--:-- Ryan Hanley: In today's episode, I'm going to introduce you to Jeremy Miller, an author, speaker, consultant, and the founder of Sticky Branding. Jeremy has a new book out. We're going to talk all about that. But ultimately, I love the way Jeremy approaches branding and in particular naming. We go through a thought exercise on how to name a business or when to rename a business. It's incredibly valuable stuff. You're going to love this episode. Let's go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So basically the long story short is I was the CMO of an insurance technology company. I had been in that space for about six years. Previous to that, I had been in the marketing space doing a lot of stuff, content marketing, all that kind of stuff. And then it became kind of on the brand side building an insurance brand. And then about seven months ago, I got offered the opportunity to become a partner and actually have the position of CEO in a fitness concept, Metabolic. That's what I'm doing now.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: That's awesome. So you're taking all the marketing you teach other people and applying it to yourself.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I actually have to put my money where my mouth is and see if all that bullshit that I said for all those years actually works or not. We'll see. It's Train Metabolic, a branded version or a more focused version of what's happening in the CrossFit community. It's its own boutique fitness concept. Metabolic training is a style of training. It's not incredibly widespread. It gets used kind of ubiquitously with a lot of other training philosophies that aren't similar, but in a nutshell, it's strength training at a pace. It's doing load-based exercises, but doing them in rapid succession. You're able to get all the same impacts on your body as running on a treadmill or something like that, with the advantage of also building lean muscle at the same time. So it's sustainable and fun and fits in a busy work schedule. And it's also hard. I had been working as a client at this business for about five years. So when I had the opportunity to come in and help them grow nationally, it was a no brainer for me.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: How is your methodology different from say a CrossFit water class?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: From a business standpoint, they license their agreements. So I can see from a biz perspective. I think what you're doing is amazing. I have a client who's a CrossFit gym owner. They probably have the largest CrossFit gym in the Toronto area, but they're fucked. Every time they turn around, a trainer leaves and starts their own gym. You can't have a non-compete in there. The barriers to scale are insurmountable. His business model is terrible because of his relationship to Glassman and those guys.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: So what we found is that in the first year of a franchise business in a fitness concept, there are so many landmines. It becomes partially a barrier to entry for new people because they've watched so many issues over the last seven years. The other part of it is brand quality and quality of product are so incredibly important. The way our business is set up, Orange Theory, F45, Red Effect, insert new fitness concept here, all of them are drinking the technology Kool-Aid and going more and more towards a fitness concept that does not involve real human trainers, or the trainers are marginalized. I'm going to stand in front of a screen, that screen is going to tell me to do bicep curls, that's what I'm going to do, then I move to the next screen. We are the exact opposite. We have almost no technology in our business besides the sound system and a timing system. It is all about the human trainer. One of our core philosophies is turning personal training from a job into a career. We salary our people, we pay them very well. As we expand our business, our business model is we're going to start new locations as corporate locations, run them for one to three years, and then somewhere in that three to five year range, we're going to look to sell that operating, profitable, existing business to the personal trainer, to the studio manager of that business. It essentially gives a personal trainer the ability to start as an entry-level person, work their way up to assistant manager, become a studio manager, and then ultimately give them a path to owning that particular location, if that's what they want out of their life. A studio manager in a full gym at Metabolic can make six figures. Losing trainers is a big deal, but we haven't lost a studio manager in three years because they make it a career. They're not getting jerked around. They have health benefits. They have a 401k. It's a real career for them. I think that changes the whole model of the business.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love it. I love what you're doing, how you framed it. A good friend of mine, she ran a daycare franchise with a very similar concept. They would basically run it as a corporate shop until they got a manager up to a certain level, and then they would empower them to become franchise owners. They grew that business up to about 80 million. Where she made a boat ton of money though was every time they could buy a building or buy a property, they ran that on top of it. They had two companies. They had the Opco, which was running the daycares, and that was just all cash business. Then they had the property building. They sold out to an Australian firm and now she's living beach life.