Michelle Warner shares a powerful realisation: the missing link wasn’t a better strategy, but a clearer brand voice.
Ever feel like you’re saying all the right things in your business—but it still doesn’t sound like you? Michelle Warner shares a powerful realisation: the missing link wasn’t a better strategy, but a clearer brand voice. After years of wrestling with traditional branding methods, she finally cracked the code with the help of Justin Blackman, discovering not just how she communicates, but why it hadn’t worked before.
By identifying her unique voice and setting boundaries around it—like realizing she’s the “general manager,” not the coach—Michelle unlocked clarity, confidence, and a whole new way to connect with her audience. It’s a reminder that sometimes the breakthrough isn’t a new plan, but a better understanding of how we show up.
Resources
Justin Blackman - Brand Voice Expert
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist. And in the 15 years that I've done this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere: business owners are falling into the trap of centring strategies first, when they need to be centring sequence.
Because the reality is, the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy.
So, on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
In every episode of this show, you know that I tackle a real question I'm hearing from real entrepreneurs. Well, this week, I am fulfilling that promise in another way, and I want to share with you an experience that I recently had over a question I have been struggling with in my business for years.
And I think it's going to shed some light on something many of you may also be thinking about, struggling with, or specifically about a solution that you may not realise exists—or you don't have the vocabulary to perfectly describe. Because until recently, I think I knew this existed, but I didn't really have any idea what it was. Definitely did not have the vocabulary to describe it.
And so I wanted to surface that for you, because, you know what? It was a missing step in my own sequence.
What am I talking about? Here's what I'm talking about.
Actually, before I get into this, I want to be very clear that I am going to be talking about an experience I had with a service and a service provider that I received, and I'm a massive fan of him. But this is not an ad. I don't have any financial stake in this.
It was simply so profound that I wanted to share it with you. That's it. I wanted to share it with you because, again, it filled in a huge missing step in my own sequence of events.
It's just something that—it's a term I had vaguely heard thrown around. I just wasn't familiar with it. So, I wanted to surface it to all of you, in case you were the same way.
What I'm talking about is brand voice—and specifically, where that fits within a branding process. Because let me tell you about my experience with branding over the years. Obviously, everyone's mileage is going to vary here.
And unlike most episodes, I'm not sharing here like a business process that I have developed. Instead, again, I'm describing my personal experience with something—and, in this case, my personal experiences wrestling with my own branding.
So, let's back up. I've done traditional branding exercises before. I've worked with branding folks who were wonderful and experienced and professional.
But, if I'm being totally honest, they've all fallen kind of flat for me. You know, mission, vision, values exercises—branding exercises—they haven't connected with my brain. And, you know, if you're someone who has worked with me individually or through my Relationship Funnel Bootcamp, you will be familiar with something that has helped me before with my own branding.
And that's thinking about it in terms of competitive differentiation. To me, that's my brain kind of, you know, branding light. But traditional branding—it just hasn't worked.
And that, again, does not mean that it's not something that is a really important tool for a lot of people, and that there are wonderful professionals doing it who know what they're doing. Some of them are my colleagues—I refer to people.
It just hasn't connected with my brain. So, before I get pushback from folks who, again, are wildly talented branding professionals—or those of you who may be out there who have had great experiences—I see you. I believe you.
I get it. I refer folks to branding. It is just something that my brain has really struggled to connect with.
And that has left me with a real hole in my sequence. Because I know what I stand for, right? So, I guess I do kind of know my mission and vision and values—I just think my brain defines that a little differently.
I know that I stand for Sequence Over Strategy, a commitment to telling the truth—which might sound obvious, but that goes a little deeper for me.
As part of that commitment to truth: surfacing options and best next decisions that a business owner needs to make, and surfacing and understanding the consequences of each of those decision paths, so that they can kind of go confidently in the direction they need to go. I believe in being kind, but I'm also very direct.
Because of my commitment to the truth and my commitment to surfacing options, I'm not going to beat around the bush about those things—and a lot of other things.
As my good friend and colleague, Jay Akunzo, would say—who helped me come up with some of these—like, I know my premise, and that is critically important.
However, there's a big step in between knowing what you stand for—and knowing that, you know, "Oh, I stand for Sequence Over Strategy"—and knowing how to communicate it.
Because here's what happens for me: when I go to put some of these things on paper, when I go to talk through something with you, I don't always know what to write or how to express it.
It tends to be easier when I talk it through. That's why I love this podcast. But even then, sometimes I second-guess myself.
And the reason I'm second-guessing myself isn't because I'm not confident in what I'm sharing or how I'm thinking through something—but it's because the topics I talk about, like, it's not all rainbows and butterflies over here, right? I'm committed to being kind and honest. And to me, being kind and honest means being really real.
