What if your brand voice didn’t live solely inside your head? What if it was a system —a tool that helped you write faster, delegate confidently, and create calm across your business?
In this episode, I share how I took my brand voice from “just a vibe” to a repeatable, documented system with the help of voice strategist Justin Blackman. We dig into how building a voice guide changed the way I write, collaborate, and scale. If content creation feels like a bottleneck—especially when you're not the one doing the writing—this episode is for you.
We’re not just talking about voice—we’re pulling two big levers from the CALMER framework:
→
Efficiency
, by turning intuition into reusable tools
→
Management Style
, by empowering your team with clarity instead of corrections
This is a behind-the-scenes look at the system that helped me put my voice on autopilot—and made content creation calmer, faster, and more fun.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why “no one can write like me” is a sign you need a system, not more effort
- The three components of a brand voice (and why most guides get it wrong)
- How defining the difference between you and your brand prevents burnout
-
Why “authenticity” doesn’t have to mean writing everything yourself
Learn More About Justin Blackman
- Website: justinblackman.com
- Grab Justin's Feelings Wheel
- LinkedIn: Justin Blackman
Learn More About the Host – Susan Boles
- Website: beyondmargins.com
- LinkedIn: Susan Boles
- Submit your Calm KPI or System: Send it here
- (00:00) - The Subjective Nature of Brand Voice
- (00:50) - The Challenge of Maintaining a Consistent Brand Voice
- (01:51) - Building a Scalable Voice System
- (04:41) - The Science Behind Brand Voice Guides
- (09:11) - Balancing Personal and Brand Identity
- (29:17) - Leveraging AI for Authentic Brand Voice
Grab the Calm Service Design + Delivery Swipe File here
We value your thoughts and feedback. Feel free to share them with Susan here. Your input is not just valuable, it's crucial in shaping future episodes.
00:00 - The Subjective Nature of Brand Voice
00:50 - The Challenge of Maintaining a Consistent Brand Voice
01:51 - Building a Scalable Voice System
04:41 - The Science Behind Brand Voice Guides
09:11 - Balancing Personal and Brand Identity
29:17 - Leveraging AI for Authentic Brand Voice
We all have different viewpoints. What we don't understand is that everyone has these subjective definitions of an objective word. So by being able to pull out and understanding what our viewpoint is, that allows us to define our brand in a way that can scale, that can spread across an entire team.
Susan Boles:What if your brand voice wasn't just a vibe, but an actual system? A tool that could help your team move faster, make better decisions, and sound like you even when you didn't touch the draft. Today, we're solving for calm. One KPI, one bottleneck, one business at a time. Imagine this.
Susan Boles:You're staring at a Google Doc from your VA, your marketing assistant, or maybe even a hired copywriter. It's a blog post or an email draft or a podcast outro, and it's fine, technically accurate, on brand ish, but it's missing something. It's not you. So you rewrite again. And in that moment, you confirm the story you've been telling yourself.
Susan Boles:No one else can sound like me. I'll just do it myself. As a founder or a consultant or an agency owner, your voice is often your brand. You've built trust with it, a vibe, a following. But that trust becomes a trap when your voice only lives inside your head, undocumented, undefined, and totally unscalable.
Susan Boles:And if you think you're the only one stuck in this loop, you're not. I was doing it too even as the only person writing my content. Because here's the truth. Documenting your voice isn't just about delegation. It's about removing mental load.
Susan Boles:It's about creating repeatable decision making tools. It's about building a system, not for someone else, but for you. A system for your voice helps you write faster, delegate with confidence, and lead more effectively. That's what I did. I brought in Justin Blackman, a brand voice expert, to help me create a voice guide that's now at the core of how I run my business.
Susan Boles:I even used it to help me write the script for this episode. As it turns out, building a voice system doesn't just make things sound better. It pulls two key levers from the calmer framework. The ones that make things feel better too. First, the lever of efficiency.
Susan Boles:So you're creating reusable tools that cut down on decision fatigue and help everyone's work run smoother. Second, your management style. You're making your team more autonomous by giving them clarity instead of corrections. So here's the bottleneck. I was the only person who could write like me, not because I wanted to be, but because no one else could hit the tone, the rhythm, or the intention, at least not consistently.
