The Mill #8 – RMFP’s Brand Strategy and How To Create Your Own (Part 1)

The Mill #8 – RMFP’s Brand Strategy and How To Create Your Own (Part 1)

Our relationship gets stronger. Our relationship on our vendor side is stronger because we did some things over here to help this guy out as well, too. And it all falls. It all pulls together.

Hey everyone. I’m Taylor Poole of Rocky Mountain Forest Products. And this is today’s The Mill. So what we’re going to be discussing about the coattails of episode six of The Mill, where I sat down with Bryce Ballaw over at Tradecraft industries where we’re at today in the classroom that we’re actually going to be sponsoring here.

And kind of some of the results that came out of that we were talking about. Why does brand matter? Well, we’ve had quite a few questions, quite a few engagements on. How do you actually break out your brand into a content strategy? How does it formulate out? So what we’re going to try to do is a few part series on the Rocky Mountain Forest Products brand, and how we take it from our big idea all the way down to the implementation within our marketing.

So a little bit different style than what we’ve done in the past, but we’re going to give it a shot. And, once again, if you have any comments, questions, concerns, leave them down below, leave them in the comments. So that way we know what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, and we’ll go from there.

So today the first type of thing that we’re going to be talking about is a brand pyramid. And what it is, is it starts from the very top of your vision and your mission statement, all the way through to the very bottom end, touch points, everything to your business card, to your email, to the content on their social media, how your websites develop and how that whole structure kind of functions. Tye’s going to throw this up, the brand pyramid of how it’s done. So that way you can kind of see where we’re going to work down for the first part.

We’re literally going to be talking about the very tip top box and your brain unifying reason for being, which also means your vision and your mission. So today, like I said, we’re going to focus on the tip top box, which is your vision.

Like we talked about in episode six at the very end, I would suggest going back and watching that if you don’t really care too much, as far as the full length of the 60 minutes, we really kind of dive into this in the last 15 or 20 minutes of that episode. So feel free to check that out. I will get that linked into the full episode of episode six into the description.

Thank you so much, Tye, I really appreciate you. So the difference between a vision statement and a mission statement is fairly simple. A vision is where we’re going long-term with our business. A mission is how do we get there? Lots of times these two things get confused, and the other side of it is too many too often than not, they don’t make a ton of sense as far as what they’re trying to do. And so you hear these really long 21 word vision or mission statements that a company we’re going to unify the world through amazing culture.

What does that necessarily mean? How does that play out within your organization? And so that’s some of the things that are kind of interesting is that this one can be a little more ambiguous, whereas this one has an actual goal and an actual direction, and that’s where those two things get confused. So one of the things that you see is a company like Apple, Or Google, very big companies. Everybody knows who they are, their vision statement. I believe it’s like do no evil, do no harm, something like that.

These are very big news segments, but it kind of drives the whole of their organization. So the thing with the vision statement is in the pre-suit it’s who we are in our soul, at our core. And then how are we going to get there? Who are we at our core and our soul? How are we going to get there?

So Apple determined that we’re going to think differently. Everything that we do needs to be outside of the normal realm, normal possibility. One of my favorite stories of all time is with Apple, when Steve Jobs came into his room and was telling everybody about the iPhone.

And when they were talking about the iPhone, I referenced this story in one of our other mills. They looked at him and they said you’re going to build phones. That’s what you want to do. We’re going to break away from computers. We’re going to go against who we are, you know, our brand.

And he was like, no, we’re different than that. We’re not isolated to a singular thing. And that’s where he came up and he said, I’m going to make a phone. That’s so sexy that it’s going to want to make people like the buttons right off of it. The phone was an imagery to the consumer he was wanting to target.

And so they created a device. That’s where the iPod came from. There’s tons of MP3 players that existed within the world at the same time that probably functioned better, you know, dating way back to the iPod touch and whatnot. But the iPod became this cultural thing, just like the iPhone did Google.

Their statement comes from the sheer fact of the massive amount of data. That they have on everybody. You know, they built their machines so large and everything that their systems do and learn and study, they realize that in the wrong hands, that that information could be used in a negative fashion.

So they want to make sure that we’re constantly building mankind. Now, I don’t know either one of these organization’s mission statements. I probably should. Tye is going to make me look a little bit better than I actually am, and he’s going to throw them both up because I’m sure we can find them online.

You know, Google could say, we’re going to build the largest search engine in existence, whatever, who are we, how are we going to get there? Very simple concepts. What I’m going to start doing throughout this, I’m going to do some general things like this. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to dive through who Rocky Mountain Forest Products is just so that way if these are a little more ambiguous, I’m going to show you how it plays out within the construction or building materials industry.

As I’m doing this, I want to point out that we are in the classroom over at Tradecraft industries. Rocky Mountain Forest Products is sponsoring this joint for the next 12 months. We’re going to be running different classes out of here teaching differently. Different seminars, whether it’s on our products, whether it’s on marketing, lots of different things. Education is very important to us in our organization. And so that’s why we’re pushing into our local building community with this setup, like we’ve got going on here. So, Rocky Mountain Forest Products is fairly simple.

So our vision statement, and I talked about this again in episode number six. So please, please, if you haven’t watched it, please go check it out. Our vision statement over at Rocky is very simple. It’s building relationships. And it’s an interesting thing because he gets a nice little play on building because we’re a materials dealer, but on the relationship front, it pushes more into our long term play in building materials, we’re not the guys who actually go and install the material.

