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Building my second company has reminded me that what matters most hasn’t actually changed.

In this episode, I share the behind-the-scenes of launching a brand new business after 10 years of marketing experience, the foundational work I did before touching AI, and why I think entrepreneurs are focusing on the wrong things right now.

We also talk about MVPs, brand identity, and how to know what deserves depth versus what simply needs to get out into the world.

Key Takeaways

• Define your ideal customer, messaging, and brand strategy before launching
• You need soul & vision at first, then AI can speed up execution
• What makes anything ‘AI-proof’ is bringing your full self to it 

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Every business, whether you are the face of the brand or not, needs a brand identity. And that is the thing that I believe AI cannot do. Because if you let AI tell you what that is, it’s gonna sound like everybody else. So you can take from this and really ask yourself, do you have that brand identity?

In the era that we are in of AI, and the strength behind that brand identity, that embodied conviction authority authenticity connection and clarity that you have with yourself that is infused into the company is gold and is the thing AI cannot do.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an amazing week. We don’t really put episode numbers in my podcast, and I happened to look at it and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, 810 episodes.” Insane. That is a lot of podcasts, and here we still are. I am really grateful for the journey, and 800 plus episodes is pretty cool.

So anyways, I saw that today and I also cannot believe it’s this is like the last episode of June. We are going into July. That’s insane. Actually insane. It feels like it was literally just the holidays. I don’t know. I saw this post the other day that I liked that was like, “Do you wanna know how to slow down time?”

There’s some name concept they had for it, but it was like, do something new Every week or every day or incorporate new things into your routine because when you rinse and repeat your days, it is when time actually feels faster ’cause you’re just in that motion. And I think that’s so true because when you throw in travel or an experience or you go out with friends or you just do something fun, something that really gives you that life, time does feel like it actually slows down ’cause you’re enjoying it differently.

So maybe you needed that reminder today. I liked that. Anyways, today I thought I would give you a little behind-the-scenes of the new company I’m building or I’m a partner in, but really from the perspective of marketing. And I’m realizing as I’m doing this, things that I know now, a decade later, building a second company, things that I know now that are helping accelerate massively the success and the launch of this company.

And so they’ll be relevant to you. So I’m actually gonna have my partner that I partnered with in this company on the podcast at some point, and that’s when I’m– Some point soon. And that’s when I’m gonna share the actual company. But I’ll tell you this. Number one, I’m not the CEO of the company. I was very clear that, and I believe this to be true, that as an entrepreneur, you can’t be the CEO of two companies and do a good job.

I think it would hurt the other companies. So in a way– It would hurt both companies. In a way, this company’s almost like a client of mine like a VIP client, and I’m implementing all of the marketing and that’s my role is the marketing, the branding, the messaging, the offer positioning, everything that I’m really good at.

That’s what I’m doing. And then I partnered with somebody who is titled the CEO of the company, but they will be the operator of the day-to-day. And it took me over a year from having this idea to launching this because I was clear that the partner I partnered with had to have the capacity to basically be full-time.

I’m telling you this not because it has to do with what I’m gonna teach today, but because I don’t want you to think it’s a good idea to just go start a second company. Because first of all, my current company operates the day-to-day without me. It does place still a lot of demands on me if I wanna grow to the eight-figure level, which we are.

And so I can’t take away from that, but I also have had this vision to start a company that, in my opinion, is AI-proof because basically it’s, let’s just say, an in-person service. It is completely different industry than you would expect, and it just gives me that, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with AI over the next 10 years, but I know that this company, people will still need its service, so I’ve wanted to do this for a long time And I also knew I couldn’t run it.

So anyways, I wanna give you that context. And the reason it took me so long to launch the company is I couldn’t find the right partner. And I wasn’t gonna force it. I wasn’t like, “I need to do this today.” It was more of if this falls into place, then it will work out. And I kinda put my trust in the universe and was like, “When the time is right, it’s gonna work out.”

I almost launched the company six months ago. I actually had an operating agreement and a partner, and it just kinda fell through ’cause they were like, “I can’t put in the time.” So anyways, found this partner. You guys will appreciate this on the podcast since you heard all the gym drama a few months ago.

Guess where I found this partner At the new gym. At the gym I went to after I got kicked out of the other gym. You can go listen to the episodes and then put the episode out. My kids got kicked out, whatever. I found this new perfect ideal partner for me in this venture at the gym. So anyways, you’ll get that story if you’re a regular listener.

Okay. Here’s what I want to share that helps you with your marketing. So I am in charge of the marketing, the branding, the messaging, the offer positioning, and the vision of the business. The strategy. I’m very much the business strategist is my role. And then my partner is taking what I know, because I have a decade of building business experience, building teams, systems, operations, marketing, all of that, and operating the business and doing more of the like hustle, grunt work of actually starting up the business and operating it.

