The Grit Blueprint

A Brand That Sells: Mastering B2B Branding with Stefanie Couch

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Branding in the building materials industry is the foundation of trust, growth, and legacy, not just logos and colors. Strong brands differentiate products in crowded markets, helping companies avoid competing solely on price while creating emotional connections that drive purchasing decisions.

• Psychology of branding explains how emotions drive 95% of purchasing decisions, even in B2B transactions
• Strong brands like Trex, James Hardie, and Kohler have invested decades building authority that contractors remain loyal to
• Branding takes time and consistent investment – it's a decades-long game, not a quick-win strategy
• Small companies with clear branding can effectively compete against larger players by highlighting nimbleness and personalized service
• Employer branding is crucial for attracting talent with 25% of the industry retiring in the next decade
• Companies with CEOs who have personal brands see 11% more profitability and attract better talent
• Consistency in messaging, visuals, and customer experience must align with what your brand claims to be about
• Successful branding involves sharing stories rather than simply claiming product superiority

If you want your company to stand out today and thrive tomorrow, branding is not optional – it's absolutely essential. For more tools, training and industry content, make sure to subscribe here and follow me on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. To find out more about how Grit Blueprint can help you grow your business, check us out at our website, gritblueprint.com.


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Stefanie Couch :

If you want your company to stand out today and thrive tomorrow. Branding is not optional. It's absolutely essential, but branding is really about trust and differentiating yourself in an often very crowded market. Branding communicates value behind your projects and your products and your services. That's what branding does so well, and you also want your CEO or your executive staff to build their personal brand, because executives that have a personal brand have over 11% more profitability in their company and they also attract more top talent. The four key things that I want you to know is Welcome to the Grit Blueprint Podcast, the show for bold builders, brand leaders and legacy makers in the construction and building industry. I'm your host, stephanie Couch, and I've been in this industry my entire life. Whether we're breaking down what's working in sales and marketing, new advances in AI and automation, or interviewing top industry leaders, you're going to get real-world strategies to grow your business, build your brand and lead your team. Let's get to work.

Stefanie Couch :

Welcome to the Grit Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Stefanie Couch, and today we're talking about one of the most misunderstood aspects of business. It's branding. This isn't about logos and taglines only. It's not just about the colors that you choose, even though those things are important. Branding is really the foundation of trust, growth and legacy in any business. I personally believe that it's the most important thing in building a business that can stand the test of generational challenges and all of the things that go through a business's life cycle if you're going to be around for a long time. When it comes to the building materials industry, a strong brand is no longer optional. It's actually essential, and that's being proven more every single day.

Stefanie Couch :

I actually grew up in the building industry and have been in a small family lumberyard and also worked for a large Fortune 500 company for 10 years helping them grow a new division of their business the door and millwork segment and I found out really quickly how much brand really mattered when we started getting into something that we were not known for. You see, our brand that corporate business was known for things like engineered wood and commodity lumber and all of those other things that they had sold for years. But when we told people, hey, we sell doors, they were like really, I thought you guys just sold lumber and it was a brand shift that we had to do. And still they are working on that to try to get that brand out there and that is not something that a lot of companies focus on, and I want to talk a little bit more about that today.

Stefanie Couch :

Branding is really critical in building materials. It's an industry where trust, reliability, service and being different than your competitors they're the backbone of long-term success. If you're working with contractors maybe designers, architects or maybe you're working with distributors maybe you're actually working with manufacturers your brand is what actually drives long term high value relationships, the type of business that all of us would love and would fight to have for a long time. Those are the customers that you want to keep and they're the ones that you want to understand what your brand's about. So today, in this episode, we're really going to hit four main topics. We're going to talk about what is branding, defining it and explaining why it actually matters to you in your business. Secondly, we're going to explore how branding applies specifically to B2B sales in building materials. I get asked this a lot. Well, hey, branding is really only important to consumer brands. We don't sell to consumers. Well, that's where you're wrong, because branding really matters in B2B. Third, we're going to talk about common objections and misconceptions that I hear all the time about branding. You've probably thought or heard some of these things as well if you've been in the industry a while. And then, last but not least, we're going to show how branding really impacts everything from attracting top talent in your market which is a huge problem in our industry and will become even more of a problem in the future to becoming that trusted legacy business in the market that you want to build. That will stand the test of time for generations to come, if you and your family choose to keep the business, or it will be a highly profitable, sellable asset for you and your family at some point when you decide to sell. There is so much consolidation in this industry so it's important either way, no matter what side of the coin you fall on.

