Black Swan Real Estate | A Case Study

Developing the Core Values to secure $10 million in 24 hours by leveraging something they already knew.

Our tale starts on a Tuesday. The atmosphere is electric. It’s full of anticipation, worry and excitement. Their reputation hinges on this moment. The Black Swan Private Equity Fund is due to launch within minutes. Could it work? Would people believe in their cause and hand over their hard-earned cash?

The time comes, and the fund launches. The numbers start to tick upwards. $100,000, $1,000,000. $3,000,000. Within 24 hours the fund reaches the $10 million mark. And then it exceeds it.

The Black Swan Private Equity Fund has been a standout success, with plans for future, bigger funds, already in the works. On the surface like a serene swan swimming, it seemed like it was an easy in-the-bag achievement, but in reality, underneath the water line, you would have seen those webbed feet paddling furiously due to all the hard work that went into getting the fund to succeed, with help from a fruity friend.

Stoned Fruit rolls in…

Nick and Elaine credit the success of the Black Swan Equity Fund to working with Rebecca Gunter of Stoned Fruit to build a brand the right way, from its webbed feet right to its wing tips. 

Rebecca helped Black Swan Real Estate figure out what was important and leverage that knowledge into unlimited opportunity and capacity.

You see reader, Black Swan Real Estate is not your average real estate firm. Like their avian counterpart, they do things differently. 

Founded by Nick and Dr. Elaine Stageberg, together with their team of fellow property and avian lovers, their mission as an investor-focused real estate business is to deliver wealth creation for their clients via unique investment opportunities. They want to give people the chance to take control of their life, time, and freedom through next-level property investing that generates prosperity in a revolutionary way; one where everyone benefits.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Before developing brand 2.0 with Rebecca, Black Swan Real Estate was helping people invest in properties with their name on the door, one at a time. 

Whilst profitable and successful, for many this would be their perfect business model, but for Nick and Elaine, they wanted something more. Something bigger, that could change more lives.  

They were dreaming of a Black Swan Private Equity Fund, a large-scale investment vehicle that purchases multi-family apartments and large-scale residential properties in need of transformation, renovating them, finding renters, and taking care of everything needed to get the returns, without investors getting their hands dirty. 

Once complete, everyone would be happy. Not just the investors getting great returns, but also renters who now have a high-quality place to call home, surrounded by streetscapes and neighborhoods that have been transformed by investment and a proactive landlord. 

The Black Swan Private Equity fund would bring people and properties together, community building in the truest and most literal sense.

But it wasn’t going to happen overnight. 

People associated Black Swan Real Estate as the “Single Family Investing at Scale” folks- real estate investors who worked with individuals and families to buy their own properties, renovate and rent them. No one knew them as the Private Equity guys, managing large-scale funds and projects, brokering multi-million dollar deals and keeping everyone’s best interests at heart. 

After brainstorming with Rebecca, chewing the cud (or floating sweet grass), and diving deep into the details, a clear and scalable brand was hatched to represent a new business model, one as yet untested and unfamiliar to their clients.

It was out with the old and in with the new…

Black Swan needed to leverage and harness what they already knew to bring customers, clients and colleagues on their journey with them. Their brand is built on values. 

Values give you wings:

The answer to creating a brand that would bridge “Single Family Investing at Scale” and the Black Swan Private Equity Fund was to codify and articulate the core values of the Black Swan Real Estate brand.

The need was to communicate that what was important to them, was important to everyone. Everyone could grow authentically and create infinite opportunities, by focusing on the long term, creating a legacy full of limitless abundance. 

By channeling their values and conveying them through everything they did- whether written, spoken or the actions they took- enabled Nick and Elaine to bring their investors onto their journey as equals, co-builders of a world where everybody, whoever they are, wins.

To pinpoint the core values of Black Swan and to transform them into the beating heart of the brand, it involved a lot of brainstorming, talking, and understanding. 

And getting deep, real deep. It wasn’t just a case of just plucking 5-7 words out of the air and saying that’s it. Rebecca rolled up her sleeves and...

