Finding Your Spark in the Messy Middle Part 1 | Beverly Cornell

Why does marketing feel so much heavier than it should… especially for thoughtful, capable entrepreneurs who deeply care about their work?

In Episode 1 of this special season of Marketing Magic & The Messy Middle, Beverly Cornell begins the journey through the revised edition of Marketing for Entrepreneurs by exploring the hidden disconnect many founders experience between the work they do and the way they talk about it.

This conversation is about more than strategy.

It is about the quiet friction that happens when your message stops sounding like you. The endless rewriting. The overthinking. The comparison spiral. The feeling that your marketing needs to sound more polished, elevated, or impressive in order to be taken seriously.

Beverly shares her own story of transitioning from military spouse freelancer to agency founder and how that experience shaped the Brand Spark framework inside Wickedly Branded. She unpacks why so many women entrepreneurs get stuck in “the spin” and how reconnecting with what has always been true about your work changes everything.

Read Marketing for Entrepreneurs!

Revised Edition
Shop on Amazon: https://a.co/d/02BEL4H7

Questions about the revised edition? https://a.co/d/06dtKQ2e

Original Edition
Shop on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0eBn7jHu

Questions about the original edition? https://a.co/d/06c6PDiA

Dare to be Wickedly Branded

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to the Wickedly Branded podcast. I am Beverly Cornell, I'm the founder of Wickedly Branded. And in this season, we are walking chapter by chapter through my revised book, Marketing for Entrepreneurs: A Quick Guide to Spark and Met Your Marketing. This first episode is about the place almost every single thoughtful, capable founder finds herself at some point in her business. Usually when you are transitioning from a freelancer into a full-fledged business, you sit down to work, your coffee is warm and the calendar is full, you got all kinds of meetings on your calendar, and the business is real. Clients exist and money is coming in. You're doing the thing, like you're doing what we're supposed to be doing. But what happens is even though you're successful by I feel like all measures of society, there's still something intangible that feels a little bit off. Like it doesn't feel comfortable. So you open your laptop and instead of moving forward, you scroll, you save posts, you reread your own website 5,000 times, you think about rewriting your bio again, and you tweak a headline and you open Canva and you close Kitva, and you tell yourself you just need a better hook or a stronger plan or a fresher angle. And underneath all of that movement, all of that like struggle to get the thing right, there is this deep, quieter feeling, this like sense of friction that's happening. Your work is deeply meaningful. What I have found is women specifically do a lot of relational work where they're solving the world's problems, right? Making people healthier, making people have more successful businesses. They are actually doing relational work that it matters human to human. So when you do meaningful work, marketing specifically can sometimes feel heavier than it should. And I have, I'm a marketer and I've lived that exact moment. Years ago, I remember sitting at my desk. I was, I think it was during a deployment and I was juggling motherhood, military life, cloud deadlines, and this constant mental load that comes with running a business inside of a real life. We have a lot that we think about as women and as founders. And from the outside, everything looks really solid because we have it together. We're doing, we're showing up, right? I had clients that I loved, I had projects that were moving, and I had revenue that was steady. But inside of that particular time, I felt like I was circling my own message, circling my own business. I wasn't really growing. I was actually getting more frustrated and almost to the point where I was resenting some of my clients. Now, I didn't start my business as an intentional entrepreneur. I am an accidental entrepreneur. I was working as a VP of marketing for a tech company, and I got married to my military husband, and I had to take my show on the road. It's really hard to find a high-level marketing position every three years. You have to know people and network and things like that. So I just started freelancing. And what I found was I was really good at articulating other people's brilliance in minutes. Like I could talk to them, understand, relate to them, and I could pull their language out of them like this like golden thread and weave it into something really strong and steady from a marketing perspective for the business. Oftentimes I was the first hire beyond maybe a CPA or an accountant that really got to understand what the business was like for their founders. I was the first one that they shared profits and the things that scared them and the things they were excited about. What I was finding was I was really able to capture them. But when I turned to my own work, I felt extremely lost and like almost there was this fog or this veil over seeing myself. I was not confused about what I did, but I was completely confused about how to say it in a way that felt like me. I wrote my about page more times than I could count. And I drafted posts and deleted them