Henry Kaminski Jr.: Unique Designz; Unique Designz

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Henry Kaminski Jr.: Unique Designz

I have a guest that I’ve known for many years, but believe it or not, I never knew his last name. I’ve always known him as The Brand Doctor and I’ve known him as Henry. I knew of him more than I knew him and I was thrilled when he asked to be on the show. I was pleased to have him as a guest. I’m pleased even more of the information he’s going to give you. He’s going to talk to you about how he’s pivoted during times of chaos and distortion, which we’re in now but bear in mind, we get into a lot of the times. Henry Kaminski will be telling you why you should pivot and identify your brand.

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Henry, welcome to the show.

What’s going on, Steve?

I’m absolutely thrilled that you’re here because as anyone that’s been listening to me, watching me on the social, they’ve seen that I’ve been on a fake guru bash for a while. We all know what they look like. Those are all the clowns leaning up against the car they don’t own. Someone said to me, “You need to speak to this guy.” The funny thing was when they mentioned your name, I didn’t know your last name, but I knew your brand. I knew what you did. Let’s jump into the deep end because I hate waiting until the end. What’s your website? What’s your company and what do you do?

My name is Henry Kaminski, I go by The Brand Doctor. I have a company now called Unique Designz. It is a boutique branding agency that helps online entrepreneurs scale and build their business online. I started out as a graphic designer and matured that business into this agency that employs eight team members including myself. We’ve helped hundreds of entrepreneurs over the last several years to grow and scale a business that they’re proud of online.

You’ve got a wide range of names around you. I knew about The Brand Doctor and I knew your first name. Every time I’d hear about you, I’d hear things like Fabio and Jon Bon Jovi and Russell Brunson, you’ve worked with some serious talent. Is this always to help identify that brand and help get it out there to the masses?

Right around my five-year mark in business, my business started to take a huge nosedive. What happened was Fiverr came out, disrupted the whole design industry and Hurricane Sandy came by at the same time and wiped out two of my biggest clients. One of the things that I needed to do was increase the value that I was delivering to my marketplace. Otherwise, I was going to be out of business. The one thing that helped me was learning about sales and marketing funnels, specifically ClickFunnels. I’m going to abbreviate this story but what happened was as my business was about to go bankrupt, I quickly found out about ClickFunnels. I said to myself, “Here is a tool that can help people scale and build their business online.”

The way you win in entrepreneurship is to give and to serve, not to take. Click To Tweet

I see a need, and the need is for quality designed funnels. The templates and stuff that come with the software, they’re okay, but when you start to get hundreds and thousands of people using them, where is your point of differentiation? There isn’t. I came in and I said, “How can I use my talents, skills and my experience to help these folks design a sales and marketing funnel that represents their true value and will attract a higher-quality client?” I believe in this statement right here, “The quality of your brand determines the quality of your clients, and the quality of your clients determine the quality of your life.” If there’s going to be one thing you want to invest in, it’s your brand, your business and the look and feel, and the messaging that goes into it.

You can tell I’m passionate about this. When I found this niche, I went all in and I was able to leverage my design experience and my design skill into this world. I started to learn more about digital marketing and online entrepreneurship and all of that, and I just fell in love. Ever since then I’m saying to myself, “How could I marry what I’m really good at, which is design, with all this other stuff?” It just so happened Russell Brunson started to become a client of mine. After 2.5 years of working with him and ClickFunnels, they go on to do $100 million in revenue, which I’m forever grateful to be part of that story. It’s going to go in my entrepreneurial memoirs as I continue to grow this business. To be part of those experiences and success stories for my clients, it’s been a true blessing.

The thing that I hoped to know as well apart from the great takeaways was that you did an amazing pivot during a downturn and we’re seeing that now. We’ve got chaos, distraction and distortion in front of us. You’re faced with two options. You can lay down, cry and binge watch Netflix or you pivot. That seems to be the common word being used at the moment: reinvent, retweet or whatever. That’s exactly what you did in a downward spiral. You found a different way to optimize what it was you did for the benefit of everyone that was working for you and your clients.

