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Show Your Work: How to Collect Client Feedback and Turn It Into Marketing That Builds Trust Scroll long enough through any small business's social feed and a pattern will emerge. There are posts about services. Posts about offerings. Posts about the founder's journey, branded quotes, motivational reminders, the occasional behind-the-scenes glimpse. What's almost always missing? Proof. The work itself. The receipts. The story of the client who walked in unsure and walked out t

For most of modern business history, a local brand was something you knew because you walked past it. You saw the sign. You smelled the bread. You waved to the owner through the window. The shop was on the corner you passed every morning, and your relationship with it was built one in-person interaction at a time, over years. That model is no longer enough. Today, local brands compete for attention in two places at once: the physical street and the digital scroll. A customer

A founder story shaped by a pandemic, a community, and the quiet courage to begin again. I have always believed that the most powerful brands are not manufactured. They are revealed. Portia & Cleo was revealed slowly — through pandemic Zoom calls, hand-built graphics for community fundraisers, late-night client emails, in-person introductions to people I had only ever known through a screen, and one very persistent realization: that what I was building had outgrown the name o