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: Well, that's the dream, right? I'm Skyping you from my yacht in the future. That's the dream, but we're a few years away from that. That's the method. If you can get into the real estate side or even the financing side, there's a lot there. So we'll see.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I also like the fact that the product actually works. That's always fun. Selling insurance is cool, except everyone hates you at the same time.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: No one wants to pay for something that hopefully never happens.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You can't take Insta bangers of insurance policies. That doesn't really work too well. The marketing of the product is definitely tough. But we didn't come here to talk about Metabolic though. I'm just really curious and I'm happy for you. I've been following you for years, going back to before Sticky Branding, my book came out the first one. Watching the journey, because you were pioneering a lot, or at least pioneering in terms of vocalizing what you were doing in social. I thought that was fascinating, how you were taking that to a B2B place. It was always fun watching. I think I go back to my blog back in the days, there's got to be like Ryan Hanley quotes from.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: Oh, geez. It's funny. I was actually on the other side. I was in your seat about an hour ago. I was being interviewed for Eric Fisher's podcast. He works for Social Media Examiner. He was asking me about these different stages. This is actually my third podcast I've done today. It's been interesting, man, because I keep having to reinvent myself. I was a marketing and sales guy. Then I became the CMO of that insurance brand. I had to kind of take it to the streets, B2B, put it all into practice in that world and re-engage. Now I'm out of the insurance world completely, focusing more on topics around leadership and peak performance and marketing as well and how all that fits in. It's an interesting life, how it works out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's the entrepreneurial journey, isn't it? That's the game. All right, so let's get into what you have going on. I'll do a whole intro for you so we don't have to do all that. I want to get into this conversation with you because I am horrible at naming things. Horrible. When I say horrible, I mean maybe I'm not as bad as I think, but in my brain, I am terrible. The name of this show is The Ryan Hanley Show. I had a vlog that was some variation of that. Whenever I come up against naming something, I am awful at it. I got into your book and I said to myself, I love what you're talking about. But I guess my first question is, are there bad names of things? Can you have a bad name? How do you make sure, how do you get past that initial fear of whatever I call this thing, it's going to be terrible? I hate naming things.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: We all do though. It's hard, shitty work. Every time you think you've found a good name, you find out someone else has taken it. That's the reality we're facing. Not only do we have to have good ideas, we have to find available names. You've got a bunch of questions packed into one. The basic thing I'd first say is, I don't think there actually is such a thing as a bad name. I think you can have a bad strategy. If you're running a senior's living center and you're going to call it Purple Taco, I'm probably going to tell you that's not the right name for your brand. But if you look at what you do today with Train Metabolic, that's a really interesting descriptive name of the gym, the mindset, the whole kind of training you're going to be doing. It gets you into that moment of "that's interesting, tell me more." What we're first and foremost looking for is a name that fits the strategy. What is your strategy? That would be the starting point of everything. What are you naming? What does it have to do? How does it have to function? Who's going to use it? How does it require to stand out in the marketplace? Once you know what you're trying to do, that's where needing a process kicks in. I think I've been, like you, I have approached naming without process, without a roadmap, and can burn hundreds of hours just trying to come up with an idea and not find one that I like. The key to good naming is good process.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Does the name have to be a thing? Does it have to even exist? The example everyone throws up is Google. They just made up a word. Sounds good. Google's biggest little competitor or littlest big competitor is DuckDuckGo, which seemingly is an odd name for a search engine. Feels very 1999, 2000-y internet boom time name for something. How do you compare those? How do you know where to start? This show doesn't have a specific topic outside of I want to talk to interesting people doing interesting things, learn more about them and share it with an audience. Using my name seemed to fit. Plus I have a little bit of an ego and seeing my name in lights feels good. But if I were trying to put a name on this show, I think of Moz. I think of these things that feel like someone just threw items up against the wall, listened for sounds, and they're like, "That sounds like a good name. We'll see if we can figure out how to put that into words." Wistia is another one. It's a made up word that they just liked. How do you go about that strategy? Where do you actually start into this process versus should I use my name? Should I just use a descriptor? Should I just go to GoDaddy.com and start looking for URLs that work?
