I did what I set out to do, what I wanted to do.
I updated all of the on page SEO on my site - and I launched a blog.
And did so LIVE, during my Summer CCO week with some of you!
Each day - I wrote and sent an email with some writing/thinking prompts to marinate on during your CCO week (I’m adding all these to the Summer CCO Week Journal when I wrap up here). Some of the themes that came up were:
1. It's never going to be perfect (and that's the point)
You want the time you have to work on your brand to be too perfect. The right timing, a clear-enough schedule, the office set up just so — you'll make any excuse there is. You daydream about the Airbnb, the lake house, the cleared calendar… and then life goes life-ing and the perfectly laid plan goes to shit. It never is perfect. This week sure wasn't.
The lesson: Stop chasing ideal conditions and just make the best of the time you've got.
2. No one else can give you clarity
You can throw money at it — buy the course, hire the consultant, "just effing do it for me," or wonder if AI should be able to do it for you. But no robot is going to fix that. You can absolutely pay someone to help you find clarity (that's literally what I do with you inside a Studio Session), but you still have to go looking.
The lesson: You still have to do the work and make the time. That's the hardest part of running a brand.
3. One day a week is never enough
One day a week has never been enough for you to feel like you're actually making progress — and it's too easy to fill with tasks that feel more pressing than your own brand. Just when you get the gears turning in one direction, you have to stop and switch back to client work. That's the whole reason DIYing rebrands and websites takes so long — you were only ever chipping away at it.
The lesson: A CCO Week is about creating focus by going deep on one big project instead of scattering yourself across a bunch of unrelated tasks.
4. Find your pockets
Find the times of day and the conditions you know you work best in — and protect them, especially when you've got client and family stuff to balance. Your creativity is tied to your conditions.
The lesson: There's no perfect or overnight fix, but the more you understand your own creative process, the more you can beg, borrow, and steal to build not perfect but this'll work conditions.
5. CCO, not CEO
The word "executive" gives you a weird, swirly spaghetti feeling in your stomach. You never wanted to be a CEO in a blazer filming Reels — you wanted to be a creative in camo sweats on your second cup of coffee.
The lesson: If you're still solo, you're responsible for all those Chief Creative Officer roles anyway — the vision, the brand, the content, the whole creative direction — often the rest of the C-suite too, all inside one brain.
6. A slow summer, on purpose
Maybe Q3 is going to be a slow, slow season behind the brand — because life is taking up space in the best way possible. When you're off the clock in summer, you want to be off — but that's not stepping away from your brand, it's building healthier boundaries around it.
The lesson: You plan life first: block your time off, then client work, then carve out the CCO Week so your own brand doesn't get pushed to the back burner until fall.
7. You have to choose your seeds
You love the plan — the visualizing, the strategy, adapting as you go. Sure, you can chaos garden and throw seeds around to see what sticks, but if you want something you can depend on, and track you need a plan. Growing a brand is the same: "I want to grow my brand" is like "I want to grow a garden." But what kind? What plants? What conditions? When do you plant, and when do you harvest?
The lesson: You still have to narrow it down and decide.
8. Define what "grow my brand" actually means
Everyone says they want to grow their brand — but what does that even mean to you? Saying you want to do something without knowing what it looks like, how it'll happen, or in what capacity is the difference between saying you'll do the thing and actually doing the damn thing.
The lesson: There are a gazillion ways to grow (SEO, IG, email, blogging, a new offer, walking down the street in a hot dog costume) — and you can't do them all, so you make it concrete.
9. Showing up beats going big
After a year of dipping my toe in the idea of a live CCO Week, I finally did it — I didn't have 100 people. I didn't do a big launch, and while I could have been in my stories every day hustling for more sign-ups… that would've defeated the whole purpose: making the time to do the work behind the brand. Without the people who joined, I’d have thrown in the towel — doing it with other people helped me want to show up and keep at it, even when it wasn’t perfect. And I did. And now I've got a whole big chunk of behind-the-scenes work for my brand done.
But there’s a 10th point I want to talk about.
10. Doing the real work.
For a while now, “the real work happens behind the brand” has been the slogan for my newsletter.
But it wasn’t till someone said something in the group chat that I realized - I don’t know if I’ve really ever defined what the real work is.
Or if it is even my job to.
Let me explain.
I’ve spent a lot of my career worrying about the “real” work, the “good” work - the tasks that are going to “move the needle forward”.
I’ve read books, taken workshops, listened to podcasts.
And all of that over-optimization really did - was eliminate the time it takes to be creative, to develop your own ideas and processes.
Aka. The thing that is going to make you superpowered in whatever the world has next for us.
Regardless or not of if you want to use AI.
After a lot of trial and error, I can confidently say that the real work, the best work, comes from giving yourself time to play. To experiment.
For lack of a better term - to fuck around and find out.
But there’s a catch 22.
That work can often feel long, arduous, like you aren’t actually doing anything at all.
And there is a thin line between researching, brainstorming, writing, and never taking any action at all.
So how do we find that sweet spot?
Just enough wiggle room to play, let the idea unfold, see what it wants to become before having to have a box to check off (although if you are like me you will make research and write, and brainstorm and plan their own tasks so you can check them off).
I wish that I had a perfect answer.
A perfect planner, formula, prompt for Claude.
But I don’t.
Here’s what I do know.
It can be really hard to play, to give yourself time to play around, to work on something and come back to it - to go down a rabbit hole you want to go down.
When you only have one day a week to work on your brand
Or one day that you batch all your content.
Having a longer stretch of time - 3, 4, 5 days to keep working on one big thing.
That’s where you can find some time to go down a rabbit hole, figure something out, and end up actually saving yourself time in the long run.
Going down a rabbit hole on a day I “should” have been working on something else adjacent is what made it so that I published 6 finished blogs instead of just 3 for my blog launch (which was my goal at the start of the week).
Spending three hours in my backyard with a notebook, and my laptop is what helped me to figure out I wanted to rebrand Cedar June and reposition my offers a couple of years back now.
Taking the time to do a quarterly reset is what has helped me to grow my brand - even though I haven’t been doing huge launches (and life has been someone feeling crazier than usual in the meantime).
Knowing what growing my brand even means to me (a revenue goal for the year, a subscriber goal, and organic traffic to my site) took time. Time to go down the rabbit hole, crunch numbers, write on paper and cross things out and draw arrows and take the time to set goals for the season of business ive been in this year.
That is where all the good stuff happens.
The best stuff really.
Behind the brand.
So - why not tell all of you what I’ve been doing with the CCO week gals all week long.
Give you a prompt.
Whether you mull it over in the shower, your morning pages, or on a walk.
What do you consider the “real” work behind the brand? What is your relationship with that “real” work? Looking back - what were you doing when the best stuff came out?
And how can you make more time for that?
If you want to get the full week of prompts, you can still join The Summer CCO Week!
The giveaway is open through the end of July - and all of the content is going to be up for the rest of the summer - so you can schedule your own CCO week whenever you want.
Then come October - i’ll be doing another LIVE CCO Week from October 13th - 20th - you can click here to sign up for free now.
Oh yeah - and now there’s a Cedar June Blog.
It’s called Note to Self, and it’s all about the fact that building a brand is a lot of work — but it doesn't have to be so complicated. Inside you’ll find Step-by-step guides, platform breakdowns, and client case studies that decode the fluffy marketing terms and show you what actually grows your business.
There are six blogs up on my site for you to peruse at your pleasure including:
And more to come/ in the works.
