Elevated with Brandy Lawson

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Have you ever done that annoying exercise where you have to instruct someone else how to make a peanut butter & jelly sandwich? It’s a reliable way to frustrate people. Okay, so that’s not the actual point of the exercise. But you already know the point of the experiment here - no one successfully communicates to the other person all the necessary information t...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Marketing is the art & science of attracting people to buy our stuff. Seems pretty straightforward on the surface, but anyone that’s tried will tell you it is not that simple in practice. When you are part of a growing company - ( and “growing” always means marketing needs to get turned WAY up), it’s just not possible to do everything yourself. More often than...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Hiring experts and getting the results you want can be a challenge. There are lots of reasons we need expertise - to accelerate knowledge, to show us what we don’t know, or just to get something handled (Personally, I’m so grateful I could hire someone to replace a failed air conditioning unit). But we’ve also worked with experts where things didn’t go well. More c...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. If you haven’t heard, Clubhouse is the newest social media darling to burst onto the scene. And it's causing a lot of business owners heartburn. Should they be on it? How to use it? What to do with it because it is different . And at the same time Facebook, the old standard, seems to be a hot dumpster fire mess. So, what do you do? Let's work through the...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. May Day, May Day - the Core Web Vitals are coming… Here’s the news: On May 1, 2021, Google will start factoring in Core Web Vitals as part of how Google decides what pages show up wherein search results. And as my friend, Stacey might say - “those are all words and all English, but I don’t know what you are saying.” We’re going to translate & demystify Core Web...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. The idea of paying for leads is a hard one to swallow when you start a business, but once you have some cash flow seems an easy way to acquire new customers. But only if you can turn those eyeballs into email addresses and those email addresses into money in your bank account.  In this episode I’ll reveal two Google Analytics reports I implore you to look at before...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Growing a business is nerve-racking, anxiety-inducing, and stressful. In my experience, we entrepreneurs have a knack for making it even more anxiety-inducing and stressful than it needs to be. And about the time that we are “in it” we are reaching for anything that looks like a life preserver to help us feel like we can keep swimming. In this episode of Leverage Y...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Growth is messy. It just is. As much as we (and I’m clearly projecting here) want to make it planned, predictable and an exponential curve up & to the right, that isn’t reality.  There are many quotable insights from history’s greatest military minds on the value of planning and the fact that it doesn’t hold up as soon as battle starts - Churchill, Eisenhower,...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Not sure where to even start with Google Analytics? There’s a lot of information in there, but it’s not really clear what matters and what’s important for your business. Let’s dig into this, and why you might not want to climb this mountain all by yourself in this episode of Leverage Your Spark. 📋 Get the AI Note-Taking Setup Guide — stop relying on memory and sta...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. We business owners have plenty of ideas. I don’t know about you, but I can’t even stand in line at a coffee shop without having thoughts about improvements that could be made to the experience. I think that’s just the nature of the entrepreneurial brain (maybe it’s just me)? So why in tarnation do businesses hire metrics consultants? Who needs more ideas about metr...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Do you sprint to the mailbox and excitedly tear open your retirement account statement when it arrives every quarter? No?  What about regularly checking in on the status of your other assets - equity in your home, real estate holdings? Still no? You’re not alone, most of us don’t. But why?  Doesn’t it seem like we’d be really interested and motivated to know how to...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. I recently did a training for a group of business owners on Tiny Tech Hacks. It’s a training that shares my framework for making tech decisions and my absolute “must have” tech tools. During the Q&A one of the ladies in the group asked me about tech trends. It was a great question, but not because I had trends I wanted to share. Afterwards she thanked me and sa...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Anyone remember having to paw through vast filing cabinets to find documents or information when you needed it? Specifically I can remember doing this for tax returns and at the library for some college assignments. When I asked my dad why he has decades worth of records in the storage space above the garage, he cited the one time my aunt needed proof of employment...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. I clearly remember a sign on an executive’s desk in a tiny 12 person company I worked for. It said “ Nothing happens until someone sells something.” Obviously he was a sales exec, but there was definitely truth in the statement. The same kind of statement is true about data: Nothing better happens until you use your data. I know very few people get as fired up abou...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. I know RuPaul was talking about models when he said “You Better Work!” but really, he should have been talking about data. I know lots of businesses that have gone to the effort to collect data, but then fail to use it. That’s like taking the time to get the hair & makeup done, getting in the outfit and then not walking the runway. In this episode you are getti...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. I guess this episode might have been more appropriately titled: Why you should give a crap about this stuff that you don’t think you care about.  On the surface, no one sees just how sexy data is from your website. It's so much easier to talk about design, fancy effects, and what you “like” rather than what the business goals are and what needs to happen to ge...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. If you run a business, I think it is a MUST to have a Biz BFF. If you’re new to the term, a Biz BFF is a friend that cares more about your business than your feelings. So they’re incredibly valuable to have in your support system. And, I think, essential for growing a business.  I’m beyond thrilled to have my Biz BFF Stacey Harris as my first guest. Stacey is found...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. You aren’t wrong if you expect me to be giddy with excitement about using technology for metrics. You might be surprised though that I’m actually not an advocate of getting super automated and fancy. This surprise and more ahead in this episode of Leverage Your Spark. 📋 Get the AI Note-Taking Setup Guide — stop relying on memory and start building a searchable rec...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. The saying goes: The numbers don’t lie. There’s also a quote popularized by Mark Twain that says: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Hmmm… so which is it? Well, I think it is all in how you approach it. Let’s get into numbers vs. insights in this episode of Leverage Your Spark. 📋 Get the AI Note-Taking Setup Guide — stop relying on...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. No one likes being judged. Which is the reason I think that a lot of businesses end up skipping or avoiding metrics. But, hear me out here… metrics are not judgements! Sure, most of the time they get treated like grades, but that’s all wrong. Metrics are the landmarks and trail markers on your treasure map to success. If you aren’t checking them, you’re going to ha...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. When presented with a bunch of options, it's completely normal to be overwhelmed. (if you don’t get overwhelmed, we need to talk - I want to know your secret). I’ve found the best way to combat overwhelm is to figure out my criteria for what’s important, so I can get right to the information that matters. And that’s what we’re digging into for your website in...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Are you hesitant to send out calendar invites or don't prefer to share drive links, because they don't actually have your business email address on them? That's NOT what email is for!  This is the final episode in our series examining the idea that we're using (and misusing) email for far too many things.  The reason this happens is obvious, ema...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Do your monthly reports arrive in your inbox? That's NOT what email is for!.  This is the third episode in our series examining the idea that we're using email for far too many things.  And I get it - email is the defacto online business communication. But that’s no reason to let it continue. In this episode we’re taking a look at this potential issue thr...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Are you keeping your to-do list in your inbox? That's NOT what email is for!.  This is the second episode in our series examining the idea that we're using email for far too many things. (that is - that’s NOT what email is for) It is understandable how we got here - email is the default way to conduct business communications online. But that’s no excuse f...

Get in Touch! Send us a message. Do your website form submissions come to your email? That's not what email is for! This is the first episode in our series examining the idea that we're using email for far too many things. [what is email for] - asynchronous exchange of messages [history of email] In the beginning, there was only email. Really - the first use of the “internet” was an emai...