Kady Sandel Helps Businesses Stand Out With Branding

Through having the Inspiring Mompreneurs series, I have met so many amazing mompreneurs! A very accomplished woman reached out to me over an email named Kady Sandel. She is the CEO of a branding agency called Aventive Studio and author of the Brand Clarity course. I hope you will become inspired by her as much as I have been!

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

My name is Kady, and I’m a brand strategist, author, and course creator – and a new mom!

I’m originally from Serbia, and I am the founder of a full-service branding agency called Aventive Studio. I love helping entrepreneurs collaborate, so in addition to my branding career, I’m also the founder of a coworking space here in Austin, Texas.

Every day feels like an adventure, and when I’m not working, you can usually find me drinking coffee and spending time with my daughter, husband, and two fluffy cats.

Related Posts:

How would you describe your job?

I help businesses stand out, attract more customers, and make more sales through creating an unforgettable brand.

Branding is so much more than just a logo or color scheme: it encompasses everything about the way a company presents itself to the public. I create a lot of educational branding content in different formats like blog posts, social media updates, my book BrandFix: A Brand Strategy Guide for Busy Entrepreneurs, and my Brand Clarity online course.

I help businesses stand out, attract more customers, and make more sales through creating an unforgettable brand.

With my branding agency, I work privately with businesses that want to either improve their branding or rebrand their businesses completely. I walk them through a brand strategy process of discovering the core features of their brand, refining their voice, analyzing their competitors, identifying their target, and so on.

After finishing the brand strategy, my agency develops designs such as brand boards, websites, color schemes, fonts, and product packaging designs.

How did you get the idea for your branding agency?

My degree was in Graphic Communications, and after graduating, I moved to the US and became a freelance graphic designer. I learned how to be an entrepreneur during those years of freelancing, and I worked with small businesses to create a logo here, a flyer there, a car wrap for someone, a full website design for someone else, etc. It was a cool period of my career, and I liked the variety of working with different clients and industries.

During that time, I saw the difference between my clients who just wanted designs that looked good versus those who wanted designs that attracted their target, stood out from their competitors, and expressed the core values of their businesses. To create the results that the second group of clients wanted, we needed to spend more time together and dive into the brand strategy of what set their businesses apart and how I could communicate that visually.

I realized that I could make a more significant impact focusing on full-suite brand strategy and design services rather than creating one-off designs. This change in my approach had two main benefits: it made my clients more successful, and it gave me the stability to work with businesses who were serious about wanting to grow. I founded my branding agency Aventive Studio at that time, and I haven’t looked back.

What is one piece of advice you would give to a new entrepreneur?

I would tell new entrepreneurs to drop the idea of doing “more” and instead focus on doing a few things exceptionally well.

When first starting a business, there is a tendency to be everywhere and do everything:

posting and interacting on all different social media platforms
going to networking events
creating content of your own
managing people
trying to build your website
interacting with clients

But if you keep trying to go full-speed-ahead and do everything at once, you will burn out before any of those strategies have a chance to be effective – and you are left with very little to show for it.

So I would encourage new entrepreneurs to pace themselves, identify which action items are truly bringing results and revenue, and focus on those. As your audience and sales grow, you can always expand and try new things from there.

How do you advertise or get the word out about your branding agency?

When it comes to getting the word out, every entrepreneur and blogger should consider where your target customers are spending the most time. Where are your ideal clients looking for solutions to their problems? Are they searching online? Are they scrolling Instagram? Are they asking their friends and family for word-of-mouth referrals…?

There are so many options for marketing our businesses, and all of them can be effective – the question is, which is most relevant to your target customer. In my branding agency’s case, our clients are entrepreneurs who are primarily searching for branding and design-related questions on Google. Since they are on Google, I focus on search engine optimization (SEO), so my agency’s website will appear higher in their search results.

On our blog, we have over 60 informational articles about branding that are tailored to what our clients are searching for. Over time, our ideal customers are attracted to our content. They join our email list, they purchase my book or online course, and eventually, some of them choose to work with us. My branding agency has also found success with paid online advertising, but only on platforms like Google and Facebook, where we know our target client is active.

What are your goals for 2020?

My primary goal for 2020 is to launch Aventive Academy by the end of the year. Aventive Academy will be a comprehensive educational platform with online courses and books that help entrepreneurs grow their businesses through branding.

