The Connection Between Personal Identity and Brand Identity with Matt Steinruck

Matt Steinruck is a brand and culture guide, owner of Big Picture Consulting, specializing in helping businesses, nonprofits, and ministries zoom out to find their big picture so they can recover what's been buried and get a clearer sense of their own purpose and identity. He spent about 30 years as a designer making everything from print to slides to websites. When clients would come with a design request, he'd look at the messaging and realize it wasn't connecting. He'd reshape it, do a fast rebranding project inline with the design work, and eventually realized: brand identity is the headwaters. That's where everything starts. Rather than do it quickly in the course of design, why not make brand the official starting point?

Matt describes brand as the top of the mountain, the headwaters of a water cycle. From there flows brand design: the visual artifacts that tell the story, including logos, websites, print, and video. Everything visual flows out of brand, not the other way around. From there the water flows into the river, which is marketing: the activation of brand, figuring out who you're talking to and how to reach them. And then Matt adds what he calls brand culture: where the brand seeps back into the fabric of the organization, where identity floods into how decisions are made, how people behave, how the company operates. If your marketing isn't connecting, don't throw more money at it. Go back to the top of the mountain. That's generally where the problem lies.

Business owners rarely stop to ask who they really are. Matt calls this operational sediment: layers of stuff that happen over time as they race forward building the thing, taking care of staff, showing up every day. When people stop and think about identity for two seconds, it feels frilly and froofy and fluffy. No ROI. So they don't do it. But what Matt sees is that when a company does this work properly, from the top down, it transforms how they message, how they operate internally, and how they understand themselves. Everything else that gets produced after that becomes a lot easier and a lot more effective.

It's hard to see the label from inside the bottle. Matt has the domain don't redo your website dot com: a landing page to help people think through the real problem, which is almost never the website. When someone comes saying they need a new website, the first question is: why? What problem do you think a new website will solve? If you trace it back far enough, there's something else going on. An identity issue. Fix that from the top down and a lot more becomes possible.

One of Matt's magic questions in brand exploration is: what makes you cry at movies? The theme that makes your heart leak out of your eyes tells you something inherently true about you as a person. If you can find that thread, you've found something deep. And very often, as a founder, the theme that moves you is the same theme that drove you to start the business: restoration, justice, overcoming hardship, belonging. Whatever it is. When you can name that theme, you can make your brand resonate with who you actually are at your core. That tie-in between the deep heart of a person and why they started their business is one of the most powerful threads in brand work.

When you understand and own your identity and just live into who you are, everything else in the business becomes easier. You stop borrowing someone else's identity. You stop putting Saul's armor on David. You're not trying to live out of something that doesn't feel natural. You're making decisions in the way that you operate, the way that you really are. And that seeps into everything: your messaging, your culture, how you show up in the market.

Ten years of running an agency without having this figured out: not knowing yourself well as a person or what you stood for, constantly looking at what everyone else was doing. Fifty thousand website iterations. All that back and forth broke down confidence as a human. What comes out of that experience is the realization that the key to figuring out a brand and business is first figuring out yourself. Matt confirms: focusing on what someone else says you should be doing, spinning up something because someone else thought it was great, taking courses about the right way to do LinkedIn: all of that leads to, well, that doesn't work for me. The deeper route is: what makes your brand unique because of who you are as a founder? Let your brand really represent something true to you.

Brand exploration often moves into something that feels like therapy. Matt has had clients say: nobody has ever asked me these questions before. This has felt so cathartic to be able to explore this stuff and talk about it and get it out into the open. The questions move beyond business analysis into what's really going on under the surface, what's preventing you from moving ahead. When someone comes saying they have a felt problem in their business, you trace it back to an identity issue. And getting into that space, asking questions that people typically don't let themselves think about, is very therapeutic and can push people, in a good way, into new spaces.

Matt's journey as a solopreneur has been ten years. Some years really good, most of the time figuring out what comes next. His first anxiety attacks. Some periods of being a crumpled mess. The question shifted from what project does God have for me to who does God need me to be? He leans into the Israelites in the desert: led by a pillar of fire, God always present, but going through an extremely hard time anyway. They left Egypt but they were still in a slave mindset. Not yet ready for the promised land. God needing to evolve them through what they'd been through, to form them into who they needed to be for the next season. Matt sees his own desert season as a similar formation process: coming out of a borrowed identity, working through fears and hesitations, learning to step into what God has actually called him into.

Contentment: Paul's letter contains the statement I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, which tends to get written on boards and painted on walls. But in context, it's about contentment in little and in much. Paul is saying: I've had a lot and I've had very little, and I've found the secret to being okay in both. Wherever God has called you right now, in this process, you can do that, because Christ has given you the strength to do it. Matt finds that a hard context to sit in, but the one that's actually being taught.

Joseph: the dream given to him young, then sold into slavery, then twelve years in jail with no escape possible, fully reliant on God. The formation happening in Joseph during those twelve years must have been necessary preparation for saving Egypt and stepping into the dream. Pivotal things in life were not our doing. Doors opened, connections were made, opportunities appeared in God's timing. Looking back, we didn't make those things happen. Matt connects this to Moses: forty years in the desert before being called back into his ministry, being formed and trained and made ready for the next journey. These seasons of waiting are formation. Uncomfortable because you don't know how long you're in this space.

What does it look like to come into acceptance and boldness about how God actually made you, not trying to be somebody else or do it the way somebody else does? Matt is still walking that out. He feels closer today than yesterday. One thread he's following: what am I afraid of? What are the fear hurdles in front of me preventing me from being more fully connected to what God's plans are? Looking at those fears, understanding what they mean about how he views God, and putting truth into those situations to dispel the lies and the falsehoods. That's where some of the keys and connecting points are for moving into the next phase of his identity journey.

A concept Matt is exploring: God's unique name for you. The way a shepherd knows each sheep individually by a distinct call or sound. If Jesus were to walk into the room and call out a name that identified you uniquely as a person, not your job title or your role, what would that be? Listening for that, leaning into what that is, understanding it: that's when identity starts to connect at a really significant level.