And sometimes that means acknowledging unpleasant truths that people would prefer not to be true, right? Or suggesting strategies that might be most effective and the best option, but they can be a little intimidating to implement, right?
I spend a lot of time talking to people about relationship marketing. Well, relationship marketing can be intimidating. There are other humans involved. You have to go out and do things. You can't just check things off a to-do list.
I talk to a lot of my clients about having to rebuild their audiences because their business has outgrown them. I talk to my clients about the fact that their audience is no longer in alignment with their product.
And so they have to pick one or the other. And these are not fun conversations to have—and to have to confront somebody with—when they're just hoping for a little bit of an easier solution.
And so, when I'm communicating these things—or when I'm teaching all of you kind of sequence over strategy, and the order in which to think about things in the business—I do worry that I come off as cold or heartless or uncaring.
Because I know I can definitely be sarcastic and have some dark and dry humour, and that I'm too direct sometimes because I just say what I see.
And I do that for a reason. I mean, I happen to believe that there's a lot of clarity to that when we're just really direct. But I also know that that's not always the way people like to receive information.
And so, while I've always ploughed ahead, it's not always been easy or comfortable. And I constantly worry that I'm delivering something too harshly or I'm not helping as much as I could.
We all have these things, right? I'm just not enough in some way.
Like I said, to me, truth and options equal clarity and freedom. They feel like a relief to me.
So in my brain, when I am sharing these options—even if they might be unpleasant ones—that feels like a huge relief to me. And from your feedback, I believe it feels like a huge relief to most of you.
But I also worry that sometimes it can come off, again, a little too harshly. Like, did I just say in passing that you need to trash five years of audience-building work?
Right? That's not a fun thing to hear. And so, I just worry about how I communicate these things.
So, long story short: enter a now colleague and friend, Justin Blackman, and his brand voice work. I'm going to link to Justin in the show notes—you can check it all out.
But suffice to say, I think he's wildly talented at doing exactly what I needed, but I didn’t know I needed. And that is helping people find their brand voice.
And it turns out, he's done this for numerous famous names that you've probably heard of in this world—including Todd Herman, Amy Porterfield, like you name it.
He's probably built them something he calls a voice style guide that larger businesses can use to, like, pass off to their copywriters so that the copywriters can nail the voice of the business really quickly.
And so, this is familiar to me, right? I understand brand style guides where you have fonts and colours and how the brand is presented that you would pass off to a graphic designer or a web designer so that they could present your materials in the best way.
I understand that. I'd heard of it. But I wasn't as familiar with a brand voice guide.
And I certainly did not understand how it could help me in an individual situation, where I don't have a team of copywriters I need to pass this off to.
I didn’t understand that having a brand voice guide could actually help me communicate, because I had never really thought about it. I didn’t know it was a thing.
But this is what Justin does. He helps entrepreneurs find their voice—and, more importantly, and this blew my mind when it happened (and I'm going to share it all with you)—find the boundaries around your voice.
Like, I love myself some boundaries. I did not know that voice boundaries were a thing.
Seems obvious now—and all of you may be laughing at me, thinking, “Michelle, this is the most obvious thing in the world.” I never thought about it.
So, I want to share my work—the work that Justin and I did together—and kind of the outcome that I experienced.
In case, again, if this resonates with you, like, go Google brand voice. Go look up Justin’s work. Go look up any other professional who’s doing this.
If you are also feeling kind of this chasm and this missing step in your business between knowing what you stand for, but maybe struggling in the day-to-day and second-guessing how that actually comes out of your mouth—whether that be on paper or in a podcast.
So, here's what Justin and I did. He has a service where you sit down with him for two hours. All it takes is two hours—this blew my mind.
And you start with 140 words. And these are different words like “kind,” “intimate,” you know, “truthful”—all the different types of words that could describe how you might communicate.
And there's 140 of them. And you just sit down and start going through them one by one and sorting them into a few categories.
I'm not going to remember all the categories right now, but there's a category that this is a top four-to-nine word for you. There's a category that this is an important word to you.
There is a category that this is a “hell no” word to you—I used a lot of that.
There’s also a category that this is a “Michelle word,” but not a brand word. That came in important.
And you just go through these words. And I didn’t think about them for too long. I tried to go off my gut instinct, because that tends to work well for me—what category did they go into?
But sometimes we had words that sounded kind of similar. And so, we would get Google out and see what the different definitions were and make sure we were really diving into the specifics of all these different words and categorising them.
Then it's really interesting—as you get to the end of that process, you go back and edit it a little bit. And then he has actually put a weight on each word so that, in the spreadsheet, it spits out an archetype that you might be.