--:-- Jeremy Miller: Let me take a step back. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've been doing this now for over 15 years. Not only naming my own businesses and products and services, I've helped lots of companies go through this. What I have found through this journey is that having that strategy is really important, but then it comes down to that process. There's a few things we can unpack in what you're talking about there, Ryan. For me, not having process was really frustrating, so I actually wrote a book on it called Brand New Name. It's coming out this October. It's a graphic design branding book that shows you how to name or rename anything. You don't need an agency. You don't need a ton of time. It's a process that takes two to four weeks to do. Let's unpack this a little. Let's first and foremost talk about what you're asking in terms of types of names, because I think that's really important. In the book, I talk about three categories of names. You can have a descriptive name. It says what the product or service is. Think of Big Ass Fans. Those giant fans you see in a gym or a warehouse. It says what it is, but it's an evocative name. Through the word "ass," their name and logo is a picture of a donkey backwards. It's a fun, interesting, descriptive name. TripAdvisor is another example. The name gives you a sense of what you're buying. You can have a suggestive name. Twitter, Slack. Those are giving you an indication of what the brand is like. The third is an abstract word. This is where you have the Google, the Hulu, the invented words like Kodak and Verizon. All three types of categories work. I think you can decide what fits. One of the challenges I often get people to do at the start of a naming project is to go and create a list of all your competitors, both direct and indirect, and slot them in. Who is using descriptive names? Who is using suggestive names? Who is using abstract or invented names? Get a lay of the land. What you're really looking for is not "should we have a descriptive name or an abstract name?" You're actually asking the question, "What's it going to take to stand out?" You might find that if everyone in your industry is using an acronym or an invented word, maybe actually being really blunt and saying what you do is a better strategy. Understanding what types of names are is a very valuable way to give you a little bit of centering so that you can move forward as you start the creative process.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things I've always gotten hung up on is, and this was in big, bold letters in your book, it said, "Successful businesses create successful brands." When I'm thinking about names, I tend to think, does the name really matter? If my business, if all these companies have these ridiculous words that have just become cool because the business is really cool, does the name actually matter? Should I just come up with the first thing that feels good that has a URL and then go focus on my business? Or should I take this time? Obviously I'm probably setting you up with the answer here, but how much time should I take in coming up with a name? For a guy like me who's incredibly impatient, two to four weeks to come up with a name feels like an eternity.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: Okay. How long would you spend, or actually how long did you spend creating the Train Metabolic website?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The website itself probably took a month to build out.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: Okay. And any planning and pre- it was including planning and content creation or is the whole cycle?
--:-- [Sound of someone entering the room]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hold on one sec, man. Someone just walked in the room. It just walks right in. What happens? It's an office. Gotta love co-working.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right. So it took us about a month to build out the Train Metabolic website.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: Perfect. How long do you think a website lasts though? What do you think the shelf life of this website is?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Probably these days, no longer than two years.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: I think that's the point. We look at marketing assets like websites, brochures, any kind of SEO campaign, and they can take months to create. Sometimes they're fast, like a month for a website build is incredibly fast. Oftentimes it takes about 90 days to take those types of projects, but they have a shelf life of two to three years. Your name lasts pretty much forever. It's the longest living artifact of any business. The fact that we just kind of half-ass it and throw it away is really kind of shocking considering it's going to outlive the logo. It's going to outlive the website. It's probably going to outlive the fundamental business model. Think of Colgate. It's probably 120, 130 years old now. Coca-Cola and Ford are the same type of thing. This is probably one of the most important business decisions you'll have just for the simple longevity of the name. You're absolutely right though. A great name is not going to make your business great. If you have terrible operations, terrible people, you're a bad leader, whatever it is, your business is going to suck. The name is actually going to absorb all that suckiness. Your name is a vessel. It contains all the experiences, all the positive and negative affirmations that go around it. What we have to look at is the name is like a label in your mind. It's like a label on a file folder in your customer's mind. It's how someone categorized you. It contains all those experiences. If you get that name right, that label becomes really easy to find and share and refer. But if the contents of your package suck, then the name's not going to matter.
--:-- [Sound of equipment moving]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: They're moving equipment today. It's incredible. I'm trying not to be frustrated by the fact that I booked a room in a co-working space and that dude just plowed right in the door, walked into the utility closet, was banging around in there. I try to be an easygoing person, but sometimes I just don't know.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: Don't worry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I apologize for that.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: No, don't worry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay. So I was reading the part about Colgate in Brand New Name, your book, which I highly recommend everyone pick up. You can pre-order it now, correct?
