The journey behind
Clear Authentic Brands
I built a business around clarity and authenticity because I spent years getting both completely wrong.
I grew up a military kid.
Moving every two or three years. Always the new person. Always having to figure out how to read a room, build connection from scratch, and find my footing in a place I didn't choose.
I didn't know it then. But God was developing something in me through all of that.
A deep curiosity about people.
An instinct for asking questions.
An ability to find the thread in someone's story.
As I got older I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And by the grace of God, found myself stumbling into entrepreneurship.
In 2011, my husband Josh and I started a web design and marketing agency. We had no idea who we were or what we were doing. It was trial by fire and just figuring it out as we went.
We chased everything.
Constant pivots. New offers. New strategies borrowed from whoever seemed to be winning. We were grinding without traction. The more things we tried, the more confused we became.
It was one of the hardest seasons of my life.
The business struggled. Our marriage struggled. We were broke and broken. Ashamed of our failure and hiding because of it.
And underneath all of it was a deeper gnawing I couldn't put words to yet.
I didn't know who I was. I didn't know how God had wired me. And I felt like an imposter. Battling how I wanted to live and lead versus how I actually did.
We slowly started to figure some things out. I started reading books like Traction, Storybrand, Start With Why, Good to Great. I was fascinated by the concepts of organizational health, clarity. alignment, simplicity, trust, authenticity.
I started trying to implement those concepts into our own business and how we operated and little by little we started to understand ourselves and our clients a little better.
I began to recognize my own natural wiring as a gift, and started applying it intentionally to the work I was doing with clients.
I approached clients with an open interest wanting to know everything. I would sit down with business owners, ask questions, find patterns, and pull on threads. How did they operate? What set them apart? Why should people do business with them? Were they authentic? Did they care?
And I began to help tell the stories of other businesses. Trying to help them clarify their message, create a website and marketing that was based in truth. Wanting to help them convey the experience that customers would actually have with them.
Because they, like myself, also struggled to articulate their brand.
But I could see it in their story and bring it to the surface. The identity was always already there. It just needed someone to pull it into the light.
I got really good at that process and fell in love with it.
The painful irony was I could do it for everyone else but not for myself.
It was too hard to read the label from inside the bottle.
No matter how many times I redesigned our website, rewrote our offers, or changed our niche, nothing stuck.
I still wrestled with my own identity.
My own failure to show up authentically.
In 2019, I went to work for one of our clients, a gas and welding distributor. I joined their leadership team and spent five years learning the ins and outs of how a small business with 80 people and multiple locations runs.
I got a front row seat to all of it. The burden, the decisions, the stress, the never ending surprises, the revolving door of people.
And through that experience, I realized the connection between marketing and operations. Between the brand and people. I learned that it was one and the same.
The more dialed in and clear we got on our brand, the more tangible it became to implement it throughout every process.
We hired amazing people even in a competitive hiring market.
People thrived in their roles and in the company and it completely shifted the atmosphere.
We built a reputation as a great place to work.
We experienced year over year growth across the board.
And it all traced back to clarity.
We defined what we valued. We attracted people who shared those values. We filtered for alignment. And we created an authentic experience for everyone — leaders, employees, customers, vendors.
It was truly amazing.
And that’s when clarity became a conviction for me.
It was the slap in the face realization that the reason I struggled so much with my own brand was because I was missing the foundational piece.
In 2024, God called us out of Montana.
Josh and I had felt the stirring for over a year.
This sense that what I had learned needed to reach more than one company.
That there were leaders everywhere wrestling with the same things I had wrestled with.
That most business problems weren't strategy problems. They were clarity problems.
So we packed up our family and moved to Alaska in two weeks. No safety net. No detailed plan. Just a strong sense that God was calling us to something new and that we needed to obey.
Clear Authentic Brands is the practical expression of everything I've learned and lived.
Years of building without clarity and the price I paid for it.
Hundreds of conversations, asking questions to better understand people and brands.
Five years of watching what clarity did to a culture, a team, a hiring process from the inside out.
The deep conviction that how we’re created and wired is tied to our calling.
And finally coming face to face with my own identity. Forcing myself to go through my own brand identity process. To look back over my journey, pull the threads, and articulate it in a clear way.
To embrace who God made me to be and the call to build my own clear, authentic brand.
To let go of the ruts that have kept me stuck for so long.
I don’t have it all figured out. But I’m on this journey and sharing what it looks like to learn how to build a clear, authentic brand.
If you’re interested in those stories, you can check out the
Building A Clear Authentic Brand podcast.