Business

Heart Centered Branding Takes Front And Centre In 2022

Published

3 years ago

January 27, 2022

As a new wave of female leadership expands into the world, the landscape of branding in business is deepening. Consumer expectations demand a new level of connection from those in positions of influence where real, raw and relatable is now the currency of long lasting impact.

Passionate entrepreneurs like Sara Blakely, with boundless authenticity and ambition, are taking center stage as heart-driven leaders. SPANX, now a billion dollar brand has become a household name, by way of inspiring hundreds of thousands of women through Blakely’s Instagram account. Connecting with her audience through her now infamous coffee mug images, Blakely shares such action-inspiring quotes as: ‘If your own story is not inspiring to you, it’s time to rewrite that sh*t!’. The realness of her videos, immersing her audience in her home-life, magnifies the sense of belonging to her family. It’s a revealing perspective that has allowed other women to chase their dreams and grow their own brands by simply being themselves.

The Pillars Of A Heart Centered Brand

Building a business that is bigger than you, takes heart and demands a wild ride into defining the values of your company, the mission it serves and a story that people can not only relate to but deeply trust. From purpose to profits, let’s explore the 5 pillars to establishing a heart centered brand…

Purpose: This is the heartbeat of your work. It is the reason people connect with, and rally behind what you do, and why you do it. Articulate this well and your brand will move mountains. Your purpose is shared through potent storytelling and a community culture enriched with powerful values.

People: Brands exist because they serve people. Knowing who you are designing your products and services to support, is essential. Defining your target audience will ensure aligned branding and messaging that speaks authentically to your ideal consumers.

Possibility: Knowing the problem your business solves is crucial. However, in contrast to the pain-based selling and engagement tactics of the past, heart-led businesses are fluent in speaking to the wisdom and potential of their ideal audience.

Products: The place where people invest to reach their goals and meet their needs. Your services or products are the bridge between where they are now and where they will be tomorrow. Your brand is their solution.

Profits: A successful heart-centred brand is profitable. Setting your business up to ensure its ability to sustain impact and service for years to come, is critical in establishing a trustworthy brand.

Establish The Energy For Congruency

High energy and the know-how to helm a Billion Dollar Company, Blakely swears by morning yoga at 6:30am, followed by a healthy smoothie. “It has frozen wild blueberries, a few dark cherries, kale, dates, cinnamon, spinach, cilantro, fresh mint, lemon, water, ice, chia, and walnuts,” Blakely shares. Where most female start-ups believe their brand will be built on the coattails of sleepless nights and another hit of caffeine, it is quite the opposite for those deeply devoted to heart-centered leadership and a sustainable business model.

Similarly, Ondi Laure swears by her morning ritual of practicing gratitude at 5am. According to Ondi, early mornings are the sacred time of day allowing for calm and creativity to be born: “I like to think of an early morning routine as self-care. Because without a healthy me there are no books. No books mean no business.”

Ondi, Founder of Story Launcher Publishing, enriches the lives of her readers through the magnificent power of story-telling, to remind us of the savagery of the past. She writes of the struggles and glories of today and brings stories that inspire hope for a better future. Through her publishing company, Ondi has become a powerful catalyst for other women to bring their stories into the world and give them life.

For Ondi, bringing a legacy piece to life for her clients has become part of her life-giving mission and brand – “A business built on purpose, if you approach it as being bigger than yourself, will allow you to find profound intention in your craft, a passion, and a purpose that you didn’t know you had.”

The Power Of Inclusion

At its essence, a successful heart-centered brand has people as its core. For Kathy Gibson, a passionate leader whose unique gifts and talents reside in work of diversity, equity and inclusion she is trailblazing a path forward where unintentional division no longer exists for those in the business of people.

“It’s been a profound journey of self-discovery, compassion for all people, particularly those who face adversity or ancestral trauma. I aim to acknowledge, and recognize, the things I can control and support positive change in those around me to elevate and give life to the power that inclusion has, both personally and professionally.”

Gibson, is an advocate and expert on pressing economic, social and technology issues. As a working mother of two children, Kathy has had the opportunity to pursue the true passions in her life – motherhood, operating her own successful business, and bridging the gap between incorporating her spiritual path with her professional life to enhance impact at scale.

Her biggest piece of advice for CEO’s managing a team within a heart centered business model: Diversity and inclusion needs to be at the foundation of your operations. Establishing policies and procedures at every level of the employee life cycle will ensure that your unique goals are attainable. Employees will thrive in an inclusive environment, allowing them to express their unique perspectives to initiate strong performance and innovation for your brand.

