Apparently, Building a Business Requires Being Perceived
A note from a very private person who knows she has to put herself out there anyway
I have spent more than 15 years working in marketing, which means I know exactly what I am supposed to tell myself right now. Visibility matters. People cannot hire you if they do not know you exist. Trust is built through consistency. Share your perspective. Tell your story. Put a face behind the business. All of that is true, and I would also rather not be perceived on the internet.
That is the conflict I keep running into as I build Trillium Creative Studio. I want this business to succeed. I want to work with thoughtful, interesting people, and I want to share what I have learned about branding, marketing, strategy, creativity, and building something with intention. I just do not particularly want to become a public person in order to do it.
Being visible feels different when the business is yours
It is easy for me to see what someone else should say. Give me a business, a founder, and a pile of scattered ideas, and I can usually find the thread. I can ask the questions, clarify the message, identify what matters, and help someone show up in a way that actually feels like them. Then I turn toward my own business and suddenly everything feels deeply personal. It is not just a strategy anymore. It is my face, my voice, my opinions, my work, and my name attached to all of it.
Every post creates a tiny opening for someone to misunderstand me, judge me, disagree with me, or simply decide they do not like me. Logically, I understand that this is not an emergency. My nervous system has apparently not received that memo. There is anxiety in hitting publish, sharing a photo of myself, or writing something honest and then realizing that people may actually read it. Sometimes I want to be seen, and the second I am seen, I want to disappear. It is a very convenient personality trait for someone who just started a business.
Putting yourself out there is putting yourself out there
The more I think about it, the more building a business feels a little like dating. You cannot stay home, refuse to speak to anyone, reveal nothing about yourself, and then feel personally betrayed when your ideal partner fails to appear in your living room. At some point, you have to leave the house. You have to say hello. You have to let someone learn what you care about, what makes you laugh, what you are good at, what is weird about you, and what kind of relationship you are actually looking for.
Friendship works the same way. You do not build real friendships by presenting the most polished, universally acceptable version of yourself. You build them through recognition. Someone says something honest, another person thinks, “Oh thank God, me too,” and suddenly you are not strangers anymore.
Business is not exactly the same, obviously. I am not asking potential clients to split dessert and meet my parents, although they would love that. But connection still requires some level of risk. The right clients need enough information to recognize themselves in what I say. They need to understand how I think, what I value, what I notice, and whether they would want me in the room while we untangle their business. If I sand down every opinion, hide every personal detail, and wait until everything is flawless, I may appear professional. I may also become completely forgettable.
Privacy and visibility are not opposites
I think part of my anxiety comes from believing there are only two choices: stay private and invisible, or turn my entire life into content. I do not want strangers to know everything about me. I do not want every meaningful experience to become a marketing opportunity, and I do not want to perform vulnerability because an algorithm rewards it. But maybe visibility does not require any of that. Maybe I can be a private person who shares selectively.
I can talk about what travel teaches me without providing a live map of where I am sleeping. I can share how dogs, friendships, art, and weird experiences shape my creativity without handing the internet every intimate detail. I can have strong opinions about branding and strategy while keeping parts of my life entirely mine. Privacy is not the absence of a public voice. It is deciding where the boundary lives, and I am still figuring out where mine is.
Marketers are terrible at doing this for themselves
I know I am not alone in this particular mess. Marketers, designers, writers, strategists, and other creative people are often exceptional at helping someone else show up while quietly avoiding their own visibility. We build beautiful websites for clients while ours has said “coming soon” for six months. We create content strategies we do not follow. We have folders full of ideas and drafts we cannot convince ourselves to publish.
We know every rule, which means we can also see every possible flaw. Nothing feels finished or quite good enough. There is always a stronger headline, a better photo, a clearer framework, or a more strategic time to launch. Sometimes that is discernment. Sometimes it is perfectionism wearing a very convincing marketing hat. I am trying to learn the difference.
So this is me leaving the house
Root Notes is part of me putting myself out there. It will include thoughts on branding, marketing, strategy, creativity, entrepreneurship, travel, friendship, dogs, being a weirdo, and building a business and life that actually feel like my own. Some of it will be useful, some of it will be personal, and some of it may make me want to throw my phone into the French Broad River immediately after publishing.
But I want Trillium to succeed more than I want to remain completely hidden. So I am going to practice being visible without giving everything away. I am going to share before every sentence feels perfect (because what is that anyways) and trust that the right people cannot recognize me if I never let them see me. Then we will just see how this goes.
If you are also trying to build something while wrestling with the anxiety of being seen, what part of putting yourself out there feels hardest for you? I have a feeling there are a lot of us quietly hiding behind our businesses.
About Root Notes: Thoughts on branding, marketing, strategy, creativity, entrepreneurship, travel, dogs, friendship, love, being weird, and building a life and business that feel like your own. Written by Kara Schuler, founder of Trillium Creative Studio.
Until next time,
Kara
Still figuring it out, but at least taking notes.
