Every season of building a business is different, and this summer has been no exception. I’ve worked with eight different clients, booked out my design calendar through the end of the year, broken a four-year income plateau—with four months left in the year to go—and taken 30 whole workdays off just this summer.
And it feels pretty scary to say this, but I’m only $400 away from my first $10K month ever this September, so I’d be remiss not to invite you to book a Studio Session to help get me there.
I can’t help but want to pitch myself a little every time someone whose name I don’t know pops up on my HoneyBook.
Is this thing working?
It’s been a while since I’ve considered getting a “real” job.
This year has been my best yet in business.
And before you go thinking, “Too good to be true,” I’m going to tell you exactly what I think has made the biggest difference.
No, it’s not my super-cool website that I launched back in March (but it certainly does help).
Is it the offer ladder I spent a good year working on? Sure.
But none of that would have happened in the first place if it weren’t for the CCO Week.
A quick note on just what the CCO Week is, if you’re new around here:
A CCO Week—or Chief Creative Officer Week—is a dedicated 7–14-day stretch when you create focused time to work behind the brand.
Whether you can take the whole week off from client work or just create an hour of time a day, the CCO Week helps you focus on the real work while prioritizing your own creativity.
I do a CCO Week once a quarter for my brand, and I give the CCO Week tonssss of credit for helping me finish and launch what felt like a never-ending rebrand—a rebrand that has turned this into my best year in business yet.
You can get the CCO Week framework for free here and sign up to do it LIVE with me this fall, kicking off on October 5.
So, sure—there are lots of things I can credit for the balance I’ve finally found in my brand.
But the process is the secret—the CCO Week is just one piece of that
Because if you don’t know which direction your brand is headed in, you are essentially lost—mid-brand pivot and unsure which way to go.
What if you aren’t sure what direction your brand is headed in—or what you would even work on during a CCO Week?
This week’s newsletter is dedicated to helping you get clear on what to work on during your fall CCO Week.
Because if it’s the end of the year, it doesn’t really feel like the right time to put together a whole new brand strategy. You just need to get clear through the end of the year.
How to get clear (on WTF you are doing with your brand) through the end of the year
What to do if you aren’t clear on your brand’s direction—but you know you want to grow it.
You’re ready to start now. You don’t want to wait until the new year to create a brand strategy. But that is actually a good thing.
Q4 is an ideal time to gather data of all kinds, write, reflect, and experiment—so you know exactly where to take your brand in 2027.
This is something I’ve been talking about with many of my Studio Session clients this summer. They have an ambition to pivot their brands—to be seen differently.
But that’s all they really know.
How to do that? The best route to take? It’s all up for discussion.
A CCO Week can help you find the time to move your brand forward.
But sometimes, time isn’t the thing keeping you stuck.
Sometimes you’ve made the time—but you still can’t tell which idea makes the most sense or which direction to go in.
Every part of the brand feels connected to every other part. And the longer you stare at it, the harder it becomes to see what the actual problem is.
Case study one:
You’re ready to grow your brand + even hire some help…but you don’t quite know what growing your brand would mean—or what that help would do.
Behind the brand
This client booked back-to-back Studio Sessions: one in the spring and another in the summer. In the spring.
Summer, an esthetician, wanted to create an offer that included more of a seasonal experience, blending personalized skincare treatments with nervous-system support, guided inner work, and progressive care.
But by the time that offer had run its course once, she had different feelings about it. Executing the offer was taking up much more time than she wanted it to. And what really stood out was how much she wanted to make the experience she created in that offer part of everything she did within her brand.
She knew she wanted to grow her brand. But what exactly did growing her brand mean?
She was also ready to hire some help and had brought on a temporary VA to test it out. But once she did, she realized she didn’t know what to give them to work on —and she didn’t have the documentation or understanding of her own brand strategy to train someone else on it.
How she got clarity:
- She gathered the numbers behind her brand, including revenue and sales information, her most profitable services, product and online shop sales, average client spending, and repeat bookings.
