We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ashley Brundage. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ashley below.

Alright, Ashley thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

I was trying to get a job while navigating homelessness, harassment, and discrimination and I had never faced any of those issues before. This led me to do a google search on how to overcome obstacles. The search came back with an article about how I needed to access more empowerment. That prompted me to then google empowerment. I found that the answer said it was authority and power connected to people. As a past human resources point person for a team of 50, I knew what people are so I felt I understood that pretty well(of course I came to realize I knew nothing). I then focused on reading about authority and power, and this led to so many different threads and topics. The consensus that I found was that power was easily tracked and measured and judged but authority was very all over the place. The main reason authority is all over the place from what I found was because each person had a different experience based on their differences including myself. Then in that moment I knew I needed to expand my research and create a leadership training and consulting platform to help people better understand empowerment, so why not help everyone be Empowering Differences.

Ashley, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started my second career as a means of survival while doing research on empowerment and differences, this career began as a part time bank teller because many employers did not take my work seriously due to my gender differences. I worked in various roles at the bank for the first 4 years until I became the national vice president of diversity and inclusion for PNC Bank. I worked there for 11 years in total, and the last 3 was while I was solidifying my empowering differences research study as well as publishing all of the learning content I was creating that would become the cornerstone of my third career. Each day now as the CEO of Empowering Differences, I get to work with organizations and individuals track and measure how empowered they are as well as helping them learn and grow through our published learning content platform.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Active engagement on social media is a good start but leveraging a newsletter platform has been really helpful. It sets the cadence that every other week my followers will hear what I am up to and they can see new products and offerings I am work on that might be of interest for them.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I worked extremally hard on my LinkedIn platform, always inviting the max limit of 100 people to connect each week. I recommend searching for people who do work that is of interest for you or your potential clients that you might want to sell goods or services towards. Another item that helped me grow that page was leveraging the events feature and collecting contact information on anyone who accepts the event invite. I empty my event invitations out each week which allows me to invite 1000 people each week. Lastly, I also recommend offering a free download or resource in exchange for providing an email address, this helped to grow my email database pretty quickly.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://empoweringdifferences.com/
• Instagram: @ashleytbrundage
• Facebook: @ashleytbrundage
• Linkedin: @ashleytbrundage
• Twitter: @ashleytbrundage
• Youtube: youtube.com/c/ashleytbrundage