Stefanie Couch :

First I'm going to break down brand that word. It's a big picture word. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. Brand is not just your website, it's not just the color of your trucks. It's the perception of your business. It's an emotional and practical association that people have with your company. Think of it as a bridge between who you are now and how your customers actually feel about you, and that bridge sometimes is a lot shorter than we believe. That it is because the things that we do in that association emotionally, even in B2B business, actually matters. Our relationships matter. We all know this is a relationship business. I hear that all the time, but that doesn't mean that branding doesn't actually come into play here. So let's talk a little bit about psychology Spoiler. For you guys that don't know, I actually majored in psychology and social science in college while I was working at my dad's lumberyard full time, and I love this stuff. So I'm going to nerd out on you just a little bit, but follow along with me because this is important.

Stefanie Couch :

Brands exist in the mind of our consumers. So no matter who you're selling whether it's B2B or B2C or maybe B2B2C, like most of us are these brands actually evoke trust. They have a feeling of building confidence in what you're getting and sometimes they really can even evoke excitement, which is really cool. Harvard Business Review statistics show that emotions actually drive 95% of our purchasing decisions. And before you say, oh yeah, but that's not in B2B, that actually is even true in B2B. That actually is even true in B2B sales and there are a lot of examples of how this works. But if you really think about the decisions that we make, most of them are actually subconscious. Our brains do not have enough time to make every single little decision that we make be a top of mind thing where we can think through it and we really think about what we're doing. A lot of our decision making is actually autonomous, almost like breathing. We don't even realize that we are going towards something because of the way it looks or the way we feel about it.

Stefanie Couch :

I want you to think for a minute about something from your childhood. So I'll give you a good Georgia Southern girl example. Here I grew up eating boiled peanuts and for those of you who can't understand my Southern dialect, that is B-O-I-L-E-D peanuts. They're boiled in a pot of water with salt. That's it. It's peanuts. They're green peanuts, by the way, and it's water and it's salt. Super simple.

Stefanie Couch :

And I grew up coming up to Northeast Georgia, where I live now. Before I moved here, my granddad had a cabin. We would come up and every single time we would stop at Fred's Boiled Peanut Stand, and that place was my childhood in a little shack. Basically, I loved going there. It evokes memories of joy, of family, of all these things that I care about, and when I eat peanuts now, which are one of my favorite treats. I think I would rather have it than a five Michelin star restaurant and I absolutely love them and I think a lot of that is because of the emotion that's tied to me eating those with my family when I was growing up, all those things.

Stefanie Couch :

I know you have a story. A lot of that is because of the emotion that's tied to me eating those with my family when I was growing up, all those things. I know you have a story, a lot of stories that make you feel that same exact way where you think of something, a brand or a product, and you feel something inside. Maybe you can feel excitement, maybe you get mad. Think about a brand that maybe really ticked you off. The customer service was terrible. A restaurant you ate at that you got sick at. Oh man, like nothing stings, like a stomach bug or food poisoning after you eat somewhere and it is really hard to mentally want to go back to that place. So I want to talk a little bit about that in the context of someone who has actually done a brand. Revitalization has changed the minds of someone. In branding it is a consumer brand, but I'm going to use this as an example because I think everyone will know what I'm talking about.

Stefanie Couch :

New Balance is a shoe company. You probably might have thought right when I said that of the chunky white sneakers that older white men like to wear. This is something that New Balance was struggling with for around 15 years. Their sales had been declining, stagnant or declining for over 15 years. So the CEO finally said, hey, we got to do something. He hires a new CMO and that new CMO says look, I really want to shake things up here, I really want to go for the gold. Can I do something wild and crazy? And so he started to rebrand and he put 70% of his marketing spend into rebranding, which you may think sounds insane. That's a lot of money and these companies obviously their marketing budgets are a lot different than the building industries. They are very substantial. So to flip that from 80-20 in the way of branding only getting 20% to 70% branding, that is a tough sell. And the first 14 months actually, sales continued to decline and I'm sure there are lots of naysayers that said, like this guy doesn't know what he's doing and now we're wasting all this money. But after month 19 it actually exponentially went the other way and started to hockey stick grow in the favor of branding the way that he was trying to brand.

