Natasha Davis is the founder and CEO of Impact Branding Consulting, a company that specializes in helping lost businesses find their why. As a successful author, speaker, success coach, TV and radio host, her main goal is to take the most complicated aspects of marketing and branding and simplify those processes so that businesses can survive and thrive.
But Natasha’s narrative doesn’t start there, far from it. Her journey as an entrepreneur took her from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and she is a testament to true survival in the business world as well as in her personal life. This is her story.
The business nurse
From a very young age, Natasha was always taking care of others. She became a registered nurse by 21, and at 22, was the lead emergency nurse in the trauma unit.
“As long as I can recall, it’s always been that I'm going to take care of you,” Natasha said. “I'm going to take care of it. You’re going to be OK. I'm putting the Band-Aid on you. I always wanted to make people feel better and to make it easier.”
She worked hard to care for her patients. But she was also curious about how a hospital ran from a business perspective—so much so that she started reading business books and immersing herself in all things operations. She became so knowledgeable about business that she garnered the nickname “Business Nurse,” and became the go-to for a group of doctors who began pursuing their own businesses.
“I started reading, started educating myself on process improvement, performance, evaluations, business, finance, marketing, every day, I just started reading,” said Natasha. “Over time, doctors would ask where the ‘business nurse’ was. They’d say, ‘Go find the business nurse in the ER; she can help you with that.’”
Finding her passion
Natasha just knew there was something else she was meant to do besides be a nurse. She wanted to have her own business. So on the side, with her dad’s encouragement, she made her first attempt as an entrepreneur with Soothing Aromas, a custom gift basket company. The caveat? Her dad gave her a one-year deadline to learn everything she could about business, then she would have to shut it down and do what she wanted to do, once she had the confidence to do it.
“I went into Soothing Aromas. I gave it everything I had. I did the business, and I was still working as a nurse,” said Natasha. “It was a couple months before my 12-month anniversary. My dad was like, ‘Yeah, you're ready.’”
Because she finally had the confidence she needed to own her identity as a businesswoman, Natasha started the business she truly wanted to run: Visionary People, a branding consulting agency.
At this point, she quit nursing to do it full time. She was passionate about her work, but she wasn’t living as her authentic self: she hid her nursing background because she was afraid she’d be found out as a fraud. And, like most new ventures, the business didn’t come without its fill of hard-learned business lessons.
“I never disclosed that I was a nurse. I would literally start from the business onward, as if I never had a life before,” Natasha explained. “I hired a coach and a business consultant to support me along the way. She asked me why I wasn’t listing my nursing [background]. I was like, ‘Oh no, we can't put that down there.’ I was adamant. And she, at that point said to me: ‘If you don't put anything related to healthcare down here, we're done working together. You are short-changing yourself.’”
That was a wake-up call for Natasha. She realized people and companies wanted her and they wanted the skill that she had. They wanted the nurse that understood business.
“I would tell people: Listen, back then I saved lives. Now, I save companies.”
The heartbreak and the breakthrough
After 12 years of marriage, Natasha’s husband and business partner left her unexpectedly. Business was tough, and they were months behind on their bills. Suddenly, Natasha didn’t know who she was. She had lost her identity, and found herself in a very deep depression.
“I lost all confidence and all sense of who I was. I was a wife. I was a nurse. And here I am in my early thirties, like, who am I? Did I make a mistake by leaving nursing? Am I crazy? I lost all sense of what I thought was normal,” Natasha expressed.
One night, when Natasha couldn’t even muster up the strength to answer the door when the pizza she ordered arrived, she hit a breaking point—and remembered that she needed to serve herself, too. She remembered her why.
“I got up and I came into my office for the first time in two months and I felt alive again. And I sat at my desk and I said: ‘From this day forward, I will never be broke again. I will never be broke and I will never be broken by anything.’ And that was the day—January 28, 2016—that I got my life together,” said Natasha.
Making an impact
This is when Natasha decided to reinvent her business and named it Impact Branding Consulting, where she continues to serve her clients—and her true self—as they rediscover who they are and what they are meant to do, as well as pivoting her business to offer online consulting services to those in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I am so passionate about supporting people through their dream. I am here to support those people to get there and literally just [align] their purpose with their why. Because I lost my why,” said Natasha. “There are some days that are going to be really painful. They're going to be financially painful. They're going to be emotionally painful. But you have to get through it. It's about focus. It's about discipline.”
Keap’s role
Natasha became an Infusionsoft by Keap customer in May 2018. When she first learned about it, Natasha was under the impression that Keap’s products were for large companies and convinced herself it wasn’t for her.
“I didn't know that one existed for a small business. I knew it existed for a large company. So my main driver was the sequencing and automation,” said Natasha. “That was huge, that I can only do it with one [system], I didn't need two or three other companies to do it. I was completely sold.”
Natasha applies Infusionsoft by Keap to the following use cases for her company:
While operating her business, and as she was growing, Natasha realized she really needed more automation and more streamlining. She didn't know there was one system, one company, one platform that could actually give her everything she needed. As she realized she needed to automate certain communications, she thought, Oh, I wish I could just click a button and this would know what to do.
“I transitioned all the way over to Infusionsoft by Keap. Prior to that, I was on several different systems. I had at least three different other technology platforms I was using, which was quite frustrating,” said Natasha. “[I had] to log in to three different ones to do what I needed to do. And with Infusionsoft by Keap, it did everything–it was in one place and I call it my little beast of a system.”
At the time Natasha actually started using Infusionsoft, her business was growing and she was onboarding new clients and new team members and figured it would make it easier for every new client to go through the same process in the same way.
“Now I can spend the time actually providing service to the customer, as opposed to doing all this administrative stuff that has to be done. That was my big pain point,” said Natasha. “At the end of the day, the investment that I make each month, which is very nominal compared to what I would be spending to hire two or three more people to do the work that Infusionsoft is doing, it's hands down a much better decision.”
Recently, Natasha started learning more about some of the pipeline features, automation and campaigns and how much more she can do with them.
“When I found out that I could tell the campaign to switch or put somebody in a pipeline, I was like, yes, I absolutely love it. It has the ‘if this, then that’ scenario, it really makes me perform more efficiently. I'm more effective with my day to day. I don't waste time. It actually has improved my productivity. It improves my days.”
Natasha also pointed out that one of the major returns on investment of this system is what it does with payroll.
“It keeps payroll controlled. Not only does it increase productivity, it increases production, but drops costs,” said Natasha. “So Infusionsoft by Keap allows you to achieve economies of scale as well. Because we're increasing production, but we're also lowering costs. And I personally have been able to save on my payroll because of the automation and sequencing that's in place that allows my team to be more productive.”
Infusionsoft has helped Natasha grow her company. Now she’s not afraid to take on more clients because before, while doing things more manually, there wasn’t a technological system that helped move things along. Therefore, Natasha is able to increase her client threshold now that she has a system that's taking care of it.
“The thing I love about Keap is it grows with you. When I started with Keap, I started at the lower level and I just kept growing and growing into it,” said Natasha. “This thing grows with you and it evolves with you and your business. You have to have a system that grows with you.”
To learn more about Natasha and her business, Impact Branding Consulting, visit keap.com/big-grit.