Your Systems Are Your Brand

I spent 23 years building brands. The logo was never the problem.

Twenty-three years. That's how long I've been in branding. Long enough to know that the logo isn't the problem. The website isn't the problem. What's keeping most small businesses quietly stuck has nothing to do with what their brand looks like. This is how I found that out.

Chapter One: The Empty Apartment

(Scene)

The PATH train from Hoboken to Manhattan costs $2.75 and takes eleven minutes. For most people, it's a commute. For me, at 31 years old, it felt like a daily crossing between two versions of myself I hadn't quite reconciled yet.

I was living alone in Hoboken. Really alone, for the first time in a long time. A seven-year relationship had ended, and I'd moved into my own apartment, my own space, my own silence. I had a good job. Creative Resources Manager at Malka Media, a sports and entertainment agency in Jersey City. I worked alongside the Head of Creative, built out design teams, managed studio operations for clients like Showtime, Morgan Stanley, and Amazon. The apartment was quiet, but the work was real, and for a while that was enough.

Then I quit. No backup plan. No wife. No savings worth mentioning. Just a growing certainty that something was missing, and a stubborn belief that if I stopped moving long enough, I might figure out what it was. I thought maybe it was music. I had always been a musician. Maybe I just needed to go back.

What I found instead, a few weeks later, was God.

I became a Christian at 31 years old, alone in my apartment in Hoboken, watching a YouTube video from a street evangelist named Ray Comfort. I wasn't looking for it. I wasn't even really looking for anything. And then, somewhere between the thumbnail and the end of the video, everything changed.

A friend named Raheem took me to a church in the Lower East Side of Manhattan called kings' Church. I walked in and felt something I hadn't been able to name in years: I'm supposed to be here. The space was small, the people were glowing, and within a few weeks I was still broke, still figuring out my life, and now also deeply, enthusiastically, possibly-annoyingly on fire for Jesus.

The apartment was still expensive. The bills were still there. So I started driving Lyft. And because I am, at my core, a branding guy. Even in my most disoriented personal season, I think in content. So I started filming spiritual conversations with my passengers and posting clips to Instagram under a YouTube channel I called Lifting Spirits.

You know. Because I drive Lyft. And we lift spirits. I thought it was very clever. My passengers were more mixed on this.

The clips found their way to my pastor, David Engelhardt, who loved them and started mentioning them from the pulpit. People were paying attention. I started to feel like this might be the first thing God had handed me to do.

Then Lyft shut down my account. Somebody had reported me. For sharing the gospel with a passenger, as best I could tell. No warning, no appeal. Just: account terminated.

I was out of income, behind on rent, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, Pastor David told me he wanted to meet. I figured it was a check-in. What he actually did was offer me a full-time job: build and run the entire media operation at kings' Church.

I said yes immediately. Because it felt exactly like the answer to a prayer I hadn't been brave enough to pray out loud.

What I didn't fully understand yet was what I was walking into. Or who I was about to be working alongside.

But we'll get there.

Chapter Two: Cables in the Dark

(Struggle)

Pastor David's exact words, when he handed me the job, were something like: "I unleash you. It's yours."

Which sounds empowering. And it was. Right up until I showed up on my first week and took stock of what "yours" actually meant.

A media team made up entirely of volunteers. No centralized system. No documentation. No onboarding process. If you needed the sound engineer to show up on Sunday, you texted Colton. If Colton didn't respond, you texted Colton again. If Colton had plans, well, you found that out on Sunday morning, when the board wasn't on. Nine ministry teams operating exactly like this, all of them held together by the collective memory of whoever happened to show up and happen to remember what they'd been shown the week before.

I came from Malka Media. Hundred and fifty people. Slack channels, shared storage, project tracking, clear creative pipelines delivering assets to Showtime and Morgan Stanley all day, every day. Not because we were geniuses. Because we had built the infrastructure that made it possible.

I looked at kings' Church and thought: okay, I know this isn't a creative agency. But we need at least some of that.