Stefanie Couch :

And now Gen Zers everywhere love these clunky, big white shoes and they wear them with big, chunky socks that you've probably seen and I think it's atrocious, but they love them. They have experienced record-breaking growth. They went all in on brand and you need to get this right for this to work. But the point of the story is that it did work. It took money and it took time. So the biggest takeaway from this is that branding really is about creating trust, reliability. It differentiates you in a crowded market, it makes you stand out and people associate emotionally with your brand if you do it well. But it will take time and it will take effort and it will take money. So if you're not willing to invest some time probably a good bit of it, which we're going to talk about and some money, then you are probably not ever going to win at the branding game, and that's okay. There's no guarantee that you'll be able to build a legacy business. Most businesses that stand the test of time have very strong brands in any industry, but you've got to decide how much you're willing to go all in on this branding thing. This could be the year that you decide to really go all in All right.

Stefanie Couch :

Topic number two why does branding matter for building industries? Well, our lumber industry and a lot of our other products are seen as a commodity, and one thing that we never want to do is compete on price. Yet here, most of us are in this industry, competing on that very thing. If you don't want to be the person who sells lumber, insulation, drywall, some of these other products that really are commodity driven, they're seen as interchangeable. The brand does not matter. If you don't want to be that person, you need to focus on building your brand, because branding really elevates your product from just another thing that's on the shelf or in the store or on the yard to being a preferred choice, something that contractors, architects, builders they ask for by name. This is where you really start to see a company grow exponentially and, more importantly, stand the test of time, because eventually there will be someone that figures out how to sell it cheaper, or someone who comes out with a brand that is more recognizable, and then you become the person who can now only compete on price, and that is really something that you don't want to do.

Stefanie Couch :

The real world impact of this is that if you brand yourself well, you're communicating out to your customers what makes your product or your service unique. It may be that it's superior in quality. It may be that you deliver faster, you have exceptional service. You have all of these things that contractors, architects, distributors all these people you sell love. It will build a stickiness in your marketing, in your branding, in your customer base, and no one doesn't want a sticky product or service. They want that thing to be something that is like a fly trap. People keep coming back. They can't get away from it. They love it so much but it's sticky because they are choosing that. It's not by force, it's not something that you have to have, but it's something that they're choosing. That is the best type of brand that there can ever be Building trust and loyalty with people, contractors and distributors. They stick with brands that they know and trust. How many of you know a contractor and he or she absolutely will not change from the brand that they love.

Stefanie Couch :

We like to call this in the business being able to veto and make homeowners or people who are building and using these products. They make them a choice to veto the thing that that homeowner has seen or thinks, or maybe even the dealer or distributor is trying to push on them. They will say, for instance, I'm sorry, I don't want that other brand, I want Trex. Or I'm sorry, I don't want that other brand, I want James Hardy. I use these two brands because Zonda recently did a study and Zonda's results showed that there are a few brands that have worked for years, decades, to build the brand authority that they now have. Trex and James Hardy are two of those. Kohler is another one. Those brands now are so far ahead of other brands in the market that they almost don't seem to be able to be caught, according to this research from Zonda. And contractors have a very big loyalty to these brands. In fact, when a homeowner comes to them and says, hey, I saw this commercial or I saw this thing, I saw this website when I was doing some research on this product, this decking or the siding, those contractors are so loyal to those brands that the homeowners are probably asking for them and then the contractor is vetoing any other ask to get back to that brand they're loyal to.

Stefanie Couch :

Now, this is obviously not an endorsement for Trex, kohler or James Hardy. I love other products in those categories as well. I'm just telling you what the data says. On Zonda's data, these brands are standing apart and if you go and do a deep dive into why they're standing apart, it is because they have spent years and millions of dollars getting to that branding. So now you're telling me well, steph, I'm hearing you, but I don't have millions of dollars to spend. Well, that's okay, you need to spend something, you need to focus on this somehow, and you can use some guerrilla marketing tactics, some guerrilla branding tactics, to build a brand. I'll give you an example of someone. I recently heard a podcast about this. There's a brand called Gym Launch, and Gym Launch did a lot of in-person networking at trade shows and they found that even though their ROI on those trade shows of actually going in-person probably wasn't as great as could have been done online with sales, this is a consumer product that focuses on fitness wear for people that are fitness enthusiasts, but even though they didn't actually get an ROI on that exact moment, the later data showed that the cities that they had gone to in person had exponentially more sales than the cities they had not been to long term.