and I studied other agencies and I adjusted my tone to sound more polished and corporate. I wanted to be more elevated and more impressive. And every time I did that, my words drifted further from my actual voice. That experience shaped what later became the brand Spark experience inside of Wickedly Branded. Spark is the first movement in the brand magic method, and it has nothing to do with tactics or hacks or algorithms. Spark is what happens when you slow down long enough to hear yourself again under all the noise, all the to-doos, everything you have going on. Most founders assume they are stuck because they need more strategy, but what I see after decades in this work is something entirely different. The women who struggle most with marketing are really lacking the skills or the smart or even the effort. They're working hard. They have a full calendar, often a full household, and they are responsible for so many outcomes. They are very relationally in tune, they're very nurturing and understand people, and they care deeply about their work, about their lives. That level of care, though, creates such a deep complexity in their world. So over time, advice accumulates, platforms have multiplied, like social media platforms, for example, trends have rotated more times than I can think, and language shifts. Expectations have expanded, the pace of decision making has to sped up. And somewhere inside all of that movement, your original voice has gotten crowded. You still know your work, you still believe in it, you just feel slightly disconnected from the words that actually represent it. That is what I call the spin. It shows up as rewriting, overthinking, restarting, comparing, second-guessing what you already know. The tornado overwhelm is very loud. It rewards urgency, it rewards novelty, and it rewards constant reinvention. But Spark moves differently. Spark asks a quieter question. What has always been true about your work? When I sit in on our brand Spark experiences with clients, I listen longer than I speak. I pay attention to repetition. I notice that phrases they say off-handedly. I watch where their energy shifts when they describe a client that they love, the work that they love to do. There's always a moment when something actually clicks in place as they're talking where I feel like I see her shoulders drop, her voice becomes much more confident and steady, and she says, That's it. That's the spark. It's not something that is this all-knowing moment. It's just a feeling of recognition that happens that feels like home, truly. When client came to me convinced she needed like a complete rebrand, she had new offers and new programs and new ideas, and her website felt outdated to her. Her message felt very scattered. But as we talked, I noticed she kept returning to the same theme. She cared about helping women navigate transitions with steadiness and self-trust. Every story she shared circled back to those concepts. Her brand did not need to become something new and needed to name what had been there all along. When she left that session, and a few days later, when we gave her brand magic blueprint, she did not have a 20-page strategy deck. What she had was a sentence that sounded like her. She had language that matched the depth of work that she did, and she had really clear next steps direction for her business. And within weeks, her content felt so much easier to write because she was no longer trying to impress or be something that she wasn't caught in the competition trap of looking at everybody else's work. She was fully expressing herself. And that's where the difference lies. When your message reflects your lived experience, you stop feeling like you have to perform for the world and you start to actually speak from the soul. Spark is where identity and language come together and they reconnect. And there is a science between all this, underneath all of this. Even if we do not call it science in the moment, the human brain responds to familiarity. When something feels coherent, when your internal experience matches the external expression that you have, your nervous system settles. You start to make decisions faster. You have a really good yes and no filter. And you use fewer words, and you stop scanning for approval. The internal steadiness shows up in your marketing. Your audience can actually feel the shift. People often tell me they cannot explain why they trust someone's brand. What they are responding to for themselves is that the words match the work. The tone matches the person. The message stays consistent. And before we ever talk about platforms or posting frequency, we always come back to the spark. Who do you help? What are they experiencing right before they find you or need you? What shift happens after they work with you? What do they thank you for that you barely think about because it feels so deeply natural to you? These questions are really simple on purpose, but the impact is very deep and layered. Let me give you something tangible to think about with this. Think about the last client who felt like a perfect fit. You loved working with them. What was happening in her life when she reached out? What words did she use to describe what she was navigating? What did she say after working with you? If you build your messaging around that lived, actual lived arc, your content starts to carry a deep recognition. Recognition can create trust, and trust is amazing