What I didn't anticipate was how alone I would be in knowing that.

Most days, I was the only one in the building. I'd come in planning to work on the livestream and discover the cabling was all wrong. Run across the ceiling in the wrong sequence, completely unusable for what we needed. So I'd start pulling cable. That would turn into a bigger project than expected. I'd look up and it would be 2am. I had to be back in eight hours.

No one had asked me to do that. No one had told me it needed to be done. But the livestream couldn't work with cables like that, and the livestream needed to work, and I was the only one there.

That sentence became the defining weight of that season. I was the only one there.

The direction I kept receiving was simple: just make a checklist. Write down what people need to do, put it somewhere, send it out. Simple. Fast. Done.

And I knew exactly what tool everyone had in mind when they said that. Google Docs. The universal answer to every documentation problem in the modern age — or, for the especially brave, the Notes app. I will not get into the Notes app.

Here's my honest take on Google Docs: running your business operations on it is like running a marathon in flip flops. I guess technically you can do it, but you're going to be in pain the whole time and everyone watching is going to be deeply uncomfortable.

It's a word processor. That's what it is. What I needed was something that could actually show people how to do things — with embedded video, step-by-step guides, camera settings, equipment specs, links to everything they'd ever need. The kind of thing a brand-new volunteer could open on a Tuesday and actually follow on Sunday without needing to call anyone.

That's where Notion came in.

I had been using it for a few years by this point — discovered it somewhere, genuinely can't remember where — and had quietly become a little obsessed with it. A workspace tool, a documentation platform, a database system, a wiki, all rolled into one. I had built a spa's entire business backend on it. I had tried to introduce it at Malka Media before I left, but the company was too big and too entrenched for it to take root. It was one of those ideas I had been carrying around, looking for the right place to use it, because I knew — the way you sometimes just know something — that it was capable of more than most people realized.

But nobody at kings' Church had heard of it. Nobody was asking for it. And every time I tried to push toward it — with the other team leads, with the leadership, in my own head at 2am — I'd hear a voice: You're overcomplicating it. Just make a checklist. This isn't your job.

I couldn't tell if that voice was wisdom or fear. They sound a lot alike in an empty room at midnight.

I remember lying on the floor of that church one night, not dramatically, just tired, staring up at the ceiling, feeling the full weight of what it means to be the single point of failure in a system that shouldn't have one. The knowledge of how to run Sunday morning lived in my head and nowhere else. That was exactly the problem I was trying to fix. I just didn't know yet if I was allowed to.

Then Maggie joined the staff.

She was the lead administrator. More formal ministry experience than me, more patience than me, and a look she gave when I started explaining Notion for the third time in a week that I can only describe as supportive skepticism. She'd grown up in church. She knew ministry. She also knew that I was a newly saved guy with a lot of ideas and zero institutional memory.

I was, to put it mildly, a lot.

I also could not stop thinking about her. But that's not what this chapter is about.

Chapter Three: The Subway Walls

(Switch)

Sometime in year two, I was riding the train into the city, still wrestling with the Notion question.

It had become a kind of internal debate I couldn't resolve. Notion felt obvious to me. The right container, the right infrastructure, the thing this church needed to stop bleeding institutional knowledge every time a volunteer cycled out or a season changed. And every time I pushed toward it, I'd wonder: is this a God idea, or is this just me being a weirdo who is oddly obsessed with this niche piece of software?

The train pulled into my stop. The doors opened.

Every wall of the subway car was covered in Notion ads.

Not a banner. Not a small poster in the corner. Every single wall. Like the inside of the train had been wallpapered overnight specifically for me.

I walked out. Went up the stairs. And there was another one. A massive ad stretched across the entire subway platform steps, impossible to miss even if you were staring at your phone.

I took a photo. And I sent it to Maggie.

"I think it's a sign we're supposed to use this."

She sent back something like lol.

