Scaling with Purpose: The Art of Growing While Staying True to Your Identity - Meg Schlabs - S2. Ep. 13

Agencies That Build

In this episode, we are joined by Meg Schlabs, Co-founder & Creative Director at Wizardly, a visionary brand strategist specializing in creative branding and design services. With a background in copywriting and a passion for creativity, Meg crafts captivating brand positioning and design, leaving a lasting impression on clients and their audiences. She values partnership and trust, navigating the challenges and successes of building a business together. In this conversation, she talks about brand positioning, traditional A/B testing, and partnering with family members in a business.

Discussion Points -

• What sort of bogus strategy, or misconception do you want to set the record straight on? 4:08
• What is the best approach to determining the right brand positioning and logo design when traditional A/B testing is not applicable? 5:07
• How did your agency decide to involve creative experts directly in client conversations, and what led to the realization that this approach was more effective than the traditional method of relying solely on account managers or producers? 12:09
• Can you share the origin story of Wizardly, including how the company came into existence, and the inspiration behind the name "Wizardly"? 14:45
• What are some of the learnings in partnering up with somebody in the family? 21:11
• What tools do you use to facilitate project planning, maintain reference points, and ensure smooth communication within your team? 27:43
• How did your agency identify the need to pivot towards the biotech niche, and what strategies did you employ to successfully transition your services while ensuring continued revenue generation? 33:53
• How did you identify the need to support startup target audiences and position your agency as a valuable partner? And, how do you determine the pricing structure? 37:23
• Where do you spend your time researching and learning about this industry? How do you keep yourself up-to-date? 41:44
• What are your pain points? What is something that keeps you up at night? 43:55
• What is exciting you about the future? 46:01

Show notes -

• We use a combination of research on the target audience and brand positioning. And I believe that every business is scaling into something at any given moment. 5:44
• We do a ton of competitor analysis, and target audience research. And, based on the research, we identify brand differentiators' value propositions. 8:35
• The first strategy session is all about digesting, and the second one is about presenting. The third one is focused on defining and hammering out the details, allowing us to walk away from this meeting, knowing what we're going to create. 9:15
• There's no perfect answer, and it's better to move forward, we're going to see more progress moving forward, than if we're standing, still debating which way to go. 10:45
• You learn something about yourself when you observe how your business interacts with its market. 11:07
• There needs to be more connection between the person that's driving this project, the one who knows the company, and the person going off to write copy for the web project. 13:34
• The beauty of parenting is that they're just passing through your fingers; you only have a few moments in time to be a part of their life. Similarly, with employees, we have limited time to be a part of their work journey and cultivate them as humans while pushing them toward their goals. 32:49
• We start with a deck, which helps to solidify our clients' messaging. This way, they can better understand their own identity and develop an elevator pitch to confidently present themselves when walking into a room. 36:45.
• Building a company and taking care of your people, doing good work they're those threads that run through every business. So, I find the most inspiration from my friends who are building companies and are in the same stage of building. 42:57
• I'm excited about design subscriptions and seeing where this leads for Wizardly. We have intentionally not been a retainer-based company because we feel like retainers can sometimes be unfair to both parties. So, it takes a lot more effort to restart the scope with clients and manage cash flow. But we have a new product - design subscriptions - that we're rolling out in an effort to provide really solid design services. 46:11

Myth Busted - There is a perfect logo or brand position for companies.

Links -

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meg-schlabs-7a7714b1/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/megschlabs

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megaustinschlabs/

Company website: https://wizardly.co/

Show Credits -

Host - Varun Bihani & Jessie Coan

Produced by Bobby Soni

Edited by Priyanka Sharma

Content by Aakash Damani, Yashika Neekhra, and Juhie Bhardwaj