Anchor Advisors is celebrating our 10th year in business. Yep, we’ve been around longer than iPods, Windows XP and Wikipedia. A lot has changed for our company since 2001 – except, that is, for our logo.
It was time for a change. You knew it and we knew it. Thanks to the help of some very skilled Chicago marketing professionals, we arrived at an image of a ship’s wheel to signify how we help business owners “move” their businesses toward the owner’s desired destination. You may have seen our new logo on our Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages and we’ll be making updates to our Website soon.
Not only were we happy with the new imagery, but the exercise for coming up with a logo brought our team together and our business into focus. Bonus! And along with our shiny new logo came a new tagline. A tagline is the essence of your brand promise. It tells people in a few words what they need to know about your business.
We thought we were clear about what we did here at Anchor Advisors: We work alongside business owners to help them grow their businesses. But we really go deeper than that. We help business owners take control of their futures, and their lives, by taking control of their own businesses. Our message to business owners now is “Own Your Course.” You know you “own your course” when you have:
1. Purpose. Narrow your focus and choose to pursue a course in one direction. This is the Purpose that we talk about when we refer to the four Ps. Understanding your company purpose, and values, and then expressing that purpose in an envisioned future, which is made real through a strategic plan, means that you can clearly articulate your course. When you know your course, you know the direction and speed needed to get there.
When you choose your course, you are free to do the things you enjoy. You aren’t compromising yourself, you aren’t selling out … instead you are clearly expressing the course that you choose. That means that you will attract clients, employees and vendors who align with that too.
2. People. Our clients aren’t solo-entrepreneurs – they are trying to accomplish much more than that. They want to grow their business and make a impact. Being clear about your purpose helps you to choose the right team members and clearly communicating that purpose sets them going in that same direction with less intervention from you. A key part of owning your course is being able to “own” your role as captain of the ship.
3. Process. Now that you have set a directions, and you have enlisted your team, you need detailed plans for executing the vision that you created. You need to develop a step-by-step program for how each of the team members is going to operate, and how they can work together. We usually express this in the form of processes and procedures. Part of owning your course is making conscious choices about what needs to be done, and where the quality checks need to be, in order to deliver excellent work.
4. Performance Measures. There’s no point to setting a course if you aren’t going to check your progress and make course corrections when you find yourself drifting one way or another. When you are measuring your team’s performance, you have the tools to hold yourself and your team accountable for the results.
In a recent INC article, Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, shared that through her research, she found that entrepreneurs don’t pay much attention to macroeconomic trends: “Entrepreneurs believe that to the extent they can control the future, they don’t need to predict it.”
It’s that attitude that we are trying to capture with our new tagline. We want the business owners we work with to drive their own business – not be driven by the attitudes and whims of the marketplace, competitors, employees and clients. At Anchor Advisors, we help our clients to create a plan, marshal the resources, and make the decisions they need to make to execute that plan.
Where do you want your business go? We’d love to help get you there. Please Contact Us and let’s get going.
