Hope as a Strategy: How Reflecting on the Past with The Meaning Movement shaped our Future
In his business accelerator programs for entrepreneurs, Dan Cumberland, founder of The Meaning Movement, poses a question to business leaders: “What do you have the greatest control over - the past, the present, or the future?”.
While most people may believe that they have the most control over the present or future, Cumberland argues that it is the past where we hold the most power. Our ability to shape our own narrative, choose which experiences to focus on or omit, and decide how we view ourselves as either victims, survivors, or heroes, all have a significant impact on how we perceive the present and our future expectations.
Cumberland encourages business leaders and entrepreneurs who take his course to take a deeper look at their past by creating a timeline, but it has to fit on just one single page.
On episode 28 of Growing a Fruitful Brand, join Raj on a journey of reflecting on the 10 most pivotal moments that shaped Fruitful’s story and how Fruitful founder, Ben Lueders has grown a business with hope as a strategy.
Check out the episode on YouTube or listen on your favorite podcast platform!
Learn more about Cumberland’s work and read The Meaning Manifesto at themeaningmovement.com or subscribe to The Meaning Movement podcast wherever you listen to podcasts!
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Ep. 28:
Marketing Nonprofits that Tackle Sensitive Issues
Automated Transcript
Raj Lulla:
As a business leader, what do you have the most control over, the past, the present, or the future? Fruitful friend and collaborator, Dan Cumberland asks this question in the business accelerators he runs for entrepreneurs, what do you have the most control over, the past, the present, or the future? Most people, of course, will say the present or the future, and that makes sense. We can change things right now or we can try to make changes in the future, but Dan argues that we have the most control over the past. How we tell our story, the moments we include or don't include, whether we describe ourselves as victims or survivors or heroes, those determine how we think about our present and those impact what we expect from our future.
Welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Raj Lulla, Principal Brand Strategist at Fruitful Design and Strategy. Fruitful, our company, is turning 10 this year, and that's a milestone that most small businesses never achieve statistically, and yet we're doing so in the midst of a tough economy and that's following three years of pandemic and we're grateful to still be here and are hopeful about the days ahead.
Today, instead of sharing marketing advice, I wonder if you'll indulge me in a shameless appreciation episode in which I'm going to talk about the 10 moments that made our company, or at least made the relationship between Ben and I possible. Today's episode should help you think about your own business or career with a sense of gratitude. I know how losing perspective in the past has led me to burnout, so if you're feeling thankful for where you are today, celebrate with us, cultivate that hope and gratitude. It's a discipline that business leaders need. But if you're feeling discouraged because of where you are right now, hopefully this look backwards will help you reflect on your own journey and be proud of how far you've come.
At the end of the episode, I'll offer some tips on reflecting well. You'll have noticed by now that I am Benless. I am not joined by my co-host and business partner, Ben Lueders, who is currently out on family leave after the birth of their sixth child, Moses. Everyone is doing well, but it has presented me with a unique opportunity to talk about Ben without him being here. That's what we're going to do today.
In honor of the 10 years since Ben opened Fruitful's doors, here are 10 Fruitful moments that have defined our company culture. Number one here is Ben and I met at Starbucks. It was about 9:00 at night on 72nd & Dodge, for those of you who are familiar with Omaha, about the middle of our city. I was coming from way down south in Papillion, and he was coming from way north in Benson. It was almost kind of a proverbial meeting in the middle for us. The thing that really stands out to me about that moment was there was one particular story that Ben told there that made me realize that we had common values. We already had a common connection, it was through our friend Jeff [inaudible 00:03:19], who we very much appreciate connecting us, and so I'd seen a little bit of Ben's art, we had a mutual friend.
But when we sat down at that Starbucks, there were a couple of things that really impressed me. First of all, it was 9:00 at night and Ben was meeting a client. He was starting this design company on the side and was hungry enough to get business that he was willing to meet me at 9:00 at night. I think I had band practice that night for the church that I was attending, and so, he made it possible for us to meet that late.
