--------- HIGHLIGHTS ---------

0:00:54 - Kevin Finn (59 Seconds)
0:04:33 - Approaching International Clients From Remote Australia (68 Seconds)
0:08:10 - The Definition and Importance of Branding (186 Seconds)
0:18:57 - Starting a Business Without Experience (72 Seconds)
0:30:20 - Community-Based Successful Pizza Shop (37 Seconds)
0:39:24 - Redefining the Importance of Storytelling (94 Seconds)
0:44:22 - ACCC Investigating Authentic Communication Techniques (68 Seconds)
0:53:29 - Advice on Belief and Success (101 Seconds)
0:58:57 - Connecting With Brand Principles and Kevin Finn (67 Seconds)

--------- HIGHLIGHTS WITH TRANSCRIPT ---------

* Kevin Finn | 0:00:54 - 0:01:53 (59 Seconds)

0:00:54 Craig Schulze (Host)
We have a phenomenal guest with us today. He's a thought leader. His name is Kevin Finn. He has quite a remarkable story which he's going to showcase very shortly, but he's a CEO of a business called the Sum of. He's just launched his own book, which is around branding principles. We'll talk a bit about that in the episode. But he's a very highly sophisticated designer, graphic designer that's worked with some phenomenal brands around the world, including working on a project with you too. I'm sure he'll share a bit about that, and he also is an innovator in his space, and he'll talk about how he went from his back bedroom into a global, having global clients. So welcome to the show, kevin.  

0:01:42 Kevin Finn (Guest)
Thank you so much, Craig. Good to be here.  

0:01:45 Craig Schulze (Host)
Craig Great and I always like to invite each guest just to provide a bit more context and showcase your story, and then we'll get into the conversation.  

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* Approaching International Clients From Remote Australia | 0:04:33 - 0:05:41 (68 Seconds)

0:04:33 Kevin Finn (Guest)
So that's kind of a bit of an overview and just a.  

0:04:36 Craig Schulze (Host)
it's a really important point in regards. You say pre-COVID, but it's very much pre-COVID At the time, from memory 2007, we were just probably transitioning into social media platforms. I'm not even sure whether Instagram would have been even around at that stage. How did you go about getting international clients and saying, hey, I work in remote Australia, I'd like to service you. Is it just through relationships or networks or direct mail? How did you approach that?  

0:05:17 Kevin Finn (Guest)
It's an interesting question. That's a good question because I think it's probably more relevant today than it was even then. If we look at what happened with COVID, there's a lot of people working from home, a lot of people you know the great resignation people pursuing the things that they want to do and not feeling they need to be bound to a job or a career that they may have started out in.  

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* The Definition and Importance of Branding | 0:08:10 - 0:11:16 (186 Seconds)

0:08:10 Craig Schulze (Host)
Someone like yourself, as you just showcased there, I always I like asking this question to entrepreneurs around branding and design advertising, like defining that. Do you have a clear definition for you of what a brand is? You know it's certainly not a pretty logo, but do you want to sort of use your sort of knowledge on that space?  

0:08:42 Kevin Finn (Guest)
Yeah, again, really, really important question. I think you're right, logos aren't brands and the way that I look at it and it's tricky because they are in the art, right. So how does that work? And I have a view that the logo isn't the brand in isolation. The brand gives the logo its value, right? So I look at logos and I, you know we know brands through logos, but we only know them because logos are what I would call a canvas for meaning and over time, oftentimes decades, individual interpretations and associations with an organization or a business. We will see a logo and say that's what it means to me, so it's a canvas for my very individual personal meaning. Then it becomes a wider canvas for an aggregate of meaning from people who generally think a certain thing about a business or a brand. So that's kind of how I see logos. The other interesting thing is that and I laugh when I'm working with businesses it's very common to get businesses to say that they call themselves a brand. And I question that. I do. I question directly to owners and CEOs and I say according to who? According to who or you are brand, because we as businesses can't say we're brands necessarily, the only way we can acknowledge whether we're not, or a brand is if our customers and our clients and society more broadly refers to us as a brand. If we as a business have enough relevance and enough value in the world and people see us as a benchmark in a sector, then you kind of become a brand. So Jeff Bezos very famous he said a brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room and that kind of encapsulates what we're talking about. If you're a business and you refer to yourself as a brand, it's sort of like when people say that they're cool, you're not cool. If you say you're cool, it's only when other people call you cool that you're cool. I think with brands it's similar. So that's kind of a lot of the rewiring work that I do with some of the business leaders that I work with, just so they understand that that's kind of what a brand is, because a brand is literally what you do every day, day in, day out the value that you provide and the relevance that you provide your customers, your staff and society more broadly, the community.  

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* Starting a Business Without Experience | 0:18:57 - 0:20:09 (72 Seconds)

0:18:57 Craig Schulze (Host)
Yeah, I wanna just move a little bit sideways here, because you had a lot of the reason I asked this question. There's a lot of people out there that are at crossroads and they want career changes. I'd love to start a business. You seem like, just from listening to your story, you had developed such a level of expertise in your profession and turned that into a business. But I think you mentioned you hadn't never run a business and you didn't have business experience. If somebody was just getting started or wanted to start a business, what did you do? Was it just like I'm gonna burn the boats and put my back to the wall and just go for it? Was you studying, learning, trying to upskill and develop skills? How did you go about it?  

