I’m in the middle of a career transition. This involves an evolution of not just my professional life but my professional brand.
Frankly, I’ve been a little concerned about the process, but branding expert Bruce Turkel says I’m doing just fine.
“First of all, you’re talking about it on the air. Which means every single person listening is now an opportunity for you to find opportunities – and an opportunity for you to help them,” he said during a recent Fried On Business appearance.
“And you’ve also aimed all of this not at who you are and what you’re doing, but at how you can help others.”
Now, I’m still going to work in the large-scale commercial real estate capitalization market and the investment sales market, but I’m also entering the commercial hard money lending market and the residential market for jumbo and super-jumbo mortgages.
I’ll be teaming up with Bob Gutlohn at Spectrum Mortgage. You can reach me at 305-773-6300.
Turkel, not surprisingly, has a better way of saying what I just told you. According to him, I’m “going to help people get the money they need to live in the homes they want to live in and to buy the properties they want to buy.”
Put another way, “What I want to do is help you.”
Genius. Just what you’d expect from the CEO and ECD at Turkel Brands.
Sending the message that you’re in business to help others is the key, Turkel said, and it’s a point he’s been hammering ever since he started appearing on the show.
“I don’t know what hard lending is. All I know is getting a loan is hard. But none of that matters when you’re selling the brand,” he said. “What matters is, ‘What are you going to do for me?'”
Once you have the message nailed down, the next task is to distribute the message. That means you have to repeat, repeat, repeat, Turkel said.
That doesn’t mean you have to be repetitive. You just have to find different ways of expressing the same idea.
Then, Turkel said, you need to stay on track. Know where you’re going and how you want to get there. Then, when something comes up to derail you, it’s easy to fix.
“If you’re a dirt biker or you do off-road bicycling, they tell you that if you see something in your way, you look at it and then you look away. Because what you look at, you hit,” he said. “But if you look away, look forward, look to where you want to be, you ride right around it.”
It’s important to remember, Turkel said, that people aren’t interested in your qualifications until they’re interested in you. They need to like and trust you first, then you can give them the RTB’s – Reasons To Believe.
Bottom line, there are seven aspects to building brand value, Turkel said:
1. All about them.
2. Hearts, then minds.
3. Make it simple.
4. Make it quick.
5. Make it yours.
6. All five senses.
7. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Bruce Turkel never disappoints. Click here to listen to the full interview.
