My wife told me many times, You’re a real estate agent. Nobody cares about your logo. Just pick one. And she’s right! I get it. You probably care about this at all. But if you are part of the Sztanyo clanyo, let me tell you about it! We got a brand new logo! I want to tell you a little bit about the process, how we got there, why I’m super excited about it, what it means about our business and how it communicates what we’re all about here at Team Sztanyo. My name is Eric Sztanyo from Keller Williams Realty and TeamSztanyo.com where we are helping you find your home and strengthen your family.
My Journey in Finding The Logo That I Love!
Got some big news around here, guys. We just passed 3000 subscribers. Thank you so much for subscribing to the channel. If you haven’t yet clicked that subscribe button.
It’s a big deal. This thing has grown from being very, very small to over 3000 subscribers. It keeps growing! We keep getting calls from people who are looking to move to the area or needing to sell their house in the area. And it’s been awesome. It’s been a huge blessing to have you guys watch our videos, follow the channel and reach out to us. The team is growing. We just got the top down results for the last month and within my office here in Cincinnati, which has over 200 agents, I’m now the fifth-ranked agent and that includes other agents who have much bigger teams than me, which is amazing! And then we got a regional report, which the Keller Williams region includes all of Kentucky, Ohio, up to Columbus, as well as Indiana. And Team Sztanyo is I wanna say the ninth rank team in the entire region.
And teams are defined by just two agents or less. So Carrie came on and she’s kind of helping me out. So, thank you. I mean, you guys watching our videos just means so much. We get to help more of you find your home. You guys are helping me grow my business and my family. It means a ton! Thank you for watching. Thank you for subscribing. Obviously, we wouldn’t keep doing these videos if they weren’t impactful and we get to hear from you guys so often saying thank you for doing the videos. It’s encouraging and super exciting cuz coming up in November, we’re doing our first-ever Team Sztanyo client event. We’re doing a team Sztanyo date night. We’re all about the family here, and so you guys gotta get the childcare, but those of you who are coming, I can’t wait for you to be there.
And it’s just gonna be a fun night where you can be with your significant other, you can maybe meet some other people who have moved to the city recently and make some friends. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. Looking forward to doing a lot more of those events in the future!
I know a lot of you just care about real estate information. You’re trying to figure out if you wanna move to Cincinnati or not, but I wanted to do this video because we did just launch a new logo and because we’re a small team, it’s kind of slowly getting rolled out there. Just have grace and mercy on us, you guys who run small businesses. You know what it’s like. It’s a new logo. I’m super excited about it.
Just give you a little history of where we are at with the Team Sztanyo logo. This is my fifth year of doing real estate now. It was the end of 2017. My daughter, Miriam, we were literally giving birth and my wife was giving birth to my daughter when I was studying for my real estate licensing. That was November of 2017. So we’re coming up right on five year anniversary. And from a logo standpoint, I mean I was changing businesses. I didn’t think much of it. I had a friend who was a designer, an artist, and I said “Hey, would you mind just doing a sketch of the Roebling?” And really no thought went into it except that I was gonna be licensed in Kentucky and Ohio. I had lived in Kentucky and Ohio. And I’m like, Hey, a bridge, that’s a great logo idea. It’s a kind of iconic image of Cincinnati, the famous Roebling bridge. And I was like, Could you just kind of sketch that out? That’ll be the logo. And then of course I went and mess the logo by doing the team Sztanyo lettering underneath. I’ve never really liked that because I end up messing up with artists in their vision. And I was like, What if we changed the Z into a big line underneath of it? And it’s just like, Ugh! I’ve always really liked the bridge and what Daniel created. Shout out to Daniel, my friend, the artist, who made that logo for me. But I’ve always been a little upset with how I mess it up. And we were thinking about whether should Sztanyo even be in the name or the logo or the business name at all. Because Sztanyo, if you guys have seen it, it’s spelled really weird.
Nobody knows how to say it. This is why I brand you guys the Sztanyo clanyo and we drive the Sztanyo vanyo. Cause I’m like, this is a really weird name. Oh, fun fact. My nickname in college from my friends was, well in high school it was Sztanyo the Manyo. And then in the early 2000s, some of you guys can maybe relate, Hey, tanning beds were on the scene. And so I was Sztanyo the tanyo manyo.