- I reviewed her website and content analytics, including which pages were receiving traffic, how individual offer pages were converting, which blog posts were getting traffic, and where her website traffic was coming from.
- We reviewed email and platform performance, including the health of her Flodesk list, what people clicked on, and the overall effectiveness of her email marketing strategy. The newsletter emerged as her strongest nurture-and-conversion channel, while Instagram had gone quiet and wasn’t bringing enough new people into the brand.
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I also had Summer do some audience research into what clients were already buying and returning for, including which services people booked repeatedly, the products they reordered, what her highest-value clients cared about, how those clients described their experience, and the difference between the people who engaged with content about her new pivot and the people who were already paying for and booking her services.
- That helped us see that Summer’s paying clients wanted visible results, expert guidance, and restoration—but they didn’t necessarily want those things packaged as a separate spiritual offer.
Equally important to the numbers—I wanted to know about the person behind the brand
A big part of our clarity stage in Summers Studio Session was based on Summer’s own reflection. Once we did all that digging, I was able to help Summer:
- Define Brand Growth Missions: Set two to three specific, measurable goals for the year, such as a revenue target or online product sales goal.
- Plan Quarterly Strategies: Develop two to three simple, experimental strategies for the next 12 weeks—testing content, offers, systems, and ideas so the next decision is based on what actually happened, not what you think might happen.
But let’s pretend this is you
Maybe you’re interested in doing a CCO Week—but you’re still not sure what “brand growth” means for you. And if you blocked off an entire week to work behind the brand tomorrow, you aren’t totally sure what you would work on.
You don’t need to walk into the week with the answer. Getting clear can be the work.
Start by asking yourself:
- When I say I want to grow, what do I actually want more of: revenue, time, visibility, better-fit clients, repeat sales, creative freedom, or something else?
- What do I want growth to require less of?
- What is already working that I could deepen before I build something new?
- Where am I relying on feelings when I could gather evidence and data?
- Which part of the brand feels heavy because the strategy is wrong—and which part simply needs a better system?
- If I could make only one meaningful part of the brand stronger before the year ends, which one would make everything else easier, better, more fun, or more like me?
Then gather four kinds of information:
- The numbers: Revenue, sales by offer, repeat bookings, product sales, website traffic, email performance, and the content people actually respond to.
- The people: What paying clients buy, ask for, return for, and describe as most valuable—not just what gets likes.
- The energy: What you love doing, what you avoid, what takes too much time, and what you don’t want growth to cost you.
- The systems: Where work repeatedly gets stuck, what only you can do, and what could be documented, automated, or delegated.
You’re looking for the overlap between what is working, what people will pay for, and what you actually want to keep doing. That overlap is usually a much better place to build from than your newest idea.
It doesn't need to be the start of a new quarter to do a brand reset - you can click here to get instant access to the FREE CJ Brand Reset template that helps you gather and analyze the data behind your brand.
What that process looked like for Summer
For Summer, brand growth stopped meaning “add another offer.”
It became two clearer missions: increase annual revenue by helping existing clients invest more deeply in their skincare journey, and build the systems that would allow the business to grow without her workload growing at the same rate.
Then we turned the rest of the year into three experiments:
- Create content about blending personalized skincare treatments with nervous-system support, guided inner work, and progressive care—a.k.a. all the things that make working with her different.
- Go deeper on the services already making money by optimizing the landing pages and content connected to her most profitable ProCell service—as well as the related content already receiving the most traffic on her blog.
- Build a system for her content and client experiences. Yes, I converted Summer to Notion—a place where she could easily create online resources for her ProCell clients and plan and create her content in one place.
Going into the new year, these changes and strategies would give Summer lots of new data to work with so she could plan her best year yet in 2027. Plus, if she decided to do a fall CCO Week, she would already have the filters in place to know what was worth her time, what to work on, what she was working toward, and what was going to make the biggest impact. She already knew what to work on once she had the time to work on her brand.
