I hear some version of this at least once at every networking event I've ever been to.

"Here's my card, but don't look at my website. It's not really what I do anymore."

Or: "I'm in the middle of a rebrand." Or: "I just haven't had time to update it." Or the version where they just hand you the card and wince a little, hoping you won't look too closely.

I never judge. Because I get it... completely, personally, in my bones.

Your business is a living thing. It grows and shifts and evolves, sometimes faster than you can keep up with. If you're in the first few years, it's not unusual to go through three, four, five different internal identities. Different ideas about who you serve, how you talk about what you do, what you're actually building. It's like trying on clothes. You wear a model for a while, see how it fits, decide what you love and what's making you itch, and keep moving.

And that's not failure. That's how it works.

The shifting isn't usually what builds momentum, though. What builds momentum is showing up, over and over, for six months to a year, regardless of what your logo looks like or whether your color palette is perfectly cohesive. Consistent presence builds relationships. Relationships build businesses. The brand stuff matters, but it matters later... not on day one.

So you DIY something passable. You get your hands dirty. You show up anyway. And that time is never wasted, because you're learning who your people are, what lights you up, what kind of work makes you want to get out of bed and what kind makes you want to hide under it.

But then something shifts.

There hits a point where the DIY brand stops being good enough for now and starts being the thing that's holding you back.

It's subtle at first. You hesitate before sending someone to your website. You don't mention your Instagram in conversations. You turn down opportunities to be on podcasts or speak on stages because somewhere in the back of your mind you're thinking... but what if they look me up? You edit your words endlessly, polishing them until they sparkle, which is really just shining off everything that's actually you. Your writing gets bland. You stop feeling a real connection to what you're putting out into the world.

Your brand, the thing that was supposed to represent your business, becomes the thing standing between you and showing up bigger.

I know this one personally.

My old brand was refined. High-end. Polished in a way that never quite felt like me... the woman with dirt under her nails and clay stains on her jeans who barely tosses on makeup before a meeting. I spent so long trying to be the person that brand implied I was. Editing. Polishing. Performing. And the more I polished, the less I sounded like myself, and the less connection I felt to any of it.

When I rebranded to something that actually reflected who I am and how I work, everything changed. The colors are fun and a little unexpected. There's playfulness in the shapes. There's room for snark and rambling and metaphor and the occasional f-bomb when it's earned. It's totally in brand for me to go on a hike and share it. To show up covered in clay. To write in long winding sentences that eventually land somewhere true.

I'm in brand just by being myself and that permission unlocked oh so much joy in showing up for my business— which is what being in business should feel like.

And here's what I've learned doing this for others: the path to that feeling looks different for everyone. For me it meant starting over completely. For some of my clients it's been that too. But more often than people expect, it's not about tossing everything out. Sometimes the bones are good and the problem is something more specific, more fixable, more nuanced than "burn it all down and start fresh."

I worked with a client recently who had a perfectly good set of brand colors and fonts from another designer, but she couldn't figure out how to make them work. How to make the darks and lights play together. What imagery to pull in. How to make bold color choices feel cohesive instead of chaotic. We kept everything she had, added one flowing script font to elevate the feel, and used her colors in a way that made her site feel airy and alive... like what her clients actually feel when they work with her.

Bam. No new brand. Not burning her business to the ground. She just needed someone to figure out how to make her existing brand actually work. And that distinction matters, because starting over when you don't need to is expensive, time consuming, and honestly a little demoralizing. You built that thing. Sometimes you just need someone to help you use it properly.

Sometimes it's that. Sometimes it really is starting over. Either way, the goal is the same: to get to a place where your brand gives you permission to show up as yourself. Where you're not performing someone else's version of professional. Where you can hand someone your card without wincing.

Where you're just you, and that's exactly on brand.

If your website has been making you wince for longer than you'd like to admit, that's information. Let's talk about what's actually going on and what it would feel like to fix it. Let's chat about it →