The story that he told me though was a quick throwaway comment about how he had done some nonprofit work in China. For me, as a person of color, somebody who has South Asian ancestry, Ben's heart for other people around the world, his willingness to travel internationally to do nonprofit work and the faith that drove him to do that were things that we had in common, and it was honestly that one comment that told me beyond his art skills, beyond our mutual connections, that maybe this would be, forgive the pun, of fruitful partnership.
Then, out of that meeting came one brochure. So, this is the second moment. When we started working together, when I was the communications director for Nebraska Christian College, it was this brochure, it was for the college that we were working for, and anybody who's ever received college mail knows that most of it goes in the trash. You get a million pieces from different colleges that you're not interested in. We decided to fly in the face of that a little bit, and the brochure literally said on the front, really big, "Throw this away." We were just playing into what most people are going to do anyway, but when we put in asterisks and it said, "If you want to pay full price for college."
We got so much reaction to that, that Ben and I then were able to work together on the magazine, the alumni magazine that Nebraska Christian was doing, and it was in that time that I discovered that we were more together than we were separate. I was just beginning my journey as a professional photographer. I'd been at it for a couple of years, but it hadn't really taken off yet, and when I started providing photos for the magazine, Ben complimented them every time. That was nice, but I was his client and I thought maybe that he was just being a little flattering of his client, but then the way that he used my photos to make those magazines really beautiful, full page photos on the cover, interior spreads, and he really gave the photos room to breathe and he really respected my craft with his craft, and I realized we were more together than we were separate.
This was also a time where in order to make ends meet, Ben was doing piano lessons up in the 402 Arts Collective studio where he had an office, and just again, that the hard work ethic and his willingness to do whatever it took to get this business off the ground, I really admired. It was sometime later that I learned that Ben had lost a child during that time. They had a baby. They, I believe, knew wasn't going to make it, and so they had a few precious hours with their son there in the hospital. I didn't know that until a while later. I knew that they had lost a child. I didn't realize though, that the timeline had coincided so closely with when he and I started working together.
That was really powerful for a couple of reasons. One was that he's a loving husband and family man, but he was also such professional that I didn't know he was going through one of the most unimaginable losses possible. That spoke a lot to me of the kind of man that he was and the kind of company that he was building. Soon after that, well, I guess probably a year and a half or so, we had the third moment where it became the future of Fruitful. The first was meeting at Starbucks. The second was us working together on those first projects for Nebraska Christian, but then I left Nebraska Christian, and the third moment was when a church had approached us, it was Life.Church here in Omaha to do some work for them. They had seen the stuff I'd been doing at Nebraska Christian, and they were impressed with it, and so they decided to approach me about joining their staff.
I had worked in non-profit for almost 10 years at that point. I had my third kid on the way and I just didn't feel like I could work for a non-profit salary. In fact, we didn't even get to that part of the conversation, so they might have been offering something really, really generous. I don't know. What I did know is that about every 18 months or so when I'm working for non-profit, I was changing jobs because of the economy, because of some internal politics. Again, nothing to do with that particular organization or layoffs or any of those sorts of things, and I was just tired.
And so, I offered to Life.Church, which is now called Dream City Church, I would love to do the work for them, but they had to hire me and Ben at the same time. I asked Ben about this, if he'd be okay with that arrangement, and he was like, "Of course, please bring me business." And so, that first retainer that we did together was a long-term contract with Life.Church to do their strategy and to do their design for a full year, and they actually had to write two checks every month. I can't even believe they put up with it. I'm so thankful they did. Ben's willingness to just entertain a new business model, to try something is such an entrepreneurial spirit. I knew that we could do good work together. We had a common desire to grow.
