Brand decisions don't have to be personal. The best rebrand leaders know how to take the emotion out and replace it with clear criteria.
In this episode of The Debrief, Focus Lab CEO Bill Kenney sits down with Beth Forester — now CEO of Animoto, and VP of Marketing during their rebrand — to explore how intentional process and clear decision-making can be the difference between a brand project that stalls and one that actually succeeds.
Animoto was shifting its market position from consumer to SMB, carrying four iterations of their old brand across their product experience, and accumulating brand debt fast. What followed was one of the most structured, stakeholder-savvy approaches to a rebrand we've seen.
In this episode, Bill and Beth cover:
→ Building internal alignment before agency engagement ever begins
→ Using the RACI Matrix to manage input and keep decisions moving
→ Navigating the logo phase before opinions start to outweigh criteria
→ Defining success metrics early to keep brand decisions objective
If you're a B2B marketing or brand leader heading into a rebrand — or trying to figure out how to get your organization aligned before one — this episode offers a practical, grounded look at how to lead the process with clarity and confidence.
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Full Transcript:
[Bill Kenney]
Hey everyone. This is Bill Kenney, CEO and co-founder of Focus Lab, a global B2B branding agency. I'm back with another episode of The Debrief, where I sit down with past Focus Lab partners and we relive their branding experience. We uncover what it's like to truly go on that journey. Not just what you see in the case study, but the realities of stakeholder management and decision making around logos and all of these types of fun things.
In today's episode, sit down with Beth Forester. She is now the CEO of a company called Animoto. She was the VP of Marketing when we worked with her, so we talk a little bit about that journey and what it's like to have transitioned through that as well as the branding project. We spent a lot of time talking about stakeholder management, how critical that is to a project.
That cannot be overstated. And really what we harp on throughout this episode is this idea of frameworks that help decision making. So instead of just saying, do I like it, don't I like it? As the project team or as the stakeholder seeing it for the first time.
Beth did a wonderful job at driving this project within her organization, so that every decision was put through a lens of how we're measuring success. This is what we need, this is what doesn't matter. We talk about the RACI framework: responsible, accountable, contributor, and informed, right?
If you've heard of that before. All that to say, another wonderful episode. A lot of insight, especially if you're curious and or nervous about how you're going to manage stakeholders during a branding effort. I hope you enjoy it.
[Bill Kenney]
Beth, excited to chat with you. It's been a while since the work has gone live. There's been all types of things that have happened in between acquisitions and your title has changed and all that fun stuff. But before we get into it, you want to take a second here and just introduce yourself and tell people who you are and what you're doing.
[Beth Forester]
Yes. Thank you Bill. I'm really excited to be here, it's been great working with your team and I'll try to remember as much as I can 'cause it has been a while. A lot of things have happened, uh, since then, but I'm Beth Forester, I'm the CEO at Animoto.
Animoto is a video creation tool that makes it easy for anyone, no matter their experience to create video. We all need to communicate, and we know that video is one of the best ways to communicate with people, and that's really how they're engaging with most brands these days. And our goal is to empower anyone with the ability to create video, to tell their story.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, great, great. And you have a pretty deep and rich background, which we were just talking about pre-show and background of photography and being a creative yourself. I think you're uniquely positioned now being a leader there. But again, maybe we'll get into some of that. So my first question that I always lead out these conversations with, in an effort to kind of uncover and help people that are gonna go on a similar journey: how did you know that it was time to invest in brand? How did you know that that was needed and would be important?
[Beth Forester]
Well, it was a long time coming. I'm not gonna lie. I think you might cringe when you hear some of the things that I'm getting ready to tell you. Maybe, maybe you've heard it all before, you know. But anyway, I mean, the biggest thing, I think the impetus at the time was we were making a strategic shift up market.
So when Animoto first originated, it was primarily a consumer product, and we had a long history of consumers and we were really trying to make that strategic shift up market into small and medium sized businesses. A lot for retention and ongoing video, needs and uses. So we needed to reflect who we were to that target audience at that time and really, speak to, you know, our shift in our customer, our product, and really get something that resonated with our target audience.
[Bill Kenney]
Got it. Got it. And you say it was a long time coming, and we do hear that fairly often, right? Which is like, man, we've needed this for a while, but we finally are ready to act on it for whatever reason, because we're falling behind in the market because people are passing us, or the market has shifted, whatever it is.