And this was familiar to me, right? We've probably all heard some of these before.
Like, maybe you show up as the interviewer, where the way that you provide value is you go out and reach out to other smart people and you interview them so that you can share their insights with the audience.
Or maybe you're an expert—and these aren’t the exact words Justin used, I’m using the words that I typically hear for archetypes—you’re the expert, where you do kind of show up as an academic and you share your things.
Or you're the friend at the bar who just has some friendly advice for folks.
I was familiar with all of those and had gone through some of those exercises. But, again, I didn't really understand how to translate that.
Like, I don't even remember what these things would spit out for me in terms of what archetype I was.
But let's say it spit out that I should be the interviewer. I was like, “OK, so I should go interview people and then write about that?”
Like, it didn’t get me to any kind of resolution that truly made sense to me.
But Justin has—in the way his process (and I’m assuming the way other professionals do this) is—they have, you know, a broader lens of archetypes. And also, they’re not going to pigeonhole you into one of these archetypes.
They're going to use these as a starting place.
So, after we sorted these 140 words, it kind of spit out a general archetype that I might be.
And we were debating, you know, where in here, in between a couple, might I land?
But as Justin and I were having that conversation—and he knew my background through that conversation, so he knew that I had a background working in sports and that I would always be up for a sports analogy—he looked at me in the middle of that conversation and he just said, “Oh, you would trade the quarterback if you had to.”
And I kind of looked at him, I was like, “What? What are we talking about?”
And he expanded.
Because, see, as the sorted words—as we look through those—there were some themes that came up.
Number one: I care very, very deeply that you win. Like, very deeply.
And if I’ve ever responded to an email from you—like, if you reached out to me, telling me that you got a win from something that I shared on this podcast—I may have replied to you that I screamed and pumped my fist at the desk out of excitement in reading that email.
And if I have ever replied that way, I was not lying. I do that all the time.
When I get emails from people who have, you know, gotten a win or gotten an “aha” from some of my work, I audibly cheer—to the point my neighbours have asked about it before during the summer when the windows were open.
But other things are also true...
But other things are also true. You have probably also heard me say over and over again that I'm a strategist and a consultant, and not a coach. I say that until I am blue in the face, but I say it because, A, I want to be very clear about that, but also because it comes from a place of a lot of uncertainty for me.
Namely, I know that I'm absolutely fantastic at partnering with you, seeing what you want, building the path to get you there, having difficult conversations, surfacing those difficult decisions, getting you in the right sequence, having difficult conversations if they need to be had, helping you figure out what the answers to those things are, and getting you resourced to then go do it.
So, I am your person if you are lost and you're confused and you don't know where to start and how to fix things, and you need someone to just get in there, diagnose what you need—even if it's unpleasant—and then help you build up the plan to get it.
But I am not the person who is great at then maybe holding your hand and being there every step of the way as you implement. And even saying that last part out loud makes me uncomfortable, because I've always felt guilty about that.
And that I should be that person—to hold the hand and be there every step of the way. Kind of makes me feel like people might think I don't believe in my plan if I just set you up for success and then make sure somebody else is helping you, if you need that accountability.
I know that there's incredible power in what I do, but I always felt like, “Gosh, you know, I want to make sure that they know I’m not a coach,” because I looked at that as something that was a fault, that I couldn't bring to the table.
But let me tell you, when Justin said, “Oh, you would trade the quarterback,” I wasn't sure where he was going with that, but my gut connected to it immediately. I was like, “Yeah, I would trade the quarterback.”
And so he continued, and he said, “You're the general manager.”
And if any of you know the structure of a sports team—right, I'm oversimplifying this—but there's an owner at the very top, and then there's a general manager who runs the team and makes all the decisions about the roster and gets all of the right ingredients in place.
And then there's a coach that he passes those ingredients—that team—off to, and says, “I gave you what you need. Go for it.”
So, he said, “You're the general manager. You care very passionately that your team—aka my clients—are set up to have what they need to succeed. You're very much in that game with them, right? And even at the top of that decision-making tree with them. But then, once they have the pieces, you are going to hand them off to the coach on the field to see it come to fruition. You are going to put together the team and the resources.”
Even when putting that together is hard—because I’m going to surface and make the hard decisions. Like, I'm okay with realising, you know, in a football scenario, there's a salary cap problem with the quarterback.
And if it's the right decision, I'm going to go trade the quarterback.
If it's for the better of the team—aka I'm okay having a really hard and surfacing a really hard conversation with you—if it's for the betterment of your business, then I’m going to do that. Even if it rips out my soul to do it.
Because I don't want to trade the quarterback. He's always been good to the team. He's always been an asset.
But right now, what the team needs is not the quarterback.
