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she stopped hiding behind the screen — and built a business that runs on relationships.
AMY HAYES· GLOBAL CREATOR STUDIO
Amy Hayes
The Global Creator Studio & Academy
A decade-long web and brand designer who built an entirely referral-based business — while barely touching social media.
Amy Hayes describes herself as an accidental web designer. She spent years in luxury travel and travel media under the name Cree Mondi – which translates, fittingly, to Global Creator. Because her own platform was design-led and visually compelling, people started asking for help with theirs. She backed into a decade-long career doing something she was genuinely exceptional at, for clients who kept referring her to more of the same.
She now runs two things: The Global Creator Studio, her web and brand design practice that runs almost entirely on word-of-mouth and repeat clients – and The Global Creator Academy, where she coaches other creatives and designers how to build premium, high-touch service businesses without the portfolio obsession, the certification chasing, or the assumption that social media is required.
Stop living in the reactive cycle of feast or bust — full calendar, exhausted, secretly wanting all the clients to go away. Get clear on vision and values. Build the systems for the studio to run itself. And finally create the space to launch the coaching side of the business she'd been holding back.
Full calendar. Great clients. Still exhausted and running on reactive.
Amy had no trouble filling her calendar. She had no trouble getting clients. What she had was a start-stop-collapse rhythm that she couldn’t break – busy until she was burnt out, then craving quiet, then starting again. The business was running her. She wasn’t running it.
01
No Way Out of Feast or Famine
Amy had a decade of client relationships and genuine referral momentum. But her business operated in waves: she’d get very busy, get very tired, and find herself secretly wishing all her clients would just go away for a while. Then the calendar would clear, she’d feel anxious, fill it again, and repeat. There was no intentional rhythm – just reaction. She was always catching up, never ahead.
02
No Vision or Values Clarity
Amy was deep in the doing and had no structured time to zoom out. She knew she wanted to expand into coaching – helping other creatives build the same kind of premium, relationship-based practice she’d built – but she’d never created real space to build toward it. The studio was consuming everything. The vision for what came next lived entirely in her head, with no plan behind it.
03
Believed She Was Doing It Wrong
Despite ten years of consistent referral-based growth, Amy had absorbed the noise from the online business world: build a funnel, grow a following, referrals dry up, word of mouth isn’t sustainable. She was running a thriving business and simultaneously convincing herself it was built on sand. The CEO Collective gave her the thing she didn’t know she needed: a room full of people doing exactly the same thing – proving it worked.
“I stopped telling myself I was doing it wrong — because there were examples inside the Collective of people doing the exact same thing as me. Referrals are still the lifeblood of the vast majority of businesses.”
amy hayes · global creator studio
What the system actually built for Amy.
Amy came in with a full book, real momentum, and a business that was running her instead of for her. The 90-Day OS gave her the structure to zoom out – to work on the business rather than just in it, and to finally trust that consistent, constrained actions would move her further than trying to do everything at once.
Phase 01
Vision and Values — The Work She’d Been Too Busy for
Amy describes the vision and values work as one of the most significant things the CEO Collective gave her – and the thing that’s easiest to skip when you’re booked. But once she had clarity on who she actually wanted to serve, how she wanted to work, and what she was building toward, everything else could follow. The coaching business that had been stuck in her head started to take shape as a real plan with real constraints and real actions.
Phase 02
Doing Less — Discovering the Studio Could Almost Run Itself
One of Amy’s most striking observations after two years in the CEO Collective: her 90-day plans now contain about a third of what her first plan had on it. Not because she’d given up on growth, but because she’d discovered that three consistent weekly actions, repeated, move the needle more than twenty scattered ones. She built the systems for the studio – specifically for how she continues to make and nurture connections – and the referral engine that had always existed became a deliberate, maintained strategy instead of a happy accident.
Phase 03
Freedom — From Reactive to Proactive
The most personal transformation: Amy stopped being afraid of her inbox. She started skiing. She traveled without her laptop. She stopped needing everything outside her to change in order to feel okay about her business. The shift from reactive to proactive – knowing the plan, trusting the systems, and understanding that she could only control how she showed up – was the thing that made all the strategic work actually land. And it made space for what came next: the Global Creator Academy.
What it looks like when a designer stops hiding behind the screen and starts building relationships.
I’m what I call an accidental web designer. I wasn’t trying to build a design business – I was building a platform around luxury travel under a different name, people liked it, and they started asking for help with theirs. Within a decade I’d built something that generated consistent income entirely through word-of-mouth, repeat clients, and referrals from those clients. No social media marketing. No content calendar. No funnel.
And yet somehow I had absorbed the message that this wasn’t real, that it would dry up, that I needed to build something more “scalable.” The CEO Collective gave me a room full of people who had built the same way I had and were thriving. I stopped telling myself I was doing it wrong. That alone was worth the price of admission.
"My studio Instagram is a static grid. I'm not even sure I have a Facebook page. I spend zero time on social media for my design work and I don't get clients from there. All my time goes to being available for high-touch relationships. It's more fun. It's more profitable. And I never have to cold outreach."
When I look at my 90-day plan now versus my first one, I’m doing about a third of what I thought I had to do. I was so deep in the doing that I couldn’t see how much of it was unnecessary. Three consistent priorities, repeated week after week, moves the needle far more than twenty scattered ones. That realization changed how I run everything – the studio, and the coaching business I finally had space to build.
The coaching side – helping other creatives get out of the starving artist paradigm and into a sustainable lifestyle business – was always the vision. I just couldn’t see it clearly until I had the framework, the space, and a community that kept showing me what was possible.
What’s different now
Amy’s biggest wins.
Result 01
The Studio Almost Runs Itself
Result 02
The 90-Day Plans Got a Third Shorter — And More Effective
Result 03
The Global Creator Academy — Built From the Space Created
Result 04
Freedom — The Answer to What It Means to Promote Herself to CEO
Featured Episode · Promote Yourself to CEO®
Building Premium Services Through Relationships — Not Funnels
Amy joins Racheal to challenge almost everything the online business world tells creatives they need: the portfolio obsession, the certification collecting, the funnel-building, the social media grind. What actually builds a premium service business is relationships, self-concept, and the willingness to show up as a strategic partner instead of a creative gun for hire.
MORE MEMBER STORIES
CEOs Building Unshakeable Businesses.
Stop hiding behind the screen.
Start building relationships that run your business.
If you’re good at what you do and you’re exhausted trying to build an audience, a funnel, or a social following you don’t need – there’s another way. The CEO Collective is where business owners who build on relationships come to do it with more clarity, more intention, and a room full of people proving it works.