How Stacy Eleczko Helps Service Businesses Clarify Their Message (and Scale Faster)

Stacy [00:00:00] Most of the businesses I work with—they're amazing at what they do. They have great offers. Their clients love them. But like many businesses, they grew through word of mouth, got referrals, and they were doing really well until they weren't and hit a wall.

Hector Hello, and welcome to another episode of the How to Scale a Business podcast. My name is Hector Santiesteban, and I am your host for today. Our special guest is Ms. Stacy Lesko, and she is a—well, we'll call her a buyer and business… I don't know if wizard is the right one. Definitely not fairy.

Hector I'm trying to think of a magical, mystical person that helps connect businesses to their customers, because it seems like that's sort of what you do—to help illuminate that. All that to say, Stacy, welcome to the show, and thanks for hanging out today.

Stacy Yeah, thanks for having me.

Stacy I will say, I've been called the Queen of Clarity, so I don't know if that's really magical, but there—

Hector [00:01:00] We go. I should have put that on my bio list, so we'll go with that. And I think that's so important because businesses struggle so long trying to figure out exactly what their buyers want and how to get it across that they have something that can help.

Hector So I'd love for you to share with us a couple of key milestones in your career and sort of what you've done along the way, and then a little bit about what you do with your clients now.

Stacy Yeah, absolutely. I sort of stumbled into entrepreneurship, I think, which is really fascinating to me.

Stacy If you had asked me five years ago if I would ever own a business—much less be talking about growing or scaling a business—I would have probably laughed at you. I was in education for over 20 years, and when I shifted out, my goal was to find a job copywriting and to sort of get those copywriting chops.

Stacy I did some projects for a few friends, and before I knew it, those turned into referrals, and I kind of stumbled into starting a business, it seemed.

Stacy [00:02:00] And here I am. I've been three and a half years in, and I absolutely love what I do, which is supporting small businesses and some solopreneur businesses as well grow and scale their businesses through strategic messaging.

Stacy I help them figure out their positioning, where they fit in the market, the white space that they can claim, what the differentiated value is that they provide, and then how to clearly communicate that.

Stacy So it is connecting with the right people, and they're building consistency in how they communicate across their brand.

Hector What are the biggest problems, challenges—maybe mistakes or even blind spots—that you see a lot of businesses have that, if they were able to see around these or sort of take the needle out of their proverbial eye, things would be so much easier for them?

Stacy Yeah. So I think there's two. One I would say is the more expertise we have and the longer we do what we do, the harder it is to speak about it clearly and concisely. Our messaging tends to get diluted, and because we have so much expertise, we feel like, "Oh, I should be able to do this," and then tend to delay seeking support for it.

Stacy [00:03:00] Another big thing is this idea of jumping straight to tactics because they think it feels productive, right? We can work on lead generation, or let's just tweak the website, or let's run some ads without making sure that those strategic pieces of the positioning and messaging are in place first.

Stacy Some of that happens just because most of the businesses I work with—they're amazing at what they do. They have great offers. Their clients love them. But like many businesses, they grew through word of mouth, got referrals, and they were doing really well until they weren't and hit a wall.

Stacy And then that's when they tend to jump to those tactics.

Hector Yeah, it really is an important process. I'm curious, are there certain industries or verticals that you think are particularly susceptible to these sort of issues or challenges, or ones that you think would have a bigger benefit if they were to make some adjustments that you talk about or that you work with your clients?

Stacy [00:04:00] Yeah. So I would say more broadly, I think it's service-based businesses, which is who I work with, and it's because we don't have really a tangible offer, right? When you're talking about a product, it's so much easier to talk about the outcome or what somebody's going to get as a result of that product.

Stacy But when you're delivering a service, it's much harder to quantify what those results are going to be, and so that's just a challenge to begin with.

Stacy And within service-based businesses, the companies that I've worked with that I've found to have the hardest time doing this tend to be coaches and consultants. It's partially because the market really is saturated. There are so many people doing those things. If you don't have the proper research and you haven't really dug in to figure out what sets you apart or how to communicate that clearly, it's just a sea of the sameness.