--:-- Jeremy Miller: You can pre-order it now as a recording. October 8th is the launch date.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We'll have the release of this package around a launch date so people can get the book. One of the reasons when you first reached out to me that I was so interested is because I feel like this is something that I really struggle with, naming in general. I was reading the copy of the book that you sent me and the Colgate thing was really interesting. Colgate was actually the name of the initial founder's family. Today I buy Colgate toothpaste and I don't even think twice about it. To me it's just Colgate. It could be anything. The family name has been detached for most people from the products themselves. You don't think of it as William Colgate toothpaste. This is just Colgate toothpaste. I either buy it or I don't buy it. Coming from my previous life in the insurance industry, so many of those businesses are family names. My wife's family's agency is the Murray Group. It used to be the Guilderland Agency. There's Rose and Kiernan. So much of that industry is family names. What I heard you say before was to look at the ecosystem of businesses and their naming segments. It may make sense to go a different direction. Thinking tactically, it may make sense for an insurance business that might be starting today to, instead of just dropping their last name into the business as the naming, go with something completely made up, like Lemonade is an insurance brand that has absolutely nothing to do with insurance, or come up with something that's very straightforward, like Cheap Auto Insurance, which is actually already taken.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: I wholeheartedly agree with this actually. I'm starting work with an insurance agency right now. A family had built up a second generation, very successful group benefits practice, got it up to 80 employees and sold it to a much larger firm. The eldest son who was running the business is two years in and realized working for the man's not his thing. He's going to be moving out to start his own practice as his non-compete ends in January. The question he asked was, "Do I reuse my name because that name carries weight in the market that he was in? Or do we come up with something different?" To your point, when everyone in the industry names under a certain convention, good marketing would indicate to stand out, you should do something a little bit differently. What we are doing is a naming sprint to generate lots of potential names. In that, we really have two objectives. One is the family name is focused on one individual. You could have a lot of people working under a family name, but if you're in a startup, it's about you. What is a name that will be identifiable and distinguishing in the market? What is a name that staff can want to work for and identify with and make it their own? What can customers use as a way to distinguish? What's the difference between Agency A, Agency B, Agency C? When your customers can't differentiate one option from the next, they're just going to go for one of two ways of buying. They're going to go with what they know and choose the person they like, or they're going to go with what's cheapest. That's the way insurance brokers have been selling for a hundred years, based on relationships and price. That's not a very sustainable, scalable practice. If you've got an opportunity to actually create value and stand out, a hundred percent, take it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When should an agency think about—I'm going to use insurance agencies as an example just because I think the naming is so ubiquitous. The singular naming culture of using some founder or family name is very widespread. In an ecosystem where many of your competitors, and probably even the agency that you're currently with, are staring at all these similar names. The Hanley Agency, the Johnson Agency, the Jones Agency, Stevenson and Robinson. It's over and over and over again.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: What's happening in that industry in particular is you're starting to see a rollover from the baby boomers to the next generation, whether it be Gen X or Gen Y. These individuals are starting to come up. If I'm in that position, I'm the next in line. I see this as my future. The name of my agency is Robinson and Jones. I'm trying to stand out and differentiate my agency. I want to be forward leaning. What does that conversation look like? How do you start to consider the process of doing a renaming of that business? What should you even be thinking about in order to consider it? Because it's not going to be for everybody. In some cases, renaming, even if you see opportunity, I'm assuming it still might not be a good option. How do you start to work through that exercise as to whether or not renaming your business might be something that's worthwhile?
--:-- Jeremy Miller: It's a fascinating question, especially in the context you've laid it out. One of the things I find really interesting in my business is 60% of Sticky Branding clients are actually family enterprises. Part of that's because I come from a family business background. My first naming project was actually changing my family business name from Miller and Associates to Leap Job. We were in the IT staffing industry. I reinvented the business and rebranded it. That all got triggered with my dad saying, "You know what, there's too many Millers on the door. It's time for us to stand out." That was our catalyst. What I have seen and what I've worked on in a lot of Sticky Branding's naming projects have been related to succession. For example, if you go to Seattle, there's a restaurant group there called Consolidated Restaurants Inc., or used to be called Consolidated Restaurants. They own the Metropolitan Grill, Elliott's on the Water, and several other very well-recognized restaurants there. As they transitioned to their third generation, Jim wanted to come up with a name that was more identifiable for the team. They changed the company name from CRI, Consolidated Restaurants, to E3. That was actually a hat tip to their executive chef back in the 1980s, Earl Owens. He created a seasoning spice that's used across all their restaurants. It's a word. It's a symbol that everyone in the entire company knows. It became a symbol of excellence that they could own as their brand. For businesses going through succession, my suggestion to the next gen is to ask the question, "What do you want this business to look like five years from now?" You have the value that your parents created or your grandparents created. You have that legacy. But changing your name is about putting a stake in the ground of what you want to become. You still can hold on to all those relationships and history that you've created. What you're doing by changing your name is establishing yourself in the next generation of leadership and growth. The market's moving so fast. If you assume what worked well for your dad or your grandfather or your great-grandfather is going to continue to work in 2020 and beyond, that business is probably not being set up for success. Next-gen branding, this is your opportunity to think big. Build something. You've been given or you've acquired this gift. Make it your own.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm just going to keep peppering you with contextual questions because I find this to be so interesting. One of the things I've also seen, particularly in family businesses, is I am ascending to a leadership spot within that organization, whether it's the leadership spot or just on the team. I see the opportunity that you just presented, a chance to reposition our business in a way that is future-facing and is more indicative of who we want to become. I get incredible landslide pushback on the idea of changing the brand that over the last 35, 40 years has essentially built this business, if not longer. What I've seen some of these individuals do is create secondary brands. You'll have the standard Miller and Associates, and then you'll have this other brand that they spin up as a separate company. This to me seems like a long fail to sidestep short pain. If this is a situation that is brought to you, how do you start to address it? What I heard as the pushback being like, "This is who we are. Why would you want to change that?" How do you start to talk through that with the individual who's looking to make the change? What advice could you give them in approaching the previous generation with a potential change? How does that conversation start to work out?
