Dreaming Into Action

Who am I?

I am Arianna Golden — yes, that’s my real name — and I help entrepreneurial and creative-minded people like you build business systems that work. Not business systems that work for other people, business systems that work for you. Everything I do is customized to your specific personality, goals, and circumstances.

This can include any or all of the following, depending on your goals and priorities:

• Branding: understanding yourself, your organization, and your audience(s) is necessary before you can create authentic, strong relationships with colleagues, funders, and customers/clients.
• Marketing: bring your stories to life in clear and compelling ways that inspire your audience to pick you every time — potential employees, future investors, and paying customers/clients alike.
• Business Operations: hiring the right people for the right work, clear and enjoyable meetings that move your business forward, and scalable accountability structures allow you to grow as big or stay as small as you want.

Have you been struggling to implement systems for your business? Get started with a free session.

What the hell is Golden Branding?

Golden Branding is a 5-phase process for creating your authentic brand and your personalized marketing system.

I designed it to remove the decision-paralysis out of the process.

Everything flows from your brand persona and your audience persona and how those two “characters” communicate and bond.

It takes work to set it up, but it’s scalable and you can iterate and optimize it over time to grow your audience and income without feeling pulled in a million directions.

NOTE: I find Golden Branding useful, but I don’t impose it on anyone. If you have a clearly defined brand and a clearly defined audience, move on to the parts you’re struggling with. And if you realize later that your brand and audience aren’t as clearly defined as you thought, go back and fix it. Not a big deal. We’re all solving jigsaw puzzles at our own speeds in our own ways. Personally, I like to start with corners and edges before tackling the muddly middle, but you get to do whatever works for you.

Ok, back to the point: Dreaming Into Action is what Fairy Godmother’s help heroes and heroines do.

People badmouth fairy godmothers all the time. “Cinderella only got the guy because her FG gave her a magic dress and magic shoes.”

Umm… hello? The shoes and the dress got Cinderella through the palace gates and gave her the confidence to be herself. She chose to be kind and helpful to those around her — if she hadn’t passed that test, her FG would never have helped her. She got the prince by being real — she wasn’t desperate to marry him, she just wanted a chance to enjoy a dance. That’s what really made her stand out to the prince: Cinderella was herself. Her dress and shoes were mere packaging.

Think of me like your Fairy Godmother: I give you the tools and confidence you need to attract the right people to you so your business can thrive. (If you need help with appearances — first impressions are what we base snap judgements on, after all — don’t worry. That’s all part of Golden Branding.)

Does your business need a Fairy Godmother? Schedule a free session here.

How do I know all this, anyway?

I figured it out, so you don’t have to. Generalists are looked down on, because “generalists don’t have the ability to dive deep into any one discipline.” That’s a stereotype. I’m not the shallow wanna-be generalist. Proof: I have a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical & BioMedical Engineering and a master’s degree in BioMedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and I got all that done in four years (2008-2012).

Before that, I had 10 years experience designing handcrafted garments for myself, friends, and clients. That was my first business (I know, I started really young… and honestly I could say I started when I was four, but doll dresses aren’t all that impressive.)

My last semester at CMU, I had the opportunity to showcase one of my senior design projects in Washington DC. I convinced one of my team-mates to go with me, and we got so much positive feedback that we took our prototype and built a business. The roots of Golden Branding began then, although I didn’t think of it as a process at the time. SolePower Tech still uses the branding I helped develop before I left because it works: we won enough money at our first pitch competition to pay for the provisional patent application and one of the judges later became our first mentor. (The patent got approved, too.)

After that it became obvious to me (I’m sure it had been clear to everyone else for years), that I have a strong entrepreneurial and creative impulse. So I turned everything into a business. That’s when I realized I needed a branding and marketing process: I wanted an easy way to remember what needed to get done and in what order, but it needed to be customizable for different businesses in different industries. I may still be me, but how I present myself when discussing custom designed, handcrafted wedding gowns isn’t the same as how I present myself when I’m formulating Herbal teas based on Chinese Traditional Medicine to help people maintain their wellness. (If you stick around long enough, you’ll learn all about those two businesses. Whenever I need an example and I can’t talk about my clients, I use them as case studies.)

I have been using Golden Branding for myself and clients for five years — at least since 2014 — but I didn’t start calling it Golden Branding until the fall of 2018. After mentoring the 2018 VentureBridge cohort, I felt that Golden Branding needed a name so people could refer to it without a long-winded explanation every time.

What’s the experience like, working with me?

I love working with myself because it’s the only time that telepathy works reliably. But that isn’t relevant to you, so here’s what Tarra Riley has to say about it:

Test the waters for yourself. Schedule a free session here.

What if it doesn’t work for you?

Golden Branding is like a lego set. There are certain pieces with certain colors and shapes. But you get to build whatever you want with those legos. You can make something streamlined and beautiful or you can make something clunky, ugly, and functional. It’s your choice.

If you decide that it can’t work or won’t work, then there isn’t anything I can do about that. 

If you decide it could work, if you commit to trying your best, if you are open to change, and if you are willing to do the work to get things done, then I will do everything I can to support your success.

My special Fairy Godmother magic doesn’t cure laziness and it doesn’t force you to change who you are. If you want to change, you have to decide to change. When you’ve committed to change, that is when the magic fairy dust will help you.

Also, change takes time. You’ll get things done right away, but those first things may be background or foundation that you need to build on before you can get the results you want. You control how fast you change. You decide how much you do each day. You decide what your sustainable acceleration rate is.