Rebranding a Business for Success

Anh Tran rebrands her business to strengthen and expand her client base.

Like many attorneys who find practicing law unfulfilling, Anh Tran decided to choose a different career path. "After a couple years out of school, I realized that law wasn't the right career for me. It was always one side against the other," she said. She went to work at Goldman Sachs in their private wealth management division, where she soon found her calling. "I learned that you could be on the same side as your clients in the financial planning world to create more of a win-win situation."

After a decade honing her skills with a roster of Fortune 500 companies, advising them in all aspects of financial planning – including estate planning, retirement planning, pensions, and employee benefits – Anh decided to strike out on her own. "I left to start my own practice, joining another independent broker/dealer."

After a few years building a solo practice, Anh joined LPL Financial in 2016; merging her practice with that of another LPL advisor's, while keeping the latter's corporate name. "We felt it would help us make a more seamless transition if we didn't change our brand immediately," she said. "But we knew at some point we would need to create a new brand and identity, which would clarify the focus and direction of our practice for our clients."

Step One: Assembling the team

A proper rebrand is a deliberate exercise, one that requires far more time than Anh could devote to the process. "As a small business owner, we tend to think we can do everything ourselves, which we probably can. But as your business grows and expands, you need to farm out some of the work, bring in professionals to help you do the things you might not be best at," she said.

Anh and her partners hired a professional marketing and PR firm to assist them, making them think critically about the brand they wanted to create, including its mission and values. "The firm asked tough, thought-provoking questions, like, 'How do you want your clients to feel about your brand?’ and 'What things do you want to help your clients accomplish?' It was a great exercise for us to really hone in on the messaging and what we wanted to bring to our clients and to our firm," she said.

Step Two: Incorporating core values

For Anh, the messaging had to embrace a lifestyle of "doing good," a goal that aligns with her personal and professional pursuits. "Being able to align their investments while also doing good in the world was something that we really wanted to emphasize in our new brand," she said. "It's what we call 'socially responsible investing.' That's been a big part of our practice and our business."

Step Three: Settling on a Name

With that in mind, Anh set out to choose a name for her firm, which she assumed would be relatively straightforward — until she began the process. "I think coming up with a corporate name is probably one of the most difficult things I have ever done," she said. "I think naming a child is much easier than naming a firm because when you name a firm, it has to represent so many things and have meaning behind it."

Anh and her partners settled on SageMint Wealth: "sage" meaning wisdom, experience, and judgment; and "mint" meaning innovation, wealth, and where money is made — highlighting their innovative approach to investing.

With the name chosen, they focused on a new logo, which incorporates a light bulb, a tree, and leaves. "The leaves represent the sage, and the light bulb represents the mint, which together are SageMint Wealth," she said.

Step Four: Marketing Your Brand

With a new corporate name and logo in place, it was time for Anh to formally introduce the new brand to her clients. "We wanted to be strategic with the announcement, to position ourselves as creating a new beginning, especially after 2020 being the year that it was," she said. "So we decided to incorporate the name in our holiday gifts, which was wonderful."

The brand announcement was thoughtful and deliberate, explaining how it represented the evolution and direction of Anh's firm. "That was very important because once clients understood the meaning behind the name, it made a lot of sense to them," she said, earning her strong and positive feedback.

Step Five: Compliance

Commensurate with Anh's work on her company's new name and logo was undergoing a compliance review of her efforts, a detailed task for which she turned to LPL for assistance. "We have a business consultant that helps us with all areas of our practice, and that has been an area that has been extremely helpful at LPL," she said. "We're still working on all of that right now, just making sure that everything we touch with the new brand gets approved through LPL's compliance department. They've been extremely supportive."

Step Six: Lessons Learned

It's been only a few months since SageMint Wealth made its public debut, and Anh looks back on the process with the eye of a seasoned veteran, eager to advise wannabe rebranders. "As a business owner, I thought I could do everything myself, but the minute that I hired a marketing and PR team to help us, it was night and day," she said. "If you're going through a rebrand, you should consider hiring a marketing PR firm to help you understand your business and your values and create a strong brand."

Once you create a branding guide of who you are — your values and your vision — your marketing pieces will then flow logically. "If you're creating a brochure, if you're doing a one-pager, or promoting yourself on social media, it's much easier because you now have a guideline of who you are," she said. "You've already done the hard work. And from there, you can focus on reconnecting with your existing clients while reaching out to new ones. That's when your business will really take off."