--:-- Jeremy Miller: From a consulting methodology and the way I'd work with a family, it would really be in a two-step process. The first thing is to look at the strategy. Are you building this business for succession or are you building it for sale? They're two very different tracks. If you're building this thing for succession, then you're looking at a horizon of 10, 15, 20 years. If I'm coming in as the leader and I'm, say, 35 years old, I'm not going to retire anytime soon. I want to have some longevity on this. If we're building this thing for the long term, then the question is, what does this business need to do? What does our brand need to do? What are those strategic questions of where we're going to go?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now, if we come to the decision that, you know what, we actually do need a new name. We need to stand out in a better way. And then there's that question of, should we keep our existing business and start another business? You're kind of creating, in branding terms, a house of brands. It's simple math. At that point, you can pull out a marketing budget and just start doubling everything. I need two websites. I need to have two content marketing strategies. I need two social media strategies. Oh, by the way, we're going to probably have to hire another body because we can't create that much content. And we need a different, we're going to have to double our PPC budget. You start putting these line items up and you go, oh, wait, we just took, let's say, conservatively, a hundred thousand dollar marketing budget. We just doubled it. Well, then pops who's taking a dividend out of the business, probably still going, you know what? I really don't care all that much about this name. I'd rather take the paycheck and go to Florida.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Are there ways to hat tip the old name into something new? Is that something that you should even consider? I'm searching for ways or guidance, and you've given us a lot to think about so far, to maneuver what is the inevitable pushback that you're going to get. In the case of my wife's family business, for 37 years it was called the Guilderland Agency. Guilderland is a small town in upstate New York, which makes it even smaller in terms of everyone else in the world. It's also a tough word to say. There are like four or five different sounds you have to make just to get that word out of your mouth. What was interesting was our receptionist had a really hard time with it. She would say Guilderland and really pronounce odd parts of the word. It just got to the point where this can't be our future. We went with the family name because my wife works with her twin sister, her father, and at the time, her brother as well. So there were four of them there and they called it the Murray Group. We kept the colors the same. Our hat tip to the previous brand was the colors. The colors stayed red and gray and white. We just changed the fonts and the feel. Is that a good move to keep some of that? Or when you're trying to reposition, should you make a full break? There's obviously no absolutes in this. I'm just trying to help people understand as they think through this process. Is it better to think, let's stop where we were. If we were red and gray and white, let's move forward as blue and black and green?
--:-- Jeremy Miller: The short answer is, I don't know. I don't think there is a definitive way on that. What I would suggest is a different metaphor. If you think of Guilderland, it was a vessel. It contained all the experiences, all the customer relationships, all the staff history, and all that lore sits in this vessel that was Guilderland. And then you have the Murray Group. What you essentially have to think of is how do we pour the contents of one brand into the other so people know what that is? You use colors and some signals to indicate the path from vessel A to vessel B. But a communication strategy is fundamentally all you need. The biggest mistake that I see brands make when they're changing their name is they short-cycle themselves or they short-circuit themselves and they don't give it enough time. Whatever you think you need in terms of a communication strategy to pour the contents from one brand to the other, double it. If you're under 18 months, it should probably be at least 18 months. Give yourself time, especially if you've got a multi-generational business. You have a lot of history, a lot of touch points, a lot of people. The larger your brand, the more you're going to have to market yourself. But that's what we're doing. People will be very generous in a name change, provided they're given a clear path that you've gone from point A to point B and why you've done it. If you give them that history, that story, those hooks, that's sufficient. It can be as simple as in their invoices for the next two years, you include a one-pager that just says that story and says, "Guilderland is now the Murray Group, and this is why we changed it. If you have any questions, talk to so and so."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's really interesting is we actually found throughout that name change that it was an excellent opportunity to retell a story about the business that we hadn't told in a long time. Nothing was actually changing from an ownership structure. It was just a modernizing of our business and getting us out of what was seemingly a small town field to, hey, we're more regional. All the stories we were able to tell around this change and what it meant, we got to say things and share ideas that hadn't been shared in a long time about the business. Even though there were some hiccups, and I think some people still don't understand six years later that the name is different, which is probably always the case. Did you see a lift in sales after you launched the new brand?
