Fabian Geyrhalter:
Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Browning Jr.:
Hey, thanks for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, it’s really great having you. I’m really excited about this conversation today. You’re the founder and CEO of Unleashed Brands, which most listeners might not have heard of. However, Unleashed Brands is the parent company of youth enrichment franchises that most people do know. It’s a urban air adventure park, the little gyms n apology, premier martial arts class, one to one. Shall I go on like XP League water wings? Unbelievable. So your brands serve millions of families annually across 1,400 plus locations. We, for instance, have an urban air adventure park down the street here. We don’t have kids, so we are not as active in the location, but I know that you just recently hit the milestone of opening your 200 location of urban air. That is quite the journey from when you opened the first location in 2011, which is really not that long ago. Back then you invested everything. You had to take a really, really big bet and that bet paid off. Take us back to those first years when you made that decision and what was the drive and how difficult was it in the first years to get all of this literally off the ground?

Michael Browning Jr.:
Yeah, I would say being a founder or running a company, it’s like a constant stress test. And yeah, it was one of these things where I can’t take credit for being the inventor of the trampoline park, although I did scale it. We can talk later about the invention of the adventure park, which is another big bet. But I saw a trampoline park as I was traveling for my day job and I saw this and as an entrepreneur or a founder, this light bulb went off and I said, man, this seems like a very innovative and scalable concept. And those are two things I’m always looking for in great brands that we acquire today or things that we start is very scalable and very innovative. And when I saw this and I started to study it, the curiosity in me wanted me to go like, okay, how could I take this, bring this home and morph it more from it being a sports training facility to more of a family entertainment facility?
And I did risk. Everything went to my parents friends, nobody from banks, landlords, nobody believed in me. They thought it was crazy. The only people that believed in me was family, and we invested everything we had in that first location. No one had ever really known what it is. So from a branding perspective, we had to create a category. A lot of people will Google trampoline park near me these days, but when you think back to 2010, 2011, that term didn’t exist the same way. Go Google it or now chat GPT, it exists. We had to create a category.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. That’s really, really difficult. So I mean you literally, you had to build this from scratch and I’m talking about the physical location alone. I mean envisioning it and I mean it’s a huge upfront cost with something like that.

Michael Browning Jr.:
It was at the time, we invested around $850,000 into that first location, which was a lot back then. And we literally built it with our bare hands. My father was a home builder here in the Dallas-Fort Worth community. And so using some of his home building crews like plumbers, electricians, my dad and I installed the actual trampolines. There’s a picture that I just love of me driving a forklift, my dad standing on top of it. I wasn’t a certified forklift driver, I just had to teach myself how to do it so we could move things around and bolt these things together. So both physically, we had to build the location and then we had to figure out what are we going to call it? We had to build the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Amazing. And then going into location 2, 3, 4, 5 was franchising from the get go. Was that part of your big picture idea of like, wait a minute, this thing has legs, we can turn this into a franchise if it works?

Michael Browning Jr.:
It’s so funny that you asked that because franchising was not in the cart. I didn’t even know what franchising was. Save and accept. I had watched that movie called The Founder on McDonald’s. Oh yeah, fantastic. That was the extent, yeah, so we opened two more locations in Dallas-Fort Worth after the first one. So to put it in perspective, in that first location, we paid ourselves back the capital that we invested into the business in 10 months. Amazing. It was absolutely amazing. And I went to my wife and I said, I want to open another one. And she looked me like dead in the eyes, and I remember this so vividly in my mind, we were standing over the island in our kitchen and I said that to her and she said, why? And I said, well, what do you mean? And she goes, I just can’t believe after all the blood, sweat, tears long nights like stress that you want to open another one. And I said, at the time, we had one kid, we had opened that kid, we had had that kid 30 days after we opened our new location, our first location. Oh my God.
So all of my kids were born in big milestones in my entrepreneurial journey. So this first kid we had, and so 10, 12 months had gone by and I had gone to my wife and said, I want to do another one. And she said, why for all this? And I said, well honey, why do you want to have another kid? And she said, excuse me, true story. She said, excuse me. And I said, Hey, hear me out. Hear me out before you throw me out. I said, you have your first kid and every little scary moment scares you. The first bump, the first bruise, the first time they make a sound that you don’t know, you’re running them to the urgent care. You’re just constantly trying to keep them alive and you feel so inadequate. But as you have all of those learnings, you cross all these milestones. When you have your second kid and you hear that weird cough in the middle of the night or they have that bumper bruise, you’re more calm and you know what you’re doing. And it’s the same as a founder. You’re like, man, I learned so much on that first one that it seemed like it would just be a shame to not go and apply the wisdom, the learnings into the second one and the third one. So we opened two more, so she didn’t divorce me and she let me

