In this Business Blast Podcast episode, host Tyler Wagner interviews creative entrepreneur and writer Rachel Gross. The conversation begins with a sponsor plug for Anchor and Authors Unite, then moves into Rachel’s personal narrative: a pivotal moment three months prior when she experienced a crisis at a Starbucks, realizing that academia no longer defined her identity and that entrepreneurship offered a more authentic path. Rachel emphasizes that branding and marketing are fundamentally different—branding stems from a company’s origin story, mission, and values, while marketing is the vehicle that communicates a pre‑existing brand. She offers broad business advice centered on adaptability and proactivity in the unpredictable startup environment. When asked about advice for her younger self, she shares her mother’s quote, “Life happens when we’re busy making plans,” urging less rigid planning and more openness to unexpected opportunities. Rachel defines happiness succinctly as “coffee and dogs,” expanding it to include inspiration. Her favorite book is Sarah Knight’s The Life‑Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fck, which taught her the importance of self‑care and selfishness for better serving others. Her favorite quote, from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, reflects her desire to collaborate with unseen forces of inspiration. The episode concludes with Rachel’s online contact points—LinkedIn and Facebook under the name Rachel Lee Gross.
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Thank you for listening to the Business Blast podcast. So for all my listeners out there that have been wanting to do your own podcast, I'd like to introduce to you Anchor. Anchor is a one-stop shop for recording, hosting, distributing, and monetizing your podcast. So before I found Anchor, I had never actually done a podcast because all the research that I had gathered made it seem very complex. Then I found Anchor, and Anchor makes podcasting extremely simple. So if you want to do your own podcast, go to anchor.fm/start. I can't wait to hear your podcast. Welcome to the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with all the resources you need to become a successful author. You can learn more about Authors Unite and join the free community at authorsunite.com. Now let's jump into the episode. All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner and today I have Rachel Gross with us. She is a creative entrepreneur and writer. Using her passion for narrative to redefine the process of branding and create compelling stories for companies. So welcome to the show, Rachel.
Thank you so much, Tyler Wagner Wagner. It's great to be here with you all.
Of course, it's great to have you here. We'll dive into the first one, Rachel. The first question I have for you is, what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
Yeah, perfect. As a narrative girl, I loved the question. So definitely one of the best stories from my life that has a lot of meaning and still does to this day. It kind of sounds a little a little bit unhappy. However, it was probably about 3 months ago, I was sitting in the middle of Starbucks having a complete meltdown at what I thought was my life kind of turning, turning up against me and these plans that I had set for myself from a really young age. It was kind of the moment where I started to realize that though I love education, academia wasn't a place that I wanted to spend the rest of my professional career in. And I had sunk every part of my identity into my education thus far. So it was this moment of really kind of earth-shattering nature to me. I wasn't sure at that moment who I was, who I wanted to be. However, the happy ending to this story is that in that moment, it's brought me more happiness than I could ever actually have imagined. It's opened me up to entrepreneurship and into a world that I'd never really felt I had, I had a say or could have an identity within. And it showed me that I'm so much more than my academic achievements. I'm so much more than a grade on a paper. And that even though people might have some sort of preconceptions about me, that actually means nothing to me because what matters is, is who I am, who I believe myself to be, and who I work towards every single day.
Yes. And as a college dropout myself, I praise you and I love what I just heard. So awesome.
Thank you so much.
Um, the next one I have for you is, what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
Perfect. Yeah, so I have one huge one that I try to tell as many people as possible, and it's that branding is not marketing and marketing is not branding. These are really two completely different spheres that I know a lot of the times kind of get conglomerated all into one. If, if someone's going in to hire a marketer, that also means in the back of their mind they're thinking about the branding that this marketing intern, this marketing employee, can actually do for them, when in reality these are two incredibly different things. You can't market something that isn't branded, and you can't build a brand simply through its marketing. Branding goes back to the very origin story of the company, the very mission and the values, and you need to kind of get those out on paper first with a brander, and then you can kind of move that into the marketing space and how branding then can be marketed through content, through social media, through YouTube, whatever, whatever your company kind of sees fit.
And what's your best piece of overall business advice, so not necessarily industry-specific?
Yeah, so I think my main piece of advice would be to be adaptable to the situation. I've kind of incredibly thrown myself into the startup world over the past few months, and that's the biggest thing that I've kind of noticed about startups is sometimes you just have absolutely no idea what you're walking into and what every single day is going to look like. You can schedule as much as possible, but sometimes things kind of have to be pushed aside and you have to be adaptable to whatever is going on. On in order to kind of get through the day, succeed, and get positive results from whatever you're doing. And then also, on the other hand, being proactive. So never sitting bored in the corner, not sure what to do. Make sure that you're always kind of thinking ahead, thinking to the next step, the next day, or the next week, and making sure that you know what you're doing, how you're going to get there, and how you're going to be positive and enthusiastic about the process.
And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
Yeah, so going back to something that I think a lot of people might say is actually listening to my mother more. She always, she always had this one quote, and it hasn't made sense to me until this point in my life, and it's, "Life happens when we're busy making plans." So I would really tell my younger self to think more deeply on that, and that I can plan out the next 20, 30 years of my life, but life is going to happen while I'm sitting there making those plans and figuring out kind of how I'm going to get there. And some of, some of the biggest moments that I've even had just within, within my life so far have been when I've kind of deviated from what I thought I should be doing, what I thought I'd kind of planned out to do. Like that moment that I had in Starbucks, that kind of life-shattering type moment. I had planned to graduate school, and now I know incredibly strongly that that is not for me. So maybe if I had taken the time in my younger years to not plan so much, I would have, I would have been able to kind of expose myself to more earlier on.
And in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?
Yeah, really short answer for this is that it's coffee and dogs. My longer answer is going to be inspiration.
Awesome. I love it. And what is the best book that you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
Yeah. So the best book by far I've ever read is The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck by Sarah Knight. It's been one of the books in my life that I've probably read the most over and over again because it just meant so much to me. And it's the feeling of knowing that it's okay and it's totally necessary to be selfish sometimes, to put our self-love, our self-care, and our compassion for ourselves first. And that's in order to make sure that we're bringing everything that we can for everyone else who's in our life.
And what is your favorite quote and why?
Yes, my favorite quote is by Elizabeth Gilbert in her book Big Magic. "All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life: collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see nor prove nor command nor understand. It's a strange line of work, admittedly. I cannot think of a better way to pass my days." Why that's my favorite quote is because it's kind of exactly what I want to make out of my life. I want to be inspired every single day to be creating and to be creative. I never want to put myself in a corner, tell myself I'm not good enough. I just want to know that I might not be able to understand what exactly is going on, but as long as I'm being creative and being expressive in my creativity, that I can make good things happen.
Yes, love it. Thank you so much for coming on. The last question I have for you before we let you go is, where is the best place for people to find you online?
Yep, you can find me on LinkedIn and Facebook, mainly Rachel Lee Gross. I would love to chat with anyone who'd like to.
Perfect. Thank you again, Rachel. We appreciate it.