Susan Boles:And it wasn't just slowing down my content. It was bleeding into other areas, emails, proposals, client communications. If I wasn't the one writing it, it just didn't sound right. And if it didn't sound right, it didn't ship. I've built a business that depends on my voice.
Susan Boles:But without a system for that voice, I can't delegate, and I can't scale, and I can't do all the things I wanna be doing. And here's the twist. I don't even want to outsource my writing. Most of the time, I like writing, and I'm pretty good at it. But I needed a way to make it faster, more consistent, and less exhausting, especially during seasons where my capacity drops.
Susan Boles:And that's when I realized the problem wasn't output. It was clarity. I'd never taken the time to define what my voice actually was. So even when I was the one writing, I was reinventing the wheel every time. And when I wasn't the one writing, everything just stalled.
Susan Boles:So I called Justin. He's someone I trust, not just because he's worked with big personal brands, but because he's a systems thinker like me. And he geeks out on the science of voice. And together, Justin and I built something I'd never really had before, a brand voice guide that captures the decisions that I'd been making intuitively and turned them into a tool I could reuse. We're gonna take a quick break to hear from our sponsors.
Susan Boles:But when we come back, Justin and I get into the science of systematizing your voice and how we each use our own brand voice guides even though we're still the ones writing our own content. So what problems do most people not realize are actually like voice problems or system problems? What problem do they think they have versus what problem do they actually have?
Justin Blackman:A lot of people think that they actually have a copy problem or they have trouble working with creatives, or they say that nobody can get my voice right, because they feel like they have a strong brand voice. The fact is, maybe they do, but there are a couple of challenges with this. One, if it's not documented, the voice in your head is never going to match exactly the voice in a writer's head. And they're going to think that they're getting you exactly. It's like the whole reading the label from inside the bottle thing.
Justin Blackman:You can't hear the voice that is coming across in the reader's head because it's going to sound different in your head. So getting an outside perspective on how you are, they're gonna be seeing things differently. So a lot of times they think that they have creatives who just can't get it right. Other times they're trying to do too much with their brand voice. And if you have a personal brand, this is very common, especially these days, where people are putting too much of themselves into the copy to the point where it becomes unscalable.
Justin Blackman:You're one person, and then there's the brand. And even if it's your brand, the voices should be deliberately different. They should be similar, but there should be boundaries around the brand voice. Like, you talk about common KPIs and things like that, but we don't necessarily know all the details of what's happening in your life. You're showing up as a professional and an expert in your business regardless of what's happening behind the screen.
Justin Blackman:So sometimes they actually have a boundary problem, which is showing up as a voice problem.
Susan Boles:Interesting. When we were working together, one of the things that I thought was really interesting was when we were going through the process, one of the questions you asked was, is that a Susan thing or is that a brand thing? And I had never really thought about them being different because I have a personal brand. Yes, I have a brand, a company that I talk under sometimes. But for the most part, I'm talking as me as a representative of the company.
Susan Boles:And it never really occurred to me that there are parts of me and my personality and how I naturally communicate one on one when we're talking versus how I communicate when I'm being a representative of my brand.
Justin Blackman:We all have worries, we all have troubles, we all have problems. But nine to five or whatever hours you work, we want you showing up as the expert in what you do. We're hiring you. We're paying you. We want confidence.
Justin Blackman:We don't want to hear that you're being troubled by either a personal problem or family problem or maybe even a business problem. We wanna hire people who are the best at what they do and can absolutely help us. And vulnerability, that's okay. We're allowed to show like, Hey, I can help you because I struggled with this too, but here's how I figured out. So you're positioning yourself as the expert.
Justin Blackman:I want the work done, and I wanna hire the most capable person for that. Yes, we should have connectivity through personalities and things like that, but there's a difference between the way that you show up at work and the way that you show up in life, that's important. And I think the lines have been blurred, or in some cases completely obliterated. And that's causing a lot of challenges that people are getting burnt out with their brands right now.
Susan Boles:Yeah. It's always challenging for me to figure out what should be me, what should be my company. And if my company is not named Susan Bowles, right, then how do I make that distinction between brand stuff, company stuff, and my stuff? Because I don't really show up publicly in any way that is not somehow related to my company. And they feel so intertwined sometimes.
Susan Boles:And it's such a difficult decision as to like what should be under what bucket.
Justin Blackman:Yeah. Completely get that. There is a challenge. There's a an issue to be solved with how you show up publicly versus privately. With social media, sometimes these lines are blurred.
