Vitals

• Born & raised in New York. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for the past five years.
• Started career at an investment bank: A time I’d like to forget.
• Ditched the suit to build a profitable dot.com in 1999.
• Built a boutique digital agency from $1MM to $20MM in 4 years.
• Launched 60+ major brands online across industries & sectors.
• I’ve worked on the brand and agency side, and have spent the last seven years as a consultant.
• Published two critically acclaimed books & seeking new representation for my third: My books and work have been featured in dozens of publications…

I once worked for a sociopath who took on any client as long as the checks cleared. Zeroes at the end of bank balances mattered more than ethics and integrity. Social responsibility was useful for photo ops, posh parties, and celebrity cameos.

Ours was a world where people pretended to care about other people, the world, when the reality was we focused on the care and feeding of our checking accounts. Money was the only thing worth nurturing.

No one tells you this starts as a controlled burn until the fire ravages and rages. Always, it flares out. …

A year ago, a coward sent me an anonymous note via the contact form on my exceedingly janky website. Who do you think you are charging clients eight thousand dollars? You’re a nobody.

I had just gotten off the phone the prior week with a client of mine who told me, point blank, that I was undercharging for my work. An agency billed us $50K for the mess you charged $15,000 to fix. …

Your brand isn’t your Instagram post. It’s not your logo or your blog. These are expressions of a brand — how you could potentially bring your brand to life, but it’s not the core of who you are, what you believe in, what you do and why you do it.

Trust me, I do this for a living for real companies and real people. Successfully. For years.

Simply put, a brand is a set of perceptions a customer has of your business. These perceptions are formed based on the products you sell, how, where, when and why you sell them…

I’d rather bludgeon myself with common household appliances than crack algorithms and chase clout. I don’t want my stories to follow a formula; I’ve never been someone who’s ever colored inside the lines. Instead, I’d rather burn the book and devour the ashes.

For years, I used to downplay the marketing work I did because it wasn’t high art. It wasn’t literary. The stories I told for my clients paled in comparison to the worlds I composed on the page. Sentences that would take hours to knit together because I had to get the cadence and rhythm just right. …

I am still forming. I am dorsal, fin, and bone. Surfacing from the shallows. Listening to everyone make their mouth sounds. The children smell of cotton and peppermint. I think of that first light and those tight, tiny fists. Where am I? What is this? I’d like a do-over. Their teeth storming through while the old spit tombstones out. Their faces woolen and worn. I don’t want to go just yet. What have I done? I’d like a do-over.

Both sleep heavy and complete. One heart throttles while the other thumps. Teeth still in transit.

It’s the middle we’ve made…

Value is a not a wonder drug. It’s not the one pill that makes you larger, to quote Jefferson Airplane. Value is the baseline, the bare minimum you should be offering your customers. Otherwise, take up cross-stitch or some other harmonious hobby because you’re not running a business if people don’t achieve any one of the following:

• Entertainment (they feel something),
• Education (they learn something),
• Value (price to quality ratio),
• Utility (their lives are easier), or
• Reciprocity (they feel part of something larger than themselves or experience privileges from being aligned with the brand).

​Here’s what customers value above all…

I used to be proud of being a cactus — a woman who was prickly, hard to know, content in my reclusiveness. After 16 years working in an office, surrounded by a constant stream of chatter, personalities, and politicking, all I craved was quiet. I wanted to focus on the work. Instead of having to work with brands that didn’t align with my values, I no longer had to smile through gritted teeth. In 2013, I left full-time life in favor of building a business on my own terms. …