Episode 144 – Heather Steele

Introducing Heather Steele

Heather is the founder and CEO of Blue Steel Solutions. Heather started her marketing agency 10 and a half years ago because she was tired of seeing great people fail just because they couldn’t clearly communicate their value.

Show Notes

Websites | bluesteelesolutions.com, problemsolvermethod.com

LinkedIn | HeatherSteele

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 144.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Heather Steele. Heather is the founder and CEO of Blue Steel Solutions. Heather started her marketing agency 10 and a half years ago because she was tired of seeing great people fail just because they couldn’t clearly communicate their value. We’re glad you’re here. Thanks for joining us, Heather. How are you?

Heather: I’m great. Thanks, Tara. Thanks, Liam. I’m excited to be here.

Liam: And we’re so excited to have you here today. Very nice to meet you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Heather: Sure. I’m Heather Steele, as Tara said. I run an agency called Blue Steel Solutions. We help businesses create really great messaging for their websites and funnel programs that make people want to learn more about their business, helps drive leads for them, and ultimately grow their business. 

Liam: What caught my attention when you were saying that…well, when Tara was saying, to be perfectly honest, that you started it 10 years ago when you were noticing and struggling at the fact that so many people were struggling with their messaging. I wonder what were you doing before you started your own business, where that particular issue around messaging came to your attention and was something that you decided you needed to fix.

Heather: I was actually working in house at a broker-dealer. So we were an independent broker-dealer that supported financial advisors who basically were running their own business, their own advisory services, but we provided some backend support to them. One of the things that we did was help them with some marketing. I would see a lot of people who came from a captive world, which is, if you think like Merrill Lynch, some of the ones where they’re direct employees, and they have lots of support, everything’s kind of handed to them and all they have to do is run their book of business, then suddenly, they go independent, and they’re a business owner, things are a lot different. They’re having to go out and generate their own leads and grow their business themselves instead of just focusing on kind of their day to day workload. 

I would see people make this transition and it didn’t always go well. It was difficult. It was something that they really struggled with. Because you had people that were top performers that had always done really well and then all of a sudden, things aren’t working very well for them. I would see that there was other marketing companies who would kind of come in and just act like vultures and take advantage of these people, and charge them outrageous fees to give them very templated, cookie-cutter solutions that didn’t actually do anything to help them grow their business.

So now these people felt like, “Well, I’ve wasted my entire marketing budget,