Justin Blackman:I mean, it used to be that our Instagram pictures were filled with pictures of our pets and our sister's goofy looking kid. And now it's just all business stuff. It's like your Instagram reel is now like three keys to close more sales. So our brands have overtaken our lives, and rather than building businesses that are part of us, they've built businesses that are all of us, and they've taken over our feeds. And some of us want that back.
Susan Boles:I desperately want it to be more human. It feels like no matter what social channel you go to, at the beginning, it feels fun and genuinely social. So LinkedIn, three years ago, there was the channel of like very, very business y stuff. But then there was also this very human piece that it felt like very, very early Facebook days, right? Where you're like DMing people, but you're DMing people and you're making friends in those DMs.
Susan Boles:And then it got taken over by now we have to turn this into something that turns a profit and that makes money for the algorithm and the company that's, you know, controlling the algorithm. And when we turn it into something capitalistic, it sucks all the fun out of it.
Justin Blackman:Yes. It used to be that we went to social media to avoid making decisions. And now we treat it as a place where people are going to make decisions. And it's just ads, and it's just pitches, and it's just not fun anymore. And we feel that we need to show up that way.
Justin Blackman:And that's okay. Sometimes you can show up as business you on certain platforms. On LinkedIn, it makes sense to show up as business you. But Instagram, maybe you don't want that to show up as business you. Maybe you want that as old you, as personal you.
Justin Blackman:Know people that treat Facebook and Instagram as a record of their lives, and that's great. Other people treat it as a record of their business, and that's okay too. But when they blur, it just becomes this challenge to the point where it's like, I don't know what to post anymore. The way that we can define this a little bit clearer is if we were to make a Venn diagram of what's you versus your business, I mean, for some people, it's just a circle. Like, it's the same.
Justin Blackman:And that becomes exhausting because you have to show up on all the time. And when you have that split to figure out what's the business, what's you, and what's the overlap, it becomes much more manageable. You can turn it off. Your business can scale. If you're working with a team, they know what elements of you to replicate, to emulate, to embrace.
Justin Blackman:They don't have to represent the way that you act at the dinner table. They have to represent the way that you act at the office. That's going to be different. It's the brand value versus personal value. Those don't have to be identical.
Justin Blackman:The purpose of your business is not the same as your purpose of your soul. And without that clear distinction, sometimes your employees or your teams, we really don't know what we're there to do.
Susan Boles:I think that makes perfect sense and is a fantastic transition to basically using the systemic process that you created to systematize all of those pieces that we're talking about, to look at what parts are me and what parts are part of the brand's voice and then can be explicitly defined and explicitly delineated how in fact this voice happens out in the world. And I'm a huge systems geek. So the fact that you have developed a system and kind of a science behind creating that package that can then be handed off to somebody to replicate your brand voice was super interesting to me. Yeah. Like, just the fact that it's for someone like me who came into being creative, what feels like very late in life.
Susan Boles:And it always felt very, I don't want say mystical, but like very squishy.
Justin Blackman:Yeah.
Susan Boles:When people are writing out in the world, I kind of assumed it just happened magically or that they had some innate skill that I did not have. And I think the idea that that can be quantified and it can be systematized is super interesting. So walk us through what a brand voice guide should have in it. And then maybe the process of how you think about creating a system around something that feels very squishy?
Justin Blackman:Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of brand voice guides that you'll see. Some are created by creative agencies. Some people do themselves.
Justin Blackman:Some people pay like way too much money for it. And then other people, sometimes they don't pay enough money for it. But there's this belief that you can create a brand voice guide that's three adjectives in an avatar. We're friendly, we're human, we're professional, and then we act like your favorite neighbor or something like that. Honestly, that's garbage because they're open up to so much interpretation that they don't mean anything.
Justin Blackman:It means that everyone can have an opinion and everyone is right. Like the term friendly, for instance. Almost every voice guide I've ever seen actually, let's go with human. That's an even better one because everyone's big on that with AI. We want our voice to sound
Susan Boles:I feel attacked because I'm pretty sure human and friendlier were both on
Justin Blackman:this Right, but that's the problem. They're in everybody's list.
Susan Boles:Nobody wants to be like, I want to be the evil corporate overlord.