Stefanie Couch :

So think about where you're going and what you're spending your time on and then when you're showing up at these trade shows. I know a lot of people spend a ton of money on things like IBS and NALA. I just spoke at NALA and did the keynote there. World Millwork Alliance did the keynote there, saw all these amazing booths and different things. And IBS is even bigger. They do crazy stuff on their booths there. I think Kohler spends $10 million on their booth every year. But if you're thinking about your ROI on that, think about it long-term. It's not just about that day, that weekend, that moment that someone's in your booth. It's about the long-term value that people associate with your brand.

Stefanie Couch :

I want to tell you a childhood story. I grew up in a lumberyard you already know that and I remember that Pink Panther was one of my favorite things because it was pink and, as you can see from what you're seeing here with pink hat, pink nails, pink everything I think the inside of my soul is pink and I've always loved it. So the fact that Pink Panther was a known icon that had actually been a long-term cartoon that a lot of people born in you know. Times before in the boomer age, they actually knew what Pink Panther was. So, owens Corning, they actually decided that they were going to make their insulation pink. They were going to make everything pink logo all of it on the insulation, and they were going to use the Pink Panther to brand that as a campaign. This worked very well because people that didn't really care or know anything about insulation like Stephanie that was a seven-year-old girl when that OC salesperson came in and brought me my first little plush, pink Panther which I still have to this day, by the way. It's been a long time. I won't date myself, but I have that Pink Panther in a keepsake box because it was cool and it's still cool, and that's been years.

Stefanie Couch :

So insulation became something that now was branded and it associated something that you already liked. So if you knew okay, you know even the song that the Pink Panther walks out to right. So you connected that product with innovation, dependability, all the things that Owens Corning is known for. And then you've also connected it to something you know and love the Pink Panther. It's genius, it's like the Chick-fil-A cows. It works and they're still using that today. So that's just a little example from my childhood that I love and you probably love too. Maybe I don't know. Maybe you sell insulation against this brand and you don't love that story, but I bet you remember that that's who you're competing against.

Stefanie Couch :

I want to go back to psychology for just a moment, an emotional connection, because I think this is so important. I want you to think about repeated exposure and you need to see things over and over. One time is usually not enough for people to associate things in your brain. Branding really is about the association of two things. You have one thing and then you have another thing and somehow you connect those dots in the brain of your consumer and by doing that over and over you're creating a familiarity. You're building trust through those links that you are continuing to go and use.

Stefanie Couch :

And if a contractor has seen the brand of house wrap or maybe it's the treated lumber you use Maybe they always see the yellow wood commercials. Jimmy Raines with Great Southern Wood is a genius at this. He's probably one of the first personal brands that I've ever known in the industry of building industry products that have come in and say, hey, I'm going to brand myself and I'm going to be the face of the brand and then I'm going to use that to leverage. And he made everything yellow, obnoxious yellow. And now when I see a truck of treated lumber go down the street or go down the road. I know if that little tag on the end is yellow, it's great Southern wood and it's yellow wood. They have branded pressure treated commodity lumber. That is quite a feat if you know anything about our industry.

Stefanie Couch :

So you really are creating cognitive shortcuts. You are creating a bridge right from one thing to the other, and a strong brand helps us simplify decision making. It reduces the amount of mental effort that we need to be able to make that decision, to create and evaluate something that gets us to an end decision point. The more you can make those bridges, those shortcuts, the better off you're going to be. I want to challenge you to think about what that means for your brand. What does that mean in your company? What does that mean for you as a person If you have a personal brand and people automatically think of something when they see you, talk to you, hear your name? Because they definitely do if they know who you are at all. Maybe they don't, and if they don't know who you are, that could be just as much of a problem, because anonymity and not being actually known at all could be the worst possible sentence for a brand or a product or a building company.

Stefanie Couch :

Number three how long is this going to take? Branding is a long-term investment. If you are looking for a quick hit, an ROI, to drive revenue tomorrow, it's probably not branding. There are a lot of other revenue generation tools in the marketing toolbox, in the sales toolbox, that can help you get to the hey, we need to make five more sales tomorrow. We need to do this today, but much like buying a new piece of equipment, the return on investment is seen over a long period of time. That's why when we buy new equipment, like a truck or a door machine or any of these things, we actually have years that we put them in the P&L over all this time. We don't make that hit all at once.