And so I built our website with a little support and then my team took the tech and is implementing all the tech. But I did it in a day. Less than a day of actual time, but in a day. And AI is for sure speeding it up. But if you listen to my previous podcast, I talk about not sacrificing depth when you use AI.

And so where I started, I think this is so important because right now it feels obvious to me, but if I went back 10 years ago when I was starting my company, I had no idea that this is what you needed to do as one of the first things that you do when you start a company. And so where I started is very relevant to you because when I see entrepreneurs, most of the time they skip this step.

They skip this step and they don’t actually know they need to do it until way later on when they’re not getting results. When somebody starts a company or has a company, what I see is that their biggest focus is on selling their offer. Which of course is what you need to do to be successful in a company and make money, is sell your offer, make the sales, prove that it’s successful.

What happens is they skip over the very important messaging and brand identity steps that are going to make selling the offer possible because you then stand out. So the very first thing I did, like literally very first thing, and this was actually before I even found this partner because I had already had this vision, is I sat down and I basically brain dumped my vision for this company and who the ideal customer was, but like In detail of who they are and beyond…

So this is an in-person service business, right? And I know that in the space of in-person services, there is gonna be… Everybody focuses just on the what. They focus on the what of how they deliver a service, right? Whether it’s painting or plumbing or cleaning, it’s like they focus on, we clean or we paint, and they’re missing the underlying emotion of the person that they’re trying to target.

And if you’re missing that, you’re not gonna be able to create good content. You’re not gonna be able to produce, and attract people. So I sat down and in depth, I described that person, and the person we are targeting is me. Like I’m the ideal customer. It is a female who wants to have it all, but can’t do it all.

Who want… Who is constantly, maxed out capacity in terms of time because I have demands of a business and life and, relationships and my kids and kids’ activities and all the things. I’m maxed out, but I wanna have it all. I wanna be present. I don’t wanna worry about is my house clean. I don’t wanna worry about, is this done?

Do I have this support? Whatever. So I went into great detail of that person and what they want. What they want, what they struggle with, what they’ve struggled with in hiring previous companies in this space and like their ultimate dream and desires and also frustrations. Marketing 101, right? Then I went into detail of how I wanted people to feel when they came across this brand.

So how I wanted the messaging and the brand identity to feel. I wanted it to feel premium, luxury high touch little details Connecting, like I went in detail of that. Then I went in detail of our company values. So what is our company values when it comes to how we service clients? And I walked through this with my partner and was like, “Listen, this is what you hire and fire based off of.

These are the values that you have as a company.” And then I went through this is what we stand for. What we stand for in this space. Compared to other companies, this is what we value and what we stand for. Not just values in the terms of company values, but like this is what we stand for and how the service should be done, how it shouldn’t be done.

One of them is we’re always on time, and the other one is ease. It’s very easy to book with us, to go through the experience. You don’t have to do the anno- … ‘Cause I’m the client, I’m like, “You don’t even have to call. You can text us, and it’s super easy. We’re not gonna ask you a million questions.

We’re not gonna make us come out to your house and do a stupid quote before we can actually do work.” I intimately know the ideal customer, and so then I can bring that into the customer experience. So I sat down and mapped all this out, who the ideal customer is in detail beyond just the service they want.

Because if that’s what you’re focusing on, you are missing the point. Regardless of what you sell, you need to understand the deeper thing that somebody wants. Beyond oh, I wanna lose weight. Beyond I wanna make more money. Beyond I want to have my house painted. I wanna have this service done.

What is the deeper thing? Why? Why do they want that done? Why do they want that done? How do they want it done? What is important to them when doing it? And so I went in detail. And then what do you stand for as a company? That is truly what a brand is. It’s not just your colors and your font and what things look like.

That is actually impacted by that. But first, before you can even decide the colors and the way things look, you have to decide that feeling And so I took all of that, and then I brought that to Claude. And then from there, I was able to develop the website copy, the logo, the… Which I have a design team, so I didn’t do everything through Claude.

But the logo, the colors, the uniforms that we’re gonna have, the font, the way that we’re gonna do it, all of it very intentional. Here’s also the thing, though. I didn’t waste time on “I need a perfect logo.” My logo is so basic. I, because I don’t care. Because it, it’s enough to where it, it communicates the brand that I want, but it’s not overthought or over-invested in, because that doesn’t matter as much.

The logo matters, enough to have it to be able to represent that, but not to the point where to start and to get our first, to first six figures We need to overthink that or over-invest in that. So that’s another piece to this is I did the foundational work. I spent a good amount of time, and not just time, intention, depth of really fleshing all of that out.

