The Missing Piece in Your Marketing Is Identity

The Missing Piece in Your Marketing Is Identity

If you’re a new founder or business owner, chances are you’ve skipped building your brand identity first. You get flooded with DMs promising fast growth.

Ten-thousand-dollar months.
Done-for-you systems.
Three thousand dollars a month and “we’ll handle everything.”

And if you’re being honest, you already know this: if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

The issue isn’t that marketing agencies or growth teams are bad. The issue is that most of them are built to execute after a brand has already been clearly defined. And most businesses skip that step entirely. So the work gets done. Money gets spent. But nothing ever really sticks because the missing piece in your marketing is identity.

Most businesses don’t have a marketing problem. They have a brand identity problem.

They haven’t fully locked in who they are, what they actually do, who it’s for, and what the intended outcome of the brand is. Without that foundation, every marketing effort feels like guesswork. Messaging shifts. Offers change. One agency gets replaced by another. Then a consultant. Then a new strategy.

Eventually, it starts to feel like nothing works — when really, the brand was never anchored in the first place.

Branding is a long game. Marketing is a multiplier.

If the identity isn’t solid, marketing just amplifies confusion faster. So many founders are constantly restarting: new website, new content strategy, new paid ads, new positioning. Not because they’re doing it wrong, but because they’re trying to build on a foundation that was never fully thought through.

I’ve been drawn to this work for years!

Before Covid, I mentored new personal trainers at Equinox — helping them position themselves, talk about what they did, and build confidence in their work. When everything shut down, that same instinct showed up again. Trainers and wellness professionals suddenly needed a way to show up online, create income, and adapt when the industry they knew disappeared overnight.

What I saw during that time stuck with me.

The people who took the time to define who they were, who they wanted to work with, and what they stood for didn’t just survive — they adapted. Even when their offers or audiences changed, the brand held.

And the ones who skipped that work kept starting over.

That’s why I start with identity. When the foundation is solid, marketing becomes easier to focus, content feels more natural, and growth becomes sustainable instead of reactive.

The Maxwell Method exists to help founders and personal brands get the brand right first, so everything else actually makes sense.