Meet Calliope Tornatore | CEO of MUSE branding studio

We had the good fortune of connecting with Calliope Tornatore and we’ve shared our conversation below.

What should our readers know about your business?
I’m Calliope, the owner of MUSE branding studio. We make hot brands even hotter online.

I’m the CEO, the Brand Strategist, and the Brand Manager. My team and I help women-owned businesses create an online presence that builds their brand awareness, gets them more sales and attracts more opportunities.

We offer all of the things you need to properly represent yourself and your business in the online world.

We realize that so much of success in business today is determined by what people see online. To that end we offer all of the tools to make our clients’ businesses impossible to ignore in the online space. Social media management, content creation, website design, funnels, and ads. We make your vision for your business and your online representation for your business cohesive.

We stand out because we offer everything in one place. A client works with me as the Brand Strategist to get their vision and needs locked in and I direct my team to do everything else for you. As a CEO you’re really busy, so you touch base with me and I direct the rest of my team to make sure everyone is gelling and communicating the same things so everything looks extremely high quality while offering our clients the freedom to be as hands off as they need to without compromising the end result.

Clients meet with me, make sure everything is all good, I provide them the reports and analytics. Everything is customizable. You might need less online management, you might need more, whatever your needs, we make sure to bring in more leads and more opportunities.

What I’m most excited about now is having a team behind me. For the past decade I’ve been doing this all solo. Now with a team, everything we do can be bigger and better than it could before, including the results for my clients. It’s so exciting to me to see my clients scale their businesses with our services. I’m really excited to grow alongside the women that partner with MUSE.

This is exciting because it means I give women jobs, I can go bigger and brighter with everything I’m doing, whether that is education on social media, throwing events or having retreats. It means I can hire the best of the best and keep growing this in a way that blesses everyone from the client to the team to anyone who is involved in the brand, even just people who follow us.

I want to use MUSE in a way that inspires women to make money, to be seen, to go after their passions.

I think the internet is amazing, I’m so into the digital world. I am one of those people who was around twelve when MySpace blew up, so I grew up with social platforms and the internet. In the times of my life where I was very alone, the internet was there to connect me with people across the country and the world who felt the same way I did and were also trying to realize a vision like mine. The internet connected me with resources that helped me learn so many things that became a part of who I’m able to be today.

I love that MUSE is a digital branding agency because I want the internet to be a hub of beauty and education and genuine social connection. I feel that the way MUSE manages brands online feeds into that mission.

Building a business is not easy; well, it is and it isn’t. You have something, someone else needs it, you provide it and now there’s profit. That’s the basic principle I started on at fifteen, and it did feel easy. I was following my passion, someone had a need, I filled that need and got paid for it. So on one hand it’s that simple, and on the other hand it’s the hardest hustle ever.

You have to forge your own path and make your own creation and do all your own hard work, you have to have your own genius. There’s so many moving parts. One you have to take care of yourself as the CEO, you have to have a balance between work and life that mitigates burnout, you have to remain at optimal energy and brainpower while doing all of this and maintaining emotional intelligence and self-awareness.

Often times you have to have a thick skin against naysayers and still be soft enough to be approachable and authentic for your team and your clients.

In regards to that team, you have to know how to be an effective leader, and communicate and manage and direct and take people to a collective goal.

Then there’s the client aspect where you have to be good at marketing and sales and building genuine client relationships and managing those.

Then there’s delivering on your promises, you have to have the skills and actually bring the outcomes your client paid for. You have to deliver what you have marketed and sold.

So, it’s easy and it’s not.

I’m thirty and I’ve been doing this since I was fifteen. It’s all I’ve known and it’s all I’ll ever do and ultimately you have to choose your hard. At this point it would be harder for me to have an employment position than what I’m doing now. So I choose the “hard” of being a CEO over the hard of being employed. But that’s an individual thing.

One of the hard parts as a business owner is all of the trial and error. There’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of learning curves, there’s a lot coming at you from all angles. The only way to overcome it is to see it as a lesson, an opportunity to learn. So I’ve learned thousands upon thousands of my own lessons in the past fifteen years but I’ve used each one to grow.