--:-- Jeremy Miller: I wouldn't say right away, but we certainly did trail. I think the insurance sales cycle takes a little bit, but today the velocity is way more and it has to do with the regionalization of our area. It feels like the Murray Group could be anywhere. The Guilderland Agency was in Guilderland. That gave us the ability to reach into other townships and other cities within the Eastern New York area that previously were kind of cut off to us because people felt like we were too far away. That has definitely been a boost for them. Now here we are, I guess it's been eight years now since we made that change. The strategy is really, really sound. The reason to change the name and the opportunities to get into new markets makes absolute sense.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: Leading on the question on sales lift, what a lot of companies experience when they go through a name change or any kind of rebranding is they experience a lift. The reason for that is they just increase the volume of their marketing astronomically just to get the new name out, just to announce the new brand. They got a new website, whatever it is. They just start promoting that. They're doing more marketing than they ever did before. Oftentimes, we will see a one or two year sales lift just on a campaign launch to change a name. If you've got an opportunity to blow your own horn and you take it, giddy up, then you're going to pay for this thing real fast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things, at Metabolic, we recently, probably two and a half years ago now, did a name change. I was not part of the company at the time. The original name of the gym was Metabolic Meltdown. The whole idea was it was much more cardio-focused at the time and was more geared... The issue was the word "Meltdown" made the workout program feel like it was just about weight loss. We didn't want it to just be about weight loss because that could be one of your goals, but in many cases, especially for me, I'm not particularly interested in losing more weight. I don't show up to lose weight. I show up to just maintain strength and be fit. We didn't want it to feel that way. So we just dropped the word "Meltdown" to just "Metabolic."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's been interesting is that has created two dynamics. I'm kind of using this podcast as free consulting now. There have been two dynamics that have been very interesting to me. Now that I've had a chance to dig into the company and I've been here for eight months now, looking back at some of these things. People were very enamored by the name, the two M's, the rhythm of Metabolic Meltdown. It had a nice rhythm to it. It was very descriptive. It was very unique. People called it "the Meltdown." That was like a nomenclature that surrounded it. Especially at that time when the business was growing so rapidly, that was the name of the business in its initial growth curve. We were going from 150 members to somewhere up around 1500 members in less than two years. Those people, Metabolic Meltdown, it was the name. Then wanting to get away from the idea that the workout program was just for weight loss, we dropped the Meltdown and just left Metabolic.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The interesting part about that is, from a pure out-of-region branding perspective, the term "Metabolic" has pros in that it is both the training philosophy that we are built upon and the name of our business. There are some advantages to that. I think advantages that will play well in our favor down the line. But in the short term, we are a mishmash of being able to get found online because people are not searching for our business. They're searching for metabolic training and metabolic syndrome and some of these other things. We just don't stand out yet because our brand isn't strong enough. Metabolic Meltdown is very clearly a business. Metabolic is not necessarily a business just at face value. The other part is the term "Metabolic," though, I think long term, this was a really good play. Short term, I'd say 50% or more of our members called us "the Meltdown." Getting them to lose that and drop that has been a challenge over time. I think we're probably finally there, but that took easily the last two and a half years to get out of that. It's been really interesting to watch how what you'd think was a fairly simple name change, just dropping the second half of the word, has had some parts where we've really struggled through it and some other parts where it's helped us.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: What "Metabolic" does is it sets you up with an accessible name. One of the things that CrossFit is really suffering from right now, and they're going through Herculean efforts to fix this, is CrossFit's view as an extreme sport. They're trying to get into that place right now where the running joke is that anyone in CrossFit has "pukey the clown" as a metaphor, and everyone's going to get injured. My wife, for example, she works out probably two to three hours a day, seven days a week. She's almost on the extreme end of things, but she's addicted to it. It's how she deals with her stress. If I were to ever ask her, "Hey, do you want to come to CrossFit with me?" She'd be like, "No, that's extreme." It's kind of funny because that's what she does is probably on the extreme end of things. But if you were to ask her, "Hey, do you want to go train and do a metabolic workout?" She'd be like, "Yeah, that sounds cool. That sounds fun." If you were to say to her, "It's going to be a class where you're going to be doing endurance-based strength training," she'd be going, "That's interesting. Tell me more."
