When Brooke audits a client path, she's looking for one specific thing: how you take a stranger from cold to warm. In this episode, she walks through the exact path she teaches — and, just as importantly, who it's actually for.

You'll hear why social media makes a shaky foundation to build on (you don't own it, and it could vanish tomorrow), and why a simple free offer is the bridge that moves people from that noisy, rented space onto your email list — a place you actually own and control.

Brooke also gets honest about the fact that this isn't the only way. You can send people straight from Instagram to a paid offer. You can even convert cold buyers without warming them up at all. But that approach leans on volume — big reach, big numbers, big top of funnel — and that's not who she's usually talking to. If you've got a smaller following, a newer business, or you're rebuilding after a pivot, this episode is your permission to stop playing the numbers game and start building a foundation you can actually stand on.

In this episode:

• What "cold to warm" actually means, and why it's the heart of every client path
• The two ways people warm up: sticking around, or grabbing your freebie
• Why your email list beats social media as a foundation (you own one, you rent the other)
• The job a good free offer quietly does for you
• The truth about converting cold buyers directly — and the volume it quietly requires
• Who this path is really for: smaller followings, newer businesses, and post-pivot rebuilds
• The one question Brooke asks in every audit: is the line direct, or is it leaking people?

Connect with Brooke:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/with.brooke/

Free Client Path Map: https://withbrooke.myflodesk.com/freeclientpath

Get a Read with Brooke: https://withbrooke.com/the-business-read-with-brooke/

This one is different.

No interview. No solo episode. Just Brooke and her collaborator Karrie sitting down to plan a brand new offer in real time — and deciding to record the whole thing so you can watch it come together from the very beginning.

What you're hearing is an actual planning session. The messy, exciting, ADHD-brained, talking-over-each-other kind. The offer isn't launched yet. The name isn't finalized yet. But the concept? It's good. And we wanted you to see exactly how something like this gets built from scratch — because that's kind of the whole point of what we both do.

Stay tuned. More details are coming later this month.

What This Episode Is About

Brooke and Karrie are building a small-group offer together — and this episode is the recorded planning session where they figure out exactly what it is, who it's for, and how it works.

Here's the concept: Karrie comes in first and does a deep dive on your offer — the messaging, the client path, and whether your freebie is actually connected to what you do. Then Brooke comes in and goes through the backend with a fine-tooth comb — every link, every automation, every system — and makes sure everything is technically connected and pointed in the right direction.

The goal: you leave with an offer and a backend that are conversion ready, retention ready, and referral ready.

It's a small cohort. They're capping it at five people. And it launches at the end of August.

Key Takeaways

• Your freebie is connective tissue. If it isn't connected to your offer, your specialty, or your style of working with people, it's pulling people into your world and then leaving them with nowhere to go.
• Most founders know their backend technically works. Fewer have ever sat on the other side of it and asked what the experience feels like for a client moving through it.
• Client experience drives conversion, retention, and referrals. Those three things aren't separate strategies — they're all downstream of how someone feels moving through your business.
• When you're too close to your own business, you stop seeing what's missing. That's not a flaw. It's just proximity. A second set of eyes — especially two very different kinds of eyes — changes what's visible.
• Simplicity is great. Simplicity that costs you your time and your client's experience is not the same thing.

Want In?

This offer is launching at the end of August and spots are limited to five people. Stay close — details are coming the last week of July.

• Follow Brooke on Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com

Most founders build their email list for themselves — the asset, the numbers, the growth. And the freebie they build to grow it gets built with that same lens: what will get the most people to sign up?

That is a different question from what will get the right people to sign up. And those two questions produce completely different lists — and completely different results when it's time to sell something.

In this episode, Brooke breaks down why the intention behind your freebie matters more than the freebie itself, what it looks like when that intention is off, and what to ask before you build anything at the front of your email ecosystem.

Key Takeaways

• An email list is an asset you own — that's the right reason to build one. The problem is when the list itself becomes the goal, because then the freebie gets built to maximize sign-ups instead of attract the right people.
• A broad freebie that brings in a wide audience will always produce a flat conversion rate. The person who signed up for one thing and is now being sold something else was never set up to buy.
• When conversion is low, most founders start tweaking their emails or their offer. The real issue is usually sitting at the front of the funnel in the freebie that brought in the wrong person to begin with.
• Confidence in your sales emails comes from clarity at the front of your funnel. If you know why every person on your list is there, you can sell to them without flinching.
• Before you build a free offer, ask three things: Who specifically do I want on this list? What does that person need that will give her a real result? And is what I'm offering her directly connected to what I'm going to sell her next?

