066: The Riches are in the Niches with Philip VanDusen Founder of Verhaal Brand Design

Consistency is really king when it comes to you know, consumer recognition, right? So whenever a consumer or customer of yours comes to your site, or comes to your Facebook page or comes to your twitter feed, you want their initial reaction, their initial view of you to be consistent, so the same picture of you, the same colour scheme that you are using, the same fonts, the same logo, the same photography style, the same pattern or texture, all of those things are really important.

#00:01:03-3# Neil : Hello, its Neil Ball here, thank you so much for joining me today on The Entrepreneur Way. The entrepreneur way is about the entrepreneur’s journey, the vision, the mind-set, the commitment, the sacrifice, failures, and successes. I am so excited to bring you our special guest today, Philip VanDusen. But before I introduce you to him, I have a quote for you. Joe Stein Garden I think that’s how you pronounce it, said ‘I am really more interested in questions than giving answers. The entrepreneur way asks the questions, so we all get the insight, inspiration and ideas to apply in our businesses. Philip, welcome to the show, are you ready to share your version of the entrepreneur way with us?

#00:01:50-9# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I am Neil, thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate the opportunity to share my story with your listeners.

#00:01:56-7# Neil : Thank you for coming on the show Philip. Philip VanDusen has over 20 years of experience in branding and design serving as VP of Designer, Pepsico and Old Navy. He was the executive creative director at the global branding agency and Landor Associates. Philip is currently a principal at Verhaal Brand Design and a founder of Verhaal.co. A director/consumer ecommerce and media brand. Philip can you provide us with some more insight in to your business and personal life, to allow us to get to know more about what you do and who you are.

#00:02:38-7# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Sure, well I think every entrepreneurial story is really a story, its a journey, and in fact my two businesses actually use the word story, and I will talk a little bit about that later, but I grew up very creative and inventive kid, always drawing and painting and making things and I started working from a very young age, I remember in kindergarten I used to make these little plastic toys, they were these things called creepy crawlers that you bake this liquid plastic and it made these little rubberised insects and I took them to school and sold them out of a cigar box, and I kept coming home and asking my mom to buy me more of this goop that I could make more of these things with, and after a while, she asked me, ‘you know, where are all these things going? And I told her, ‘oh I am selling them at school’ and she said, ‘well that’s not how this works, you are going to have to pay me for this, for the goop.’ So it was like I immediately kind of put together supply and demand and expenses. But you know I grew up and I went to school for the fine arts, my brother and sister are both actors, and I decided to go the fine arts way. So I went to University for Painting, I got my master’s degree painting, actually and taught at the university level at painting and drawing. And at one point, I went to the South of France, and was teaching drawing there, and did a lot of print making, and came back to my home in Brooklyn, New York and started up a tee-shirt company. Putting my art work on tee-shirts and walking the Island of Manhattan and selling them to any boutique that would have me.

#00:04:23-3# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : And at this time, it was kind of the dawn of the computer age and the Mac had just come out and graphic design and design was just being able to be done on computers. And I was just totally excited by it, enthralled by it, and took to it like a fish in water. And I very quickly kind of went to, after having my tee-shirt company, went to work for one of my competitors, and as a designer, and working with the Mac, and very quickly learned that being a creative director and managing other designers was a lot like teaching, except you were not out of work every nine months, and you made a lot more money. So I kind of moved very quickly over to the business side, in the fashion world, doing graphic payroll, and I worked my way up through a series of companies, eventually landing at old Navy. Which was owned by Gap Inc. and was the most successful retailer in history, and agreed to a billion in sales in under five years, so I was part of that rocket ship, and managed their graphic payroll business which was a $700 million dollar a year business, just in graphic tee-shirts, it was pretty amazing.

