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

Cheryl, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

In the brand & web design industry, most folks focus on helping their clients gain more clients. We know this is an obvious need, and it’s nothing that we don’t do as well, at Hey Sunny Studio. However what’s happened when there is so much emphasis on building a brand for your clients, you end up losing yourself along the way. Pretty soon, you have a brand that you feel disconnected from, there’s a personality mis-match, you don’t feel excited to show up and market your offers, nor do you even like your offers as much as you did when you first started.

Our approach is helping you build a brand that serves both your clients AND you. It’s not about ’embodying your brand’ – which we hear a lot of in our industry – it’s about your brand embodying YOU.

When you put your needs in the brand, along with your clients, you maintain cohesion with who you are in both your marketing and real life. Your clients aren’t surprised with who you are when they hop on a call with you or meet you in person. You stay fulfilled with your brand, excited to show up and serve your clients because you are also being served, just in a different way.

Building a brand is a personal development journey, so when you flip the script and have a brand that embodies you, it pushes you to become the best version of yourself. To hone your skills, better your education, improve your messaging, all so you can help your people more.

Bottom line – when you don’t leave you out of your brand, you build something that’s purposeful, and fulfills the reason you started your brand.

You run your brand, your brand doesn’t run you.

Cheryl, 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 got into the brand & website industry after leaving the fitness world. I spent over 10 years in the health & fitness realm, and you can bet your bottom that I’ve witnessed brand owners come face-to-face with the feeling of being undervalued for the time, effort, and straight-up sacrifice they’ve given their business.

But what I saw wasn’t an issue with their offers, or how they helped folks with their struggles. It was a disconnection from their brand to their best-fit clients. In the health industry, you’re competing with weekend warriors, side hustlers, MLM’s and a lot of uncertified individuals, all offering low cost ‘solutions’.

So how do you beat out the weekend warriors and become recognized for your high-quality solutions? (and properly compensated!)

You build a brand with YOU in mind. Not just a brand for your clients.

But it’s a lot easier said than done. What truly makes me so proud about what we do is the introspective process our clients go on with our projects. Typically, when you’re feeling imposter syndrome, doubting yourself or comparing yourself to others – it’s not failure that’s setting in.

It’s growth.

You aren’t who you were when you started your brand, and you’re in this messy-middle of trying to figure out who it is that you want to be, and what you need to do to OWN that next phase.

Our projects guide our clients through this period of growth, and help them come out the otherside feeling clear on their next steps, with a visual identity that represents this new version of them (the more experienced, more educated, more confident version), and a website that lets all the right folks through their doors.

While we work with a lot of service providers in the health & wellness space, we also love partnering with photographers, creators, stylists, trades businesses, and really – anyone who’s down for shooting a game of pool, perusing an old antique shop, or sitting by a fire on a Saturday night.

We value collaboration, partnership, humour, grit and being open to the process of growth.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

There’s 2 sides to social media:

1. The curated, super aesthetic, polished version where it’s business only.
2. The lived-in version. And this is how I built my audience.

As a mom of 3 kids, I don’t have the capacity to create perfectly aesthetic content. Even as a brand designer. And quite frankly, that’s not the brands that I even connect with. My focus from the beginning has been growing a brand that feels lived in, like you can walk into my home and get the same feeling as you do scrolling my feed. I don’t live in a brand new home, i’m not a minimalist. And I wanted my social media to represent exactly who I am – down home, people centered, a safe space to land and get the guidance you need to move forward.

Have I been consistent? Of course. But I don’t polish up. I show up exactly as I am on social media, on zoom calls, in real life. This has allowed complete strangers the ability to know me, like me, trust me quickly and then book in for projects with me.

I don’t think you should have a different version of you for your brand, or for your socials. You also don’t need a huge following to hit big financial goals either. You need to be a human first, a brand second.

Focus on connecting to your best-fit clients like you would connecting to a new best-friend.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

This is a recent lesson actually!

Like many others, I’ve had a desire to ‘scale’ my business. So I took the courses, I did the mentorships, I followed the formulas.

And it worked!

We’ve hit our financial goals 5/5 years in a row.

But what I realized (just the other day) is that we haven’t scaled, per say, we’ve multiplied. We’ve increased our client load, our consistency of that client load. But we haven’t gained any time back for ourselves.

My teammate and I are both moms to young kids, and our lives continue to get busier with the older they get. And frankly, we can’t take on more clients in this season of life!

So i’m currently in a phase of balancing my offers out. We’re creating a brand strategy mini course, which is truly so unique compared to what else is out there, and we’re scaling back our 1:1 client capacity.

We’re building out our funnels, and cleaning up our slow marketing paths (seo on our website, pinterest, blogs etc).

I’m a natural workaholic, and I push and push until I have to slam on the brakes. And it’s not sustainable anymore! Nor do I want to be burning out all the time.

So I’m taking a card from my own approach, the one we help our clients with but have somehow skipped over ourselves, and that’s building a brand with US in mind, so that we can serve our people in the best ways possible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://heysunnystudio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heysunny.studio/?hl=en

Image Credits

Laura Manson Photography