Content and communication from the brand should be forwardlooking, growth-oriented, and spoken with conviction. When I am explaining concepts, explain the situation today for context, but focus on helping people see the vision for the future. Use stories to engage people in examples.

Origin Story

I’ve been grappling with the question of “Who are you, really?” for as long as I can remember. My path to finding the answer has been embarrassing, circuitous, and surprising. It’s also been the key to finally feeling happy and secure, seeing real results in my business including my first $50K month, and becoming the person that I always knew I could be.

Even as a kid, my first computer password EVER – and this was back when I was 11 years old, in 4th grade – was “identity.” Remember, I was a nerdy kid. The word has come to mean many different things over the years, but even back then, for some reason… it meant something to me. I needed to know the answer to the question: Who am I?

When I was 11 years old (this was 1999) my parents had a home computer. They both worked full-time, so me and my four younger brothers had a babysitter for the summer. I had a ‘falling out’ with my core group of girlfriends right before the school year ended. (Newsflash: middle school girls can be cruel.) So, I entered summer vacation with no plans, no friends, and a brainy mind to keep occupied. So, I decided that I was going to build a website. 

I chose the identity of a nerd. Smart one. Geek. Shy. For a while, it protected me from the mean girls who rejected me and became my armor for the next few years.

I’ve been obsessed with “figuring out” my identity for as long as I can remember because it never came easy to me. I always felt like I was putting on a face, molding who I was to whatever situation I was in.

This stunted my personal growth. I continued to frustrate myself with the gap between what I knew I was capable of, and what my reality actually was. I felt like I was on a never-ending spiral roller coaster, and the answer was always out of reach.

Building a brand was work I needed for myself to finally answer this question. When I was first starting out in business, I was AWK-WARD. I didn’t lack for gumption, but it was a bumpy road. I knew that I had valuable skills to sell if only people would pay attention. I could design. I could write. I knew stuff about marketing. People should hire me, gosh darn it! During this time, when I was trying all of the things and not much was getting traction. One book I read during this time expounded on the ease of just “modeling” what is successful. Oh! Maybe that is what I’d been missing! I turned my gaze to the successful online entrepreneurs at the time to see what I could incorporate into my own brand.

One entrepreneur was a former pro athlete and helped people achieve. So I started a video series called, “Your Monday Morning Kick in the Pants”.

sigh

Another entrepreneur was girly and feminine. So, I changed the opening headline on my site to, “Hey BOMBSHELL!”

groan

And another leading entrepreneur showed off her NYC jet-set lifestyle, so I renamed my signature service to finding your “It Factor.”

cringe

By being more like them, I was hoping I could attract some fraction of the audiences and results that they’d created for themselves. And to nobody’s surprise (except my own), these tactics fell flat on their face. People can sniff out inauthenticity a mile away. And it doesn’t even matter if those things are some small part of me—they aren’t true to me at my best or highlight my greatest strengths. So the messages came across as cheesy, reaching, and confusing.

I knew that I was missing something, but I just didn’t know WHAT that was yet.

For me, the moment of epiphany that I was going about it all wrong came once I discovered archetypes. Basically, I was following a rabbit hole of internet links, when I stumbled on a website that listed twelve “archetypes.” It was the first time I had heard about them, and I was instantly hooked.

The cliché “eureka!” light bulb turned on. It was truly the most impactful moment of my career so far. As I started reading the descriptions of each archetype, my brain was lighting up with connections to successful brands, and I could immediately identify the stories these brands were telling through their identity. I could also see the connection to personal identity that the archetypes represented.

Results Stories

I’ve spent my career obsessively figuring out how to apply the psychology-based principles from the most successful brands in the world to the brands with much smaller budgets. 

I grew my consultancy and agency from scratch, with zero official employees. I work with talented contractors from across the world. We all work remotely, at the times that work for us. We do the work that is in our zone of genius. At the time I’m writing this, we’ve taught over 1,400 students in our courses. I’ve worked directly with hundreds of brands behind the scenes. I get to see, in real-time, what’s working in psychology-driven online brand building, and what’s just theory.

After working in marketing in traditional media (radio), and then in a small digital marketing agency, I realized that there were unseen forces that dictated how well a certain action would work for a business or not. How else could you explain that one entrepreneur could send an email to 1,000 people and make thousands of dollars, while another entrepreneur could send the exact same email to 10,000 and make the same amount (or less?). You may have experienced this phenomenon for yourself as I have. I enrolled in an expensive program, followed the advice to a T, but my results weren’t close to what others were seeing. It was a bit of an ego-crushing realization to see that it wasn’t the marketing strategy or the tactics – it was me. Or more specifically, my brand that was driving the real results. It’s the invisible influence.

TRANSFORM THE REALITIES OF OUR CLIENTS AND STUDENTS

• Reassuring affirmation
• Reminders of their personal power
• Thoughtful over-communication (release anxiety)
• Cohort/connection with ambitious peers
• Carry theory through to implementation

Movement Story

We believe that the untapped human potential (the genius inside) is the key to changing our own & others’ worlds. Aligned & effective branding is the key to unlocking this hidden potential.

Also, the ways that we change our own lives have a ripple effect and ultimately change the world (even if our goals aren’t that ‘big’). By proving our own possibilities, our families, extended families, clients, and friends all benefit. We get to live as a shining example of what is possible when you’re serving the world in the way you’re meant to serve.

We also believe that humans are on a quest to discover their own truth and to have that truth seen and understood by others. Branding is the process to make that happen.

Archetype Stories

Sage Archetype Stories

• Big Brand Genius: Show how hugely successful brands are using archetypes, visibility, and their values to create success.
• Psychological Theories: Use proven psychological concepts like the Mere Exposure Effect, Reticular Activating System, etc. to explain the underlying neuroscience of why branding strategies are effective.

Magician Archetype Stories

• Trouble with Tactics: Illuminate that tactics alone aren’t going to create success. There has to be a clear vision that’s driving you forward.
  • Selling radio ads with bad ROI for clients
  • Trying to design a logo without really understanding the brand
• Choose Your Future: We moved every 2-ish years, to wherever the military sent us. I had no idea what to expect when we started, and It’s been the best situation I could ask for — a “normal” job was out of the question, so being an entrepreneur is the only option for me. It’s taught me that our life experience goes way beyond whatever circumstances that are handed to us. You make life be what you want it to be. And bonus points – we’ve lived in some amazing places. 

Phrases I Say

• Shut the front door
• Crazy-pants
• YAY!
• I’m rooting for you.
• NICE.
• You’re a rockstar.
• Yesssss!
• That’s a future me problem
• Good idea fairy

The Clarity Code is our overarching framework for entrepreneurs who need to get their brand out of their brains so they can scale.

Brand New Brand is my incubation program for entrepreneurs who are getting started, and need to build their brand from scratch. It’s for ambitious entrepreneurs who are at less than $100K in revenue, and who want the step-by-step process that I use with my one-on-one clients.

Get fluent in the emotional language of your ideal clients with the 12 archetype-specific Brandfluency courses. Each course is like a secret toolkit to incorporating your archetype into your brand.

The Brand Advantage is the “learning by BEING” experience designed to create results in 30 days. Students create brand clarity, momentum, and results quicker than they ever thought possible in this 30-day brand-expanding sprint.

Convert with a Quiz helps online business owners grow their audience, list, and sales with a high-converting, lead-generating quiz. My brand archetype quiz has generated over 100,000 leads, $130,000+ in revenue in the last 12 months (2021), and has been taken over 200,000 times.