Introducing Rhythm Systems: Rebranding to Achieve Focus

For the last 6 years, our team has worked hard with Rhythm software and coaching to help many companies execute well and achieve breakthroughs. Breakthroughs don't just happen magically when you have a great idea. It takes strong execution to harvest those great ideas into breakthroughs. We've had a great time and every time we help a company achieve a breakthrough, we live our purpose of changing the world one entrepreneur at a time. Why? Because we can only help to change the world when our clients have breakthroughs towards achieving their dreams. So why did we decide to rebrand ourselves from Gazelles Systems to Rhythm Systems?

Rhythm Systems - focusing on owning a single word... Rhythm!

Our desire is to clear up any brand confusion and make it easier and simpler for our clients and prospects to be clear about what we promise to deliver. For the first few years of our life, we thrived as Gazelles Systems, partnered with Gazelles (Verne Harnish's company).

Challenges we wanted to solve proactively

• Brand confusion. As we have both grown more successful over the last few years, there is some confusion between what Gazelles Systems provides and what Gazelles provides.
• It's hard to Focus. It seems difficult to focus when we have two brands to focus on. Two words, two brands. By focusing on both Gazelles and Rhythm, it diffused our efforts and it was very difficult to drive hard and focus on making Rhythm everything Rhythm could be. Instead, to gain acute focus, we would have to pick one word and really focus on it.
• Difference makers got diluted. Brand confusion made it very difficult to call out what was uniquely and powerfully Gazelles Systems. Our difference makers were diluted as many thought that we provided similar solutions as our partners, Gazelles and Gazelles International.

Rhythm Systems - Who we are and what we do

A client recently commented during a planning session, "In my previous company, we had 26 products; now we only have one. And we are bigger and much more profitable and successful with one product." He is right. So anything we can do to simplify and make it easier for our team to focus on less will translate to better solutions for our customers. We would greatly simplify our work and message by focusing on Rhythm. We are well on our way to owning the word “Rhythm” in our market. Our software is Rhythm, our blog is Rhythm Blog, and our book is also named Rhythm. The logical next step is to rebrand our company to Rhythm Systems. By rebranding and focusing on what we do, we solve the three challenges that I pointed out above.

Our core purpose remains the same. We live to help our clients make breakthroughs and achieve their dreams. By doing so, we can help to change the world one entrepreneur at a time, through the successes of our customers. Every time a customer achieves a significant milestone or experiences a breakthrough, we get goosebumps. We feel that we've made a difference.

Our core values remain the same as well.

• Go the 2nd mile. We want to anticipate our customers’ needs as well as our teammates’ and make it happen for them.
• Keep smart. Continue to learn and improve in practical and actionable ways. Thanks to our keep smart core value, our team meets every week for an hour of training and knowledge sharing. I humorously remind our team that “no one wants to hire a dumb coach!”
• Family is a blessing. We encourage each other to enjoy our families. When we need to, we pitch in as a team to help meet deliverables and goals so that a team member can attend to family matters. The Rhythm Systems Way is to come together as a family and work on solutions that allow our team members to enjoy family moments without compromising our company or customer goals. We want to enjoy our families AND succeed for our customers. We work hard to find ways to make this an A-N-D solution instead of an O-R problem.
• No TDC. No Thinly Disguised Contempt. We believe in having crucial conversations when needed, to deal with and resolve conflict. This preserves our team health. If we do the hard work to continuously improve team health, we will have a much more joyful journey together.
• Be appreciative. Self explanatory, and yet so necessary to be intentional about showing appreciation so we can enjoy a great journey together.

MOZ is the who. A big thank you to MOZ

Once we made our decision to rebrand, we asked "who's the who?”…meaning who has done this well before that we can learn from and avoid costly mistakes? My partner, Cindy's research led us to MOZ. They went on a wonderful journey, rebranding from SEOmoz to MOZ, and they shared their rich experience in a slideshare presentation. Here is the link to their slideshare.  

Learning from MOZ helped us to think through our process and achieve a lot more with our rebranding project. MOZ shared that it is important to think through our reasons for rebranding, to be guided by these reasons, and for the team to support these reasons. Thanks to MOZ, we discussed and got really clear on our reasons and goals for rebranding. These are our reasons that guided us:

• Achieve market clarity
• Get extremely focused
• Expand our audience and market
• Serve our current customers better
• Launch Rhythm 3.0 

We are midway through our rebranding, and it has been a joyful journey for our company. I'll share about how we execute on our rebranding project in my next blog post.