Ready to see your business more holistically, cut the clutter, and make your systems work for you—not against you? Get actionable advice, spicy real talk, and a behind-the-scenes look at building a brand that runs like a well-oiled machine.

We sit down with Erin Taylor, founder of Lunimae and the self-proclaimed "Systems Whisperer" your business didn’t know it needed. We talk to Erin about her journey from corporate IT project management to launching her own business dedicated to helping entrepreneurs untangle chaos and build holistic business systems.

Forget quick fixes and shiny new tools. Erin shows us why treating surface-level marketing problems rarely gets to the root of what’s holding your business back. We talk about why systems aren’t just about Asana boards and automations, how over-complicating things can hinder seasoned entrepreneurs, and why client communication is usually the overlooked key to scaling.

Erin shares practical steps for getting unstuck, questions to map out your processes, and tips for choosing the right tools (without falling for “shiny object syndrome”).

Here are 3 key takeaways for every entrepreneur:

Systems are more than just tools.

It’s not just about Asana or Trello. Your systems are the step-by-step processes that guide your marketing, client experience, and team collaboration. The tools should support these processes, not define them.

Don’t silo your business functions.

Looking at client experience, marketing, or project management in isolation leads to breakdowns. The magic happens when you connect these areas and see how they interact, making your business smoother and more scalable.

Simplicity scales.

Overcomplicating systems is a common trap for seasoned entrepreneurs. Erin’s advice: streamline. If you can get something done in three steps, don’t make it six! Regularly reflect on what’s working, what’s not, and keep removing unnecessary friction.

Moments

00:00 Collaborative Patience and Vision

05:33 "Automating Project Management Challenges"

09:48 "Aligning Tools to Job Needs"

13:36 Streamlining Simplifies Entrepreneurial Systems

16:43 Streamline Tools or Optimize Business Processes

17:33 Connect with Lunimae Online

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The Rebel Hour

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Submit your question ahead of time or grab the mic live. It’s bold, it’s unscripted, and it’s built for small businesses ready to grow.

Copyright 2025 Rebel Marketing

Our guest today is Erin from Lunimae, the Systems Whisperer, your business didn't know. The Systems Whisperer. Your business didn't know it needed. She's here to help you solve surface level problems and start thinking holistically. Because let's be real, if your marketing's not working, the issue probably isn't your Instagram strategy. Erin, I'm excited to have you here. Please don't air all of the rebel marketing dirty laundry unless we need a reality reality check, I guess.

Oh, thank you for having me.

Can you tell us about your business and what inspired you to start it?

Definitely. I. I spent a lot of time corporate. I. I really believed my end goal would be to climb the corporate ladder, and I did that for a while, and it just became very unsatisfying and extremely frustrating at times. And so I. Aspects of what I did, which was it project management, and I decided to leverage that into my own business. So after several iterations, we are where we are today.

But Lunimae started in January 2020, so it was a fun first year figuring things out. But my main goal was to help people understand systems, set them up for success in their business so they could do what they do best while I help with everything behind the scenes.

Yeah. When did you realize that focusing on just one area of business just wasn't enough?

Oh, probably. I mean, gosh, back in my corporate days, honestly, I did a lot of process improvement. And in corporate, everything is very much siloed. And you see that now in the online space as well. Of. We're only talking about, you know, client experience, or we're only talking about project management. We're only talking about this, you know, marketing. And there are so many overlapping pieces and intricacies between the two.

I think it's. It's not responsible to only look at one piece. You have to pull back and look at it all holistically.

How has your own experience running a business shaped the way you work with your clients today?

Yeah, I. A lot of patience, I think. Yeah. No, I feel like. I feel like most people don't understand everything that goes into running a business. I know I didn't. I went in, you know, eyes wide shut, I guess, and. And figuring things out and.

And you just have to have the patience to work through the questions, work through the process, understand that, you know, it might not be the first time we set something up, might not be the end goal. We're gonna see. See how it goes and make adjustments.

I agree. You have to probably have. Just speaking from Working with you. You do have a lot of patience with us, with myself, with my brain. And there's a lot more. It's not just patience, but it's also like taking your own experience of what you see other companies doing and giving your. You're not just a doer of the tasks you try to actually support in that ideation process and what, where we can take the business next. So that's, I think that's great.

Yeah, absolutely. I think with any part of business, it's like listening to your clients and understanding what they want, whether they can articulate it or not, and trying to, trying to get that there.

Yeah. So a lot of people think of systems and they immediately picture like tech tools, Asana, Trello, all those things, or just automations. What do you mean by holistic business systems?

