Want to get the attention of a CEO? Tell them you’ll help them build an unstoppable business.
That’s one thing I’ve found in 40 years of working with CEOs to build their brands: they want to build an unstoppable business.
That’s what Brad Wendkos envisioned when he started building his empire that now boasts 2 million customers worldwide and over 400K subscribers on YouTube.
Are We Ready to Build an Unstoppable Business?
Founded in 1991, TrueFire has collaborated with 600+ top educators to produce what Guitar Player Magazine calls “the planet’s largest and most comprehensive selection of online guitar lessons.”
Over 2 million guitarists from virtually every country in the world “learn, practice, and play” with TrueFire’s interactive video courses and patented learning systems for personalized and private online instruction from GRAMMY award winners to top session players, to world-renowned educators with a course library featuring 40,000+ interactive video guitar lessons.
Brad, a lifelong guitarist, had a vision, a passion. It started using the available channels of communication: the phone. Then it moved onto the Internet.
But there was a problem: passion without a plan only went so far.
Brad was also a lifelong entrepreneur and disruptor with an engaging gift for gab (the most successful CEOs I know share similar qualities).
Brad realized in order to grow, he had to “package” his business idea: to have a music community that could improve their musician skills using today’s technology, especially those who found reading music hard.
So Brad and I sat down. Talked over his vision. He had the name: Truefire.
The rest was up to me, to convey the meaning (the fire here being the artistic passion) visually, in story, and its now globally recognized slogan.
Brad In His Own Words
Brad Intervention
Here’s the discussion CEO Brad Wendkos of Truefire and I had about growing an idea into a business.
“Someone’s brand. It’s you know, it’s the most important element in the entire business mix if you ask me because it, it tells you who you are and who you have to be and how you have to behave.
“It communicates the same to your audience and it gives you, even though it’s a word or a graphic, it embodies everything that’s true about what it is that you’re doing. Okay. And if ever in doubt about a new program or a new vision or a new mission or a new employee, you know, you can put everything back to that brand, and if you follow your brand religiously as I think we have — you’ve watched us do it now for more than 20 years….
“I think we’ve done a really really good job of… I have to credit that to a large degree with our success because a permeated every decision we made, every behavior, every communication to our audience, how we interact with artists today. and it’s become, you know, culture, right?— that other people adopt and participate in and you know, we have a community that is indeed ‘Ignited we stand.’
“You know, it’s killer!
“Well, I mean this sincerely this isn’t just gratuitous, you know, ‘interview chatter’ but you know, couldn’t have done it without you but I’m sure you haven’t given anybody as good of a slogan as ours. I’m sure of that.”
If you’re a CEO with a vision, don’t let your great idea go up in flames by overlooking the power of what your brand can convey, can ignite in others.
If this sounds like you, you deserve better. You really do.
This is why great brands led by entrepreneurs such as yourself deserve the best tools so you achieve the goals you desire.
Missing the mark? Then reach out and let’s solve this.