#00:05:43-8# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : And then I worked at a succession of global branding agencies, Anthem worldwide, Landor Associates, doing working with lots of different fortune 100 clients, everything from food technology to energy to pets. And then I went and worked at PepsiCo for a while, e and after PepsiCo, I just decided to take a little break and kind of nurture my entrepreneurial side in my spirit. And so I decided to start an ecommerce company, which I called Verhaal, and Verhaal I will just a little bit of story about that. Verhaal is a dutch word its spelt Verhaal and it means story in dutch and my family was one of the first settlers of Manhattan. One of the first 100 families there in 1627. So my entrepreneurial roots go way back in the United States before we were even the United States, so that name was kind of appropriate, so I started an ecommercendI company called Verhaal, and that’s located at the Verhaal.co not com. And then just recently in the last few months, I have started up kind of a sister company, Verhaal brand design, which is a brand design consultancy kind of leveraging my historic skill set in brand development, graphic design in creative work.

#00:07:12Neil : Mmm and do you specialise in anything in particular in your business or what kind of clients do you have?

#00:07:16-4# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I do brand identity and graphic design are definitely key competencies. I like to talk about brand eco systems because as you think about brand identity, its not really just a logo, its also colour, font, photography style. And so many businesses have such a broad range of brand touch points these days, I mean everything from retail stores to outdoor signage to online to social media, products themselves on shelves, retail displays, there are so many different brand touch points that being able to design a kind of cohesive system that’s consistent across all of those is a challenge for individual entrepreneurs all the way up to the largest corporation, so designing really cohesive and consistent brand eco-systems is kind of my specialty.

#00:08:13-1# Neil : And your customers, are they small businesses? Medium businesses? Large businesses? Are there any particular ones?

#00:08:21-6# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Yeh my history of my career has obviously been working with very large businesses and you know one of what the kind of value add that I am bringing to my consultancy is that I have learned the strategic design processes and business strategy processes that the largest corporations use to develop new brands and products and manage their own brands, and those theories and tools and strategies that those company use that I did while I was working in larger agencies, are the same needs that smaller companies and individuals have, so I bring the ability to really bring very thoughtful strategic work to everything from individual entrepreneurs and small to medium size businesses. So I am able to give them what could be in a large agency, a $250,000 dollar branding job, you know I am able to bring it to an individual or a small company for a fraction of that amount.

#00:09:27-7# Neil : And what do you enjoy most about what you do Philip?

#00:09:30-6# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Well I think what I really love most is I love creating, I love helping, you know design is really about I like to call it the intersection of art and science. I mean its really where beauty meets function. Design, there is a difference between art and design. Art is very subjective, and is really all about beauty. Design is actually for something, its supposed to do something, so I love how you can make something, you can design something so it actually functions and does what it needs to do but also brings a level of beauty and grace to whether its a product or a logo or a uniform. I just kind of love that wedding of design and art, and I love solving problems, I mean one of the great things about working with clients is that the range of problems that they have to solve our myriad, they just everything from our identity on our website does not look right or we are having trouble kind of maintaining consistency across all of our different touch points, I love learning about new industries that’s another thing that I really love about it. You know I have worked in everything from aerospace to technology to pet food.

#00:10:57-9# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : And every time you work with a new client or on a new project, you have to really dive in a do a deep competitive audit and kind of discovery process with their brand to really learn about the industry, learn about the consumers, learn about what the consumers’ needs are. How they are met, what their competitive set is doing. What their competitive advantage is and so getting in and learning about new businesses, is just absolutely fascinating, its one of the things that I just absolutely love about what I do, this level of discovery and learning.

#00:11:33-3# Neil : And what is it that drives you?

#00:11:36-9# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I think what really drives me most is curiosity, I have always been a really curious person. And when I hear people who are talking about entrepreneurial development or personal development, talk about finding your passion. I think that that is kind of a tough thing to do, you know labelling something your passion is you know, it kind of puts a tremendous amount of weight on it, and I think that’s one of the things a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with. They are trying to figure out what is it that drives them? What is their passion? and what I like to do when I talk to people, you know other entrepreneurs is and businesses is that not to try to figure out and nail down exactly what your passion is, but to really follow your curiosity. Because your curiosity is what’s going to take you to new places and you never know what your journey’s going to be, you may explore and get in and try something, and it may actually lead you on a very different path. I mean my career is a perfect example of that.