I’m still doing it, Steve.

You’re doing it very large. You’re very much out there. I’m proud to see these working for you. It’s just strange that a lot of people don’t have that wherewithal. Did you always think you were an entrepreneur? That’s an entrepreneurial trait that you have there.

I always had this philosophy of never giving up. I’ll share with you a quick story. When my parents got married, they tried for sixteen years to have a child and to start a family. Medicine wasn’t the way it is now, so there were a lot of unknowns. I would always hear my mother, God rest her soul, talk to her girlfriends about how I was her miracle baby, and that it took sixteen years to have me. When I was a six-year-old kid, I thought women were pregnant for sixteen years. It never hit me until later on in life.

To be honest with you, I don’t know if I would ever try anything for sixteen years to continue to fail and continue to go and do it. There was a lot of persistence, grit and determination amongst my mother and father that since day one has been embedded into me. It goes a little bit further than that. I’m finally here and I’m two years old and I’m in my crib supposedly taking a nap. My mom’s in the kitchen doing whatever she’s doing. She comes into my room to check on me. She looks in the crib and I’m blue and unresponsive. They rushed me to the hospital and they come to realize that due to poor nutrition, I lost all the salt in my body. I don’t know what my parents were doing back then. They rushed me to the hospital, they pumped the sodium back in and then I’m here.

When the smoke clears, you're going to get exposed. Click To Tweet

Long story short, you hear the story growing up over and over again and you start to say to yourself, “I’m here for a reason. I’m here on borrowed time. This is luck at this point.” I need to do something with my life that I’m going to be proud of when I’m 90 or 100 years old. I always had this never give up mentality ever since I was a little kid. I was in corporate for eight years before I started my own business. I worked for a local hospital and I worked my ass off. When I first got there, I was cleaning coffee pots and checking insurances, then I moved my way. I got my Master’s Degree and moved my way up into a position which led to my design career, which was a cool position in the Children’s Hospital.

I always was this passion-driven person that honestly wanted to help people. I always had this drive to help people, but my internal was not aligning with my external, and I’ll share with you what was going on. Unfortunately, my parents get divorced and I’m living with my father. My father was the one that raised me. He was working four jobs. He was a shop steward at UPS for 33 years. He was a mechanic and a damn good one too. This guy bust hustled his ass off but never spent a dime. He carries nickels like manhole covers. I saw that growing up and I was like, “We would go to Chinatown in New York City to get my school clothes.” We never had the fanciness but I did have this very wealthy uncle who was like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I would go up as a kid and visit him and it was a culture shock. The way they treated him, the cars and the house and everything, I was like, “I want that.”

What happened was I let money be my number one driver, not servant leadership. It took me a long time to figure that out. When I finally realized that the way you win in entrepreneurship is to give and to serve, not to take. Back in the day, I was a taker, I wasn’t a giver and I almost lost my business twice because of that. I realized after the second time I almost lost my business and I had a newborn that I couldn’t put them at risk anymore. It wasn’t the business that sucked. It was me that sucked. I needed some mindset readjusting for me to start to say, “You were put here to help and serve people, to live a life and to have a business that they’re proud of. You don’t do that by taking. You do that by giving.” I completely rewired my thinking process and that’s what helped me get to where I’m at now honestly.

That will be a nice segue into the word on a strange world that we have of the fake gurus. Your job is to work with people that have a mission statement, have a message, can provide a solution, and as all coaches and consultants want to do, to benefit the client. We’re in a world of Instagurus of Instagram and everyone leaning up against cars that are literally stationary and not taking off, and make it out as some millionaire and they all go like, “Millionaire Instagram whatever.” How do you see through those people? Do you get a lot of those people come into you trying to build up mass scaling businesses? What’s your process in getting rid of the flakes?

I must repel them like the plague because I don’t get a lot of those folks come in my way. I think it’s the branding that I’ve done for myself, so the personal branding that I’ve done. I’m an aggressive guy from New Jersey and I don’t put up with a lot of bullshit. I’m going to tell it to you the way it is whether you like it or not. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s how I learned the most valuable lessons in my life. It was doing this shit from the streets up, learning from the streets and having people slap me around and be like, “Who the hell do you think you are?” l learned that way. When I put myself out there on social media, my message is if you’re trying to get Instagram famous, I’m not your guy because I don’t believe in all that fake hype bullshit. When the smoke clears, you’re going to get exposed.