because it builds momentum for you and your business. Inside the Wikidly Branded, we call this narrative over niching. Instead of shrinking yourself into some demographic box, you anchor it into a lived moment, a season, a pressure point, a desire that has not been fully articulated. When you speak from that moment, your words land. You stop trying to be for everyone and you start resonating deeply with this shift can change everything for you. Spark also asks you to look at your own story, your lived experience. Not as like just something that you talk about in a bio, but as a deep orientation of who you are and how you serve. For me, military life has shaped how I think about sustainability. Constant movement has taught me that anything lasting has to travel well. Motherhood has shaped how I think about energy. You build what fits inside a real day, not some imaginary one on a flat piece of paper. And nearly three decades inside branding conversations shaped how I listen for patterns, the shimmering thread that runs through all of our clients. Spark is where we trace that thread. You begin to see how your past and your present work together and how your future direction is connected to all of that. And when you see that connection, you will stop chasing some kind of reinvention mythology that you think you have to have because you keep, you begin building from that knowing with continuity for the first time. If you are listening to this and recognizing yourself because you are in the spin right now, I want to invite you into something that will ground you, an intentional step outside of the spin. Open a document or grab a notebook or write in the workbook that you have downloaded from us. Sit quietly for 10 minutes before your next call. Write down three things your favorite clients consistently thank you for. Something you could do that's really easy is I've taken all of my testimonials, put them in a Google Doc, and I ran it through AI and asked AI to help you find those things. Write down one sentence that describes the moment before they hire you. Write down one belief that you hold about your industry that you rarely say out loud. One question we ask in the Brand Spark experience is what annoys you about your industry? How do you do things differently? That is what is the essence of your Spark work. It feels really simple and it's very core, but it can create a very deep orientation of who you are and remind you of why you started your business and who you are at your deepest level. And this orientation becomes a filter of yes and no decisions for your business. Does it really speak to what I'm trying to do? Yes or no? Yes, great, do it. No, don't do it. From there, strategy becomes way easier because it has something solid, this foundation of orientation to stand on. I feel like this orientation idea is incredibly important. If you start to build a house without a foundation that's strong, it will fall apart very quickly. So doing this work early and often, like recentering yourself, is incredibly important. If you are feeling what I'm talking about in this episode, if you're understanding that this is something you're struggling with, there is a whole chapter, the very first chapter of the Marketing for Entrepreneurs book that goes way deeper into this phase. And then the companion workbook actually walks you through these exact reflections in a way you can return to over time, a reminder of who you are. You can evolve and you can tweak and you can change as you grow into your business, but it will give you a center that you have never had before. You can grab the book on Amazon or you can download the PDFs and companion playbook through the link in the show notes. When you do, you'll also receive some weekly marketing magic from us and podcast episode updates. So we can keep this conversation going about what it's like to be a founder and to have to work on your marketing together. So if you're at a place where you want someone outside of your business to reflect back when you're circling, because sometimes if you're just in the trees, you're in the business so much. We really suggest a brand spark experience inside of Wickedly Branded. It's designed for exactly that moment. It is 90 minutes, it's focused listening, it's pattern recognition, it's direction you can use immediately. We are not here to reinvent you. We are uncovering what they has been there all along. It is as if you are Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It is if the moment where Glinda says to her, you've had the power all along to go home. This is your power. This is your time to choose what feels like home. So as we close this episode today, I want you to imagine something really simple. It's a normal weekday morning. You open your laptop, you know who you're speaking to, you know what you believe, and you know who you help, you help people move through in your business. You write a post in one sitting, you publish it, you move on with your day. And later a message comes in. I feel like you understand exactly where I am. That's not some kind of like serendipity or luck. That is your spark at work. So next week we move into chapter two and we talk all about why marketing feels heavier than it should and see and how seeing your work through your client's eyes changes the entire conversation. So until then, I want you to choose what fits your life and stay with it long enough to see what grows.