Brooke's Resources:

• The Read: https://withbrooke.com/the-business-read-with-brooke/
• Free Backend Self Audit: https://withbrooke.myflodesk.com/self-audit
• Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com

One of the things that comes up in backend audits is that the backend is only part of the picture — and sometimes what's missing isn't a system or a process. It's clarity on who you are and how that shows up in everything you put out into the world.

Kimberly Gayle is a personal brand strategist, business consultant, podcast host, and forever entrepreneur on a mission to help women unleash their real, bold selves — guiding them to step boldly into the spotlight, build unstoppable personal brands, and differentiate themselves by who they are, not just what they do. After 12 years in corporate PR and branding, Kimberly walked away and built her own life on her own terms — through a craft beer taphouse, a soaping company, a photography business, and eventually the personal branding consultancy she runs today.

In this episode, Brooke and Kimberly dig into what personal branding really is (and why most people have it wrong), why established founders still need it, what happens when you evolve as a human but your brand doesn't move with you, and how to share yourself online without oversharing.

Key Takeaways

• Personal branding isn't about attention or self-promotion. It's coming home to your true self — sharing the parts of you that make you most uniquely who you are, so other people can see what's possible for them.
• Brand is the emotional connection someone has with a person or a business. Marketing makes people do something. Brand makes people feel something. Those are two very different jobs.
• Most founders build their businesses before their personal brands — and it works for a few years. Then revenue plateaus, burnout creeps in, and they start to feel like one of many in a sea of sameness. That's usually the signal that personal brand work is overdue.
• We become known for what we put out into the world. If all you're putting out is content about one thing, that's what people will know you for — even if you've evolved well past it.
• When you share from struggle before you've processed it, you attract people who are also in that place. When you share from the wisdom on the other side of it, you become a leader people want to follow.
• Personal brand is also offline. How you walk into rooms, how you introduce yourself, how you show up in every space — all of it is building or eroding the brand you're trying to build.

Guest Resources + Links

Find Kimberly

• Instagram (business): @boldemergencebranding
• Instagram (personal): @ItsKimberlyGayle
• Website: boldlyemerge.com
• Podcast: Brave & Bold — The Personal Branding Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/brave-bold-the-personal-branding-podcast/id1587515399
• Free Personal Brand Strategy Call: https://mountain-cardamom-037.notion.site/2955061b5cdf803790aecbbb4badc5bd

Find Brooke

• Business Read: https://withbrooke.com/the-business-read-with-brooke/
• Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com

Last week Brooke sat down and did something most business owners never do — she followed every single link, clicked through every freebie, and traced every path in a client's free offers from start to finish. Not to find broken links. To find out where the business was actually pointing.

What she found wasn't an error message. It was something a lot more common.

In this episode, she walks through what the audit revealed and why it matters less as a story about freebies and more as a story about what happens when you get too close to your own business to see where it's actually aimed.

Key Takeaways

• When you build something in your business — a freebie, a funnel, an automation — you build it with a purpose that made sense at the time. But your business moves. The freebie doesn't. Over time it can end up pointing toward a version of your business that doesn't exist anymore.
• Nothing signals the drift. The form still submits, the email still sends. From the inside, it looks like it's working. From the outside, following the full path, it's aimed at the wrong place.
• A freebie is often the first real experience someone has with your business outside of your free content — before she's paid you, before she's talked to you. That first impression matters more than most founders account for.
• When the path someone is on doesn't lead to where you want her to go, it doesn't show up as a complaint. It shows up as someone who downloaded something, seemed interested, and never came back.
• The habit isn't auditing everything once a year. It's occasionally walking through your own business as if you were a stranger — not checking whether it works, checking whether it's still aimed at the right place.

Resources + Links

• Business Read: https://withbrooke.com/the-business-read-with-brooke/
• Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com

One of the things that comes up in backend audits is that the backend is only part of the picture — and sometimes the heaviest thing a founder is carrying goes beyond her systems.

Sandy Boone is a therapist and coach who works at the intersection of trauma healing and burnout recovery, and she does it in a way that goes a lot deeper than traditional talk therapy. She works at the nervous system level — using somatic healing and neurofeedback to address what the body is holding that the mind alone can't fully process.