Justin Blackman:Right, but even so, the evil corporate overlord, that's a human. There are 8,500,000,000 people in the world. Choose one. As far as friendly, think about how many friends you have. There's no way that they all sound the same.
Justin Blackman:Friendly is a personality. It's not a voice. We actually need to define our voice way more deliberate than that. And what it comes down to is brand voice is three things. It's your vocabulary, your tone, and your cadence.
Justin Blackman:Vocabulary is the level of words that you use. Do you say big or huge or gigantic or tremendous, gargantuan? Those are all different. They all mean the same thing, but it keeps getting more complex. So there's a level of vocabulary.
Justin Blackman:The tones are the emotions in your writing, and that could be on a broad level, like, you know, happy, sad. Like, so you've got calm. Calm is a big part of your business. Calm can mean balanced. It can mean tranquil.
Justin Blackman:It can mean serene. Those are different versions of calm that can be defined differently. When we talk about happy, there's about 300 different definitions for happy. Everything from optimistic to hopeful. Those are going to mean different things to different people.
Justin Blackman:So we want to get really granular on the tones that we're defining. We want to truly understand what the tone is. Not just happy, but what level of happy. And then the cadence is the rhythm of your writing. Is it short and choppy with a lot of periods, very few commas?
Justin Blackman:Or do we write long, wordy bird sentences that tend to go on and on forever with tons of commas, maybe a semicolon, a couple of em dashes, and some ellipses that go on until you actually run out of breath before you get to the end of the sentence. That's the cadence. So your brand voice are those three elements. And then we want to define that super clear so anyone can emulate the style consistently, and we actually have a way of measuring to know if it's on brand or not. We can literally use math and calculators to calculate your brand voice, which is separate from your brand personality, which is broader identity.
Justin Blackman:A lot of people are giving brand personalities and mistaking them for a voice.
Susan Boles:Say more about that.
Justin Blackman:So, like, a brand personality it's gonna sound cocky, but my brand personality right now is unusually insightful. And what I mean is that I look for an unusual insight. That's something that just shows that I look deeper. And it kind of shows you how I show up and the way that I'm thinking, but that's not how I talk. The way that I speak is deliberate.
Justin Blackman:It's short. It's choppy. It's about making something complex more simple. And it's designed to be at a lower vocabulary level, a more objective point of view. I'm not using a lot of you and I as I speak.
Justin Blackman:I'm talking about, like, the process rather than my process or your process. So it's an objective tone, and the vocabulary is pretty basic. I like to make it accessible. I want anyone to be able to understand it. So my voice is more of a simple objective element, but my personality is more about unusually insightful.
Justin Blackman:And the way that someone defined my voice, way that I show up is a very bright light that shines narrow. So basically like a laser. I'm a spotlight on a very specific thing. Those are some of the leading elements, but I keep it short. I keep it tight.
Susan Boles:I am curious. Do you have a Brand Voice Guide for yourself? Like, did you do this process for yourself and you have one?
Justin Blackman:So I've tried to do it for myself, and it's really, really hard. Like, the things that seem interesting to other people are every day for me. So I don't realize that those are unique. I have a co instructor in Brown Voice Academy. Her name is Jillian Hill.
Justin Blackman:I had her run me through the process. My voice came out so much different than when I did it. And I was like, Oh my God, this is it. Like, now I know why I do this for people. I know the power of it.
Justin Blackman:And because this stuff is so in-depth, the process is the product. Like, going through that, I'm able to figure out what my voice is, and I can actually just put the transcript through AI. And I have a template that I've created that will make the voice guide more accessible. And the plus side is because it's built with AI, it uses the terms that AI understands. So if I'm using AI to brainstorm or to come up with a couple of headlines or even repurpose all my content, it comes out so much better than it ever did when I just said make it more friendly.
Susan Boles:Yeah, I have definitely found that to be true in using my own going back and forth with an AI tool. Being able to brainstorm has been really interesting because my brand voice guide, like it's still me, but there are elements of it now that I am leaning into more. The one I like, we decided it should be 77% nerdy. And, like, it's always been kind of nerdy, like, because I'm kind of nerdy. Like, you know, this is the kind of stuff that I like doing is gigging out about different systems and nuances and, like, little fine details.
