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How to Creatively and Strategically Scale Your Business with Lysle Wickersham
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Creativity and strategy can seem like two sides of the same coin when it comes to business scaling, but they run well together when combined. I discuss how to do that in this episode with my guest, Lysle Wickersham.
Lysle’s unique crossover skill set and insights not only transform startups and SMEs into scalable, successful ventures but also redefine the very essence of creative capitalism, masterfully blending positioning strategy with storytelling and building intangible equity to drive growth and build enterprise value.
Lysle is an combination of two career paths that led him to his current business. He grew up as a creative director in integrated communications and brand development and advertising and eventually built a large agency that he ended up selling. After that Lysle ran a couple of tech companies connected to venture capital groups. He founded an investment bank and did a strange crossover for a creative person into mergers and acquisitions working with private equity and venture, a more strategic endeavor.
What felt natural to him was the integration between the pragmatic side developing sound business strategies and the creative side of expressing the attributes of a company that builds the emotional connections. The truth is if you do both of those things well, that’s where the money is.
Where to Start When it Comes to Blending Creativity and Strategy
Creativity and strategy don’t run at the same time; it’s a linear process. To be creative you first need to be strategic. Every business must start with core positioning. Who is the target market that you’re trying to reach? All of this at first is connected to the founder by the company’s goals and visions and what they want to be and build.
You take that and decide who would buy that and who’s going to scale with you so you can grow. You need to ask: What is the context that you are in the market in other words what space are you playing in, what’s your primary point of differentiation and what’s the proof that you can deliver on that point of differentiation? You must be able to deliver on that brand promise.
If you do that stuff well and you have that core foundation that naturally leads to the attributes of your brand that align with your positioning and audience. That means answering questions such as: What do you look like? What do you sound like? What are the brand values from that you can discern your primary messaging?
All of that then moves into things such as brand identity and communication strategies. The marriage between the two comes when you know who you are as a business and how you tell your story in a way that emotionally resonates with your potential clients.
That’s the natural connection between the strategic foundation and the creative expression of that foundation.
How to Know When You’re Ready to Scale
It’s kind of an abstract way to look at the word, everybody wants to scale or grow. Every business’ goal is to get bigger and make more revenue. That’s a natural progression. There is no specific trigger for that. When you’re figuring out positioning for your business you want to make sure that the audience you want to build has room to grow. Then there’s market potential. That’s where there’s white space competitively where you can be different and be desired.
All those things must go into consideration when you’re figuring out how to position a business to raise capital. You’re looking at the size of those marketplaces, how big they are, and what your potential to attract a piece of that market is. All those things must be calculated, especially if you’re talking to investors and you want to present a financial story to them about how your company can grow.
How to Differentiate Yourself in the Marketplace
That is the connection between strategy and creativity. When you create your positioning one of the core functions of that positioning is to articulate your core point of differentiation. You’ve got to nail that right away and that takes market research and understanding your competitive environment. You must also figure out where the place where you can put a stake in the ground and own that position lies. That includes your point of differentiation. A lot of that is understanding how you build equity, and equity over time is how you create wealth.
Equity happens by owning space in people’s minds. That is what brands do, and they do that by creating emotional connections and having a good service. Those two things become your table stakes. Sometimes the differentiator can be emotionally driven. That’s the difference between Reebok and Nike. Nike has been unparalleled at owning space in our minds and having a position of performance. They own that space and nobody can take that away.
Those are the emotional connections. The objective of doing positioning early on is that it allows you to own that space. That’s how we remember things, that’s how our memory systems work. Consistency over time is key so you do that strategic foundation work in the beginning. That forms how your brand lives and breathes. When you stick with it and over time and that’s how you create alignment. That’s how you get consistency. That’s how you build equity.
We also dive into topics such as:
- How to know if you have a viable, profitable business idea with which to grow.
- How smaller businesses can get started with owning space in people’s minds.
- How to uniquely differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace.
- How to determine your messaging structure around your points of differentiation.
- How to maintain mind space once you start to get it.
- Why building brand and building equity is not about spending money and what they’re really about.
- How to reinforce your market position and continue to own that space in people’s minds once you’ve created it.
- Why scaling your business is something you need to consider even while you’re still building your foundation.
- How to know when it’s time to make noise in the market and ramp up your scaling initiatives.
- How often you should evaluate and re-evaluate your market opportunities.
- What to do when a competitor tries to copy you and take away a share of your market.
- Why businesses don’t scale in a consistent linear fashion and what to do instead.
- How to measure whether you’re on track with successful growth.
- The characteristics of a great business goal.
- The types of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you should define and measure for your business.
- The one thing, above all else, that you need to do to be both creative and strategic when scaling your business.
…and other golden nuggets of advice!
You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”
Click here for more outstanding interviews with entrepreneurs and thought leaders!
About My Guest
Lysle Wichersham
A uniquely right- and left-brained strategist, Lysle is a true brand capitalist. He understands the power of branding and positioning, as well as the practical aspects of operations, managing a P&L, and scaling a business to raise capital or achieve a liquidity event. Drawing on a career in brand development, investment banking, and management consulting, he has refined his craft over 30 years.
As Chief Creative Officer and Managing Director, Lysle built and sold a $170M integrated agency, where he created and positioned numerous world-class brands. He then worked with a VC group, managing several tech startups and successfully exiting from one. This experience ignited his passion for value creation and scaling businesses, leading to the co-founding of an investment banking and M&A firm.
Lysle’s diverse skill set, which integrates the pragmatic strategy of scaling business with the creativity and storytelling that builds intangible equity, explains BRANDThink’s holistic and integrated approach to positioning, building brand equity, scaling companies, and accelerating value creation. Today, BRANDThink works with startups and early-stage businesses on competitive positioning and brand development, strategic planning, modeling, pitch decks, and data rooms for raising capital. You can connect with Lysle at [email protected].
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