I later found out that my boss at Nebraska Christian, knowing that layoffs were coming, had actually tried to set Ben and I up as business partners. He had told Ben to hire me away from Nebraska Christian, and I didn't learn that until probably I think two years of us doing business together, maybe longer, and Dave was right. In fact, I'm going to have dinner with Dave soon and I thank him for it every time that we see each other because he saw that there was something special that Ben and I had, these common values, common desire to grow, and there was so much about Ben starting Fruitful that just made that obvious to both of us.
A little while after that, so we had started these retainers, it was Life.Church, and then there was this church, Thanksgiving Lutheran, down in Bellevue. Then, we started with Cole Information, which is a software company. Ben took me out to lunch or coffee one day and he said, "Hey, we're doing so much work together, I need to see more of you." I was working from my house in Papillion at that time, and so I was literally almost 10 miles from the Fruitful office, which in today's post-pandemic world with Zoom calls and everything, doesn't seem that far, but at that time, hardly anybody was doing Zoom. I'm trying to remember when Zoom was actually founded, but I had never done a Zoom call up to that point. I had done Skype. I think I'd had some interviews on Skype or maybe Google's video platform, but he asked me to come work in the office with him and he would provide me a desk and he's like, "You can work on your photography stuff while you're there. I just want to see more of you so we can work together."
And so, we decided to do that. I started working in the Fruitful office probably about 2015, 2016. There was a night that happened in all of this, that's our fourth moment here, where he was working on a project that had nothing to do with our engagements. It was this video production company. They had a website that Ben was updating and something about the DNS records, which is all the weird numbers that if you ever see the backend of a website, they're the numbers that tell the internet where to go. We kind of think of the internet as having addresses like www.google.com, but really, there's these numbers that really tell everything where to go, just like we have street addresses.
Well, in this particular video production website, something went haywire in those numbers when Ben was making an edit and it took their email system down too, because it also operates on those numbers. And so, Ben was very stressed and he asked if I would stay late and help him figure it out. My dad was a computer guy. Growing up, I have slightly more technical knowledge than some people, so he asked if I would just stay and help out. That was our first startup moment, kind of those moments they talk about of being in the garage and inventing the future like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak or the sleep all night at the office and the brilliant idea, whatever.
We didn't come up with anything brilliant that night, but just working together hard on something that was difficult to figure out, being on the phone with customer service for the domain provider. It was an amazing night and we still look back on it with fondness. We went out to Benson Brewery afterwards and had a burger and then I think I went home about 9:00 or 10:00 that night. It was amazing to just again, see his determination, his work ethic, his willingness to put the customer first even though we both had young families and certainly didn't want to make that a habit all the time, but it was so good to see the kind of person that he was and the company that Fruitful was becoming.
In those years, then, we had these customers that we were working on together, and we started to make it easier on the customers, thankfully, where they would just write one check to Fruitful and then Fruitful would write a check to me. It got to be the point where about 50%, a little more than 50% of Fruitful's business came through our partnership, and Ben thought that it would be nice for me to be in the office and actually work for Fruitful on all of the customers just like we had worked together on the video production website that had encountered that issue.
For me, at that time, I was running my own business, running Lulla Photography and then I was doing work, doing some contracting work for Fruitful and these other clients. It didn't necessarily make sense for me to go in-house somewhere and work for Fruitful. I knew that was going to be a contentious conversation of how do we figure out how to make this feel good for both of us? And so, I approached Ben with an idea, what if I become a partner at Fruitful? I'm already bringing half of the business and I would like to own half of Fruitful. Now, of course, I wasn't asking to own half of Fruitful right away. And so, we agreed on an escalating partnership that after one year of working together, I would own 10% of the company, and then two years 20%, and so on and so forth.
It only took us two years to discover that neither of us was going anywhere. And so, after two years, we just escalated it all the way to 50%. That moment of signing the partnership agreement or even just the conversations that went into that, Ben's willingness to imagine a future together, his hopefulness that this would work out, it made a world of difference to me. I had come through, like I said, 10 years of basically 18 months everywhere that I went, always feeling like I couldn't figure out the rules to these organizations and why am I the first one to be laid off and what are the unwritten games that are being played here?
