Rebranding a professional services firm is more than a fresh coat of paint; it’s a strategic move to align your brand with evolving market demands, attract ideal clients, and drive growth. Join Michael Ivie, Managing Partner at Eclipse Consulting Group as he shares what led to the rebrand, his journey through the rebranding process, and lessons learned along the way. In this session, you’ll understand how to assess whether a rebrand is the right move for your firm, including evaluating market signals, internal readiness, and potential impact on your business strategy.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody, welcome to the ProServ podcast. This is your host, Greg Alexander. If you’re new to this podcast, this show is dedicated to three things: helping you make more money, making scaling easier, and making an exit achievable. We’re dedicated to founders of boutique professional services firms. So if you’re in the expertise business—maybe you’re an IT shop, a consulting shop, a law firm, an accounting firm, a marketing agency, or what have you—this is for you. On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about rebranding.
Greg Alexander: Now let me set this up a little bit. What normally happens in the boutique pro-serve world is you start your firm, and you have a problem, a solution, and a customer, and you go to market. Then, three, four, or five years later, you’re going after more than one problem, you have more than one solution, and you have more than one customer type. All of a sudden, who you were is no longer who you are now, and you need to communicate to the world who you are and what your new brand is. Sometimes that calls for a wholesale rebranding effort.
Greg Alexander: Now, rebranding a firm is a ton of work. So today, we’re going to talk about what that entails. We’re going to compare rebranding to things like a brand refresh or a refresh of your niche positioning, or maybe just rebranding a single service line, etc. But we’re going to start with the whole rebranding effort. We’ve got a long-standing, well-respected member with us today who recently went through this. His name is Michael Ivie. Michael runs Eclipse Consulting. Michael, would you please introduce yourself to the audience?
Michael Ivie: Hey, Greg! Great to be here with you today. I’m excited to be here to not sell anybody anything but just to be the voice of a peer as someone that has a lot of lessons learned from having been through a couple of rebrands. I certainly dealt with some costs, missed opportunities, and things that resulted. Had I known a couple of things along the way, I could have saved myself and my teams a lot of headaches.
Michael Ivie: Very quickly, Eclipse Consulting is a boutique professional services firm that focuses on providing subject-matter-led, execution-focused services to highly regulated and data-intensive businesses, most of which happen to be financial institutions. Branding and marketing are not in there anywhere, but nonetheless, it is table stakes for how we run our business and engage with the public. So I’m excited to talk about some of our experiences.
Greg Alexander: All right. So let’s start from the top. What was your reason for executing a rebrand?
Michael Ivie: Yeah, it’s a great question with a potentially loaded answer. But to be brief, this most recent one was because I had a shared services agreement with some other partners. They had different firms, and we had kind of co-branded. Going back seven years ago, we were all part of a larger company that was acquired. Our businesses essentially spun off and needed to be rebranded then.
Michael Ivie: Back then, I said, “Guys, I’m going to focus on go-to-market. You guys can call it whatever the hell you want. I’m going to stop consulting at the end of it, and I’ll be fine. I don’t care what you call it.” I later learned that was not the best thing to do. Happy to jump into that. Our old name was, I’ll say it, “Fighting Consulting,” and everybody thought we were “Python,” among other challenges with the name of the brand.
Michael Ivie: Most recently, though, we separated from the shared services model, and as part of that, we needed to have our own brand identity completely separate from the other businesses. With that change, we rebranded and went through a very long, very detailed, focused process to come up with our new brand and all the things that are behind it for Eclipse Consulting.
Greg Alexander: All right, perfect. So I started with the reason for a rebrand. The reason why I started with that is that for those listening, as I mentioned, a rebrand is a lot of work, so you better have a good reason. In Michael’s case, he had a trigger event. He was separating from an agreement, basically relaunching a firm, so he needed a new brand. That was an obvious thing he needed to do. But for those of you not going through such a thing and wondering, “Why would I rebrand?” here are some reasons: your target client changes.
Greg Alexander: That’s often a good time to rebrand. You need to differentiate. You know you’re lumped into a big category, and it’s tough to stick out, if you will. Maybe scaling is too hard, and the reason for that is that your brand doesn’t accurately represent to the world who you are and what you do. Maybe you did an acquisition—you know, you bought a firm, and they brought new capabilities, or they bought you, and they brought new capabilities. That’s another reason. Sometimes your brand is just flat-out tired. It’s outdated. You know, you launched a company 20 years ago, and it’s the same brand. Lastly, a common one that I see, unfortunately, is reputational issues. Your brand needs a fresh start. Maybe you got some bad clients, or maybe there was a lawsuit. You know, we see this in financial services quite a bit, and you need to rebrand. So those are some reasons. That’s not all the reasons, but those are some of the reasons. The lesson here: before you launch a rebrand, make sure you have a good reason. All right, let’s go to the next step. Michael Ivie: I want to ask you if you did a brand audit. What was your starting point?
