Month: September 2024

What is the value of a mission and vision statement? It’s difficult to put that on a balance sheet, just as workplace culture is difficult to put on a balance sheet, but both of them can affect your bottom line. Mission and vision statements are part of the core identity of any business. In previous episodes, we talked about core values and how they operate. Today, we will look at mission and vision statements. Now, both of these statements can play a role in shaping the culture and the future of an organization as it continues to grow and change. It sets a theoretical standard for behavior, a rubric for actions and goals for the future. Mission and vision statements allow for shared meaning that can also be referenced as an anchor in the turbulent seas of business. Shiny options might come by to distract, and disruptions in the marketplace can happen, may try to change your path even, and personnel can change your capabilities. But these strategic statements can be help to put your eyes on a North Star during all those changes. I think a mission statement is the focus of a business that shouldn’t be moved away from. It can keep us focused from distractions and gives us a rubric to judge whether we are being successful and really should be true for a 10 to 20 year long time horizon. The mission statement for Adelsberger Marketing is to make creative work that grows our clients’ businesses in a culture that values our team and community. Our mission incorporates several elements that I hope will be true of us for the future of this company. First of all, We don’t just make work, we make creative work, and we believe that creativity is important. Also, we don’t just make creative work. We’re not just artists. We make creative work that grows our clients’ businesses because there’s a commercial into our work. All of that is done in a culture that values our team and community because we recognize that our people are not just robots on an assembly line. They are real humans with feelings and feelings and thoughts. Our community allows us to exist, so we want to be good members of our community. All of those things are things I think are important for us to remember as we grow and change. As a business, it’s all so short enough that hopefully our team can think about it and digest it easily. We’ve operationalized it by going over it in detail in onboarding. We generate cool stickers with it to make the idea sticky and visible in our team members’ lives. And then annually, we do a year-end review where we use it as a rubric to see if we accomplish these things throughout the course of the year. We go through each point as a team to make sure that everybody can see that we’ve accomplished these goals. Vision statements, in my view, are what would happen in the distant future if you were successful in pursuing your mission statement. That’s the big picture accomplishment. And so for us, our vision is to be the best place for creatives to work in West Tennessee. Now, I know you can’t define that with a set of scores, and there’s no authority giving that grade out, but I have worked by operationalizing it and making a list of things that make a great place to work and have worked on including those in our strategic planning. Additionally, I think it’s helpful for the team to know that that’s the vision that I’m pushing towards. It’s very important that companies work on operationalizing these things. And when I say operationalize, I mean make it relevant to their operations. As a business, how do they make it more than just a statement that lives on a piece of paper in a three-ring binder in HR’s office? How do they make it alive and relevant to the people that work there? So we work as mentioned, including it in orientation, but not just saying it and explaining it, showing what it means. We include it in our annual reviews, and our core values are in our quarterly reviews with team members. We’ve also done our best to make the idea visible and available for our team to review. And ultimately, it’s on my plate as the leader of the company to ensure that these ideas are visible and active. And so I need to return to the practice I used to do, where once a week I’d review a core value, a mission or vision statement with the team so they can remember what it means to be successful beyond our monetary metrics. What’s your favorite mission or vision statement that you’ve ever come across? Send me an email. I’d love to hear about it, kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to this edition of the Content Machine podcast. Stay tuned for future episodes where we talk about marketing, culture, and leadership in the small business environment.

