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Brief de Design de Logo

Marcus Druen
Impact & Insight

Business type: business consultancy

Specific sector: niche consulting – my focus on people development and organization evolution (most of my competitors call this HR Consultancy, Leadership Training, Executive Coaching, Organisation Development Advisory) but also overlapping a bit with change management and innovation consulting

Note: this niche of the consulting sector is dominated by a few dozen global firms e.g. Impact International, The Mind Gym, Oxford Leadership Academy, Axialent, QA, Business Schoools like Duke Corporate Education, and management consultancies with dedicated people practices e.g. PA Consulting, Booz Allen Hamilton, McKinsey.

The market is complemented by thousands of small boutique brands. Most of the smaller players – even if they are very good at what they are doing – a bit stale. Innovative rarities are The Innovation Beehive, Nowhere Group, Relume and AllChange.

Also, most of my competitors look, sound and smell like HR and ‘training’. Half of my clients are actually not in HR, but are mid to senior business leaders in their organisations who need someone like me, to solve a business problem, but rather than calling in a management (or even worse large IT Consultancy) they choose to do something with their people, for example:

• Sales and marketing don’t collaborate as they should, because the two functional heads don’t work well together, because they don’t trust each other, because they are very different, because they have not learned how to value diversity, because of their upbringing (I help uncover this root cause sequence in my coaching)
• Middle managers struggle with engaging a growingly younger workforce and client segments, because they are in their usually in their 40s and feel a bit removed from digital natives and job nomads
• The Head of Innovation always says he wants the company to be more innovative, but when it comes to setting the budget, the CFO always ‘wins’ and the budget for research and development is limited to 1% of total budget ( help by calling out competing commitments and helping clients to have more strategic clarity and make critical choices, and then implement them more consequentially)
• Managers in large organisations confuse leadership and management, they struggle with convincing people without authority, where only their presence wins or looses the day, e.g. in partnerships with other organisations, where your title and sign-off level doesn’t mean much to the other party

All of the issues above are business problems and originate in one or more function. Even though my first point of contact clients are those business leaders, the HR Director, or Head of Learning & Development is usually the person who approves me as a supplier; also when I co-design solutions it is with the HR people plus a small group of ‘customers’ who give their feedback before any training or programme is being launched.

I need to be both friends with HR, but also not smeel too much like HR, because it is my business acumen and commercial style that often wins the work with the more hard-nosed clients. They value that I have walked in their shoes, and of course that I am the expert for people development and culture change (which I didn’t study, but I did the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours, so I am very good and experienced as a facilitator, speaker and coach.

I don’t target specific sectors, I anticipate that I have clients ranging from tech start-ups to large companies in all sectors. My hunch is though that my sweet spot will lie in companies that are fairly innovative and have between 500 and 5000 employees.

From the beginning I will target clients in Germany (where I am from) Central Eastern Europe and the UK.

A bit more about me: experienced, international organization development consultant, workshop facilitator and executive coach.

I am quite extrovert, love presenting and speaking, but I also like solitude (I do a lot of walking where I incubate ideas or get to that breakthrough insight)

I have worked in various functions (sales, marketing, finance) before becoming a specialist consultant; I then went client side as Executive Development manager for a large bluechip.

More recently, I have been the Head Coach in a start-up accelerator. This has demonstrated that my style is very agile, innovative and direct.

Rather than relying too much on theories or accredited processes I use my intuition combined with hard data collection to have impact. I use myself am an ‘instrument’.

This is a bit of jargon, but it’s important to understand this: when an organization development practitioner like me runs e.g. a board workshop around their strategy or what they want to change in their culture and why, my main role is to facilitate and intervene ‘in-the-present’ where I don’t have much time to prep but I need to be very quick on my feet, and take risks in what I am saying. Not everyone needs to like me in every moment, it’s more important that I generate impact and the client says at the end ‘only because you were so persistent and patient you got us to where we needed to get.

That means, I ask hard questions, listen harder, and then hold up a mirror on what I hear and what my hypothesis is. Very often, I use my presence to help my clients ‘switch’ through the way I use intonation, body language, and also my own emotions. For example, if what I hear really upsets me (because I think a general human value is being violate) I will use that and ask them if they can imagine if their employees would feel the same. I use my emotional reaction to what they said as an instrument. This required a very high level of self-awareness, the ability to read the room, and to practice self discipline and control. I need to get on the balcony a lot to understand what’s really happening on the dance floor.

