Book Review: “Badass Your Brand” by Pia Silva
Ever have a groundbreaking read that changes everything?
As a solopreneur, I am always seeking easier, more efficient ways of running my business, serving clients and staying relevant with my products and services. It’s important for me to find the best ways to deliver value the most effective, simple way.
There are a handful of books by authors out to do the same: make life better for business owners. There are a few that I’ve consumed with ferocity that have helped me deliver more value while simplifying my life. The first is Pia’s Badass Your Brand: The Impatient Entrepreneur’s Guide to Turning Expertise Into Profit as it changed how I sell and deliver my work.
Freelancer to Strategist
Throughout my career as a creative professional, I was always hired based on my ability to design, write and create marketing collateral that would communicate some message or promote a campaign or product. That’s fine, it’s what I went to college for, and over the years I expanded my skills from analog creative to digital with the evolution of technology in graphic design and of course, the onset of the internet. Wowzah.
When I started my business in 2006 after being riffed from Marriott, I kept doing the work the same way I did in the corporate setting. I’d create a piece of marketing collateral, website, copy, etc. for an hourly rate. I charged hourly for years. The other thing I was doing was creating scopes and estimates for prospective projects that were time consuming and sometimes didn’t result in new business.
You can imagine how tiresome that was. But I didn’t know anything better. For freelancers and graphic designers that were hired for gigs, that was the way things were done. Every year I’d increase my hourly rate a little bit, but based it on no intelligence other than what other freelancers and graphic designers were charging.
That positioned me as a commodity. Not good.
In late 2009, I wanted to rebrand and position my business services more as a consultant focused on more effective marketing and communications, driven by customer behavior and experience. I renamed my company from Terry Pappy Creative Services to Better3, which remains today. I arrived at Better3 through a thoughtful process of looking at my approach and why my creative was so much more effective for my clients. It was based on the following methodology:
Better Understanding of your customer so you can write and create communications that attract and serve them better than your competitors. I’d do qualitative research to understand how my client’s customers thought, acted and made buying decisions.
Better Communications so what you’re creating and conveying is professional, consistent, well-branded and helps customers identify themselves in association with your brand. This was where I designed brands and deliverables that worked more effectively at growing my client’s businesses.
Better Relationships so you create loyalty, brand advocacy, repeat business and referrals from your existing customer base as well as caring relationships with your prospects, audience and followers. This empowered my clients to save money on new marketing tactics because they were keeping existing clients longer—it’s always cheaper to keep the customers you have than constantly having to replace the ones that leave with new ones. (Same goes for employees, by the way.)
Better3 was solid. It was the perfect culmination of what I was about and it created more runway for me to deepen each of the three aspects of the brand.
However, even with that revised brand, I kept charging by the hour and kept doing time-consuming proposals for free, among other one-offs that were total time wasters and wore me out.
In 2017, I stumbled across Pia’s first book, Badass Your Brand. What a blessing from the book universe. LOL. I think I read it in two days, and it was such a powerful answer to a long-time struggle I’d been having trying to grow, evolve and improve how I ran my business. It was practical. It had voice. It was easily read. I related to Pia. I felt like Pia “got me.”
In Badass Your Brand, she proposes a different, more efficient way to market a service business. To create a brand that’s distinct. To make your time more valuable. To be compensated for all of the value you’re bringing to the table.
What it did for me was release the shackles of hourly “time for money” services, organize my offerings more succinctly, and differentiate my “freelancer-graphic designer/web designer” moniker into a creative consultant and strategist—which what I was actually delivering.
I had evolved how I presented it to prospects and clients, not how I created value.
Pia’s book helped me evolve my business in several ways. Here are a few of the big things I did as a result of adopting her approach:
I no longer charged by the hour. I charged by the project or product. I was no longer commoditized and compared to other creative’s hourly rates.
I no longer did free proposals or estimates. What a time saver and money maker!
I took every service I provided and created three core products which simplified my offerings.
I created a product staging formula that enabled new clients to try me out at a lower cost, get high value and continue to work with me over time. I achieved more profitability and had less hassle finding new clients to work with. More recently, it has helped me develop another new product where I become an outsourced “fractional” chief marketing officer for more established businesses in addition to serving solopreneurs.
Pia’s book and her approach transformed my business from a freelance agency by the hour to a strategic consulting and branding firm. It also helped me isolate who I was selling to as my products serve a specific type of business owner: service-based solopreneur and as a fractional, a larger business without an in-house marketing team. It also helps me deliver more refined content specifically geared toward my ideal client.
Since that first read, Pia and I have become friends. I’ve shared the impact she’s had on my business and life, and how she created something really powerful because she was 1000% Pia when she created it. She is firm in her conviction about branding and marketing and has helped thousands of people improve how they deliver value. I recommend her book to all of my clients and use her approach (with some TPappy customizations) in my strategic design of productizing services for my clients and it works amazingly well for them.
Two conversations with Pia
Pia was a guest on my Simplify & Multiply podcast twice, and you must listen to both conversations to get even more rich inspiration from this incredible woman:
