[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host, Ana Gonzalez and you can find me on social media at Annabelle Prime. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals and scale your business faster.
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[email protected] that's conversationalfunnels.com Today's guest is Roald Davis. He's an executive branding authority. Roald Davis. Oh, executive branding authority. Raul Davis, CEO of Ascendant Group Branding.
So, David, welcome to Big Ticket. Bruce, what is the best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Yeah, so how do you become an industry leader? You got to think about that from the gate. So you got to look at the space and say to yourself, here is what I'm contributing. Here is where the future of a space is going and really focus there. Because if you're trying to just compete with what everyone is currently doing, doing, we call that a red ocean. It gets pretty bloody. Right. But if you can kind of think about what's that next thing where you can have your expertise at, then you can be in a blue ocean.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: That is interesting.
So totally agree with finding your genius and bringing value, contributing to the community, the world, whatever you want to focus on and to think. What's the next thing?
Do you have any tactical advice to about what someone can do to think and brainstorm? All right, what is the best thing? Like when or where can someone start?
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Sure, absolutely. Yeah. So, and I'll just dial down a little bit more in terms of why. Okay. So basically if you are just talking about where the hockey puck currently is, you're always going to have to spend more money to be heard. But if you're talking about where the puck is going, you have to put less resources in because less people are talking about that.
So let's go to your space in terms of the funnel world. Right. There's a lot of conversation right now. People are beginning to talk about AI. So if you're just another person talking about AI in the funnel space, you pretty Crowded. If you talk about what are going to be the two or three evolutions that are coming in 2026 and how do you prepare yourself for that, then you are focused a little bit better. How do you do that? There's a lot of ways to do it. You do your own research online, you can begin utilizing some of the tools like ChatGPT and pick its brain. Right. And then think about what your strength is and how does your strength align to whatever that next thing is and then you're truly making it yours. Right. Because if we think about something like nascar, all the cars are high performing, all of them have great pit crews, but what's the difference? The driver. So you're the driver of your business. You're the differentiation point. So lean in on that.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: That is pretty interesting. And you know that what you said about focus on the next two or three evolutions, what will happen in 2026, it reminds me. So sometimes I go to Improv Classic because it's fun. And there's this game where someone says one word and you need to relate it. Like if someone tells you one word, you relate it to someone to something else. For instance, I don't know, if I say chocolate, I can relate it to ice cream. But then you need to relate it to the next second thing. And then an evolution of the game is related to the third thing. So if I say chocolate, I won't say ice cream. I will say, I don't know, tummy ache. Or I will say like, this is hopefully not on top of my. On top of my mind. Yeah, chocolate is awesome. But that was like the first thing that right now. But I think that maybe an exercise for people who are like, all right, how can I think about this business in thinking about the second or third evolution about it could be, all right, I will think about one word and what the third, second, third evolution would be about it. And maybe because I'm an expert here and on whatever I do, it makes it easier for them to think about the evolution.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because if I go back to how we started our business back in 2004, I was working at a speaker's bureau initially and two of the clients approached me and said they love working with me. Why don't you start your own company? Will become your first two clients. So I couldn't just start another speakers bureau because there was like 300 of them and some of them had existed for 50 plus years. So we decided to focus as a speaker management agency, which basically means we were not Only booking them directly, but we were also listing them with other bureaus and basically using them as a distribution source. So we were managing for career.
Well, a couple years later, you know, realize what's the thing that determines how much someone speaks, it's their popularity over brand. So we began getting into personal branding. That was the next evolution. And then by the time 2009 came out, personal branding was the key buzzword everyone was using. Right. And it wasn't as much of a differentiator. And I could kind of see that it was going to become a crowded space. So that's when we made the shift to CEO branding and we ended up being like probably too far ahead of a curve, like five years, but eventually the marketplace caught up. And now when you think about the marketplace and CEO branding, it's like a common thing, but we've been positioned there for so long that we essentially are the leader in the marketplace.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: And in some way I see with your evolution that you went niching down because you started with the branding, then personal branding and then CEO branding, which I think you have been niching down with the evolutions of what you've seen that's coming in.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: What do I see coming next? Yeah, I mean, so for us, what we decided to end up doing was to now build a fully integrated agency. Right. So now it's essentially you're getting branding plus PR plus social plus design plus videography plus photography. So we decided to then become the most integrated, one of the most integrated agencies in the world that way. And then the next spin for us is we've worked with so many CEOs, getting corporate branding opportunities is now very possible. Right. Because that's the marketplace verba decision makers. Anyway. So we found other ways to kind of go across the avenue in terms of growth, in terms of just thinking about what's the next thing in the marketplace. Because CEO branding is kind of the thing, and it will be for a minute. The next evolution at some point will be going more into executive branding. Right. And we've begun to tackle into that, but that's probably a couple years away before it kind of becomes the next kind of IT factor.
Because you have to then get companies to think about it from the lens of having multiple leaders, ver positioning. And a lot of them get very frightened about, well, what if those people go? And the answer is you institutionalize it. If your CMO goes, you just do the same program with the next cmo. But there's a educational curve that happens with that. And we've gotten our position in CEO branding. So we're basically got a parallel approach of trying to think about how we continue to expand our leadership and begin to position ourselves for that next evolution.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: That's super interesting, man.
So tell us about who you serve and how people can reach out to you.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So we specialize in three type of kind of core clients. So your CEOs that are at the Fortune 500 multibillion dollar level, very successful businesses around the world. We specialize in the mid market. These are companies between anywhere from 10 million to a billion in revenue. And they're established but they're looking to go to that next level. And then finally those early stage companies that may have got some investment capital or they may be at the first 1, 2 or 3 million and they want to hit the Inc. 5000 list. Right. Or they want to get for series A funding. So positioning for them for that. So those are, those are the main avenues that we serve.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: That's awesome. And how can people find you?
[00:09:05] Speaker B: So a couple ways to find me. So Raul Davis, you can put that in LinkedIn and I'll be there. Instagram, super simple. Raul Davis brands.
That's on Instagram. So those are the two best ways to contact me. And our website is ascendant group branding.com.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: Fantastic.
So we're going to wrap it up here. Thank you Raul for joining us and sharing some wisdom about thriving in a competitive industry. You can learn more about what Raoul does by visiting his website on ascendantgroupbranding.com or going to Instagram or LinkedIn. Roald DavisBrands.
If you are an agency coach, professional services provider or otherwise all expensive stuff, we'd love to have you in a future episode. You can
[email protected] and once again, if you want to learn about the new way we're booking dozens of qualified calls per week with no ad spend. Download our free blueprint@conversational funnels.com that's all for now. Go get that big ticket punched. See you later.