When you say it was a long time in the making, was it years that maybe you've had foresight to see, like, we gotta do something about this, but then it takes time to get there?
[Beth Forester]
Well, let me tell you this. So at the time when we actually all agreed that this was something we had to do as part of our strategic shift, we had four iterations of our old brand live across the user journey.
[Bill Kenney]
Okay. Alright. Yes.
[Beth Forester]
Had it been a long time coming? Yes. That original brand had evolved multiple times, and the way that our product was built and the way certain things had been engineered and certain things were hard coded. We didn't have a design system across our, you know, entire product and web experience and CMS, and it made it hard.
So there were places where people encountered multiple brands and some weren't that far off, but it was enough. It was very recognizable. It also made it hard to make decisions, right? We were accumulating more and more brand debt every day. The real crux of that is we knew we weren't speaking to our target audience, you know?
I was also a director of product marketing, so I'd done a lot of product marketing research, trying to understand what messaging, what resonates, and we would hear a lot about our design in those, in those calls. So we knew as we were working on our messaging for SMBs, that our design was off.
[Bill Kenney]
Okay. Got it. So then you get everybody coalesced and everybody agrees, okay, we can't just make minor tweaks and then launch those over here. And now we've got this brand debt, to use your word, which is a great word for that, you realize it's time to act and now you're like, who do we work with? I'm assuming, which is why I always ask this question.
That's a bit of a monumental task too, because there's just so many different ways you can go, right? There are freelancers, solopreneurs, there's agencies, small agencies, big agencies, agencies position themselves differently. They have different offerings. Full service, very narrow and tight, right?
So how does one go through that journey? How did you find us? How did you land on us? Feel free to speak openly on all of that.
[Beth Forester]
Yeah, I Just wanna say one thing too, as part of my background as a photographer, I also owned a design company where I worked and offered design tools and branding for other photographers, and sold that. I had an e-commerce business centered around all of that. So I had a lot of experience in working with designers because I was working with designers to help produce my products, and things like that.
One of the things we did early on in the project, or I did early on, is really define the scope of the project and the stages of work that we would go through.
And so by doing that. It was interesting, you know, across the org you got a lot of like, oh, we need to bring in this agency, we need to do this or we need to do that. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Not until we have done X, X, X, and X. And so I laid out a long document about our process and our strategy and what we're gonna do, uh, what we need to do, we need to identify our current problems and where we are today.
Where are our challenges with that brand today? What has our market research told us? What other market research do we need to do? We need to really align on our company values, mission, and vision.
It's not been updated in quite some time. We've had a change in leadership. And so these are all the things that we really needed to do before we brought in an agency, in my opinion, because these were gonna come from us. And I know that a lot of people will bring somebody in to facilitate those conversations and manage those conversations.
I was willing to take it on myself, uh, to manage those conversations, and that's just what we do because I had learned over the years in working with agencies, a lot of how even complicated that can get. To be honest with you, when your team is not aligned, working with an agency a lot of times is not gonna make that any better.
It can actually, again, throw another wrench into that. So by setting those parameters of the stages of work. I had a real defined time of like, okay, well, when we know where we are and where we need help, that's when we can define what we're looking for in an agency, right? And so you, I literally had on this document, this is the stage when we start looking for an agency.
Now, I did tell the team at the time, I said, you know, we may get there earlier and decide that we can't make these decisions. We need a facilitator in, we need to bring somebody in, but right now, I don't believe that's the case. And so it enabled us to get to a point where I knew exactly what I was looking for in an agency.
[Bill Kenney]
Fantastic.
[Beth Forester]
I think the other thing too, I, I knew, you know, brands are very personal, and how people feel about it. So I knew bringing an agency at the right time would also bring a certain objectivity to where we had landed, right. And so, a lot of that to me comes from, you know, who we are trying to be and if we can't figure that out and communicate that to you, then we have a problem.
So that was the other thing. I wanted to make sure we were really clear on who we were, how we wanted to be perceived, what our challenges were and all that before we even started looking.
[Bill Kenney]
Kudos to you. I'm gonna interrupt you for a second, but that doesn't happen all the time. I don't even know what percentage I would put on that. 50% maybe would take the time to understand how important it is to do those things and to kind of think that way. So I just wanted to high five you while you're,
[Beth Forester]
I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So then once I knew, once we knew, then it was really pretty easy to go out and start to define what we were looking for in an agency, and things like that. I had a criteria. This is what we're looking for, and I let other people surface, like multiple people around the company.
