6 Tips for How to Build Your Startup's Brand From Scratch

Good branding is at the heart of any good business, but most of the branding advice you’ll find online or in person is about making sure that your brand remains consistent in your marketing efforts, or gets improved, if it's already established. What happens if your business has never developed a brand, or if you’re just starting out, trying to build a business from scratch?

The latter effort isn’t going to be easy, but it certainly is possible -- even for a non-professional. Eventually, you’ll have to enlist the help of an experienced professional (either an in-house creative director or external marketing agency). But when it comes to establishing the core features and qualities of your brand, all you need is a little time, a little research and an in-depth understanding of how your company operates. Here are six considerations.

5 Things Not to Do Running a Small Business

I've been a creative entrepreneur since 2005. My first design company was a partnership with my significant other. It was largely a freestyle experiment in running a business, conducted live over the course of five years. As a business, it was marginally successful. As a learning experience, it was my equivalent of a masters of business administration.

So, by the time I had started my second and current company, I had a pretty good blueprint of don't's for running a small business. I had been fortunate enough to make the mistakes that have yielded five valuable lessons learned -- lessons that have truly paid off the second time around.

The 4 Stages of Enterprise Maturity: From Startup to Self-Sustaining

What do I do next?”

That’s the question I get asked repeatedly by students and entrepreneurs. They may have an idea for a startup or have already started a fledgling enterprise, but the quandary is the same: how do I take my business to the next level?

These advice seekers have instinctively realized that their enterprises demand very different things of them at different times. But they don’t know what those things are. What an entrepreneur was doing well in one phase to grow the enterprise may be the wrong thing to do just a few weeks later once that phase ends.