We are not the contractors that go in day in and day out and create the beautiful projects that are materials built. And so where we’re slightly different is that everything in our organization, and this is true for most businesses in life, but comes from relationships. Do we have a relationship with our community?

Because if I have a good relationship with my vendors, I can buy better. Do I have a relationship with our employees within our organization? Yes, because it builds longevity, which builds speed. And like I said, with the community and the contractors, ultimately retail and B to C, those are our customers.

If I have a relationship over time, rather than a single individual interaction, then I get to build a business that will be around for a long time, like 45 years, kind of funny how that works. So this is where we sit on our vision statement. Our mission statement is we want to be the best building supplier possible, and we want to do it in the right way.

Not doing one of the things that one of the kind of people we pull from within our company, he typically talks about doing the right things, always the right thing. And it’s one of those it’s simple. And every person from being a child all the way to an adult gets it. But it’s important to us.

There are companies who have built businesses in the building materials world who have literally done it just out of necessity but then also if you call it to some of these companies, it’s like hey, I need fencing and they’re like, great. Here’s the price, it’s one by four, six costs, you know, a dollar 99, a one by six costs two 99.

And that’s the end of the interaction. And to us, we looked at it as most homeowners nowadays. You do have your weekend warriors, but the reason we called weekend warriors just because they’re not professionals. They don’t do this stuff every day. And then on the other flip side of it for a contractor, maybe he’s bidding a job out such as the Stanley hotel that we recently got to work on with the 50 to 80 exterior. Is that right? 50 to 80 exterior’s if you wanna check them out, they’re down here, they’re an awesome site and company. And so we did the original phase one back in May. They’re set to do phase two and phase three, I believe in Spring of 2019. And that’s one of those jobs where the siding on the building was from 1917. When the building was originally built the Stanley hotel, it was synonymous with the Shining, the movie. Everybody knows that. And it’s a historical building, not only as a historical building. It’s extremely old. So rather than just ripping the siding off and putting it back up, it’s good.

They want to make sure the material put back on the building is as close as possible to the original material that was used. Minus the lead paint that can hurt everybody. So when we went through this process, they had to take samples of the boards. And we had to sit down with Boulder County and our sales reps center materials, suppliers, the whole nine yards. So that way we could try to get this board as close to the original material as possible.

As a siding guy, you know, like Bryce over at 5280, exterior is a great individual. The company is amazing. They do a wonderful job. But you’re asking, you’re asking somebody to 100% try to mimic what is on there. There’s a lot of headaches when it comes to that, there’s a lot of headaches to what type of species is it? What is the profile? How do we make sure that the paint is going to stay on and last for a long time, you know, like a hundred years. Up in Estes park where the weather up there is not the best. And so these are the things that we were tasked with in this. And so we wanted to be able to come alongside our contractors almost as if we’re a part of their organization and be like, no, we’re the material experts we’re going to help you.

Get the exact product that’s going to perform best in this project. So those are the two areas where we really focus on as a company. So that way we can be the best building materials, supplier period, by doing the right thing. Sorry for my beautiful handwriting. My seven year old daughter writes better than I do. So this is kind of how we set up everything we do in our business. This is important for building relationships. How can we take a relationship to the next level and make sure that not only whoever we’re working with, they’re being taken care of, but also we’re becoming the best supplier by doing the right thing. So to use the Stanley hotels as a good example, the material that was supplied on the Stanley hotel, one of the things that happened was the paint shop that Aurora did some of the material, they ran it through and it didn’t dry completely.

So what happened? It wasn’t all of it. It was only a couple of units, but when it got up to the job site, it was rushed, but when it got into the job site, they were pulling it off. So it really had nothing to do with us from a liability standpoint.

So when they’re pulling it off the units, they’re realizing that it wasn’t consistent. It was going to create issues for when they painted the last two coats onto it. And it wasn’t going to look the way that it was supposed to. And what happened was that the primer did not set up before they ran it through the machine for the next paint.

Well rather than starting point fingers and doing this man it’s okay. This scenario isn’t great. You know, our builder is working with the owner of the holding company that’s working with the Stanley hotel, they’ve got a deadline, they gotta get this done. The front of the building is exposed.

Okay. Once again, that part doesn’t, you know, have crazy weather. So our contractor is over at 5280, they’re trying to make sure that they can work through this as fast as possible. So they need the material to meet their deadline. But now it’s because of the type of special material that it is. It was a CVG Cedar with a special profile and all these different things with the special paint.

Now he’s looking at us going, I have to hit this deadline, you know, realize it was neither one of our spots. How are we gonna make this happen? What are we gonna need to do? So we work with Bryce, we get another set of material. We get brought over to a different paint and stain shop. It gets run through, it sets up, right.

We get it on the job. They complete the job. Everything goes wonderful. At that point, we could be like this big giant, fighting between all the different parties, but that doesn’t get the job done and it doesn’t help any bone out. It’s not that Bryce has fallen on us on our fault. Well, what do we need to do to make it right?

What do we have to do to go through those next steps? And so when we did, and because we did, Bryce gets more work, we get more work. Our relationship gets stronger. Our relationship on our vendor side is stronger because we did some things over here to help this guy out as well, too. And it all falls, it all pulls together.

So everything that we do in our business is going to hit these two things from the get-go. And that’s the top box on our next video that we’re going to be filming. It’s going to talk about our five pillars. What is important to Rocky Mountain? What are the five pillars that sit under here? That encompasses these two main ideas.

Once again, I’m Taylor Poole of Rocky Mountain Forest Products. Stay tuned to episode two of RMFPs brand strategy.