#00:12:40-5# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I mean I started off as a painter and then fell in to putting my work on tee-shirts and then fell in to the fashion industry. And the fashion industry took me in to packaging, and packaging took me in to agency work so its been a real interesting kind of journey, and its all brought about by curiosity.

#00:13:02-5# Neil : And how do you relax when you are not working in your business?

#00:13:05-3# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Well I have two big 110 lb Shepherds, one long-haired German Shepherd and a Shilo Shepherd, and so I spend a lot of time walking them in a huge park we have near my home, I am also a musician and I play guitar base and I sing and I write and record music, in logic pro x and I participate with other musicians doing collaborative music projects, and post my work on Sound Cloud and another site called MacGems. And then for real fun and one of my favourite, one of my passions really is scuba diving, I love to go scuba diving, I was fascinated with Jack Custo when I was a little kid. So I love diving, I dove all over the caribbean, Hawaii, one of my favourite dives is an open water shark feeding dive that takes place in Walkers Quay in the Bahamas which is really amazing, so if there are any divers listening, they should definitely look in to that dive.

#00:14:07-0# Neil : Do you have any entrepreneurial role models?

#00:14:09-7# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I do I have lots, you know everything from CEOs at big companies to individuals, I am sure a lot of listeners here are fans of as I am of other internet marketers, Chris Ducker, Pat Flynn, Amy Porterfield, those are some of my favourites. I have just recently started listening to a brand new podcast by a guy named Aran Pearson, his podcast called Branding like a boss which is a really great, great podcast. There is a young designer guy named Roberto Blake who has got a really successful YouTube Channel, and puts out just an insane amount of value and content. So check him out if you are a designer working in that space. You know the biggies like Gary Vaynachuck, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, you know. Those guys I find incredibly inspiring, but its generally the smaller people that I think are have most translatable to what I am currently going for.

#00:15:13-1# Neil : Philip, can we talk about the time before you were an entrepreneur?

#0 #00:15:16-2# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Sure.

#00:15:16-2# Neil : What difficulties did you have to overcome when you started your business?

#00:15:21-0# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Oh boy, well I think coming from my history of working with large corporations and large agencies, the biggest thing that kind of really threw me back was being alone. You know I have been working from my home office, for a couple of years, I started Verhaal with a partner, a business colleague of mine in San Francisco, so we work have worked virtually through skype and conference calls, but you know, being home alone at my studio was really isolating, you know I liked it for a while, but then after a while, I really felt like I was getting out of touch. You know and being part of a group is you take on a lot of energy and a lot of trend and information comes your way when you are in a group and missing that, was a big shift for me. So one of the things I have done recently just in the last six months was I joined a mastermind community online, which has just been an incredible boon for my spirit, feeling plugged in, learning all sorts of new things that other entrepreneurs are going through, its really cut down my learning curve. And I think the other thing, the other difficulty was doing it all yourself, so branding your business, doing your sourcing, business development, email marketing, financials, its again, coming from large companies you have divisional areas that handle all sorts of different specialties, but when you are an entrepreneur you really have to kind of boot strap it and learn a lot of things that you may not necessarily you know, may not be your absolute strong points.

#00:17:10-5# Neil : I guess you probably experienced the reality of when you do that because when you are working in a big company, you have got people that can do this, that and the other for you, and all of a sudden when you are working on your own, you find you have got to do everything, and you don’t realise how time consuming all those little bits and pieces end up being.

#00:17:30-0# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : That’s absolutely true, and I think that time management just becomes one of those all important things that finding a way to schedule your day and prioritise effectively, is a challenge you know, its my favourite new chrome extension is called the one-minute timer and the one, I think its the one-hour timer or something like that, but anyway you can just set this little timer and you can set it for an hour, you can set it for ten minutes, and when it goes off its an alarm, so you can schedule what you are doing, I have a tendency when I am doing something I am interested in or passionate about, I kind of lose track of time so, actually having something beep and go off, and keep me on task is really helpful.

#00:18:20-9# Neil : Ok, so did you have any doubts that delayed you starting your business?

