Why I Stayed Invisible

FOR YEARS, I STAYED PRETTY INVISIBLE.

Which is a slightly strange thing to admit after spendingmore than two decades in branding, marketing, design, and communications.

But here's the part I haven't always explained very well:

I didn't actually need to be visible.

My business grew through referrals and longtime client relationships, and for much of my career I was serving two very different kinds of clients at the same time.

On one side were corporate clients and event companies. Much of that work happened behind the scenes for major franchise conferences, conventions, and exclusive incentive trips for brands you've definitely heard of.

At the same time, I was working with Christian ministries, nonprofits, authors, speakers, leaders, and personal brands—people and organizations whose missions I deeply cared about.

I loved both kinds of work.

And because both sides of my business grew largely through relationships and referrals, I could do excellent work, keep my clients happy, and stay very busy without ever building much of a public-facing personal brand.

For a long time, that worked beautifully.

But the economics of those two worlds were very different.

Corporate projects generally had the budgets to support the level of strategy, design, and execution I wanted to provide. And they could write a big check without blinking.

Ministries and personal brands were often much more budget-conscious.

And because I'm me, when the budget ran out before the work was where I thought it needed to be...

I usually didn't stop working.

[Ask me how that went.]

I donated a lot of hours over the years because I cared about the client; I wanted the work done well; and frankly, if my name was attached to it, I wanted it to be a good representation of my work too.

That wasn't exactly a scalable business model.

But there was something else going on too... my own public brand wasn't telling the whole story.

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I Wasn't Proud of My Own Brand

For a long time, my public brand was mostly about what I did.

Graphic design. Branding. Marketing. Websites. Communications.

All true.

But that didn’t fully explain the value clients actually experienced when they worked with me.

The deeper work had always been there: discovery, clarity, positioning, messaging, helping people see what they were too close to see forthemselves.

I knew that work mattered. In fact, I required discovery before major branding and website projects because I knew the execution would only be as strong as the thinking underneath it.

What I hadn’t done was pull that deeper work forward, define it as an offer of its own, and publicly position myself around it.

So my public brand felt incomplete.

And when you know your public presence isn’t telling the whole story, becoming more visible doesn’t necessarily feel exciting.

Sometimes it just feels like sending more people to an incomplete version of you.

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Who Was My Market?

For a while, I assumed the next version of my business would be specifically for Christian entrepreneurs, experts, and leaders.

That made sense to me. My faith is central to my life, and I had already spent years working with Christian ministries, authors, speakers, and leaders alongside my corporate clients, and from a positioning standpoint, niching down seemed logical.

And then something happened that made me question the whole thing.

Two Christian businesswomen I respected—both of whom were also involved in ministry—strongly advised me not to do it.

Their concern was essentially: You already have credibility and established relationships in the corporate world, where the budgets are bigger. Don't walk away from that to build a business around a market that may not be willing or able to pay you what the work is worth.

Around the same time, I heard a guest on a Christian leadership podcast say "Christians are the worst people to do business with." What a terrible thing to say! He went on to talk very candidly about losing money when working with Christian clients because of discounts, late payments, and tight budgets.

And I remember thinking, Okay. Maybe I need to pay attention to this.

Especially because some of it matched what I had already experienced.

I loved working with ministries and Christian leaders. But I also knew how many hours I had donated over the years because I cared about the mission, wanted the work done well, and couldn't bring myself to deliver something I wasn't proud of.

So I took a pretty big step back.

And if I'm being fair to the woman I was then, that wasn't simply fear.

I was trying to figure out whether what I felt called to do could also become a sustainable business.

The problems I was helping people solve weren't uniquely "Christian problems". Getting clear about the value of your work, figuring out what you want to be known for, positioning years of experience, and building a brand that accurately represents who you've become matter whether someone shares my faith or not.

And eventually I realized I didn't have to choose between buildinga business that openly reflected my faith and building a brand exclusively for Christians.

My faith could be part of how I show up without becoming a requirement for who I serve.

That was another piece of clarity I needed before I could confidently position the work.

At the same time, I still had a successful corporate business and no desire to unnecessarily close those doors.

So rather than rushing to publicly position a new offer before I understood exactly what it was, who it was for, and how I could deliver it sustainably, I kept doing what had worked for years: serving clients through relationships and referrals while I figured it out.

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I Kept Trying to Build an Offer That Did Everything

Beginning in 2018, I kept coming back to the idea of creating a Done-With-You group program with some significant Done-For-You pieces instead of just 1:1 engagements.

Discovery and strategy had always been part of my process, but I also knew what happened next.

Someone still needed the website.

The lead magnet.

The email sequence.

The social profiles.

The messaging.

The content plan.

And because I had spent years watching clients struggle to implement good strategy well, I kept thinking the answer was to include all of it.

Which meant the offer became enormous.

Every time I mapped it out, I ran into the same question:

How am I possibly going to deliver all of this at scale, make it financially sustainable, and still produce work I'm proud to put my name on?

I couldn't find an answer I believed in.

So I didn't launch it.

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Eventually I realized I had been trying to take responsibility for far too much of what happened downstream.

I had always known the discovery and strategy mattered.

What I hadn't fully recognized was that the strategic work could be valuable enough to be the offer—not just the work that made everything we created afterward better.

I didn't have to personally build the website, lead magnet, emails, social profiles, and content plan for that work to be enormously valuable. I could help someone uncover what was already there, clarifythe value, find the positioning, answer Why You?, shape the message, and create a strategic foundation they could continue building from.

That work could stand on its own.

And once I realized that, everything changed.

I didn’t need a bigger offer. I just needed a clearer understanding of the value already inside it.

Once I really understood that, I finally had something I was willing to put my name behind publicly.

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Where Brand with Bravery Came From

For a long time, I assumed that if I was ever going to become more visible, I probably just needed to get braver.

I'm pretty private by nature. I don't particularly want attention. And yes, there were fears attached to becoming more public. But looking back, I can see that courage wasn't actually the first thing I needed.

For me, bravery came after I finally got clear about what I had to be brave about.

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Why This Matters

This experience changed the way I think about branding.

Sometimes the problem isn't that you need a better website, or more content, or a stronger personal brand. Sometimes you've grown into something you haven't fully figured out how to name, position, or represent yet.

And if that's true, pushing yourself to become more visible may not be the answer. You may need to get clear first.

Clear about the value you've actually developed.

Clear about the work you want to be known for.

Clear about what still belongs—and what you've outgrown.

Clear enough to believe what the evidence already says.

Because once you know what you're trying to make visible, bravery finally has somewhere to go.

That's what happened for me.

And it's the work I now get to help other people do.

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