Winning On Main Street: Branding Secrets That Create Credibility For Small Business— with Ross Kimarovsky

Below is a transcript for Thryv’s weekly Podcast: Winning On Main Street on January 14th, 2021.

Episode 52 | 26:52 | Branding Secrets That Create Credibility For Small Business — Crowdspring

For more Thryv Podcasts visit the Winning on Mainstreet Homepage

EPISODE SUMMARY:
Take a minute and think about what makes your business stand out. Is it your show-stopping logo design? Maybe it’s your punny advertising efforts? Could it be your thoughtful core values that inspire others? Well, that’s your brand, and even when you’re not trying, you’re making a name for the company.

“Every business has a brand,” says Ross Kimbarovsky. “And if you’re not actively building that brand, then your brand is going to be very weak.”

In the latest episode of the “Winning on Main Street” podcast, we sit with Kimbarovsky, founder and CEO of CrowdSpring, as he explains the importance of actively shaping your brand to make a memorable impression on customers.

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Gordon Henry: Hello, this is Gordon Henry. And this is Winning on Main Street. Winning on Main Street is by and about small businesses and entrepreneurs. And this week we’re with Ross Kimarovsky, CEO of Crowdspring, a company that provides design solutions for SMBs worldwide using an unusual crowdsourcing methodology. And we’re going to hear all about that, and how small businesses can fix their brands from Ross Kimarovsky. Well, welcome, Ross.

Ross Kimarovsky: Hey, Gordon, happy to be here talking with you and your listeners.

Gordon Henry: Yeah, great to have you and happy 2021.

Ross Kimarovsky: Likewise, same to you.

Gordon Henry: So, let’s jump into it, Ross. You have, I think, an interesting, I guess they call them origin stories these days, what was the origin of Crowdspring?

Ross Kimarovsky: So, for the first 13 years of my life, working life, I was a trial attorney, focusing on complex commercial and intellectual property litigation. But, I’ve always been entrepreneurial, I was always thinking about starting businesses. And I actually started practicing law in ’95, when the internet was commercialized. So, I was working with lots of small businesses, startups. In 2006, I was leading the rebrand of my law firms website. And like a lot of entrepreneurs who end up finding ideas that solve their problem, I ran headfirst into a problem. We did what normally people do, we put together our requirements, we sent them out to agencies who did law firm websites, we received their bids, we interviewed them, picked one, paid them a lot of money, waited two months, received the visual designs, and I hated them. They were horrible. And I was embarrassed and frustrated because people who, you know, people who conduct service businesses, attorneys are service business, people who have retail businesses, they don’t really know how to how to create great designs unless they’re a designer. And that’s why we hire specialists. And so I hated what happened, I went back and I said, There’s got to be a better way for small business owners like me to buy design services. And ultimately, research and testing led me down this path of turning the entire model upside down. Because the question we asked is, why do we have to pay tens of thousands of dollars, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for good design? Why do we have to pay in advance to see designs weeks or months later? So, that turned into a lot of research and thinking and ultimately, it turned into crowdspring.com, which helps small business owners, entrepreneurs, agencies, and nonprofits with everything from custom logo design, to web design, to product design, and even naming businesses. And our intuition was great design doesn’t have to cost tens of thousands of dollars. Our project started $299, including all fees, and we have a community of 220,000 freelancers around the world helping businesses with custom design in a very unique model.

Gordon Henry: Hmm, great. So, our listeners are mainly small businesses, local businesses, service businesses in particular. And the question I want to ask you is, does creative and branding matter for a local business? You think of, you know, John’s Plumbing or Bill’s Roof Repair? We’re not talking about Coca Cola, we’re not talking about Toyota, or, you know, any of the major global brands and we all get that they have to have a certain cachet. But, for the local business with 5, 10, 15 employees going out to service people’s houses. Why does creative and branding matter?

