Jaci recently chatted with Bold Journey Magazine about her journey and losing and regaining her purpose. Check it out below.

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jaci Lund. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jaci, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
Treebird celebrated 10 years in March, and when I started, I had a lot passion about our purpose, our values, and my vision for what TBB could become. And like a lot of small start-ups, the day-to-day quickly got in the way of really crystallizing and codifying all of those components. It seemed the more anniversaries we celebrated, the more resigned I was to the status quo of simply getting work out the door and finding new clients and training new staff. So I lost that initial spark of inspiration and became more or less consumed with just running the business.

Everything changed when a colleague suggested I join the Entrepreneurs’ Organization’s Accelerator program. This group focuses on connecting fellow entrepreneurs and offers masterclasses and thought leadership to help build your business–all of which starts from the inside out. Entrepreneurship can be a very lonely place, and being able to connect so closely with other people who decided to go it alone and build businesses from scratch has helped me to rediscover my purpose.

Professionally, Treebird Branding’s purpose is We’re creative problem solvers. We spent a ton of time as a group defining our core values and getting to the root of what we really love about the work we do. And it’s as simple as that. Our clients come to us with problems. Problems they might not even realize they have. And we don’t simply fix them with a band-aid, but work with them through a rather intensive process that allows them to get to the next level in their business. When our clients understand we’re more than just a superficial firm creating nice collateral, but a true thinking and transformation partner, then the real magic happens.

Personally, my purpose is to use my womanly powers, intuition, and dedication to the extra to trailblaze creative passions and nurture, inspire, and compassionately lead those in my orbit.

Without the inspiration from the wonderful folks at EO, I would have never been able to find my new personal and professional purpose, and for that, I’m incredibly grateful.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
One of the most exciting things to happen this year at Treebird is that two out of the five winners of the newly minted Michelin Stars in Atlanta are our clients–Bacchanalia and Lazy Betty. We’re so incredibly excited about this high level of recognition for them, this amazing city, and yes, ourselves. We love working in the hospitality industry and this was the culmination of a wonderful 10 years of partnering with so many incredible restaurants. Of course, great branding alone isn’t what’s going to get any restaurant a Michelin Star, but when you look at the winners, they all have very strong brands that stem from a deep and mature knowledge of who they are as institutions and what their audiences expect of them. So while I’m not saying that working with TBB can get you a star, it certainly wouldn’t hurt!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Embracing change: After 10 years, it’s safe to officially say that nothing is permanent. Once you think you have everything figured out and you can just repeat that solution over and over, you’re dead in the water. Everything needs to be on the table at all times. That task management system you use, your social media strategy, that revenue stream, that SEO company you hired, your sales pitch. You have to not just be open to–but truly embrace–change because there are always better solutions out there for your business. To be pithy about it, complacency kills!

Empathy: You have to be able to not just see situations from other people’s point of view, but to accept where they are and how they feel without judgment–and without trying to just “fix” things for them. And that’s hard enough in daily life, let alone when running a business! But this applies to clients, vendors, employees–everyone you interact with. You don’t have to agree with everyone’s points of view, but you do have to have the ability to understand why they might see a situation one way or another and then respond in kind.

Spite: This is going to seem orthogonal to empathy, but there’s a method to my madness here. I realized early on that no matter your best intentions and most gracious actions, you will be wronged by people. And I’ve learned to use that sense of injustice to light a fire under myself and climb even higher. Treebird wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for people doubting me and telling me “that’s impossible,” which helped me hone my subsequent “I’ll show you” mentality. It’s how we started and it’s how we continue to endure.

How would you describe your ideal client?
Our ideal client is an experienced and successful entrepreneur who also knows they don’t know everything and is interested in relationships over transactions. Someone who understands the value of strong branding and execution and is looking for a partner to co-create with. We love people with a vision who trust our interpretation of that vision so we can bring it into consciousness in a way that makes it more tangible and evocative than ever before. Give us a challenge and we’ll come up with a solution that you probably had never considered or even thought possible. We also love it when there’s an opportunity to be a little eccentric or outside the box. Check out the floors at Pancake Social at Ponce City Market. That’s a perfect example of us getting to show our creativity in a bold way and the client trusting our vision.