But with Ben, it wasn't like that. He was open and honest and willing to have the conversation even when it probably came off as a little bit insulting that I would want half of his business and not want to pay anything for it, but just to earn it through sweat equity, through working together, but he was open to having that conversation and that was six years ago now. I'm so thankful that he was willing to do that. We've built something that is approximately five times this size in that time. We've 5x'ed in those six years, all because Ben had the vision and the imagination to make that possible.
I was trying to think of a way to describe this sixth moment, because it wasn't really a moment. Between the time we became partners in 2017 through about the beginning of the pandemic, I just call it growing pains. We hired some staff. I was actually the second employee at Fruitful, Ben being the founder, and then Erin Pille was our designer. I came on third to the team here as second employee, and then, we realized pretty soon that we needed a project manager. We then needed another designer and Nic Fredrickson, who's brilliant as well. And so, we had all of this growing complexity. When you 5x in six years, there's a lot of things that we have to figure out.
And so, taxes got more complicated, and scheduling got more complicated. I've told this story before, but we locked the door to our office because we were right behind Hardy Coffee in Benson and all of Ben's friends would come by and want to talk to him while he needed to be working. And so, we would wave very kindly to them while they continued on to the coffee shop after that, and we would still let people in if they pounded on the door, but there's just a lot of growing pains, a lot of complexity during that time. We ended up moving upstairs to a bigger office to accommodate our growing team and to have a conference room that wasn't directly next to the bathroom. I guess it was still technically next to the bathroom, but there was a door this time, so it helps it.
We just went through so much together in that time and there were moments where we would look at each other and go, "Hey, my kid needs more diapers than I can afford right now, and we're going to have to get a new minivan," and those types of things and create budgets that would account for our growing families. Ben has been a great partner through all of those things. I would definitely not say that it's always been easy, but it's never been Ben that's made it not easy. It's always been just life and business that have made things somewhat difficult.
What I will never really truly understand is that when Ben and I think about an issue separately, then we come back together and say, "Okay, here's what I'm thinking." We, to this point, have always been on the same page. Now, sometimes, it takes some conversation of what that means and how we move forward from there, but like I said, those common values that we started with have made it so easy to work with this wonderful founder of our company and a great business partner. We went through growing pain season. I'd call that moment number six, even though it was actually a few years.
The next thing that was really pretty significant for us was hiring a project manager. I know I kind of mentioned that in the growing pains, but this was our first non-production role. This is where we started to say, "Hey, yep, I know Google Calendar's great, I know we've got a task management software, but we need somebody to help the trains run on time to communicate with our clients and to give them a better experience." Ben has always been somebody who believes the best about the future. If it's glass half full or glass half empty, Ben is, why don't we just fill the glass up all the way? He is that kind of person, very optimistic. I don't personally understand that. I probably lean towards the, I don't call it pessimistic, I often call it realistic, but Ben has corrected me before to say that optimistic can be realistic too.
And so, hiring a project manager, we actually have gone through a few, but just that taking that step of hiring somebody in a non-production role on our team, it really spoke to where we were going, where we wanted to go. We wanted to create even more capacity that wasn't stressing out him or me or our team and wasn't providing suboptimal, subpar experiences to our clients.
Then, the next thing that we had to do, we were approached by a business that wanted our name. They actually wanted us to become part of their company, and we didn't know what to do with that. So, we engaged a fractional CFO to help us figure out what our company was worth. Did we want to sell? I mean, we were both fathers with young families, and I don't know, $1 million sounds pretty great to split. Do we want to sell our company for that? We both had to call our dads and call Dave Miller who set us up and who you've heard on the podcast before, and we had to talk through that conversation.