Stacy [00:05:00] And it's really hard to figure out how to keep yourself from blending in.

Hector Yeah. I remember hearing a talk from Christopher Lockett one time, and he—I think he wrote the book… Bigger something. But essentially, he was someone early on who talked about category creation and the need to be able to create your own category.

Hector And it seems that a lot of service-based businesses, if they don't do that, they sort of either get lumped in with all the other ones with no real way to distinguish themselves, or they separate themselves and become a category of one.

Hector Because a lot of people in that space—the thing about a coach or a consultant or someone who's a service provider in that sense—it seems like they may be the only one who can do this sort of thing. And so it's important for them to tell the market that and have the right messaging so they're not grouped in with everybody else.

Stacy [00:06:00] Exactly. And sometimes it's not even that you're the one who really owns that category—you're just the first one who said you did, or who said it the most clearly.

Stacy And so I think that's why—again, I just… it's like beating on a dead horse with me with the research, the evidence—but really knowing and understanding how to position yourself.

Stacy Part of that is knowing what's in the market, who your competitors are, how they're messaging, and what they're talking about, so that if there is a space you can claim—either because, "Hey, this is the category we own," or, "A lot of other people are in the same category, but nobody else is talking about it. Let's plant our flag in the ground here"—that definitely gives you a strategic advantage.

Hector So how much of the mix is external versus internal? You talked about looking at competitors and looking at the market, and then obviously there's got to be some sort of assessment internally of strengths and values and that sort of thing.

Hector And so what does that mix look like, or is that a process? How do you help people navigate those sort of three—perhaps even competing—forces?

Stacy [00:07:00] Yeah. So I think of positioning kind of like a three-legged stool, and what I find is most people tend to miss one or two of these.

Stacy The first to me is really about your brand. Who are you as a brand? What's your purpose? What's your mission? What's your vision? What are your values? Because those should really drive the non-negotiables for your business—both internally and externally.

Stacy I think a lot of times businesses will develop these things in a silo, and then their mission and vision hangs somewhere on a wall but doesn't actually drive decisions. So it's really important that you're clear on those things in your business, as well as your voice and your tone—how do we want to show up as a brand?

Stacy So that's one leg of the stool.

Stacy [00:08:00] The other leg of the stool is really that piece of the market we talked about: who are your competitors—and not just your direct competitors.

Stacy We have a tendency to think, like for me, I'm certainly not the only messaging strategist in the world, right? There are plenty of other messaging strategists, but they actually aren't my biggest competition. My biggest competition tends to be indirect competitors—maybe things like people using AI, or maybe a copywriter who offers some messaging strategy underneath, or even just this idea of status quo: we'll just keep doing the same thing that we've been doing. So you have to understand how all of those things impact.

Stacy And then the third leg of the stool is really about honing in on your target audience—not only who they are, but what triggers their buying decisions, what creates urgency for them, what are the problems that they really need for you to solve for them, and how are they thinking and how are they talking about it, so that you can craft messaging that will then resonate.

Stacy And when you have all three of those things combined, that's when you can really figure out how do we position ourselves in the market so that we can clearly communicate who we're for and who we help and translate that into messaging that then helps them feel seen and know that, okay, this person is the right choice or this brand is the right choice to solve my problem.

Hector [00:09:00] It seems like today with there being so many options out there and there being so much noise—whether it be on social media or wherever you look—the need to have quality and clear messaging is so important. Not even really to stand out, because I think it's less about standing out and more about signaling to the right people.

Hector It's sort of that like… I'm a parent and I have a six and seven-year-old, and so I try and lock in what my kids are wearing when we're around a lot of people because if I'm looking for what they're wearing, it's much easier to find them because I know what I'm looking for.

Hector Your buyers know what they're looking for. It's oftentimes about us getting in front of them at the right time and not having there be anything lost in translation to letting them know that we can help them.