• Took the time to understand what made Black Swan different from the rest of the real-estate flock. She did a deep-dive discovery with everyone in the Black Swan family from the CEO to the sales team, the finance department to the maintenance crew, to listen to what was important to them and what vision they had for the future.
  
  
• Brainstormed a list of nearly 30 action phrases and things that had come to light during workshops and interviews, eventually whittling them down to a curated list of 7 core values that best reflected the Black Swan way of doing business.
  
  
• Wrote both short and long-form accompanying narrative, content and copy to illustrate and inspire every customer on the Black Swan Journey, whoever they were, whether a landlord, renter, investor, or team member.
  
  
• Worked intimately with the marketing team to mentor them on how to implement and action the brand strategy, weaving core values into every aspect of their marketing mix with authenticity and approachability.
  
  
• Put core values front and center. Like a film star in their starring role, the Black Swan core values are performed daily, in every presentation, on every coaching call and in every piece of Black Swan communication.
  
  
• Promoted living the values. Values are to be lived and felt, rather than static on a piece of paper, in the back of a desk draw. The core values of Black Swan were backed up by more than words; they came through in every decision, action, and reaction.
  
  
•   Enabled Nick and Elaine to speak about their Black Swan brand through its values, rather than specific products or services. This attracted people who had similar values and who had money to invest.
  
  
• Built trust through the core values. People trusted and invested in Nick and Elaine. They were the opposite of the walnut-cracking wall street trader avatar. Nick and Elaine were soft, caring and understood the struggles that people had. They wanted to help them.
  
  
• Empowered Black Swan to change the language of real estate and the stigma attached to being a renter, a landlord or a tenant.
  
  
• Helped to pave the way to live with purpose. Nick and Elaine care so much about the end user and are radically transparent that they literally attract people like a lighthouse. With goals to have over $1 billion dollars in assets, to help over 1 billion people and to create abundance for investors, tenants, team members and charitable causes, AND to ultimately to give away everything, Black Swan is on course to swim into this goal.

Planting the seeds to grow an orchard

Growing a business is tough, but it can be made easier when you have values that give you the breadth, width, and space to flourish.

By focusing their marketing on their core values, Stoned Fruit helped Black Swan to create an environment where their audience knew what was important to them, and trusted in whatever product or service they were selling or promoting. It wasn’t about the product. It was about the people. It was about how those people could help more people. It was more than a business transaction. It was a personal one. It was planting seeds to grow an orchard.

So, you see reader, a brand is not just logos and a swatch of colors. It’s your reputation, what they say about you when you’re not in the room, brought to life in words, actions, and images. Black Swan invested in Rebecca to help them develop a brand, a brand with heart, so much so that people would invest in anything they promoted, aligned in mind as much as model, and in spirit as much as salesmanship. That’s the magic.

It's an entrepreneur’s prerogative to grow, stretch out their wings and to dip their toe (or a webbed foot) into new waters. Black Swan Real Estate is doing exactly that. They are constantly evolving, discovering new ponds and lakes to glide into, and ultimately always choosing and doing the right thing, all whilst being followed and joined on their journey by thousands of customers, clients, and metaphoric cygnets who believe in what they do, as much as they do.

Swimming into new ponds
 

It’s a Wednesday. The first round of the Black Swan Technology Fund I is due to launch, with the goal of raising $10 million of $165 million fund. Excitement and anticipation fill the air, but there is no trace of worry or anxiety. Nick and Elaine are quietly confident. The technology fund is a new project for Black Swan Real Estate, buying tech companies with $1-5M in annual revenue, improving and scaling them, and then sharing the returns with investors.

The fund launches. The numbers start to tick upwards. $100,000, $1,000,000. $3,000,000, and it keeps going. The fund has been a standout success.

Black Swan can turn its wing to anything, all thanks to living and breathing their values, and sharing those values with its flock, fans and followers. That’s the power, and magnetic magic, of brand values. It makes business personal. All made possible by a simple Stoned Fruit.

Wings Up! 🦢🖤

This case study was written by the lovely Becky-Benfield Humberstone, the Brand Artisan. 🫶 💯