We figured out that no, we did not want to sell. But making that decision together and deciding to professionalize our organization and realizing that we had a lot of future in front of us, that 5x in six years would be possible if we got down to business fundamentals and learned how to run a good budget and how to price our services that we could grow. Ben is an artist through and through. He does not like the numbers part of those conversations. I can watch him struggle to stay in, but he will. He will stay in the struggle. That's something I admire about him so much is that he's not just an artist, he's a creative professional. And there are times when the professional part of creative professional has to come out and do the right thing for the business. He hung in with some really thick numerical conversations as we went through that season and we decided to stay partners, not sell, and it's been the right decision for our company.
The next thing, I kind of alluded to it again in the growing pains, but we ended up moving offices within the 402 Arts building and it's a 100-year-old building and there are some times when the heat is either really hot or there were some ductless heaters that did not quite keep things as toasty, and that it's almost... A business partnership is a lot like being married. I know we've mentioned that before, but it's kind of funny to look back on just like you might look back on that first apartment. Do you remember the one with those neighbors and all that sort of thing? We were really thrifty about office spaces and we're really thankful to the 402 Arts Collective for providing us with those spaces and for helping us get the heat issues figured out whenever they could in an old historical building.
We look back now with fondness on those tight quarters and bumping into each other and not having private office space. Literally, when somebody would have a meeting in our first office at the conference room table, which again was right next to the bathroom and the kitchenette, the rest of us would have to put headphones on to not be a part of that meeting. It was a funny time. It was quite the adventure.
During that time, towards the end of that time, again, we're starting to experience a little more success. Ben's wife, Meg, was our original sort of pseudo project manager. She wasn't on payroll. We have since given her some money to thank her for the time that she did that. But as we finally got to be a little more successful, Ben ordered, I think, from a jewelry store, a birthday gift for his wife. He was in the process of ordering it, and he had to call him to make sure it was going to get there on time. While he was doing that, he was also working on the Christmas party invitation that was going to go out through our email system.
Trying to do two things at once, he accidentally invited 600 customers, family members, acquaintances, vendors to our Christmas party in our office that was 1100 square feet. I love this moment about Ben because of a few things. One was the sheer look of terror on his face when he realized what he had done, and we all make mistakes, but it was very endearing. The second thing was that he was in the middle of ordering a birthday gift for his wife. Again, it's such a family man, such a good, generous person that you can't exactly be mad at somebody who makes a mistake while they're in the process of being really kind and generous.
Being a strategist, I had to very quickly write an email uninviting about 500 people from our Christmas party, and they all had a very, very good laugh about it. Some of you who are listening may have experienced a similar mistake that we made a few months ago where we may have sent photos of my high school reunion to our entire Fruitful mailing list. But again, things happen. By the way, that was actually one of the best mistakes that we've ever made. We're about to unveil a project that we got because somebody got in touch with us after we all made a boneheaded mistake in sending out that email to our entire mailing list.
At the end of 2019, Ben and I got the chance to go down to Nashville to become StoryBrand Certified, and this was a dream come true for us. I remember calling StoryBrand when they first unveiled the, well, just the workshops, and I said, "Hey, I don't need this for our business." That was maybe a little arrogant, but I was like, "I don't need this for our business. I need this for my clients. Can I do this for my clients? Can I come do the workshop and do this for my clients?"
They said, "No, thank you." They said, "We're working on a certification program and it'll be out in a few months, so just hang tight." I waited for the announcement and when it came out, it was thousands of dollars, and at that time, my wife and I, we were sharing one minivan together that I was driving 10 miles away from home to work in the Fruitful office and all that, and it was too much money at that time. We couldn't do it. We had to wait a couple more years. In December of 2019, Ben and I got the opportunity to go fly down to Nashville and become StoryBrand Certified. That was a dream come true all by itself. We were starting to see some of the fruit of our labor here and we are investing in ourselves and our future for our customers.