Stacy Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the message has to meet the moment, and that's the thing I think we tend to overlook. We might have a massive audience. That audience is not—everybody is not ready to buy from us at a certain point, right?

Stacy [00:10:00] But what we need is this consistent message so that when they are, they can see themselves in it. And that's why I am so bullish all the time on really collecting voice of customer insights: how is it that they're talking about their problem?

Stacy Because the way we talk about the problem we solve and the way our ideal clients talk about how their problem is impacting them day to day—those two are not the same things.

Stacy And that's another mistake: we have this tendency either to drift into insider language or just to talk about, "Here's the outcome. Here's what we can give you."

Stacy But what they really need to hear is something that we recognize, like, "Hey, when you should be watching your kid's soccer game, instead you're busy thinking about this other thing that's showing up that's creating overwhelm or stress," and helping them understand, "We see you, and this is why we can help you."

Stacy And if they don't hear that message, then they're going to tune you right out and go to someone else who is clearly saying that.

Hector [00:11:00] Yeah. I think also another challenge—and you hinted at it at the beginning—is that because getting out the message, the barrier is so low these days. Someone can start an Instagram page or a Substack. Anyone can start a website.

Hector So the accessibility is there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be effective. Just because you can create a blog doesn't mean that it's going to work, or just because you can start an Instagram—name your platform of choice—that it's going to be effective unless you have the right strategy behind it.

Stacy Yeah, absolutely. And I would say even the same is true for things like word of mouth or referrals, because it's very different for someone to say, "Hey, you should work with Hector—he's great," as opposed to, "You should work with Hector—he can help you XYZ," right?

Stacy [00:12:00] And so your messaging is so important because your message travels quicker than you do.

Stacy The first time you're in a conversation with someone is probably not when they're developing their first impression of you. They've had that long before, and the impression that they've developed of you—whether it's from referral or what they saw on your website or Instagram or wherever you are—has to be consistent with what they see when they actually meet and talk with you.

Stacy Because if not, you're just eroding trust before you've really even solidified it.

Hector Yeah. And in a space where everything is being tagged, everything is being noticed, right? Someone can go onto an AI platform and say, "Who is Hector Santia-Stevon?" And I did that the other day, and it was like, "Well, he's a podcast producer in Southern California." But it was like, "Oh, that's me." It sort of nailed it.

Hector And so that stuff is out there, and people are going to be looking to these ways to figure that stuff out. And so the clarity, I think, is going to go a really long way as we continue to move into this sort of post-AI world.

Stacy [00:13:00] Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think that consistency across your content, wherever it is—because that's what's showing up when people are searching you. The LLM results, they're quoting LinkedIn. They're looking at Reddit. They're looking at places where you are.

Stacy And if you are not clearly communicating who you serve and how you help them, and you're not doing that consistently, it's not going to pick up on those patterns. And then when somebody does say, "Who is…," it's not going to necessarily be able to tell them all of the things that you offer or that you do because you haven't effectively communicated that.

Hector We've talked a lot about how someone should show up. Do you have thoughts or ideas or insights on where you feel people should be showing up and giving this messaging or delivering this sort of messaging?

Stacy Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, first is wherever your clients are. That's what you have to know: where is your audience?

Stacy [00:14:00] I am definitely a huge fan of LinkedIn. My audience is on LinkedIn. Most of my clients that I've worked with—that's exactly where we know that people are.

Stacy But it's a matter of figuring out what events are they going to? If you're a speaker, where are my clients going to hear advice on marketing? What podcasts are they listening to?

Stacy It's really what platforms, but then also: where are your competitors? Because you don't want to leave that space so wide open where maybe somebody's going to YouTube, and one of your direct competitors is owning the space on YouTube, and you're not necessarily found there.

Stacy That being said, I don't think you necessarily need to spread yourself super thin across a zillion platforms. It's better to be on a few places and very clearly communicating what you do.