So, I'm going to make that right decision.
And when he was explaining all that, my jaw just dropped. I was like, “Justin, you absolutely nailed this,” because that is exactly what I do for you.
I will kindly but directly raise those questions and decisions that need surfacing. Do you need to trade your quarterback, right?
AKA, do you need to rebuild your audience? Do you need to rebuild your network? Do you need to restructure your product mix?
I am going to ask you those questions.
You may come hoping that I'm going to give you a simple, overnight answer.
But my answer actually may need to be: we need to rebuild.
AKA, like, we need to trade the quarterback and start over here.
And it might rip out both of our souls, because that's the harder and more uncomfortable path.
And you might have a lot invested—if we're talking about rebuilding an audience, you might love your audience, but they no longer fit.
Same way we might love our quarterback, but he no longer fits.
So, if it's the right path, we're going to know how to do it.
And we're going to make that right decision and build the path going forward, even though it might rip out both of our souls a little bit.
And so once I understood that, once I all of a sudden understood like, “Oh, I'm the general manager,” well, now I immediately had boundaries in how I communicate, right?
I no longer have to stress that I'm coming off harsh, or I'm not playing the coach role, or that I'm not taking care of the field—because I know that's not my job.
My job is to be the general manager for all of you.
And I know how to do that. And I'm really, really, really good at it.
And so this has been a long story, but I'm going to wrap up here.
So, the point of what I'm trying to share is that, as I said at the beginning, I'm a huge lover of boundaries. But even I did not know that boundaries were a thing in a brand voice.
And now that I do, I've just instantly crossed this chasm, because now I have these instant boundaries in my head. When I go to write something down on a piece of paper, I can just take on the persona, right?
I can just take on the persona, being like, “Oh, I will put on my general manager's hat right now,” and off we go.
And I just love having that feeling that I can just dip into that personality.
And when I do that, I know exactly how to communicate and exactly how not to communicate—and what not to worry about.
And that, again, has been a really long time coming, because all those boundaries, all those lines, have always been blurred. I didn't know how to express it, but I was always vacillating between being the owner, the GM, the coach, and even the players sometimes.
And now I'm just like, “Oh, I'm the GM. That's my voice guide. That’s how I communicate.”
And having that clarity, that again started with just sitting down and sorting 140 words into different categories—this just blew my mind, that in the course of two hours, we could go from sorting a random set of words into this profound experience.
I thought, how interesting, because again, I’ve always known what I stood for.
And then holding the sequence, because now, even though I know what I stand for, how do I communicate that? Lots of blurry lines there.
Now that I filled in that gap and I know that I communicate as the GM—no blurry lines. Just instant clarity and instantly knowing how exactly we go through that, and I go through that, and I process those communications.
And so I wanted to share this, again, because I hear a lot about, “How do I write the best copy? How do I hire a copywriter? How do I do this? How do I do that? Or what's my brand?”
And those are all good and interesting questions. But if you haven't grappled with this middle step, you might be like me and you might have a big missing hole.
And if that is the case—well, I know I have a wildly new appreciation for brand voice professionals, and I would encourage you to Google this.
Look up some resources. Go check out Justin Blackman. The process I went through with him was his Founder Unbound programme.
And again, I’ll make sure that’s linked in the show notes. You can check him out, and if you're interested and if this story resonated—highly encourage you reach out to him.
But more importantly, I highly encourage you just to, again, if this feels like something that you struggle with, to just check out this process and see if it might be something that helps your brain click.
Because, listen, I’ve been an entrepreneur for—I mean, we’re working on 20 years now—and I have gone through branding exercises for companies that were not under my name, that were more tech startup-y, stuff that is under my name.
And those have all been fine and good. I’ve never understood brand voice and guidelines in this way.
It has just really exploded my brain in an extraordinarily productive way.
So, I wanted to share it with you because, hey, if I’m going to preach Sequence Over Strategy, I’m going to fess up when I realise that I had a massive hole in my own sequence—and scream from the rooftops how I filled that sucker in once I realised it.
So, I hope this episode—I know it’s been a little bit different than the ones that we usually do—but I hope it’s been helpful for you if you are someone who, you know, again, kind of struggles in this chasm of how to communicate.
And if it has, let me know. I would love to hear from you if this was helpful, because as I discover more of these, I may do more shows like this if it is helpful for you.
So, thank you very much for being here. And as always, I’m going to be back in a couple of weeks with a brand-new episode.
But in the meantime, if you need me, come on over to themichellewarner.com and I will always be there. And I will always be ready to fist-pump and scream and bother my neighbours for you, if you need to share a win with me from something that you have taken away from this podcast or from any of my materials.
I would always love to hear it.