Ross Kimarovsky: So branding, your brand identity, your visual identity matters, whether you’re a single person, plumber, providing services, or an electrical contractor who has 10 employees providing services, or a dental office, or Coca Cola, here’s why it matters. Your brand identity is really about your credibility as an individual and a business. If you were a plumber, and you walked into a customer’s home, in a torn T-shirt, in shorts, flip flops without a tool bag and said to the customer, I’m ready, they would look at you and say, you don’t look ready, you don’t look like you’re here to fix my plumbing problem. And so visually identity is very much like that. It’s one of the most powerful ways that as a small business as a solopreneur as as a business of 1 to 10 employees or as a huge global conglomerate, you can differentiate from other people because here’s the thing, visual design is important for a very simple reason. We process as consumers images 60,000 times faster than we process words. So, if you think about you wake up in the morning and you look around you, you see logos, you see brands, even before you read things, you see them. If you see a person walking across the street carrying a coffee cup, and the coffee cup looks like an emblem with with green, you’re going to assume at Starbucks, you don’t even know what it says. That’s because there’s an association. So, the best thing that Small business owners can do is create a strong visual identity that makes them look credible. Because like it or not, that’s how people decide. They decide based on how you look, they decide based on how your logo and business cards look, if you drive a van, there’s a difference between not having anything on your van versus having a little sign, versus having a complete wrap that has your phone number and focuses on your business. All of that matters.

Gordon Henry: What is the biggest mistake that small businesses make when it comes to design and branding?

Ross Kimarovsky: The biggest mistake is under investing in good design when they start their business and when they try to grow their business. Here’s the very simple truth. Good design does not have to be expensive. But, a lot of small business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs think that they can get a free or cheap design and do okay, now, let me say something that you’re not going to hear from just about any agency, good design doesn’t fix bad service. Good design does not fix a bad product. Good design does not fix bad communications. You still have to be a great plumber, great electrician, great doctor. But, when you under invest in good design, and as I mentioned earlier, Crowdspring project start at $299. So, this isn’t about 10,000 versus $50,000. This is about several hundred dollars versus $50. When you under invest in design, what happens is you end up with a visual identity based on templates, clipart, generic design, so your business looks like dozens of other businesses in your area, everybody looks alike, clients can’t remember you, can’t differentiate you. Imagine if you walked into a store and you wanted to buy cereal, and every box looks the same. You wouldn’t know which brand to buy. And if you bought a brand when you came back, you wouldn’t know which one to buy again. This is why it’s so important for people to in the very beginning invest in affordable design that makes sense for them. Because the reality is when you get free or cheap design in the beginning, you end up paying more in the mid to long term because you struggle to grow the identity for your business. It’s what big companies know, a huge part of the value of these huge companies worth trillions of dollars and hundreds of billions of dollars is their brand. It’s the intangible things that make them so successful.

Gordon Henry: So, how, since you got started during the internet era, how has design and branding changed with the growth of the internet? How has that changed? How has the internet changed what you do?

Ross Kimarovsky: Well, first of all, the internet has made design more important because when you used to compete against somebody who was in your several block area, now you’re competing against businesses that are miles away and tens of miles away. And if you’re selling it retail or providing services that you can ship, you’re competing globally. And so that has meant that more businesses are online, e commerce, as you know has been expanding significantly and the pandemic has has fueled that growth. So, we in the past nine months, just in the US alone have moved forward probably 6 to 10 years in terms of where we expected ecommerce to be. Which means there’s more competition, there’s more competition online, more businesses are trying to steal your clients, and they’re doing so by investing in good visual design. So, it forces people to be more particular about their services and products to stand out. It means you have to be conscious about building a brand. This is the thing that that I hope people understand that every business has a brand and a brand is is is every touchpoint you have with the customers. It’s how customers feel about you. Ultimately, every business has a brand. If you’re not consciously building that brand, if you’re not taking steps to create a strong visual identity, if you’re not investing some time in sending good emails, if you’re not following up with clients, then your brand is going to be very weak and confusing to clients, which will decrease the incentive for them to tell their friends about them. So, when somebody is looking for a plumber, or electrician, or dentist or somebody else, they’re not going to recommend you, they’re going to recommend somebody else. Or they’ll just say, I don’t really know anybody great. And so this is where you can change the direction of your business by saying, I’m going to take steps to make sure I have a unique logo. I want to make sure that I have a unique name that stands out that people like. I want to have a consistent visual presence. So, my truck is going to have a visual design that that’s similar to what I have on my website. And my website will have a design that matches my logo. And if I’m going to walk into a customer’s home and I want them to remember, I’m gonna buy a $15 T-shirt that has my business’s name on it because I want to be always in front of the customer. I want them to remember me. There are lots of interesting principles of marketing and psychology, you know, like mere-exposure theory in psychology is a theory that says that the more exposure you have to potential customers, the more they get to like you. And it’s why companies advertise so much and repeatedly because one advertisement isn’t enough. And it’s why every business owner should look to create more and more touch points with every customer.