In this episode, Brooke and Sandy dig into what neurofeedback is, what's actually happening in the brain during a neurofeedback session, who it's a good fit for, and what burnout really looks like at a nervous system level for high-performing founders. Brooke also shares her own experience doing neurofeedback — because yes, she's doing it too.

Key Takeaways

• Neurofeedback uses the electrical pulse of the brain — similar to how an EKG reads the heart — to monitor brainwave activity and train it to stay within healthy ranges. When your brain is where it needs to be, it gets positive feedback. Over time, it learns to stay there.
• You can't force it. The harder you try to control the result during a session, the less it works. That's part of what makes it different — it's working at a level that willpower can't reach.
• Neurofeedback can support anxiety, depression, ADHD, trauma, burnout, TBI, cognitive performance, stress management, and pain perception, among other things. The brain and body aren't as separate as we've been taught to treat them.
• Burnout is what happens when you needed to take a break and didn't. Recovery looks different for every nervous system — and it's rarely what the self-care industry is selling. Did you eat today? Did you rest? Those are the questions that matter first.
• As a society we are deeply disconnected from our bodies — and that disconnection is often by design. Neurofeedback brings awareness back in a way that's physiological, not just mindset-based.
• Results typically show up between 30 and 60 sessions. Sandy doesn't assess for change until session 20. Younger brains tend to shift faster — but also revert faster.

Resources + Links

Work with Sandy

• Free Neurofeedback Information Pack: https://www.sandyboone.com/opt-in
• Work with Sandy for neurofeedback: https://www.sandyboone.com/neurofeedback-sales-page
• Email Sandy directly with questions: [email protected]

Find Brooke

• Business Read With Brooke: https://withbrooke.com/the-business-read-with-brooke/
• Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com

There is a specific kind of frustration showing up in online businesses right now. Showing up, putting out content, doing everything the way it's supposed to be done — and the results feel slow. Slower than expected. Slower than they used to feel.

The story a lot of founders are telling themselves is that something is off with their business. In this episode, Brooke offers a different way to look at it. The timeline has changed. And the founders who are going to build something that holds are the ones who start building for the actual timeline instead of the one that no longer exists.

Key Takeaways

• Sales cycles are longer. Trust takes longer to build. A person who finds you today might follow for months before they buy anything — and that is not a sign something is wrong. It's the current reality of how buying decisions happen online.
• Social media was never labeled long game because early on, it was fast. That speed is gone. The runway from first impression to sale now looks a lot more like the blogging timeline than early Instagram ever did.
• Ads are a tool, not a replacement for the runway. Without a clear client path and a backend that converts, ads accelerate the spend without accelerating the results.
• Stop measuring progress by sales alone. Email list growth, podcast downloads trending up, DMs from people who have been watching for months — those are runway indicators. They show up before the revenue does.
• Every time you rebuild the offer, change the messaging, or switch platforms, you reset the clock. Staying the course on something that's building — even when it doesn't feel like it's building — is how you play the long game.
• The infrastructure worth building right now: an email list you own, a client path that's mapped and working, and backend systems that keep the business running when you step back.

INFORMATION RESOURCES FOR YOU:

• The four backend gaps showing up in founder businesses right now: https://withbrooke.com/episode-29-female-founder-business-diagnosis/
• Before we fix anything, we need to talk about your client path: https://withbrooke.com/episode-31-client-path-mapping/

Links

• Backend Business Audit: https://withbrooke.com/backend-business-audit/
• Free Backend Self Audit: https://withbrooke.myflodesk.com/self-audit
• Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com

This one is special — Brooke's first ever in-person podcast episode, recorded inside a local studio. If you're listening, head to YouTube to watch the video, because the experience of being in that room together is worth seeing.

One of the things that comes up in backend audits is that the backend is only part of the picture — and building a business that looks and feels like you on the outside matters just as much as what's running behind the scenes. Lindsay Gronos is the owner and creative artist behind Oak & Ember Collective, a North Dakota-based photography brand known for cinematic, editorial-inspired work that blends emotion, storytelling, and intentional artistry. With over ten years of experience — including work alongside Walt Disney's Yellow Shoes Creative team and jewelry campaigns across the Midwest — she's building a luxury photography brand in a smaller market entirely on her own terms. Today they talk about what that takes creatively, personally, and as a business owner.

Key Takeaways - These apply to most creative businesses!

