When a founder-led brand no longer reflects the business it has become, a rebrand isn’t cosmetic—it’s required. Darren Horwitz, founder of TenTen, shares how he shifted from personal identity to scalable firm brand without losing clients, credibility, or confidence. He reveals how ICP changes, service evolution, and internal scale pressures made legacy messaging unsustainable.
What you’ll get from this session:
• How to know when your brand no longer matches your business
• The right way to transition from personal brand to firm identity
• Tactics to reposition without alienating your existing client base
Why it matters:
• Brand drag kills growth when the firm evolves but messaging lags
• A founder-led identity can become the bottleneck to scale
• Strategic rebranding preserves equity and enables firm-level differentiation
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast. Brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to this show, this show is dedicated exclusively to founders of boutique professional services firms. We aim to help you do three things on this show, and that is make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. And on today’s show, we are going to talk to Darren Horwitz, Collective 54 member, who runs a firm called TenTen. And the genesis of this episode was, I got an email from Darren on 10-10 day. What the heck is 10-10 Day? It was the day that Darren launched his new brand. And he wrote an article called “Rebranding 1010: My Personal Journey as a Founder,” and it’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. Because of that, I reached out to him and said, hey, this article isn’t enough — you need to come on the podcast. And I need to double-click on some of these points so that our members could benefit from your wisdom. And he was kind enough to say yes, so here we are. So, Darren, do me a favor and introduce yourself to our community and our audience.
Darren Horwitz: Sure. First off, thank you, you’re very kind, and I appreciate the kind words. I’m the founder of 1010, and we are experts at helping marketing leaders navigate planning, building, or managing brand change. We come from the brand agencies, we’re used to people going through rebrands, mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, or even just managing their brand day-to-day and making it work better for them. And we are what we would call brand implementation experts.
Greg Alexander: Okay, so not only did you rebrand yourself, but you’re a branding expert — which I find kind of ironic, because you would think your brand would remain up to date in perpetuity in real time. So let’s start with that, because I’m going to call BS on you a little bit.
Darren Horwitz: Sure.
Greg Alexander: You’re a rebranding firm, and your brand got dated. So tell us all about how you got to this point.
Darren Horwitz: Well, I’m sure as everyone in the billable business knows, non-billable projects are the hardest and the worst to do. Yeah, it was… you know, we launched it… I’m a practitioner. I mean, I love what we do. I came from the agencies, I started this business 10 years ago to really just work with people going through rebrands, and that’s all I wanted to do. But over time it evolved, and we really started to go beyond just execution and started to think about being more strategic partners and consultants. And in doing so, it just happened. Next thing I know, I look back and there’s a pandemic, and that changed everything. And then I look back and it’s five years after that, and our business has evolved, and there’s AI in there. So everything we started with 10 years ago is — I don’t want to say obsolete — but it’s really very different. And I think I was so focused on just trying to grow a business that I didn’t stop to ask myself what we’re growing into, or who we’re growing it for. And that was really… it was a big pause. And then it became a series of questions after that — of, okay, now we need to follow our own advice a little bit. So yeah, it took us a little while to catch up. Mostly me.
Greg Alexander: She was there.
Darren Horwitz: But me.
Greg Alexander: Totally understandable and very representative of our community. So let me elevate that above Darren’s instance and just share what we see across Collective 54. Our members launch their firms and they go on their journey — grow, scale, exit. And as they go on their journey, all kinds of things change. COVID, AI — things happen in the macro environment. But then things happen in the microenvironment. For example, the types of clients you serve changes, your ICP changes. The services that you use to solve those clients’ problems change. Your pricing changes, your employees change, etc. And that’s the nature of having a boutique pro serv firm. The challenge with that — and the reason why Darren is such a great lesson for us today — is how do you stay up to date and represent yourself in the marketplace accurately with what you do today? That is the challenge.
Greg Alexander: One specific element that you mentioned in your article that I want to double-click on is that your original brand was basically a personal brand, because you were building the firm around you. And now, you’re several years in, and your firm is a lot more than just Darren. So you needed to create a firm brand in addition to, or maybe even in replacement of, your personal brand. And I think a lot of our members reach that point — and maybe they don’t know how to do that. So tell us a little bit more about that.
Darren Horwitz: Yeah, I mean, it did start that way, and I kind of knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to be bigger than just me, which is why I didn’t call it Horwitz Consulting and went with a name that could go beyond me. But you’re right — in the beginning, it was: do a project, find a project; do a project, find a project. And we had people working with us, we had people working for us, we had partners. But it just kept growing beyond what we started as. In the beginning, it was really just, let me catalog — I’m going to oversimplify it — but let me just catalog what needs to be rebranded and tell you how to do it. And as we grew from that, we realized we could offer more. First of all, we could replicate the services that I had built out. So it wasn’t just me doing this; other people could do what I do. So I think about this as productizing our services a little bit. We could replicate them without me in the mix — some of them. People were still hiring us for who we are, but it didn’t have to be just me anymore. I also started to get a little bit more comfortable in — yes, I wanted to be involved in the projects, but I didn’t need to be involved in every project. We also didn’t need to take on, nor should we take on, every project.