I didn't think it was funny. Not because I lack a sense of humor. Because something had landed that I hadn't been able to articulate before. God knew about Notion. That sounds absurd to say out loud. But I was still relatively new to faith, still learning that God was interested in the specifics and not just the big strokes, and standing at the top of those subway stairs something just settled in me. The infrastructure I kept reaching toward, the systems I could see clearly and hadn't been given full permission to build. None of it was crazy. None of it was overcomplicating. It was exactly what was needed.

I stopped second-guessing after that.

I also stopped pretending I wasn't paying close attention to the way Maggie responded to things. But we're almost at that part.

Chapter Four: Building The House

(Solution)

We started with the media team handbook. My team. My lane. A clear place to start.

I built the structure in Notion. The skeleton, the logic, the way pages linked to pages, the way a volunteer could arrive at the top and follow it all the way down without needing to call anyone. Then I handed the bones of it to Maggie and walked her through how it worked. Not because she was going to build handbooks herself. She had nine team leaders for that. The idea was that she could teach the team leaders the basics, and the team leaders could build their own handbooks for their own teams. They were the experts in their areas. I was the expert in Notion. Together, we could actually make this work without everything running through me.

Slowly. Slower than I wanted, faster than I expected. It started to take shape.

Things started getting written down. Checklists got created. Step-by-step guides started appearing for processes that had previously lived entirely inside one person's memory. Someone finally uploaded photos of exactly how to clean the coffee carafes. Whether or not Colton actually follows those instructions is a different story. Sorry Colton, you're actually great. This story just needs a guy.

Handbooks got sent to volunteers during the week so they could read their role before Sunday morning and show up actually knowing what they were doing. The pressure that had defined every Sunday setup started to ease a little.

It was starting to work.

Maggie was building alongside me the whole time. She shaped what I was building around how the church actually operated; I brought the systems thinking. We sharpened each other the way two people do when they both actually care. We also, somewhere in the middle of all of it, started dating.

Which, looking back, was either very brave or very poorly timed. Possibly both. I'm choosing to remember it as brave.

While the Notion handbooks were taking shape, we were doing the same kind of overhaul across every other tool the church was using. Communication had started in scattered group texts. Twelve different threads, owned by whoever happened to have the right phone numbers. We moved everyone onto Discord first, a free messaging platform with dedicated channels for each team, so people could finally talk somewhere centralized. That held us for about a year. Then came Subsplash, a platform built specifically for churches, which let us create our own branded app and became the permanent home for everything: giving, messaging, scheduling, media, all of it in one place. Discord retired. The group texts died for good.

The same logic applied everywhere. Passwords got logged. Storage unit codes got documented. Onboarding flows got written. The knowledge that had lived inside a handful of people's heads for years got extracted, organized, and stored somewhere it could outlive any one person. Including me.

And slowly, something shifted.

The handbooks were done. The communication was centralized. The onboarding was documented. New volunteers could arrive on a Tuesday, read their role, and show up on Sunday actually knowing what to do — without calling anyone, without texting Colton, without the whole thing hinging on whoever happened to remember what they'd been shown the week before.

The church lost its building during this stretch. We kept moving. Operated out of a storage unit for a season. Gear in boxes, no permanent space, everything uncertain. And the infrastructure held. Because it didn't live in a room, or a binder, or in our heads. It lived somewhere anyone could find it.

That was the moment I knew it had actually worked. Not when someone said it was good. When it kept running without me standing over it.

I should tell you what I was doing with my other hours.

I had built a Notion page.

I called it Godly Pursuit. It had scripture at the top. It had prayers. It had a full list of everything Maggie enjoyed: thrifting, live music, coffee, art museums, watercolor, candy. It had a section on her love languages. It had counsel I had gathered from seven different men I respected. And it had a journal entry from July 28th, 2:49 PM, that simply read: "I heard the Lord tell me: 'Maggie will be your wife. Trust Me.'"

I am, at my core, a systems guy. Apparently there is no area of life where this does not apply.