Michael Ivie: Yeah, so we did a pretty rigorous process. Our starting point is because, keep in mind, we had to do a lot of other things. We had to re-platform the whole company—everything from accounts receivable, payable, finance, legal compliance. Our mailing address had to change. Bank accounts had to be changed—like everything had to happen. And oh yeah, we needed a new brand and all that stuff to go with it. So we put on our consulting hats. Normally, my intuition would be that we should drink our own Kool-Aid, and we should go seek outsiders’ help to advise us through the process, just like our clients shouldn’t try and do what we specialize in—they should hire us, kind of thing. However, the other time I’ve had to do this, seven years ago or so, the acquiring company had provided a couple hundred thousand, if I recall, of funds to fund our rebranding exercise the first time. And man, it was a giant waste of money because we ended up with the name “Fighting Consulting” that I spent the next five years after that just explaining. We’re not Python, we’re not Photon, and what the hell is “Fighting”? So honestly, regardless of the change, changing the name was great just in that sense.
So where we started: we started a task force, and rebranding was one of many things. We just tackled every single thing that we needed to relaunch the business. Under the rebranding piece, we were struggling a little bit. We talked to some firms. Nobody gave us the warm and fuzzies that they were our partner to help us through the rebranding side of it, and we didn’t want a repeat of what had happened five or six years before. So I did what I do for a lot of things: I went and immersed myself in the literature, read a bunch of books, and the one book that I loved so much and read was a book called *My Name Is Awesome* by Alexandra Watkins. Probably the shortest of the five or six different books I read on this topic, and by far the most impactful. I think I read it in like 90 minutes. So it’s a short read—so amazing. I won’t even try to summarize the incredible concepts that the author summarizes there because I will never be able to do it justice. In fact, had I just come across this book even sooner in the process, I probably would have reached out to the author. She has a company called “Eat My Words.” I probably would have reached out to her and even tried to engage her if we had discovered it sooner.
The key mantra from the book was: you should never have to apologize for your name and explain it. If it’s that hard to pronounce, say, or spell, then you’re starting off on the wrong foot out of the gate with something as critical as your brand. I had lived that, so I loved that aspect of the book. It walks you through a very methodical process to approach rebranding, and I especially love frameworks and methodologies. She lays out a lot of frameworks and methodologies of how to go through the ideation and brainstorming phase. For us, we had already started our own process and sourced over 300 different names. We were using Jira to put those names in. If you think about it, those are just the root names. You can add all types of modifiers to those that ultimately, with all the permutations, you could have thousands of names off of those 300 or so. We went through all the things that you have to consider when you’re picking a name. Ultimately, we rated them and disqualified some. Was it easy to say? Was it easy to spell? It was on my wish list to have a name that started with an “A.” We ended up not getting that one, but you know, not the most important criteria there.
There are other things you have to think about: linguistics tests. Is there a meaning in the Urban Dictionary you need to know about for that name? Does it mean something in French that you should probably know before you pick that name for your company? Is there a trademark in place for it? Are there other companies? What I learned is that every name possible is already taken, particularly for web domains. It’s a little different for trademarking—there’s a little more opportunity or green space there. But still, it’s a lot to navigate. So we did it ourselves. In hindsight, if we had more time and if I had discovered a good resource sooner, I probably would recommend you get some outside help.
Greg Alexander: Okay, so that was perfect. Great recommendation on a book. I haven’t read that, but I am going to read it, especially since it’s only a 90-minute commitment. My question was around a brand audit. In essence, Michael did that. He did it himself, and he did a version of it.
Greg Alexander: But for those that are considering a rebrand, it’s often a starting point—a brand audit. So what goes into a brand audit? I’m not going to do it justice here, but to hit the tips of the ways: First, you want to understand the client perception. How do they see you? And, by the way, the name is such an important thing, but that’s only one component. You have the messaging, the brand promise, your visual identity, etc. The name is only one thing, so what is the perception of the client, especially your best clients and your ideal clients? How do you want to amplify that and portray that to others? Next, what is your brand recognition? If you think about your target market, how much brand awareness do you really have? If you have not much, which is the case for most boutiques, is there anything you can do with your brand to get you some more brand awareness?
Greg Alexander: Next, I mentioned messaging and visual identity. This is a big thing, a very broad topic. We could have multiple podcasts just on that alone. In my opinion, the most important thing there is the brand promise. So you hire me to do X, and I promise to deliver Y. What is that promise? Is it believable? Can you stand behind it? Lastly, as part of a brand audit, you want to look at your competitive landscape. You want to examine your direct competitors, indirect competitors, adjacencies, and people you aspire to be. Make sure if you go through a brand audit—because this is not something you’re going to do every year—this brand might last you for the rest of your time as a firm. You want to make sure that it has legs. All right, Michael, let me go to the next question. Knowing you the way I do, I’m sure you considered the business impact of this. How do you measure a rebrand?
Michael Ivie: Yeah, and man, there are some things on the brand audit as well that I very quickly just wanted to add because we essentially did that. We did a series of workshops. We did different workshops on looking at our values and differentiators. I have to say, I did my MBA 15 years ago, and when I did my MBA, I would always rush through the Mission, Vision, and Core Value section because I wanted to just get to coming up with a business plan and going to market. It wasn’t until I was in this situation where I had to grow and scale a business and have that fail miserably because I didn’t lead with mission, vision, and core values—and thinking about intentionally having operating systems that will allow us to scale—that I really started to learn the criticality of it.