Yeah. So systems are how you run your business. Everyone has a system. Whether it's the best system or not is another question. But it comes down to the steps you take to, to meet your client where they are. It's the steps you take to market your business. It's the steps you take to delegate work. So systems are the process along with the tools that support that process.

And so when they are all working together, it's that, that's where you get a beautiful, smooth, easy process. When they're working against each other. And that's never on purpose, but it doesn't feel right, it feels bumpy, it feels like a lot more work. That's usually when people start questioning the tools and calling that a failure of the system, where the system is everything and we gotta look at it across the board.

So what are some signs that a business is just treating the symptoms instead of the root problem of a system then?

Yeah, yeah. It's usually when they start saying, oh, I've tried everything and nothing works. I'm going to stop trying to automate because it's never works. I don't trust the tools. Things like that, where there's usually a disconnect between, you know, the process and the system and there's usually something at the root cause of that that we can, we can fix.

Can you, can you walk us through an example of a client who came in thinking they had some kind of systems issue or marketing issue or sales issue, but it turned out to be something else entirely.

Yeah, the most common one I run into is people coming to me saying they have a project management issue. And usually that comes down to a gap in the process somewhere. So one particular client I won't use you as an example, one particular client said they needed to hire a project manager because the process took too long. And so after working through a few iterations, we found that she was doing everything so manually and so detailed that it was taking her hours to send, you know, you know, one follow up email or one proposal. So we were able to take that. While not, you know, and her concern was I don't want things to feel impersonal. And so being able to take that concern and look at what her clients needs were in their feedback, we were able to take that process from needing a project manager to doing the things she thought a project manager would do completely by automation with what you were.

Just saying, with like the project managers and them saying it was going to take too long. What is like the most common disconnect you see like between these systems and like why is it even taking them that long in the first place?

It's usually because business owners don't want to let go of control. They want to be, they want to be hands on at every single step. And so yeah, half of the battle is releasing control either to a tool that will do the job for them or people on their team and not not letting the, you know, trusting the people on their team to do their job.

I think that, I don't know, I know we work with you, so maybe in team meetings or something, you just have like a little card that as soon as I start saying something, it's like a red card for controlling or like, I don't know, yellow card for like. Is this shiny object syndrome?

Right.

So what's one small change in a business system that tends to have a bigger ripple effect?

Understanding how your system interconnects, I think again, like the silos. Not looking at your systems in a silo but looking at them across the board and seeing how you can better leverage what you already have.

Are there any areas in a business that people like often overlook when they're trying to scale?

Yeah, client communication. Everyone, everyone says that that's a top priority. That's usually the area where I find the most room for growth and improvement. And when you're trying to scale, half of it is feedback and testimonials from clients. And so taking better care of your clients in a way that doesn't take more time or energy from you, but helps, but still helps them, makes a big impact.

So how do you approach helping a client untangle a business that feels really chaotic or stuck?

Yeah, I go back to process mapping. I love process mapping. So visually laying out what happens across the business, every single step. And so talking a business owner through that and you'll find that there's so much information that lives in their head and it's not documented anywhere. And so when you continue to ask them, okay, but then what happens? What does the client, you know, does the client get an email here? Do they get a reminder? How do you tell your team asking those questions and really documenting what's happening or where there's a gap will will really clarify where we need to step in and make some adjustments.

Okay. I feel like us as a small business too, we struggle with this, but what advice would you have for like small business owners or entrepreneurs who feel like the systems are always too big for their company or like not as well. Like we deal with a lot of tech and marketing, but we sometimes feel like we're cutting certain things because we're not the big heavy tech startup. So like what advice would you have for people in our position and others that you've dealt with before?

Yeah, it's one, it's getting the requirements of like what do you actually need to do the job properly, you know, regardless of tools. You're not even talking about specific tools, like what do you need? And then let's align the tools to fit those needs. And then sometimes with those tools it's, you know, some of these tools have options where you can shut off bigger features and so you can only use like certain aspects of the tool. And sometimes from a, you know, size perspective, it's easier to start with a simple tool and then add to it versus, you know, having this big tool that you feel is built for Fortune 500 that you're working with currently. So it's, it's finding the right balance and being willing to do some. Sometimes manual is the right step, sometimes it isn't automation, sometimes it isn't finding a tool that does everything, it's finding the tool that does everything 80% and being willing to find the right steps manually in there.

Yeah, I agree and I agree with looking at trying to step away from the actual tool and trying to see what your needs are or what does that process, I guess that process map, what does that look like? Because the tools you might have might not you think you want, you might not be the ones that you actually need. Speaking as a person who loves tools.

Yes.

Or shiny object syndrome. So when is it the right time to start thinking about these holistic systems? Like from startup to mid growth overwhelmed chaos.