--:-- Jeremy Miller: What I think is really fascinating in the Metabolic brand, especially when you put the word "Train Metabolic" to it and make that part of the name, is that you're giving me an indication of what that life is like and what that program is like. When I move away from "Meltdown," now I'm no longer in that extreme workout profile. The people that are just so passionate about working out that it's like an addiction, they might be the ones that are caught up on "Meltdown." But if you want to go from 1,500 to 3,000 to 10,000 and just keep tripling in size, then this brand has to be accessible, not to the gym rats and the people that are really looking to kill themselves, but to the broader cross-section of people that want a great workout, want some structure, but don't want to get injured and probably don't ever want to use this as a competitive sport.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That has been the second half of this path. In the last year, we've taken that 1,500 person gym, and we now are over 3,000 people at our six locations. I think a lot of that has to do with what you just said. I think the Meltdown was scaring people away. It definitely attracted that small section of the market. It's so funny, you dialed in on that. You dialed in on the fact that that "Meltdown" piece brought out the people who were looking to get punched in the face. The people that enjoy that, that's what it was bringing them out. That was a great small, if this was the innovation curve, it got those innovators. But we couldn't cross the chasm for anyone who read the book. We couldn't get across that until we dropped the Meltdown and gave it that broader feel. The workout has adopted and adapted to the segment of the population that now is willing to give Metabolic a try because it doesn't feel like, even though it's an incredibly hard workout, it doesn't feel like that extreme thing, which is what we wanted to get away from. We didn't want this to be CrossFit 2.0. Not to do anything wrong with CrossFit, just that's not what we want it to be. That has helped us. Today, with the rebrand and re-logoing with just Metabolic, it feels like it has that staying power. We'll see.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: I think that's really what great brand building is all about. You've got a name, but what you're doing is you're breathing life into it. At 3,000 plus members, you are reaching fans and building relationships and having this referral network. The challenge that I would be posing to your group, and this comes into some of the core work that I do at Sticky Branding, is how do you get to that next level, which in your case would be 10,000 members? We look at it scaling through a couple different lenses. One is through revenue plateaus. Typically a company has to reinvent itself at 1 million, 5 million, 10 million, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500. You're basically transforming not only your operations but your leadership and your whole business model to get to those plateaus. In a membership-based organization like Metabolic, we look at it through the lens of the law of three and ten. Every time you triple in size, you're building for the next level. It's 1,000, 3,000, 10,000, 30,000. You look at those plateaus in that threshold. The question I would pose to you and your team is, what do you need to do to bring the gym and the franchise network up to 10,000? And when you're there, it's at 30,000. What you've been doing with your name though is making it accessible to hit those flips. Not treating a name as sacred, especially in a startup or in a high growth business, is really important. We hold ourselves up and we look at Apple and Nike and these really well-established brands, but we don't look back to the 70s and 80s of when they were being pioneered and built and just how much changed and how rapidly they changed to find success. Your name is not sacred in the early days. Your name is a living, breathing brand asset that you've got to breathe life into. If it starts to feel rigid, you change it so they can continue to grow with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What I think is funny about Apple in particular is that there was a time when Macintosh, one of the versions of their computer, they pushed the Macintosh name just as hard out into the marketplace as they did Apple, the brand. Today, they would never do that. I completely agree that I don't know that I always believed it because I probably didn't always understand naming, but I certainly have found that it's almost like half art, half science. You obviously put a lot of thought into your name and your book outlines a lot of these processes. Anyone who is considering any of these things around names that we've talked about, whether it's a rename or you're starting your own business, this is worth picking up. I'll have links to it. Or just go to stickybranding.com and you'll be able to find it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The idea around Metabolic in particular that I've seen is interesting is how people chop it up, "Meta this." They're adding the M to all different kinds of words. You want to have the science of feeling like you've done the research and the work to feel like you've put yourself in position, but then there is also this organic nature to how a name evolves and how people use it and how it becomes a signal for who they are. You kind of have to let some of that run and play out. You almost want to be careful not to over-engineer it. If I have an entire portion of my client base that feels a certain way about the brand, and if I over-engineer it, I could take that away from them. Am I describing what I'm saying to understand what I'm saying?