Stacy And I still think the website's really important. Many people—whether they get a referral or not—they're going to head to your website, and more often now, they're heading there at a decision-making stage, right? Like, "I think I might be ready to buy." Does this person say the thing to compel me to buy? And I think we underestimate how important it is to still have that presence.

Hector [00:15:00] Yeah. I learned that—I was doing some experimenting with our website, and I learned a very important lesson. One of our clients reached out and they said, "Hey, do you still do this thing? I was going to refer you, but I didn't see it on your website anymore."

Hector And I was like, "Okay, well, that's really good feedback," because I thought I was trying to be slick with these new adjustments that I was making when it was actually just more confusing.

Stacy Yes. Yeah. And I think the website is one of those things in particular that we tend to either let go completely.

Stacy I worked with a client recently who—we worked on their positioning and messaging, and then I also did the copy for their website. And when we were talking about the website, I started asking them the questions. They're like, "I actually haven't been on the website in like three or four years. I should go look."

Stacy It's like, all right, that's definitely too long. But it tends to be the thing that we either ignore or we just keep making little tweaks here and there, and we didn't do this cohesive strategic plan.

Stacy And then it's so common that I hear somebody like, "Oh, I was on a call and somebody asked something about my website, and I didn't realize that thing was still up or it wasn't still up."

Hector Yeah. It becomes increasingly challenging, especially as the digital world continues to evolve. As you look at the landscape, what are your thoughts on how that plays out for businesses?

Hector [00:16:00] I think that social media and the internet obviously opened up the accessibility for businesses to be able to get their messaging out, but it definitely didn't make it simpler.

Hector I don't think that it's easy necessarily. It's accessible, but getting your messaging out there is not necessarily easy.

Hector How do you help businesses navigate—once they've got their messaging dialed in—actually getting it out and in front of their target audience?

Stacy Yeah. So one of the things after we do positioning and messaging is I have implementation support that I provide to my clients.

Stacy Depending on the scope of what we do, sometimes we'll build out a whole content framework. So we have figured out these are the places you need to be, and we create a strategic plan for how they can roll out being in those places.

Stacy But that implementation support is really critical. We kind of figure: where's the first place that we need to update or adjust your messaging? Often that's the website or LinkedIn.

Stacy And then I help them implement the actual messaging. Sometimes I execute and I do it for them, but a lot of times they might have small teams—someone's managing the content, or maybe they're handing this off to a PR firm.

Stacy So they get a deck that kind of explains, "Here's how you use this messaging in this context, in this place," and then they can share those assets with me and I give them strategic feedback.

Stacy And I found this to be really beneficial because before I was doing that, I'd hand off these messaging documents, which were very clear to me, but then they would get them and be like, "This is great, but what do we do without you?"

Stacy And so I help them with that implementation support so they know how to go in, how to utilize it, where they need—when they need to be paying attention to which buyer they're talking to, or buyer's journey, or things like that.

Stacy So we go from positioning to messaging to the messaging implementation support, and then that can stay ongoing for them as well. And often I execute on their assets too, like their website.

Stacy So yeah… I don't know, did I really answer your question, or did I kind of talk around it there?

Hector [00:19:00] Well, one of the things that's coming out for me is I'm guessing that this thing is a living and breathing document. There's a lot of research and insight building that comes, I would imagine, at the beginning, but I'm sure that once you put the messaging out there, you start to get some feedback from them to iterate upon.

Hector What's that process like, or how should someone approach this initial document, if you will, and how it sort of evolves over time?

Stacy Yeah, I love that question because I think that's the other—back to your first question that you asked—that's actually one of the other huge mistakes that I see businesses make. Like, "Oh, well, this is check. We have our brand messaging guidelines. Check mark, we can say we've done that thing."

Stacy Or they've come to me—they've hit a wall, and maybe they did do this work early on, but so much has changed both in their business and in the market that it's completely out of date.

Stacy [00:20:00] So yeah, absolutely. One of the things when we off-board is talking about what are the things you need to be paying attention to and listening to, to see what's resonating, what's not, what might we need to shift.

