IAM1093- Business Owner Helps Entrepreneurs Become Visible

Kim Speed is a brand visibility expert, speaker, trainer, award recipient of the 2019 Most Influential Business Woman in Brand Development and best-selling author of Branding on a Shoestring. How to recreate your small business identity and increase sales results in 83 days or less.

Kim has worked as an art director and creative director during her years in the corporate world and worked with Fortune 500 clients including Coca-Cola, TD Bank, Ford, and Molson Coors.

In 2009, Kim started her own business, Purple Moon Creative, Brand and Marketing Boutique, where she shares her brand expertise and her business knowledge with budding and building entrepreneurs helping them become visible, memorable, and profitable.

• CEO Hack: Listening to podcasts
• CEO Nugget: You don't have to do this alone or hide behind your expectation
• CEO Defined: Having the time to work when and with who I want to work with (ii) Making an impact

Website: https://purplemooncreative.com/

http://brandingonashoestringbook.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/employeetoentrepreneursociety

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Transcription

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[00:00:07.90] – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

[00:00:37.29] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Kim Speed of Purple Moon Creative. Kim, it's great to have you on the show.

[00:00:46.79] – Kim Speed

Thank you for having me, Gresham. I am so excited to be here and, looking forward to our conversation.

[00:00:53.70] – Gresham Harkless

Definitely looking forward to it as well and super excited that you took some time out. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Kim so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. Kim is a brand visibility expert, speaker trainer, award recipient of the twenty nineteen Most Influential Businesswoman in Brand Development, and best-selling author of Branding on a Shoestring. How to create your small business identity and increase sales results in eighty-three days or less.

Kim has worked as an art director and creative director during her years in the corporate world working with Fortune five hundred company clients including Coca-Cola, TD Bank, Ford, and Molson Coors. In two thousand nine, Kim started her own business, Purple Moon Creative brand and marketing boutique, where she shares her brand expertise, her business knowledge with budding and building entrepreneurs, helping them become visible, memorable, and profitable. Kim, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:50.40] – Kim Speed

I am.

[00:01:51.59] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kick it off, I know I touched on it a little bit, but I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you guys started, what I call your CEO story.

[00:02:03.20] – Kim Speed

Okay. So I remember the clock eleven years ago, sitting in my office, being called in and told that we have lost a huge client, and they have to lay off a whole bunch of people. And I was one of them.

[00:02:19.69] – Gresham Harkless

Oh, no.

[00:02:20.50] – Kim Speed
So, my friend, I was never thinking my end goal was never to be an entrepreneur. But during that time, I packed up my bags and took that walk out with some of my other co-workers. It's one of those emotional days. You hug each other goodbye, and go home and, you tell your family what's going on. And I was the steady breadwinner. So my husband was an entrepreneur, and I was the one with the benefits and, the steady job and the regular paycheck. So it was a bit of that.

But, a surprising thing happened, in Gresham, during the time I was at home, networking and putting my resume together and looking for another job, which I just assumed that's what I was going to do. It's not that I didn't have any skills or qualifications, so I could certainly do that. But I spent some time with my family. Being present with my family during the day was just, a light bulb moment. I did not realize how much time I'd been spending away from my kids, how much time, or how much I had been missing and not seeing what they were doing.

I felt like all of a sudden I was given the gift of being part of their life, and I didn't want it to go away. So that's when it, all started to percolate. Like, how can I remain part of their lives, be present, be with them, and do the things that I like to do and still make an income? And that's, me jumping in full with both feet and saying, okay. Well, tell me how this is gonna work out, and I went out and started offering my services. And that was the beginning of my entrepreneurial career.

[00:04:23.30] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, I'm sorry to hear about being laid off as somebody who has been laid off before. It doesn't feel, great and warm and fuzzy to say the least. But I love that phrase that you said given the gift. And I think when sometimes things happen that we don't, sometimes understand or maybe even agree with and wanna fight, sometimes if we can look on the other side or just ride it out, there might be some other opportunities or different ways that we can kind of approach our lives or our businesses or whatever that might be that provides a gift at the end of the tunnel. So I think it's great that you've been able to see that and remind us of how important that is as well.

[00:05:02.89] – Kim Speed

Yeah. It really, truly was a gift. It would be, like I said, it was never a plan. And if this hadn't happened, I wouldn't have ever as I call it, I saw the light all of a sudden, and I saw that there was a different opportunity.

[00:05:18.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And the beauty of that is that you had been cultivating, your skills and your, talents for so many years before being able to kinda start the business. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about what you're doing with Purple Moon Creative, how you're working with clients, and how you've been able to cultivate those skills.

[00:05:36.60] – Kim Speed

So, what I started off doing, was working with people and helping them to, brand and market themselves. And, I went out and just worked with my network and connected with people. And the people who knew me wanted to hire me, or I hope they wanna hire me. But I got work that way. However, I knew that wasn't sustainable because it was all I had done was create another job for myself without the benefits except that I was working from home and able to be with my family.

But I knew that if I needed to, have something sustainable, I had to do the work that I made my clients do and for myself. And that was to figure out who is my audience. What are their problems? Where can, I reach them? And how can I tell them who I am and what I stand for and what I can do for them? Once I started to focus on that, it was amazing. My ideal client found me and, started she asked if she could work with me, and, she was a small business owner. She was starting a second business. She had been trying to work with marketing and marketing and advertising agencies, but they just weren't able to give her the time of day.

She was too small. They were too costly. And she heard about me through a friend of a friend, and we started working together. And I realized how much I knew and, you know, had taken for granted that I was able to bring and offer her and help her to, you know, brand her business, market it, and see it grow from, you know, opening one location to then having three locations. And that's when I knew this is my audience, and this is who I could help.

