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Success Stories / Megan Gersch

The Success Story

She reviewed 262 websites in 30 days as an experiment. Now 50% of her clients find her on TikTok.

MEGAN GERSCH · BRAND Strategist & WEBSITE DESIGNER

Doubled Down on TikTok
New Media Opportunities
Broke Through Plateau
262
Websites Reviewed in One Month
Megan Gersch
The Member

Megan Gersch

Brand Strategist & Website Designer

Branding Website Design Launch Assets VIP Days Creative Visionaries
MEET THE CEO

A brand designer who helps creative visionaries stand out — and needed the business structure to match her own creative ambition.

Megan Gersch helps creative visionaries attract their dream clients and make more sales through bold, standout website and branding design. She’s not the designer for people who want a beige website that looks like every other beige website. She’s the designer for the business owner who knows their brand should be as distinct as they are and needs someone with the eye and the strategic depth to make that happen.

She found Racheal on TikTok – which, in Megan’s story, is not a small detail. It’s the whole point. She had been in business for a few years, had genuine demand for her work, and had hit a plateau she couldn’t figure out how to break through. She came to The CEO Collective craving structure she’d never had, and left with a framework for her business and a visibility strategy that transformed her client acquisition.

The Goal

Break through a plateau after initial business success. Build structure into a business that had been running on instinct. Find a way to get visible without losing the creative spontaneity that made her work worth seeing in the first place.

Before The CEO Collective®

Talented. Busy. And stuck at the same ceiling.

Megan had proof of concept. She had happy clients, a growing reputation, and a distinct design point of view that most designers never develop. What she didn’t have was the structure to scale past where she already was or the visibility strategy to keep finding the right clients consistently.

01

Plateau After Early Success

Megan had been in business for several years when she joined the CEO Collective. She had clients. She had demand. But she had hit a ceiling she couldn’t see past. She knew the work was good enough to grow further – she just didn’t know what “further” actually required. The business had success, but not a strategy for what came next.

02

Flying By The Seat of Her Pants

Megan’s business background was creative, not operational. She’d been figuring it out on the fly – building things in real time, reacting to what came in, working without a planning framework or CEO rhythm. There was no model calendar, no quarterly focus, no structure to return to when things got chaotic. As a creative, she worried that structure might constrain her. What she hadn’t yet discovered was the opposite.

03

Visible But No Strategy to Convert to Clients

Megan was showing up on social media, but without a consistent strategy or a real framework for understanding what was working and why. She had a TikTok presence but hadn’t yet turned it into a reliable client channel. The visibility was scattered. The experiments were ad hoc. She needed both the mindset shift — visibility as infrastructure — and a structure for running experiments that could tell her something useful.

“The structure gives me the baseline to come back to. Even if I have a week where everything goes off the rails — I just come right back to that grounding place in my business. It gives me a little bit of both.”

MEGAN GERSCH · Brand Strategist & Website Designer

The 90-Day CEO Operating System® at Work

What the system actually built for Megan.

Megan came in as a creative who had been running purely on instinct. The 90-Day CEO OS gave her what she’d been missing: a home base. Not a cage – a foundation. The kind of structure that makes creativity more sustainable, not less, because you know exactly what to come back to when the week goes sideways.

Phase 01

Foundational: CEO Days + The Model Calendar

One of Megan’s most significant shifts was getting a model calendar and a structure for her CEO days. For a creative who had been building in real time, this wasn’t a constraint – it was a relief. Knowing what she needed to focus on each week meant that when things inevitably went sideways, she had something to come back to instead of starting over. The structure held the creative chaos rather than fighting it.

“I have a structure for my CEO days now. My vision is much more laser-focused on what I need to do each week. I don’t restrict my creativity – it gives me that home base.”

