Hi everyone that is tuning into this course. I'm SOUL excited for you to be here. If you don't know me, my name is Ash Ahern and I co-create truly aligned soul brands for visionaries and people who have mission based businesses!

I have slowly developed my career to be able to step into this role and help support businesses who are...concerned with making a huge impact in the world. And it's not so much about making a million dollars and maybe becoming a celebrity, but more about changing the world in a positive way through your work and through your business. 

I'm so excited to have you here investing in yourself and investing in this course to get your business off the ground and get something started going with your brand. So if you're not developing a personal brand, maybe you're developing a brand for a new product or on the other end of things, you might actually have an established business, but maybe be looking into creating a brand for a new course that you want to do or establishing a new brand for a new offer. Whatever you're here for, I'm so excited that you're here. And I'm just honoured that you would trust me with leading you through bringing your vision to life through your own DYI branding and graphic design course. So let's dive in!

If you're just getting to know me, I'm tuning in from my home here in Calgary, Canada. I've been living here since 2009. Before that I was in Saskatoon (of all places) for six years doing my degree there. And before that I was born and raised in Fort McMurray, Alberta, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere. If you are not Canadian you'd probably have no idea where that is. But if you are Canadian, you'll know a little bit about Fort McMurray and how much of an interesting community it is. I'm so blessed that I was able to grow up in such a melting pot of cultures and really a community of collaboration. I think I've really taken a lot of that and brought that into what I do for business. I love collaborating with people, so if you have a new business and you're really wanting to collaborate with me on it further, after you finish this course, I invite you to do that and just contact us (calendly.com/ashahern/jv) So let's get started!

I want to give you a brief introduction as to what you can expect with this course. We're going to go through some things that you might not have realized would be important in a brand, and one of those things is just getting yourself into alignment; making sure you're on the right path, in the right place, and you've got the right time, partnership; whatever that looks like for you. I want to make sure that you can feel confident in moving forward with that business venture or your idea, and you're probably in the stage of your business right now where it's really exciting. And what I urge you to do is to stick with that as long as possible. Keep the momentum rolling; ride that energy as long as you possibly can and get some of these frameworks and foundations in place for your business. 

I urge you to get through this course. If you feel yourself waning or you feel yourself putting it off and not dedicating your time to it; putting it in your schedule and working on it regularly, reach out to me or my team ([email protected]). We would love to help support you and help you finish; to get this course down because there's this terrible stat that only 2-5% of people who buy courses actually finish them. And I think that that's because you're not sure if there's going to be something tangible on the other end of this course. So what I'm promising to you is that if you finish it, you will actually have a working brand protocol and visual identity for your business that you can start implementing and using right away. 

I'm not just going to leave you with that! We're also going to help you set up systems, templates and things that can be useful for you in your online business. Then also create some print materials if you have an offline component to your business as well. There is a really great positive outcome and what you can feel like tangible takeaways when you're done this course. So stick around, and like I said, if you feel yourself waning, or you feel yourself losing someone momentum in this course, do reach out to us and let us give you a hand and help you boost your motivation in getting finished. We would like to help support you in that way. 

Some of the things that you can expect to learn in this course are not what you would expect, like I kind of mentioned. We're going to help you get an alignment, and some of the ways that we do that is activating your senses; really getting in tune with some of the things that your potential clients might be thinking or going through circumstantially right now. We use a lot of different things to do that. So we're going to be talking a little bit about what some of those tools are and how to get in alignment with a potential client and buyer.

Once we move on from that state of things, we'll be starting to teach you some basic foundations and fundamentals about design and graphic design, branding to be specific. [We'll be ] talking about things that you might not have realized are important when developing a brand such as typography (which is another fancy word for fonts), using resources and books that I've used in my education as a graphic designer and sharing some of those resources and tools with you so you don't have to go out and get certified as a designer or anything like that. I'm just going to share all my knowledge to you and impart you with as much tools and resources at your fingertips so that you can create something for yourself. 

We're going to walk through some of those beginning stages, and once we've been able to get you to a level where you're understanding some of the language that I use, then we can start getting you into building up your brand and establishing a framework, looking at imagery; figuring out what your core anchor words are for your brand, [and] how to take those anchor words and translate them into something visual; where I find all my stock imagery if I use any, where I find inspiration from and some techniques and tools that you can use with apps like Canva, Photoshop and illustrator. So I'm really excited to get you going.

If you're thinking right now "I don't have any technical skills, I'm not a computer savvy person, I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed already hearing this introduction!" Don't worry! I'm going to make this as simple and easy as possible so that somebody who...doesn't have any of that expertise or background can figure it out. And if you do have some of that background, there will be some more advanced classes that you can unlock as well, if you wanted to learn how to do advanced Photoshop work, illustrator work, tablet design and anything like that.

So stick around! I can't wait to hear your feedback on some of the modules and the overall curriculum once you've had a chance to give it a finish. And of course as you're working on things, I would love for you to be sharing in our Facebook group and getting some positive feedback from some of the other people in the course so that you can share what you're working on and you can get some feedback from myself or my team and some from other people that are working on the course as well to help you and to polish your process as you're working on it.

We're here as a community to help guide you and support you through this process. You're not alone, so again, if you get stuck and make sure you reach out and I'm so excited that you're here. Have a wonderful time in this course and we'll see you in the next module!