A few weeks ago, Adelsberger Marketing celebrated 10 years in business. And on today’s episode of the Content Machine podcast, I want to look back at a few lessons that I’ve learned over that decade. The first couple of things have to do with leadership. It is an interesting thing to learn about the value of leadership as someone who’s went through a lot of leadership development classes in high school and college. Hearing it so much, it can become blasé or devalued or just common, that leadership is really important. But as I’ve continued this business and observing things in our society, leadership becomes more and more valuable, and that burden for the company largely falls on me. Seeing the value of leadership is definitely something that I’ve learned. But it’s also because the burden of that mostly falls on me, I’ve learned that it can be a lonely endeavor. All the problems I run into in this business are not unique to me or Adelsberger Marketing. They happen to most anyone leading a business or within a company. I have a responsibility that no one else shares, and so I don’t think that I would have guessed that that would have felt like a burden 10 years ago like I do today. I also would not have guessed that the most joy I find from the business comes from helping my team members create a life for themselves and seeing them grow and develop and see their families grow and change. I’m not the best business owner, but I’ve gotten to see my people buy their first houses and have children buy cars, and that is some of the favorite things that I’ve gotten to do as a business owner. In business, it matters a lot that you are paying your bills. But I’ve also grown a bigger appreciation for the amount that people matter. Caring for developing the culture that cares for people may be the thing that sets our business apart from so many others. Because as our theme was a few years ago, if you want to go fast or go alone, if you want to go further, go together. And I can see that even more clearly now. There’s a limit to the work that I can do, the amount of effort that I can put in and how hard I can push on a goal. But when I bring others to the table, we can do it together and go further and accomplish more. I have been fortunate to find people who are capable and good culture fits and willing to work And hopefully, I’ll be able to continue to find people that help us do that. I’ve learned a lot about marketing in a world that’s moving faster and faster. And in our society, niching and differentiation becomes more and more critical. Niching is about finding a horizontal or vertical niche that helps you be special and defines who your customers are or the services in a way that allows you to be successful. I think the future for niche services is growing, and I think it’s a lot clearer to me now how important it is than it was 10 years ago. And so I’m trying to reckon with that from inside our own company, working through what that could look like for our future so that we could be more niched, so that we can be more competitive. Differentiation continues to take on a bigger and bigger role in our marketing plans for our customers. Having niches is a differentiator, but that also applies to all the clients that we have. Clients who try to compete with every person who sells the thing that they sell everywhere are going to not succeed like those who have a niche. And so we are increasingly pushing our clients to help differentiate themselves and find ways for them to set themselves apart from the crowd. Not just your typical marketing ways, but in a very crowded market, being able to separate yourself from everyone else is crucial. And then one added responsibility I found for myself is that I need to be working six months or a year or two years ahead of the rest of my team. Because of that, finding a project manager to help manage the day-to-day gives me the flexibility to focus on the bigger picture things, which is also something I never would have guessed when I opened the company. And finally, I’ve come to realize that burnout is a real thing. I would hear people talk about burnout, but I had never experienced it. And so I wasn’t sure that if I was just getting older or the work was more stressful. But now I’ve realized that I’ve nearly burnt out several times. But now I can identify when it’s happening. The last time I felt it, I could feel it coming. I could identify it, which is new to me. So I was able to take precautionary measures to ensure that I didn’t completely burn out and leave the company in a bad spot. And now I know that I’m out of that spot and I’m ready to rock and roll again. Business is way harder than I thought it would be, but fortunately, we’ve got a great team of people that is helping to build this in a way that it will be sustainable. Hopefully, we’ll see you again in 10 years, where we can talk about what I’ve learned over 20 years in business. Thank you for supporting Adelsberger Marketing. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast. If you found this episode interesting, share it with a friend, and stay subscribed for future episodes where we talk about marketing, culture, and leadership in the small business environment.

Kevin Adelsberger

Welcome to part 2 of the Content Machine podcast with Chad Wilson, President of Foundation Bank. We had the pleasure of working with Chad on a rebrand recently, and this is the rest of our conversation with him about that project. Foundation Bank has been around for a while, right? Almost 100 years? Yeah.

Chad Wilson

1934, so we’re 90 years old this year.

Kevin Adelsberger

90 years old. Things maybe in the recent past wouldn’t… Like a rebrand would never have been on the table in the last couple of years, probably. So this is a different thing for you guys to think about. How has that… How has been the response been internally? It’s been good for the culture or bad? Or how’s it?

