By Joost Visser, Partner StarfishMRM

The StarfishMRM partnership was formed in 2014 when the founding partners realised the pressing need for digital transformation in many organisations and associations in Brussels. In the space of two weeks the company was launched at a ‘Pecha Kucha’ event for Accredited Service Providers of the British Chamber of Commerce in Belgium. We came up with a name, quickly designed a logo, built a website and created a PowerPoint presentation. “We hit the ground running”, as they say.

About a year later, with a number of successful digital transformation projects under our belt, we realised that we needed to practise what we preached. We had a ‘stop-and-think’ about how we could operate more effectively instead of flying around like busy bees. We needed to have a closer look at who our target clients are, what their needs, wants & desires are and what the most compelling benefit is we as a service provider can offer to them to address those needs. We also needed to clarify how we wanted to be perceived by our current and future clients if we wanted to develop a business that can be sustainably successful.

As a team we clarified that our target clients are small and medium sized organisations (non-profit and for-profit) that are run by leaders who are passionate about what they do and what their organisations stand for but who are very often too busy running the day-to-day and who often think they do not have enough time and resources to make their organisation more effective and efficient. A lot of those leaders are aware of the benefits digital technology brings and use them in their everyday personal life. Yet most of them struggle to incorporate these into their organisations in an integrated and holistic way. We realised that you do not have to be a Silicon Valley start-up to benefit from the digital revolution: ‘Everybody can be a Digital Star’.

We defined our DNA as the 3 core benefits we can bring to organisations through technology and cultural change: we help them Engage more strongly and consistently with their stakeholders, we help them to Collaborate more effectively and we help them Empower their teams.

Having clarified the key benefit we deliver to our clients and our DNA we decided we needed a corporate identity that better reflected what we stood for. This would allow us to build awareness among new contacts and build stronger connections with existing and potential clients. With the help of Bruno Micolano a young Italian designer who joined us through the EU Erasmus programme for young entrepreneurs we designed a new logo, corporate style and built a new website. Bruno was very successful in translating our positioning into a very distinctive style that symbolised the balance between ‘digital’ and the ‘human’ success factors of digital transformation.

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