Final Thoughts

2022 will see heart-centered entrepreneurs cultivate a deeper level of authenticity in their branding, energy and communities. The Hustle and pain-focused selling of the past, has given way to story and messaging that speaks to possibility and potential through the lens of love.

When more women are themselves, anchoring into their values and influence from that place, only good can come of it. That is a world we can all begin to consciously cultivate in 2022.

Business

MetaWorx: Building Full-Stack AI Teams, Not Just Automation

Published

6 days ago

June 6, 2025

Matthew Wiles

Automation still dominates most headlines, yet the returns often fail to meet expectations. A sprawling chatbot rollout might shave a few support tickets, but it rarely shifts the profit-and-loss statement in a lasting way.

McKinsey’s 2025 workplace survey pegs AI’s long-term productivity upside at $4.4 trillion, but only one percent of enterprises say they’ve reached true “AI maturity.” MetaWorx, a Dallas, Texas-based AI employee agency founded by Rachel Kite, argues that the shortfall has nothing to do with models and everything to do with people.

“Treat AI like a point solution and you’ll get point-solution results,” shares Kite. “You need a roster that can carry the ball from raw data to governance, or the whole thing stalls at the proof-of-concept phase.”

The pod blueprint

When a plug-and-play automation script collapsed under real-world data drift, costing Kite a lucrative contract, she sketched the six-person “pod” that now anchors every MetaWorx engagement:

An infrastructure architect to tame compute costs.
A data engineer to secure and shape pipelines.
An applied scientist to prototype models against live feedback loops.
An MLOps engineer to automate rollback and retraining.
A domain product lead translates forecasts into features users actually notice.
Ethics and compliance analysts to stress test outputs for bias and keep the audit.

The team’s first sprint still delivers a quick-win bot — “small enough to calm the CFO,” jokes Kite — but the roadmap quickly pivots to reliability, explainability, and eventually optimization. By tying every algorithmic decision to a quantifiable business metric, the pods turn AI from a science project into a growth lever.

Recruiting for curiosity, not credentials

With Bain & Company predicting a global AI-skills crunch through 2027, MetaWorx has stopped chasing unicorn résumés. Instead, it hires “adjacent athletes”: a computer-vision PhD who hops from medical imaging to warehouse surveillance, or a former journalist who recasts her nose for story into prompt-engineering finesse.

“Domain expertise expires fast,” Kite says. “What doesn’t expire is the instinct to ask better questions.” The result is a lattice of overlapping skills that stays flexible when models wander into the long tail of edge-case data.

A culture of rapid experiments

Inside MetaWorx, every idea faces the same litmus test: ship something — anything — into a user’s hands within 21 days. The “three-week rule” forces prototypes into the wild early, where failure is cheap and feedback is swift. Post-mortems, including cost overruns, are circulated company-wide, erasing any stigma associated with missteps.

That laboratory mindset powers velocity. “Our first model is almost always wrong,” Kite admits, “but version 1.0 is the tuition we pay for version 2.0.” The philosophy echoes her TEDx talk on resilience: progress is iterative, not heroic.

How leaders can steal the playbook

Executives itching to replicate MetaWorx’s results don’t need a blank check. Kite offers a five-step sequence:

Inventory pain points, not tools: Walk the P&L line by line and tag the friction you can measure.

Map the stack to the problem: A recommendation engine, for instance, requires behavior data, retraining triggers, and feedback capture — automation alone won’t suffice.

Stand up a pod: Reassign existing talent into a cross-functional tiger team before hiring externally; the chemistry test is free.

Measure the story, not just the statistic: Pair model accuracy with human-scale metrics like ticket backlog or employee churn.

Budget for the boring: Reserve at least 30 percent of spend for MLOps and governance; Stanford’s HAI review links most AI failures to neglected upkeep.

Taken together, those steps shift AI from a pilot novelty to an operational habit that compounds value rather than topping out after an initial PR splash.

Character still scales faster than code

MetaWorx plans to double its headcount this year, yet Kite insists the secret isn’t a proprietary framework or a monster war chest. It’s credibility. Clients see a founder who has wrestled with the same outages and surprise bills they face. That authenticity converts skeptics faster than any algorithmic novelty.

“Tools level out,” Kite says. “Culture compounds.”

The insight lands in a marketplace still dazzled by generative fireworks. Yes, MetaWorx ships models and dashboards, but its true product is a mindset: resilience over rigidity, questions over credentials, experiments over edicts. In Kite’s world, automation is merely the appetizer. The main course is a full-stack team that knows why the model matters to the business and who owns its success after launch day.

And that, Kite argues, is how AI finally graduates from cost-cutter to growth engine, one curious pod at a time.