Stefanie Couch :

And branding is the same. It is a decades game. It is not a quick win. It's really a commitment to your future and your legacy as a company. It's a foundational effort that is really building blocks for your future. And if you're not planning on being in business for five to 10 years, or even you know a short term, if you're doing something in the short term, you're not going to reap the full rewards of this. So if you are three weeks out from retirement, you can just stop this podcast now if you're not interested any longer, because this is not something that you need to do for the next three weeks. This is a decades game. This is a decade's game, but if you want to build a legacy business, if you want your business to stand the test of time, for your grandkids to be telling the story of how they're running the same lumberyard or building materials company that their grandpa ran or their grandmother owned, like my grandfather, then you need to do branding efforts now. Remember that this is also a compounding effort. Warren Buffett says that leverage and compounding interests are the two things that are the most valuable things in business, and I tend to think that old Warren, uncle Warren, is pretty smart. Each touch point that we build on brand it is built upon with the next stepping stone to make people remember, trust and, hopefully, love us and our products. Over time, we become a default choice.

Stefanie Couch :

When I go to the ketchup aisle, I don't think about what I'm going to buy, other than if they have a sale on Heinz ketchup and I don't want to start it right here if you're a Heinz person, but I'm sorry if you are, because it's a bad choice, but I'm a Heinz girl. My dad's a Heinz person, my grandfather was a Heinz person, my mom likes Heinz, everybody in our family. It's a Heinz deal, right. And so when I go to the aisle for ketchup, I default to my hand going straight to the Heinz, and I'm just trying to figure out which size I'm going to buy. Do I want to buy the bigger one? Is the smaller one? Buy one, get one free at Publix. That's how I make my decision. It is a default choice for me.

Stefanie Couch :

So how do you make people become a default to you, to you as a product or service? It is very possible, and there are a lot of people that already have this type of loyalty. So you may be saying to me okay, steph, I hear you, you know, I hear all the things you're saying, but we have a huge business and we're not hurting. In fact, for the last four years we haven't really even been able to take all the orders that people have wanted to give us, and we all know what was during. The pandemic was the craziest time I've ever seen in my life, and I've been around for over 30 years in this business, but that was an anomaly. That was a blip on a small radar of the legacy business building efforts that you have to make to really make things good for a long time. If you wanna win forever in this game, you wanna be around 100 years from now. You're gonna need to do this because you will not always be catching fish in a bucket. That's what we were doing the last few years. Everybody knows it and everybody understands it. It's already gotten way tougher. You've already had to start fighting and competing for business again. So really just think of it as a foundational need. It's consistent, it's strategic and you're showing up building that brand every single day to continue to grow where you can stand the test of time.

Stefanie Couch :

Next I'm going to cover. One of my favorite parts of this is the objections. So I'm a salesperson by trade and I have been handling objections my whole life and now that I'm in the branding business and the growth and strategy world of building materials, I'm handling some different objections, right, sometimes it's the same ones, like hey, that's too much money, or hey, that takes too long. That's the same type of thing, but I'm going to go into each one. So the number one branding objection that I hear of why I wouldn't spend the time and the money on branding is because, steph, it doesn't deliver results immediately. I want to see my results. Marketing is mystical and magical and I don't even really believe in it, but I certainly don't want to do it if it's going to take 10 years.

Stefanie Couch :

You're saying it's a decades game. Well, here's the thing it's not about instant results. And if you think that it is, I would ask you to go do the research on companies who crush it in the branding space, whether they're in building materials or not, and see how long they've been investing their time, their effort and their money into branding campaigns and working on this strategy work. I guarantee you most companies have done it for a long time if they have built a brand that is really known in the industry and becomes a default choice. Companies with really strong brands, after they get to that point, end up spending less time, less money and less effort on customer acquisition and retention of clients. So, yes, you're paying now, yes, it's going to take some time and you will reap the harvest later and in exponential ways that cannot be purchased. If you think about ad spend and all these other things that we can do to lever? We can hire more salespeople, we can do all those things. That is all kind of a one-to-one ratio. It can be a lever of sorts, but branding well, it can be an exponential leverage point and if you do it well and you do it for long enough, it will become that and you can become a leader in the industry that almost cannot be caught, like some of those brands I mentioned earlier.

