One of the joys of being a small business owner is that you can often invest some of your business development time into doing business development for the community around you.  This kind of work builds credibility in what you do, as people get to know you and how you invest in them.

During my time in Florida, I had the opportunity and pleasure to work with the Green Cove Springs Business League.  This non-exclusive community based business development group had 20 members when I joined.    When I started, the logo looked like this, pretty – but hard to read:

We needed to re-brand, to something fresh – that represented the old car history of the town, yet reminded people that we are a modern, thriving community – and that business is on the upswing.  Perception is a big part of branding.    I grabbed my favorite graphic designer, Stephanie Brinley at Flightless, and we started to work.  The theme – metro, retro.  The spark – a car grill.  After a few iterations, we ended with these:

The Green Cove Springs Business League adopted the new logo – we started branding the website, got banners, designed name tags and stickers, event signs and began theme branding for the events we sponsored:

 

With event sponsorship, we created Facebook pages based on the events, sent out email blasts, started gathering more contact names and really focused on talking to people, both about attending events and joining the business league.  We doubled in size after the re-branding, and the Green Cove Springs Business League continues to thrive.