#00:18:27-3# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Yeh I know and I think you know I have kind of got two businesses going right now, I have got Verhaal, which is the ecommerce business and Verhaal Brand Design which is the consulting business. And I have had doubts on both of those, I mean I think on the ecommerce, on Verhaal, I did not know first-hand a lot about ecommerce. I worked in branding and marketing for a long time, so I knew about it from working with clients. But in terms of really getting in there and getting your hands dirty, and learning about different ecommerce platforms, website design, shipping, inventory management, all those sorts of things were very new and not knowing about it was one of the reasons was one of the reasons why I wanted to get in there and do it. I really kind of wanted to learn those things and get my hands dirty. And its just been incredible learning experience, and very fun but it definitely was, its daunting when I started off just because there is so much to learn, and I think you know doing your research and doing a competitor audit of the space, the retail kind of commerce space that you are going in to is really, really important. And on the brand design side, on my Verhaal Brand Design at the consultancy, I think finding what my real niche was you know they say, ‘the riches are in the niches’ and so really kind of defining who my customer target was going to be and what my value add was going to be for them.

#00:20:07-0# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Took a little thinking and time, really deciding that I wanted to take big branding solutions to smaller companies for less money, so they were affordable to them so they were getting real value, and real high – level thinking. That only giant companies have historically been able to afford. That is something that I am really passionate about, and I guess the other biggest thing that you kind of struggle with at first, is you know not having the security of that pay check right? so when you are working for a big company, you just show up and you do your job as best you can, and the pay check gets direct deposited and its lovely. But when you are working on your own, you are getting out there and you are hustling, you are new in business development as well as developing your own product and that’s a big change.

#00:20:59-4# Neil : And what mistakes did you make that slowed your journey?

#00:20:59-4# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Oh that’s, what mistakes didn’t I make? ha ha that’s the question. But really when it comes down to it, what I think is that there are really no mistakes. I really think that you know, getting in there and getting your hands dirty, and actually trying stuff and making mistakes is how you learn, right? You know, no one is an expert at anything right out of the gate, I have been working on ideas starting a podcast and I have been really inspired by you and starting this pod cast, and you know right when you out of the gate, you can’t do everything perfect. You know you just got to start, its like if someone made the analogy of when you played tennis, you can go and watch all the YouTube videos on tennis that you want and read all the tennis books and sit in your back yard and swing the racket and get the feel for it, but until you get on the court and start hitting balls, you can’t start learning about tennis. And so, you have got to start and as soon as you start you start hitting the ball over the fence in a bad way, in tennis and then slowly you get better and better and better. You can’t over think it at the beginning, you have just got to dive in and I think that’s a lot of what entrepreneurship is about.

#00:22:27-4# Neil : What are some of the things that you did before you started your business? that would be helpful tips to some of the listeners who have not yet taken the first step on the entrepreneur way?

#00:22:37-2# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Sure I think the main one, and I think its someone of an unpopular kind of opinion, but I think that and I have heard this from Gary Vaynachuck, as well as others, and I did it myself, its like stay in your job for as long as you can. For all the money and connections that you can, and work on your business on night and on the weekends. You know, start making steady income in your business before you sack your day job. I think that really paying attention to leveraging my connections while I was in the corporate world and in the agency world has really paid a lot of dividends as I have gone on my entrepreneurial way. The other aspect of it is, you really have to think about banking 6-12 months worth of living expenses, before you kind of take off on your own, because you never know how long its going to take to really bring an income. So I would say, no. 1. stay in your job as long as you can. No. 2. Design your brand, and I am coming from a design perspective, so that’s why I am going to kind of talk to you a little bit, but I would say design your brand before you go, meaning a lot of people just go to Fiverr or 99 designs and they have a logo designed or they design one of their own and they throw it up on their website and they start doing social media and YouTube and all this stuff.

