My personal motto for years has been ‘Lift up every person and project that comes your way.’ It’s concise and meaningful. When I started to brainstorm the business I would soon have, lever came to me because it is basically just an extension of my personal motto. Lever exists to lift brands to the next level. To passionately assist business owners who are passionate about how their product or service enriches the lives of their customers. Once I landed on lever, things sort of exploded in my brain. WeLiftBrands.com was available. I have ideas for a new biz initiative using “Does your business need a lift?” etc etc. The fulcrum of the lever made for an obvious solution to a super cool business card. The concept has legs that I can use forever, when naming blog posts, when coming up with visuals for marketing materials, etc. Something to think about for you because it’s a lot easier to create an awesome website – and even company culture – around a concept rather than a last name or a bland name describing what you do.

Beyond the name, your brand needs a backbone that is personal and meaningful to you the owner, and all of your employees. If your name is lacking then hone in on your mission statement. (Or call me so we can rename you and rebrand you!) No one really wants to work with – or buy from! – someone whose only goal is to make money. Now don’t misread that. I want to make money. I want to work with clients that want to make money. But there has to be a bigger goal. A goal that drives beyond profitability. It needs to make sense for who you are. If you make products for children your big goal should – duh – be about helping children or maybe parents/teachers. It wouldn’t make sense for Lever’s driving goal to be enriching the lives of families. It’s not totally far fetched, but really only makes sense if all of Lever’s clients had products and services geared towards families. Throw one casino client into the mix and bam – credibility of that mission statement would be lost.

Luckily, I am very, very passionate about seeing my work take businesses to the next level, the key is for me to partner with the right businesses. That’s the key for all agencies, in my opinion, and the more focused you can be about who the right partner is, the better. (…Said the agency owner who currently only has one partner and is not sure if the next partner will fit her focused idea at all because at this point she’d like to just have more than one client. I’m aware.)