The short version of the paragraph above is that my clients value me for who I am and how I approach things, not necessarily because my interventions are rocket science or cheaper. They value me because I have impact and because I tend to uncover what’s really going on. I uncover patterns and phenomena deeply nested within and organisation’s culture. The even shorter version of this paragraph is:

I have immediate impact and offer powerful insights

What I want to disrupt in my niche segment:

• most people development interventions are generic, a bit dull, and never transcend the mumbo jumbo touchy feely smell e.g. a team workshop off-site with team bonding exercises; my solutions are fun, exciting, and at the same time no nonsense and cutting through the crap just at the right time

• most leadership training is drowned in models, theories and laborious pre-reading etc; my way of teaching and delivering master classes and workshops is very visual e.g. I use two three picture heavy slides, and I tend to draw in facts, insights and ideas from sciences that are – at glance – not relevant to people development in commercial organisations, but very powerful because they resonate with the audience, for example, neuroscience, biology, social science, art and physics

• most business transformation programmes fail, because people can’t see benefits fast enough, the project team gets lost in blue sky thinking, and the people who are asked to lead the change often are the biggest resistors to that very change; when I am convinced that a client’s new strategy is good and relevant, I become a powerful promoter and advocate on behalf of my client; in practice that means I use every single interaction with everyone in that client organization to embed the desired change, even at 11pm over drinks at the bar, I relentlessly sell (often disguised through coaching) the ‘why’ and help people find their own ‘how’ so that e.g. 100 individuals together achieve the ‘what’.


Three of my USPs as a personal brand:

• I can trigger/evoke/catalyse improvement/change/value in a very short time, my clients say I have immediate impact

• I have a very disciplined process and 10 years of experience in that to uncover what’s really going on in an organization; when a client says we need to be more innovative and our middle managers are not creative enough…quite often my process reveals that something else is the main reason – deepest root of that problem e.g. an incentive and compensation structure that prevents innovation and instead rewards people to do urgent things or milk an existing client through legacy products; those insights are often ground breaking and also get me subsequent work

• I have started to use video for communications in change programmes (you can see this on linked in, quality bad, alpha pilots, but they proved a point and got great reception); moreover, I intend to make my consultancy digitally savvy; this is something almost no competitor does so a source for disruption e.g. I will use Trello for project management and client communications and co-design, I want to use Air BnB type booking API for clients to book my time and I will heavily use LinkedIN for marketing and generating leads (most competitors still solely bank on face-toface meetings and physical word of mouth)


I am starting this consultancy from scratch, but about 50 clients who worked with me in the past know what I stand for: reliability, freshness, inspiring, energizing, challenging, credible and authentic

Authenticity: this is probably the core of my brand. I have some unpolished edges, and I am not afraid to say ‘I don’t know’. What you see is what you get with me, and my solutions deliver what they say on the tin.

My make or break factor to pull this off successfully very quickly (I have a runway of 6-9 months) is that I have to radiate confidence to my clients. Confidence to do something different, new and bold. Many of my solutions require some degree bravery for my clients – no pain no gain right? Risk = Return. At the same time, it can’t suggest danger and frivolous experiments!

Check out my linked in profile to see what I look like and spend some time reading the feedback clients left in the past.

So, I need this logo for my website, business card, LinkedIn profile, Twitter page, email signatures, and when I use this for videos and white papers. And of course for invoices☺ either via PDF or on paper. I don’t expect to develop any print based marketing collaterals.

I am very open to style, colours and visual enhancement. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I pride myself in fresh smart casual attire (often jeans, shirt and jacket) and most of the things in my life are aesthetically pleasing (my dad was an architect)

Marcus Druen Ltd will be the official company name.

Marcus Druen is the actual logo, and could/should stand on it’s own. However, I envision the logo to work together with the tag line ‘impact and insight’.

For the foreseeable future, I will work on my own under this brand name, but with growing clients and bigger projects I will pull in similar one-man bands to form a project specific team under my brand.

Right then, I have never done this before (start my own company or crowd sourced a logo design) so I didn’t know what you needed from me, and I possible erred on the side of over-sharing;-)

Many thanks and good luck!

Marcus Druen
Impact & Insight

Secteur / Type d'entité

Business

Texte du logo

Marcus Druen - Impact & Insight