She eventually said yes. Then yes again. And then, on a snowy day in Brooklyn, January 2024, she said yes in front of everyone.

Pastor David married us. The whole church was there — the same people who had shown up week after week, served with everything they had, and somehow put up with me in the process. It was one of those days where everything you've been through suddenly makes sense, not because it was easy, but because it led you here.

At some point during the reception, I looked out at the dance floor. And there was Colton. Right in the front, arms out, fully committed, leading the Soul Train line like he'd been training for it his entire life.

Turns out Colton is a leader. He just needed the right moment.

We got married. We gave everything we had to New York. And then one day, not long after, we looked at each other and said what I think we had both been quietly thinking for a while:

I think our job here is done.

Not because we were finished with the church. But because the thing we had been called to build, we had built it. It was standing. It was running. It didn't need us to hold it together anymore.

So we packed up. We moved south. And I started to think.

Chapter Five: What Your Business Is Missing

(Significance)

Charleston is quieter than New York in a way that takes some getting used to.

Not just the noise level. The pace. The absence of urgency. No countdown to Sunday. No cable problem waiting at the church. No one texting me at midnight about the livestream. Just Maggie, and a new city, and a question I had been carrying around for three years without quite knowing how to hold it.

What is it that I actually know how to do?

I had been in this world a long time. Thirteen years old designing T-shirts for local bands in a New Jersey garage, then years of freelance, a record deal in Atlanta that taught me more about the business of creativity than any classroom ever could, then Malka Media, then kings' Church. Different contexts. Different scales. Different stakes.

But the longer I sat with it, the more clearly I could see the thread running through all of it.

Every organization I had ever worked inside had a version of the same thing. Not always a catastrophic failure, but a crack somewhere in the armor. The way files were stored. The way passwords were managed, or more accurately, not managed. The way communication happened in twelve different places and nobody could find anything. The way institutional knowledge lived inside one person's head and everyone quietly hoped that person never left.

It wasn't always obvious from the outside. The brand could look great. The logo, the website, the content, the impression they made on the outside world. Often genuinely good. But get close enough and you'd find it. The backend that nobody had really thought through. The thing that worked until it didn't.

What I noticed, what I became almost acutely aware of, was that most people didn't even know this layer existed. They'd come to me thinking they needed a logo. And they'd be sitting across from me not knowing where their passwords were stored.

The logo isn't the problem. The logo is fine. But you can pour everything you have into how your brand looks and completely overlook how your brand functions: how it feels to work inside it, how it feels to be handed something and actually know what to do with it, how it feels when someone asks a simple question and there's actually an answer. That's a layer of branding most people have never been told to think about.

And when you get it right, when the operational infrastructure actually reflects the same care and intentionality as everything else, it doesn't just make the business run better. It transforms the owner. The confidence that comes from knowing exactly where everything lives. The peace of not being the single point of failure in your own company. The clarity of having it all out of your head and somewhere you can actually see it.

Here's what I came to believe, somewhere in the quiet of that first Charleston year:

Your brand is deeper than what the world sees.

When someone says "where do I find the onboarding documents?" and you can tell them in ten seconds — that's your brand. When a new hire shows up and there's actually something to hand them — that's your brand. When you take a week off and the business doesn't quietly unravel — that's your brand.

That's what I want to do for you.

Whether you're running a business you've spent years building, a ministry you've poured everything into, or sitting with a launch you keep dreaming about but feel frozen by. Because the idea is clear and the doing of it feels like trying to build a house with your hands full. You need somewhere to put it down. You need a system that can hold what you've been carrying.

I built something for exactly that moment.

It's called the Business HQ Buildout Sprint. It's free. And it's designed to do in a focused session what took me three years to figure out in an empty church in New York — get what's living in your head out into a real, organized, functioning operational headquarters built around how you actually work.

No templates you'll abandon by Thursday. No productivity framework that requires a PhD to maintain. Just your business, finally living somewhere other than inside you.

What you're carrying is too valuable to stay in your head.

[Start Your Free Sprint →]