Susan Boles:But the fact that you were able to mirror that back to me and say, hey, this is an element that you talked about, but is is not actually as present in my writing and my content as I would like it to be because I like it being nerdy. And over the course of the last four years, that sort of faded away. Like it was there initially. And then my like it I just kind of forgot about that piece. And it's one of those elements where now that it is very explicit, I can explicitly aim at that element because I want to lean into having nerdier content.
Susan Boles:I want it to be a little bit more sciency. I want it to be a little bit more geeky. But I never would have headed in that direction, except that it came out of the process of trying to be very explicit about what are the different elements. One of the challenges for me, because I've, you know, I've been through a lot of messaging stuff, I've done a lot of like brand and personal voice work. It was never explicit enough.
Susan Boles:And I think that is true of most systems. Honestly, they don't work when we're not explicit enough. That is really one of the main benefits of having something like a voice guide. It's that it makes the quiet pieces louder.
Justin Blackman:Yeah.
Susan Boles:So that you can hand it off to a copywriter who you have chosen the 10 words that you very thoughtfully spent twenty minutes debating whether or not which word was the appropriate word. But we did. We went through the process and there were a few words where we looked up the definition of the word and compared it to a similar word and which one had the right flavor. And I think being able to be very explicit about all the different flavors that make up your brand voice or in the case of other systems, all the different elements, that is the piece that gives clarity to be able to delegate this function, whether that's to AI, whether that's to a copywriter, whether that's to your visual designer even. The piece that I think we miss when we're trying to delegate is almost never are we explicit enough.
Justin Blackman:Yeah.
Susan Boles:And if we aren't direct and explicit enough about what we're communicating, that's where the message gets missed, I think.
Justin Blackman:Yeah. That's what's so interesting is we all think that we have the right definition of what these words mean. And the fact is sometimes they mean multiple things. Authoritative is a word that comes up a lot. Some people are like, Absolutely, yes, I want to own my authority.
Justin Blackman:Other people are like, Absolutely not. I don't want authority to be part of my brand. I always respond either way with, That's interesting. Tell me more. And sometimes they define authority as someone who can be trusted, which is great.
Justin Blackman:Absolutely, we want that. Other times, it can mean someone who is obeyed or in charge and can also be repressive. We all have different viewpoints. What we don't understand is that everyone has these subjective definitions of an objective word. So by being able to pull out and understanding what our viewpoint is, that allows us to define our brand in a way that can scale, that can spread across an entire team, and also maybe able to alter your views a little bit.
Justin Blackman:I had one agency owner in particular who was against the word authority, and her team was on the call as we were doing this. And they're like, We understand that, but we have a team of experts. And because of your views of authority, it means that we actually have to hold back, and we have to play small because of our leader's view on this. So we understood that she, separating her view, wanted to lead with accessibility, but the brand can lead with authority, meaning someone able to be trusted, someone as an expert, someone who was just confident in their role. So the brand became more authoritative than the founder, and it had its voice that allowed the team to flourish.
Susan Boles:The way that I have experienced leadership and being inside agencies and those kinds of things, I think it is interesting, particularly as you get a bigger team. It's one thing if it's you and I, we pretty much do all of our content. We don't really have teams that are writing for us. But I think once you end up with a bigger team, it adds exponential issues to trying to have somebody else represent your brand, represent your voice. It's really interesting to have like the founder personality and the brand personality.
Susan Boles:They start to really diverge when you have a team writing as the brand versus the founder writing as the brand.
Justin Blackman:Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes when you have a founder led brand, you get a team that tries to mimic the founder all the time. And basically, they're trying to be stunt doubles. And they're trying to step in and, like, let the audience make the audience think that this is the star.
Justin Blackman:Other times, you get a brand that's influenced by them under their direction, but not them entirely. So what you're doing is you're building a supporting cast that's there to bolster the brand and make it come alive in a way that fits the scene, in a way that fits the theme of whatever it is that you're talking about. And it makes the entire brand stronger. It gives it a well rounded cast as opposed to just mirroring one person. And it could be done both ways, but sometimes a brand develops the owner's personality not intentionally.
Justin Blackman:And sometimes a founder may leave, and then the brand kind of suffers a little bit, or it has an identity crisis. When you build a brand that's beyond just you, influenced by you, led by you, but not just you, even if it's a personal brand, it can scale even if the founder exits.
Susan Boles:Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point because so often, like the conversation I'm having with other founders, with other business owners, is what happens when things have to transition, right? Like what happens if you lose a key team member? What happens if the founder leaves? What happens if I decide to sell this brand that I've built? How do I manage the risk of that?