That was the other thing. As part of my plan, in each stage of the work, I had a ‘RACI’ for each one of those, the roles and responsibilities, so, you know, it enabled me to expand at times and let people bring in stakeholders and have more input and then, you know, compress at times when I needed to move things along for quicker decision making, but also to actually get the people with the right expertise in the room and in that decision making.
So that was one of the things that I did, but part of that, it's like, Hey, we're looking for an agency. This is the criteria we're looking for. We want people that you've worked with or brands that you identify with and think, wow, whoever did this, did a great job.
So we kind of opened that up to like, send us your, your brands and you know, who, who you think it might be interesting to work with, or even just a brand. And then we'll go figure out who they were. So we had, you know, quite a long list and some of those, you know, they didn't meet the criteria or, or different things like that.
But, then the list got narrowed and it did get a little bit like, how do I perceive your brand online? And can I imagine myself working with you? Do you have the values and are you talking about the things that are, I think are gonna be important to us on this project, and things like that.
So, you know, you get down, then you get a certain feel for, you know. I would say we had a handful at that point that I had narrowed it down to with the team, we had three people involved in making those decisions. Then we started the conversations, right?
So then it gets into the, let's reach out, let's see what they have to say. Let's, let's talk, you know, I was on a budget, so I was like, hmm, this is our budget. I know what our budget is and I didn't really let that a hundred percent guide the conversations. I knew that some people were probably gonna go out the door because it was gonna be too expensive for us.
Then we get into the conversations, and then you start to get a more personal feel. And really, at the end of the day, what I was looking for as a collaborator, right? I wanted to make sure that whoever we worked with would be a partner and a collaborator. Because it's, again, a brand is so much about us, it's about Animoto that you really need a good collaborator in order to do that work.
And, you know, I've worked with a lot of agencies and, and very few were really good at what I thought was good collaboration, to be honest with you.
[Bill Kenney]
Okay. Okay. Good to know.
[Beth Forester]
I talked a lot about that. I talked about that with Will and I talked about what we were, you know, looking for. And so through those conversations I got to feel like, Hey, this is, this is a company that I believe we can work with, uh, collaborate, you know, with what we need. I feel like they would be a really great partner for us.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, and I'm sure some of that comfort came from this idea that we have weekly touch points with you. We ship work every single week. We meet with you every single week. It could be fairly high touch con considering how a lot of agencies are constructed, ours is more high touch in that way.
[Beth Forester]
Which actually worked really great for keeping everything moving along. And, I mean, that was one of the things I asked about is the process. I can be pretty agile for the most part, but we have to have some sort of process to start with. So I did, I went, how's it gonna work?
Explain to me how we're gonna work with you, how I'm gonna collaborate. I had a process with your team, and then I would take that, and I had a week of process with my team to get to the decision making, so that we could come back to your team with our feedback, and I had a complete process for how that went down as well.
Um, but it was great. I actually really liked the cadence. It kept us all fresh and in the project and really kept it moving along, so I enjoyed that.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Happy to hear that.
[Beth Forester]
Because it’s really easy to get stuck in these brand conversations. It can feel really personal, personal to people, you know? We had a founder at the time. In a lot of these, we had people that had worked there like myself for a long time, but people had worked there longer than me. Their whole identity was, you know, they cared about Animoto's brand and perception, and it affected their work identity.
So they all were invested in it, and then I had stakeholders that were invested in it, and, and it's hard to remove the personal and emotional feelings from the business.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. So let's maybe break that down a little bit so people understand you had a small dedicated team that worked with us, and we have our small dedicated team that works with you. But you were still able to then have a separate group under a different process that you then managed all of that feedback, ran it through the right filters, and then brought it back to us. That's kind of the, the, the three step kind of process
[Beth Forester]
Yeah. We got great things from your team. Your team would send the weekly work. You know, we identify sort of what, what's gonna be the deliverable, what can we expect at the end of the week? Um, and they would do that with a video, which I loved, and explained a lot of the why.
You know, I asked them, look, I've gotta go out and take this out to people that really don't, they're not marketers, they're not designers, so we need to hear why, um, which your team was great at, and they would deliver the video. What I had as a core group, there were three of us.