Chad Wilson

It’s been very good for the culture. I think that people are happier to wear the brand now. That was a real priority for us is we wanted it to be a brand, the color scheme, the fonts, the look. We wanted it to be something they’d be proud to wear. On Fridays, we encourage branded material to be worn. I think it’s landed very well with that. The feedback has been, I would say, almost uniformly positive within the team. There have been a couple of folks. One of our core values is absolute honesty, and we want to be able to hear-

Kevin Adelsberger

That’s a double-edged sword, right?

Chad Wilson

We want to be able to hear contrary opinions, and I’ve appreciated some of the input for, I’d say less than 2%, but a couple of folks that had some concerns, and that actually has fed into maybe the way or maybe the mix of colors and the kind of branding we’re using in different places because of some of the input that they gave about color combinations and things like that. Even though we were on the back end of it by the time we got that input, it’s still helpful in the way we represent the brand going forward. You guys provided us a great brand guide where we can mix and match a lot of these colors and looks of the logo. That’s something I learned is that you’re not just picking one representation of your logo and your logo type and your icon, you’re really getting a palette of things consistent with your brand to use depending on the setting, depending on what works for that particular audience. So Yeah, internal input, generally positive. External input has been good, too.

Kevin Adelsberger

Now, if there was a company listening to this that’s thinking about doing a rebrand, what would you… Just say they came to you and said, Hey, I need a rebrand. What should we be thinking about if we’re going to do that? What would you set them up to think about?

Chad Wilson

So I would ask them, Are you worthy of your brand already? Are there bigger problems? Because you can have a beautiful façade, so to speak, But once people get inside it, if they’re not having an experience that’s what they expected just from what they saw on the outside, you don’t want to whitewash your business. And so I think that there’s a real need to look internally, what are the biggest operational challenges, culture challenges, morale challenges? Hey, just are we making money in the first place? Make sure that the guts are good, the bones are good. And I think once that’s the case, there’s a necessity to turn to, Okay, what is the message we’re sending through our external marketing? Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger

Well, let’s talk about banking for just a minute here. So what are your thoughts about marketing for community banks? So you’ve talked about making sure that you know who your niche is and what your service you’re providing, but anything else comes to mind when you think about marketing for community banks?

Chad Wilson

I don’t think community banks do it well. I think community banks do the relationship side of banking really well. But I think there’s another piece there that we’re missing as an industry on being, I would say up to date. Community banks at times can seem, I’m speaking of us too, can seem a little behind the times, maybe a little old fashioned. And I think there’s some great things about being old fashioned, but I think what community banks have an opportunity to do is hold on to everything good about being old fashioned, about being traditional, about down home family values kinds of institutions, but represent that in a way that looks current, that looks like you are on top of things, that you are not stuck in another day, but you’re trying to tease out all the great things about the past, but you’re trying tweak that looking forward to the future, because people need to know that community banks are future-oriented. I think the degree to which you can represent that will allow you… There’s going to be a lot of community banks that sell over the next decade. In my career, we’ve gone from 9,000 banks down to less than 5,000, and that’s just in a 20-year period. And so more and more community banks are going to be selling if they’re not future-oriented. And I think a brand is one aspect of making sure that you’re forward-oriented.

Kevin Adelsberger

All right. Give you one minute just to pitch on Foundation Bank.

Chad Wilson

So we absolutely love building long-lasting financial relationships at Foundation Bank. So if you felt overlooked by your financial institution, or if you felt like you’re just a number, if you felt like you don’t know anybody at the branch in which you do business anymore. We want to be the alternative to that experience. We want to know your name when you walk in the door. We want to be available to help you in all the financial decisions of life. There’s home buying, there’s investing for the future, there’s managing your assets currently. We’ve invested a lot into technology to help those be tools to help you do those things. But at the end of the day, we provide financial solutions, not just financial products. We think there’s a difference. It’s the way in which you go about teaching people how to use those tools and helping them make good financial decisions for their future. If that’s something folks are looking for, we think people are starving for that. But most don’t have the time to set aside to make a change in their financial life. But we think it’ll be worth it. A little time now could lead to tremendous dollars and time in the future.