Gordon Henry: Do you find that too many small business people just try to do this themselves? I once heard a little joke. They said, marketing is like sex. Everybody thinks they’re an expert, but few actually are. Do too many small businesses think they’re experts, when they’re not, at creative and branding and design?

Ross Kimarovsky: I found so we talked to thousands of small businesses every year. And I find that most small business owners recognize they’re not experts in that area, I think the problem is little different. As I said earlier, most simply don’t appreciate how important good design is. And so whether they do it themselves, or get a template or get some clip art, the result is a weak brand. And when they struggle to build their companies, when they’re doing everything right, but still unable to grow their business, a smart marketer will look at and say, you’ve got a great product, you deliver a great service, you’re always on time, your pricing is outstanding. But, when people look at you, they just don’t find you to be very credible. And so at the end of the day, whether they do it themselves or not, and certainly some do, or use free or cheap design, the end result is the same, they just struggle to create powerful brands. And what I want people to take away from this is, is that it used to be and the reason I started Crowdspring used to be that great design was was very expensive and inaccessible. And it was frustrating for me and frustrating for business owners. But, it doesn’t have to be. We have, we created this great guide to the cost of design that I’m happy to share, you could put in the show notes, which walks people through free, cheap, affordable, inexpensive options for things like logo design and web design and business card design and talks about, you know what you get for each and if you’re going to talk to a freelancer or talk to an agency, the questions you should ask them and what you should expect to get from them in deliverables, if they’re gonna charge you some money to do that work. People need to be informed about it. I think smart smart business owners know that a small investment helps them grow their business and under investment is going to hold them back.

Gordon Henry: We’re gonna take a quick break right now to hear word from our sponsor, and we’re gonna be back soon with a lot more from Ross Kimarovsky. Tim, everything okay so far?

Tim: Yes, sir, sounding good.

Gordon Henry: Great. All right. 5 4 3 2 1. We’re back with Ross Kimarovsky. Ross, you run an amazing worldwide business, Crowdspring. But, the secret is, you have a very small team, you told me I think under 10 employees, actually, how do you do that?

Ross Kimarovsky: So one choice we made the first time we had to hire people, we do two things, I guess, let me back up. The The first thing is, we try to do every job ourselves first before we hire people, because we really try to understand what it’s going to take when we hire person to do it. So, back when we started in 2008, we had to support our customers. And so customer support was not an optional, we made a conscious choice to have world class customer support from the day we open for business. I did all of the customer support for six months. So, all of the tickets, all of the phone calls, chats. And I did that for two reasons. Number one, we were a small company so so as a founder, I had to add to help everywhere I could. But, the fundamental reason was that I really needed to understand what it would take for a customer support agent to deal with customers, what skills would they need to have? What kind of demeanor would they need? The kinds of questions they would answer? And also, I wanted to learn as a business owner, what pain were the customers feeling. And so we did each of these jobs first wherever we could. And when we hired, we try to optimize and use software or change processes that gave us the ability to do more with less and that’s just in our DNA. So, anytime we’ve had to think about hiring more people, the first choice we always make isn’t let’s just hire one or two more people. It’s been asking the question, how can we do this better to reduce the work our existing team is already doing? And for 12 years, we’ve been able to successfully do that at every turn. So, fewer than 10 people we support a community of 220,000 plus designers. We have something like 70,000 clients from over 100 countries. So, pretty big community. We handle thousands of tickets every month. Lots of chats every day, lots of phone calls, but we do it efficiently and we use tools the right way to help us.

