The Rebrand That Transformed Two Businesses (Shari Gannon​​​​​​​)
 

[00:00:05] JESSE GILMORE: Hello everyone, today I'm here with Shari Gannon, the founder and creative director of Krave Branding. And Shari just completed the most complex, tightest timeline, largest team rebrand in company history. And I just want to say that it's actually for Niche in Control. Shari, welcome to the show.

[00:00:25] SHARI GANNON: Thanks, Jesse, I'm happy to be here.

[00:00:29] JESSE GILMORE: So as we were talking right before this, we started going through and understanding all of the complexity that Niche in Control's rebrand was. Bring us back a little bit, because I know that this has actually been a really big project for you, but also kind of an eye-opening project. Talk a little bit about some of those insights and we'll go through what that was.

[00:00:52] SHARI GANNON: Yeah, so the project started out like any other project that I would do, starting with the brand foundation and the brand story. But what it really turned into was this big, orchestrated event process of not only completing the new brand launch, the logo and the messaging and those things, but then also going into working with a large team of multiple agency owners to complete the goal, which was to rebrand and relaunch Niche in Control.

[00:01:39] JESSE GILMORE: And it's huge. I was in that first conversation, and it was a brand clarity session. I remember you were like, where did you get these logos that you have? And I was like, Fiverr for five bucks. And you're like, no!

[00:01:57] SHARI GANNON: Yeah, that was great. Fiverr is such an easy tool for new business owners to use and it's got its purpose, right? You were able to get a logo, you were able to get kicked off and start building your business. But then what was interesting, after we were talking, is that over time you realized that there was something missing. There was a disconnect, or the logo didn't really mean anything or match your brand in any way. And then you started adding other logos, like for Leverage for Growth, and that looked completely different. But you didn't know what you didn't know, right? So when you saw them, they were working great, they served the purpose. I guess I'd be curious, after meeting me and we started talking about brand disconnect and some of those things, what led you to want to take a look at your logos and your brand and see if it was what it needs to be?

[00:03:22] JESSE GILMORE: When I thought about this, I remember one of the first questions he asked me. I was like, what made you choose this logo? And I was like, I like Adidas because it has the three things. And obviously that wasn't, you're like, well, what's the meaning behind it? And I was like, I don't know, Niche in Control and these three little things. As we started diving into it, I remember feeling like my Niche in Control had evolved a lot. When I first started off, I was kind of the freelance consultant. And then I started getting really good results. And then over a period of time, Leverage for Growth is kind of like an art deco type of look, was the thing that we started leading with. And it was more so, like you had said, I just didn't know what I didn't know. And I started to realize that over a period of time, there's so many changes that we've made, that it felt as though we had a constant over-explain, it's like the brand was working against us. Like we were on the startup, and we're more of an established business now, but how do you represent that? And I remember one of the first conversations we had was originally for an hour, and we started diving a lot deeper into this understanding, and this idea of a beacon started coming out. It was very interesting how layers upon layers of imagery or visuals kind of unearth that. Do you remember that conversation and the aha moment with the beacon?

[00:05:00] SHARI GANNON: Yeah, absolutely. That was a really cool time. We were digging in deep and going back to your origin story and back to how things were originally set up. What I wanted to really help you figure out was your why. What was the actual purpose that you wanted to build this business? What were your goals and how did it transform? And what did you see it being moving forward? And so when we got to this conversation about the beacon, you had shared that you really want to be this source of light for businesses and help guide them to their personal freedom. Once we looked at the entire story all together, we were able to really come to the conclusion that, yes, this is where we want to be. And one piece of that was that you really started just processing, talking, that's part of the whole brand clarity session process, you just get to sit and talk and think and let whatever flows flow. And I'm on the other side capturing it. I'd love to know what your experience was in that situation, because it's a very intimate and very personal conversation that we have to really get you to unearth some of these hidden stories that you didn't even maybe realize at the time. So how did that process feel for you?

