. And also you are thinking this stuff like, I've built up this following or I've built up this and what if people don't recognize it? But you have to just remember that you've built up a brand that you have a community around and they're going to be there when you change things. Don't be afraid of it, but just keep in mind that if you are going to rebrand, just look at your handles across all social media and make sure that you can get something that is either consistent or very similar so that it is there is a level of consistency across it. Changing things like the image that is, or the icon that is across social media platforms, making sure it's consistent, is also going to help.
There's so much there. As I said, I could talk for hours and hours about this. There's so much other work that I've mentioned like why I'm even in business in the first place. There's so much research and data that also goes into a decision like rebranding. That is it. I hope it has been helpful. If you wanted to revisit any of this, you can find the show notes at MyDailyBusiness.com/podcast/304. And if you found this useful or you want to chat about anything in this, feel free to just send us a DM @mydailybusiness__. Thank you so much for reading.
