Hera Hub is excited to share Startup Stories from our members in honor of National Entrepreneurship Week. Each day this week we will interview incredible business women from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines. Our goal is to share our members’ wonderful stories with the public.

Rebecca Tall-Brown is the founder of Office of Awesome. Office of Awesome offers transformative strategies that you simply can’t find anywhere else.

“We’re not a marketing agency, we’re not a bunch of freelancers, we’re brand producers—meaning, we take what an organization has and we make it a lot more awesome.”

Rebecca has been a member of our Mission Valley, California location for more than three years. Here is Rebecca’s Startup Story:

Growing up in a family business. I saw hucksters, marketing tool charlatans, trying to sell my parents everything from Yellow Page “upgrades” to midnight hour radio spots. These tool hucksters worked at befriending my parents – with a priority on making their sales quotas, not what target market bought from a neighborhood nursery. And I KNEW that if my parents misspent, if the tactic didn’t work, we wouldn’t be taking our annual trip to a hotel with a pool – we’d be car camping. And this was BEFORE the internet… so multiply those tactic hustlers by about sixteen fold.

It’s not uncommon for a business to waste tremendous resources on marketing because they don’t have a strategy – what usually happens is they’ll want a new website, so they’ll start that process, and along the way they end up with a hodgepodge of social media pages, photos, copy, a logo, print collateral… all mismatched, and all the work of varying designers and professionals. The tragedy is they’ll have spent eight times more than they would have spent, had they had a straight-forward strategy to guide the process.

I’ve spent the last decade honing how to bring straight-forward, working strategies to businesses large and small, not using cookie-cutter approaches, but instead taking a cue from what works for each business’s unique operations, goals, and with their specific target markets.

Our clients do awesome work and typically they’re so focused on their work, their customers, their service, their marketing often gets put on the back burner. They are in the business for the right reasons, they are experts at their crafts, leading their industries, coming up with amazing products and solutions.

And because they’re not talking about their work to the full capacity, their sub-par competitors have the advantage. We plug the hole in those boats by getting them a marketing strategy – we call it a Brand Architecture. And we transform those brands to make them real, relevant, and recognizable, in order to make their businesses grow.

1. Don’t be icky.
Life’s just better under this tenant.

2. Err on the side of “doing what’s right.”
It buoys me when things don’t go well, and it’s what humbles me when things do.

3. People first.
Projects come and go, relationships are forever.

4. Play for the end game.
When I look back at my working career I want to know my work improved lives and the planet.

My business partner, Leah Prehn, came up with it – throughout our projects, she just kept saying, “I just want an office of awesome people.” You know the old adage if you want something that doesn’t exist, you have to build it yourself? That’s what we did.

Seeing amazing, hardworking clients receive opportunities and watching them being able to help more people, do more of their awesome work, because of their newly working brand. We have a law firm client – they specialize in Veterans Benefits – and it can take seven years for a Veteran to get their full benefits. Veterans who are 92 are still not getting their benefits. Returning veterans from the Iraq/Afghanistan wars are living in their cars, or on the streets, because their petitions for benefits are being denied. How unfair and messed up is this?! This law firm changes lives. Hell, I know it SAVES lives. To know that a mailer, or a process diagram we design has THAT kind of power… there is nothing better than that. Marketing has been idly used for a century. There is SO much power in communicating the work of phenomenal organizations.

Focus – especially when you want to do good AND do well.

To be able to train other marketing service providers how to work strategically – and how to build their own Office of Awesome.

I’m going to steal from my dad, a 45 year entrepreneur: Never start with a negative. Whatever your idea. If you start with a negative, you might as well not start at all.