When something fails, or is extremely challenging or doesn’t go the way I wanted, instead of beating myself up I choose to look at it through the lens of “Okay what did I learn? How can I get better? What does this reveal to me about how I need to change my approach and my structures?” So when failure, rejection or challenges happen you have to see it that way or you’ll get knocked down way too early in the game, you won’t be able to keep growing as a business owner.

So yeah, I’ve learned a lot along the way but I can sum up two of the most important lessons I’ve learned. One, you can do hard things, but you don’t have to do them alone. Two, follow your instincts, follow your intuition.

As for something I want someone to know about my brand story, it’s that you can build something absolutely mind blowing by just taking one step at a time, and creating your own opportunities. You have to have an interest or a passion of your own, and you have to gain the skills and knowledge to go with it. Then you just have to have that one person to buy one offer from you. If you enjoy that, you sell the next offer to the next person, and then the next person, and on and on, focusing on that next step ahead.

With each new project or client you keep refining your process a little more each time. Each step becomes more intentional. Eventually the steps begin to tease the edge of your comfort zone, but that’s a good thing. Keep taking those steps. They could look like starting to raise your price, or starting to go from one gig at a time to really building a brand or an online presence or adding another skill to the table. Do it in bite sized pieces.

I never went to college, I didn’t get loans or handouts. I would make some money and then invest what I could back into the business after I paid bills. There was a long period of time where I just had a laptop on a cardboard box. I would do my client sessions that way. So you work with what you have, take those steps every day, refine them and become more intentional about them, keep learning and growing, tease the edge of your comfort zone. Over time you’ll look back and see that you have come so unbelievably far with those efforts.

There’s things I have in the works for MUSE right now that I never ever would have been able to conceive even two years ago. Where I was two years ago would have been inconceivable in all of the years prior. So it’s really just about taking those intentional steps ahead. If you do that, you will build something great. So I want people to know that, I don’t want people to look at my business and think it just materialized one day, even though sometimes it feels that way to me. It has really just been one foot in front of the other since twelve years old. It has been a gradual process, but gradual processes are how you make crazy, impossible, awesome things happen.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I would tell them to go have breakfast at Breakfast Republic. Then of course they have to go to the beach, Mission Beach is my favorite. They’d need to walk along the boardwalk, check out Belmont park rides, eat some really good fish tacos at any of the Mexican restaurants. Definitely go downtown to little Italy, get some great pizza or pasta. The zoo here is pretty spectacular too!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I want to shout out every single person who tuned out the voices of people that told them that they shouldn’t, that they couldn’t. Everyone who decided to go against the norm and take the risk of starting their own business. The people who are hustling while holding down a job that pays their bills while their friends and family tell them they’re crazy. The people who feel alone while building their business and going after some kind of vision or dream. All the people who are in those early stages where it’s really hard and you feel really alone, you don’t feel supported, who maybe doubt themselves but are so fueled by the vision of what could be that they go after it anyway and make it happen.

I want to shoutout all those people because that takes such courage and audacity. It means they are truly following their vision, their heart, their instincts. If everyone could do that we would probably have a better world. It’s incredibly difficult to veer off the cookie cutter path in life. It takes a long time to feel like people are cheering for you again and you have support. The beginning is so isolating and lonely.

I want to shout out the people in that lonely beginning phase. Just because other people cant see your vision doesn’t mean it is impossible or unreal, it just means it is truly your vision and only you can make it real. If you can see it, you can go after it.

Beyond them, I want to shout out people who do the work and learn the processes and then put out free content on the internet to teach others the things they painstakingly learned. So much of where I am today has come from consuming so many free books at the library and resources online. Those sources got me to the point where I did have money to invest. So definitely a major shout out to anyone who has put that kind of free content out there. Those resources are why I want MUSE to grow big enough that I can really continue the tradition of sharing such useful knowledge for free.

Website: info@musebrandingstudio.com

Instagram: @muse.brandingstudio

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/calliopescherrer/

Image Credits
Darren Smith & Tom Bertolotti