Stefanie Couch :

Objection number two we're a small company and we don't have time, money, to spend on this. Branding is really just for the big boys I've heard this a lot Small companies that have clear, consistent branding, they can often really effectively compete against the larger players in the market. As we know, this business is a relationship business and a lot of people do not want to buy from the big boys or girls, as we say. And you can really level up your playing field with branding because people know who you are and then they see that you do have a competitive advantage as a small person in the market because you're quicker, you're more nimble, you care more about every single order, you can really hone in on problems because they're not so big that you can go straight to the source and figure out why and how to fix that thing. That is why a competitive advantage is often in the small company's favor. It does work the same way with branding, but you still got to do something right, all right.

Stefanie Couch :

Objection number three here we go. Our products speak for themselves, steph. I mean, we got a quality product and you know it's quality. It's amazing. It's the best product on the market. Well, number one thing I would say to that is is that actually true? Because now, with technology and all the things that we've had advanced in our market, there are a lot of really great products out there and some of these patents that really people had that stood out where they really truly did have a competitive advantage on the quality side. A lot of those have run out. I can think of a few right now that the patents run out and now that person pretty much has the exact same recipe that you have. They have the same ingredients, the same recipe and they're trying to do the same thing that you're doing. It's just the colors on your logo are different and it's coming from a different person. So maybe that's true, maybe you truly have a quality advantage.

Stefanie Couch :

But here's what I will ask you, if no one ever knows, does it even matter? Is that something that people are going to care about? If they don't know who you are because your brand is not strong, and oftentimes, if you think about it, you may buy something and you spend more money on it. Let's talk about clothing. You buy that shirt that has a certain logo on the chest. It's a black tee that you could buy at Walmart for five dollars, maybe ten dollars for a pack of three, and you go spend 40 or 50 dollars on that T-shirt. Maybe it's for your kid that just has to have that brand that all their friends have. Is that t-shirt really actually a better t-shirt? The truth is that sometimes those t-shirts are white labeled, so it might really be Hanes from Walmart and it's really just that company has bought the same shirt from the same manufacturer and put a logo on it.

Stefanie Couch :

Branding communicates value behind your projects and your products and your services. That's what branding does so well. So to those people who say the products speak for themselves, I surely hope they do. But if your brand is strong, then it will allow the product to speak for themselves, because people will know about you and will buy the product and then they can tell all their friends and every single person they know that it's amazing and they should buy it and it will really become that exponential leverage.

Stefanie Couch :

Last objection, number four our customers only care about price. Doesn't matter what we do. Branding won't influence them. And listen, I get it. Price matters on commodity driven items, like lumber where it's trading in the markets. Changing price definitely matters, like lumber, where it's trading, and the market's changing price definitely matters. But customers will pay more for trusted brands because it reduces their risk and it ensures their reliability. How many times have you had a customer that comes into your lumberyard or goes and calls your distributor partner and just orders what they need? They don't even price check you. Well, I know that game because I used to have that happen all the time at my dad's lumberyard when I was a little girl.

Stefanie Couch :

We had certain clients, especially builders, that did cost plus. They didn't want to get ripped off. They wanted to have a fair price. But as long as they knew that you were pricing them fair, it didn't matter if you were a little higher, because if they loved your service and what you were doing for them and your brand was strong enough, they were going to pay for it, and that happens a lot with luxury brands. There are a lot of people who will pay for a luxury brand and they don't care what it costs. Now, most people are somewhere in the middle of that, but almost everyone has favorites. You want to be the favorite brand, so how do you get to that point? You got to reduce the risk and ensure that you are a reliable partner for them and become the default choice.

Stefanie Couch :

All right, moving on to employer branding, we talked so much about customers and all that outward facing thing, but one of the biggest problems in our industry right now it is a gaping red sea parting, a horrible thing that everyone wants to solve. We don't have enough people to do the jobs in this industry that need to be done. We don't know where we're going to find them. We don't know how we're going to train them. We have a huge shortage already and over 25% of our industry is standing to retire in the next five to 10 years. The average person in the construction industry working is 42 years old. Now, for some of you you're like, well, that's really not that old, that's average, but a lot of these people are actually way older than that that are running these businesses. So we got to attract and keep and develop top talent. So how do you do that? Well, you do that by building an employer brand. So how do you do that? Well, you do that by building an employer brand. You magnetize and attract the people that you want to work here. Then, once you get them interested, you got to actually keep them there with things like training and environment and culture and all those amazing things. And it's not just about free pizza on Fridays and working from home all the time. There are other things that people care about but a strong employer brand is a way to really help this critical need in our building industry, where we have to have skilled workers and we need them to be the next generation.

