Why We Rebranded

This is the Momentum podcast. Welcome. I am super excited to be recording this with you today and for you today, because today is the 15th day since I had positive COVID symptoms and the 14th day since I tested positive for COVID. And you know, I'm pretty healthy. I do a ton of biohacking. I take care of myself. I do what I can to kind of stay as healthy and is as vital as I possibly can. And COVID really was challenging, you know, I think before I got it, I had these delusions of I would get it and I would just walk right through and it would be no big deal. And the last 14 days have been a journey. They have been intense. I did not walk right through it. In fact, Monday, two weeks ago was the first day I had symptoms. I had some neck pain. That night I was up in the middle of the night with body pain that was so severe I had to get in the bathtub. I basically lived in a bathtub for three or four days during the body pain portion, and then I had just extreme fatigue and irritability. And then what felt like a sinus infection. So two solid weeks of being ill and I'm excited to be back up and moving around and meeting with my team and recording this for you. And so this recording is actually an interesting one. You know, on, as you probably know or you've heard, we went through a huge rebrand of our company. And what I realized just recently is that I haven't really like shared overtly, why did we rebrand? What was the process for rebranding? What were the questions that we asked ourselves that got us to the point where we knew we needed to rebrand? And I'm doing this on video and I can see that my tongue is blue from using L-carnitine, which is a supplement that I used earlier today. So it's very funny that I'm seeing myself over and over again on video here with Blue Tongue. So if you're listening to the audio, you don't get to see me with my Smurf tongue. But let's jump back into the to the actual subject here of rebranding. And so I wanted to take you through our rebranding journey and why we decided to rebrand and what were the reasons that we considered before we changed a brand that we've had now for over 10 years? I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Should we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will? We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be. You know, our brand for the last 10 years has been Charfen. We've just used our last name and we were at Charfen dot com. And the reason that we originally did that is dang it. The reason, the reason that we originally did that is because, sorry, I had got a phone call. The reason we originally did that was because we felt like it was easy. We felt like we had a unique enough name that didn't really. And not a lot of other people had it really just my family, which I have a small family in the world. I mean, it's a large family, but we kind of know each other and we know who everyone is. And we felt like Charfen was a good brand. And so we started using it. And it really wasn't until the past year or two that we realized just how confusing it was. And so there's really three reasons we rebranded. The first one is to create clarity. The second one is to create, refer ability. Gosh, that one's really hurt me when I heard about it. And then the third one is just an overall reduction of noise. So let me give you kind of a background on this here. So for me, using the brand Charfen, it was really a personal brand. And so when I when I think of this first point of creating clarity around what we do, the brand Charfen created a ton of confusion around what we do, and I don't think that we were as aware of it as we should have been until we really started doing interviews with people over the past couple of years. Really, the best six to nine months is where it got intense and what members, what our members are. Actually people who bought our stuff would tell us is that it took them forever to figure out what we did. And then once they did, they wanted us to help them, and that the fact that my personal brand was Charfen, they felt like I was a personal coach or like I would be coaching people that there really wasn't a system or a team there or the and even if there was, they expected me to be involved. And so it created a massive amount of confusion, and it required too much explanation, telling people that we were Charfen and we helped entrepreneurs with operations. And what we really did is train entrepreneurs teams to support them so that entrepreneurs can do less while they grow and scale their business. It was like this huge explanation based on how confusing our brand was. So number one, first and foremost, we wanted to eliminate confusion. Now here's what's interesting in this process, we spoke to a lot of our members and a lot of our biggest fans and said, Hey, we're rebranding, we're considering rebranding. And here's what a lot of them told us. The first time I had one of my members who was a close friend of mine, Andrew Rendall, tell me this. It was kind of like a punch in the gut. She said, You know, you're the hardest company to refer. And I remember saying, Andrea, what do you mean we're hard to refer like referrals are my love language. I know that they don't have them in that book. The five for love languages. I think it's four or five. Whatever it is, they're missing one referrals. And I love to get referrals. It's one of the best ways to bring people into a coaching membership. What do you mean? We're hard to refer, and here's what Andrea told me. She said that that first she had to explain to people who Charfen was and who I was. Then she had to explain that we had a company, and then she had to explain that we help people simplify their operations. It was brutal hearing that, and I actually talked to a bunch of our other members and some other people I know, and they all said the same thing. In fact, one said, I send you referrals all the time. I just don't think they call you because the referral is so confusing. And so when you think about referring somebody to Charfen and then saying, Hey, they can help you with your operations, they can help you with your team, they can help you make sure that you're doing the right things. That's actually a pretty easy, pretty easy. Path to take, it's a pretty easy referral to make. And then what what would happen is people would tell us that they didn't feel like they could refer us. They didn't feel like they could send people to us because of the fact that it just it created more confusion than clarity and that that hurt the fact that that it was hard for people to refer us because they had to explain what they were referring. And it was difficult for them to refer us because it was so hard to get that to stick. It made me really say, like, we need to fix this, we need to move this in the right direction. And that's why the third point we we rebranded really just to reduce overall noise. You know, our motto is lowering pressuring noise for entrepreneurs, but here's what an entrepreneur had to go through to work with us. First, they had to understand who Charfen was and really who I was. And then they had to understand what we did. But there wasn't really a lot of clarity around that, so they had to deduce that what we do is we help entrepreneurs, teams support them to grow their business, and we help entrepreneurs