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Open two more. First of all, that’s important. That would’ve been the next question.

Michael Browning Jr.:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we opened two more and then from there we had three amazing locations in Dallas-Fort Worth that people would come and visit in the summer and on school holidays. And it was during that time, people would then call me and say, Hey, will you open one in Wichita, Kansas? And I’m like, I don’t even know where that is. And I would say no. And then there was this one guy who called me every week and he continually came to our first location visiting his sister, and he finally said to me, will you franchise it? And I said, I don’t know what that is, but you’re so persistent. Let me do some research. And I did some research and got a mentor in franchising who taught me the business. And I went back to him and I said, John, I will franchise it to you and you can be our first franchisee. And that was the start of this amazing franchising journey.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Unbelievable. That is really, really cool. And then tons of more locations, and then you’re like, wait a minute, let’s buy up similar businesses that are in that learn, play, grow kind of arena and create Unleashed brands. That’s how simple it was

Michael Browning Jr.:
Just like that again, that too Unleashed Brands was also, it was not preplanned. Everything that I have done has always been very mission oriented, purpose oriented, because I believe when you solve a problem for a customer or you deliver them something that is extremely meaningful, you can be very, very successful. And I don’t focus on product features or I focus on the problems that we solve. So for example, it was during COVID, we had two kids, two girls at the time, then we had just had a boy on February of 2020. And coming out of COVID, my wife and I were sitting on the couch and I said, okay, let’s divide and conquer. I’ll take our newborn Bentley, you take Landry and I’ll take Latton and let’s start figuring out what we’re going to enroll them into coming out of. If you remember, the world was shut down and so you had to re-enroll in everything.
And it was so in that moment as a parent, I was just googling on my phone trying to figure out who was still open, who made it through. My kids had changed. So I have three kids all different, I have a fine arts type kid, I have a sports kid. And then we had a newborn that we needed to start helping. We wanted him to grow. And so it was in the moment where I was just left, felt so helpless, just Googling things, going like, man, this is way too hard as a parent to figure out what to put our kids into that can help them learn, play and grow. And the light bulb went off in my mind that said, where there is fragmentation, there’s the opportunity for consolidation and to solve this problem for parents. And my wife saw my eyes and she goes, oh no, what are you thinking about? And Unleashed brands, the vision of Unleashed Brands was born

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That, that’s fascinating. So how did you survive the whole COVID time? I mean, creating indoor places with tons of kids sounds fun until COVID hits, right? Did you have to downscale or how did you get through that time?