A lot of those people don’t care. They don’t care about getting exposed. They are playing a short game and not knowing what the ramifications are going to be. Here’s a better question for you. As you are there to expose the talent and caring in the coaches that you take on, how does your message get through all of the clutter to make it very straight that, “This is a person of credibility, this is someone with substance and experience over the Insta tops?” How do you do that?

I’ll give you a crash course in branding right now for you and all your readers. The biggest part and the most foundational part of branding is understanding who your customer is. I’ve done so much work on my ideal customer. We’ll talk about one of my customers, Dom Faussette. He’s a mutual friend of ours. The one thing that I love about Dom Faussette is when he came to me, he was a humble action taker that wanted to make this world a better place. What I realized was that is the common denominator amongst all of my clients. They are humble action takers that want to make this world a better place and they’re sincere about it. I could see that because before I took Dom on as a client, I did some research on him.

AMT 2 | Unique Designz

Unique Designz: The quality of your brand determines the quality of your clients, and the quality of your clients determine the quality of your life.

 

The one thing that I will tell you as an entrepreneur, it’s tough when you’re starting out because you feel like you’ve got to take every job that comes your way to keep the doors open. As you start to mature, it is as important to qualify your clients than it is for them to qualify you. When I saw the consistency in Dom’s presence, which was small at that time, I saw somebody who truly loved people and truly loved helping people level up and not to take the status quo as is. When I see that consistency, those are the folks that I want to connect and work with. You can see the fly by night, Steve. They stand out to me because they’re here one minute and then they’re onto the next thing and they’re like gypsies. You don’t have to be a branding expert to see that. You don’t need to be somebody that has significant knowledge of that. When you see the gypsies bouncing around, those are the ones that are out to grab the quick cash and move on.

There are thousands of them. Look at the people that use ClickFunnels as a get-rich-quick tool. I go into that group and I’m very vocal about being that way. I go, “You’re going to put this scammy ass funnel out there and think that you’re going to attract high-quality clients with it?” We’re not going to put our credit cards 10 feet from this funnel because we can smell your insincerity from a mile away. If you really cared about your customers, it would show in your brand’s identity and your brand’s messaging. I would be able to see it through testimony on social proof. If I don’t see any of that, then you’re just a fast talker to me.

The trouble is we, as humans, and the world’s moving at such a fast pace, we have shiny object disease. We see someone in our eyes visually going, “I’m down on a jet or we’re in an expensive car.” The ones that make me puke are the ones that are like, “I want a plane with loads of cash laid on the table in front of me and a couple of scammy.” It’s all the eye candy. The downside is a lot of people don’t look at it and go, “Why are they doing that?” You know why they’re doing it. They’re doing it to grab your eyesight and they did. They’re not looking for the substance. They’re not looking for the message. They go, “That’s shiny. I’m in.” It’s very much of a squirrel mentality. The funny thing is I’m concerned of how many people buy into it that they’re helping those people get more money. Secondly, it’s one of the perks and benefits of the COVID pandemic in the fact that a lot of these have gone away and still sitting on the sidelines waiting for our stimulus checks.

The biggest part and the most foundational part of branding is understanding who your customer is. Click To Tweet

There are going to be a lot of wolves in sheep’s clothing that get through, but look at who they’re attracting. I’ll give you a quick example and I’ll throw myself under the bus as an example. I thought that that worked. When I was coming up into the digital marketing world and the online marketing world, I did exactly that. I went and I bought a JetSmarter Membership, I was flying around semi-private for a year. You would see me coming in and out of jets, and I did all of that. I was running ads with all of that flash. I’ll never forget, there was a guy that was trolling the hell out of my ads and he said to me, “Who are you? I do a Google search for you and nothing comes up, yet I see these videos of you coming in and out of jets and stuff.”