We would watch the video independently. I would take my notes. They would take their notes. It was like our head of design at that time, myself, and another, another designer. And so we would all review the material and come back and we would discuss, the three of us would discuss, we would have our opinions and thoughts and understanding on what's meeting our criteria where, how do we feel about this? What do we think? So then I would have that discussion before and then I would move it to my key stakeholders. This was like our executive team, Head of Product, Head of Engineering, our CEO, at the time I was VP of Marketing, so myself and then our CEO, who was a founder.
I would send them the video. You go watch, take your notes, and then we'd go into the conversation, but I was able to guide that conversation based on the discussion between me and that core team of the visual brand team is what I called it at the time.
And so when they came in and we talked about things, I started talking about why this made sense for us and didn't make sense for us. So I could help guide some of those conversations, but also like, hear what they were saying. And then take that back to our brand design team. And then we, then we would give our feedback.
So we discussed that and our designer would write out the feedback, we'd approve it and send it over to your team, and that worked really well. It sounds like a really lot to happen.
[Bill Kenney]
Yes.
[Beth Forester]
And it was, but your team delivered on the weekend. It was usually the first thing that I would usually actually look at it at the end of day.
[Bill Kenney]
Friday.
[Beth Forester]
My creative process is I'll look at something sort of, I'll have an immediate reaction or perception to it, and then kind of, I don't even take any notes, I just watch, right? And then I sit on something and then I usually sit on it for a day or two, and then I come back. So then Monday morning I would come back, review it again, and I'd start making my own notes. We'd have those two sets of meetings in the afternoon.
[Bill Kenney]
On Monday.
[Beth Forester]
On Monday and then we'd ship off the response to your team on Tuesday, so a lot happened between Friday and Monday afternoon.
[Bill Kenney]
Right. It is a lot, and that's why I wanted you to break it down so people can understand, because then there's a Tuesday meeting that is now that small brand team on your side and then our team, so that's yet another meeting.
[Beth Forester]
Exactly.
[Bill Kenney]
That does sound like a lot of work and it can be when you're in it. But it's necessary work, and I just wanted to, again, high five and highlight the fact that you spoke to the fact that you joined those executive level meetings and helped to facilitate them in a way. It wasn't just, go watch this video and if you have time, tell me what you think. And then you get bombarded with a bunch of different opinions and then you're like, oh geez, we're kind of like all over the place.
You really manage the project the whole way through, and that's really critical to the success of these projects. It doesn't matter if it's a small team, if it's a giant organization. Somebody has to, you use the RACI framework, RACI, we use D-A-C-I but it's all the same. Somebody has to be that driver, someone has to be responsible for doing that part of the job. So kudos to you. Again, I think that's really important to be able to do because these things are personal.
[Beth Forester]
They are.
[Bill Kenney]
They become very subjective. Like all these things are true. They're challenging, which sometimes as a creative, they could be bad, right?
You paint them as bad, oh, we wanna make this subjective, not subjective, it doesn't matter. It's still that it's still subjective no matter how much you try to make it objective.
[Beth Forester]
A hundred percent.
[Bill Kenney]
Thank you for highlighting the importance of these different parts of the process, in a condensed little window and it keeps that machine moving.
And I think that's another thing that you're highlighting here. Yeah, we deliver on a weekly cadence and we are very process oriented. I'm sure you loved that part, but it's not at the detriment of creativity. Both of those things can be true. You can be creative and in a tight process. I think creative organizations often are either wildly creative or they're just a conveyor belt machine.
The wildly creative is the, well, we haven't come up with the wonderful idea yet. Like, give us another couple days. And you're just kind of wondering, when the hell am I gonna get it and what is it gonna look like? And did we go off track? And now, how do you run your process? You just spoke about what you don't, you can't, right now, you gotta corral your team last minute on a Wednesday.
And they're like, my calendar's full. So we were probably a perfect match. In a lot of those regards of just intentionality and process, you were very intentional about how you entered the project. We're very intentional in how we run our projects. Yay for picking us.
[Beth Forester]
Well, yay for us for picking you.
[Bill Kenney]
Yay for you. Yeah. Yeah.
[Beth Forester]
It was a great experience and it really did work. Um, the process worked really well and your team was always on, your team was always on time. They were great communicators. They also took feedback really well to be, that's another thing like, it can be when you are, I know as a creative, how hard it can be to take feedback on something that you designed or put your creative talent to get that feedback right. And so I know that all too well and I learned, you know, for me, a lot of times, even as a photographer, I would say like, Ugh, I don't wanna shoot this one particular shot.
I'm so particularly tired of it, but I knew it was going to sell every time.
