We recently connected with Brandy Miller and have shared our conversation below.
Brandy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?
I got my A.S. in Elementary Education but the one topic of discussion that never came up was why we teach students what we teach them. Every ounce of our energy was focused on what to teach and how to get students to accept what we’re teaching. I think that’s the first problem we need to tackle. It’s unfair to ask students to blindly follow where we’re leading them if we aren’t willing or able to explain to them how learning what we’re teaching is going to help them achieve their goals and dreams. No adult would waste their time that way, why should kids be asked to?
The reality is that education is nothing more than a toolbox handed down from one generation to the next. Everything in that toolbox is designed to help them find the answers they need to their own questions about life, the universe, and their place in it. 99% of their questions have already been answered by someone else and education is designed to provide not only the tools they need to find those answers but to test them before applying them so they don’t get led in the wrong direction.
Once we’ve tackled that challenge, we then need to structure our schools to teach entrepreneurship from the ground up. Not only will that show students how everything they are being taught applies to their own life, goals, and dreams but it will teach them critical thinking, problem-solving, and the importance of ongoing professional growth because that’s what entrepreneurship forces people to learn to do. Successful business owners are master problem solvers who can apply critical thinking skills on the fly to the many challenges they encounter.
Brandy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’ve always loved books and writing, but helping other people write and publish their books wasn’t something I even realized I could do. I stumbled into this business after publishing my first book and starting up a writer’s group. Working with those writers led me to start working on a universal writing system that would help anyone who wanted to write a book find a system that they could use that would apply no matter the genre. I volunteered to help someone who was dealing with writer’s block outline their story in an hour and she asked me how much I would charge to write the book for her. That became my first client.
Eventually, I got tired of watching my clients get book projects finished but then never publish them so I expanded my areas of expertise and learned more about how to get books published. I began growing my network in the writing industry and today my client base is mostly made up of companies like Path To Publishing and Chosen Pen Publishing that serve authors and writers.
One of the things my publishing and author services clients love about me is that I’m the Swiss Army knife of creative individuals. I have such a diverse background with many different talents and gifts that I can help them plug in the gaps in their staff and keep supporting their clients at a high level. I’m also an award-winning Creative Strategist so when problems come up, I can usually find a strategy that helps them overcome the problem or turn it into something that works for them rather than against them.
What I am most proud of is putting my talents and gifts in the service of others and enabling those who might never have their voices heard get that chance to step up and be part of the conversation. That’s what real leadership is all about, and that’s why I’ve been working with Path To Publishing to launch a new Magnetic Leadership Training Program.
Great leaders aren’t born, they are trained – and the price of failed leadership is evident everywhere: rampant child abuse and a growing homeless crisis, wars and divisions among people, low morale and a growing apathy about participation in society, decreased productivity and profitability, families falling apart – it’s all part of the same package and parcel.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
I started my business with a $0 marketing budget. I didn’t have any money to pour into marketing, so I had to figure out ways to spread the word about my business without engaging in paid advertising. What I learned was that service to others and relationship-building are the single most effective methods of growing clientele.
Service can just mean offering helpful advice or providing some guidance in solving a challenge that’s relative to what you know how to do. It doesn’t have to take hours of your day or a long time to do. What it does need to do is help someone else solve a problem that’s been hanging them up for a while. Not only does this prove your expertise without you needing to trumpet it, but it begins to form rapport. It may not directly lead to business that day but it can lead to it later down the line or to word-of-mouth referrals which are equally invaluable.
As for the importance of relationship-building, I will leave it to Michael Port who said it best, “All business problems are relationship problems in disguise.”
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The hardest part about being a creative has been learning how to value my work. A painting or a work of fiction doesn’t – at least on the surface – have an immediate, measurable impact on the life of the other person. People tend to pay based on the results you can deliver, so I had to look beyond the surface to see what the measurable results are that creative works actually provide that are valuable enough that people will gladly pay money to receive.
What I discovered is that everyone who buys anything – whether it’s a painting or a piece of jewelry or a work of fiction – is looking to meet some underlying need. What they buy tells us something about what that need is. If I know what the need is, I can then identify the results that purchasing my work will deliver for them and what the work is worth based on the behaviors that tend to crop up when the need goes unmet.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://writeyourbook.today
- Instagram: @DesignerBrandy
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrandyMMiller1975
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/brandymmiller
- Twitter: @WriterBrandy