I started to play with this guy. I figured, “Why not? We’ll create some engagement here.” He’s like, “Show me what you’ve done.” At that time, I’ve had quite a bit of work under my belt but I never leveraged it as proof of my expertise. He kept coming at me. Finally I said, “Here’s the message that I’m not getting. Stop showing the flash, start showing the results.” I changed my entire ad strategy and social media marketing strategy with the show and prove philosophy. It’s funny, I grew up in a high school where I’m 1 of 50 white kids in my whole school. I grew up in a very urban area. We used to go out there and play football on the field on Sundays. We’d get out there on the basketball court, we would play and we would always have the trash talkers.

The big thing on the schoolyard was this, “If you’ve got that much to say, show and prove.” I lived by that philosophy for many years but I wasn’t applying it to my entrepreneurial career. That troll that day made me realize and it was such a gift. I didn’t bash him, I didn’t hate him for trolling me. He gave me the best gift I could ever have gotten. It was, “Wake up, Henry. The flash, jets, stupidness and the materialistic things aren’t what attract quality people. It’s the results that you’ve gotten.” If you look at any of my social media channels, you’ll see me in video with a client, with their permission, working through some of my brand accelerator program work, how we develop their sales funnel and how we develop their brand from scratch so that it truly represents them. I let that do the marketing for me. You don’t see that much with the real deals out there, do you?

The biggest part and the most foundational part of branding is understanding who your customer is. Click To Tweet

You don’t see any of it. That’s all eye candy. They’ll show you a pair of breasts in a flashcard and hope that does it for you. You’re right, so that’s a good call out there. I know you do a small video course for those people that are sitting there going and they’re questioning where they are. Tell me a little bit more about that.

If you go to my website, UniqueDesignz.net, right underneath the hero image, there’s going to be an opt-in and it’s four ways you can scale your business online. What I did was I created a little four-part video series. They’re very short, they’re eight minutes long videos. I walk you through how I helped Russell Brunson scale ClickFunnels. I walk you through how I helped Jon Bon Jovi scale his fan club website. I walk you through how I helped the digital entrepreneur, Adam Winning, go from crickets on social media to a highly polished personal brand. When he goes out there into the marketplace, he’s seen as a subject matter expert.

I walk you through another client out in Toronto who was in her career for many years getting paid $200 an hour, getting killed and crushed. This woman had so much credibility and authority. She worked with some major sports teams yet she’s getting paid $200 an hour and she has a workload that’s so much, she has no time to breathe in her personal life. How we flipped her into charging 5x that, taking her client roster in half and making more money with it. I walk you through this and show you the step-by-steps on how we did this for them to inspire the folks that go through that series to level-up their game. There’s one thing that there’s always going to be with me. There’s a fire under my ass to always do a little bit better. When you reach that level of success, to raise that bar and to go a little bit higher.

One thing that my uncle who’s successful told me, I said, “What’s the key to this success here? How did you get here, Uncle Joe?” He said, “Every time I set a goal and I achieved it, I celebrate it but I always set my next goal right away.” I’m talking to the coaches and the consultants out there that have a great product or service, have been serving people for a while now and you’re getting some momentum, and now it’s time to reinvest because you want to take your business or brand to the next level, and you want to take it online so you can scale. Those are the folks that I want to talk to and serve because they’re pent-up with all of this potential and they don’t know how to systematically lay it all out on the table and say, “This is what’s going to scale my business online.” I have a program that’s able to do that for them in just about 90 days.

How much is it?

The Brand Accelerator Program starts at $15,000 and goes up but that’s the done-for-you. I do have a lower ticket offer, it’s called The Brand Strategy Guide and it comes with supplemental video training that’s $97 and you can get it at UniqueDesignz.net/BrandStrategy. It’s going to walk you through the step-by-step guide on how to position yourself online. It’s going to give you some very practical, easy to implement steps here. You don’t need to be a branding expert to implement this stuff. I highly advise if you’re ready to take that next step and you’re ready to invest, start there and see how much of it you’re already doing or if not at all. Start implementing some of the things I put in that guide because it’s going to give you the momentum to take your business to the next level online.

