every great brand needs these 3 roles

Every brand you love was built by 3 very different people.

And knowing which one you are changes who you should hire next.

First, there's the Visionary.
The one who sees what the brand could be before anyone else does.

Then the Tastemaker.
The one who makes people want it.

And the Builder.
The one who figures out how to make it work.

Look at Apple. 

Jobs had the vision, Jony Ive gave it the look, and Steve Wozniak built the first computer.

Nike's the same.

Phil Knight was selling shoes out of his car at track meets.
Bill Bowerman wrecked his wife's waffle iron experimenting with rubber soles.
And Tinker Hatfield was an architect before he started designing sneakers like the Air Jordans.

Then there's my favorite one for beauty brands: Clinique.

A Vogue beauty editor named Carol Phillips wrote an article with a dermatologist, Dr. Norman Orentreich, about whether great skin could be created.

Evelyn Lauder read it and turned it into a whole brand.

Taste, science, and vision, all in the same room. Honestly iconic.

And then there's Sara Blakely, who just went ahead and did all 3 herself.
She cut the feet off her pantyhose, wrote her own patent, and started Spanx with $5,000 of her own savings.

Wild, right?

But here's the thing I see with founders all the time:

When 1 of these 3 is missing, the brand starts to wobble.

Vision and building, but no taste? 
You get a great product nobody remembers.

Vision and taste, but no builder? 
You get a gorgeous brand that can't keep up once demand picks up.

And the founders who try to be all 3 at once usually burn out long before the brand hits its potential.

Sara Blakely is the exception, and that's exactly why her story gets told so much.

For everyone else, the move is simple.

Figure out which one you are.
Then go find the people who cover the other 2.

♻️ Repost for the founder trying to be all 3 at once.
And follow me, Jacob Rokeach, for more on brand and creative systems that scale.