0:19:52 Kevin Finn (Guest)
Yeah, when we moved to East Kimberly, to Kananara, there were no design studios. I had no choice. I had to set up a company, as you mentioned. I had no desire to, I didn't think I was qualified from a business point of view, but I had no choice.  

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* Community-Based Successful Pizza Shop | 0:30:20 - 0:30:56 (37 Seconds)

0:30:20 Kevin Finn (Guest)
So that was kind of what he wanted to do. They launched and he said he was terrified. He went out into the market day one highest labor costs, highest ingredients cost, highest every cost. Six months later word gets out that there's a cool little pizza shop that is paying a living wage and the community said we should go support that. So they started to go to the shop a little bit longer. The queues went around the corner. So it was clear the values that that business had not about  

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* Redefining the Importance of Storytelling | 0:39:24 - 0:40:59 (94 Seconds)

0:39:24 Craig Schulze (Host)
Yeah, well said, I mean I could take this conversation completely on another tangent, but I want to spend a bit more time with you talking about storytelling, because you mentioned the word relevance and we sort of talking about facts, tell story cell and you bought a really good, I guess, way to put it when we had a conversation the other day. Do you want to sort of bring that to the forefront of the conversation?  

0:39:53 Kevin Finn (Guest)
Yeah, and it's actually very, very relevant as of this morning, which I'll get into in a minute. So most organizations and businesses historically will go out in the marketing space, let's say in the communication space. They'll go out into the world and they will talk about their story. We're amazing. We have history, we have legacy, we have innovation. This is what we do. We've been doing it for so long. Got the best in the world, got the best in category. It's their story and they tell that story in an incredibly well-crafted way, whether it's through video or text or both or whatever it might be, but it's their story. And it struck me a while ago that actually I understand that businesses need to tell their story, but the way it's been told, no one really cares about that story. They don't care because essentially, the story is where better than our competitors pick us. That's the story. In whatever way they want to translate that and I've had pushback on this as well Business leaders would say, well, we have to tell our story.  

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* ACCC Investigating Authentic Communication Techniques | 0:44:22 - 0:45:30 (68 Seconds)

0:44:22 Kevin Finn (Guest)
So, as of this morning, ACCC is checking out how these stories are going out into the world, and it's a real thing.  

0:44:32 Craig Schulze (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean just leveraging on hot topics to take advantage, really, yeah, yeah, you mentioned, I guess in the practical terms you know, getting somebody to see theirself in your story or how you show up in their story. Yeah, do you want to go through how somebody could actually do that? Yeah, you mentioned that. There's a little technique that you use where you ask a series of questions.  

0:45:11 Kevin Finn (Guest)
Yeah.  

0:45:11 Craig Schulze (Host)
Yeah, and share that with the audience.  

0:45:13 Kevin Finn (Guest)
Sure, yeah, and this is the basis in my view and in my experience, the basis of how you might get a genuine, relevant communication story that can sit at the heart of your business, that people can remember and understand and tell on their own words.  

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* Advice on Belief and Success | 0:53:29 - 0:55:09 (101 Seconds)

0:53:29 Craig Schulze (Host)
What about the best bit of advice you've ever received?  

0:53:38 Kevin Finn (Guest)
When I was deciding to move to Kananara from Sydney and Sachi and Sachi, I went to a very good friend of mine called Vince Frost, a very accomplished international designer based in Sydney, and I asked him what the hell should I be doing? How do you have any advice for me? He gave me three bits of advice, but the one I'll share with you, which is the most it answers your question. He said if you don't believe you can do it, you won't. Sounds really simple and difficult at the same time, but it shifted my mindset to say I know I can have a plan to go into the unknown and ensure it's gonna work, but I can have an attitude that says I'm gonna try and make this work and if you've got that belief, then you'll be agile, then you can be nimble and you can make decisions because you know that at some stage it's gonna work, because you believe in yourself and what can be done, because if you go in with the opposite mindset it isn't gonna happen.  

0:54:46 Craig Schulze (Host)
Yeah, and on that point too, I used to always say to people that I was working with you know, a 1% doubt or override 99% belief.  

0:54:55 Kevin Finn (Guest)
So you know and interestingly, when we're buying luxury goods just on the flip side, there 99% of logic will be overridden by 1% emotion. So similar you know.  

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* Connecting With Brand Principles and Kevin Finn | 0:58:57 - 1:00:04 (67 Seconds)

0:58:57 Craig Schulze (Host)
At the end of each episode, I invite each guest to share with them how they can connect with you, your book. Make sure people know the right title for that, if I have got that one incorrect, but yeah, yeah, we will.  

0:59:12 Kevin Finn (Guest)
Well, the book is called Brand Principles how to Be a 21st Century Brand, and that's available on Booktopia Book Depository and amazoncomau. So if you just search for brand principles or Kevin Finn, that should come up. I'm on Instagram at justkevinfin, I'm on LinkedIn as Kevin Finn and my website is thisumofcomau.  

0:59:39 Craig Schulze (Host)
Cool and for me. I wanna thank you for jumping on the show and a lot of value shared with the audience and, yeah, once again thanks.  

0:59:48 Kevin Finn (Guest)
Oh, thank you for having me.  

0:59:50 Craig Schulze (Host)
Well, I hope you got a lot of value out of that episode with Kevin Finn. He is doing phenomenal things in the world and shared some phenomenal insights to business, to branding, and we really dived into that space to provide you with as much value as possible.