From Founder to Brand Manager – The Key Transition

In talking with B-school professors and founders, I realized that my courses hit a gap in DIY founder training. The gap is in professional brand management with an early-stage twist. Once you get into Phase 2, this is when these skills will give you an analytical and strategic planning edge over peers who are just winging it. 

It helps if you were good at school, although I made these entertaining enough for all. I hope. My signature humor is embedded in each. And there’s a pause button so you can go at your own pace, not mine. 

My goal in these dense, intensive courses is to augment the analytical and diagnostic skills of innovative founders newer to the byzantine world of consumer goods. 

All of my courses help you sharpen analytical skills traditionally ignored by founders entirely (consumer research) or outsourced to vendors (POS analytics and Consumer Marketing) 

Historically, the inexperienced founder fails to gain an intermediate understanding of key analytical functions that increasingly mean the difference between stagnation and Rxbar performance. And they can’t even interpret what agencies and scanner companies are sending their way. This must stop, but it does require you to invest time into analytical upskilling.

All of my courses connect to my book, but each goes super deep to get you to an intermediate level of understanding. And that is what is required to understand ‘reports’ and manage specialists when hiring them. You can’t manage what you don’t have an intermediate understanding of. This is my experience as a white-collar professional who found himself managing multi-skill consulting projects where I had maybe one of the five skills needed. So, I taught myself. 

If you’ve read this and are intrigued enough to make an investment in yourself and your analytical skills, then consider a three-figure investment in one of my three online, on-demand courses.  Go to my courses page for more information and trailers for each one. 

Or…commit big and purchase the Brand Management Bundle. All three courses, 15-hours of training, for a built-in discount of $200. Except that, this month, I’m letting anyone use a special code to take 15% of the bundle pricing. You get $1,800 worth of course content for $1,440. In December only. Since this is NOT a cohort-based, live class, you can pace your learning as you need to within your busy entrepreneurial schedule. 

Dr. James Richardson

[email protected]