Michael Browning Jr.:
All of our locations, we closed March 17th, 2020 in unison with, I called the CEO of Dave and Busters at the time, CEO of Main Event, CEO, of Chuck E Cheese. And I said, Hey, let’s all close down at the same time and just show support and unity for the local communities. And so we literally shut down the family entertainment industry in one day altogether. And so our locations were closed, but our home office was still open and operational. The catch was we had $20 million of payroll and zero revenue coming in,
And many of people were in this boat chasing the PPP and EIDL and just trying to just survive. And so my philosophy at the time, and I was talking to a lot of mentors about this, they said, look, there is no playbook for this crisis, but there’s a playbook for crisis. There’s the first time planes flew into a building, there’s the first time of the housing crisis, there’s always a first. And so my strategy was to make sure that no one individual location, franchisee, home office employee vendor carried the full burden or brunt of the pandemic. So what I said to everyone is this is I’d rather spread the pain across everybody so that we can all take some pay cuts. I didn’t take a salary, vendors stopped charging us so that when we come back out of this, we can turn it all back on, but if we cut too deep in one area, then it could be hard to fill that back in when we come out. And I told my team, this is why I told ’em, I said, look, I don’t believe in my soul that we have come this far to come this far and just stop here. I do not believe that humans are going to come out of COVID and be rewired to not want to go and experience things with their friends and family. I believe that humans are created to be in relationships, be around each other and have fun.
I said, however, I do believe there will be some rewiring of the consumer during COVID with regards to maybe how they check in cleanliness, how they consume media. I do think there’s going to be some changes there. And so then finally what I said to them, this is before my vision for Unleash Brands, I said, where there is turmoil, there will be opportunity. We just have to keep our eyes open and listen for it and then prepare ourselves to be able to capitalize on the opportunity when we see it. I dunno what it is this time, but I firmly believe that there’s going to be something that great that we can do and come out of this. So we didn’t lose a single location during COVID permanently, and we actually came out of COVID better than most from a marketing and branding perspective. My CMO at the time she came to me, she said, Hey, I was around at a cruise line during nine 11 and when the travel industry shut down for a bit, and she said, we bought up all the media when no one else was buying media. We pre-bought it so that when the travel industry was allowed to start traveling again and consumers were interested in traveling again, the only thing they saw would be our brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So good. So

Michael Browning Jr.:
She came to me and said, let’s do that. And I said, here’s the problem. I said, we’re broke. We don’t have any money to go buy this media. So I loaned the company millions of dollars and we went and pre-bought media around all of our locations and we sat on it until the world started to open up in each one of those individual markets. And when that happened, we deployed the pre-bought media to those customers in those markets. And our slogan at that time was, it’s time to get out of your house and get into ours. You’ve kept your kids learning, playing and growing. Now let us help take a little bit of stress and load off of you. You can breathe a little easier and come have some fun. Well,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You can breathe period after all of that. That’s amazing. You like taking big but very calculated risks. That’s amazing because you came out of it with wind in your sails, right? And you very quickly were back up to speed. Now let’s talk a little bit about the businesses aspect in your building. Great Kids and Businesses tagline, which I really like. I don’t know if it’s a tagline, it’s the headline on these brands website, which is very likable. Let’s talk about the businesses part. So you acquired a good amount of brands and then once they’re onboarded, you offer a lot of resource to your franchise owners now that you very much know what franchises are and you’re leading in the industry. So you’ve got the Unleashed Brands, command Center, supply X, the Cockpit, Unleashed University, you have all of these resources for your owners. Share a little bit about those inner workings with us because most brand builders rarely work with franchises. They see them, but it always seems like when you have so many different brands and you have to keep them on brand while you still have to empower the franchise owners to have an entrepreneurial drive, it feels like such a tension point there, right? You’re an entrepreneur, go build it, but here are all of the guidelines. How do you balance that from a business

