Video Transcription
Rachel Knutton 00:02
Rachel, hello. Thank you for coming to the session today. I'm Rachel Knutton. I'm the CEO of Alluvia Studio, and we are a strategic med tech marketing company based outside of Nashville, and we help people tell their stories. As I thought about my five minutes of fame here, I want to always share something of value. Everyone who's looking for marketing is looking to stand out, right? You want to stand out from the competition. Or even if you're a person who is building your own personal brand, you want to stand out. There are many ways to do that in branding: how do you look, how do you sound, how professional are you, and how does that reflect who you are?
But I think one thing that's really easy, it's a DIY thing, if you haven't gone through this exercise already, that you can do is to define your values. You can go to Google and do a card sort for personal values and go through a really great exercise that forces you to rank your values. I went through this with Kimberly Clark Healthcare many, many years ago, and what I found is that the five things I identified have been consistent throughout my career, and it's consistent in how I run my business.
So when you think about branding, yes, I want you to come to a branding firm like mine so we can help you really get your best foot forward in creating your brand. But I think defining your values is a really great way to start, or even go back to if you haven't done it. I really love this quote from Tony Hsieh because it really points out that your core values define who you are, and your company's core values define that character and brand, and it's your destiny. It's really important just to take the time to do that.
We might think we all have the same values or that values are values, but that's not true. Your motivators and your values are going to be different, and I think taking the time to do that helps you make sure that you have identified a North Star for your organization. For me, I have my five values that I've identified, and when something doesn't feel right with a client or with an employee or with a situation, it's more than likely one of those things is out of alignment. I can go against it, but at the end of the day, probably my intuition told me this wasn't right because it wasn't in line with my North Star.
I think it's also very important because it attracts the right people. We have been so fortunate to attract a lot of great clients. Every now and then we get someone that's not a great fit, and it's probably because of the values. I'll tell you a quick story. I went to Cersei the other day in Lisbon, left my iPhone in the Uber, and my client jumped into another Uber and helped me hunt down my phone all over town, taking her away from the clinician she was there to see and all of her work. But that's because she also understands that our values are in alignment with each other, and I would do the same thing.
So you want your partners, your investors, you want them to be the kind of people that are going to jump in the Uber for you and look for your cell phone. This is part of my team here, and you might guess one of our core values in just a minute, but it's also very inspiring for your team to know where you stand. Now, I've gone through this exercise with them, and I said, I want you to define your core values. Your five aren't going to be the same as my five. You need to be in alignment with mine and be in agreement with mine. But if I also know what's motivating you, that makes me a better boss in some situations. It's actually helped define why a certain employee didn't work out or wasn't quite as comfortable in the environment. I could say, oh, you know what? It was this one thing, this core value that they weren't in alignment with.
So it's good for everybody that's involved in your team. Obviously, it's going to feed your future; it's going to fuel your future and where you go as a company. Once you set that intention, all your activities are going to point in that direction. So I just like to share mine very quickly. My last minute, ours are joy, and I believe you can have fun no matter how hard you're working. So if you don't have that sense of joy, we're probably not going to be a great fit. Authenticity: be yourself. I've heard this many, many times in the panel sessions. As a CEO, when you're trying to attract investors, just be honest and be yourself. Continuous improvement: for us, that means always trying to find a new, better way to do things. Courage: as entrepreneurs, as leaders, it takes a good bit of comfort with risk to be able to do that well. And then faith: my personal faith is a very strong guiding factor for me, and I make those decisions. I know there's really one person that I need to please at the end of the day, and I need to make look good, and so that drives how I behave.
So finally, if you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, please use my QR code, and I'd just like to share quickly a word. My daughter writes me little notes every day that I go out of town, and each day has a song dedication. It is the most wonderful thing to be so far away from home. Today, I opened it up, and it said, "You are awesome. So show your true colors." So the song is "True Colors" by Cyndi Lauper, or maybe also Justin Timberlake. I just encourage you to find and show your true colors in what you do.