understand how to support their team to grow the business without having to do everything themselves. And the fact that that message was obscured in our branding is what really slowed it down and made us say, Hey, we need to change this. And so here's what we did. I'll give you our process. We actually worked with my friend that I mentioned earlier, Andrea Rendall, because she's a branding expert and she's amazing. And she had us go through a number of exercises like discovering what our brand was discovering, what it would be really some out of the box exercises, like if our brand was an animal, what would it be if our brand was a car? What kind of car would it be? You know, how, how, how would it how would and how would our brand present itself in different scenarios? And then we got together with our team. And I remember my wife, Cadey, saying, by the end of the day to day, we're going to have a new brand. We're going to create massive clarity around this what this company does. We're going to have the dot com. We're going to have everything ready to go. And so we got together with our team and we started talking about what we do and we started putting words up on the board. And the thing that kept coming up over and over again is we streamline and simplify operations for entrepreneurs. And what that means is we help entrepreneurs get into the visionary play of the seat, get into the visionary seat in their business, get into that place where they're running it like a CEO, and then build a real company with a team that protects and supports that entrepreneur and with a team that runs the processes to keep the company going with a team that makes sure things are moving forward for you, as the entrepreneur, as you run your business. And that day was intense. And, you know, over time, we finally kept seeing these same words show up simple and operations. And so finally, one of us said, Hey, what about simple operations? And it just so happened that. It was available, the dot com was available as a premium domain, we had to pay more than $10 for it, but it was available and we ended up purchasing it, putting it together, and then we went and shared it with our membership. And here's what we kept hearing like. That's exactly what you do. This is so much easier. Simple operations makes sense. Simple operations is what we you know what we would love to referred to. It makes it easier to refer to you. It makes it easier to send people to you. So we pulled the trigger and we rebranded the company. And you know, I think one of the one of the big lessons that I learned is and it's a lesson that I actually learned over and over again from Donald Miller at Story Brand. You know, we went and did the story brand on two day event. And the thing that stuck with me around that is it Donna Donald Miller would say over and over again that a confused brain does not make decisions and a confused brain does not say yes and a confused brain that the brain does not want to burn calories. And so if there's anything confusing about people for people that are coming towards you, if there's anything frustrating for people coming towards you, like if they have to work to figure out what you do, they probably won't. And the more that I heard that, the more that I heard that the brain needs clarity, the more that I heard that people need to understand exactly what's going on, the more than I understood that the more clear it became that we really needed to pull the trigger on this. And so now we have this brand simple operations and it's a dot com simple operations icon and in the name it tells people exactly what we do. And when people now come towards us, we can explain that we don't just simplify operations. We help train your operators so that they can take over a bunch of the tactical stuff that you're doing right now. We actually show your team how to support you to get out of the chaos, to calm the chaos in the business and create massive momentum. And we show you how to put the tools in place, the structure in place so that you can grow and scale your business without ever having to do it all yourself again. And then how you methodically replace yourself in the business. This is what we do, and this is what we did when we were branded Charfen. But it's so much more clear now for the people that we're talking to. It's more clear on our sales calls it actually, it actually feels like it's eliminated part of the resistance and people coming towards us. So if you have a business and you have a brand, it's not really clear as to exactly what you do. Remember what Donald Miller says? You know, the brain doesn't want to burn calories. It's not going to step into confusion. People will not make an affirmative decision if they're confused. And so it has been an exciting process to go through this rebrand. We're still finishing some of it up and still putting some of the systems and structure in place. But we already feel like it's creating an entirely new level of clarity for the people who are who want to work with us and who want to come and see what we're doing and see if we can help them. And so if you're one of those people, you can now go to simple operations dot com. How easy is that? And we will show you how to install the simple operation system that will help you run your business methodically and systematically and predictably over time, so you can grow your business like crazy without ever having to feel like you need to do it all yourself. Go to Simple Operations dot com and check it out, and thanks for being here with me today listening to this story about rebranding, and hopefully this can help you in your business. And again, check out simple operations dot com. There's not much more than a placeholder there, but we're building it out and we're going to get it up and running and bring in a lot more people so we can help them. You know, it's funny. I did an interview today with a prospective candidate and she said, You know what? What's like your biggest desire for the business or what do you want for the business? And here's what I said. We have a massive impact when we can work with an entrepreneur and we don't just have a business on impact on their business. We have entrepreneurs who work with us and they they end up losing weight and getting better in shape. We have people who come in with autoimmune disorders that are issues and they they become completely benign and go into remission. We have people who spend more time with their family, spend more time with their spouse and they improve their life all the way around them and feel better about what they're doing and my desires to help as many entrepreneurs as possible do exactly that. Grow your business, but then have the freedom that we've always wanted as entrepreneurs, and I feel like the simple operation brand operations brand supports us in doing that so much more than the brand that we had before. So thanks for being here with me today. I appreciate it. Go check out simple operations dot com. You can check it out as it develops and grows and becomes more robust. And if you're looking for help growing your business and you want to systematically and predictably grow and scale your business without having to do it all yourself, go to Simple Operations dot com and sign up for a call with my team. Thanks for being here. I appreciate it.