Welcome to the first Circle Talks. Our guest today is Ondřej Rudolf, co-owner and consultant at Circle Line. Ondra, straight to the point—what exactly is a brand?

A brand is what remains after you leave the room.

Does that mean a brand is how I perceive the person who just left, or even the one who is yet to arrive?

Yes, exactly. If the person who is about to arrive already has a brand—one that you know, or if they are preceded by an aura or reputation—then that is it. In such a case, you are already predisposed to listen to them in some way. When a completely unknown person arrives, you expect nothing from them and you are rather reserved. But if they are preceded by that "brand" and you know who you will be talking to, you are more prepared to listen to them. And that is essentially the whole principle of branding: to create a readiness in the listener for what you are going to bring to them. That is the essence of a brand.

But why do I, as an entrepreneur, actually need such a brand?

Nothing exists without a brand. The brand is an entirely integral part of everything we do in business. It is the personal brand of the founder and the brand of the product that was created. It's simply there; we cannot say it doesn't exist. The whole principle we are talking about lies in managing it and maximizing the effect we get from the brand through that management.

So, listening to you, is my name also a brand?

Yes.

Does that mean that who I am is my brand?

Exactly. Your signature guarantees certain things. You vouch for something with your name—there are things you do, and things you fundamentally do not do. That is your brand.

How can I prepare that brand so that it creates the right impression of me?

You have to invest in it and then properly complete it. What you feel inside yourself—what your self-perception is—does not yet mean that people read it that way or that they recognize it. It's often quite far from that, and quite often it's about completely different things. It is the same with a company: a company has some internal feeling about what it is, but people from outside do not know it because they have nothing to infer it from. You might think you are telling them, but in reality, you are telling them something completely different. There, you need to look at it and ask: "When we speak to a certain market segment, can they even understand me? Will they know who we are and why we will be here in five years so they want to partner with us today?"

That sounds almost like a philosophical question. Does that mean the first thing I should ask myself when building a brand is: 'Who am I and do others understand me the way I think they do?'

Yes. And that is why, when we work with clients on brand innovation or transformation, we take employees as one of the most important sources of information. It is not just the owner, the marketer, or the salesperson—they provide their perspective, but then we go to the employees. We ask them: "What is this company actually like?" And from them, a lot of information emerges, which is often culturally or personally focused, but it reveals the true core of the company to us. The people inside know it.

But that requires considerable courage from the owner or director, to let you talk to people and ask them what they think of the company.

There are different types of owners and managers. We recently told one to let us talk to them. He asked: "What good will it do me?" I answered that he would learn two things: one set of things he already knows, and another set he did not want to know. That is exactly what comes out of that internal analysis. It has a direct impact on another important feature—the employer brand, or employment brand. You must build this to be equally valuable for the people inside and for future colleagues as it is for customers. There is no difference in that.

But hasn't that always been the case?

It has been like that forever, it just wasn't called that before. Now it has had its name for several years.

Well, write that down, that's good—you can show off with that name at meetings!

Today, this is called employer branding. It is essentially the same brand, it is just its reflection inside the company—how the employees themselves perceive it.

It makes sense. If an employee aligns with the company, is loyal, stays, doesn't leave, and enjoys their work, those are all positive points for the brand, aren't they?

That is one thing. The second thing is that the brand with customers is created by whoever talks to them. And today, that's almost everyone in the company, because communication is much more open than before. If I don't have 150 people living the same story with me, they are neither able nor willing to pass that story on. Even if I poured a lot of money and advertising into the brand, if I don't convince those 150 or 1,000 people of our story, it won't reach the customers. The brand will simply erode.

I assume, however, that it is not completely easy to define that story so that hundreds or thousands of employees truly share it with you.

Sometimes it goes completely smoothly. Especially in companies that have grown up around a strong leader, an owner who founded it fifteen years ago and has been driving it the whole time. The story existed and breathed the whole time there; the company lived by it. The problem is that it is an individual story—it rests on that one person (or a few founders). People identify with him, but they have embodied the company's existence in that specific person. And this is where the risk arises: when that person leaves for some reason or sells the company, the brand is in danger of disappearing. It is essentially guaranteed to happen if it is not addressed. That is why it is necessary to externalize what that leader represents for the internal and external world. You have to say: "The best thing we built this on is this set of values."

So is it necessary to actually "depersonalize" yourself from the owner?

Yes, depersonify—that is a beautiful word. To say: "Fine, Franta founded it, he's great, but now we'll take all the good things out of Franta and put it into the DNA of the corporate brand as an archetype." So that the brand can exist even without Franta.

But Franta probably needs someone for that; he can't do it alone, right?

He can't do it alone because he doesn't see himself. Franta is a successful entrepreneur who doesn't have the time, the mood, or the ability to objectively evaluate himself like this.

Has this ever succeeded in practice? Imagine a B2B company that relies on me—I founded it, I know the people, I am the guarantee that it works. Has it ever happened that people were told, 'I won't be here anymore,' and they still stayed with the company?

It has succeeded. It's not for free, and it doesn't happen automatically, but it's not rocket science either. Moreover, now is a time when this happens a lot—companies founded in the nineties now have owners around sixty or seventy, so these transitions are a daily occurrence.

It is the generational change. The owner may no longer want to run the company for life, they are bored with it or overwhelmed, and they want to pass it on. Either it is taken over by the family, where there is an advantage in similar characteristics, or it is sold or handed over to management. And precisely in these moments, it is absolutely critical to dedicate care to the brand so that it can continue to function.