Stefanie Couch :

Employers are actually amazing brand ambassadors. If you don't know what that word means, a brand ambassador is really just someone that you use. That is an outward facing sign of what your company is and what they represent. You may know about celebrity brand ambassadorship. So you've seen Joanna Gaines has partnered with some of these companies. There's another designer named Shay McGee. She partnered with Kohler. You have seen people that are influencers, that are famous, partner with big companies on the non-building material side. For instance, you see that the Rock now has a tequila brand. You see people like the Kardashians partnering in Instagram, posting about certain products that they love. That is the same thing as a brand ambassador, but you're doing that internally, for your company, and one great way to do that is actually helping your employees build personal brands.

Stefanie Couch :

What is a personal brand? It's very similar to a company brand, which is what I've been talking about, and it is where you're actually digitizing your personal brand. You are showing up online and curating who you want to be seen as and what you want to be known for, and this can be done with your employees. It's actually relatively easy. You just let them share their story, and as they share their story and they talk to people about what they're doing, it naturally makes your company look good, because if this amazing person that people love is on your team, there must be something good in that company.

Stefanie Couch :

What are employees looking for today? They want a mission to believe in. They want a purpose. I hear that a lot with young talent. We want a purpose, we want to be able to grow and we want to professionally develop. Often, gen Z says that that's more important to them than salary up front in an early role in their career, because they know that what they can actually learn now, they will be able to grow on back to that foundational level and then they can grow exponentially again to become the person that they can reach their potential, where, if they just get a great salary right now and they're not being developed, they may stay stagnant and never be able to actually grow from there. So a company that really invests in training programs, they're not only building their internal expertise, but they're enhancing their reputation in the market.

Stefanie Couch :

One objection that I often hear when I'm talking about employer branding and helping your employees build personal brands and even just really signing off on that, because a lot of people get so nervous about it is what happens if all of my good people leave because they start showing up online and they're posting and then things happen. Well, the number one answer that I have to that is if you are a great company and you're doing amazing things with your employees, they're not going to want to leave. And Richard Branson has a quote about that Be the company that grows your people so much that everyone wants them, but no one wants to leave because it's so great. That's a paraphrase of Richard. It's not exactly how he said it, but it gets the point across that you gotta be the one that everyone wants to go work for and you also want your CEO or your executive staff to build their personal brand, because executives that have a personal brand, especially at the CEO level, have over 11% more profitability in their company and they also attract more top talent. They have a lot more visibility and people are going to Google. They're going to Google you, they're going to Google your executive staff. They're going to go on your website.

Stefanie Couch :

We haven't even really talked about websites, but it's a huge thing when you land on someone's website, when you Google them, what do those people see? What do you see when you look at some of these websites in the industry? I do a lot of industry websites as part of what my company does is helping by branding and helping you grow through actually having a strong website presence, and it is really sad when I Google some of these companies that I know and love and see what they're allowing to represent themselves. Your talent is also looking at that. If your website is the same website from 2014 or, even worse, 1999, you need to update it, unless you're Warren Buffett, and then you can leave your Berkshire Hathaway website the same exact thing that when the internet was made and if you don't believe me, go look at berkshirehathawaycom and you'll understand exactly what I mean. It will give you a good laugh. The main point of this is share behind the scenes culture and content to showcase what you have going on as a company, and if you don't want to share something about your company, then you may want to do some more work which is not my area of expertise on how to really make that culture something that people want to be a part of. All right, wrapping this bad boy up.

Stefanie Couch :

Today we have talked about lots of things in branding. I hope you've taken away some things that have helped you. Maybe you've spurred some thoughts in your mind. I want you to think about your default brands. What do you buy without thinking about? I bet you it's a lot more things than you think of. When you really start to write down a list, what are the brands that you would probably never change from? Maybe it's at the grocery store, at the clothing store. Maybe it's your online, your news that you watch. Maybe it's your favorite social media platform. Maybe it's the brand of building materials that you like to buy from your manufacturer that you are so really in love with. Maybe you love your rep, maybe you love the product, maybe you love the pricing. Whatever it is, think about what it is and why.