So then I could take it to AI, and I could take it to my team, and then we could move like lightning fast. And in my opinion, the website copy, it’s very simple. I’m gonna share it when it’s ready. It’s gonna be probably ready this week. But the website copy is really good, but it’s one page. We’re launching with a one-page website, which is our offer our intro offer.

And so it’s pretty cool because I’m also taking digital marketing tactics into a in-person service business that is just… I know it’s gonna crush it because it’s so innovative. And it’s cool to build a business with 10 years of experience of building a business in an industry that’s a, run like a dinosaur where people haven’t caught on to the things that, I do in Embodied.

And then also pair that with AI, and it’s holy crap. But the foundation of it is really important, and that’s kinda what I’m getting across here. And my point here is the foundation of that messaging. And really it is your brand identity. It’s the identity that you want the brand to have. And on one of my recent trainings, someone asked me and said, I– they have a brand and they’re not the face of the brand.

And a lot of what I talk about is brand identity and what’s the conviction that you have and what do you stand for, what do you stand against? And they said, “If I don’t have this brand that it, doesn’t have a face of the brand, do I still need that?” Absolutely you do. Every business, whether you are the face of the brand or not, needs a brand identity.

And that is the thing that I believe AI cannot do. And it’s the thing that I’ve doubled down on with clients is the initial process that we take every client through, regardless if you are in our first tier of our program, if you’ve never sold your offer before, and you need to validate it all the way up to our VIP clients.

The first thing that we do is make sure that brand identity is so clearly defined. Because if you let AI tell you what that is, it’s gonna sound like everybody else. But if you sit and you ask the right questions and you pull that conviction, that passion, that emotion out of yourself That you want infused in everything you do. If you sit and you do that first as your foundation, then all of your marketing on top of that is gonna be so much better. So I would have never let AI define my ideal customer, my vision for the business, my values, what we stand for, what we stand against in the industry.

That has to come from me. That has to come from my heart. That has to come from embodied within me. And so that’s pretty cool because it is a… it’s cool. I actually just got chills. It is a business in a totally boring category, okay? That you would never guess that I’d be… It’s not “Oh my gosh, this is my purpose, is building this business.”

But because the branding and the messaging and the identity of the business is so embodied in me, it is an extension of my purpose and my passion and me, because I get to have impact in a way, in a completely different way But still serve that same concept of you can have it all. My current business, that is one of the…

that’s my main Instagram tagline. That is maybe in the future the title of my book, because I truly believe that you can have it all. Now, in Embodied, I’ve helped people have that by building the business, by building the life, by building the beliefs, by building the systems, by making the money through the marketing so that you can have it all.

Because in order to have it all, you have to have time and money freedom. Now, I can help people with having it all by being a support system actually in their home, is the business. That’s really cool. And that would not happen if I went to AI and said, “Build me this business.” “Design my ideal customer.

Design it.” It has to be embodied in who you are. I just think that’s… It’s really cool to see this be coming together. But my point in this episode for you guys is to really emphasize, this is knowledge that I was able to do in a matter of hours because I knew what to do. And that only has come after 10 years of business experience and helping 2,000-plus entrepreneurs personally with their own marketing.

It’s 800 episodes of this podcast. It’s 100 webinars. It’s thousands of pieces of social media content. It’s me learning how to do this through experience. And now I can take it and plug that right into a new business, and I have a massive advantage to every other company in that space because of that, especially if they were just starting out.

The point isn’t start a new business. It’s learn from my experience of how important brand identity is. And most entrepreneurs that I meet with, talk with, see don’t have this right now and… Or they have an opportunity to go deeper with it. And as I said, that is the foundation of everything, and AI cannot do it.

So if you are using AI and you have not done this in a deep way, that’s what’s missing. And you may need someone to take you through the process because you may sit there and go, “I don’t know what I believe.” I think it is… I have a specific process that we pull out. We call it identify and align.

It is the first thing we do with all clients, and pull out of them what they stand for, what they believe, what their values are, and then know how to infuse that in all of their marketing The second kinda lesson that I wanna teach here, that I want you to learn from, is don’t spend too much time on the details that don’t matter.

Some of the things… And I’ve even caught myself in this, where it’s like I wanna have, I have this vision of building basically our own app to take scheduling and the back-end management, ’cause I can do it with Vibe Coding And at first I was like, “We’re gonna launch with that.”

And then I’m like, “No, we can launch with a spreadsheet. We don’t need this complicated system.” And so I think that’s also the thing is what’s the MVP, right? minimum viable product. when I was going down the software route at one point, which I’ll someday we’ll know whatever that lesson was as a big thing, like what’s the MVP of this and how do you keep it very simple, and how do you keep the features really simple?