• Being in a smaller market isn't a limitation — it can mean more room to experiment, more creative freedom, and more meaningful client relationships than a saturated larger market allows.
• There's a real difference between taking photos and creating an experience. Brand photography is an identity — it's showing who you are as a business owner and how you want to be seen.
• Creative entrepreneurship has a specific kind of burnout. When the thing you do for passion becomes something you have to produce, the excitement and the obligation start to separate. Collaboration with other creatives is one of the ways to bring it back.
• Investing in your craft — equipment, education, skill — is a belief in yourself made visible. It shifts your mindset as much as it shifts your output.
• Submit anyway. Lindsay submitted late to a ProPhoto campaign, got featured in their top ten, and didn't even know until they tagged her. Keep tagging, keep submitting, keep going.
• When it comes to brand photography, reach out. Getting comfortable with your photographer before you're in the room together makes all the difference in what you walk away with.

Resources + Links

Find Lindsay

• Instagram: @oakandembercollective
• Website: oakandembercollectivend.com
• Lindsay's Online Creative Collective: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1710326130138132

Find Brooke

• Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/withbrookefb

When founders book a Backend Business Audit with Brooke, some come in with a specific problem. Others come in with everything — overwhelmed, scattered, not sure where to look first.

That second kind of founder almost always has the same gap underneath all of it: the client path hasn't been mapped. In this episode, Brooke breaks down what a client path is, what happens in a business when it isn't clear, and four questions to answer before building anything else.

• Scattered confusion on an intake form almost always points to one thing: the client path isn't mapped yet.
• A client path has four parts:
  • where you're meeting people and what they're aware of in that moment
  • what you're offering them first
  • where you're taking them
  • and what comes after
• When the path isn't clear, freebies multiply, offers get rebuilt, and content feels scattered because nothing has a clear job to do.
• Systems built without a clear client path have no clear purpose. They can be built, but they won't work the way they should.
• Map the path first. Everything else gets easier once you know what you're building and where it's going.

• Where am I meeting people, and what problem are they aware of in that moment?
• What is the first thing I'm offering them that gives them a real result or gets them closer to one?
• What is the offer I'm moving them toward, and what does their life or business look like on the other side of it?
• What comes after that — is there a next step, a continuation, or a reason to stay?

Work with Brooke

• Backend Business Audit: https://stan.store/withbrooke/p/backend-business-audit
• Free Backend Self Audit: https://withbrooke.myflodesk.com/self-audit

Connect

• Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com

One of the things that comes up in backend audits is that the backend is only part of the picture. When Brooke sees gaps in areas outside of her lane, she wants to make sure you have somewhere to go — and Carlianne Compton is one of the experts she trusts in that space.

Carlianne is an Instagram strategist who helps service-based businesses grow on Instagram and turn their social media presence into revenue. In this episode, she and Brooke dig into what ideal client clarity really means (and why most founders think they have it but don't), what kills DM conversations before they start, how to find your people on Instagram, and what's worth focusing on no matter what the algorithm does next.

Key Takeaways

• Most founders have a shell of an ideal client — a title or demographic — but not the psychological depth. Getting to the internal thoughts, fears, and patterns of your person is what stops them mid-scroll.
• Being specific doesn't cancel out potential clients. People resonate with patterns and feelings, not just identities. The right specificity brings in more of the right people, not fewer.
• DM conversions aren't built in one conversation. They're built over time, the same way any real relationship forms — slowly, with genuine interest and no agenda attached to every exchange.
• The algorithm is driven by people's decisions and actions. Understanding your ideal client at a psychological level is the most reliable way to get content in front of the right people, regardless of what the algorithm does.
• When ideal client clarity is deep enough, content becomes intuitive. Ideas come on their own because you know your person well enough that you think like them.
• Fun, relatable content that has nothing to do with your business still has a place in your strategy. It widens the top of the funnel so the right people can find their way down it.

Find Carlianne

• Instagram (IG strategy): @conversionwithcarli
• Instagram (learn to be a SMM): @carlianne_compton
• FREE WTF IG Quiz: https://go.carliannecompton.com/wtf-ig-quiz
• Website: go.carliannecompton.com/strategy-reset-page

Resources from Brooke

• Backend Business Audit: https://stan.store/withbrooke/p/backend-business-audit
• Free Backend Self Audit: https://withbrooke.myflodesk.com/self-audit
• Instagram: @with.brooke
• Website: withbrooke.com