Stefanie Couch :

The four key things that I want you to know is I want you to commit to the long game of branding. If you're in this, if you heard this and you're like Steph, I'm in it with you. I know and understand this is truly a valuable thing. I want to be here in 10 to 15 years. I want to be here in 100 years, or somebody to be here in 100 years in this legacy business. Then start with your branding efforts today, but start small. You may have limited resources. You may want to just start with something really little, but you can really build a cool brand with consistent steps and they do add up. It is compounding interest. So start small, but don't delay any further. You've already waited, probably too late. There's nothing we can do about that. They say the best time to plant that tree is 20 years ago, but we didn't do that, so we're going to plant it right now, today.

Stefanie Couch :

The second tip I have for you is focus on consistency. You got to make sure that your branding, messaging, your visuals, the way you actually look physically, online or in person at that show, and your customer experience this is a big one. They have to actually align with what you say your brand is about, because if you say, hey, this is what my brand is, this is how it's supposed to look, and then no one else follows that and there's mixed messaging, it actually could hurt you more than it helps you. Now, I don't want that to scare you away. It doesn't mean perfection. It means that you've just got to make a plan and stick with it. So if you have people using your logo in a crazy, weird way and making insane colors all the time, you want to think about that. What would you think if Coca-Cola used the color blue as a Santa? That would be really weird, right, because Pepsi is blue. Have you ever noticed that Coca-Cola uses a red Santa? But you'll never see Pepsi have a red Santa. They're never going to have Santa wearing red on Pepsi cans, ever. I don't even know if they put Santas on Pepsi cans I haven't ever paid that much attention but I guarantee you it won't be red if it's a Santa on a Pepsi can.

Stefanie Couch :

All right, here we go, involve your team. You don't have to do this alone. You don't have to hire a thousand people to go do this. Train your employees on how to be the brand they want to embody, what you have and what you show, and how you show up in your brand. Every single customer interaction matters. How they are seen as one person is how you're seen as the brand above and the company actually levels up, because each individual person is really doing what they should be doing to build the brand. It also is a great way to allow your employees to shine. Leverage that employer branding to show and highlight your company culture, your opportunities and the growth for top talent and, lastly, showcase your success stories.

Stefanie Couch :

Instead of saying my product's the best, share a story, because we connect with stories deeply, much more than facts or figures or technical information. Nobody really cares about that. I want you to share your products and your services in the guise of a real problem in the world that you solved. Tell me about that home or that contractor that you fixed that issue with your product. Tell me about the time that you got someone out of a bind because your service is so amazing. Give me some stories that I can relate to and see myself in. Make that story something that could be me. It could have been my house, it could have been my job site, it could have been my paycheck that was at risk, but you helped me with this, all right.

Stefanie Couch :

And in conclusion, really branding is not just about visuals. It's not just about colors and logos All those things matter, but branding is really about trust and differentiating yourself in an often very crowded market, and mostly it's about building a legacy brand that people love that will be around for generations to come. If you choose to have it, be there. Don't allow yourself to become Kodak or Blockbuster or some of these brands that used to be so amazing. Everything has a cycle and if you don't choose to continue to grow with the way that people find you like it's happening right now, where it's going from a word of mouth business to a digital online buy, an online business, you're gonna be left behind and, unfortunately, you're gonna be sawdust. In the building materials industry, trust is the currency that we have, and so is relationship buildings, and if you build a brand, it can be the foundation of your long-term success If you want your company to stand out today and thrive tomorrow. Branding is not optional. It's absolutely essential. The decisions that you make now are going to really define your place in the market for years to come.

Stefanie Couch :

I'm challenging you today to evaluate where you are in the market and how your brand actually shows up, and I want you to be objective here. This is a hard exercise. Are you building something that will last, or are you building something that is really great right now that probably won't be around in a few years if you don't make a change? If not, now is the time to start. I'm Stefanie Couch, and thank you for joining me for this episode of the Grit Blueprint. That's it for this episode of the Grit Blueprint podcast. For more tools, training and industry content, make sure to subscribe here and follow me on LinkedIn and other social media platforms to find out more about how Grit Blueprint can help you grow your business. Check us out at our website, gritblueprint. com.

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