[Issue 12] Building Your Castle Brand
The ancient Greek model for crafting a sustainable business that keeps customers coming back again & again
[Photo by Marc Zimmer on Unsplash]
The Odysseus Files, Issue 12
Build a Castle, Not a Village, Part 5
How to Build a Sustainable Business
[Note: this is Part 5 of a miniseries within the broader Odysseus Files called “Build a Castle, Not a Village.” These miniseries will group broad topics thematically, helping you connect the dots between them more easily.]
TL;DR - Scroll to the end for the takeaways!
This week, we’re jumping back into our series on “Build a Castle, Not a Village.” The past few issues have hopefully helped you to start thinking through what you want from your life and how your business can support that. But now we’re ready to jump back into exploring a framework for building a sustainable brand that I teased about in the first four issues of this miniseries.
In Issue 9, The Ownership Principle, we said that financial sustainability is the consequence of just a handful of things:
A reliable way of bringing more customers in
And happy customers that keep buying from you over & over again
Most businesses focus on the latter. (The struggle to make it “reliable” is where most get stuck.)
But what they’re missing is that focusing on the former can have a run-on effect on the latter.
Think about it: it’s far easier (and cheaper) to sell to someone who has already bought from you, and likes your work. The more you keep them around, the more consistent money you have coming in the door, without having to hustle and directly trade your time for revenue.
Meanwhile, the more you blow them away, keeping them engaged and excited to make your brand a big part of their lives, the more they’ll tell other people, driving new customers. Word-of-mouth is the most coveted form of marketing - but most brands aren’t creating the conditions to lean heavily into it.
As we jump back into this series, we’re going to lay the groundwork for a framework that will help you rewire your business to focus more on delivering a great customer experience than on chasing new customers. The key: your brand. Let’s jump in.
Building From the Bottom Up
Your brand is your business’ identity. It’s the sum of your values, personality, positioning, etcetera. It defines the rest of what your business does.
Which means that determining what kind of customer experience to deliver, to keep people coming back and telling others about you, needs to be rooted in your brand.
Your brand is the foundation.
Everything else is built up from there.
When your positioning, messaging, visuals, content, products, operations, and the experience you provide are all aligned with your brand, you have a structure built to last.
When you’re trying to make decisions about what tactics to use, how to market your business, what products you should build, what types of customers you should go after, etcetera, having a clear brand vision & identity will keep you anchored. You can refer back to that to determine if any given action is congruent with your long term vision.
(Not to say that vision won’t shift and adapt over time - but when it does, it should be an intentional, thought-out process. This differs from a tactics-first approach, where a business chases the next “new” thing and gets easily distracted, because it doesn’t have anything to root its decision-making in.)
Crafting this vision is easy enough - sticking to it, even when things go against you, is the hard part. This is where your belief in, conviction for, and joy from your vision comes in. Which means, of course, that this vision has to be all you - not a copycat of someone else.
Let’s explore a framework for crafting a vision that is purely YOU. That will keep you waking up excited every morning, that will help you stand your ground against the enemies of fear and self-doubt, and that will help you build a sustainable business you enjoy.
Digging Up the Past
Sometime around 1,400 B.C. the Mycenaeans - the real life people behind Homer’s “Achaians” in The Iliad - started building their palaces across mainland Greece. Over the next 150 years, they erected defensive walls around their palaces, using enormous stones in a style later Greeks would consider “cyclopean” (because they assumed only the giant cyclops of ancient myth could lift such heavy stones).
These fortified palatial centers - citadels - served as the heart of political, military, cultural, and economic life for the Mycenaeans. They became known as acropoleis (singular “acropolis”).
The acropolis (from two Greek words meaning “the high point of the city”) would continue to dominate Greek cities for over a millennia. The most well known example of an acropolis is the one in Athens - rebuilt from the ground up under the direction of the great statesman Pericles, during the 5th century B.C, and including one of the most famous Greek temples of all time, the Parthenon.
During the age of Greek colonization, when Greek settlers traveled and built new homes all over the Mediterranean and Black Seas (primarily from the 8th to the 6th centuries B.C.), the acropolis was the first step in building new cities.
While its role evolved over time, from being the home of royalty and a hub of economic activity during the Mycenaean period to becoming the center of religious life in later years, it never lost its place as the anchor of the ancient Greek community.
But… what the heck does this have to do with building a sustainable brand?
The Acropolis Model for Building a Resilient, Impactful Brand
We’ve talked about how most people approach business in a tactics-first way that means they look like everyone else in their space.
Imagine that this approach to building a brand and a business is like a village.
A village:
Is generic - looks like all the other villages
Is open to anyone - including enemies and less-than-desirable characters
Can be entered from anywhere - giving control over to visitors
Doesn’t offer much - a village is passed through on the way to somewhere else
Lacks visibility - struggles to attract attention on its own
Often dependent on someone else - trade routes passing through, a neighboring castle, etcetera
You can see the similarities:
→ Most businesses are trying to serve “everyone” (even if they claim otherwise)
→ They hustle to go into other peoples’ worlds, only to desperately try and “drag” those people back into their own
→ Once an initial sale is made, they forget about the new customer
→ They look like all of their competitors, meaning people only choose them because they’re the lowest price, closest geographically, or some other reason that provides no competitive advantage
→ They’re dependent on algorithms, discounts, and other peoples’ platforms in order to make a buck
So, what’s the opposite of a village?
A castle. (To be specific, in our case, an acropolis - the high point, or citadel, of the ancient Greeks.)
What does this look like?
Next week, we’ll start to break down how to apply this to your business.
Takeaways
The most important component in building a sustainable business is keeping your customers coming back again & again. Because most businesses only pay lip service to this idea, but in reality churn through customers and keep chasing new leads, focusing on delivering a great customer experience can quickly set you apart.
The first step to doing this is to nail down your brand identity and messaging. Followed by designing a world that your customers can’t get enough of.
The way most businesses are built has similarities with a village. A better model for how we should be crafting our brands is a castle - or, more specifically, an acropolis (the citadel - or high point - in an ancient Greek city).
Over the next several issues, we’ll break down how to use this model to build out all the critical parts of your brand and customer experience.
Taking this approach allows you to optimize for sustainability while crafting a business around YOU instead of trying to create a clone of someone else’s business. This model empowers you to play your own game - to design something you actually enjoy and to build on the right foundations instead of jumping from tactic to tactic.
If you’d like help conceptualizing how to adapt these ideas to your business, I’ve got four coaching spots open in December. These sessions are a beta version, so are 40% off, but will be going up to full price in January. Hit “reply” and let me know if you’re interested, and I’ll send you the details.