Kevin Adelsberger

Then you have a podcast, so I want to give you a chance to promote that, too.

Chad Wilson

Okay. We do have a podcast we put out every couple of weeks. It’s called Money Matters. And we try to talk about things that are going on in the economy, but boiled down into layman’s terms. I know that when we read things in the media, sometimes it can be overwhelming. It’s hard to tease through some of the data and the jargon. And so we just try to boil it down to this is what it means, and this is how it might affect you in how you make daily financial decisions. It’s a quick one, 10 to 15 minutes, and really accessible for folks that just want to know a little bit more about what’s going on in the economy.

Kevin Adelsberger

Well, Chad, thank you for taking the time to join us on this episode of the Content Machine podcast. We’ll be back with future episodes, so stay subscribed to see what’s next.

Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to the second episode of the Content Machine podcast we’re recording at Pretzel Day in 2024. I’m joined by Chad Wilson, President of Foundation Bank and a longtime customer and friend of Adelsberger Marketing. Thanks for joining us, Chad.

Chad Wilson
Happy to be here. Honored to be here.

Kevin Adelsberger
Chad, we recently helped you guys with a rebrand for the bank, and I wanted to ask you some questions about that because rebrand is a big marketing decision. So why did you decide to go through with a rebrand?

Chad Wilson
It is a big marketing decision. It took us some time to get to a point where I guess we were comfortable making the plunge into rebranding. I think that the more you think about it for a business, everything in your business speaks, everything says something. If you look at all the different parts of your business, what are those things saying? What does your building say? What does the vibe when you walk into the building say? What does all of the digital presence that you have, what does it say? We had thrown together our branding in pieces over the years. We had some legacy branding for our bank that had been there for a long time. We refreshed that a bit with the new brand in 2005, and it was really a bootstrapped project where we got online, found somebody to just help us put a logo together. I think a lot of thought went into our name that we wanted to use to brand with. There’s some real meaning behind the name Foundation Bank. But the graphics, the look, the feel of that, we put some thought into, but I think over the years, it just became more and more apparent that we could do that even more clearly, could do that with even more excellence. It felt like in some ways we were playing Pong, and the rebrand was like moving to Fortnite. It was a big time advance for us just in, I think, the quality of the look that we had. We feel like we’ve got a great culture, we’ve got a unique thing in our bank, and we want that to be visible externally. And so in some ways this brand, the rebranding, we wanted it to be a reflection of more so who we really are. And we wanted it to be something that was fresh enough that it looks like we’re paying attention to what is speaking digitally. And so thought about it for years and decided it was just time to take the plunge. I think you have to have, in some measure, things right internally before you can take that plunge, because in many ways you’re wanting that brand to be reflective of who you are. And if you’re not really happy with who you are, there may be some internal work to be done first to help you feel like you’re really capturing the essence of who you are in the brand and that you’re able to stand behind what you’re communicating. So we spent some years doing that. And you never arrive. You can always improve your culture. You can always improve the experience that people are having with you. But we felt like we were at a place where we were strong enough in our confidence of who we were. It’s time for us to now have a more attractive, contemporary representation of that through our brand.

Kevin Adelsberger)
That makes a lot of sense. So what was about that process? What did you not expect? What did you learn about the bank during the process of rebranding?