Michael Browning Jr.:
Perspective? For us, what we like to say is franchising gives the entrepreneur flexibility within a framework. And so the beautiful thing about franchising is it allows an entrepreneur to open a tried and true business model that gives them the highest probability for success because there’s a statistically significant sample size of units already open. Then those units are serving a statistically significant number of customers that allow us to get enough data to say, Hey, we need to make this pivot, or this is how we market, or this is how we should operate the business. And so for us as a franchisor one, we say as a franchisor, we’re a marketing technology, customer service company. That’s what we are. Then what our job is to do is to build the systems, the processes and the procedures that simplify the operations of the business for our franchisees so they can do what they’re best at, which is serving the customer, serving the guest.
We don’t want our franchisees having to be in the back office spending all these hours publishing schedules or reconciling cash or doing all these different things, and therefore they’re not on the floor, loving on the guests, loving on the kids, helping kids learn, play and grow. And so it’s all about focus. Now, when you’re multi-brand, it is difficult because we have eight world-class brands that on their own, they, they’re category leaders, but when you bring them together and you put them on a shared services model that then they’re even more powerful. So the way that I think about things is that each brand offers classes, camps, onetime events, leagues and celebrations. That’s what they offer. But the logo and the branding around those offerings is going to be unique by brand. What the guest does in a class at class 1 0 1 is going to be different than say Sylvan or a birthday party.
The little gym is going to be different than an urban air, but fundamentally that’s still a birthday party. And so the way we sell a birthday party, the way we check in a birthday party, the way we serve the guests at a birthday party, the way we follow up on a birthday party, that’s the same between brands. And so that’s how you can get the operating leverage and get the flywheel going when you have multiple brands. And that’s really the difference between a platform company and a portfolio company. A portfolio company owns a bunch of companies but doesn’t integrate them together. They don’t have shared services, they don’t share a common customer, whereas a platform company shares those things, shares the systems services, customers buying power. That’s the power of a platform.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Really, really fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. It’s like how you can leverage everything in the back office basically, and you replicate it, but you do it in an empathetic way where you understand each of the brand small nuances, but in the end, you can leverage 90% of all of these things. And that goes from training to audience engagement to loyalty programs, I’m sure, and across all of it.

Michael Browning Jr.:
Absolutely.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Very exciting. Talking about loyalty programs, is that something that you do a lot? I would assume you would.

Michael Browning Jr.:
So loyalty at the moment in the traditional sense, like say a Marriott Bonvoy or say Starbucks. We’re not doing at the moment, however, I’ve just hired a new chief marketing officer, pat O’Toole. He was previously the CMO of Burger King. Prior to that he was the CMO over some brands at Pepsi, some iconic brands like Cheetos, mountain Dew, and we are in the midst right now of finishing up our mobile app, which will include loyalty.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh,

Michael Browning Jr.:
Fantastic. Now we’ve done some different testings and things around loyalty because right now our customers, if you’re a part of one brand, we expose you to the offerings of the other brands, and we give you special say, try this brand for free or one month free if you add this brand to the portfolio. And so it’s not necessarily loyalty in the traditional sense of the term, but we call it crosspollination and the cross-pollination, the way we are able to achieve it is bringing value to the customer.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Do you have owners of different, do some of your owners own different franchises out of your portfolio?

Michael Browning Jr.:
They do. We call ’em mumbo multiunit, multi-unit, multi-brand operators. And they’re fabulous. They’ve really bought into the vision and the mission
Of Unleashed Brands is to impact the lives of every kid by helping them learn, play, and grow through these experiences. And we believe every kid has a name, every name is writing a story, and every story is about a kid on a journey trying to reach their destiny. And every day across all of our brands for somewhere between an hour to three and a half hours, we get the opportunity to write a page in that story. And so we have franchisees who have owned, we have some franchisees that own up to four brands, and this is what’s amazing for them. When you think about shared customer shared services, they get to acquire that customer one time, and so they’ve got their consumer acquisition cost. Then when they serve that customer well, that customer is eventually going to age out of their first brand and they’re going to look for something else to sign up for. So it’s like Monopoly. Now they can move that customer into something another one of their enrichment brands. And so we have mapped out every single brand in a linear fashion. So typically they’re buying either something before their first brand or after their first brand so that they can keep that youth enrichment journey going for the customer, increase the lifetime value.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I mean, that’s always the big problem with every brand, right? You cater to a certain audience in a certain age group and once they outgrow your brand, you’re at that sticky situation. Do you keep catering to them with new offerings, but you kind of dilute your brand? Or do you just have to constantly engage the next generation? And you solve this really nicely where you have, I don’t know how long that life journey is, but it’s through the entire youth, right? I mean, what are we talking about? 10, 15 years more of one customer?

