Exploring Life & Business with Brian Guilmette of Guilmette Creative

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brian Guilmette

Hi Brian, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I got to my third page on a Word document and realized I can’t put you through all of that! I’ll put the tldr; here, which is still going to be long, sorry!

I grew up loving art, particularly drawing but when I got to junior high (late 90’s), I discovered graphics software and taught myself how to use Photoshop and other similar programs. I also then discovered HTML and taught myself how to take the code from exiting websites, change a few things and make my own website. By the time I got to high school, I saw that as an alternative to “foreign language” classes, they were offering “computer language.” I opted for computer language and began taking typing, HTML and other programming classes. At the same time, I started playing guitar and got into music. Naturally I was the graphic designer and web developer for my band.

After graduating from high school, I attended Berklee College of Music in Boston where I joined other bands and became one of the “go-to” guys in the local music scene for making graphics, band logos, stickers, flyers, etc for various bands. Two jobs at sign shops later, and a move to North Carolina put me back in college at UNC at Charlotte, this time majoring in Exercise Science. After graduating, I would spend several years as a strength coach, both for the UNC Charlotte Football team and later for a private facility in Cary, NC called Athletic Lab. It was here where my current story really started. It was there that I would redesign their logo and help them rebrand, that I realized I truly loved my creative life just a bit more than coaching.

A professional BMX athlete started working out at Athletic Lab and I got to know him from afar a bit. He had just overcome multiple brain tumors and started promoting himself as a mindset and health coach and keynote speaker. I told him I can help him with anything creative and that started a friendship.

About a year later, I was back in Charlotte working as a marketing manager for a small business when he called me and said “I just got a huge brand partnership and I need someone to help with creating my content, do you want to quit your job and start a business? I’ll be your first client.” I seized on the opportunity and 6 months later I quit my job and started my new life as a content creator. I produced mostly mini documentary style videos for Josh, or helped him with vlogging, and created any social media content that wasn’t “selfie” stuff.

Josh and I had a really great year and were gaining so much traction that brands that resonated with Josh’s story started reaching out and asking us to produce brand awareness videos for them. In February 2019 we produced a video for a brand at a metabolic research conference that created a buzz. Brands were really hyped and wanted us to collaborate. Some brands even invited me separately to their headquarters to help them with content. But that would never happen because a month later, COVID halted so many plans. Much of what Josh and I thrived at (traveling the US producing content) just shut down.

Not much later, Josh moved to Florida and our work together started to lessen more and more until finally I was faced with the choice to go back to a “normal” job or try to build a business from scratch. Most people start with a bunch of side work and when they have enough work they quit their job. I did this much different. I quit my job with one client and took a huge risk.

I decided to keep going and I poured myself into what I have always done best – teaching myself skills. I read 16 books on branding, growth hacking, design thinking and more over that initial COVID shutdown. Sooner than later past contacts, all people who I used to coach at Athletic Lab, whom I already had earned so much trust from coaching them, started reaching out needing help for their own businesses. I slowly started to build a client list.

Athletic Lab’s owner Mike Young reached back out to me asking for help on a big project of bringing his decade of providing coaching education in sports performance to an online course. I poured myself into it, handling the video production, editing, course creating, brand identity system, website development and social media management.

Other contacts from Athletic Lab would reach out looking for work and I soon was getting work, not just doing graphic design for companies but truly helping brands tell their stories.

I’ve been doing this ever since!

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Oh, see if I knew this was coming I wouldn’t have written so much in the last answer! It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. Much of which I touched on in the previous answer but I’ll just expand a bit here.

The biggest struggle was COVID squashing the momentum and direction I was headed as a videographer/producer and ultimately leaving me having to build a business almost entirely from scratch with no other income stream. People were being let go all over the place due to the shutdown so finding a job was going to be hard anyway, but I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to do that.

Luckily I had done a great job saving money in my first year of business that I had a safety net, albeit a draining bank account. It was watching this “countdown” that really was the stressful part.

When I pivoted what I was doing and opened up my services to more of my skills, I started to see glimpses of this working. Slowly I was getting work, but it was also tough to define who I was or what my business even offered.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I help brands tell their stories by offering full branding services to businesses. I’ll coach a brand through a brand discovery process, where they define who they are, what they offer, and how they will communicate to their customers. This informs all creative projects to come. In most cases that’s designing a brand identity system – primary logo, logo variations, color palette, typography, iconography, patterns, photography and video style, or any of the visual aspects of a brand that catches a customer’s attention. Once the brand identity is complete, I then help design the various ways a brand can get in front of a customer – website design, marketing collateral, photography and videography.

If a brand already has their brand identity set, then we skip that part. However, one of the things that makes me different is even if a brand already has a logo, a font and colors, there’s always a benefit to going through discovery process again. So I start almost every project with some form or branding workshop so we are all on the same page. This makes the process of working together much smoother, more efficient and in many cases much faster. It eliminates any misunderstandings that can cause several rounds of revisions and drag a project out past deadlines.

One thing I’m most proud of, which is also what sets me apart, is that I am very empathic, observant and intuitive. I can very quickly understand a business owner’s wants, needs and feelings without needing to be told too much. I can quickly connect and build trust and loyalty.

When I was working with Josh, these differences were so much on display that people would tell Josh that they also “need a Brian.” That always made me proud that I am not just ANY designer, I am ME. And it’s the ME part that builds long lasting client relationships.

Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
Again, I have mentioned some of this earlier, so I apologize.

I wouldn’t normally call myself a risk-taker. But in recent years I’ve changed my tune on that because of some of the actions I’ve seen myself take. There’s really two major risks I’ve taken since starting my business. The first was actually starting my business. As I mentioned, I didn’t have “side hustle” for many years that got so successful I could quit my job and make it a full time gig. I was presented with an opportunity to start my own business and at the time I truly thought it may be my only shot. In fact I don’t even think starting my own business was really on my radar at the time. I was just thinking of changing careers from strength and conditioning coaching to marketing and what it would take to work my way up in marketing.

The second big risk came when I basically “lost it all” and had to decide whether (and how, frankly) to pivot what I was doing and build a business from almost nothing, or go back to working a normal job. I saw a potential in myself that I could do it and I just kept at it. I think what I’ve learned is that taking risk is really about fear, and when you start to realize all of the great things that are on the other side of fear, the risk doesn’t seem so scary. There’s a video of Jim Carrey (my childhood hero but that’s a different story) telling a class of graduates about how his dad chose a “safe” job instead of getting into comedy. Ultimately his dad lost that job and they had to live in a car. So Jim’s point was that you can fail at what you don’t want to do, so why not take the risk and fail at what you love. I think about that daily.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://createdbybrian.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/createdbybrian