Today we’d like to introduce you to Jodi Hersh.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Jodi. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I call myself a smartist. I took my childhood urge to make things and turned it into a thriving career as an artist and designer.
From a young age, I could draw very well. Throughout my childhood, I took art classes where I learned to work with charcoal, pastels, pencil, pen & ink, colored inks and finally oil painting. At home, I would make things in the garage with hammer, nails, handsaw — anything that was there. For my 10th birthday, I even received a kid-sized workbench complete with kid-sized tools — just what every little Jewish girl wants. 30+ years later, I have a studio filled with not-so-kid-sized tools that I use in constructing frames and mixed media works.
Fast forward to college. I was a gifted student and it was assumed I’d go to law or med school but I still felt impassioned about “making things” and chose art school. I am grateful my parents supported and encouraged me. I studied Graphic Design and Photography at the University of Michigan where I earned my BFA.
After graduating, I returned to my hometown of Miami where I worked as part of a team designing signage and graphics for Universal Studios and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines among others. After moving to Atlanta in 1991, I broadened my experience by art directing at a printing company where I gained valuable working knowledge of developing technologies and processes.
In 1993, I started my own company Orange Star Design and have established a reputation for providing high-quality creative solutions to a very diverse clientele ranging from non-profits to small businesses to mega corps to rock stars. My creative skills apply to strategy, branding, print and the web. My experience is broad and includes branding, website design & development, logo & corp, identity, annual reports, brochures, posters, music CD packaging, tour/concert merchandise, event graphics, signage, desktop and mobile applications and more.
Since starting Orange Star, I have worked on and led projects for clients as large as AIG, ALLTEL, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The American Cancer Society, Georgia Tech, Best Buy, IHG, and even the classic rock band Styx.
Never one to simply say “I don’t know…,” but rather “I don’t know but I will find out…,” I have stayed on top of developing technologies as they emerge — specifically web design/development, user experience design, digital marketing, and content marketing in the context of how they help establish and grow brands/businesses and ultimately provide value to the end user/customer.
Having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years ranging from startups to encore career professionals, and established businesses, I realized something was missing from these engagements…Clients would come to me asking for a logo, a brochure, a website, etc… but the WHY was missing. What were these items solving for? What was the overall brand strategy or marketing strategy?
When I work with a larger organization, I’m working with a marketing/communications employee who needs help executing a part of their overall plan. When working with a small business, I’m working with the owner(s) who are great at what they do, which is almost never marketing. So I started diving deep into educating myself on what works and does not work for small business.
What works for larger organizations does not work for small business — when you are one person or even a small team, you cannot do ALL the things, all the tactics, all the channels and still deliver whatever it is you actually do for your customers. There is no shortage of information out there, in fact there is so much it is like sipping from a fire hydrant. We become overwhelmed, paralyzed, or worse, we try to execute on everything and get nowhere but burned out. We look at what others are doing and try to do the same when we don’t even know if it is working for them. I’ve seen it so many times and it’s heartbreaking to see talented people spinning their wheels trying to get noticed so they can help others with whatever it is they do. It’s also unnecessary, so I set out to do something about it.
I have developed a framework called The Smartist Way™ — An essentialist approach to branding and marketing a small business. I use this framework in my 1:1 client engagements and am in the process of building it out as a course.
Small businesses have limited resources — time, money, humans — we can’t do all the things larger organizations can. Traditional approaches don’t work because we fail to execute consistently because we must also do the actual work we deliver to our customers.
But what if you could do less and accomplish more? By focusing on the right things, and executing consistently on those key, essential things — you can end the overwhelm, tame the chaos and successfully grow your business.
That’s what I focus on. Identifying those essential things that move the needle forward so that you can 1) Establish yourself as an authority in your niche, 2) Build the right platform for generating more leads and opportunities and 3) Drive demand to ultimately land new customers and increase revenue from existing ones.
After 26 years in business, my passion is still doing great work with exceptional people to help bring their visions to life.
In 2013, I founded and launched a “pet project” — Live Love Dogs: Pawsitively fetching sWAG for dog-loving humans and their furry friends (http://livelovedogs.com). And in late 2018, I launched the Content Creators Planner with Kim Doyal — designed for planning and executing successful content strategies. (http://
Erica Jong once said:
“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.” I am happy and proud that I have taken my childhood urge to “make things” and followed that talent with courage resulting in a successful creative career that I enjoy.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://orangestar.com
- Phone: 404-377-2555
- Email: jodi@orangestar.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jodihersh/
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/orangestar
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jodihersh
- Other: http://livelovedogs.com and http://jodihersh.com and http://contentcreatorsplanner.com
Image Credit:
Kathy Wolfe (Jodi with dogs in car)
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