Susan Boles:Because it can cause a lot of chaos. And I think you have a really interesting point that having a delineated explicit brand is one of those things that allows you to build more inherent resilience in your company and in your brand is by defining this thing, defining your voice explicitly, that can be passed on, that can become part of the IP of your brand that we're talking about selling, you then have, look, here's a system. You know, a lot of the times when I'm working with clients on the how do I set my company up to sell it or to transition it to whatever the exit plan ends up being. The thing that we're talking about is systems. Like that is what makes a company marketable is that they have repeatable documented systems that somebody else can come in and run.
Susan Boles:And I don't think we normally think about our brand as part of that. But in a lot of cases, especially if you're developing a brand that is separate from your personal brand, you have a company name, and the point of that is to transition that to a bigger entity or to be able to sell it at some point. Almost never do I hear anybody talking about how the brand or the marketing or the personality can transition after the person that developed that brand is gone. So I think that's a really interesting point in terms of building longevity and sustainability into our companies.
Justin Blackman:Yeah, authenticity is about the consistent expression of core values and communication principles that doesn't just have to come from one person. That can be a team. That can be copywriters. That can even be AI. AI can still be authentic.
Justin Blackman:As long as it's representing you and your values and your viewpoint, that's what makes it sound on brand. That's the human that people are looking for.
Susan Boles:Interesting. I never really thought about that. Like, the debate now is AI is inherently not human. It's inherently not authentic. But you're right.
Susan Boles:If your AI is doing a really good job and you have delegated your voice, you've trained it on you and your voice and your ideas and your rhythms and all of those things, using AI to, as long as it's maintained by humans, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's inauthentic. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's not still your voice.
Justin Blackman:Yeah, I was a copywriter, still am a copywriter, but primarily I focus on voice guides. But as a copywriter, if you outsource your writing to me, a sales page, emails, messaging, and I write that for you and give it to you, is that still authentic? I think so. A lot of the top personal brands and even corporate brands, they all have copywriters. It's still authenticity.
Justin Blackman:It doesn't just have to come from the founder. And now that it can come through AI, it can still be authentic. It can absolutely not be authentic, and that's the challenge when it doesn't understand your voice. That's a big, big problem. But that's something that I can actually help people solve by getting deeper and truly understanding what your voice and your views and your values are, documenting it, and giving that to AI, it can now represent your authentic voice.
Justin Blackman:I've had AI write some stuff for me that is better than what I came up with, and it's still on brand. And, yeah, sometimes I change a few pieces, sometimes I don't. It can be authentic when it understands where you're coming
Susan Boles:from. As we are learning how to effectively use AI, and I think part of that is really looking deeper at what we mean by authenticity, right? Because I think a lot of people the reaction of, hey, I used AI on this thing is Oh, well, then it's not authentic. It's not real. Humans didn't put the effort into doing that.
Susan Boles:Part of the evolution of like what we end up using AI effectively for, it is interesting to really think more deeply about what we mean by authenticity. Because you're right, there's not a huge difference between spending a lot of time training an AI on your voice versus spending a lot of time training a copywriter on your voice. Those aren't necessarily different processes. Like, I think that's going be an interesting thing to see evolve in the world.
Justin Blackman:Yeah, I mean, I still love the art of writing. I love the depth. I love going down the rabbit holes and figuring out why someone's approach is like this. It's not necessarily something that AI can do or is made to do. It's made to systematize things.
Justin Blackman:A person is gonna put more thought into it. It's gonna be a little bit more deliberate. But the fact is AI is getting really, really good. And we're only really on year two of ChatGPT being out or Claude. They're getting better every day.
Justin Blackman:I do still love writing by hand. I love the craft of it. I spend weeks building a voice guide. Not everybody needs that. A lot of solopreneurs don't need a 107 page voice guide, and that's the length of some of mine.
Justin Blackman:Sometimes AI can do a really good job and get it done quickly and at a much lower lift. And so it just doesn't make sense not to use these tools. They can be a great resource.
Susan Boles:Yeah. And I think what's interesting as you were talking and you were saying, you know, that AI is really good at things. AI is really good at being a mimic. Right? So it can't write original content.