That was our first time traveling together. You will learn a lot about somebody by traveling with them. I learned that Ben is significantly less worried about the TSA than I am, though I also get stopped by the TSA a lot more than Ben does. That probably makes sense. The other thing though that was great about that trip wasn't just getting StoryBrand certified, but it was the chance to dream together. We stayed in an Airbnb together, so we were roommates for about half a week, which is an interesting experience for the first time with your business partner. And so, we traveled, we had to navigate a new city together. I don't think either of us had ever been to Nashville, but we also just had these moments of downtime in the Airbnb lobby that was beautiful and we dreamed about our future, what do we want work to be like.
Both of us had these books that we were working on, and where did that fit into the world of Fruitful and how could we make room in our lives to do creative work that didn't necessarily have to be for money? Ben's willingness to engage that conversation and dream about my future with me, believe in my own creative endeavors as well as his was really meaningful and has affected some of where we are today. If you're staying up with the timeline here, we're getting close to current days, so number nine here is the pandemic.
We got StoryBrand Certified December of 2019. In the beginning of 2020, we had the opportunity to work with Scott Wehner, who was one of the co-founders of Fusion Medical Staffing here in Omaha, but also runs several other great companies like Sovel and GreenTree and investment partners and those types of things. He's a great business person. We got the chance to fly down to Austin to see him, I think it was February 2020. I remember sitting in, it was a taco place down there where the news was on, and there was this news of a virus that was happening in China. We'd all lived through the SARS and MERS headlines before. And so, we thought, oh, well that stinks. Hope everything's okay. Not realizing that a month later we would, I'll be forced to stay at home and work in a completely different way.
The pandemic was hard. Our business grew, but it grew at a cost to our mental health, to our way of working as a team. We had to split up and all work from our houses, and I don't know how much you know about creative work, but it's not as easy when you can't just walk over to somebody's desk and hash out what color something should be or where a photo should go or what the word should say. There were dynamics on our team that were difficult. Not everybody agreed about the best way to approach the pandemic, but even though Ben and I didn't always see eye to eye on how fast can we return to office and how can we get things back to normal, we always supported each other and we were growing through the hardest things together.
That means the world. It's easy to love somebody and to work with somebody when things are good and things are easy, but when they're difficult and you have to have the conversations outside six feet away from each other just to be near each other, then it can be a big challenge. But I am so thankful to work with somebody who's always so thoughtful, always so empathetic, and always wants to find resolution. That's some of the most perfect qualities to have in a business partner. Through that time, towards the end of that time, we decided to hire some folks. Last year, Ben and I had to fire somebody for the first time. Again, going through difficult things, it was a very surreal experience. I did not go down at all the way that we thought that it would and ended with a lot of heartache, but we did it together. I'm really thankful for Ben and his resilience, his hopefulness that gets us through times like that.
About six months that followed that, I had kind of always been our defacto CEO at Fruitful, because I was just the one who knew the businessy side of things, as we call it around here. I knew that we needed somebody else to lead us through that painful season post-pandemic, not having an executive. And so, we decided that Ben would take the home for that time to help our team heal and get to the next season. He was great at that. He helped get our culture back flowing again, but it came to a point where especially as the economy started to turn late last year, that we needed to return to some business fundamentals.
And so, last year, we had the chance to go to Nashville again, and during that time, we decided that I would be the managing partner at Fruitful going forward. Now, this was a decision that we had never actually made previously, even though I functioned as a managing partner on paper, he was, because he was the founder. And so, last year when we decided that I would be the managing partner, it took a lot of humility on Ben's part to allow that to happen. It took some forgiveness to allow that to happen because of ways that I didn't always lead well in the past. It took some hopefulness and some imagination and some vision to believe that we were going to find our way forward.