[00:07:18] JESSE GILMORE: It kind of reminded me, and I even told you this when we went through it, one of the things we do with clients, and we do with you because you're also a client of ours, was go through a Three Selves exercise. We do it a lot more from the personal side: current self, future self, becoming self, and what do you have to let go of in order for you to bridge the gap. And what I felt like during those brand clarity sessions was very similar to a Three Selves type of exercise, but more for the brand. A couple of different things came out. I had it in the back of my mind, the vision of impacting a million entrepreneurs, the opportunity to expand and grow and pass on the business in some form, but I didn't really understand that Niche in Control was going to live on beyond me. And that was one of those big aha moments. It was one of the main drivers behind the rebrand, because even though I'm the founder and I do a lot of the coaching, I also want Niche in Control to have this impact that has a ripple effect. Not everything can be based around me, which is of course the scenario that I would come to, because I actually teach agency owners and founders of companies to be able to develop a business that can sustain and grow without them. And to understand that, I have to go through my own process of using Leverage for Growth as a method toward Niche in Control. The rebrand was kind of like the next step in order for us to get rid of the startup identity of the business and establish Niche in Control as an established business. And what's really cool is I get to actually go through that process of empowering people. That led from the brand clarity session into starting to bring in a marketing team, which is multiple agencies, in the beginning of 2026. And it all came from the same lens. That brand clarity session unlocked something within me where I was like, okay, this is the time, 2026 is going to be different than before. From that process, I understood that me and Jeremy, my brother does back-end operations for those who are listening, we have a certain lane that we're the world's best at. But there's other lanes that we had taken on that were not like that. And a lot of January was deciding, Jeremy, this is your lane, Jesse, this is your lane, this is where Shari is. And now we're going to start bringing in a bunch of them. Can you think about that first marketing team sync that we had, where we brought on a podcast and production agency, and we brought on a social media and PR, we brought on cold email and outbound, yourself as graphic design, and then the team. What was that first meeting like for you?

[00:10:28] SHARI GANNON: It was exciting. There was a lot of energy around it. I think everyone was really excited to be part of this. Since I am in your alliance group, and I had already met a lot of these people, we had already known each other a little bit. So there was a comfort level there. Some of us had worked together on some other projects, but then this was different, because this was all of us as experts coming together to work for a client, which was Niche in Control. So our mindset switched, everything switched, and we were no longer the student per se, we were the teachers, we were the guides, the ones that were going to make this happen. It was a cool shift that happened within that group of us that were able to work with you, and that first kickoff meeting was really well run, it was smooth, it wasn't stepping on people's toes, nobody was worried about, oh, this person's going to try and take over what I'm trying to do. It was all very open and collaborative. And I think it was well received from the whole team, and that was a great start to this journey that we were all on together.

[00:12:06] JESSE GILMORE: I remember that the first one was in February. A lot of the internal work that we were doing to set up, this is what each person's lane is, was in January. I remember knowing that bringing you on and Daisy on and everybody on, that there's going to be this inception moment of leading by example of empowering a team. When you think about other rebrands that you've done, what's the difference between the rebrands you've done with Niche in Control and the ones that you've done prior? Because you were saying even before this, that this was the largest, most complex, multi-team type of rebrand that you've done before.

[00:12:53] SHARI GANNON: Yeah, absolutely. This was a completely different experience than what I've done before. As I mentioned at the beginning, it started out the same as what I would have done with another client in the past. And the difference was that I had my role in the beginning and did my part, and then instead of us running everything through my company and me managing everybody by bringing in outside resources, it was different, because you actually brought in the other team members hand-picked and selected who you wanted to be part of this project, and then presented them to me saying, okay, here Shari, this is your team that you're going to be managing through this process. It wasn't people that I had to go out and find, you brought them in. So that was a whole other dynamic as well, because we didn't have a relationship or an agreement or anything on the other side before meeting with each other to do this project. And it ended up also being bigger because we had so many moving pieces and parts with all of the different aspects. So we started with the Brand Foundation and the Brand Clarity Playbook and gave that to the team. And then everybody on the team grabbed the resources that we gave them and started building out parts. It was a really cool experience to be able to provide what they needed and then trust that they would be able to complete their tasks for the project. I didn't have to worry about all of those different things, other than just to oversee and make sure that they were on brand and that things were getting done in time. It was working with a lot of different professionals who had their own agencies and are doing what they do best, and it made my job pretty easy, because I just had to come in and oversee and make sure that things kept moving. And they did it. It wouldn't have been possible to do this big of a project as quickly as we did it without the team that was involved. It was wonderful.

[00:15:55] JESSE GILMORE: Yeah, it's cool. What I didn't even mention was the whole SEO side too, with Nisar. Getting into a place where each person knew their role. Nisar was really helpful with SEO strategy, URLs and technical breakdowns, and getting to understand how that fits within the brand and then what our actual launch was. And we underestimated the complexity of moving from WordPress over to our system in Ontraport. I remember going through it and just unearthing how many pages of a site we actually had to do, and figuring out how to do that effectively. Because for anybody that's listening, we have over 200 pages within a website, and being able to migrate from one platform to the other while doing a rebrand, while doing an SEO with multi-team, all within about a six month period of time, is the actual complexity. Shari, can you talk a little bit about the website migration process and what you did in there, and then how it started getting represented? Because I'd love to talk about what that actually has done since then too.