[Bill Kenney]
It was the right shot for the client.
[Beth Forester]
It was the right shot for the client. They were gonna buy it. Did I wanna shoot it every day? No.
[Bill Kenney]
It’s not about what you want, right?
[Beth Forester]
I had to take my desire out, my emotion, my reaction to certain things out. And I had to learn that over time. That discipline as a creative in business helped me with these types of frameworks, because that was the other thing I had.
Even the feedback that was given to your team or that sometimes they were asked of like, oh, I need to see this in a better application than in the next round. So in the next round can we kind of see it, what it might look like in this application of the product? Because we had some particular challenges with our old brand that made it hard to actually execute on. So, you know, there were times when I was like, can we see something more than just the website?
Because these are somewhat particular challenges that we faced over time and your team is like, sure we can, we can do that. And so that was really great and helpful for us because I think that's the other thing you can come up with a brand in theory, and in practice it can then start you, you know, you dunno.
And when you're kind of just defining that visual identity. You know, you have to see it in practice to understand how it's gonna feel, how people are gonna interact with it, and is it meeting your objective. You know, for us, ease of use is one of our biggest value props, so it has to convey easy.
[Bill Kenney]
Yes. Yes. Yep.
[Beth Forester]
That part was really great. But even how we gave the feedback and how I managed those conversations is I had a framework.
Here's how we're gonna make decisions. These are the things that we need to think about as we're evaluating this color, this typography, you know, everything. Like this is how we're deciding on if it works for us.
[Bill Kenney]
So if I had the brand facilitator, driver trophy on my desk, I would hand it to you right now because you deserve it. You totally earned it.
All right, we've gone from, how did you know that you needed this, into how did you find the right partner? Now I have two specific questions. The first is, what was the hardest part of the whole project, because these things are still hard, right?
It's not just winning, winning, winning. So I always want people to hear what the hard parts are, even if they're not bad, but they're hard.
[Beth Forester]
Well, I think we've already touched on it a little bit. I think managing stakeholders across the organization, creating alignment and keeping the project on track is probably the biggest challenge in any brand journey.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah.
[Beth Forester]
I would say that's it. There were times where things for me, it felt like, oh, this is getting outta control. It's a learning iterative process of what, you know, what are we going to do? A lot of my experience in my earlier days in Animoto were on growth and testing mentality. So a lot for me too was how are we gonna make decisions? How are we gonna decide if something is successful?
So I used the scientific method to how I approached everything. And so for this, I wanted to apply as much of that as I could to make sure that people were making decisions based on criteria and frameworks that we decided. So again, trying to remove that emotional, personal right?
Also, make sure that everybody's aligned. So that was the other thing when I talked earlier about defining the steps that we would go through and who was involved in the RACI for each of those, so I can expand and contract the group of people, right? Because there were times where I did want more people involved, right?
I wanted more inputs on how they perceived the brand, what our challenges were because we had people and designers and product and engineers working across the brand, and they were running into challenges with our current brand. So we needed those inputs. We had writers. We had a lot of different types of stakeholders, again, including, you know, founder and like, how do we expand when necessary to bring a lot of voices to the table and then contract in other areas when we've really gotta move things along and be real heavy on the decision making
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yep. Okay. Yeah. And that's where that framework comes in really handy, because then everybody knows what their job is and isn't. Again, this ‘RACI’ for the people that want to look it up, who's accountable, who's contributing, who just needs to be informed of a certain thing. And I know for the D version, it's the driver. What's the R in ‘RACI’?
[Beth Forester]
Responsible. It's a driver.
[Bill Kenney]
Okay. All right. Yep. So therefore everybody knows their role and nobody's going, how come I haven't seen it? Or when am I gonna find out about a thing? Right. It's like, well, because this is what letter you are, right? You know, no offense.
From a challenge perspective, was there any point of fear at any point in the project where you're like, we haven't found the solution yet and I'm getting nervous.
[Beth Forester]
I think a little bit when we were working on the logo.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know that moment always exists. That's why I'm asking, that's not unique to you.
[Beth Forester]
I think it was probably the logo, honestly. So we had an old logo, and one of the biggest challenges or problems with that logo is that nobody knew what it was and we got that feedback a lot. They didn't understand, in our name. Animoto helped a little bit.
They kind of had an idea, but then the logo confused them. And, and really trying to define what our logo was going to be. And this is where some of the conversations got really challenging because it's like, well, why did you choose this mark? Somebody got really stuck on this backwards slash and you know, we had to really clearly define what that meant. Our founder was like, what does this mean?