Darren Horwitz: I mean, I can remember — in the beginning, it was like, a $5,000 project? That’s awesome — I could pay a bill or two, or feed my family. And then it got to… somebody said, “You really shouldn’t be getting out of bed for less than this.” And it wasn’t so much the money — it was more about what the expectations were of what we were trying to deliver. And I realized that we were growing to where our processes were such that — yeah, we can scale up or down with firm size or project size — but really there was a sweet spot. And I think that was a lot coming out of the work we did with Collective 54. So our ICP changed. And then from there, the business of branding was changing. What needed to be branded changed. How we approached it changed. And so all these things came together where it just evolved so far beyond me and what I originally thought.
Darren Horwitz: Just real quick — when I first started doing this, QR codes had just come out, and I thought they were a nuisance more than anything 10, 15, 20 years ago. And it wasn’t anything clients would say: “Oh, we should do a QR code.” No — you have to manage that, you have to stay on top of it; it’s really difficult. Well… pandemic comes. And every restaurant in the world started using QR codes, and technology had caught up. The only one who hadn’t caught up was me at that point. So it was just rethinking how we approached things — not being in rooms with people, scaling out, doing things online, bringing AI into scaling out our offerings a little bit. And we’re still working through that, but it’s just — I think to your point — it goes way beyond me. It’s now a business of offerings and services that we can replicate.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, the QR code example is a good one, right? I mean, that came out, nobody really cared, then the pandemic hit, everybody cared. I mean, this is what happens — this is life as an entrepreneur, and you have to react to these things.
Greg Alexander: Alright, let me move on to my next question, which comes from the article, which, by the way, for those that are listening to this, you can find the article at 1010group.com. Rebranding 1010, My Personal Journey as a Founder. In that article, you talked about the fact that maybe you waited too long. What was it that finally said to you, okay, I gotta get my you-know-what together and get this done.
Darren Horwitz: I think we were evolving so many different things at once. And I wanted to keep moving forward, and I don’t think I had the proper platform to demonstrate how far we had grown as a business. And the brand wasn’t there. We were… we were… our tone was different. We were talking to people in different ways. We were digging in deep to empathy, and being empathetic to what people go through in brand change. And we wanted to work with people in different ways, not just focus on rebrands. Even from the beginning, it was more than just rebrands. Just everything was different, and again, just how we were doing our own business. What was once being on the road every week with giant 6-foot plots to do workshops in a room with 10 people wasn’t realistic. That’s not how business is done anymore. So we started to lean into technology a lot more. And the more I leaned into everything, and I needed to design the things that we were building out, and I needed to put presentations together of what we were offering, I just didn’t have a platform that I felt confident in doing that with. I looked at the old brand, and it just felt clunky, unsophisticated, and not really who we wanted to be.
Greg Alexander: Okay. So, that resonates with me. I’ve been through that before. So, that’s the trigger event. I want to switch the conversation now to fear. And this concept of the identity crisis. So you know where you are now, and where you want to go, and it doesn’t reflect where you were before, and what your starting point was. But to get to the new place, you gotta walk away from the old place. And sometimes people are worried about giving up any brand equity they’ve built up to this point. And they’ve got a base of clients, and they don’t want to alienate them. So for people that are struggling with that concern, what advice would you give them?
Darren Horwitz: That’s a great question. I don’t know that I’ve figured it out yet, but I do know that I’m trying to get out of my own way, and I think it comes down to—this isn’t about me. And I’m not the only one, so I need to let go in letting others go do new business and growth. I need to let go of the one-to-one emails that say, oh, I need to see every word that goes out the door, because this represents who I am as an individual, and I’m trading on my personal credit. I think those things are still true, but I think I’m becoming more comfortable with the idea that if I want the business to grow in the way that I see it, with the services that we’re trying to offer and the products that we’re trying to build, I can’t be the bottleneck. And that’s the fear that I had. You build a business on your name. You go out there, you start selling to friends and family alike, everything you do is a personal promise. And we’re at the point—we’ve been at the point for some time, I just haven’t let go until more recently—where that promise can still be there, but it has to be there in a very different way, and it can’t be me making every personal guarantee and losing sleep over every imperfection. I have to get more comfortable with that, and this was a big step in doing that, and getting there, both from a brand and a business.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. What advice I would offer—and that’s great, Darren, I want to build on what you just shared with the audience—is that every time you bring in a new client, you’re either moving towards the new brand, or anchoring to the old brand. So I think when you do a rebrand, you start there, and you say, okay, so all new business is going to look like the future, not the past. That’s the first thing. I think the second thing is you communicate with your legacy clients that you’ve trained to engage with you in a certain way about where you’re heading. You don’t do so in a way that alienates them. In fact, you do so in a way that expresses gratitude. Because of them, you’ve gotten to this point. And you want to let them know that you’re not leaving them. You’re kind of grandfathering them in, and you’re hoping that they come along with you on the journey. But if they don’t, for their own personal reasons, that’s fine too, and we can part as friends. What I have seen not work is when people just rip the band-aid off. They end up angering the base unnecessarily. Your clients know that your business is evolving just like theirs, and they can respect that, and they appreciate the communication. So when you go through this evolution, and you rebrand, just over-communicate.