I need to point out that Henry didn’t know that I was going to be pitching that or even bringing that subject up. This isn’t a promotional item or sponsored ad. This was something that I had seen. I know Dom and Russell, and a whole bunch of people that we know each other, so there’s an immense amount of credibility there. I will say it as well, if you’re interested in taking your business into the consultant business and you may not even sure you should, start his videos, test it out there and have a look on there. Thanks a lot for doing that. We’re on The Art of Making Things Happen podcast, but you also have your own podcast. Tell us about that because podcasts are free.

Growing your business online is no longer a nice thing to have; it is a necessity. Click To Tweet

I started this show called The Brand Doctor Podcast. I put out some actionable, practical strategies and tactics on how to grow and scale your business online. I’m a practitioner. I’m not going to sell and talk about anything that I haven’t already done myself. I was scared to throw this show out there. Why? I was scared of the tech. I wasn’t sure on how to produce it and publish it. I found somebody to do that for me. I’m only responsible for creating the content. After a few years, we’re now averaging around 73,000-plus downloads a month. Steve, I would love for you to come on my show, share your message to the world and my audience, because I love what you do. This podcast has been such an outlet for me. You start to get good at it. I have some great guests come on the show. We’ve had David Meltzer, Dean Graziosi and Patrick Bet-David. We’ve had all these great guys on the show. In between those great guests, I talk about some personal things that have helped me get to where I’m at.

I talked about on my show how my landscaper lost thousands and thousands of dollars of potential revenues over a $300 bill. I told the story of what that was all about. The moral of the story was don’t cut your nose off to spite your face. I share a lot of the personal things of growing up, living in New Jersey and living in a big Italian family. A lot of that stuff is in-line with entrepreneurship, it’s not even funny. I share a lot of that experience and build that relationship with my audience. Here we are a few years later, more than 70,000 people listening in, I would have never thought that in a million years but there’s something to be said about consistency. When you stay consistent with whatever you do, eventually it’s going to catch fire.

If anyone goes through and dissects this, I realized that there’s been a number of times where you’ve moved, you translated, you pivoted, whatever you want to call it, but you’ve moved into different platforms. You’ve taken these platforms and you’re being consistent. What does the future look for you? We’re in a situation now where we’re questioning our tract. We’re questioning, “Are we here today where we thought we would be from a year ago?” That’s been a great service. Funny enough, a client of mine said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had something like this for two weeks every year where we could push, pause, reevaluate where we are, clean up and then get going again?” That’s maybe a bit harsh and I apologize for upsetting people out there, but that pause moment we never get. Where are you going over the next 2, 3, 4 years? Where do you think you’re going to end up?

Here’s the thing, growing your business online is no longer a nice to have. It is a necessity. Many businesses got caught with their pants down because they weren’t ready for a pandemic like this, and they didn’t have any other options but to fold due to the restrictions that were put on us. Look at some of these mom-and-pop shops in town that haven’t been opened for seven weeks. My heart goes out to them. The ones that I do see crushing it are the ones that pivot and was like, “Let’s put up an eCommerce site. Let’s figure out how to generate business online.” They took action right away. For my business, there’s going to be a big surge once everything goes back to “normal” for businesses to scale and grow their business online.

For me, I need to start talking about why this is important and come up with some definitive case studies from this pandemic and how some people lost everything and how some people prospered like crazy. What we’re going to do over the next six months, and I’m already starting it, is a lot of people are scared to invest in the high ticket stuff right now. I had a guy that does $100 million a year who has a big franchise company he’s the founder of, and money is no issue to him. However, when this shit started to hit the fan in his backyard, no matter how much money he had, he constricted. He was like, “I don’t know if I want to extend myself like that.” When he did that, I realized one thing. We need to transition and something that’s a little bit easier to digest.

