We were lucky to catch up with Karee Laing recently and have shared our conversation below.

Karee, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

For most of my career, I was the expert behind the expert. I had a JD/MBA, a decade of experience, and a client roster I was genuinely proud of, and almost no one knew my name. I told myself that was fine. That the work spoke for itself. That I didn’t need to be visible because I wasn’t that kind of person.

The risk I took was deciding to become that kind of person anyway. I started showing up on LinkedIn consistently, talking about brand strategy in a way that was honest and sometimes uncomfortably direct. I launched The Table, which is a curated dinner series for women founders in Houston and with no playbook or guarantee anyone would come, but I had a very real fear that I’d be sitting alone at a beautiful table I’d set for fifteen people. It sold out in days.

Then I started building Moxie – an AI-powered marketing platform, which meant telling the world I was not just a strategist for hire but a founder building a tech product. That felt enormous and still feels enormous. I have never positioned myself that way publicly. Every single one of those risks are paying off. Not immediately and not perfectly, but directionally and undeniably.

What I know now is that the risk was never really about the business. It was about me finally deciding my voice deserved to be heard in rooms I’d been quietly avoiding for years.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I didn’t set out to become a brand strategist. I set out to be a lawyer. I have a JD/MBA and spent years building what looked like the right career on paper, until I realized I was far more interested in why some businesses commanded attention and built legacies while others with equally great products stayed invisible. That question became an obsession, and eventually it became a business.

I founded Studio Brand Collective, we grew and that business pivoted into Studio SB with a more focused and aligned goal – to solve a specific problem: the gap between who a founder has become and how their brand still shows up in the world. Most of my clients are established founders and they have a proven offer/business, real revenue, and years of experience, but their brand still sounds like who they were five or ten years ago. Their positioning is fuzzy, their messaging is scattered, and no amount of content or ad spend is fixing it because those are tactical problems sitting on top of a strategic one.

That’s where I come in. Using my Brand Architecture Method, a proprietary framework built around diagnosing positioning, closing the clarity gap, and building identity systems that actually convert, I help founders to truly understand their positioning so their marketing can actually work. We don’t start with design. We start with strategy. And that changes everything downstream.

I also work with restaurant and hospitality brands through Restaurant Brand Builders, my hospitality-focused brand strategy practice. And I’m the author of This Is Branding, a field guide for founders who are ready to stop guessing and start building brands that actually mean something. What I’m most proud of isn’t a client win or a revenue milestone, it’s the moment a founder looks at their brand and finally sees themselves in it or understands exactly who they are and how they should be showing up. That shift in confidence and in how they show up and what they charge, is the real work.

Right now I’m building toward three things that have me genuinely excited: MOXIE, an AI-powered marketing platform launching May 2026 that anchors AI execution in real brand strategy so founders scale with clarity instead of noise; The Table, a curated dinner series for women founders in Houston that sold out its inaugural event in days; and a digital product ecosystem around This Is Branding for founders who want to build their brand foundation before investing in 1:1 work.

What I want potential clients to know is this: if you’ve ever felt like your business has outgrown your brand, or if you’re great at what you do but struggling to explain it, or market it, that’s not a you problem, that’s a clarity problem. And clarity is exactly what I build.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The lesson I had to unlearn was that staying behind the scenes was a form of professionalism. I genuinely believed that if I just did excellent work, it would show and the right people would find me. That visibility was somehow beneath the craft and that self-promotion was tacky or loud and wouldn’t really get me the quality clients I wanted to attract.

It’s a seductive lie though, and a lot of high-achieving women believe it. What I eventually understood is that your work can only speak to rooms it’s been invited into, whether you were invited or someone else spoke your name in these rooms. And nobody was going to invite me if they didn’t know I existed. Unlearning that belief didn’t happen overnight. It happened in stages; for example a LinkedIn post that landed unexpectedly, a client who said they hired me because of something I wrote publicly, or a sold-out dinner series that started because I finally decided to build the room myself instead of waiting to be let into someone else’s.

The practical unlearn: stop waiting to be discovered. Show up like the expert you already are and claim what is yours.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

Intentionally, yes, because building this way is now a strategic decision, not an accident. My portfolio operates under KLMG-US and spans four interconnected ventures. Studio SB is my bespoke brand strategy agency for founder-led businesses, and this is where I do deep 1:1 work using the Brand Architecture Method as well as branding work with my team.

Restaurant Brand Builders is my hospitality-focused practice, serving restaurant and food service brands that need positioning and marketing strategy built for their specific industry. The Table is my curated dinner series for women founders in Houston, which started as community building and has evolved into both a revenue stream and one of my most powerful brand assets for the community of builders and founders I would like to create and grow.

And MOXIE, launching May 2026, which is an AI-powered marketing platform for founders who want strategy-backed marketing without hiring a full team. The way I think about it: each venture serves a different client at a different stage, but they all ladder back to the same core belief – that clarity is the foundation of every successful brand. Someone might find me through MOXIE, graduate into a Studio SB engagement, and find their community at The Table. I had to really understand and remind myself that what I am creating is an intentional portfolio that isn’t fragmented, but a part of an ecosystem.

My advice for founders thinking about multiple revenue streams: make sure they’re connected by a throughline. Random diversification dilutes your brand, but intentional and aligned diversification deepens it. So run your ideas through a strainer first and be honest about each of the revenue streams and whether they meet/pass this test.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://studiosbagency.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ktlaing
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kareelaing
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ktlaing/