What's Your Brand Valuation? Your Brand Reputation Tells All. As you invest your entrepreneurial sweat, blood, and tears to build your business, you must pay attention to the business fundamentals that make any business successful: develop comprehensive capabilities, deliver on your promises, and grow an organic management team that is trustworthy, reliable, and performance-oriented. Most importantly, your “EBITDA” is the number that makes or breaks your business overtime when it comes to its overall worth.

But EBITDA only tells you how to run your financials and profits to achieve optimal valuation as a solid business. Another pivotal part of your overall worth in the marketplace ties directly to a term called “Brand Equity” or “Brand Reputation” in your specific service area. “Brand Equity” is defined as the worth of your company’s reputation with your customers, suppliers, industry partners and amongst your competitors (likely buyers, teaming partners, or merger candidates).

As the Mergers and Acquisitions fever in the business community is in its prime, if all numbers are equal, who is worth more? The company that is unknown, the company with bad service reputation or the company that paid attention to its name, reputation and profitability? Yet, few business owners have invested the proper time to position themselves for optimal value. For example, the same IT systems integrator can be known as an ‘Architect of IT infrastructure Solutions in Support of the Presidential Management Agenda’ (Architect equals highly skilled, strategic planners, knows risks/rewards) or simply as let the street define its company as the ‘Fix IT Guys’ that warm up seats at a client remote site (We need Mr. Fix It but we will never give them a large multi-million dollar project).

Savvy entrepreneurs know that their brand equity and the art of strategic communications positioning could make the difference in the perceived value their overall enterprise not only to potential buyers, but to federal customers as well.

What can you do to benchmark and build up your brand equity to a higher multiple? Plenty.

1) Assess whether your external public image/persona matches the business development opportunities you pursue. When a small company chases big contracts and looks like a garage operation, it becomes Rodney Dangerfield. It gets no respect. Perception is everything. Every touch -point in your company must engage your audience in the manner that is aligned with your desire brand equity and strategic position.

2) Identify your ‘evolutionary place’ in the ‘systems integration pyramid’ and build proof points to show you have more value than what your current contracts might be worth. A great way to demonstrate your subject matter expertise is to engage in publishing white papers and by-lined articles that talk about future trends in your niche of the market. If you can’t tell the future, you are Mr. Fix It. If you can talk about the future and offer directions, you are the Architect. Which one is worth more?

3) Don’t drink your own ‘cool aid’. It’s easy to assume that because your contract gets renewed, you must be doing a wonderful job. But it is rarely so. Ask an outside marketing consultant to interview your key customers to gain insight into your core strengths and identify the real reasons they like doing business with your organization. Very often, the discord in perceptions between why customers buy and how one company presents itself is detrimental to the company’s brand equity.

4) Maintain Strategic Visibility. Gone are the days where small business can afford remaining ‘under the radar’. In the age of Google, You Tube, FedBizOpps, and daily e-newsletters, if you don’t control the message about your company’s leadership position, your competition will. It’s up to you to create positive ink about your brand in print and online. As long as your ‘proof points’ are solid, media loves success stories and in the process you could make your government customer a welcomed hero.

Want to learn your company's brand equity? Call Gal Borenstein at 703-385-8178x205 or visit our web site at www.BorensteinGroup.com

Labels: Branding, CEO, Marketing Strategy, Valuation

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