A Founder Story so Powerful it Propelled a Company to Over $100 Million and an IPO

Eric Eden:
0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Henry Wong. He is an author, a speaker and has an extensive career in marketing. Welcome to the show.

Henry Wong:
1:12

Hey, thanks very much for having me on, Eric.

Eric Eden:
1:15

We appreciate you joining us today. I understand you have a great story for us, but before we get into that, why don't you share with us just a little bit about who you are and what you're doing in life right now?

Henry Wong:
1:28

In spite of my boyish looks, I have been in the business for well over 25 years. I have grown up through the ad agency world. I used to be creative director and strategist at Sachi and Sachi and then, through the years, I've developed a number of my own businesses, bought and sold along the way, but these days I focus mostly on working with clients who want to have an impact on the world. So clear mission, clear purpose, and it has, in many ways, for someone who's been in the business a long time, renewed my vigor in terms of wanting to have the skills that we all have to have for a positive outcome rather than negative. Along the way, I've also written a book on personal branding, telling your story. So I'm very happy to be here today and just chat about anything that our conversation takes us to.

Eric Eden:
2:21

Awesome. Personal branding is a big topic on the podcast. It's something that I think is important for marketers and business leaders to embrace. So I think everyone should check out your book on telling your story. I think it's really important. It's really hard for people to do that. To tell their own story, it requires sometimes a lot of self-reflection, if you will, and so having a good framework to do that, which is what your book provides, I think, would be helpful for a lot of people. So let's jump in and hear a story about some of the marketing that you've done in your extensive career that you're most proud of the most remarkable, the best marketing you've done.

Henry Wong:
3:04

As it relates to marketing, just recently, I also serve as chief marketing officer for Borealis Foods, which is a food tech company. Now what's unique about it is they develop a very high protein ramen, which in itself sounds like another better for you food product, but the whole company has a mission behind it, which is to try to get affordable, healthy foods into the masses. It would have been very easy for this food to be created as a $8 cup that you could buy at Whole Foods, but the production and the level of distribution has been able to bring this down to well over $2. And what that means is that it truly is affordable for people to buy into. Why I bring this up is that it is more about the mission than it is, and the story behind it than the product itself. I'll share with you an instance in which it really benefited the company.

Henry Wong:
4:01

We managed to get online in a Zoom meeting with Gordon Ramsay, a very renowned chef, and we were pitching our company to hopefully have him come on as a brand ambassador and, in the normal course of things, it would have been very easy if we perhaps wrote a large check and perhaps brought somebody of his caliber on board, but as we started talking about it, I shared the story of how the founder of the company was a former doctor in another life and he volunteered in the villages of India. I saw a lot of malnutrition and while he could help people, he couldn't really help with them post-solution. So he always felt that nutrition affordable nutrition in some way would benefit people. So through the years that he stayed with them as he went on to an investment career and gained a lot of success, he started this food company to create healthy, affordable food that everyone can consume.

Henry Wong:
4:55

When Gordon Ramsay heard that, he stopped us and said you have me on side, you have me as a supporter, and that was a wonderful thing to hear because his own background was a very humble beginning. So when he heard that story he realized that he wanted to become part of this mission. So I share that because the power of story, if it is tied authentically to the purpose and mission of what the company is all about, will bring supporters on site. It will bring people, it will connect better with people than any budget that you would have and that can do very profound things for your brand and those sort of things and approaches that I live for, to find ways in which we could center on the right story, center on the right sort of positioning that we could take the brand to market.

Eric Eden:
5:42

That's awesome. So what sort of success did the food company have with the affordable healthy ramen? Was it very successful?

Henry Wong:
5:54

Oh yeah, so four years ago this company did not exist. It was essentially a startup, but through a lot of people wanting to invest as an impact company, we went public last month, in February. So from zero to hero, from very small, humble beginnings to a very well valued company that is now trading on NASDAQ. So huge success in that way and I think we're just going to continue to grow from there. But it really demonstrates how inspirational a good story is and, again, how you can get people on site, even investors, and to create even an initial cult, like following, for people to begin to grab onto it and embrace it and have it as their own.

Eric Eden:
6:39

That's amazing. So, being a personal branding guru, tell us a little bit about some of the things you've been able to do for people you've worked with who were willing to invest the time and the effort into building their personal brand.

Henry Wong:
6:55

So a lot of the work I do really reflects the processes and methodology I developed over the years for products and services. So it's the same principle as that you would apply to a big brand as you would a small brand. So to do people brands, you realize that the same discipline can help you succeed in life in the same sort of way. So if you think of from a marketing point of view, you're trying to find the right positioning in the market, how you can distinguish yourself and then be able to do the assessment, like normally with products, you do some research to get the insights and background so that you can find the right positioning in the marketplace. Finding that will allow you to determine your key message and from there your story grows, your hook, your positioning in the market all stem from that key positioning.

