This blog post was written by our friend, Shannon of Sunday Muse Design.
Sunday Muse Design® is a premium brand and web design studio for business owners who've outgrown their brand—and know it. Founded by Shannon Pruitt, Sunday Muse works with people who have built something genuinely good—thriving, booked, and sitting with a specific kind of frustration: the sense that their brand is leaving potential on the table. They're right. And Shannon is usually right about what it is.
The work is strategic and specific. Shannon and her team identify exactly where the friction lives—where a brand is losing the room before you ever get to make your case—and remove it. The result is a brand that finally matches what's been built.Services include brand strategy, custom brand identity, and website design. Sunday Muse is based in South Carolina and operates as a studio with a trusted team of creatives.
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It's 8:47 on a Tuesday morning and you've got an hour before your next call, a lukewarm coffee, and a blank Google Doc titled "newsletter: send today." You know what you want to talk about. You even know why it matters. Forty-five minutes later, you've written three opening lines, deleted two of them, rewritten the one that's left, and googled whether "momentum" is a word you've used too many times this month.
The email will get sent. It always does. It'll just take three times longer than it should, and when you compare it to last week's caption, and last month's landing page, it'll sound like three different people wrote it.
Here's what's happening in that forty-five minutes: you're making five brand decisions before you write a single usable sentence. You just haven't made them on purpose yet.
That's the whole post. If you want to close the tab now and go back to your doc with that one sentence in your head, I won't be offended.
Stick around for the five (and what happens when you stop re-deciding them every Tuesday) and I'll make it worth the coffee.
Why your marketing takes three times longer than it should
Marketing is the visible layer. It's the email that went out, the reel you posted, the sales page you updated at 11pm the night before you launched. It's the thing people see.
Underneath it is a layer nobody sees…including, a lot of the time, the person running the business. It's where the real decisions live: who you're for, how you sound, what you're selling, what it looks like, and what you stand for that nobody else in your space is willing to say out loud.
When those decisions haven't been made on purpose, every new piece of marketing becomes a creative act from scratch. Every time you sit down to write, the decision-making starts over. And the decision-making is the slow part.
I've watched capable, high-performing business owners spend an entire morning on a 300-word email because they're unconsciously re-writing their whole brand inside the draft. The email gets blamed for being hard to write. But the real issue is that the blank doc is where all the unmade decisions come up for air.
Once those decisions are made (and I mean written down, agreed-on-with-yourself made), the email takes twenty minutes. So does the caption. So does the landing page. And they all sound like the same person wrote them, because one person did.
This is where a tool like Enji starts doing what it's built to do. Execution software shines when there's a strategy to run through it.
Let's get the five decisions on the table.
Decision one: who you're really talking to
"Small business owners" is not a person. Neither is "female founders" or "my dream client" or any of the other placeholder language that lets you feel like you've answered this question without answering it.
The person you're talking to has a year number in her business. She has a problem that's specific to her stage. She's already tried a few things. She has opinions about the tools you're about to recommend. She has a sentence in her head right now that she hasn't said out loud.
"A service-based business owner in year three who just hit her first ceiling and can't figure out why." That's a person. You can write an email to her. You can picture what she's doing when she opens it (she’s not at her desk.. She’s probably on her phone, between calls, in the school pickup line).
"Small business owners" is a census category. You can't write an email to a census category. You can only write marketing that sounds like it was written for a census category, which is how we end up with subject lines like "Let's Talk About Growth" and wonder why nobody opens them.
The test: can you finish the sentence "he's the kind of person who ___" five times without repeating yourself? If yes, you've got a person you can write to every week without running out of things to say.
Decision two: what you sound like when you're not performing
Voice is the thing that happens when you stop trying to add personality to your copy.
It's three or four decisions about rhythm and restraint. Do you use contractions? Do you use periods where other people use exclamation points? Do you start sentences with "and"—and more importantly, do you let them end on a preposition, a fragment, or a dry little aside?
It's also what you refuse to say. My brand won't touch the words "leverage," "elevate," or "empower." Those are structural decisions about how this brand sounds, and they apply everywhere, every time, regardless of topic.
Here's what a defined voice looks like in practice. Your newsletter, your sales page, your Slack message to a client who just pushed a deadline, and your Instagram caption from last Thursday all sound like they came from the same person. The consistency comes from enough voice decisions being made upfront that the same instincts kick in every time you write, in any format.
If your caption, your sales page, and your newsletter all sound like different people—you've been deciding your voice on the fly, format by format, which is why nothing feels cohesive.