Gordon Henry: Yeah, super impressive. So, without getting too complicated. I’m interested in hearing about your methodology and how you kind of keep this all going with such a small team. And particularly, you said something like 220,000 creative artists or designers. How did these jobs get parceled out or allocated out to this giant community of people around the world?

Ross Kimarovsky: So when you come to us, we offer 33 categories of projects from logo design, a web design, naming businesses. We walk you through these dynamic question and answer forms, which we’ve honed over 12 years. And you pick your budget, you actually pick your own price. Most of these projects are seven days. And once we have all the answers, we distribute it to all of our designers or namers. Now we actually, for the last five years, have closed registration. We have so many people on the platform, that it’s it’s hard for us to accept so many more. Number one, we qualify, we vet every single person that works at crowdspring. So, it’s an arduous process, and we vet them for every single subcategory. And once they get in, we actually do the same thing once or twice a year. So, we distribute it to our community. And in most cases, whoever wants to work in a project does because what we did with the business model from the very beginning was change it rather than hire a single designer, which you can do on Crowdspring, you can find a designer, we’ll recommend our best you can work privately. When you post your requirements let’s say for a new logo for a new plumbing business, new electrical business, you, you are talking with a worldwide group of designers and you’re going to have dozens of designers participate in your project. And here’s the difference, they’re not going to send you bits and proposals because you’ve already set the price, they’re going to send you actual designs for your new business. You can give them feedback, they’ll iterate, you pick your favorite, and that designer produces all the final files. And so anybody who wants to can participate in most of these projects, you get to pick the design you love the best you get a free legal contract, transferring full rights to the IP intellectual property to you. We take care of paying the designers, you get all the final files, we do have some projects where you might work with five designers. So, for example, I mentioned logo 299. For 899 for a logo, you can work with five of our best designers. And in that project, you’re not going to work with dozens, you’re gonna work with five, but they’re the best. And you’re going to pick one still, but all five get paid. So, the difference is, in that case, all five get paid, one gets the award, the others get guaranteed tips, but your cost is $899. That’s all in. And so that’s a very popular package for people that are looking for the highest quality. But, we build price points for businesses of every size, because at the end of the day, we wanted to make sure that small businesses weren’t left out, you know, huge companies, as you mentioned, they got lots of money, they can hire agencies and pay millions or hundreds of thousands. Mid-sized businesses can pay tens of thousands and not miss a beat. But, small businesses struggle to find a way to get affordable design at a price that fits their budget.

Gordon Henry: Fascinating. And in that giant audience or team, I guess virtual team you have 220,000 working for you, do some of those people work for you exclusively like that’s all they do, or many of these people juggling other jobs other companies that do similar things? So, I’m just just curious about the model.

Ross Kimarovsky: So, it varies. I mean, it’s a freelancing marketplace. So, in that sense, nobody’s captive to us. We encourage people to build their own books of businesses to work elsewhere. Crowdspring is a tough place for a designer to get into. Because ultimately, we we set our standard very high because we’re trying to deliver great results for clients. Most of them are plying their trade in other places. Because we have created hopefully, democratic and fair policies across the board. We respect intellectual property, that comes from my IP law background. We have fair and transparent policies a lot of designers prefer to work with us. But, at the end of the day, it’s about work. If we can deliver lots of work, they’ll do the work and they’ll continue to do it. If we can’t, they’ll work wherever the work is.

Gordon Henry: So, we’re talking right now virtually over Zoom. And that’s how most people are doing things these days. It seems you’re an expert at this. You told me your company is virtual. I guess you don’t have an office. Maybe you did at one point, but don’t anymore. How do you do that? You never see your colleagues in person. And I guess you never see your clients in person. It’s all virtual very, very COVID like for a company that’s been around for so many years.

