— I am a marketing and brand strategist based in the United States in Arkansas. I work with clients all over the US and even around the world, helping high-integrity brands market their business and build a life‑giving brand. Usually, I work with personal brands but sometimes with B2B and B2C brands, making sure that they build a life‑giving brand, not a business that dominates their life or takes over. And I enjoy doing it.

— I built my first website way back in 2001. I learned how to do that by hand. And so I would just code the HTML back in. Since then, I’ve used about every platform there is under the sun. So really before I discovered Tilda, the challenge for me was usually not me building the website, it’s when I turned it over to the client. Can they manage the website themselves? Can it grow with their business? Can they add to it?

And that usually does not excite a client to say, "When I need to make a change, every time I have to call a designer or developer and get in there and mess with it."

Tilda is a platform that’s powerful enough and simple enough that I can show someone else how to build on their own. And now I’m much more of a strategist and consultant. I’m not usually doing website design for people day in and day out. That’s a rare client that I will still do that for. My part is that I essentially create a template for them, and just let them continue with it.

It’s pretty easy to add entirely new pages or sections to their websites. My clients don’t have to call me back, and if they do need help, I usually like putting a client—particularly a personal brand or small business client—on a platform where there is built-in support. That’s different from something like WordPress, which is free and you have to go find a host, but there’s no WordPress hotline to call when you run into a problem.

And for those reasons, I love Tilda. Not only is it easy for me to create and build, and it gives me quite a bit of power, but it really is nice when I turn it over to the client and I feel good that they’re going to be able to use it and grow and develop with it.

And what I found for most businesses, they’ve got great ideas, but there’s something about creating a website that forces all of those decisions that you have thought about: Whether that’s the final name of your product, how many products, what’s the price going to be, what’s the purpose of your business, etc. For all of those decisions, a website forces you to make a choice right now. And Tilda does a great job of helping so that I can do the strategy piece, and then I can really help the client build the site on their own.

Everybody knows they need a website, but they don’t know what the website’s supposed to be doing for them or for their business. So that’s usually where I’m spending most of my time developing the strategy side of the brand, the marketing that goes with it. The website is just the easy thing that gets them to pick the phone up. Cause they all know they need that. So that’s how I transitioned from designer to strategist.

— Most of the clients that would relate to Tilda that would come to me would be in the personal branding space: Consultants, coaches, speakers, trainers, authors, or podcasters.

And that’s what I built my DIY course around—how you design your personal brand and business website. I’ve already designed the templates, and by the time they’re done with the course, they have a website I would’ve probably designed for them. Anyway, the benefit is they now know how to use Tilda and they know how to use the website platform, which never happens.

I remember, a client of mine had a speaking engagement, and we got the website launched before the event so that she was able to share it at the event and she’s getting leads for her business two days later! So she doesn’t have a site, then two days later, she has a site, speaks in an event, and is already accepting leads because there’s not a bunch of other stuff that she has to deal with. The website part was easy, so she was off and running.

— Many business owners can relate to the situation when you are like, "Oh, I thought this was great, but now it just consumes me." It shouldn’t eat you alive. And it doesn't have to be a battle with the customer to try to get money out of them. I can give life to the person running the business, and it can give life to the people that your business serves, not take advantage of them.

I can help someone who's a consultant, coach, or speaker grow their business. But if growing that business makes them less of a person, less of a spouse, or the worst parent, I'm not interested in helping them. Success is the worst thing I can give them because marketing and brand strategy is just one way for me to get into a relationship to hopefully help them grow a business that's life‑giving, that doesn't eat you alive.