Michael Browning Jr.:
You’re absolutely right. As we sit today, we can enroll a child as young as four months old. They can either start swimming lessons at water Wing swim school, or they can start in gymnastics. At the little gym. We can keep that child learning playing and growing continuously until they exit out of our ecosystem through our college planning company, class 1 0 1, and go off to college or into the working world. So we have the potential to serve a guest for 18 years.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And then at that point, once they finish college, you would like for them to procreate and create a new customer.

Michael Browning Jr.:
That’s exactly right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s the cycle of Unleashed brands. Amazing. That’s

Michael Browning Jr.:
Exactly right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely amazing. How do you navigate speaking through social media and your email marketing and all of the different ways that all of your brands market? How do you do this chicken or egg situation where you have to get the parents excited, but you also have to speak to the kids? Do you do that? How do you balance that? I see you do it with Urban Air, but I’m trying to feel out from your perspective how you think about those two audiences and how you engage them.

Michael Browning Jr.:
It’s a great question. So we look at it as we have a customer and we have a user. So our customer is the chief household officer, and that chief household officer is typically a mom. And that, when you think about that mom, many of them, they drive a Honda Odyssey minivan, they shop at Target, they spend a lot of time on Amazon. They’re reading parenting books, trying to become a better parent. They’re doing everything that they can to learn to grow and to help their kids. And so we spend a lot of time talking to that customer, the chief household officer, about not about we sell classes, camps, one-time events or leagues, but we talked to that chief household officer about, we sell competence, courage, creativity, helping their kids build character because that’s what our brand is. And because parents, you think about the macro today, when times get tough, they’ll trade down on things on what, but the reason why they stay in our brand is because of our why and what we’re doing to help those kids.
And so we tell compelling stories to the customer, that chief household officer that she can see herself being a part of. And so we have this saying, if you don’t define your brand, the market will. And so we talk to our customers all the time. We have a voice. Our branding isn’t our logo, our colors our tagline. It’s what people feel when they interact with our company. It it’s the emotional residue that lingers after the experience is over. And what we want the chief health officer to feel is that we’re their partner in the parenting journey. We’re their guide. We might not have all the answers, but we’re going to stand right beside them while they find their answers. And so it’s all about clarity in this identity with the customer. And then our experiences, we don’t market to kids. So what we do is we make sure that we have certain types of offerings that are samplings to the kids. So when they experience it, they’re going to tell their parent they want to be a part of it. The Little Gym predominantly is a membership based business for gymnastics, gymnastics for kids in elementary school, we’re obviously not marketing to kids in elementary school, but we have birthday parties, which is a sampling of the experience to kids. So if one of our members invites 12 of their friends to come to their birthday party, we now deliver an exceptional guest experience. We run about an 84 net promoter score at the Little gym, which is phenomenal.
We then now have an amazing experience with those kids. Those kids tell their parents how great it was, and now we’ve collected the data on those kids from their visit, and now we’re marketing to those chief household officers about enrolling their kids long-term in the little gym. And so it’s all about the experience for the kids and then the brand and speaking to the parents.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I mean, you just read chapters and chapters of brand Bibles here in the last five minutes. I mean everything from Clarity to start with why of Simon Sinek and all of that,

Michael Browning Jr.:
Huge fan

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Of him. But really putting that into work is a totally different story than reading it. And many people don’t because you get so sucked into the what and sometimes the how, the why just is being left wayside. But it’s great to hear that that is really a driving force. And there are aspects though of your brands with Urban Air, for instance, you have a mascot, which is amazing because I thought Mascots are kind of dead, but they’re not. You’ve got ibi and IBI has a role to fill, and so IBI is exciting your audience, but that’s now catering to the kids. So that is a part where it’s kind of like when kids see the website or because they do that, they still feel like there’s a place for them.

