Brand Alignment: The Secret Ingredient for Maximizing Value for Your Service Business

In late 2022, I presented “What is Branding?” at the annual Made Simple Summit for StoryBrand Guides and Business Made Simple Coaches in response to many misconceptions and misunderstandings about branding and brand strategy.

As much as I'm certain you would love to hear the backstory, I don't want to bore you. Instead, I thought I'd share Chapter 16 from Trade Secrets: Four Core Strategies to Maximize Value for Service Companies. I included it in the book to demonstrate how brand alignment is essential to business strategy and the missing piece from most business operating systems.

After reading How to Grow Your Small Business: A 6-Step Plan to Help Your Business Take Off, I felt something was missing.

In How to Grow Your Small Business, Donald Miller details his playbook for growing StoryBrand and Business Made Simple from $250,000 to over $15M in revenue in ten years. His business operating system equates a company’s operational aspects to the parts of an airplane. 

Miller puts it into an actionable framework — in a practical online resource with detailed worksheets(2) called Small Business Flight School that any service business owner can use to operationalize and accelerate their business growth.

In Miller’s model, he writes

• Leadership is the Cockpit
• Marketing is the Right Engine
• Sales are the Left Engine
• Products and Services is the Wings
• Overhead and Operations is the Body
• Cash Flow is the Fuel

(Other business professionals have used a similar analogy, most notably, Forbes from a contributed 2013 article.)

An airplane needs two wings to create lift. By design and physics, wings are on opposite sides of the aircraft and work together to lift the plane. In the same way, sales and marketing are supposed to work together to raise awareness, create demand, and generate revenue. 

But therein lies the problem.

Like the wings on opposite sides of the aircraft, there’s often a disconnect between sales and marketing and no clear way to unify them. The airplane’s body (operations) separates sales and marketing. Plus, leadership and sales teams often have different ideas and expectations.

These internal silos and the marketplace create turbulence and crosswinds that compound issues and threaten to push your service business off course.

Following Donald Miller’s model, almost every part of the aircraft is integrated with a critical business operation. Like the last crucial part of the airplane, one essential strategy unifies and stabilizes a small business.

Brand alignment is like the tail that keeps your business flying in the direction you want to go.

If your small business is like an airplane, you may be trying to navigate — and fly — without that key component. There’s no clear way to unify sales and marketing without brand alignment because they aren’t connected.

Is Your Business Flight-Ready?

Pilots rely on ground crews and engineers to make the airplane flight-ready. Pilots physically and mentally run through a pre-flight checklist to ensure every aspect of their aircraft is functional.

I remember flying in a single-engine airplane with my uncle, a former US Navy fighter pilot and retired airline captain.(1)

First, he performed an external inspection of the airplane, checked the fuel, and verified that the gauges were operational to ensure it was fit to fly.

Then he startled me by yelling, “CLEAR!” before he turned the motor over to start the propeller.

Let’s do a pre-flight check on your “business as an airplane” model (don’t yell “CLEAR,” or your team will wonder what’s going on!)

• ✔️ Cockpit / Leadership and Business Strategy
• ✔️ Right Engine / Marketing
• ✔️ Left Engine / Sales
• ✔️ Wings / Products and Services
• ✔️ Body / Overhead and Operations is the Body
• ✔️ Fuel / Cash Flow
• ❌ Tail / Brand Alignment

No Tail? You Can’t Fly.

Would you fly — or be a passenger in — an airplane without a tail or rudder? (Yes, there are exceptions. But we’re not talking about flying wings like a B2).

Brand alignment is missing or misaligned in many service businesses, even those that follow Business Made Simple or the Entrepreneur Operating System to grow their company.

An aircraft’s tail provides two critical functions:

1. Vertical stability: As the plane adjusts to environmental conditions in flight, similar to how brand alignment helps your company adjust to business and market conditions. The rudder and vertical stabilizer are the flight surfaces that provide control and stability.

2. Horizontal stability: The horizontal stabilizer keeps the airplane flying straight. Brand alignment determines the angle of attack in the marketplace regarding products, services, categories, and customers.

An aircraft’s tail is often attached last — after the airline paints it — to account for weight and balance. Most commercial airlines add visual branding elements to the tail, the body, and wingtips. That’s the simplest way to demonstrate that brand alignment must integrate with every area of your business.

If the airplane tries to fly without the tail, it will veer off course and may fail to reach its destination by the most direct route.

You can’t neglect the tail when you build your business like an airplane. You need business operations and brand integration to manage the tension that keeps the company aligned and creates dynamic stability.

What does alignment mean? Your brand — who you are, what you do, and how you matter — is integrated with every operational aspect of your company (not just sales and marketing).

Nobody wants to read a book where the last chapter feels missing. Likewise, nobody wants to fly in a plane without a tail because they can’t be confident it will take them where they want to go.

Service business owners are often so busy running their business (like building an airplane while it’s taking off or in the air) that they ignore customer experience. In extreme cases, they may lose sight of their vision and reason for heading in that direction and drift off course.

Aligning your team with a shared mission, goals, and strategic direction can be challenging without a tail to direct your flight path.

What does the tail do?

• The tail — brand alignment — adds visual and experiential elements that make your company familiar and memorable.
• The tail reminds people about your identity even when the plane is parked. Branding reminds customers that you exist without having to market to them.
• The tail provides dynamic stability as the plane adjusts to environmental conditions.

Think of brand alignment in your business like the tail of an airplane:

• Brand alignment helps you create the conditions for a successful business.
• Brand alignment is a strategy that provides dynamic stability for your long-term and daily business operations.
• Brand alignment enables you to keep your company on course.

Does Your Service Company Need Brand Alignment?

Don’t accept the advice of some business coaches and marketers who proclaim that you don’t need to invest in branding without questioning why.

The choice is yours. You can generate revenue with marketing but can’t maximize value without brand alignment.

The most powerful form of marketing is word of mouth. Give people the elements they need to frame a story so they can share their experiences with your company and do the selling for you!

A brand is a story customers share about their experience with your company, product, or service.

Thanks for reading Chapter 16 from Trade Secrets: Four Core Strategies to Maximize Value for Service Companies.

(1) My uncle flew an A4 Skyhawk off of an aircraft carrier. That takes guts and nerves of steel. It’s where the phrase, “Keep your eye on the ball” originated.

You can pre-order Trade Secrets: Four Core Strategies to Maximize Value for Service Companies on Amazon for delivery on July 1, 2024.

By the way, we renamed this newsletter to support Aespire's focus on service companies.

Brian Sooy is a design professional, certified Brand Architect, and OG in the StoryBrand community. He’s not afraid to ask “Why?” when people say “Branding doesn’t matter.”