So we did a little work on really trying to communicate and we didn't really have alignment. We spent more time on the process, I think with your team, like maybe an extra cycle, which made me nervous. I was like, Ooh, are we going to, are we gonna get there?
Because I didn't feel like I was getting the alignment that I wanted, at that time. So that was the, that was definitely the most challenging part is
[Bill Kenney]
Okay. Logo, no surprise probably to any designer that might be listening to this. Uh, but for the marketing professionals that haven't gone through, what's called a larger kind of brand effort, the logo is always the sticky area of the project, right? How much should a logo say? How much should it not say?
How important is it? Is it even really all that big of a deal, or is it the biggest deal? Every project is a little bit different, but man, that logo portion of these projects is a peculiar spot to live in. And I think what we often tell people is like, we're all okay. We're gonna have to live in this uncomfortableness for a little while.
We're gonna have to continue to go like, I don't know if that's it. I don't think I like that. I don't think you're gonna be able to find it. Why is it taking so long? I'll know it when I see it. What is, what is what, you know, like all these things are the emotions of the damn logo part of a project, and they're pretty wicked.
They could be very wicked. You can start to see it eat people up on both sides. Less for us now, having done it so many times and being okay with kind of the process, but it could be pretty scary for clients. I definitely empathize with you and our clients on that fact.
[Beth Forester]
Yeah. Yeah. There was some of that, well, I'll know this is not right. I'll know it when I see it, and I'm like, we, like, we don't have the budget to just have forty logos put in front of us like this, that's not going. That's no.
[Bill Kenney]
It makes it really hard too on the creative side to like, okay, I, I'm up for the challenge, but like, man, I don't really know where to start. Like, okay, cool, but like, damn, that's tough. It's a tough mountain to climb. It's climbable, but everyone has to be ready for that type of climb. So on the flip side, what were the most rewarding aspects of the project? Either in the details or, or, or larger, broader, doesn't matter.
[Beth Forester]
I think reflecting back on it and in the various stages and feeling that sense of accomplishment of getting it over the finish line because it did take a long time and it also took us a long time to get it out. Again, we had several leadership changes. We were acquired during that time, so even after we'd worked with you guys on the visual representation, there was a whole other level of application and getting it across the finish line.
And I think, you know, really just seeing it live and, and how amazing it looks. And the interesting thing, our founder, who was the CEO, who I took the seat for after he left. When we launched it, you know, he was super excited and he was like, wow. Like, oh, it, I mean like, he was just like, it, he's like, it's the best the website has ever looked ever. It was great. That was a great feeling.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. Big green check stamp. Yeah. I mean, is there a better statement coming from the founder, who's been there forever and has a very special kind of proximity and affinity for this thing, to say that's the best it's ever looked. I know that must have felt really rewarding for you.
[Beth Forester]
It did. It felt, it felt great. It felt great. Yeah.
[Bill Kenney]
All right, so let's, let's hit 'em with the last question. If you were sitting down with another marketer, even somebody in your position now, founder, and they were about to go on their own rebrand journey, and you could only tell them one thing to help them not mess up, what's the one thing you would tell them?
[Beth Forester]
Oh, one thing. Oh, I got like three things, but I can probably get it down to one.
[Bill Kenney]
I’ll let you, you can cheat a little bit if you want, but go for it. Open mic to you.
[Beth Forester]
I think that the biggest thing, and we talked about this earlier, is that, you know, defining and aligning a brand can be very personal and emotional for people. So if I had one bit of advice, it is just establish a clear framework, set a criteria for how you make decisions and evaluate your options because that was the one key thing that kept the progress moving along and created alignment. No team can be aligned in any way if you're not aligned on what your objective is and what you're trying, what your outcome that you hope it is, right?
So, you know, I learned that early on when I moved from a really small business over, you know, maybe solopreneur at times, and then a very small team to working in a larger organization is like we all have to be aligned on how we're gonna measure success and the criteria for making decisions.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah. I couldn't disagree with that at all. If there's not internal alignment on both where we're going and why that matters, it doesn't matter how many logos are put in front of you and color palettes and new website looks and all that. Because it's still fairly arbitrary at that point. Yeah, well said, well said.
If everybody came into a project like you, success would be eminent.