Darren Horwitz: Can I add to that a little bit? Because I think you’re touching on something critical that we tell all of our clients, and we did follow our own advice on this one. There needs to be a why story. So this wasn’t just us flipping a switch for the sake of, I wanted something different cosmetically. This was really looking back at where we started, where we were going, the things we were doing today, and that our brand was not serving us in the same way. We’re very episodic in the work that we do. We do try and maintain relationships, so I do agree and appreciate that this wasn’t ditching old clients. But I think it was about going through this journey, and then explaining to people why we’ve changed. And when we did that, we got behind it ourselves, and we were very excited about it. Now, when we get on the phone mid-project with clients, we say, oh, and we have this brand new deck that we’re using, let’s tell you about it. They ask the question. So this wasn’t about us losing clients. This was about we’re there to help them more in different ways, and we wanted to demonstrate that, so it was less subjective and very objective, and then it allowed us to bring proof points to the table of how we’re growing and evolving, and how we can offer them more. In fact, we have a call today where we are offering people more services than we have in the past, because they want to know what more we can do for them.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, a story to back that up—when I was you guys, and I was the founder of a boutique called SBI in the management consulting space, we specialized in sales and marketing. And as we expanded our service lines, one of them was pricing, and we helped B2B software companies figure out how to price SaaS offerings, because at that time most people had on-prem software. And my early clients would say, hey, I want to hire Greg’s firm to do a pricing project, but we require that Greg is on the project. And I had to explain to them, listen, that’s the worst thing I can do to you. I’m not a pricing expert. I’ve hired a pricing expert. His name is James Wilton. In fact, he runs a firm now called Monovate, who’s a member of Collective 54. Let me introduce you to him. So that was a way of serving your existing client base with more capability, but breaking the requirement for me to do it. But not because that was in my best interest—it was truly in their best interest. I had recruited somebody in the firm that was a true expert at that. So it was logical, and your why story made a lot of sense. So, just wanted to share that story as an illustrative example. Alright, two more questions for you, and then we’ll wrap this up. So, when you make the switch, it’s scary. How do you know it’s working?
Darren Horwitz: I’m only a few weeks in.
Greg Alexander: But you don’t know yet.
Darren Horwitz: Well, you know, I think… so again, this wasn’t let’s rebrand and then deliver on promises. This was we’ve already been evolving. The rebrand is yet another proof point to the evolution that we’ve been doing. So I don’t see this as working in that regard. I do see it as we have an opportunity to get in front of people more, and tell them something new. I think we have an opportunity to demonstrate things in a different way. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback through online social media and things like that. People have called us up. In fact, some of the posts were getting the highest numbers of interactions that we’ve seen. We’re tracking our website, and I think what’s also really important is, for me, it’s given me confidence to go back out to people. Again, going back to this idea that I have something to say to people that’s a little bit different, or I have something to talk about, or I just feel better when I do reach out to them and introduce myself in a new way. So there’s a lot in there as far as “is it working or not.” Time will tell, but again, this wasn’t something that we set out as a goal that we have to live up to and fill those shoes. We’ve already been doing that all along the way. This was the brand catching up to the business, not the other way around.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, and that’s usually the case, isn’t it? I mean, you’re already doing these things, you just haven’t packaged it and told the world about it just yet.
Darren Horwitz: Yeah, I mean, that’s what we tell our clients. Again, it goes back to that why story, but you can be aspirational in doing this, and that’s great, but it can’t be all future promises that you don’t know how to deliver on. You’ve got to have the right balance in there, and I think we do.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. Alright, well, Darren, listen. This was a great contribution. You always bring it. Thank you for being a member and contributing to the collective very much.
Darren Horwitz: Thank you, I appreciate the time and everything that you’ve taught me. I wouldn’t be here without all the lessons from Collective 54, so thank you.
Greg Alexander: Alright, well, you’re welcome. Alright, a couple calls to action. So if you’re a member and you’re thinking about this and you want to ask Darren questions, look for the invitation. We’re gonna have a private member Q&A with Darren, and that should be hitting your inbox soon. If you’re not a member, and after listening to this, you say maybe you want to be, go to collective54.com and fill out an application, and we’ll get in contact with you. But until next time, thank you for listening, and I wish you all the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.