Michael Browning Jr.:
And each one of the individual brands underneath the platform still has its brand heart, it’s voice. I mean, in Urban Airs, it’s all about active play, right? We help kids celebrate special moments, escape their everyday troubles, and connect socially, offline, off a screen. Kids love that. And so it’s important to have unique brand voices. Herby plays a huge part of that. He’s fun, his brand voices, he loves risky play. He loves playing with the kids running around. You just never know what he’s going to do, and that plays into that brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And

Michael Browning Jr.:
So each one of these brands, like Little Jim for example, is the springboard to life’s adventures, right? My child who’s currently five years old, a 5-year-old boy, I don’t necessarily think he’s going to be a gymnast when he grows up, but what he’s learning at the Little gym around agility, coordination, listening to a coach, standing in line sharing is going to pay dividends later in life. And once we figure out what sport he really wants to do, so it’s all about the brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. And conveying the emotion that someone feels through someone else’s voice, like Herby, right? That idea that you really need to understand the feelings of these kids walking in and how they want to actually let go, let loose, and that they actually like to not be in front of their screen. But those are all very, very emotional, empathetic, psychological kind of moments that you have to uncover and study in order to speak to that heart. And that’s a lot of the work that I’m sure you do from a branding and marketing perspective.

Michael Browning Jr.:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, we’ve been blessed with the success that we’ve had. And so now obviously we have focus groups and we’re getting customer data from our customers all the time, customer insights and research. And so that helps us understand the direction that we need to go. And it’s all about how does this customer feel before they buy? What do they feel after they buy? What tension are we trying to resolve? We’re not asking them about features, functions, and benefits. I always tell my team, Steve, jobs didn’t sell a four gig iPod. He sold 10,000 songs in your pocket. And so it’s about those things, right? It’s about as Simon Sinek as the why and how this parent can see themselves being a part of what we’re doing and how we can benefit their lives.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. I always think that after the Simon Sinek, why Blew up Right on the internet, I almost think that how is just as important because the way that you do things in your actual facilities, the how you facilitate it, why is the driving point, but how is so crucial for you to stand out from your competitors? I think that’s the initial business idea that’s like, okay, there’s a white space, we can do this. But I think how becomes more and more important too. Okay, cool. Well, let’s bubble this conversation up to some of the very big questions. One of them, which you’ve been already sharing tons of insights on, is the big question of what does branding mean to you? Because it’s such a sad, under valued and misunderstood word where a lot of people say, oh, branding, it’s like a logo, right? You and I know it’s much, much more than that, but what does branding mean to you now that you’ve been building, purchasing, educating all of these brands under your umbrella?

Michael Browning Jr.:
I would say your brand is the most important thing about your business. It’s who you are. It’s who you serve. It’s why you exist. And when you can set those things up for your brand, then you need to relentlessly align every decision and every touch point in the how around that truth of what your brand is Unleashed Brands. We’re not just a brand, and we don’t just brand ourselves as a youth enrichment platform. We embody it. We live it every single day. And so I think too many people get caught up saying like, oh, it’s your logo, your color scheme, your tagline. Logos can change over time, colors can change over time. Your tagline can change over time. Your mission should not change, your core values did not change. All of that’s a part of your brand. And I just think a lot of people don’t embody it or they miss it because they’re just too surface level. And for us, one of my mentors, Roland Hanson, he was the chief marketing officer globally for Microsoft. He told me the goal of a brand and a business is to create something complex enough to create barriers to entry, yet simple enough for the guest to understand.
And great brands make very complex things simple. It creates trust before the first transaction. It attracts believers, not just buyers. And I think too many people, they talk about their brand, but then they don’t really know who their customer is, and they try to be everything to everyone, and then they’re nothing. They can’t. They’re just so watered down.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Hallelujah. Exactly. That’s exactly it. If you would take Unleashed Brands, which in itself is eight brands plus, if you would take Unleashed Brands and you would think about it on the top, top, top level, what is one word? If it’s the thread that goes through Unleashed Brands, the DNA, there are all these different ways that we, as marketers can call it, but what is one word that can describe Unleashed brands?