[Beth Forester]
I dunno about that. We'll see hope. Hopefully this helps someone that's entering into this. I mean, it was, I think a little bit, I'd been around at Animoto when those four iterations kind of went out and most of the time I was on the outskirts of most of those projects and marketing a lot was on the outskirts of that, which is interesting.
And so, you know, I learned from that and what could we have done better? You know, how could we do that? I learned throughout the project, you know, there were just times where it felt like, oh gosh, we've gotta rein this in.
[Bill Kenney]
Rein it back in.
[Beth Forester]
And really realign people. Um, so.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, you being the driver. I'll hit it one more time, but you being the driver is critical there. There's many projects we're on that are still very successful by the end, but go through a lot of the challenges from start to finish because there isn't that single person that's really kind of grabbing the reins, right?
Sometimes the team is so nice on their side that nobody really wants to be the rein grabber. So that just leads to either indecisiveness or lack of forward momentum, which then is like lack of excitement. Right? And you can kind of feel it in the room.
[Beth Forester]
Yeah. The interesting thing was, the way I try to run an organization and, one of our principles is \we value debate, right? It's a principle that I wanted to establish as a leader because I think two heads are better than one. We can collectively come to a better solution. I've seen that time and time again.
So a lot of what I wanted to do is be able to, again, when I talked about expanding and contracting, I wanted to be able to expand to have those debates and conversations to get us to a better place. But like you said, you still have to have someone that sort of, I don't, it's not really reining it, I don't wanna say it because it feels too heavy.
But really say like, okay, well here's what I've heard, right? I've heard these three things. What do we think is the most important? How do we feel about that? So really to drive that alignment rather than sort of coming in over the top and being the decision maker. Like, I wanna be able to guide the conversation and make sure that people are staying focused on the right things. And we do have that alignment, because I think debate and differences of opinion get us to, but a lot of times people take that too personal, right? Like, you didn't agree with me. And that's, uh, you know, that hurt my feelings.
[Bill Kenney]
Yeah, my ideas are bad.
[Beth Forester]
Again, this is, we're all aiming for the same goal, goal to improve this business.
That's what we're trying to do, and if I disagree with you or I say something different, it's not because I don't agree with you personally, it's because I don't necessarily know if that's what's gonna drive our goals or our business forward in the way that we need it to.
So we all need to come with that assumption and, and understand that we're all aligned, we're on the same goals, we're moving in the same direction, and we are better collectively and together. I think that's even too with working, you know, with your group. That's why I wanted a collaborator, right? I wanted to make sure. It's like I knew being able to go in and, you know, we debated, we talked about things internally. We talked about those with your team.
I knew that was gonna get us to a better place because your team was gonna have some objectivity that we didn't have. I wasn't a designer by trade, so I wanted to hear why decisions were being made so I could understand that. I think that's the thing too. You don't have to be the decision maker and that's what some teams need. I've been in those rooms that are like, well, you just need to make a decision.
[Bill Kenney]
Someone's gonna call a shot here. Who is it?
[Beth Forester]
Somebody's gonna do it.
[Bill Kenney]
Who is it?
[Beth Forester]
Again, I wanna try to set up the frameworks for that discussion to get us to the right decision. Um, because I don't, I don't have all the answers. I mean, I know that, like I don't have all the answers personally,
[Bill Kenney]
Yep. And neither do we, right? Which is why we wanna be highly collaborative with our partners. You're gonna know your business way better than we will ever know it. You're gonna know the intimate kind of wants and needs and desires that are culturally driven in the history of things that have been funny in the past, or that have been problematic, like all this informs where the identity will go and then we just put our craft experience on top of that.
But it's both parties together that make the solution great. It's not just, Hey, here's our pain point. Go figure it out because you're the experts. It's like, well, we actually need you. We need you and we need you in a highly touched way and we need you to then go off and do the job on your side and then bring it back to us. And, you know, it's the whole system at play. And y'all were great at that. A plus, A plus.
[Beth Forester]
Thank you, I appreciate that.
[Bill Kenney]
It was wonderful to get to work with you. I don't know where we'll cross paths again. But for now, thank you for sharing your experience on the show and look forward to following along on Animoto growth with you at the helm, by the way, congrats.
[Beth Forester]
Thanks for having me on. It was fun to relive it and revisit our project and totally enjoyed working with your team. And if I ever have to do another rebrand, I'll be calling you.
[Bill Kenney]
Thank you, Beth. As I say to other people, I guess in these videos and in my team slack, see you out there.