I have already created some value-packed resources like the Brand Clarity online course. Once the Academy is launched, these resources will be in one place, so business owners can easily decide which options will help them the most. I’m excited to help a wide range of entrepreneurs through the Academy since there is a limit on how many businesses I can work with privately at once.

As for other goals, I became a mom at the beginning of 2020, so it has been an exciting and transformational year already! I have settled into my new normal and am enjoying time with my daughter and husband while also running my branding agency and helping our clients develop memorable brands.

What helps you feel inspired?

Since I started as a designer, and I’m often developing color schemes and visual designs for our branding agency clients, creative inspiration is extremely important to me!

I love browsing through platforms like Pinterest, Behance, and Instagram, where I can see visual examples of other people’s creative work. Whether it’s logos or typography or photography or attractive packaging designs that others have created, I feel like I always learn something and walk away with a fresh appreciation of our industry.

I also love reading various blogs and articles to keep my mind open and refreshed. Sometimes I read about parenting, or business, or Austin, Texas (where I live), or well-being, or design – it depends on what I’m craving on a given day.

What is your best productivity hack?

My #1 productivity hack is to set daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals and then reverse engineer those goals into actionable steps.

For example, when I decided to write my book BrandFix I had never written a book before. I looked at it mathematically: I wanted the manuscript to have around 36,000 words, and I wanted to write a draft in 10 weeks.

Once I scheduled some days off and did the calculations, I saw that I needed to write 600 words a day. Writing 600 words a day is not that hard, and it’s much more manageable than thinking about writing an entire book. I made it a priority to meet that daily word count no matter what, and before I knew it I had a completed book manuscript!

The more concrete your action steps are, the more successful this hack will be. So instead of putting “Work on social media today” on your to-do list, I would encourage entrepreneurs to choose a more measurable goal like “Interact with 8 Instagram accounts today” to ensure you meet your goal.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

If I could travel anywhere, I would go to Santorini, Greece. I love being in and around the water, and every picture I have seen of Santorini looks like it could be its beautiful painting.

What do you love about helping companies with branding?

I love the entrepreneurs that I get to meet as a brand strategist. The companies that I work with have amazing products and services, and they have poured their hearts, savings, and time into making their businesses work.

Picture a small business that sells healthy snacks at farmers markets and now wants to expand into grocery stores. To do that, they will need a consistent and professionally-designed visual brand that will position them apart from their new competitors on the grocery shelves. Their branding will need to attract the attention of potential customers within the first few seconds, so those customers pause in the middle of the aisle to learn more about their product and make a purchase. It’s so fulfilling to be part of those projects, and to know my work is helping businesses make more sales.

I enjoy mixing creativity, design, and entrepreneurship in my day-to-day work, and my favorite part is seeing the “aha” moments when students, clients, or readers gain insight into why their past branding efforts weren’t working.

Why should someone sign up for your course?

Every aspect of the Brand Clarity course is directed towards showing entrepreneurs how to create and implement a brand strategy that will attract more customers to their business. I designed the course to be straight to the point. I know how frustrating it is to sign up for an online course and feel so motivated at first, only to get lost in endless bonuses and modules and content and fluff.

As a mom and entrepreneur with a jam-packed schedule, I prefer online learning that is results-driven and straightforward. In an online course, I want to learn exactly what I need, have access to the specific exercises that will help me, and know how to implement the material quickly– without spending months trying to figure it out. So that’s how I structured the Brand Clarity online course.

Brand Clarity includes 15 step-by-step video modules that walk entrepreneurs through exactly how to create a mission statement for their businesses, analyze their competitors, identify the core attributes of their brand, differentiate themselves, and more. The course includes a workbook that students fill out as they complete each module, and that workbook is critical because it’s where the concepts get applied to their businesses.

There are two actionable bonuses included as well – a copy of my book BrandFix and a marketing elements checklist. By the end of the course, they will have created a full brand strategy of their own and will know the next steps to take to implement their brand plans.

I’m looking forward to helping business owners through this course, and I appreciate the opportunity to share my work on the Mom Beach blog. Thank you for having me!

✅Check out the Brand Clarity course here to propel your business!

Does Kady Sandel inspire you? Let us know in the comments!