#00:24:07-1# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : And before they know it, they realise they have got to kind of design in to a lot of holes that they may have in their branding, and what that can create is a lot of inconsistency and consistency is really king when it comes to consumer recognition. Right, so whenever a consumer or a customer of yours comes to your site or comes to your Facebook page or comes to your twitter feed, you want their initial reaction, their initial view of you to be consistent, so the same picture of you, the same colour scheme that you are using, the same fonts, the same logo. The same photography style, the same pattern or texture, all of those things are really important, and to design them kind of out of the gate and have a little pallet of those things ready to go, before you kind of start putting yourself out there in all these different channels, is really important and my own little pet peep on that, is that I think that cheaper is not better and a lot of entrepreneurs starting off don’t have a lot of money and I totally get that. But when it comes to brand design work you really get what you pay for, and so I am not a big fan of 99 designs or Fiverr. I think that having worked with a lot of graphic designers and structural designers, web designers in my career, you can contact people who are still in college and school and they can give you much better strategically designed work for your purposes for a very small amount of money and they are hungry to do it, so reach out to the design schools in your neighbourhood if you need some stuff like that.

#0 #00:25:44-8# Neil : Good advice. Can we talk about the entrepreneurial journey a little bit now?

#00:25:49-8# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Sure.

#00:25:50-9# Neil : Do you think culture is important from the beginning in a business?

#00:25:55-8# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Yeh I do, in my career I have seen a lot of corporate cultures, I mean I have worked in my agency work I have worked with dozens and dozens of large companies and small companies, and I have seen a lot of corporate cultures from the inside. And corporate cultures and company cultures are very different from each other. I mean the culture of Chevron is different from Safeway is different from PetSmart, is different from General Electric, different from Pete’s coffee and tea on the West Coast. So kind of try to map out your culture, even when its just you and put it in to writing, I think is a really important step and its as important a step I think than as your business plan. And writing a mission statement for your brand, and what is your brand personality? You know is it high energy? is it innovative? is it risk taking? is it in financial services? is it conservative? is it thoughtful? is it rational? kind of attributing adjectives to your company and trying to nail down what you want your company/your business to be like and the kind of personality you want, the people who you eventually either hire on or work with to have, to represent your brand I think is really, really important. You know I have seen a lot of bad corporate cultures, having siloed organisations or divisions that do not talk to each other, you know or really unclear ownership of decision making, all of those things kind of lead to very dangerous and unproductive cultures. Yeh so I think culture is really important, and I think that trying to create it and design it as early as you can in your entrepreneurial journey is really, really important.

#00:27:54-9# Neil : Knowing what you know now, is there anything that if you had known it when you started out would have helped you to shortcut the learning curve?

#00:28:03-6# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Oh definitely and I mentioned this before, I think number one was joining a mastermind group. I think that the entrepreneurial journey is a very lonely journey and the more and quicker you make it, less lonely and better off you are going to be. So I joined a mastermind online community, its a paid community and but it has a lot of very serious energetic and ambitious entrepreneurs on there, many of whom know a lot more than I do. I think its very important not to be the smartest person in the room, because you want to surround yourself with people who have what you want and you can learn by emulating them. So, finding a mastermind group, I think that either is a Facebook group or has an independent website, is really, really important. I would also suggest finding a mentor, so either somebody you worked with a business in the past or entrepreneur that you found in your mastermind group or part of a chamber of commerce or something. And make a connection, ask them if they can mentor you and act as a sounding board for some of your decisions. And make sure that some of them has what you want, and so I think that is super important.

#00:29:17-6# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : One of the things that I did just recently in the past few months was I actually joined a co-working space, I joined a co o space where other entrepreneurs and individual consultants work out of and it has meeting rooms and technology and printers and stuff that you can use but what it does is it gets me out of my home office, and gets me in to an office like space but in physical contact with other entrepreneurs who are kind of like doing things like I am. And I found it to be really inspiring, its great for networking and I think success does not happen in a vacuum, and I think working spaces are one of those things that really, really helps kind of energise an entrepreneur and has energised me. The other thing I would say is network, network, network, network. Join networking events, go to conferences, conferences can be expensive so be choiceful. But its always money well spent, and when I decide to invest in one, it always pays dividends. Another recent thing I have just done is joined our chamber of commerce, so getting involved in your local business front and making kind of connections and friends in your local business community is also really great for business development and again, a different way to where you can find mentors and influences in your business.