We’re coming out with a program. My team is in the middle of building the landing page and getting the marketing ready, but we’re calling it The Funnel Sprint. One of the things that I realized that coaches and consultants need online is a way to take their audience, bring them through a system that will get them to book a calendar invite on their schedule, and then get them more applicants on their calendar that they can interview to see if they’d be a good fit for their program. This is going to be done in a sprint format. What takes normally 60 days, I’m going to be able to do it in 30. It’s going to be a done-for-you. We’re going to do a strategy call together.

We’re going to figure out what exactly you’re doing and how we’re going to position yourself, then I’m going to have my team build out their funnel. We’re going to have the offer page, confirmation page and all the things all linked up that need to be in that funnel to help them drive traffic and get those people to book calendar appointments. I’m going to put that together and it’s going to be a $7,500 offer, so that’s digestible. I know it’s going to pay them back in spades. I’ve tested this and this is how I got to the 2 Comma Club Award. This is how I scaled my business to over seven figures. It’s this funnel. What I’m going to be doing is looking at what people need, what people want and what I can offer them that’s digestible.

We’re going to reopen The Branding On Demand Program. It’s a maintenance program. This was created because of Dom Faussette. He said, “Henry, you did such a great job branding my business. Once we stopped working together, I felt over time my branding start to get stale. I could only do what I can do by myself and with the resources that I have. Do you have a program to help me maintain the quality of branding that you’ve established for me upfront?” I was like, “That is brilliant, Dom. I have a program like this, but I only offer it to clients that I’ve worked with before.” I’m going to open that up to the public but I’m going to have to qualify those clients. I want to make sure that they’re a good fit for the program.

It’s a lower ticket offer to help them with cashflow but still deliver a tremendous amount of value. I’m looking at the high-ticket way to go. Is that the way to go right now? Probably not until some uncertainty gets lifted. What I’m going to do is I’m going to focus in on how I could help my clients in an affordable way but it’s still going to give them the results that they’re looking for. That’s where we’re at and it’s going to be at some intermediate price point so that people can maintain a solid cashflow and get what it is that they want.

We’re entering into a world of an unknown and a new normal. People in the coaching and consulting world need to look at online as hard and as strong as if they look on anything else. We’re never prepared until it’s too late. We’ve been through this and everyone’s going to be like, “Prepare me like crazy until the next unknown comes along.” The online world is one that people need to look at as the virtual store with no income. People have understood that. I know we’ve mentioned a couple of things through, but I want it to be loud and clear. How do they get ahold of the man himself or the company?

You could go to UniqueDesignz.net and you’ll get access to my podcast. My Instagram is @TheBrandDr. I’m on YouTube as The Brand Doctor. Honestly, if you google, The Brand Doctor, you will find me in a split second. I never thought I’d be able to say that, Steve.

When I got your name, I didn’t know you. We shared many friends but I’d only ever known you as The Brand Doctor. That’s pretty cool. You’ve been a joy. Your passion is leaping through this microphone and slapping the shit out of anyone reading and that’s exactly what we need. Henry, thank you so much.

Steve, thank you so much for allowing me to come on your show. I want to say one thing. The name of this is The Art of Making Things Happen. Now is the time to make things happen. There are many people out there that need you. I want to acknowledge you, Steve, for stepping up, creating this, and you doing what you do to help people see their true potential and help them get to where they want to be. We need more leaders in this world and it’s been an honor to be on your show. Thank you.

Henry, look after your telephone until we meet face-to-face. That’s it for another episode. I hope you enjoyed it. You know the usual drill. Share it, tell people about it, jump on Apple, put a review. Don’t be selfish. Spread the wealth. I look forward to chatting with you again. Until next time, be safe.

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About Henry Kaminski Jr.

Henry Kaminski Jr. is the founder of Unique Designz, a full-service graphic design, branding, and marketing company. He is also author of the best seller “Refuse to Give Up” and founder of the PassionPreneur Movement.

As a self-taught graphic designer and brand consultant, Henry has overcome all the odds to build a wildly successful multi-million-dollar business over the past decade. He has worked with a diverse range of business owners and professionals, including Jon Bon Jovi and Internet marketing expert Russell Brunson who has named Henry the “Million Dollar Designer.” It all started with a strong work ethic and “never give up” attitude.