Decision three: what you're really selling
This one's sneakier than it sounds.
You have an offer suite in your head. You have a different one on your services page. You have a third one that you're marketing this week. And then there's the Instagram bio, which hasn't been updated since February and refers to something you don't offer anymore.
The audience sees all four. They don't know which one is current. So they ask questions they wouldn't have to ask if the four matched. Or worse… they don't ask at all. They just decide the whole thing is a little confusing and move on.
This is a problem of having too many offers and not deciding, on purpose, which three to four are the front door. Everything else can exist… it just doesn't need to be marketing real estate.
The fastest diagnostic I know: open your services page, your Instagram bio, your email footer, and your most recent launch email in four tabs. Read them as if you were a prospective client who'd never met you. Do the offers match? Is the pricing consistent? Is the language used to describe them the same?
If the answer is no, the audience is filling in the gaps for you. And you don't get to control what they fill them in with.
Decision four: what your brand looks like across every surface
Your logo is fine. (It's almost always fine. But also… “fine” can be expensive… which is a conversation for another day)
What we're talking about is the visual logic that makes someone recognize your content before they see your name. The same color shows up across your feed, your emails, your PDF guides, and the slide you screenshotted for a podcast trailer. The same typeface runs through every headline you publish. The photography has enough through-line that someone stops on a reel and thinks "wait, is that hers?" before she checks the handle.
Most business owners have pieces of this. They've got a color palette they like, a few fonts they've been using, and a moodboard they saved two years ago. What they haven't done is decide how those pieces behave together, which means every new piece of content becomes a small design decision on the fly. Which color? Which font size? Where does the logo go? What's the margin?
Those are decisions that can be made once and applied forever. When they are, every subsequent piece of content inherits them. The designer (or you, doing your own stuff) stops re-deciding and starts executing against a standard that exists. That's why brands with clear visual systems produce three times the content in the same amount of time.
Cher from Clueless had a closet with a rotation system. Your brand needs something similar. Not a PDF style guide nobody reads. You need a handful of visual rules that get followed.
Decision five: what your brand stands for that your competitors won't say
This is the one most people skip because it's the one that requires the most conviction.
Every industry has a set of things that get said over and over. In mine, it's "strategy meets design." In yours, it's something else. Those phrases are table stakes. Saying them is how you confirm you know what industry you're in.
The question is: what do you believe about your work that the rest of your industry won't put in writing?
For me, it's that most brand problems at the premium tier are really problems of unmade decisions in disguise. That's a point of view. It leads to different marketing. And it attracts different clients. It repels the ones who'd rather have a more diplomatic version of the same pitch everyone else is making.
Your point of view is the difference between marketing that sounds like yours and marketing that sounds like a polished version of what everyone else in your space is already saying. It's also the decision that makes the other four stickier. When you know what you stand for, the voice sharpens, the offers clarify, the visuals follow, and the person you're talking to comes into focus.
Everything else hangs on this one.
What happens when the five decisions are made
When these five decisions are made, marketing stops being a creative act every time and becomes execution.
You sit down at 8:47 on Tuesday morning. You have an hour. You know who you're talking to, what you sound like, what you're selling, what it looks like, and what you believe. The email takes twenty minutes. It sounds like you. It matches everything else you've published this month. The CTA is the offer you're promoting and it isn't a surprise to anyone who's been reading.
This is where Enji does its best work. When the strategy underneath is already sorted, a tool built for content calendars, scheduling, and cross-platform consistency takes what you've decided and runs it across every surface without you babysitting the process. When the strategy underneath is still being figured out in the draft, you're scheduling inconsistency on a reliable cadence, which is an expensive way to stay stuck.
More marketing was never the goal. Marketing that compounds was the goal. Every piece building on the last one because they're pointing at the same thing. That happens when the five decisions are made on purpose.
Where to go from here
You're probably in one of two places right now.
If the five decisions are made and you're ready for the engine: Enji is built for exactly that. It takes the strategy you've already sorted and turns it into consistent, scheduled, on-brand output without the weekly scramble.
If you read this post and recognized yourself somewhere around decision one (re-answering these questions in every draft, every caption, every launch email): that's what Sunday Strategy is for. One intensive, the five decisions made on purpose, the whole thing written down so you stop re-answering it every Tuesday.Â
Either way, the goal is the same: Marketing that stops feeling like homework, an execution layer that's doing its job, and a Tuesday morning that takes twenty minutes instead of forty-five.
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