Marketing is increasingly central to who I am and what I do as an entrepreneur. This is not what I expected.

When I started in entrepreneurship, I was the operations guy, not the CEO. I liked to think about how things worked. I dealt with the accountants, the lawyers, the recruiters. It was fun and I was good at it. When my first business failed, I remember meeting with a top-tier VC who funded us. He asked what I was going to do next. I said I didn't know.

"Every company needs a Ryan Buckley," he said.

"Thank you," I replied, unsure of exactly what he meant.

The conversation stuck with me ten years later. That was my personal brand back then: The guy who works behind the scenes and gets things done. A capable workhorse with some leadership potential.

My brand is different now: The CEO of Shovels who writes about entrepreneurship and building permit data. For my LinkedIn followers, I hope it's also about thoughtfulness and authenticity. For my new investors, I hope it's about determination and transparency.

Of all the definitions of what a brand is, I like Seth Godin's concept of a promise. A brand a promise. It's a set of expectations tightly bundled together into this thing that we call a brand. The rbucks.com blog brand is some authentic content (not AI), well-written (I try to minimize typos), about topics that I find interesting. The Shovels brand is high quality construction data accompanied with helpful customer service. The Saranap brand (my neighborhood) is walkable, family-friendly, charming area with lots of young kids.

A brand promises that these expectations are met. If the promise is broken by unmet expectations, the brand loses value. It gets tarnished. The best brands in the world have accumulated greater and greater expectations over the years, and the years themselves produce compounding value. This is how brands become incredibly valuable.

One important note: a brand is not a logo. A logo is not a brand. A logo can represent a brand, and a beautiful logo can enhance a brand on the margins, but the logo itself doesn't make the brand. Here are some examples:

• American Express: Just a light blue square with the name of the company

• Gap: Just a dark blue square with the name of the company

• Bass: Just a red triangle above the name of the company

Yes, the fonts are distinctive, but that's the effect of decades (or in the Bass case, nearly 250 years) of presence in society. A logo can be very, very simple, and the brand can still represent a wide variety of complex associations and expectations. Brand development takes hard work, years of consistency, and a dedicated staff to ensure that expectations are always met. Logo development just takes a consultant. I care about brands far, far more than I care about logos.

My final point ties brand to culture. It's hard to imagine a great brand without a great culture, because you need that culture for the brand to consistently meet expectations. Years of achieving excellence cannot be driven by an outside consultant, a beautiful logo, or the perfect website with optimized copy. It's culture. Culture makes the brand work and that's why it's so important. Culture makes the product great, the support friendly, the documentation current. It's all of the things that allow a company to fulfill and even exceed the promise that the brand represents. I truly believe this.

I've had to think a lot recently about the Shovels brand. What does it mean to our audience? Is it meeting and exceeding expectations? Are the logo and website good brand ambassadors? It's been brought up to me more than once that we should consider a rebrand, make the Shovels guy and logo a bit more polished and serious. We should hire consultants to "rebrand" us. On the one hand, I can see that: make the logo more serious, get more serious customers! But on the other hand, it didn't sit right with me. Logos don't make companies. Logos don't make brands. Logos don't delight customers.

So I squashed it. We need design help, but we don't need a rebrand. And to the extent we need to rethink our positioning, that's work we have to do in-house.

I'm not a great slide designer, so I hired someone who can make great slides. They're not trying rebrand us. They're taking our content, our logo, and working with our brand to make a sales deck that looks nice. I'll translate the design over to the website and make it look nicer. These are useful exercises that are part of building our brand.

We'll always keep rethinking what we do and how we describe it. But WE need to be the ones doing it because that's how WE entrench the culture that makes our brand work.

I believe there's such thing as a "good enough" logo. The three logos above fit that mold. They're not beautiful. They're just logos, and they're good enough. What makes the three brands stand the test of time is everything else. That's what I'm focused on.