Stacy I do offer for my clients—this is actually something recently that I started doing—is after six months offering a strategy session just to touch base back with them. "Hey, how are things going? Let's just go ahead and look at what you have. Do we need to make adjustments? Do we need to make tweaks on things so that as your business is growing, we don't end up in this place where in three years again, you're having to redo all of the work because you didn't keep up with it?"

Stacy So it's really just kind of checking in on what are the things that we've built and do these things still hold true over time.

Hector Yeah. I think… I've been guilty of creating a deck, creating a new messaging document, and then it goes in the archive, and it goes in the Google Drive folder, and it sits there and gets digitally dusty.

Hector And then I bring it up at our next quarterly review and go, "Oh yeah, we have this. We haven't done anything with it."

Stacy [00:21:00] Yeah. And that's why I love doing that 30 days of implementation support. What my clients have said is, before I started doing that, I would maybe look at something that they wrote and I'd be like, "Hey, are you checking in on your messaging guidelines? I'm not sure this is in alignment." And that's when I realized they needed that support.

Stacy Ever since I've started doing that, my clients now say, "Oh, we're in our messaging deck almost daily," or "We are consistently referencing it," because they have an understanding of how to use it.

Stacy This is really the foundation of all of your marketing efforts. And so they will check before they're doing anything—even if it's sending out proposals.

Stacy And it's a document that they can use to onboard new people to make sure that there's consistency across the company. And even if you're a solo founder, it's very easy to lose that consistency across your brand when you're trying to keep up with everything—whether it's your social presence, your website, even just networking introductions.

Stacy So they love that 30 days of support because it teaches them, like, "How do I actually use this document as a strategic asset?" And then they can very quickly see when things are shifting or are no longer relevant.

Hector [00:22:00] What's really cool about today and where we're at—we're recording this in May of 2026, which just seems strange—but with one thing that's coming online now is these things called MD files.

Hector And so for people who are in the AI world, if someone works with you, you can now take that document and put it into an AI agent. And the great thing about those things is they read the instructions every single time.

Hector And so if you are a solopreneur, you can create these documents and put it into your AI system and everything will follow what you guys worked on and it'll follow the messaging.

Hector And so before AI, these documents used to be just really pretty things that you'd think about and would make you feel good—like a mission statement or values or these messaging guidelines. And sometimes people might read them when they're onboarded, but now if you have them, they can go into every single thing that you create.

Hector I'm a big believer of a human in the loop to make sure that it's correct, but these things will save a lot of time and keep things a lot more aligned if you can integrate tech.

Stacy They do. Yeah, and that's a great use of AI—use that as a guardrail. I do that all the time.

Stacy [00:23:00] After I write my newsletters or whatever I work on, I will put it right through my LLMs and always have it analyzed for consistency with my tone, with my voice, with my messaging guidelines.

Stacy And there are times where it will pick up like, "Hey, you didn't speak to this buyer at this stage. Do you want to address that?" And I'm like, "Oh, yes." It's so much easier.

Stacy So I think it's allowed us as business owners to do things and scale in ways we never had the capacity to do before, because of things like that.

Hector Yeah. Absolutely. And the time spent doing some of the work that we talked about on this episode used to only go so far, but now it can really be leveraged and, to your point, scaled in a way that just wasn't possible six months—even a year—ago.

Stacy Yes. Yeah. And I love that. I think obviously there are ways we don't want to use AI that are not necessarily beneficial for straight content generation, things like that.

Stacy But what I love about it is when you find the things that either there's patterns or that you're constantly analyzing in the same way and you're able to create those same systems in AI to take over the task work, it frees you up for some more of that creative and strategic thinking that before you were spending so much time on whatever this process was or developing whatever this thing.

Stacy So not only can you get your clients results quicker, but now you're freed up to maybe think of angles you hadn't thought of before or apply it in different ways.

Hector Yeah. Wow, this has been such a great conversation that I think, no matter when someone is listening to it, can be valuable.

