From Vision to Voice: Welcoming Ben Valdimarsson to Verb Ventures’ Advisory Board

The Verb Ventures team is delighted to welcome and introduce Ben Valdimarsson as a new member to the Advisory Board of Verb.

An Icelandic and Irish citizen living in London, Ben is a highly experienced international reputation and communications strategist with extensive experience of developing and implementing integrated reputation management and communications strategies.

As Managing Partner, Partner, Director and Senior Consultant with Reputation Inc, Ben has worked extensively with private equity and venture capital companies and along the way supported numerous start-ups and expanding businesses to build reputation, manage risk and tell their story locally and globally.

Ben has a relationship with the Verb Ventures team dating back a number of years. He has in the past provided us and our portfolio companies with valuable insights on the role of reputation and communications in helping start-ups succeed, scale up and ultimately realise their aspirations.

So, by way of introduction, we spoke to Ben about a few principles start-ups and entrepreneurs should bear in mind when launching, promoting and scaling up their ventures.

Have a reputation and brand ambition

You’ll have a business plan and ambition, underpinned by targets and some solid KPIs. Align this with a clear reputation and ambition setting out how you need to be perceived and positioned among your stakeholders and target audiences in order to achieve your objectives.

This is not just about your brand (or brands). You and your business will need to build a reputation among a range of stakeholders who will be key to you realising your business ambitions.

Understand your stakeholders

Key to building a strong sustainable reputation is having a clear understanding of who your most important stakeholders are and proactively nurturing and managing those relationships. Priority stakeholders will differ depending on the nature of your business but will include current and future investors, B2B and B2C customers, regulators, peers, current and prospective employees, as well as various influencers. Media can also be an important stakeholder group in helping you tell your story and reach new audiences. They also provide a platform to engage with your wider community.

Just remember, key to creating positive engagement is creating shared value and purpose. Understand what’s important to your stakeholders and engage with them on their priorities and agenda, not just your own.

Should you “fake it, till you make it”?

You absolutely need to create and tell a great story and set forward a compelling vision that will resonate with your stakeholders. This includes exciting them about your product, your vision and your ability to deliver, as well as demonstrating momentum towards your business goals and maintaining their confidence.

In the same way, first impressions matter. Always put your best foot forward and show up telling an exciting, credible, comprehensive and well considered story around your business. This will open a lot of doors for you.

However, the bravado linked to the old adage of “fake-it-till-you make it” is a risky one. Things can unravel very quickly if your story starts diverging from reality. Likewise, when does embellishing your story wear into misleading your investors and/or stakeholders? Once you lose stakeholders’ trust and confidence it is incredibly hard to win it back and the venture capital community has numerous high-profile examples of how the “fake it till you make it” approach and the lack of governance and reputation-led decisions making can go terribly wrong.

So, strike the right balance and spend time on developing a compelling story based on your ambition and strategy, and update and evolve this over time.

Have a plan…

If you are a B2C business, having a clear route to market and a great marketing communications strategy will clearly be critical to building awareness of your brand, your product and ultimately delivering sales. This is also the case with B2B marketing although strategies and platforms will differ.

However, it is also critical you have a clear reputation and communications plan to underpin this, which in time will combine strategic, corporate and financial comms, stakeholder engagement, culture, sustainability and solid issues and risk management.

With limited resources you’ll have to prioritise your spend and having a clear plan will help you do this in a structured way.

Build reputation from the inside-out

Trust and reputation are built from the inside out by delivering on, and if possible exceeding, stakeholder expectations and delivering on your promises and commitments. Key building blocks include stakeholders’ direct and indirect experiences of your brand and your business, perceptions created over time and how they relate to you and your business. Working on all three is essential and these are very much built by you and your team from the inside out over time.

Having the right culture and mindset will build positive and sustainable reputation, whereas the wrong culture will create bad experiences, poor perceptions and creates risks that can seriously damage your brand and reputation.

Therefore, doing business and making decisions through the prism of reputation is a powerful habit.

Avoid surprises and control your message

As you set out your projections, roll-out your plan and build you business, things won’t go to plan. Despite your best efforts and the best possible culture…things will go wrong.

When you hit these bumps in the road putting your head in the sand is the worst thing you can do.

Engage and communicate. Proactively managing communications around such episodes and engaging with your key stakeholders through a no-surprises strategy will earn you positive equity and credit and help you navigate these challenges.

Lead by example and mobilise the wider team

Founders, entrepreneurs and CEOs are the chief reputation ambassadors of their businesses. To some, this comes somewhat natural, while others need to hone their leadership, communications and story-telling skills.

It’s also important to remember that being a great publicist, self-promoter, while a hugely valuable and important skill, is not the same as building reputation. Sometimes a low-key approach, focused on delivering the goods for stakeholders is the right way to go….

Focus on your people. Sometimes entrepreneurs are so focused on communicating with investors and external audiences that they fail to engage with their own people, excite them around their work and get the best out of them.

As the business scales up and the team grows, you’ll need others to spread the gospel and help you build reputation. You’ll need to ensure the team has the right skills to tell the same compelling story you are. So, make sure you mobilise them to tell your story and build your reputation and in doing so maximising the impact positive reputation impact will have on your business and your performance.

Mitigate and manage risks

You can’t legislate for every risk that may impact your business. That said, taking time to map out key scenarios that may arise, and having a contingency in place to deal with these, will help ensure you are ready when something goes wrong. Likewise, going through these scenarios and contingencies may help you identify risks you can actually eliminate altogether.

Learn from the best, the words… and know when to look for support

As you develop your business and reputation strategy, I’m a great believer in benchmarking your strategies and activities against peers and best-in-class operators. Also learn from mistakes others have made and avoid them.

As you set up and start building, managing brand, marketing, reputation and communications can seem like a daunting challenge so you will need help.

This could include working with agencies or hiring a dedicated resource, but you will want to be careful as picking the wrong partner can see you burn through cash at a rate of nuts, without having much to show for it.

The best VC companies you work with will be able to help and advise you, and in some cases put initial reputation, comms and PR support behind their portfolio companies.

As you pick a VC partner, this is definitely one of the considerations you should have.