You know, it’s kind of stuck with me with some of my friends from Lipscomb University. There you go. There’s a little tidbit for you guys! So that’s where we were with the logo. It was okay, but I didn’t love it. But last year we had a full-time designer come to the Keller Williams office who could help you with a logo.
And I was like, you know, I’ve always kind of wanted to refresh this logo. Let’s go through that process. And around that same time, I was really kind of working through this idea of the YouTube channel. I was doing some branding identity work. I was really thinking, what am I about? What do we want this to be? One of the tagline options was, “Find the right home for your family.” I kind of came up with this creed of, hey, we believe that home is where your family team grows strong together. We are passionate about helping you find the right home in the Cincinnati area, where that will be true for you! And for me guys, as you know, from watching this channel, I can get too wordy. I’m terrible at copywriting. I’m terrible at synthesizing down ideas. I just get too wordy.
The same thing happened with the design process, but I gave this designer all these different words and language and themes like “Here’s what I care about.” It’s home and family and team and story and roots and generations and strong and grow and vision and guide and expert and trusted and right. She’s like “Uh, okay, that’s like a lot of things” I was like, Oh, sorry, can you just put all that into one thing?
So you can see this was kind of a disaster waiting to happen, but some of the logo ideas or concepts of the logo we were thinking about was maybe the van. She’s like “Hey, you’re a family. Why not make the vanyo like your logo?” I’m like, that’s cool, but I don’t know. It feels a little too.. I’ll make it a character but I won’t make the actual logo.
We talked about a dining room table. We’re gonna come back to that. We talked about roots and trees. And so if you think about families and legacy and generations, you know, a tree is a great image, right? The family tree, roots go down deep and we played around with that and eventually, it was like, have a house cuz like all real estate logos are house and then roots underneath it. And then we realize like, it looks like your foundation is cracking into a million pieces. That’s probably not the image we want to convey as a real estate company is that you’re buying a house that has a terrible foundation. We talked about books or stories. So we had all these different ideas and then my wife came up with this logo idea, a house made up of a bunch of different triangles.
And like the idea was like “Hey, the center of the marriage is your faith. And then you’ve got the parents and then the kids like their floor is your ceiling and the kids are on top. And you got all these different triangles. It became a little bit too much. The logo idea came from a good place. It came out from Psalm 1 27. I’ll read this to you guys, but this was before my wife and I had kids. This was actually the passage in the scriptures that was like, “we need to have a family.” Psalm 127 says “Children are a heritage from the Lord offspring a reward for him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court or at the gate.”
That’s the NIV translation. But the idea is like, children are weapons. They’re actually arrows. Like when you are raising your children, you’re actually shooting them out into the world. So we came up with this idea of like triangles and pointee and arrows and it didn’t work. It was too much. We switched from there and then we went with this. We totally went to a different idea of like, you know, let’s move away from the arrows and the triangles. What about this logo idea of a compass? I like the logo idea of when people are trying to find a home or they’re selling a home. They can do a lot of this stuff online. They can get their Zestimate. They can do all this research online. They can watch YouTube videos. I had a friend of mine, his name’s Dave, He’s in video production and he’s probably the single best friend I know in terms of thinking through customer experience and just thinking through what other people would like.
I helped him and his family find and buy a house and I asked him about the experience. He’s like, You know what I could do it all online, but what I really needed you for was to be that guide, to be that person saying like, this is right. You can have confidence in this decision moving forward. So I kind of took that concept. I really like that cuz in this age where technology’s really growing and you can do a lot of this research on your own, you still do need that trusted guide. And so then we went through this logo idea of a compass and team Sztanyo with a logo with a compass. And we looked through different compass options and we kind of created a design that was a really simple compass that also potentially looked like a table. And we’re gonna come back to that logo idea again. Cause, I love the idea of the table being part of the logo because I think it’s kind of so central to the home. But it was always hard to figure out a logo based on a table. We came up with this logo idea where the O was kind of a compass. We sent it out to some folks for their input and they were like “Uh, yeah, what is it?”