#00:30:45-5# Neil : And how much does gut feeling influence your decisions in your business?

#00:30:52-7# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Wellbeing a creative person, a lot of times I am completely driven by my emotions. One of the reasons why I have been successful in the business world is that as a creative designer type person I have a mix of right and left brain and so design can be very, very subjective, but strategic design is not, so being very choiceful and planful about what you want your design to achieve, is really important. So having that level of rational thought and logical energy around what you do is really important and for me as a creative person, having that balance of from the emotional to logic, logical is really important.

#00:31:48-1# Neil : Life is made of constant change, whether we like it or not, in fact a lot of people say the only constant in life is change. Philip, how do you try to keep up with change?

#00 #00:32:01-4# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Well working in the fashion industry for a long time, one of the things that I really learned was how to stay on top of the trend. When you are in fashion, you have to put out a collection every 3 months and so you are only as good as your last collection, in that world. So I kind of cut my teeth flying around the world and shopping retail and fashion, in Asia and Europe, United States and so I have kind of taken that knowledge of the value of trend in to my entrepreneurial business. So I really stay on top of design in business trends, and a broad range of industries, and I do that by going to conferences, I do it by reading voraciously, you know trends, blogs, news sites, reading about innovation. Following influential people on twitter, and really kind of following what they are posting, and I also do a lot of learning on sites like Skillshare you2me, linda.com coresara coresara is amazing, I mean it offers university level education for free, and you can get certificates, its a time commitment, but its really serious learning possibilities online. Which is amazing, its just phenomenal that people offer this stuff for free. So I think the biggest challenge is keeping up with all the information that’s out there and the change. One of the things that I really love, that’s really been helpful for me in the last year is a site called Feedly I am sure some of you are probably familiar with it. And basically you can just set up a news feed of topics and sources and blog feeds and magazines and online news services, around a specific topic that you like, so you can basically architect your own newsfeed. And it really saves a tremendous amount of time, and time being one of the most valuable things of an entrepreneur. It saves a lot of time kind of searching and going on a million blogs and trying to stay up to date. It kind of brings it all together in one source.

#00:34:22-1# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : The other great thing about it is which is really incredible, is that it makes sharing with that content on twitter and linked in really easy, so you do not have to kind of jump back and forth between sites, it has buttons to very easily share that content, whatever you think is going to be of value to your customers and to your contacts.

#00:34:44-2# Neil : And what is your favourite book on entrepreneurialism, business, personal development, leadership or motivation? and can you tell us why you have chosen it?

#00:34:52-0# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Sure, I have a few and I will just talk about a couple. One and I am sure you have heard this a lot is the four hour work week by Tim Ferris, its an amazing, amazing book. If anyone has not read it, they should. That is one of my favourites in terms of really putting a spotlight on prioritising in time and time management, its been very, very important for me. There is another book that I have talked about through my creative career at design agencies and managing creative departments, a book called orbiting the giant hairball, its a funny name, by a guy named Gordon Mackenzie. He had worked at Hallmark Cards for 15 or 20 years as a creative director, and one of the challenges of being a creative and working with corporations is that they are kind of diametrically opposed types of organisms. Corporations are meant to be logical and process driven and creative organisations are much more emotional and subjective and non-linear. And so he does an incredible job of describing how you can maintain your creative energy and spirit but then still be working with and needing to work with a corporation or a company, so its a wonderful thing for any kind of company that works for other businesses, in a creative way. How do you maintain that level of creative energy and spirit and life while you may be working with a corporation or business that does not have that sort of culture? And it was an incredible influential book for me.