[00:17:13] SHARI GANNON: Yeah, overall, I think it went pretty smoothly. You did have an epiphany in the middle, after we had all the content written and we had pages starting to get populated with text, that you decided, oh, this should really be about leverage. And it really shifted the original context and the original direction that we were using for all of the words and the actual feel of the site. So in the middle of doing this, then we had to go back to Nisar and say, hey, so by the way, we missed the mark on this. As we've been working through this process, we realized that we need to be focusing on leverage. So we totally shifted gears.

[00:18:14] JESSE GILMORE: The ability for you to work through revisions and pivot when we're going in one direction, and it was actually really successful, or made it so it was successful. Because I think that one of the biggest things, I've talked with Josh Lohmann, who has done category leadership and he's a category based agency, and he's worked with Stripe and a bunch of other really big companies. When I worked with him and talked with him in another mastermind about a year and a half ago, we kept boiling it down, and it just became leverage is the main thing. I started to look at the copy, started looking at things, and it really was not based around a category. It was kind of starting to be very similar to agency growth programs, where it's an incremental improvement as opposed to a new opportunity. One of the biggest things I started realizing was the biggest difference between us and EOS, or us and Dan Martell, or us and the other agency growth programs out there, was we focus a lot more on the founder's experience and the founder becoming a better version of themselves, which actually has a ripple effect in the business, and being able to transition them from being the doer to the trainer to the manager to leader to visionary. And what I started realizing was that the thing that we focus on most when we start carving out time is based around leveraged activities, or asymmetric returns, where you can focus one hour on training a VA that saves you 10 hours per week, that type of mentality. And I think what's really interesting is when you get different drafts of things, you get to a place where you can see it differently, and when you start seeing something differently, it opens up your eyes to things. It wasn't like the previous version or previous drafts were bad. It was just more so like it was a missing component. And I remember very specifically, we started to, anytime we actually went through the logo reveals with Niche in Control, and we did it with the team, and I'm like, holy crap, this is the actual essence of what I was going after. And then we did it again with the Leverage for Growth logo, and having this idea of a prism, where light comes in and it has multiple refracting lenses. Like if you had a white light going into a prism, then it becomes a rainbow on the other side. Those reveals were like steps in the direction of seeing a vision that I had in my head come into a design, which is really cool. I can understand why you would say that this is the most complex project that you've done before, both from the team side and also from being able to have revisions and go through that. Now you had said this was most complex, but yet something kind of changed with you and Krave Branding and the direction of your own business as well. Can you talk a little bit about your insight from working with Niche in Control through this process?

[00:21:28] SHARI GANNON: Yeah. And I want to just add to what you were just saying, that from the time that we started this project, these conversations all the way through the actual launch, it was a complete transformation for you. It was really cool, because every different step of the project kind of unlocked something for you, and it was cool that you were open to receiving that, and that we were able to shift gears on the fly when that happened, because it was kind of like watching somebody be born again to what we're doing here. It just kept growing and it just kept getting better and better. It was really cool to be a part of that. So for Krave and for my personal transformation, yes, I have been in business for a long time. I have tried a lot of different things, a lot of different business models, a lot of different offers. And as we were going through this process, I was also going through a transition, which you're well aware of from my side of things too. I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do, what I really wanted to be, what I want this business to accomplish. As I started working with you and with the team, I started to realize that there are a lot of things that I was doing and managing for years that I didn't really want to be doing. It wasn't my passion. It was actually doing the production of a lot of the marketing things. It was doing the technical side of it. And although I can do it, and I have, and I've become good at it over time, it doesn't mean that it's what I love to do. What I was able to discover through this process is that because of all of my years of experience and all of these different aspects, these different containers of types of work that I was doing, I have knowledge and experience in a lot of different things, which helped add to my ability to be able to help manage the team, because I understand all of the different aspects and how they work with each other. But what I really loved is that I didn't have to actually do the work for all of the different things. I could focus on what I wanted to do. Through that process, I started realizing, okay, there are things that I just don't want to be doing. So why am I doing it? It's making me miserable. And so through some pretty challenging and emotional conversations with you, and personal growth type of exercises that I did, because I did the Three Selves again, I went through the offer campaign, figuring out my unique ability, looking at all of those things that we did, I just discovered that I should be focusing on the things that make me happy, that I really love doing, that I'm passionate about. So I actually redid my entire offer, redid my website, redid my whole story, at the same time that we were doing this transition transformation for Niche in Control. So it was really cool to be able to put into practice the things that I had discovered that I really wanted to be doing, while working on the Niche in Control project and with the team that was put together for that. It was huge. It was a huge transformation time and transition time, for not only you, but me as well.