--:-- Jeremy Miller: I think what you're describing is really wise and hard. I think we try to, especially in a young business or in a small business, we try to defend our names and we try to protect our brand and we're almost overzealous with it. But if you've got your fans, your clients and members are actually creating nicknames or variants of your name and it becomes theirs, then my challenge for you would be to empower them to make it their own. The company name could still be Metabolic, but if the membership community starts to give it an endearing name that means something to them, that's something worth paying attention to. That's actually how Frisbee got its name. Just to give you a little tangent. Frisbee, those little plastic discs, actually started out life as the Pluto Platter. The guys that created the Hula Hoop actually licensed the product from the inventor, Fred Morrison. Wham-O, which created Slip 'N Slide and Hula Hoop and Silly String and all these great brands, they licensed the Pluto Platter. When Nair, one of the founders of Wham-O, went out to see kids playing with this, he went out to Connecticut near the Yale campus. He noticed that the people playing with the toy were calling it a "Frisbee." He asked them why. It turns out there was a pie company known as the Frisbee Pie Company, and it was actually named after the family Frisbee. Instead of Frisbee with two E's at the end, it was IE. Rich Nair from Wham-O noticed what these kids were calling the discs and he changed the name and he changed the spelling. He went and he paid attention to what the market was calling it and then adopted that. If you can create that relationship where your members feel like they own Metabolic and they give it an endearing name, the sign on the door could still say Metabolic, but the insiders all give it a different name. That's powerful branding. And that takes balls on the entrepreneur side of things to allow that kind of thing to take place.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's really interesting. Being in this position today that I'm in and thinking, we're six locations today. I want to have 21 locations by August of 2020. Our goal is to be up over 200 locations in the next three to four years. I look at that and there's this part of me that thinks, you've got to own the brand. Certainly quality of product is of the utmost importance. But you have to own the brand. You have to be on top of it. You have to be pushing it. And then I watch... I always try to do the workouts as a client, not as the CEO of the company. I try to show up. I try to go through everything just like I did a year ago when I was still a client of this business and not working here. I watch the way people interact with each other and the way they talk about it. One of the things that I've always found very funny and something that I never want to lose, and is definitely a struggle internally for me as I try to work through this process, is I'll give you an example. You ever see the movie Pitch Perfect? Anna Kendrick and a bunch of the singing or whatever. They say "Aca" something. It's like a big joke. They have this thing where they put "Aca" in front of all these other words. It's cheeky and fun. People do the same thing with "Meta." They'll be like "Meta whatever." I heard someone say, "Geez, I got Metamorphia." I'm like, what is that? They're like, "That's that 20-minute feeling that I have after the workout is over." It was just so... I got my guys working on it. I want to do a video around Metamorphia and what it means to people. I gotta refine the person at the gym who shared the topic with me. I was like, man, that is really... How do we start to capitalize? I don't want to capitalize to feel as smarmy as it just came out of my mouth, but how do I start to take this idea that there are people building little micro brands and micro sayings around this and start to pull those out and share them with the rest of the community so that the language can start to... I feel like that will help the community be even stronger. If someone can walk in and know that that 20 minutes of being high as a kite after the workout, that people refer to that as Metamorphia, I feel like there's a lot of power in that.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: I think it's brilliant. I think you have so many opportunities right now as an owner and a community builder. Not only can you take these ideas to social and video and create quote images. The first thing I would be doing is t-shirts. Put the name on someone's back and also give people credit. My approach to naming is actually to unlock the creative genius of teams, not to hire an agency to name things, but actually to use your employees and your own team to name things. When you do that, when you are empowering, in your case, your community to be helping to build the brand, then give someone credit for the idea. Put their name on it. Let them know they're part of that story. It doesn't cost you anything, but it means huge psychic income for them. It's also a signal to everybody else that you value that kind of creative participation. With that, I think it's something you can fully bake into the operating DNA of Metabolic. I think you can build it into your community and your culture as something that you value and that it's safe to do.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: I also would suggest that it's also leading you to what is probably the next generation of branding. Baby boomers very much ran from a command and control mindset. That is very visible in the way we have been coached in terms of how we think about our brands today. But if we look at this through, say, a millennial lens in terms of how young professionals lead teams and expect their engagement, it comes from basically a philosophy of empowerment. As a brand to empower your customers and your members to have ownership of the formation of what you were creating and to give them credit where credit is due... Wow. That is beyond awesome. Let's showcase this and hold Metabolic up as the epitome of a sticky brand.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that's the perfect tie-in of our two organizations. My man, this has been a tremendous conversation. I know I used it as free consulting, but I think the audience at home has gotten a lot out of it. You had said something that we didn't really touch on, and I want to be respectful of your time and probably my own as well. You had said that you see an uptick in sales when people change names or make brand changes because they put a lot back into the marketing of that. What I would love for everyone listening at home is, there are a lot of micro changes you can make. If you're not ready for a full-blown rename or brand change, there are micro changes that you can make from the conversation that Jeremy and I have had today, especially if you go and get a copy of his book. There are lots of little things in there that you can make just to make tweaks to what you already have. What I would encourage you to do is to keep marketing. Don't stop marketing. Don't start just when you have a big change coming. Consistently making little adjustments, little tweaks, dialing in. It doesn't have to be set it and forget it. That's one of the things that I took away from your book and one of the things that I've taken away from my own work. I think it's a very important way to keep people engaged in what you're doing. Small micro changes continually in an effort to bring people in closer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Jeremy, this has been tremendous. Thanks so much, man. Give people the best place to reach out to you, best place to find more about you and the work that you're doing.
--:-- Jeremy Miller: You can find me at stickybranding.com. If you Google Sticky Branding, you'll find me. It's the handle on all my social networks. The new book you've mentioned a couple of times is called *Brand New Name*. It's available wherever books are sold. It comes out on October 8th. If anyone wants to chat or has follow-on questions, just hit me up. I'd love to chat.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right. Thanks brother. Appreciate your time.
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