Michael Ivie: So as we did that brand audit, we spent a lot of time in workshops on what is our brand persona, what are our vision and mission statements, and our positioning statements of how we communicate those things. We also talked about who our ideal clients are, their pain points, their aspirations, and their desires. All of that informed our decision around a brand—whether what you call it or what you don’t want to call it on both sides of that. I did want to highlight that. From the business impact side, Greg, this was definitely top of mind for me. I wanted to make sure that we were able to move fast but still do a thorough job.
Michael Ivie: Particularly in our world of serving highly regulated clients like financial institutions, large banks, insurance companies, and asset managers, there is no room for error. They do not want to play around with their vendors. You have to have your things buttoned up. I can give you stories where we lost millions of dollars seven years ago in the first rebranding because there was a government shutdown going on, and our name change wouldn’t update in the IRS database fast enough. We had a multimillion-dollar contract, and one of our clients—just because when they would do the TIN check with the IRS—even though we had other active projects going and many years of history with this client, they would not approve this new multimillion-dollar project because the name, when they checked the government database, did not match our new name. Even though we could provide the documentation and prove it all, and they knew it, they did not care. They would not budge. They have to be able to check those boxes.
Michael Ivie: One of many areas where I warn you: you’ve got to think about all the different places your name change has to happen. We were very careful as we went through the name change this time to do everything we could. In fact, here we are eight months later, and my name change is still pending with the federal government. It’s changed with the state and the EIN entity, but we are still having issues. Fortunately, this time we knew to watch out for it, so we managed the risk around it. If it’s not rebranded, are we still able to contractually enter contracts with banks, even if they want to be sticklers for things? Those business disruption risks were things that we thought very carefully about.
Greg Alexander: I’ll ask you one more question, and we’re going to end on this as we try to keep these things short and simple. This may or may not apply to your case because your case was so dramatic. You were separating from another firm and, in essence, launching a brand as much as maybe rebranding. But given what we’ve discussed today and how much work and risk is associated with a rebrand, there are alternatives, and I’ll highlight three. There’s a simple brand refresh. You don’t rename the firm and redo the whole thing. Maybe you get a new logo, new colors, a new tagline, etc. That’s an easier lift. Then there’s niche positioning. You might say, okay, so I’m going to redefine my niche. For example, Collective 54 serves boutique professional services firms. What does that mean? We may further define that in the future. That’s niche positioning.
Greg Alexander: And then there’s service line rebranding. So you might not want to rebrand the entire company, but most of our members are multi-service line firms. In a professional service firm, you have to brand the individual services, just like Procter and Gamble has multiple detergent brands. A service company has multiple service lines. Michael, when you did your rebrand, did you think about those three alternatives? And did you do any of them, or did you just keep it at the company level?
Michael Ivie: Yeah, and part of that is just because of the legal trademarking issues and things like that as well. Our legal entity is now ECG Americas. We wanted to have room to grow if we did have other legal entities at some point. But we have a DBA, so we’re doing business as Eclipse Consulting Group. In other deals I’ve done in the past, sometimes you don’t even change the legal name of the firm. You just say, “DBA, our public-facing name is now this.” The beauty of that is you don’t have to go change all that other stuff. So that’s a powerful alternative. Yeah, it’s not as clean, but people will understand it, especially procurement departments, because they know what it takes to do a full-on legal name change.
Fortunately, because I bought not just the assets of the firm when we did the change of control, I bought the entire company. If you buy just the assets, then the EIN or your tax ID is changing. That means contracts, to another degree, even have to be repapered. It makes things far more complicated. So if you can avoid that, you just have to weigh the pros and cons.
Other things—I haven’t personally dealt with it, but the example that immediately popped into mind, Greg, when you said it, is the alternative name like SHIELD in the Marvel universe. They’re SHIELD, the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. They keep saying that name in the beginning of Iron Man. They’re like, “You guys got to come up with a new name.” He’s like, “We’re working on it. We’re working on it.” And then later in the end of the show, they’re like, “Just call us SHIELD.” Much sexier, much easier to remember. A lot of boutique companies I see are named after the founder or have this long name that maybe has some meaning back to what they do. It’s like, “I’m never going to remember that.” I’ve seen some of those firms, even in the Collective, try and rebrand around that. So they’ll go to an acronym or something.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, yeah, very good. All right. We’re at our time window here. Michael, as always, you made a huge contribution to the membership today. We thank you very much for that.
Michael Ivie: Yeah, thanks a lot, Greg. Great to be here.
Greg Alexander: All right, couple calls to action. If you’re a member of Collective 54 contemplating a brand refresh, either in its entirety or partially, and you want to ask Michael your questions, look for the meeting invitation for our Friday Private Q&A role model session that’s coming out shortly. If you’re not a member and you’re listening to this and want to become one, go to collective54.com, fill out an application, and somebody will get in contact with you. Until then, I wish all of you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.