Eric Eden:
7:42

People struggle with coming up with a tight two or three paragraphs about them that explains who they are and what they stand for and how they can help other people in a very concise way. People struggle with generally speaking about themselves. I'm going to say do I need to talk about myself in the third person? They don't know how to go about it. And all the way through to the dating apps, like you said, I think what a lot of people discuss is that it's really hard for people, even on the dating apps, to create a profile that is interesting for people. What pictures do they put in there? Like a lot of times people are like is that really your best picture? Did you really put your best foot forward In this short space? You have to describe yourself. People write some very interesting things. Is that really the best way to introduce yourself? And so I guess my question for you in all this is why do you think this is so hard?

Henry Wong:
8:40

I think we live in a world where we have a lot of doubt, and this is particularly true. It's ironic because I think a lot of your audience, of course, is people within marketing it, and we are often our worst enemies because we tend to overthink. We may be very clear and directive when it comes to expressing to the brands we work on or the clients that we work on, but when it comes to ourselves, it's a little bit different, because it is very personal. The idea of creating your own personal brand is to remove a lot of that away, because you have your own incomprimces, your own personal likes and dislikes. When you follow a little bit of process, many of us who have that marketing background can do it well for products and services Apply that same principle and that's really the basis of what I write about is, if you apply it to yourself and you look at yourself objectively, you can find that really key positioning for yourself in the marketplace.

Henry Wong:
9:34

Once you determine what you stand for as an individual whether it's in the dating game or whether it's as a brand, as a person trying to navigate your way through the career what makes you truly unique and that's really key positioning. How do I express that as a key message and what is the story that comes out of it? That helps prove it and share with people. Once you have that framework, it's very easy then to be able to execute, because now I know how I should be writing the story, what I should be expressing to carry that story forward. In fact, the picture is a reflection of it. Do I, based on my positioning? Do I want to be super formal, or do I want to be relaxed, or want to be more comical? Do I want to be a little bit more serious? All of that comes into play once you determine what your positioning is. Again, whether it's in the personal endeavors or whether in the professional life, that key positioning and why you exist and your purpose is so important to laying out the foundation of everything you do.

Eric Eden:
10:32

So I read your book this week telling your story and I think it's great. Everyone should get a copy of it and read it.

Eric Eden:
10:39

I'll link to it in the show notes so people can easily get to it and get a copy and read it. Thanks a lot. There's a lot of books people could read, so give us a teaser and tell us what is really the secret to personal branding. If we were having a coffee and I said, come on, henry, just tell me the couple things I really need to know about building the best personal brand as an executive for my career, what are the couple things you would tell me?

Henry Wong:
11:09

I think it goes beyond just the business application of it, because one of the things I'm a very strong proponent of is happiness in life. I think true happiness comes from when you are authentic and true yourself. I often use this line, that is, to thine own self be true, which is Shakespeare's line, of course. But really, what is a reflection of who you are as an individual? People talk about doing work on themselves. Quite often it's about improving elements of their personality or their demeanor or aspects of their life. Really, what it should be is working on yourself as coming to truly understand what you are all about, what your comfort level is, because sometimes pushing out of that is something you want to do in terms of creating some adrenaline. But, on the other hand, being happy in life means that you should be expressing yourself in the way that is mostly authentic to you. So the exercises in the beginning is really coming to understand yourself. So your brand should always be a reflection of who you are through and through. Because, as we see in life, when you get out there and you're something you're not, that does create that discord, it does create that disconnect you're not able to deliver. Be happy with where you are to find the best version of that and begin expressing it.

Henry Wong:
12:28

The other thing I often talk about is centering on owning a single word. So if you think of the big brands in the world, when I say Volvo, you think safety. When I say Nike, you think winning, or Apple, innovation, each of us have a keyword that we stand for. So through the exercises, through your own thinking and process, you can come to exactly what you stand for. Your personal brand is really a reflection of that keyword and if you always hang on to it and you always live up to it, everything becomes a lot easier in the way you express it, the way you support it, the way you position yourself in the market. So one word, one keyword.

Eric Eden:
13:10

That's interesting and good advice. I think that being honest about who you are and your personal brand is really important, because it doesn't really work to pretend to be somebody else. You can really only pretend to be something you're not for a very short period of time before people realize it's not the real you. So I think that's important advice because personal branding is not about creating something that is not you and you should be happy in being who you are and what you're doing, so you shouldn't have to pretend to be somebody else Absolutely. And to quote back Shakespeare to you, I hope for a lot of people that their personal brand isn't the Shakespeare in love quote about. It's a mystery.

Henry Wong:
13:56

You don't want it to be a mystery, yeah.

Eric Eden:
14:00

Again. Everybody check out Henry's book. I'm going to link to it here in the show notes. Thank you so much for being with us today.