Nobody knew what it was, so it wasn’t working either. And so at this point, I was like, we just gotta scrap this whole thing. I’ve got to help my clients. I can’t put any more attention or brain power towards this. So everything just went on pause and went to sleep for months. So that brings us to this year. And Carrie came on the team and Carrie went to school for marketing and she is way more aesthetically. She’s fashionable and like just better than me. I’m not good at this stuff. I can’t distill down. I’ve got too many ideas. And I knew I wanted to have her eye kind of looking at through this process. So we kind of tackled this process together.
This time, instead of having just one designer and their logo ideas, we opened up a contest online to kind of crowdsource it and get a whole bunch of different logo ideas. So I kinda shared all these ideas and thoughts and what the brand was about and kind of color scheme and, you know, trees and legacy and faith and family and tables and all this stuff. And we got all these different logo ideas. Some of it was okay, and some of it was like really bad. And so we had to kind of sift through a lot of bad ideas to get some okay ideas. In the end, there was nothing that I was like really excited about. There were some things that were kind of generic that was just like, okay, just work with maybe the T and the S to just do team Sztanyo and be generic. But what I realized in going through that process was, you know what?
The purpose of the logo actually means a whole lot to me. And unless people watch this video, no one’s probably gonna ever know about it. Again, my wife was like, “Will you just pick something? Nobody cares. They just wanna know, are you a good agent or not?” They don’t pick an agent based on their logo. And that was really good advice. And I love my wife and she’s right. I know nobody actually does that, but I’m like “No, I want this to matter.” at least for me, it needs to matter. She’s like, “Yes if you’re gonna be looking at it for the next 5, 10, 20 years, whatever. Like you need to pick something that you like.” And she just kept telling me, just pick something that you like. The problem was, I didn’t have anything from this group of like 500 different logo designs that I liked.
So I brought these home to my kids and I was kind of showing them some of the different ideas that I liked and we were kind of narrowing in on some of the things and it was getting closer. And my six-year-old Rafe was like, “You’re gonna change it from the bridge? You can’t do that! That’s your logo. It’s awesome. You can’t change it from the bridge” he was really emphatic about this. I was like, I didn’t think the bridge mattered that much. He was like, “No, that’s your logo, that’s who team Sztanyo! He had very strong feelings about it. So I kind of came back to this bridge idea of just like, maybe we just tweaked this a little bit. And then, right, kind of at the end of this contest, one of the designers did something. It wasn’t what we ended up going with, but it was the idea where they kind of combined the bridge with a table and I was like, “Oh, whoa, that may have something there.”
So the design contest didn’t quite get there, but it got the idea. It was full circle, right? We went through trees and we went through family and went through all these different kind of potential options. We went through trying to work just the first two initials of team Sztanyo and the T and the S and all these different versions of T and S. But in the end, it came back to the bridge and it came back to the table. You guys would probably never notice this unless I actually did this.
But in the end, what we did is we just kind of modified the, the existing version of the bridge. We took out my name at the bottom and we just extended the base of the bridge and separated it out a little bit to also be a table. Again, most people aren’t gonna notice that when they look at it, although I did show my 12-year-old, he is like, “Oh cool, it’s a bridge and a table.” I was like, Oh my gosh, you got it without me telling him that. And the idea is simply this, the top of the bridge is find your home. I’m still a guide. Buying or selling a house is a process and you’re kind of bridging from where you are to where you want to be with your family. And our job at Team Sztanyo is to help you have a really good experience, an amazing customer experience, and give you a trusted guide who’s gonna get you from point A to point B from the house you are or whatever or the apartment or wherever you’re living now to where your family needs you or your family needs to be. So that’s the bridge part.
And the second part is the table. Find your home as a bridge. Strengthen your family is the table. That’s been our tagline here for a long time, where we help you find your home and strengthen your family. And so I love this logo idea that the base of the logo now is a table. And the logo idea is you come around your table to have a meal with your family. You come around your table to make memories, to break bread, to eat together. You do it on a rhythmic basis. You’re sharing meals, you’re laughing, you’re sharing good stories of your day. You’re sharing the low stories about your day. The table’s also where you go when you’re grieving, when times are hard, when things are not going well. And I know as a father of five and being part of this world that all families, and I’m pulling this from my friend Paul, I love this.
