Clarity Is a Discipline: A Founder's Guide to Positioning, with Krista Patterson

Your brand isn't a logo, a tagline, or a color palette. It's every interaction people have with you, and if you're not clear on what you stand for, someone else will fill in the blanks for you.

This week I'm joined by Krista Patterson, CEO and co-founder of Positioning Collective, a brand and positioning consultancy that's spent 20+ years helping founders and executives get clear on what actually makes them different. We get into why clarity is less an exercise and more a discipline, what happens inside a company when it's missing (hint: it's meetings about meetings and slow decisions), and why the leaders most resistant to this work are the ones who don't believe there's a gap in the first place.

We also talk about the difference between being a personal brand and just being human, why consistency builds trust faster than any messaging ever could, and what AI is actually good at right now (tasks, not thoughts). Krista shares the story of taking a client from "we need a new logo" all the way through an acquisition by VMware, and why the logo and tagline are always the last thing, never the first.