Michael Browning Jr.:
Oh, man, that’s a great question. I think I would go with Destiny. It’s very important to me that we as a brand, help people understand we’re not just entertaining your kids. We’re not putting your kids in a back room and feeding them pizza and just trying to keep them quiet for an hour. We’re equipping them for who they’re meant to be. Every experience we offer is designed to shape identity, build resilience, call out greatness. And so we believe every kid has a destiny, and our mission is to help them find it, face it, and live it. And so when we think about Unleashed Brands, it’s just so mission oriented. We believe we are stewarding the kids today who are going to be tomorrow’s leaders, and we firmly believe impacting this generation, we can change the world.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s amazing. I love that. Very, very inspirational. And Destin is that overarching. It’s so much bigger than a trampoline park or a place you go to learn to swim. It’s a much, much bigger word. Very cool. Any brand advice for founders maybe or marketers as a takeaway? I mean, you learned a lot in the last decades, but is there anything that kind of stands out where you feel like you want to share it with the group before we end this episode?

Michael Browning Jr.:
I think I would tell people to really do some soul searching for your brand, for your company, and know exactly who you are and more importantly, know exactly who you’re for. I said it earlier, you can’t be everything to everyone. That’s the fastest way to dilute your brand. It’s when you chase every human thinking they’re a customer. The strongest brands are magnetic because they’re clear and they speak directly to a specific person. They solve a specific problem, they deliver a specific feeling. And so really getting that brand and identity solid is so important because then over the years, many times people have asked me to chase a different demographic or to chase a particular trend. And when you stay consistent with who you are and who you’re for, it can keep you on that right path. And I think it’s one of the biggest things that people, they try to be everything to everyone, and then they become so diluted that they become nothing.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You said that word at least three times today, which is clarity. I think for me, that is literally our tagline, clarity for brand transformations, right? Because that clarity is everything, right? Once you’re clear about all of that, you’ve got that path and then you can focus on it. And once you have the focus, you know who you talk to, and once you know who you talk to, et cetera, et cetera, right? It keeps going into this one direction. That’s great. Hey, what’s next for your umbrella brand or for your portfolio brands? Is there anything specifically that you’re really excited about in the next six months?

Michael Browning Jr.:
We’re always excited about something. We’ve got some brands that we’re in discussions with about coming into the platform. We typically add one to two great brands a year into the platform, and so we’re excited about that. But what I think as a marketing focused CEO and founder, what I’m most excited about is what our CMO Paddle tool is working on right now in making Unleashed brands, the Marriott Bonvoy of Youth Enrichment. When a parent picks up their phone and says, man, I got to find something to put my kids in this fall school year’s right around the corner. I don’t want them to go to Google. I want them to go to our app and know that we are trusted and that we are the voice of Youth enrichment, the key opinion leader in Youth enrichment, and we have the world’s best brand. The first thing that they open is our app. So we’re building that Unleashed Brands consumer brand this year along with that app we’ll be launching in the first of next year in a really big way. And so I’m so excited about that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m going to have to have you back in two years and see how that is going, because that sounds absolutely amazing of a strategy move there. Super, super cool. How can everyone follow you either personally or how can they get to know the universe of Unleashed brands?

Michael Browning Jr.:
Yeah, Unleashedbrands.com is the website to go to. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Michael O. Browning Jr. No spaces, no dashes, MichaelOBrowningJr. Love to interact with founders, marketing experts online. So would love to do that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, your passion came through and you had some absolutely amazing insights. I am so thrilled that you were able to spend the time with us today. And by the way, we’re recording this on a Friday, so thank you. Special, thank you for that. And yeah, looking forward to maybe having you back sometimes to dig deeper into how things keep evolving.

Michael Browning Jr.:
It’d be an honor. Thanks for having me today.