[00:07:36.69] – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for yourself or the business, or a combination of both. But what do you feel sets you apart and makes you unique?

[00:07:48.60] – Kim Speed

The one thing that I would say is I'm really, passionate about finding, other people's uniqueness And, being able to see things that they don't see for themselves. So when I work with people, a lot of times, they don't realize the expertise they have or the authority that they already have and, or they don't know what to do with it. And I'm able to take all that and, mold it into something that helps them step into their spotlight and get seen and get, heard, and more importantly, be remembered.

[00:08:30.50] – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to, switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:08:41.29] – Kim Speed

Listening to podcasts has made me more, effective and efficient because, I listen to and listen and learn while I'm able to keep, moving and work in, fitness into my life, which I'm sure everybody's experienced this a little bit now because if you're working from home, you can find yourself sitting for a very long period and forgetting all about that physical part that is needed. And if you don't do it, you're not healthy. So I incorporate both of them. So I'd love to hear, podcasts that there are things that I wanna listen to, and I know that I'll learn from them. And I do that while I walk, so I can incorporate it too.

[00:09:33.10] – Gresham Harkless

Well, I would agree with that. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around a brand or small business strategy, or it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.

[00:09:49.89] – Kim Speed

Well, if I hop into the time machine and go back, I would tell myself that, you don't have to do this alone, and you don't have to hide behind your expectations or what you think other people expect of you. I used to think that, I couldn't let people know that I was starting or that I wasn't established enough, and I would hide behind pretend successes. And I hid behind that long enough that, it almost was to a detriment, and I almost had to go back and find a job because I was afraid to tell people I wasn't doing well yet. I was doing okay, but I wasn't doing well enough. And finally, I went and put up the white flag and said, you know what? I need help. And I found a business coach. I found some mentors, and I went out and, became part of communities of business people and learned about safety.

[00:10:53.29] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That's so huge. And I appreciate you for being vulnerable and sharing that and being vulnerable at that time as well too because I think, I say so often that, a lot of times in business, whenever you start a business, you're an entrepreneur or CEO or whatever title we might give, you have some sort of ego where you're saying, hey. Maybe I can create something bigger, better, and better.

But at the same time, you also wanna be able to lean back from that ego and not have that ego overtake you and be able to ask for help, to be humble, to be able to say, I don't have everything figured out. Can you help me with x, y, and z? And the magical thing that happens is a lot of times we all wanna help out each other. So it opens up so many doors of opportunities that we never would have thought would have existed.

[00:11:39.10] – Kim Speed

Exactly. It's amazing. As soon as I started to open up the floodgates of help and what you know, my success was so much quicker than if I hadn't said anything. And I was just but I was just so afraid to let people know that, oh, you know what? She's not doing that great. And I think a lot of it too is coming from people in my family who didn't understand why would you be an entrepreneur. Why wouldn't you go back and have a job? So you're trying to put up that facade.

[00:12:13.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Thank you for sharing that because I experienced that as well too where I felt like I took a path that a lot of the people that were closest to me didn't necessarily agree with. And that was a lot of times where you start to and I say for myself, you start to hunker down and don't, ask for help as much or don't show that, vulnerability because you feel like you have to charge through, you want this to happen, and you drill down on that. But I think if we start to understand that as we ask for help, maybe if it isn't the closest around us in the beginning, we will start to see that opportunity, and people who maybe have gone through similar situations get connected with us and wanna see us succeed just like I'm sure somebody helped them out as well.

[00:12:52.39] – Kim Speed

Yeah. Exactly. So that's I would tell everybody to get connected with the right people, and get help.

[00:13:02.29] – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Well, Kim, truly appreciate that. And now I wanna ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, and we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So, Kim, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:15.70] – Kim Speed

Being a CEO to me means having the time to work when I want to work with who I want to work with, on what I want to work on instead of having to work, to build somebody else's business. I'm now working on things that I love with people I like to work with, and I am making an impact while making an income.

[00:13:47.60] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I appreciate that, and I love how you help so many people do that as well too in your business and then the impact that you have there. And I love how it also comes full circle with what we talked about. Like, when you got started, you started to realize that you wanted to be there for your family. And I always visualize, like, it being a painter. You get to see, like, this is the life I wanna have. This is the business I wanna have. And you get to create your masterpiece from there.

[00:14:13.10] – Kim Speed

Yeah. That's beautiful. I love the way you put that. Creating your masterpiece, and we all have one within us.

[00:14:22.20] – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Well, Kim, truly appreciate that. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you, get a copy of your book, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

[00:14:39.50] – Kim Speed

Well, I have to say, I am loving, that you do this, Gresham. This is wonderful, to help people. And I have, I will be telling people to come and listen to this podcast. Not because I'm on it because I've heard lots of great information. But listen to podcasts, and there's so much free information out there that, you know, you can get you started. But also make sure that you reach out to people and don't be afraid to invest in yourself as well. But I do want to, yes, give the audience a gift, and I have a free copy of my book, branding on a Shoestring, that you can get if you go to branding on Shoestringbook.com, and you can get a free copy of that from me.

[00:15:31.39] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kim. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can get a free copy of the book. I appreciate your kind words and then, reminding us as well about, how important it is to continue to sharpen the saw and to learn from experts and people that have gone through those experiences. And I think that's a beautiful opportunity with podcasts and being able to kinda learn and cultivate, ourselves as well as cultivate the opportunity we have with in front of us. So I appreciate you so much, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

[00:16:05 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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