So really knowing in your marketing, in your business, what matters and what doesn’t matter to be overthought about. And so for me, like the logos, the initial photos, the uniforms, I know we’re gonna update all those things because I’ve gone through this in my business, right? Iterations of the podcast, iterations of the website, iterations of branding.

I know we’re gonna update all these things multiple times, and so let’s launch with the best we possibly can, knowing that the only way we’re gonna learn how to do it better is by getting out there and experiencing it and doing it. And so how fast can you then move? And this is where the speed comes in because the moment I was clear I talked to this partner and said, “Hey, here’s my idea.

I’m just throwing it out there if you’re interested.” And they were like, “I’m in,” in within 24 hours. They’re like, “I’m in. This is gonna change my life. This is amazing.” And from there, it was like three weeks that we were… They quit their job, put in their notice. I built the website. We had the packages. We had everything, and we’re like launching within 30 days, and then my second goal is that we’re profitable in the first 30 days.

And if I have it all right, we’d be at a six-figure business within the first 30 days, which is insane. But is only possible because I’m taking all this knowledge, and I’m plugging it right in, and it’s like a 10-year shortcut. Maybe not 10 years. Maybe it’s like a three-year shortcut if I were to start this business, but if I was to start this business 10 years ago, I know that I wouldn’t have known any of these things.

I wouldn’t have known to sit down and do that foundational work. I wouldn’t have known the questions to ask myself. I wouldn’t have known what was important and what wasn’t, what needed emphasis and what could be, just done in, in an MVP way. That experience is gold. So you can take from this and really ask yourself, do you have that brand identity?

That’s like the big point I wanna drive home. In the era that we are in of AI, and that brand identity and the strength behind that brand identity, that embodied conviction and authority and authenticity and connection and clarity that you have with yourself that is infused into the company is gold and is the thing AI cannot do.

And this is a brand where I am not the face, which is fun. I’m not the face. There isn’t a face of the brand. It is a brand. There’s gonna be two founders and it’s a brand which is fun ’cause we did a content shoot and I was like, “Ah, for the first time I don’t have to be in all the content.” It still has the same process of the brand identity, the values and that conviction that is based on, still, me and the founder.

I’ve infused him into it as well because there’s elements to it that matter, with his story and his background and his personality and his values and how that’s gonna impact the company. So think about that and then think about your brand identity in terms of your marketing, but also the customer delivery, right?

Because brand identity comes through in the marketing and when someone comes across your business and, interacts with it in any form, content, website, funnel, webinar, lead magnet, all of it is building a brand identity. But also the actual customer journey, like the experience, the micro-touches the thing that y- you want people to go, “Oh,” “that was because I interacted with that company.”

And that’s in alignment with their brand identity. And you want alignment from the very first touch to a customer and maintaining a customer and, buying more from you, buying more services, staying for a long time. Whatever your offer is, you want it to be one very clear, very Defined brand identity that is cohesive.

And that really comes from being clear on everything I said. The values, what you stand for, who you’re trying to connect with, that ideal customer. Do you know them better than they know themselves? The feeling that you want somebody to have. Actually ask yourself that question. How do I want someone to feel when they land on my website?

How do I want someone to feel when they click my ad? How do I want someone to feel when they consume my content? Everything’s based on that emotion and those emotions. And so when you’re clear on that, then when you go to create content, write copy, look at your marketing, you connect back to that emotion and go, “Okay, if I want someone to feel this way, this is how I communicate with them.”

And that’s your messaging. All right, everybody. Hopefully you found this helpful. More to come on this. It’s pretty cool. I’m definitely gonna be using this for a lot of content, ’cause it allows me to be in a different space of building a business. Which then I think helps me connect to you guys who are maybe not even at the very beginning of your business, but still needing to define your brand identity and those components.

So I will continue to bring content and things that I learn. We are doing a fun series on social media, so definitely check out my Instagram Emily Hirsch, for that because we’re doing visuals and just like the real behind-the-scenes of, okay, we had a job tomorrow, the employee quit. That happened the night before, before they even started.

And so I’m sharing it all. I’m sharing it all. The good, the bad, the ugly, the not figured out yet, the messy middle in that series on Instagram. And if you’re listening to this and you’re like, “I want to go through that process. I want to have a strong brand identity,” regardless of where you are in your business, go to helpmystrategy.com.

Look at the ways that our team can help you. We have spent the last two months literally overhauling and improving and updating and upleveling every part of our client delivery, and it is incredible. Not just in the depth, but how fast we can move at getting you launched, getting your funnels launched, getting your ads launched, doing it all for you.

So go to helpmystrategy.com. We’ve got a couple of spots open right now. We had a really amazing month but we have a couple spots to take strategy call and build out everything for you at all different levels. So if that is something that would take a lot of work off your plate and overwhelm and get you moving fast, we’d love to chat with you.

All right, everybody. Talk to you next week.