Ross Kimarovsky: So, when we started out in 2008, we started with a distributed team. We did have an office and we had an office actually until 2017. At which point there was no reason, we were all around the world. I was the only one coming into our office in Chicago. And I said this doesn’t make any sense. I’m perfectly happy working from home and we’ve been working distributed for for a decade at that point in time. You know, it requires a different perspective. So, COVID for us as a team in terms of remote was easy because we were already remote. We we understood a long time. mageau that that remote is different from office. And I think the mistake a lot of people make when they shift from office to remote, is they think that the best way to be efficient is replicate what they did in the office on Zoom or in a remote context. And that’s really the wrong approach. You don’t want to replicate what you did. There are lots of problems working in the office, you want to reject the things that don’t work, and decrease efficiency and embrace the things that do work and create lots of lots of lots of efficiency. So, for example, we’ve always been culturally an asynchronous team in the sense that we don’t have meetings day in and day out, we have one team meeting once a week to talk about our product roadmap. That’s it, we do have conversations from time to time. But, this is one on one conversations, this isn’t four or five people. And if we have to meet about something, we do it asynchronously initially. So, we use project management tools, what our favorite tool is Basecamp. And we have communications offline up until the point where we’re ready to finally talk about something and decided. So, we’re going to spend 80% of our time, asynchronously in writing, reading, responding, and saucing out the ideas and then have a quick conversation. And that really saves us a huge amount of time and lets us be efficient. This is this is the huge advantage small businesses have. If you’re a large business, most of the time, most of the people especially managers are stuck in meetings day in and day out. They have maybe half an hour a day to do any actual work, it’s hard to build a business that way.

Gordon Henry: Yeah, yeah. We just have a couple of minutes left, I want to ask you one or two quick final questions here. What’s next for Crowdspring? Where do you see yourselves in 18 months?

Ross Kimarovsky: So, we’re looking at one of the frustrations over the past year, year and a half for us has been solving some of our internal problems. Marketing is a good example. Like every other small business, every one of your listeners, how do you market better? How do you do some things need to do something? Thrive does a great job of solving some of these problems, right? Small businesses don’t have the time to do every single single thing. So, they need to find ways to automate some of the tasks that they do. So, we’ve we’ve run nurture campaigns, for example. And these are campaigns series of emails to clients and prospects about our products and educational campaigns. We’ve been really frustrated with some of the products out there. So, we’re currently looking at the possibility of spinning out some some really good tools that we’ve built internally that solve this problem for us in a nice way. And so we’re gonna we’re gonna see if we can help more businesses, not just through design, but through things like marketing.

Gordon Henry: Hmm, interesting. So, last question before we go, let’s quickly turn to Ross Kimarovsky, the person. You have an interesting background yourself. I think you were born overseas to the United States as a young man. Tell us a little bit about how you grew up and got into this business.

Ross Kimarovsky: Sure. So, I was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and emigrated with with my family, younger brother, my parents in 1979 straight to Chicago, and we’ve been here since. So, I was I was not really very entrepreneurial until probably law school. I was I was always a hard worker, I enjoyed working. So, in high school and college, I usually had two to three jobs, lots of fun things. And in college, I was fortunate to work with a firm that was involved with technology transfer, selling businesses and intellectual property to all sorts of businesses overseas. And so I did a lot of fun work. But, but in law school, I started getting entrepreneurial, I started school’s paper, I started a number of groups. And when I started my law practice in ’95, I started a number of practices as the internet started becoming commercialized. And so I had been looking for opportunities to start a business. You know, every one of your listeners knows there’s an upside and a downside to running a business. You’re your own boss, you make your decisions, but it’s not easy. You always think about your business, your brain doesn’t turn off. It’s like a roller coaster. They’re great days, and they’re really bad days and in 2020 really bad years for most business owners. But, anyway, I always wanted to start a business and in the late 1990s, I came close. But, but but the kinds of businesses people were starting that you know, give away a free PC and, and make it up on advertising were silly businesses, and I didn’t have any ideas. And so as I mentioned, just like, you know, most entrepreneurs that start a business, I ran into a problem. And in order to solve my own problem, I stumbled on something that I thought could help others.

Gordon Henry: Yeah. Brilliant. Well, Ross, it’s been great talking to you and Crowdspring is is a fantastic company. I think many listeners will have an interest in taking advantage of the services you offer. So, thanks for your time today and for sharing your story.

Ross Kimarovsky: Thanks so much Gordon. Enjoyed it.

Gordon Henry: And thank you out there for listening. If you liked what you heard, give us a five star review and tell a friend or colleague about Winning on Main Street. Until next time, this is Gordon Henry, signing off.

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