Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

She questioned every rule she was given. Then she built a business around breaking them.

For most founders the problem is not that they are bad at what they do. It is that they look and sound exactly like everyone else in their space. And when buyers can only sort you by size or price, all the marketing in the world will not fix it.

Beatrice Gutknecht is the founder of Badassery by B, a brand differentiation consultancy helping businesses escape the commodity trap. She spent over a decade across brand, marketing, and operations in real estate, hotels, and e-commerce before building a practice around one belief: the rules at the top of your industry were written by the people who benefited from them. Not necessarily by the people following them.

In this conversation Ashley and Beatrice talk about what it actually means to be trapped as a commodity and why it always shows up as a revenue problem before it shows up as a brand problem, why best practices might be the single biggest thing standing between you and standing out, and what it looks like to help a 40 year old business move seven to ten months earlier in the buyer cycle just by questioning one assumption nobody had ever challenged.

In this episode:

• Why revenue coming only through the founder is a red flag and what it is actually telling you about your positioning
• What the commodity trap is and why being another accountant or another builder is a positioning problem not a sales problem
• Why best practices keep businesses invisible and how to stop following rules nobody voted on
• The BAD framework: Badassery, Audacity, Differentiation and why your values should be this clear and this few
• How Beatrice helped a 40 year architectural hardware company enter the buyer cycle seven to ten months earlier than every competitor
• The sign your differentiation is actually working: everyone on your team can say it without you
• What Beatrice would tell herself on day one: who am I setting my compass by and who decided they were right

Whether you are a founder whose business runs entirely on your relationships, a consultant trying to carve out a lane in a crowded market, or someone who has been following the industry playbook and wondering why it is not working, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Beatrice and learn more at:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/beatricegutknecht

Website: www.badasserybyb.com

The Art of Positioning Podcast: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-art-of-branding Instagram: @badasserybyb

YouTube: @badasserybyb

TikTok: @badasserybyb

Ready to build trust into your sales and marketing strategy? Visit ponderthisconsulting.com to learn more or book a discovery call with Ashley.

About Ponder With Ashley: Ponder With Ashley is a business growth podcast and YouTube channel for founders, consultants, and small business owners who are building from the ground up. Every week Ashley drops Pondering Prompts to help you move your business forward, Pondering Lessons from real experience, and honest founder interviews from people who are in the fight right now. No highlight reels. No guru tactics. Just real conversations and practical lessons worth pondering.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

Connect with Ashley:

Website: ponderthisconsulting.com

YouTube: youtube.com/@ponderwithashley

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ashley-waddington

Instagram: @ponderthisconsulting

TikTok: @ponderwithashley

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

If you are struggling to book sales calls consistently the answer might not be your outreach strategy your content or your pricing.

It might be your offer.

Most founders build their first offer around the value they want to bring and the problems they think their ideal client has. The challenge is that perception is not reality. Until you validate in the market whether the problem you are solving is actually the problem your buyer is experiencing you are building on an assumption.

And if you are your own ideal client your pain points are a great starting point but they are not universal. The variety of buyers within your niche will feel the problem differently.

Here is what most founders miss. The problem you identified might not be wrong. It might just be upstream or downstream from where the actual pain lives for your buyer. And that small misalignment can be the difference between a calendar full of sales calls and one that never seems to fill up.

This week’s Pondering Prompt is the question every founder needs to sit with honestly.

Who is your offer actually built for? 💭

Take two minutes this week. Ask yourself whether your offer was crafted for the actual buyer or whether it was crafted to make you feel confident about what you are building. The answer to that question will probably tell you exactly why sales are or are not happening right now.

In this episode:

• Why your offer might be the real reason you are not getting consistent sales calls
• The difference between building an offer for yourself versus building one for your buyer
• Why even founders who are their own ideal client need to validate their offer in the market
• How to identify whether your problem is upstream or downstream from where your buyer actually feels pain
• Why talking to as many ideal buyers as possible is the most important thing you can do right now
• What product market fit actually means for a service based business

Want to dive into your offer and figure out if it has real product market fit? Book a pondering session here: https://calendly.com/ponderthis/consulting-session

About Ponder With Ashley: Ponder With Ashley is a business growth podcast and YouTube channel for founders, consultants, and small business owners who are building from the ground up. Every week Ashley drops Pondering Prompts to help you move your business forward, Pondering Lessons from real experience, and honest founder interviews from people who are in the fight right now. No highlight reels. No guru tactics. Just real conversations and practical lessons worth pondering.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

Connect with Ashley:

Website: ponderthisconsulting.com

YouTube: youtube.com/@ponderwithashley

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-waddington/

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

You hired people to help you grow. So why does your business feel more chaotic than ever?

For most growing business owners the answer is not the people. It is the missing structure and leadership clarity underneath them. That is exactly what Edwyn helps fix.

Edwyn Kumar is the founder of Ultra Team Development, an executive coaching and business consulting firm helping growing businesses create structure and clarity to scale without the chaos. He spent years in hospitality operations running complex businesses with full authority but always for other people. When he took the leap into entrepreneurship he applied everything he learned about building systems that just work to helping owners build businesses that do not need them for every decision.

In this conversation Ashley and Edwyn talk about spotting the constraint in your corporate career and building a business around removing it, why most people problems are actually systems problems in disguise, and what it takes to go from an owner who is in everything to a leader who works on the business instead of just in it.

In this episode:

• Why Edwyn left hospitality operations to start Ultra Team Development and what constraint finally pushed him out
• Why most people problems in a growing business are actually systems and process problems in disguise
• What organizational fidelity means and why great ideas at the top rarely reach the edges of a business
• Why business owners who finally get a great team often start meddling and how to stop
• The difference between businesses that are stable growing and retracting and why each needs a completely different strategy
• How Edwyn helped a company go from eight million to twenty million in revenue by working the leadership process
• Why frameworks are not buzzwords and how one good framework applies across every part of your business
• What Edwyn would tell himself on day one of entrepreneurship
• Why every solopreneur needs a solopreneur gang

Whether you are a founder whose business is getting noisier instead of clearer as it grows, a consultant building your own practice, or someone considering the entrepreneurship leap, this conversation has something for you.

Connect with Edwyn and learn more about Ultra Team Development at:

Website: ultrateamdev.ca

Instagram: instagram.com/ultrateamdev

Ready to build trust into your sales and marketing strategy? Visit ponderthisconsulting.com to learn more or book a discovery call with Ashley.

About Ponder With Ashley: Ponder With Ashley is a business growth podcast and YouTube channel for founders, consultants, and small business owners who are building from the ground up. Every week Ashley drops Pondering Prompts to help you move your business forward, Pondering Lessons from real experience, and honest founder interviews from people who are in the fight right now. No highlight reels. No guru tactics. Just real conversations and practical lessons worth pondering.

New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one.

Connect with Ashley:

Website: ponderthisconsulting.com

YouTube: youtube.com/@ponderwithashley

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-waddington/