303 | The Brand Ambassador Series: CEO of Impact, Bob Ruffolo

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Fast growth companies understand the value of core values, purpose and people that allow for the culture to support the growth.  Hiring right and developing leaders from within becomes critically important. My guest today is Bob Ruffalo, CEO of Impact Branding and Design. Bob shares how his use of Internal Brand Ambassadors impacts more than growth, but the growth of the people too.

Target Audience: Impact Branding and Design is helping to change the landscape to help businesses understand marketing better. Bob works with people who are wanting to have success and they focus on marketing to get there.

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 What Impact Branding and Design Provides

Educational content, online and offline community and events. Workshops offer strategies.

The challenge people are having is building an audience in a very saturated market. Bob says, you must know your audience and they pains they have and create helpful content. This allows your business to stand out in away that brings your audience together as a community.

A Supportive Team

Bob says his team makes him look a lot better than he is. But it wasn’t always this way. He made his fair share of mistakes over the last 2 years but finally figured out the right structure and found the right people to be on his team. Bob knows that businesses are people and when the people are placed in the wrong roles, the business is faulty. Once you get people in the right seats, magic happens

Defining the Businesses’ Purpose and Values

During this time, there were many internal issues. This caused him to start reading a lot of books. He learned and adopted a process in discovering core values. This allowed him to identify the business’s purpose. From there, he started building a leadership team. “That was the start of figuring out who we were, “ Bob says. It was also when they first broke through that ceiling of creating 1 million in annual revenue.   

Building the Team

Bob chose to hire people who fit the company’s core values and culture. Roles and individuals were carefully matched. Consequently, these people evolve as the bring in increasing revenue.

When to Define Values of Your Business

Defining your purpose comes first. You need to have that before even starting the business. Values define themselves once you build the leadership team.

What Did You Have to Let Go of to Be the Leader You are Today?

Bob admits he had to let go of that fact that he had to make all the decisions, be in control and in charge. He realized he was working for everyone and that was backwards. He realized he had to take more of a leadership position.

Don’t Be the Smartest Guy in the Room

No one is good at everything. In business, there are lot of different skills in many different areas. You want to have specific people who are naturally good at running their departments. You want people to take ownership so that they feel empowered because they are relied upon. People want to feel like they contributing and fulfilling their purpose in life. Get out of their way and they will feel fulfilled.

Once you find the good people for your team- that’s when the magic happens. It makes so many other things possible like being available for this podcast interview, for example.

Radical Transparency – A Key Factor to Hypergrowth

Learning from mentors, books and other companies, Bob knows transparency is an important element in running a businesses. It is a process and takes patience. Bob’s employees see and know everything that goes on in the business (with the exception of salaries). They are part of the process of changes and transitions. This also puts the trust into the employees.

Brand Ambassadors

Bob believes in letting others take the reign in the speaking realm. Bob and his team created a 3 year vision plan back in 2015. At that time, Bob was the only one speaking on stage. Employees voiced their desire to also speak. Everyone in the company now contributes to the blogs, speaking and being on podcasts. It’s good for the business. And it’s also good for each employee because it increases their value. Everyone wins.

Practical and Actionable

Document a vision. Refer to it regularly. Make things happen. Employees must be aware of the vision and be actively working on it.

Resources

• Impact Elite on Facebook 
• The Ownership Workshop with Gene 
• Results Roadmap Session with GENE
• Best of Leaders in the Trenches Podcast Episodes
• Grab your checklist of essential things to do before & after your Speaking Gigs!
• Grab your free training video and get more speaking gigs HERE 
• Start the Challenge: “Authority Gap” – Sign up to receive 5 daily videos that will guide you to bridging “the Authority Gap.” During the challenge, you will get a daily exercise showing a counter-intuitive way to go from “invisible” to a recognized authority.
• Be the AUTHORITY in your target market and SHOW UP DIFFERENTLY 
• Share the LOVE and TWEET about this episode.

How is your business going…would you like to talk about it?

I love my audience of listeners. I really do. I would love to help you in some way. I started doing calls with listeners and realized that it was a great way to understand you.

Okay, then I formalized the process to offer a Results Roadmap… it is a private one-on-one call with me about your business. I want to help you see your roadmap with more clarity and confidence. Find out more about the Results Roadmap (it takes you to my personal website). This is not a sales pitch. Let me serve you.

A QUICK FAVOR

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