Susan Boles:As a person, I think it's really good at me training an AI to replicate me. But I don't think that somebody from the outside could train an AI to be me. It's really good at systematizing and replicating what already exists. But it's not coming up with anything new.
Justin Blackman:It's not. That's not to say that it won't one day. But the vocabulary, tone, and cadence things that I mentioned before, like the definition of brand voice, AI is getting better at that every day, because it's using the math that I talked about. Literally, you can measure the vocabulary levels, you can identify the tones, you can measure the cadence. It's getting better at that.
Justin Blackman:Last year, it sucked at it. Copywriters were laughing it out of town. It can't sound like you. Now it kind of can. So the voice guides that I'm creating now, it's not just about the vocabulary, tone, and cadence.
Justin Blackman:It's about the viewpoints and the perspective, And that's the thing that a generic brand guide just isn't going to get.
Susan Boles:Yeah, you're gonna end up with human friendly trustworthy. So what is one kind of small action that somebody listening to our conversation could take today to start building their own or developing, making their own voice a little bit more explicit or moving towards a little bit more systematized process there.
Justin Blackman:I do offer services that can help you nail in exactly what the right four to nine tones that truly define your voice are. But there are some ways to do some of this on your own. It's obviously not gonna be as deep, but you can use tone wheels or emotion wheels and kind of define much clearer what tones are essential for your brand, what has to be there. And it's not just happy. Like for you, calm would be one of the elements that we want to go for.
Justin Blackman:It's not like a caffeinated kangaroo just jumping around all over the place, because that's happy too. So using a tone wheel or an emotion wheel to go from a broad emotion to a more specific one is probably one of the easiest first steps.
Susan Boles:And is there anything you think we should talk about that we haven't touched on yet?
Justin Blackman:So, I mean, if we're gonna be talking about brand voice and AI, everyone right now is saying, I could tell it's AI because of the Emdash. I've been using the Emdash deliberately for years. And
Susan Boles:Well, that sounds like the Emdash is there in AI because so many professional writers use it. Yeah. It's ours. They copied all the professional writers.
Justin Blackman:It is our crutch. I I had someone reach out to me saying, did you write this with AI because you use a short question in the middle of the statement and you use the m dash three times? I was like, AI didn't touch this copy. This is a % me. Now I have to defend myself?
Justin Blackman:I don't like that. But it also does mean that AI is getting more consistent to the way that other people write. So the lines are already blurred. Trust is lost. That doesn't mean that it's going to not come back.
Justin Blackman:I think right now we're all looking at things with scrupulous eyes, and we're hunting to discredit someone. I think as AI gets better at authenticity, because as we establish it doesn't just have to come from one person, it will be more accepted and it will be fine. And we'll be able to get our messages across tighter. We're going to be able to be authentic easier and sometimes freeing up by defining our brand voice and freeing up and being able to outsource this copy, it's great because it gives us more time to be the leader of our brands rather than its mechanic. We don't have to clean up after.
Justin Blackman:We don't have to be its janitor. It gives us more time to be the visionary and do the stuff that a founder does. So I like that it's here. Yeah. There's a lot of it that I strongly dislike.
Justin Blackman:I don't like that a lot of writers are getting put out of work and struggling and suffering right now. But I do think that for founders, it can be a great resource if you understand how to define your voice so it can sound like you to maintain authenticity.
Susan Boles:So let's zoom out for a second. What we just walked through wasn't just a story about a brand voice guide. It was a snapshot of what it looks like to build a calmer business by intentionally pulling two specific levers. The first lever is efficiency. So we created a reusable tool one that reduces decision fatigue, shortens revision cycles, and frees up time, whether you're delegating or not.
Susan Boles:The second is management style. We've replaced ad hoc guidance and rewrite cycles with a system that empowers your team to act with confidence without needing constant input from you. That's the essence of calmer. Not just making your to do list shorter, but changing how decisions get made so your business runs smoothly even when you step back. If you've ever rewritten your team's copy because it just didn't sound like you or you delayed launching something because the voice felt off, I hope this episode gave you a new way to think about solving that.
Susan Boles:And if you're building tools like this in your own business, or you want your system or you have a calmer KPI and you'd like to be featured in a future episode, I'd love to hear from you. You can submit your system, your bottleneck, or your question at the link in the show notes. And of course, if this episode helps you see something differently, share it with a friend who is stuck in the I will just do this myself loop.