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[00:26:45] JESSE GILMORE: It's cool how that happens. It's like this synergy pulls things out of you. How does it feel being on the other side of not only a successful rebrand and relaunch of Niche in Control, but also on the other side of knowing exactly what type of work you really want to do, that fills you up, and actually having an offer that specifically is based around what you are the world's best at, as opposed to what a client could ever want?

[00:27:14] SHARI GANNON: Yeah, it feels really freeing, I guess. I don't know how to describe it. I feel really good about the Niche in Control brand. I'm really happy with the work. For me, the biggest thing is that my client is happy and I feel like we succeeded there. The team that we worked with, everybody got along so well. There was never any conflict. There were never any issues. It was just everybody working towards the same goal. And there's a beauty in that. For me to be a part of that really helped solidify that, yeah, this is something that I want to do. This is where I feel like I am going to shine the most and can help bring my company forward on this type of work. And it's impactful, right? For me, I want to do something that's going to matter, that's going to help make somebody's life better or their business better, or give them an aha moment, or find that clarity and that peace at the end of a whole situation and a process. And to be able to work with people on a very, and I keep saying the word, intimate, vulnerable, open level, where we just share. It's part of what I've learned and what I do with you as my coach, but then I also encourage you as my client to be open and share. And if something came up and you're like, this isn't right, we've got to shift this, it's not quite there, you felt comfortable enough to come and say, this isn't right, this is what we've got to talk through. And we did it and shifted gears, and we're able to be flexible with each other, because not everything is cookie cutter, set in stone. The first thing you say isn't always going to be the final output or the final decision. So it was a cool process, a cool experience, a cool discovery for me as well, to figure out what I was trying to do, or what I really enjoyed doing that gave me energy, versus being something that was draining and at the end of the day felt unfulfilling. So it was nice to have the opposite of that for this situation.

[00:30:28] JESSE GILMORE: Yeah, it's cool. For anybody that doesn't know the Three Selves, it's a very transformative activity where you get to get very clear on where you are, where you want to go, and then that becoming self. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that that became a very big catalyst as an experiential activity that solidified the old version of Krave Branding and then the new one. And the transformation that you went through on a personal level also is a transformation that starts to happen in your business, very similar to my own personal transformation of using Leverage for Growth as a method in our own business, and then very specifically drawing a line in the sand in 2026 and bringing in experts, and not having to be the one that does everything in my own business. That was very transformative for me to be able to guide and facilitate and truly lead, as opposed to being the person who was doing everything or being the bottleneck. And the ability of going through the transformation, being open to it. I think that you have a gift, naturally pulling things out of people that maybe they keep down inside or hidden, and what actually happens through that process is very transformative as well, which makes sense on your tagline. As we wrap this up, if you were to talk to somebody that listens to this podcast and wants to connect, what's the best way for people to contact you, Shari?

[00:32:11] SHARI GANNON: Best way to contact me is to probably just go to my website, kravebranding.com, and that's k-r-a-v-e branding.com. There's a form on there. You can schedule a Brand Gut Check with me, and we'll take a quick, real look at your brand and see where the gaps are, and see if there's any room for improvement to help get you to that next level of your business.

[00:32:42] JESSE GILMORE: And I will say one thing to end. After the website got switched, we do cold email and stuff like that. I recently had a cold email lead come in to a discovery call, and in a very short period of time, looking at the website, they're like, all right, cool. And then they just immediately let go of skepticism, and the conversation went really well. That type of thing, where the brand is not working against me anymore, shows up in these kinds of activities. So Shari, thank you so much for being on the podcast, sharing the brand transformation, and also the personal transformation that you went through with working with Niche in Control. And most likely we're going to have another conversation in about six months and see how the re-offer has worked out in your business.

[00:33:32] SHARI GANNON: Sounds great. Thanks, Jesse. Thanks for allowing me to be a part of this too. It was great.

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