Hector Is there anything else that we didn't touch on today that you think is worth talking about or related to today's conversation?

Stacy [00:25:00] I don't think so. The biggest thing for me is always really about grounding everything in evidence and in insights. We have a tendency to kind of work off assumptions.

Stacy And so no matter how well you know your clients, it's really important that you're actually collecting real insights in real time, because what we think our clients want and need is often very different than what they say they want and need—or what they maybe even do want and need.

Stacy And so when we can understand what those insights are and how to collect them, then we can do the work of actually building this strategic foundation that can grow with us.

Hector Yeah. I think it might also change—whether it's from a technological impact, whether it's a socioeconomic impact. Things are changing and adjusting so quickly that to think that our customers are going to be the same a year from now or two years from now—having the same issues or thinking about it the same way—is sort of naive and shortsighted.

Hector I would imagine that business owners of past, you could get away with that—that things were moving at a pace where in a year or two, things would generally look the same.

Hector But I think that in a year or two, things are going to be radically different from how they are today. And so we have to be willing to adjust and evolve.

Hector The good news is it seems that we've been upleveled in terms of the tools and technology that are accessible to us, but we do still need to make sure that we are gathering that data.

Hector And I think human analysis is important. We can run it through an AI, but the human aspect is, until I see further, still going to be necessary in anything that we do.

Stacy [00:27:00] Yeah. There's that discernment, right? And especially—I love to do client interviews, and when I'm talking with a client's client and doing that customer interview—AI doesn't sense when somebody hesitates, right? Or when they pause or when body language shifts.

Stacy And so yes, I do run those transcripts and all of those things through AI to look for the patterns, but I also do that myself first because there's just nuance and things that you're going to pick up on as a human that a machine can't, at least not yet.

Stacy And so yeah, I think that human eye is critical. It's almost like I see it kind of like a collaborative partnership. Maybe AI will pick up on something I didn't, or maybe I'll pick up on something, but when you combine forces, then you're coming up with even a more in-depth analysis.

Hector Yeah. You nailed it with discernment. That's one of the things I think that we humans index well on—discernment—at least right now over AI, because some of these things I go, "How did you think that was a good idea? How did you think that is something we should do?" Whereas an adult seems to at least hopefully have a little more rationality in it.

Hector Stacy, thank you for indulging me in this great conversation. I have two more questions for you. The first is: if people want to find out about you, your services, get more connected with you online, where's the best place for people to go?

Stacy [00:28:00] LinkedIn is where they can definitely find me: linkedin.com/copybystacy.

Stacy My website is a great place to visit to find out more about what I offer, which is just my name: stacyelesko.com.

Stacy And then I also provided a link for you for the show notes that has a document, and when they download it, they can get on my newsletter then too. Basically, what that does is it'll tell them how to source those voice of customer insights we collected.

Stacy It does have the exact AI prompts that they can use to go through and figure out what patterns to look for in those for their messaging, and then it also includes the exact survey that I launch to my clients' clients to get some of those insights.

Stacy So LinkedIn, my website, my newsletter are the three best places.

Hector That is very generous, and we'll put that in the show notes for you listeners as always.

Hector Last question for you, Stacy: in your opinion, what is the secret to scaling a business?

Stacy [00:29:00] Well, if I tell you, it's not really a secret. No—I'd say: don't skip the foundational work.

Stacy I think it's really just a reiteration of kind of what I said: businesses jump straight to tactics without doing the foundational piece, and then that's when your growth stalls.

Stacy You can't guess your way to scaling. You have to be really crystal clear on your value, where you fit in the market, and all of that before you even try to translate that into messaging.

Stacy And this idea that we talked about—it's not a one-and-done kind of thing. And so you just have to keep evolving.

Stacy And then when you treat it that way, now you've built something sustainable that will help build all of the marketing efforts that you're going to do. It'll be the foundation for marketing, for sales, all the things in between.

Stacy [00:30:00] [inaudible]