He said “All families are strong and all families are broken. And this is, I believe this to my core. We all have brokenness in us. We all have things in our past that are hard where we’ve been hurt and we all are doing things probably to our kids that are hurting them. But we also all have strength. We have strong things in our family that we need to pass on. The table to me is like, this is the symbol of the home. And I think I’ve shared this before, but the table is actually, I’ve had this on my screen wallpaper on my computer for years, and I’ve got this verse that says on it “How happy is everyone who fears at an eye, who lives by his ways. You will eat what your hands have produced. You will be happy and prosperous. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine in the inner parts of your house. Your children around the table will be like, shoots from an olive tree.”
And I love that imagery. I look at it every single day because what I’m aiming for as a father, as a dad, as someone in this city, is what I think is the good life. I think this passage, this is another psalm that actually explains what the good life is. The good life is your family around your table. And what I’m aiming for as a man and as a husband and as a father, is I want to be eating meals with my kids when I’m a grandpa. And hopefully when I’m a great grandfather. And not only my kids are around the table and my wife, but my grandkids and maybe even my great grandchildren and everyone is being fruitful, everyone is being multiplied. It’s that same idea of the arrow is being shooting out, but there’s growth, there’s strength, there’s fruitfulness in the proper season.
And I know guys, everything is broken. What’s happening at my table right now? Oh my gosh. I want it to be peaceful and like, oh, we can read like a little passage about a book or talk about culture or politics or like, I have this vision in my mind what it could be. What it really is is like chaos and mess and my two year old getting up every few seconds and me like yelling at kids, like, get back here and like it’s all chaotic and mess. But the table, I’m still shooting for it, right? The vision is there, which is like for the next however many decades that I’m on this earth, the table’s gonna be the thing that unites my family and connects me to the future generations. And so that’s where we landed on the logo. :Find your home, strengthen your family.”
We got the bridge and we got the table. And so I love it. I think it all came together and I’m super excited that it’s here. It’s still rolling out. Maybe we’ll get the merch here soon. I want to get some clothing apparel with it on. It’ll be plastered up everywhere. But I wanted to just share it with you guys, kind of the journey that it’s been on. And I’m sure again, the five of you who are watching this to the end, Thank you! I appreciate you guys.
All of this does really come back to the experience we want to give you. I think there’s a reason why a lot of you call me and not some other agent. I’m not the flashiest, I’m different, right? But there’s a culture here at Team Sztanyo, which is we’re gonna work hard, we’re gonna serve you, we care about honesty and integrity and hard work and we care about growth and competency, making sure you’re getting a good deal for your family and making a good decision for your family.
Finding The Best Real Estate Agent in Cincinnati!
So all those things are kind of baked in. For those of you who choose to use us instead of any of the other thousands of real estate agents that are out there. Thank you!
I wanted to share with you guys more about the idea of the brand, the culture that we’re building here. And by the way, besides just being a client of Team Sztanyo, if you’ve ever wanted to be in the real estate field, we’re hiring guys, we are growing. Do you ever want to do anything related to real estate? Whether that’s being an agent or there’s other roles that we need on the team, both on the client side and I’ve got an investing business too. Reach out! We’d love to talk to you about that. So feel free to email us and shout out we’ve got a process for that and what that might look like.
So just to wrap! Thank you for being a part of the Team Sztanyo clan. Now you know a little bit more about how we’re thinking about the brand. And how we like to do business for our clients and how we like to serve you. Now. Hopefully, whenever you see the logo going forward, you’ll know that it’s about finding your home and strengthening your family. And I hope that the next meal that you have around your dining room table with your family is like, Hey, this thing matters. This table matters. It is sacred, and this is where we come together and this is where we strengthen our family. Maybe you’ll look at it a little bit differently and take advantage and have a vision for what those times can be in your family.
Thank you for being part of all of this. Thank you for subscribing and getting over a 3000. I just still can’t believe that happened. Let’s, let’s get to 5,000, let’s get to 10,000 and let’s keep it going. Thank you so much!