Always Start With Why

Businesses often get bogged down in the details of what they’re offering, who they’re targeting, and how they can gain market advantage.  Our clients are passionate about what they do.  They’re selling more. They’re reaching more. They are excited to be out of bed and making calls.

But they rarely show up knowing the why behind their business.  Business people can say a lot about what they offer their market, but they usually have a much harder time giving an answer to “why?” They are rarely asked that question, by the way.  After we eliminate “to make money,” we are often left sitting in silence. It should be easier than that.

Simon Sinek, a leading business and culture analyst, summarizes: “People don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it.”

Fidelis has been guilty of the same thing. We’ve worked so hard at creating value for our clients, so many hours working in our business, that we neglected to define our own brand. The last six months has been intense, but we’ve finally launched our own re-brand. We have had to dig deep and repeatedly ask ourselves: why? What is our reason for existence? What is the essential need in the market that we are fulfilling? We help the businesses we partner with answer these questions on a daily basis, but we finally had to lock that down for ourselves. We’re glad we did. Fidelis exists to help our clients through this process of defining and communicating. And creativity is our greatest tool.

Here’s a quick scenario:

Jim is an entrepreneur. He has built a small business from the ground up and it is succeeding. Jim is ready to start growing his business. Yay Jim! Jim realizes it might be time to start doing some marketing, and with his entrepreneurial spirit, Jim decides he will handle it himself (because that is what entrepreneurs do). He begins the process of cobbling together some sort of brand package. He calls on his niece for a logo because she is artistic. He gets some photos taken by a family friend and hires a

web builder to make him a site. Unfortunately, throughout this process, Jim has given little thought to his own brand position and how design communicates very powerful things (both good and bad) to his market. Sad. In the end, Jim ends up with a Frankenstein, strip mall version of his marketing presence. It’s not a good look, Jim!

This story happens every day.  We see it again and again. We want to change that story for our partners. We feel inspired when we see clients firing on all cylinders.

We believe that companies that provide a quality good or service in the marketplace deserve a chance to be known, to be understood, and to be heard. By leveraging a large team of creative individuals who work with a wide flow of cross-communication and knowledge, we provide a holistic approach to marketing for medium to large sized small businesses. Fidelis aims to capture the essential nature of a company and tailor it to their market. We are averse to any piece-meal or add-to-cart mindset when it comes to marketing a brand. Because this is our why: we are passionate about each of the six core services we offer our clients. Branding, Media, Strategy, Social, Websites, and Marketing are all deeply interconnected and are most valuable when deployed systematically with one another. We submit that it is more valuable for a company to partner with a team of creative professionals than to shell out a salary for a single marketing executive — a very tired employee who collects all of the odd jobs that nobody else seems to pick up! So. Fidelis can be your marketing team.

It’s why we are here.