I help you use your mission to fuel your message and your strategy.
Understand your story.
Use your story to get to the next level.
Organizational health and well-being is rooted in your team’s understanding of why you exist, who you serve and how you help them. Clarity about these fundamental distinctions provide the foundation for natural team building, effective communications and meaningful strategic planning.
When your group sings from the same songbook you sound like a choir.
Agreeing on a common understanding makes it easier for every team member to speak with ease about your organization’s purpose and mission. Imagine the synergistic boost this same understanding can give to your strategic, development and communications efforts.
Clarity is the strategy.
Clarity about purpose, vision, mission, and values means that your whole organization works together to achieve common goals with coordinated effort. You know that your company is integrated when there is minimal confusion, engaged and enthusiastic morale, and very high productivity.
Most importantly, you know clarity is working for you when your key stakeholders and advocates tell your story for you in a way that supports your mission.
My Services
Branding, Positioning and Messaging
When a member of your audience thinks of you, what do they think? This is the position that you own in their mind. Is this what you want them to think? If not, what do you want them to think? Over a 40 year career I have developed rock solid processes to identify your position, and the messaging strategies that will best support it.
Naming and Identity Design
I’ve named industrial products, vegetarian sausage, non-profit organizations, start-ups, athletic shoes and teaching and training programs. I’ve also built the teams it takes to do dozens of complete visual identity programs for the same, from logo to type and color palette, from website to graphic standards manual.
Creative Direction
Most of my work begins with core brand and positioning work. If you have a design or creative firm you trust then I’ll hand it off to them. But if not I will build you the creative team you need to design and build your next generation website, presentations, collateral and/or advertising programs. I’ll even act as your CMO for hire.
Group Facilitation
There is nothing like the power of a group to unleash meaningful learning and discovery. Facilitation is a relatively small part of practice, but it’s work that I really enjoy. I’m experienced in running executive and board retreats, community input sessions. Tough decisions and difficult conversations are a specialty.
Strategic Planning
I take a decidedly bottom-up and team-based approach to strategic planning. Strategic thinking together gives teams and organizations unparalleled opportunity to learn from mistakes, assess challenges and opportunities, envision success and build resiliency. You can’t map the future, but you can be ready to respond, together.
Purpose, Mission, Vision, and Values
True organizational health is predicated on a clear understanding of why your organization exists, your vision of how the world will be different when you are successful, and how you will do that. Underlying all of these definitions are the values that guide how you act. I have developed a series of engaging workshops that help you to name these essential agreements.
Listen first.
“Mitch’s process is one of inclusion, listening, and clarity. Because he guides clients to really understand who they are and what they stand for, representing their story becomes much simpler. Because his process includes the client at the deepest level, they become co-creators with the teams that Mitch builds. I’m always glad to be on one of Mitch’s teams.”
— Elizabeth Solomon, Goleman EI Certified Coach, Storyteller, Corporate Culture Maven
Select clients and partners
“Working with domestic violence services requires a great deal of sensitivity, emotional intelligence and communication. Mitch and the team he built for us helped our leadership, staff and board find and understand our brand, build more robust internal communication processes, and rename, create a new visual identity system and build a new website and communications platform for our agency. Thank you, Mitch, Liz, Seth, and Tony."
— Carmen Nieves, Executive Director, Alianza