Paul Avins is an Award Winning Business Coach and International Speaker. He was almost ready to go to print on his book ‘Business SOS’ which was needed for a large event. He showed me the draft but he knew there was something about it that wasn’t quite right but couldn’t put his finger on it. I could see that the content was excellent and yet the product looked less than world class. Everything Paul does has an attention to detail and a quality about it but the design of this book had those attributes missing. I said I would be able to turn it around in a week, and I did. We kept the front image of a life-ring but started again with every other aspect of the design.
Something interesting happened that would be the key to the design of the book.
I noticed that Paul asked a lot of searching questions in the text of the book. The original typography inside had been cluttered and messy and the questions were lost in the text. I put forward the idea of inserting a space, a box for the reader to write the answer to the questions in. This isn’t to say that the book became a ‘workbook’ but it had the workbook elements in there. It also didn’t mean that we were forcing people to write in the book, some people will never do that. But by creating a discrete space for the answer, it allowed the reader to pause and reflect on the question (the space gave them an idea of the required length of their answer) whether they chose to write it down or not.
This turned out to be the key to the success of the book. Business owners loved the dip-in nature of the book and the proactive way it helped them analyze areas of their business.
Within six months Paul was able to connect the success of the book to a tangible increase in his business. See the video below. A year later he would revise that figure upwards by a factor of ten as the book became the foundation stone to position his Business Networking and Coaching Group as a Franchise Business and open five other Clubs around the UK.
I was commissioned to design Paul’s Turbo coaching materials and the brand for the exciting Business Wealth Club itself. The distinctive and powerful look we came up with for the Club helped to position it as a valuable and different networking and coaching experience that hundreds of business people have now joined and are reaping the benefits. We are now working on Paul’s next book, ‘Rev Up Your Business’ and the Business Wealth Club is set to go global with Clubs about to open all over the world.
Call us today on +44(0)1865 779944 to discuss how we can turn your expertise into a brand or create a book with selling power.
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