#00:36:38-2# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Another one, is a book called The rules of the red rubber ball, by a guy named Kevin Carroll who’s title was creative catalyst at Nike. I had the opportunity to hear him speak early in my career and incredibly inspiring guy, and that book, The rules of the red rubber ball is a perfect book if you are looking for that passion or you are trying to exercise your curiosity, as I spoke about earlier and trying to kind of find what it is that lights your fire. So its a great really fun book to read. One other that I will mention, that I think is really important and has been for me is a book, and its been around forever but its a book called The power of now. Its by an author named Eckhart Tolley and its been translated in to about 15 languages around the world. Really influential book, and its all about being present, so living in the present moment. And that does not necessarily mean that you cannot plan for the future, that the future is not important, but it is very easy as an entrepreneur to get overwhelmed by all the stuff we have to do and what is in the future and then sometimes to get burdened or brought down or dragged down by the history of what we have had in our past. And he does a really incredible job of talking about staying, having your mind stay present in the future because if you are stuck in the future, the wreckage of your future, or if you are stuck in the wreckage of your past, then you can’t make best use of the present moment. And being present is the best way to be as effective as possible in what you do, is to really be have your consciousness in the here and now. Its been a really influential book for me.

#00:38:25-5# Neil : Everyone, when you have a busy life, listening to audio books is a great way to expand your knowledge in the time when you may be doing other things, such as driving or when you are at the gym. We have a special offer for you of a free audio book of your choosing, to choose your free audio book, go to www.freeaudiobookoffer.com. As long as you have not already signed up then you will qualify. Philip, what I would like to do with you now is speculate about a few things about the future. What one thing would you do with your business if you knew that you could not fail?

#00:39:02-9# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I think that I would probably publish a tremendous amount of content in terms of starting a YouTube channel, writing more eBooks, and I think that its a challenging space, number one, there is a lot of competition there. But you know really bringing value to your audience and your customers is all about publishing things that they can use. So I think that my branding work I am putting a tremendous amount of effort in to developing content to share with my customers. And so I think that if I could not fail, I would do even more of that.

#00:39:47-2# Neil : What skill if you were excellent at it would help you the most to double your business?

#00:39:54-6# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I think having an MBA really. And in my career, I have had the luxury of being challenged with larger and larger roles and having incredible mentors in my career. Shout out to Lisa Jacobi, one of my old managers, who was able to give me assignments and responsibilities that kind of stretched my business abilities, meaning teaching me how to read a P & L statement, profits and loss statement. Teaching me how to manage a budget, learning how to manage designers and write smart goals for people and do performance appraisals and all of the kind of business level things, that our usual tool box that are given to designers or creative people, out of school or in their initial jobs. So having stronger classical business acumen, when it comes to finances and business planning, is one of those things that I have had to grow that muscle over my career, but if I had had a little more formal training or had really pushed that getting some training that early in my career, I think it would definitely would have helped because I am still coming up to speed on that.

#0 #00:41:12-0# Neil : In five years from now, if a well-known business publication was publishing an article on your business after talking to your customers and suppliers, what would you like it to say?

#00:41:23-6# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I think what I would love it to say is you know Verhaal Brand Design and Philip VanDusen like made my brand, magnetic in a love mark for my customers. I think the gold standard of either bringing a product to market or helping another brand with their design and branding and their design eco system is creating a consistent message both in terms of visuals, in terms of sound, in terms of photography that creates such a beautiful, memorable and relevant picture of their brand for their customer that the customer remembers it, reveres it and recommends it to others, that creating that level of magnetism and loyalty, brand loyalty, is the gold standard. And I think that if someone was running and article about my group that if saying that we helped to do that for our customers and clients that would be my dream.

#00:42:34-3# Neil : We are now at the part of the show where you share three golden nuggets with us, Philip, what is your favourite quote and how have you applied it?

#00:42:44-6# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : My favourite quote, one of my favourite quotes is by a guy named Paul Pressler who was the CEO of Gap Inc. after Mickey Drexler left and he actually said to me personally, he said to me, ‘Philip, a great career is more like a web than a ladder.’ And I have really taken that to heart, and my career has really kind of been kind of a personification of that quote in the fact that what I have done in my career has not been linear. The things I have done have in the curiosity that I have expressed across what I have done has taken me in a very non-linear kind of way through my career and its been amazingly enjoyable and profitable, and exciting and I think that you can have only so much planning, in where you want to go because the forces of nature in the world and karma are going to throw things in your way, challenges and opportunities that you are not expecting, and so having a level of openness, and willingness to kind of take those jogs on the road, where they present themselves in making the most of them, is really what I have tried to live my life by, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs are constantly being thrown you know, road blocks and opportunities in their businesses and as they develop and work through what they want to do. And I think being open to that not being linear is really helpful.