All the time. All the time. But specifically when. Nice trigger Points would be when you're revamping your offer, when you're adding a new team member, when you're scaling in some way. Those are big points that you want to take a PA and think about what's happening across the board and how everything interconnects so you can take that next step fully seeing what's happening today.

What is one hack you have or a trend you've seen that you think is totally overhyped when it comes to businesses? I'll go on LinkedIn and I'll see these people be like, I know how.

To make you 100 million in sales.

In the first year. You know what I'm saying? But in your field, what kind of overhyped trends are you seeing?

Well, the big trend I've seen lately is jumping ship on tools. The minute anything happens, you know, that works.

Totally. Not us.

I mean every, every tech has downtime. It, you know, sometimes happens, unfortunately at bad times. But that doesn't mean you should jump ship. It should mean that you're looking at like, how is the company responding? Are they doing, are they proactively communicating with their clients? Are they making sure, like, did they have backups? Did you lose during this downtime? So looking at those, instead of immediately saying, well, this company didn't have downtime at that exact same time, so I'm going to jump ship over here.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that goes for a lot of different things. It's really about that communication, the data, the backups. Because it could be your project management system went down, it could be email, whatever it was, you have to look at it, I guess holistically and see is it time to switch? Is this just an ongoing thing or is it a one time occurrence? Also, was it user error?

Right.

So, okay, what's a mistake you see even seasoned entrepreneurs make when it comes to their systems?

Often with seasoned entrepreneurs, it's the over complication of systems. Like we don't need to have complicated systems. If we can get the job done in three steps, why are we taking six? You know, if this automation does this already, we don't need to have a different automation doing something very similar over here. So many times when I work with business owners who've been around a lot, a long time, we're actually removing things from their process and from their systems to just streamline it. Because at that point they don't know what's going on. They know there's tech happening somewhere and I'm not even sure what's going on.

Yeah, Just to interject, I think, from my. In my world, that's like WordPress plugins. Right. I've seen some clients that have the plugin that's very similar or does what another plugin does, but they have all of these separate plugins that are overloading their system. And I think that can also be a reflection of business. And do you have 20 different subscriptions that kind of do the same stuff? And do you even need them?

Exactly. And like you said, it overloads the system. Even if that system is you.

Us. That happens to us way too often. So how do you market? Like, it's hot.

I like to outsource that side of my business.

But how about branding then? Like, how do you. How. How did you build this? How did you get out there first? And we can go from there.

Oh, okay. I was like, I don't do that. Yeah, Hire companies like Rebel Marketing. Uh, gosh, isn't that hard to put yourself out there? I think it was almost easier when I started because I didn't know any better, and I didn't have any. Any moments that I felt like, you know, I'm questioning myself. And I think at this point, you know, you look back and you're like, ooh, that was a little cringe if I rewatch something from when you started. But I think that there's some great lessons learned when you look back and say, well, I just was doing it, you know, I didn't know any better. I was just getting it out there.

And sometimes I think it's important to, you know, tell yourself that again, even as a seasoned business owner of Just. Just do it. Who cares how it looks like? Just get it out there.

So I guess how do you Systems like it's hot.

Systems like it's hot. I. I like to do a reflection both with myself and my. Excuse me and my team on what's working, what feels hard, where is she coming back and asking me questions. And that's my trigger point to say, oh, we need to do something here. I need to make this either. I need to document something. We need to put a tool in place.

Something needs to improve. So it's a nice little quarterly check in with my business on how I can improve things.

So what's one action step our listeners can take this week to start seeing their businesses more holistically?

Oh, I got two options for you. I would say. One, you can list out all the tools that you're using right now or paying for and identify what you're using them for. It might be an eye opener on areas you can cancel a tool or where you might see overlap. The other place that you could go, depending on where you are in your business, is to map out what's happening in just one area of your business. And it might start getting you thinking about how you can improve that, even onboarding a client and taking it step by step to make sure that their experience is as white glove as you would expect it to be.

All right, well, where can people learn more about you, Learn more about your business and what you're working on and. Or if they want to join your community, plug all your stuff.

Yeah. So my website is lunamay.com. that's L U N I M A E dot com. I'm Lunimae strategy on all of the places. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all the things, threads. I'm most active on Instagram, so DM me there or head to the website to learn more.

How'd you get that name?

I came up with the name combining two words, illuminate and then Mayan, which is an old English word meaning intent or purpose, and I smashed them together to make my own word that I could trademark.

Yeah, that's marketing.

Like a T. There we go. Okay, okay.

Until next time, stay strategic, stay spicy, and whatever you do, don't settle for boring.