Chad Wilson)
Well, one thing we already knew is that we’re not perfect, and there’s always room for improvement. And that’s helpful, too, because sometimes you can poke your chest out too much and think, we got it all together. We’re the best thing since slice bread. Going through the process that you took us through of really trying to identify what we do well, where we really excel in the marketplace. When you do that, you also see where you don’t excel. You see the holes, and I think we knew that going in, but it was a more specific process to be able to see, okay, this is an area we just got to be okay with not being good at. These are areas that we just really need to lean in on. I think that’s the thing that I learned. I knew we had shortcomings coming in, but I think I came out of the rebounding process, and I think our whole team did, having a greater understanding of who we are, having a greater understanding of what we do well, and just really leaning into that. And being okay with that. It’s really easy, I think, in the business world to try to become all things to all people. I think, particularly in the banking world, there are lots of banks, and there are lots of banks that do different things well. If you’re not careful, you can always be chasing what seems to be really attractive at the moment or really eye-catching at the moment. But the fact is, every bank has a niche, and we embrace that niche even more now than we did before the rebrand, because I think the team that went through the process, they were able to see, okay, this is what we are good at. Let’s be better at it. That’s one thing that we took away, is a greater understanding of our strengths, and I think an even clearer understanding of our weaknesses and we’re trying to play to the strengths in our everyday operations and then represent those in the rebrand

Kevin Adelsberger
You mentioned a niche and feeling you define that now. How would you define that niche then?

Chad Wilson
I would I would say that our niche is providing financial solutions for people who appreciate a values-based culture and a values-based financial decision process. At first, going in, I think we thought we’re a small bank, we’re just able to do customer service really, really well. Sure. And that is something we do well. But I think we’re able to press even deeper into that. Not everyone is looking for a great customer service experience. Those who are sometimes are looking for not just a good customer service experience, but a process in which their own values are appreciated and even pushed up to the front in the process itself. And so we want to appeal in a culture where honesty and integrity are often questioned and where most institutions are approached with skepticism. We want to really, for those who value trust, who value integrity, we want to be an institution worthy of that, if that’s something that they care about. Some people just want a close bank that has a great app, and they never plan on walking in the door, and we’re not going to be the best fit for them. But for folks that want honest, sound financial advice, who want more than just a place to put their money, but people to help them decide what to do with their money, that’s where we’ve honed in to be able to get that personalized, not just relationship, but attention consistent with the values that they may already have.

Kevin Adelsberger)
That is a niche, I think, for sure, because I think most banks that people run into are large banks that are more interested in the transactionary stuff than the relationship stuff. Now, if you were to ever think about doing a rebrand again, what would you do differently or Or is there a way that you’d approach it differently? Or anything that maybe was a surprise to you in the process? You’re like, I wouldn’t have even thought about that on the front-end

Chad Wilson
I’m proud of the way that we went about it because we did include people from different parts of the bank to speak into it. I thought that was really important. You don’t want maybe the typical decision-makers being the only ones to weigh in on a rebrand, I think. We had a core team that was composed of a couple of typical decision-makers, but then we had some folks that just had marketing insight, and they were helpful to whittle down choices, to give some impressions of this is how this lands. But then we did include, at certain parts of the process, an even wider group to just give us, How does this hit you? If you were to choose between this and this, what would you do? We intentionally also were in six different markets in Northwest Tennessee. A lot of them are smaller towns than Jackson, Tennessee. And so we wanted to make sure that this brand would be embraced in each of those markets. And so we did get someone from each market to just let us know what they thought about the brand. So if I were doing it again, maybe even broadening that just a bit, You have to be real careful, I think, of involving too many people in the decision making, or you might say the draft input phase.

Kevin Adelsberger
Too many cooks in the kitchen.

Chad Wilson
Too many. But once you have have some choices, and once you just want to see how something lands, I think you can broaden the audience to where you’re able to just be even more informed. So we might have even broadened that. I think we did a good job, but we might could have done even better strategically not saying, What do you think our brand should look like, but here’s some work we’ve done. What do you think about it?

Kevin Adelsberger
And I’ll say from our perspective, we’ve done this with other companies. I think your team was on the better end of teams that we’ve worked off on that because You did have people from different departments. You had people with different opinions. And I’ll say everybody was cordial, worked together, was not in there just to throw a wrench in the plans. They were all there for the same goal and working together. It went really smooth for us. Thank you for listening to part one of our two-part podcast with Chad Wilson, President of Foundation Bank. Stay tuned to Content Machine for a future episode featuring Chad talking about his rebranding process.