#00:44:30-1# Neil : Its a great quote. Do you have any favourite online resources that you can share with us?

#00:44:36-9# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Tons yeh. Well just recently I started to use Hubspot which is kind of a CRM tool, online CRM tool which is at a certain level, free. And I have struggled to maintain my contacts, I have over a 1000 contacts in linked in, I have got a ton in my address book, I have got them in googles I mean spreadsheets. All over the place, and so having a way to kind of centralise those contacts and really organise them has been really helpful to me, and its also helpful in terms of building your email list and it interfaces with Mailchimp really well. So you can start to set up email funnels to make your work flow and communicating with your prospective customers and clients and current customers. Much less labour intensive, so that’s definitely I would say ‘whoever is not using Hubspot should check that out.’ Mailchimp of course, Feedly I mentioned, I also started using Sumome, which is a sweep of tools that are plug-ins for websites, so everything from pop up email list builders, to all sorts of different plug-ins that work with square space or Weebly or Wex or whatever platform your website or wordpress that your website happens to be on. So check out Sumome. And one last one I will mention is that a lot of people, this is one thing I have come across doing branding is there is a lot of crappy photography out there, and a lot of people are using stock photography that they find online, and it has no personality, no energy, no differentiation between you and your competitors.

#00:46:23-2# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : So one of the things I recommend is Flicker, the website, has creative comments area, where there are millions and millions of photographs on just about every conceivable subject that photographers around the world have uploaded and allowed other people to use. Then you can choose the licence that you want available, whether its completely free, for commercial use, whether it just needs attribution in terms of just writing down the photographer’s name. So its a way to get really interesting, unique photography that can tell your brand’s message and story, in a way that’s more unique and does not feel cheesy.

#00:47:04-0# Neil : And what is your best advice to other entrepreneurs?

#0 #00:47:11-8# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I think my best advice is really to, you know one of the things I really used to kind of say is like ‘dare to be stupid.’ You know? I think that not trying to be, being open to learning and being open to not being the smartest guy in the room, and to finding people that you can learn things from, and for me that’s been joining a mastermind community, that’s full of a lot of people who are entrepreneurs who are a lot more advanced in working for themselves than I am. You know I have worked for other people for most of my career, you know I think that being open to learning, and just getting started is the best advice, its really about jumping in. Like my tennis analogy, its like you really can’t make progress and learn until you start doing something. Its like my wife is starting viola, and you know, she’s older like I am, and she just decided that one day she wanted to learn viola and when it comes down to it, one day you have to pick up a viola and put a bow across the strings and make a horrendous noise and you can’t learn viola unless you start working through the horrendous squeaks and squalls right? I mean that’s just what happens but she’s only been doing it for a little over a year and she’s making music now, and that’s really what its about, you can make music but you got to get in there and kind of make some squeaks and squalls first.

#00:48:44-2# Neil : Everyone, if you did not manage to get a note of Philip’s favourite resource, or his favourite books, you can find the links on Philip’s show notes page, just go to theentrepreneurway.com and search for Philip or Philip VanDusen in the search box. Philip, is there anything else you would like to add about your business?

#00:49:07-4# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : I think I am good Neil. You have done a great job and I am really enjoying your podcast and your guests are fantastic and I learn a lot from them. So, everyone keep coming back and listening because Neil has got it going on.

#00:49:19-3# Neil : Thank you. Its been an honour having you on the show Philip, you really have given us some great quotes and some great ideas of how to brand your products, and your business and things like that, which is great to hear. So thank you very much for coming on the show.

#00:49:34-7# Philip VanDusen Founder & Owner of Verhaal Brand Design : Thank you Neil.

#00:49:34-7# Neil : You are welcome. Thank you.