Phase 02

Visibility Experiment: 30 Days of Website Reviews

In February 2023, Megan set out to review 100 small business websites live on TikTok — one each day. By day three, she’d already hit 30. She raised the goal to 250. She ended the month at 262. The experiment was market research disguised as content: real-time, live, in front of an audience who had the very problems she solved. The result: 50% of her clients now come from TikTok, a Brit+Co feature, and a product library built entirely from what she saw those 262 businesses get wrong.
“It gives you insight into what people are truly struggling with – the common mistakes, over and over. I got so many ideas for products, for series, for what to build next.”

Phase 03

From Pie in the Sky Goals to Actually Attaining Them

Before the CEO Collective, Megan’s goals were aspirational but not actionable. The 90-day planning process gave her a way to zoom out on her business and then break goals down to what actually needed to happen each week and month to reach them. New offers – the Launch Prep VIP Day, website-in-a-week – didn’t come from inspiration alone. They came from a planning framework that turned vision into a sequence of concrete moves.

“If I need to do XYZ goal, here are the steps we need to break down. By week, by month. So it actually feels attainable instead of just a pie-in-the-sky type of thing.”
In Her Own Words

What it looks like when a creative finally builds the business around the talent.

I had been in business for a few years. I had clients. There was clearly demand. But I was flying by the seat of my pants and I had hit this place where I just couldn’t get to the next level. I didn’t have a framework for what the next level even meant, let alone how to get there. I’d been figuring everything out as I went, and I was craving some structure – business lessons I’d just honestly never had.

The 262 website challenge started as an experiment. I went live on TikTok every day in February and reviewed small business websites in real time. I thought I was going to do 100. By day three I’d already done 30, so I raised the goal. I ended the month at 262. And what that experiment gave me wasn’t just visibility. It was market research I couldn’t have paid for.

""Every single video on TikTok has the potential to get in front of a new audience. That's how I've been able to grow — and why 50% of my clients now come directly from that platform.""

The same mistakes came up over and over – no buy buttons on the home page, about pages showing up before the offer, too many clicks between the client and the thing they actually wanted to buy. I started building products and frameworks from what I saw. The Launch Prep VIP Day came directly from recognizing that overwhelm around launch assets was the thing holding most of my ideal clients back from getting visible at all.

The structure the CEO Collective gave me didn’t kill my creativity. It gave me a home base. Even when a week goes completely sideways, I know exactly what to come back to. That’s not a cage – that’s the thing that makes the creative work sustainable.

WHAT’S DIFFERENT NOW

Megan’s biggest wins.

Result 01

Consistently Attracting 50% of New Cients fro TikTok

“It’s been an incredible tool for my business. Every single video has the potential to get in front of a new audience – the algorithm puts you in front of the right people at the right time. You can’t get that on other platforms.”

Result 02

New Media Opportunities: Brit+Co and MSN

“I had just spoken with 262 businesses so I could speak to the TikTok question really well. I responded to the HARO inquiry and it got published in Brit+Co and reposted on MSN. Timeliness is a part of the equation.”

Result 03

New Products Based on 262 Website Reviews

“I got so many different ideas for products and series after that experiment. The Launch Prep VIP Day came directly from seeing the same bottleneck holding people back from getting visible – over and over and over again.”

Result 04

Structure That Enables Creativity

“Even if I have a week where things go off the rails, I have that structure to come back to. I know what I need to focus on. I just come right back to that grounding place. I get a little bit of both.”

Featured Episode · Promote Yourself to CEO®

How One Visibility Experiment Got Her in Front of 262 Potential Clients

Megan joins Racheal to break down the 30-day TikTok experiment that became an accidental masterclass in market research, the most common website mistakes she saw across 262 businesses, why TikTok works as a top-of-funnel tool when nothing else does – and what structure gave a creative entrepreneur who’d spent years flying on instinct.

Your Story Belongs Here Too

If you’ve outgrown your pot —
it’s time to find a bigger one.

If something feels off and you can’t figure out why, if the tinkering isn’t fixing it, if you’re ready to stop making it look different and start building on something deeper – The CEO Collective is where that work happens. With a framework, a community, and a room that will help you see the through line you can’t see from inside.