Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
You've handed over responsibility. So why is everyone still asking you to make the decisions? And why, if you're honest, are you a little relieved that they are?
I'm Dr. Tara Vossenkemper, a consultant and group practice owner. On Integrity at Scale™, I teach, think out loud, and get into the practical and human sides of leading a business. That means roles, numbers, culture, and the things that keep happening even though you've already had that conversation. Three times.
Some episodes teach something you can use. Others take you into a decision I'm making in my own business, a pattern I'm noticing, or a question I haven't settled yet. You'll also hear conversations with other leaders and responses to listener questions.
I want you to leave with a clearer understanding of what's happening and something useful to try. Sometimes that comes with a great idea. Sometimes it comes with, “Well, shit. I do that.”
This was previously called the Culture Focused Practice podcast. All the earlier episodes are still here in the same feed, so you can keep listening right where you left off.
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@culturefocusedpractice
Explore the Model and Working Together: https://www.taravossenkemper.com/
Okay, so hear me out. Branding isn't your website or your colors. It's the day-to-day story that your team and your clients and the community tell about you. It's the things that they say, it's the experiences they have, and all of that is built and shaped and evolved or broken by your culture.
My name is Dr. Tara Vossenkemper, and you, my friend, are listening to the Culture Focused Practice podcast. Thank you for being here with me.
Let's keep this going then. A good brand isn't something that you just get on Canva, or honestly, it's not something that you can pay somebody to do for you. It's comes from your culture. It's a product of your culture.
Every email that your admin team sends, every intake that your therapist has, every single tone you use in a team meeting, in an interaction with a community partner or with a stranger that you meet on the street and you end up talking about your practice or the practice. All of that is your brand.
The design might dress it up. It might be a physical and aesthetic representation of how you feel about things, but the story that your team lives is the brand, and that's the one that the community believes.
And you know, I like to set an agenda just to give some parameters to the space that we're in. So there's three items on our agenda today. Easy peasy. Number one, why branding is not about design. Number two, how your culture is your brand. And number three, aligning your story inside and out. Love it. Love it.
Let's continue, shall we?
Agenda item number one. Why branding isn't about design?
Look, I love a good logo, and I think that the aesthetics of a business or a practice are, I mean, really freaking important, like. I will click off a website immediately. If it's fugly can't, I can't look at it. It makes my eyes hurt, so I'm absolutely 100% in the camp of make things look good, period.
However, that is not all that goes into having a brand. You can have really welcoming colors and a really physically beautiful space, but if a client calls and your admin, or your receptionist or your intake coordinator sounds irritated to be on the phone talking to them or frustrated by the questions that they're answering or says, yeah, I don't know, sorry, good luck and then goes to hang up?
That's busted, like that's broken. You have just killed off this relationship with this potential person. And also you've sowed a seed of discord with a person who may not ever have another experience with you, and so their only experience is negative and unpleasant.
That's now your brand with them. They don't give a fuck how your waiting room looks. They don't care how pretty your website is. They called expecting to be treated with kindness and consideration and compassion and maybe some help, and they got an irritated tone and an unhelpful person.
Congrats. That's your brand.
I'm harping here, but my point is the same, that it doesn't matter how great something looks if the content of the package, if the experience of the people, is not pleasant in delivery, then your brand is going in the wrong direction.
Here's what I will say, and I think that this is obvious, but I feel I need to say it because I'm talking about people having a pleasant experience with us, et cetera. We're not for every person. I, my practice is not for every single person who needs help. Yours is probably not.
The point is not that you make it so that you are for everybody, because that's not realistic, but instead, my point here is that you do everything that you can on your end to ensure that you're operating with key things in mind.
And so it might be that the expectation is that if somebody needs help and we don't do it, we work hard to find them somebody that does. Additionally, if there's things that do go wrong, I think that there's a need to try to make it right. You might not make the person happy. So the point here is not, again, make everybody happy around you. The point is, I think, have integrity and do things that are in alignment with your own core values as a group.
So be living out the things that you say that you are in every direction in terms of relationally, in every direction.
The logo and the aesthetics and how pretty things Look, that's the icing on the cake. It's the wrapping on the package, it's the bow on top. It's all of the things that make somebody a little bit enticed to engage with you. Period.
Agenda item number two is how your culture is your brand. I think it fucking goes without saying that I really love culture related stuff. My podcast name is the Culture Focused practice. That is by design. It's for a reason.
