Chad Nahrup, owner of HuDawn Facility Solutions, has seen a great deal of success building their brand. His leading construction and facility service company scaled from eight employees to fifty in three years; they just closed their most profitable year in the company's history; and confidently stepped into 2018 with new ventures. Here are his top three brand tips of 2017.
1) Stay true to your brand position in every aspect of the businessAs your business starts to scale with more sales and more people, keeping your brand fully in tact becomes challenging. You have more variables to control and the brand can start to get misinterpreted or misrepresented. We felt this last year, especially in a particular division. That arm of our business was headed in a different direction and our position of building confidence was starting to get lost. Once we started to see the changes taking shape, we had to work hard to turn the ship back to center. We started to empower our key team members that were champions for our brand to rally our team back to our mission. And we had to make hard departure decisions to ensure that we had the right people to carry our values forward.
2) Your brand can and should take new form as you growOur business has gone through a maturing process and in each stage our brand has evolved as well. The only constant is change and if you aren't adapting to the change you will get left behind. We have made changes to our services and our structure to better serve our customers. With these changes our brand needed retooling to ensure we were best representing our advanced services.
3) Your brand is obsolete if your people are not inspired by itWe have made a concentrated effort to keep our people engaged in branding decisions. If your people are involved in the process and aligned to the promise, they will be more invested in supporting it. If you can't get all your managers involved in the process, ensure that you are explaining, providing rationale and weaving it into everything you do, to inspire them.
More about Chad Nahrup
Chad started his career at a Cincinnati real estate and property management firm. After 12 years as the head of the property management division he took the leap into entrepreneurship and started HuDawn Facility Solutions in 2009. In the height of the recession Chad grew his company one satisfied client at a time starting with Mercy Health.
Chad also started an electrical contracting business called Rebco Electric and has repositioned the maintenance arm of the business, HuDawn FS, as a unique stand alone brand that has doubled in size in just a year.