Today we’d like to introduce you to Brandy Lawson.
Hi Brandy, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I actually come from a long line of self-employed people. My great-grandparents on both sides homesteaded in Montana and produced generations of farmers and ranchers. Even though my parents grew up on a farm, they moved to the “big city” and opened a restaurant the year I was born. My dad, who went to college for engineering, wrote the restaurant payroll program on the computer with a green-screen and 2 floppy drives. So I grew up around two things: running a business, and technology that made the business easier. I spent two decades in tech, and then in 2012 I got laid off from my corporate job. A former colleague needed a website, that became my first freelance project. I continued to look for a job, and every “perfect” job offer that followed fell through for reasons outside my control (one of them was Microsoft). At some point I realized that the business I was building was the job I kept looking for.
For the next decade I worked with over a hundred companies, and about 3 years ago we narrowed in on luxury design businesses… kitchen and bath dealers, remodelers, interior designers. People who build gorgeous spaces and run multi-million-dollar companies. The pattern there was very similar to the pattern in digital agencies: talented people running profitable businesses entirely from memory. Every client decision, every project detail, every “we talked about this”… stored in the owner’s head and nowhere else. And because of that, people burn out.
I spent years helping them one at a time. Then I built a system so I wasn’t the bottleneck. It’s an AI-powered meeting documentation system, and it starts in the one place where everything gets decided and nothing gets written down: the client meeting. Once meeting recording exists, then everything else can be much more easily created – mostly with the help of AI. Then the business exists on paper, sometimes for the first time ever. The team can move without a 20-minute download from the owner. New people get up to speed without six months of shadowing. And the owner finally gets to do the work they got into the business to do… and can go on vacation.
Just before we niched in, I wrote High-er Help, about how to get real value out of experts and outside help for your business. I host a podcast called Elevated for design business owners. And I speak and lead workshops on practical AI for design businesses, including with NKBA and at KBIS. Plain English fundamentals on what works when you’re running a real company with real clients who change their minds about the countertop… again.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Nope. There’s been plenty of bumps, washouts and some serious detours.
Getting through the rough road is challenging, but when I kept encountering similar issues I finally came to see that the person who started the business wasn’t the person capable of building the one I wanted. I hired a coach early on, and I was not an easy client. I resisted change, argued, and was reluctant to address the root cause of my problems. I spent the first four years “should-ing” all over myself… I should have a system for this, I should be better at that. I also failed at building systems for my own business for years while telling clients to build theirs. I’m sure no one can relate.
The other struggle was focus. When you can do a lot of things, it’s tempting to sell all of them. FieryFX has been a web shop, a marketing agency, a marketing operations consultancy… each version was real and each one taught me something, but the business got dramatically better the moment I picked one kind of client with one kind of problem and went all in. Choosing the right fight, and protecting that focus is very anti-entrepreneur, but essential for a thriving business.
The hardest lesson for an eldest daughter is: don’t try to do it alone. Coaches, peer groups, industry communities. The soft skills (courage, communication, knowing yourself) are learnable, and the fastest way to learn them is around people who already have them.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about FieryFX?
FieryFX helps luxury design businesses put AI to work, starting with the meetings where everything gets decided and nothing gets written down.
Most design business owners have heard about AI. Some have poked around with it, gotten garbage results, or there’s one person in the company applying it to some of their serious pain points, like pricing. Meanwhile they’re still running a million-dollar business from memory. Six-month renovation projects, clients who swear they never approved that tile, a hundred details that have to be right or you’re eating the cost… and most of it lives in the owner’s head, their text messages, or a notebook that’s somewhere.
We fix that. We built an AI-powered meeting documentation system that captures every client conversation and turns it into clean notes, action items, and decisions you can find later. No more “I thought we agreed on…” moments. No more losing money because a detail slipped. No more staring at the ceiling fan at 2 AM wondering if you ordered the right sink base.
What sets us apart is where we start. We don’t sell “AI.” We fix the specific, unglamorous problem that costs design businesses the most money and sleep, and we’ve spent over a decade inside more than a hundred of these companies learning exactly where that problem lives. I’m humbled that our clients say the same thing about us that they’d say about a great trade partner: we tell them the truth, even when it’s not what they want to hear, and we do the work to a standard they’d put their name on.
Beyond the implementation work, I speak and lead workshops on practical AI for design businesses, host the Elevated podcast, and wrote High-er Help for any business owner who has ever paid an expert and wondered why nothing changed.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
The Curiosity Shop with Brene Brown & Adam Grant
Must have apps:
• Ditto – it is a clipboard manager, lets you search and paste anything you’ve copied
• 1Password – for business and personal, stores all the passwords, info, life details (insurance info, VIN numbers, etc.)
• Wispr Flow – talk instead of type on your computer (and phone)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://brandylawson.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fieryfx/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fieryfx
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandylawson/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thefieryfx
- Soundcloud: https://listentoelevated.com
- Other: https://higherhelpbook.com
