Wickedly Branded® empowers established women entrepreneurs to rethink their professional identities, challenge expectations, and reshape their brands and businesses around their ambitions, values, and lives. Why was this an important book for you to write?

I wrote Wickedly Branded® because for years I quietly believed something was wrong with me. I could answer a client email from a parking lot while I waited for my oldest son to finish camp, take a call from the bleachers, and still remember what he needed for the next day. I pushed lunch back for one more email and sometimes put off using the bathroom to finish one more thing. Apparently food, water, and basic bodily functions had joined the list of things I would get to right after this one last thing. I woke at 3 a.m. and checked my phone over and over. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I looked at my life and thought, “I don’t just need help. I need a wife.” I didn’t mean a romantic partner. I meant someone whose brain could remember the permission slips, the soccer sign-ups, and the dog’s vet records. Then one day, while giving a client direct advice about simplifying his marketing, I caught myself thinking, “Beverly, when are you going to do this for yourself?”

That question made me look at the structures around me instead of my own effort. I was born in 1975, one year after the Equal Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal to deny women credit because of their sex. As late as 1988, some women still needed a male relative to co-sign a business loan. Women my age grew up with those doors already open and built real companies. Now we’re reaching the middle of them, with few women ahead of us who made the same choices at the same stage. I wrote the book as a map for the women I work with, for myself, and for my sons, so they can see what it looked like when their mom built a business on her own terms. What we normalize now, the women behind us will inherit.

How have your experiences with military family life, motherhood, health changes, and neurodivergence shaped your understanding of authenticity in branding?

I became an entrepreneur at 36 because I married an Army soldier and needed work that could move with us. During training and deployments, I handled almost all the logistics of daily life. I answered client emails from school pickup lines and took calls from the bleachers. When our youngest son came to us through foster care as a newborn, there was no maternity leave. He slept on my shoulder through Zoom meetings, and we later had the enormous joy of adopting him.

At 48, I was diagnosed with AuDHD. A major hip injury, and now perimenopause, added limits of their own. For years, I filed it all under personal failure. The diagnosis explained why I could rarely finish a thought before another responsibility came looking for me. Once I could name it, I could see how much of the work world assumed a brain I didn’t have and a life I wasn’t living.

Those years changed what I mean by authenticity in branding. For a long time I kept myself in two boxes, one labeled professional and one labeled personal. I edited out the military moves, the foster care, the sparkly ballet flats, and the pink bedazzled microphone. My AuDHD brain connects six ideas before everyone else finishes taking notes on the first, and that same habit lets me hear the thread running through a client’s twenty years of work. I did not get less strategic when I wore sparkly ballet flats. More of me was showing.

Your book connects everyday decisions about pricing, availability, and boundaries to professional identity. Which of these changes do women entrepreneurs often find most difficult, and why?

Availability is usually the hardest, which surprises people, because pricing gets most of the attention. Raising a price is uncomfortable, but it is a number. She can research it, test it, and practice saying it out loud. Availability is tied to how she earned her reputation. For many established women founders, dependability built the business: answering quickly, taking the extra call, and remembering what every client needed. Over the years, that responsiveness quietly became part of the product, although nobody ever wrote it into the actual offer.

So when she considers stepping back, it can feel like taking away the very thing clients trusted her for. Being needed can feel remarkably similar to being valuable. I lived this. My availability expanded with my business until almost every question, task, and decision came through me, and my inbox took up 3 a.m. instead of my sleep.

The three decisions reinforce each other. If her website still describes the business she ran ten years ago, prospects hear support when she is selling strategy. The price needs a paragraph of explanation, and clients assume they are buying personal access to her. When her methods and her point of view reach people before she does, they understand what they are paying for before the first call, and she can decide when to be generous with her time.

What inspired you to explore the disconnect between a woman’s growing professional expertise and the business structures that may no longer serve her?

I first heard it from my clients, and then I recognized it in myself. Women come to me with fifteen or twenty years of client results, referrals, and opinions they have tested on real projects. Then I look at their homepage and find the business they started a decade ago: the original service list, the old job title, and prices set when they had a fraction of the judgment they have now. On a call, a woman will say something that makes me stop and write it down, and none of it appears anywhere a prospect could find it.

I call that gap the translation tax. She pays it on discovery calls, rebuilding the doorway by hand. She pays it when referrals arrive with kind, familiar words that are too small. She pays it in proposals that need a paragraph of context before the price makes sense. I paid it for years, from BeverlyCornell.com to BC & Associates Marketing to Wickedly Branded®, and for a long time I called the frustration personal failure.

Then I looked at the structures themselves. Much of the way we price, schedule, and stay reachable came straight from corporate assumptions we brought into entrepreneurship without ever questioning them. The women I work with have the judgment and track record to write different operating rules, and Wickedly Branded® helps them build those rules into their brand, their offers, and the way their business runs.

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