Ben has always been by my side fighting for the future and his willingness to reformat our company in that way just shows what he believes can happen and what we can do together. And so, that was moment number 10 is installing me as managing partner last October, and it's not been easy since then. There's been moments where we've maybe stepped on each other's toes a little bit, not on purpose, and certainly not with any malice, but there have been moments where we've had to figure it out. We've also done it into yet another difficult season of a recession that I don't know if we're dipping in and out of, or if it's going to get a little worse as we go through the year here, but there there've been some stressful moments in all of that.
I remember back when I met Ben at Starbucks, one of the things I remember is just how much he smiled, and I don't know why, but it was almost a little off-putting to me because I wondered if he was genuine or if he was just trying to win my business. Having worked with him for all of these 10 years, I know that it is genuine, that he really is that optimistic. There was a while where I thought maybe it was because he was aloof, but that's absolutely not true. He certainly has moments of head in the clouds, we all do. We forget to pay attention and we burn the pancakes on the stove. But Ben's a very thoughtful person, and I still a little bit struggle to understand how you can be so thoughtful and also be hopeful, but Ben is someone I strongly admire because of that. He doesn't just have hope as a barrier head in the sand kind of denial of the world.
Ben has hope as a strategy. Every time I talk about how challenging something might be, Ben challenges me to think of how good it could be. With economic headlines the way they are with the past few years that we've all had with pandemic and a recession, I think hope as a strategy is exactly what we all need. And so, even though I've taken over as managing partner here, Ben's DNA of Fruitful, I mean even just the idea that good things grow, that's core to who we are, and it has changed me. We kind of joke that he's sunshine and I'm the rain cloud around here, but there are times where we flip, and if he's feeling down about something, I can help him return to hope again. That's something that he has taught me. He has rubbed off on me in that way, and I'm really thankful for it.
Thank you for allowing me 10 moments of Fruitful's history. I hope you see how they have influenced the company that we are today. I hope that it will help you to look back on your own journey, whether it's the last 10 years, the last 2 years, and you'll just see how far you've come. Being a business leader is really tough, and I hope that as you reflect on that time, that you can see those moments that have made you and made your company as well.
Dan Cumberland, who I mentioned at the top of the episode, runs a company called The Meaning Movement. In his accelerators, he encourages his participants to reflect on their entrepreneurial journey much in the same way that we've done today. He does it by having them create a timeline on just one sheet of paper. That's really strategic to write down on just one sheet, the things that have happened since you've started your business, started your career, whichever mode of working that you're in, he goes into a lot more detail about how to make sense of that timeline, but if you fit in on one piece of paper, you'll be surprised how difficult this is, how it'll make you reflect on what wins were really important and what losses or low points were as well. If you do this, and I encourage you to do it, that's kind of our takeaway for today, is to do that timeline. You will see your story in a different light, and that will help you see your present in a different light as well.
Again, do you have more control over the past, present, or future? Dan argues that you've got more control over your past because you can figure out how to tell that story in a way that reflects who you are now and who you want to be in the future. Maybe you should pick up some practices that you had in the early days of your business, but you've let slip. You need to make that bold phone call to get a new customer. Do you need to show up in somebody's doorstep with a fruit basket? Do you need to apologize when you've messed something up? Or maybe you need to let go of some things that happened that are farther back in your history than you realized that there's actually quite a bit of dust on that memory and you can let that go now, that failure go, or that disappointment go.
So, write out that timeline on a one sheet of paper. I'm going to partner with Dan on LinkedIn, where he will share some reflection tips to make this exercise meaningful to you. Please go follow Dan and The Meaning Movement on LinkedIn. We'll put those LinkedIn links in the show notes. And, because I can't be bothered to record the outro piece of our episode myself, here's a hologram of Ben to close out our episode today.
Ben Lueders:
Thanks for joining us today on Growing a Fruitful Brand. If you found today's show helpful, don't forget to subscribe and consider sharing it with someone who might also enjoy it. If you'd like to work with Fruitful on a branding website or messaging project of your own, you can always reach out on our website fruitful.design. So until next time, don't forget to grow something good.