I think that culture is the ground for anything. Anything that you build out within your business is going to fail without a healthy, cohesive, thriving culture.
So when I say your culture is your brand, what that looks like it. It's that every single internal interaction becomes external reputation. And it's easy to say, well, you know, I'm nicer to my clients than I'm to my team. Or you might have a team member. You might have a, an employee or a person who is sac and sweet with clients on the phone, or their clients love them, but they're sewing major discord among your team.
That shit's gonna get out. You might think, oh, Tara, no, that's not gonna get out. That's not going anywhere. It's, you know, they're great with clients though. Clients love them.
I love good clinical work. And that doesn't trump internal interactions. It should not trump internal interactions.
When your team feels supported. That's the energy that leaks out. That's the energy that is spread, not only internally, but also externally. And then conversely, if they don't feel supported or if they feel like there's a person that's not safe or that they can't trust or they're not really sure or things aren't very safe here for some reason, that's gonna leak out.
Think about this from a living practice framework perspective. So the Living Practice framework is my own framework for how I view practices as living entities.
Marketing is the glow, it's the light, it's the energy that radiates from the organism. And so when I say if a team feels supported or cared for or like we're living out values, that leaks out, I literally mean to say that that energy is, it's radiating out of the system.
And conversely, if shit's going sideways, that same energy that could radiate out and bring people in, sort of like moths to a flame, it is doing the opposite. It's atrophying. It is not glowing bright enough to attract any of the right people.
So when we think about our team and we think about our culture, and we think about our interactions and engagement with one another and with the community, et cetera , that does not exist outside of us. That is absolutely reflective of us and it's microcosmic, if that is a word, it should be if it's not, and that also means it can be positively impacted by us.
And so when we're thinking about our brand, we should actually be thinking about alignment. And that is a fantastic segue if I do say so myself to agenda item number three, aligning your story inside and out.
There's a couple very simple things you can do here. One is you can start with a self-audit. I really love doing things with my leadership team, so you know, I might do this on my own and I might take it to my leadership team and have us do it collectively. Maybe I do both. Maybe I have all of us do it individually, and then we also all come together to discuss.
But the question that you really wanna be asking yourself and then your leadership team is, how does our external messaging match what's actually happening in the practice?
You could start with does it match? I think that's a very simple yes no answer. Maybe sometimes, but then from there I would expand out and say, how does it match? And also maybe how does it not match? How does it match what's happening within and how does it not match what's happening within.
Once you get that self-audit and maybe that leadership team audit done, I would take it to the larger team. This is sort of the second part of doing the alignment or ensuring that alignment is happening.
And the question to bring to your team is what do people think it's like to work here, and how does that line up with reality? Or you might ask people, what did you think it was like to work here before you joined the team? This is great for new hires actually, or even like relatively new, you know, within the past year or so. And then how does that line up with reality?
And I think the last piece to the aligning is that real branding work is culture work. It's not about the slogans, which slogans are great. Taglines are great. Preview text is great. All of that is necessary. I get it.
But it's really living out your story on a daily basis, which honestly doesn't sound sexy. Like it sounds anti climactic and kind of fucking boring. Like, oh God, I just gotta do this again. Okay. I guess, you know, and if you're used to living it out, it might feel like you're doing nothing.
Or it might end up not looking like much to people who are there because they also are used to just living out your values and acting with integrity and being authentic and candid and whatever other values you might have.
That is living out the story daily, that is feeding into the brand, that is sending out that radiation, that energy from the entire practice, the entire organism to the larger community, to your clients, and to again, potentially hires in the future, which is a really great thing to have.
Lemme just say one more thing. If you leave with nothing else, leave with this. Your brand is not what you say. It's what people experience.
Every decision, every tone, every interaction writes that story, and our job is to make sure that we are showing up in such a way that what they write reflects our values, our cohesion, our team health, how we live and exist inside of the group.
And that wraps us up. I have two things for you.
Number one more info on the Living practice framework. If I said that and you were like, what the fuck? Go to. Www.taravossenkemper.com/living-practice-framework-overview and check it out.
Second thing I'm gonna ask you again before you hop off to make sure you subscribe. When you do this, you help people who need this also find it, and that's what I love. I wanna be of service to people who need it most.
All of that said. I super appreciate you being here with me. I think you know how I feel about time. I highly, highly value it, and it means a lot that you spent some with me. So I'll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.