Meghan's next act, and what carries into yours
Situation
In August, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced an extended stay in Britain this autumn, and within days the reporting had her in talks for her first scripted acting role in close to a decade. Nothing has been confirmed, and her next act is still anyone's guess.
Every founder who changes direction runs into the same question, but usually with far less press. When you move from one business into the next, how much of what you built comes with you?
Madonna has answered it more publicly than almost anyone. In October 2023, she opened the Celebration Tour, a retrospective drawn from forty years of her own work, and took it through 80 shows before closing in May 2024. It grossed $227.2 million. It sold 1.1 million tickets at an average price of $208.85. The final night was a free concert on Copacabana Beach that drew 1.6 million people, the largest audience ever recorded for a stand-alone concert.
Across twelve headlining tours, she has taken apart and rebuilt her public identity so many times that reinvention is one of the things she is known for. Her image and music changed constantly. What sat underneath her identity never did.
Founders face the same thing when they change direction, which happens often. And there is a cost you can calculate before you make the decision.
Insight
Underneath all the celebrity gossip is a question about an asset. Meghan Markle has moved through several very public versions of her career, and each time, the question is how much of the reputation and audience she built in the last one carries into the next.
Brand equity is an asset, and sometimes the most valuable asset a business owns. It does not appear on your balance sheet because the accounting rules will not let you put internally generated goodwill there, and that is a large part of why founders forget the value and impact of brand equity. It behaves like an asset in every way that matters. It was expensive to build, and it can produce returns for years. When you change direction, some of that value comes with you, or you leave it behind.
We’re going a little deeper into the financial analysis here. Hang with me.
Customer/Client acquisition cost is what it costs you, all in, to bring on average one new client through the door. The marketing, the hours, the ads, the calls that go nowhere, the year of showing up in rooms before anybody hires you. Lifetime value is the total gross profit that client produces across the whole relationship, and gross profit is simply what is left of her fees after the direct cost of serving her. The distance between CAC (Client Acquisition Cost) and LTV (Lifetime Value) is where a business either builds value or quietly burns it.
One of the most valuable things brand equity can do is lower CAC. Every year you spend being known for one specific thing is a deposit. The return shows up when a client comes to you already sold before you ever speak to her. Equity you carry forward lowers what it costs to reach the next customer. Equity you have to rebuild gets paid for twice, once in the time it takes and once in starting the relationship count back at zero.
Madonna is the version where it carried. Read the Celebration Tour as a profit and loss statement. She sold her own back catalogue to more than a million people, and her cost to acquire those customers was effectively nothing, because she had already paid it, across four decades of hard work. Every reinvention was a deposit into the same account. She never opened a second one.
Equity attaches to a promise, made to a particular set of people, and it carries only as far as that promise does.
If you already run a business with more than one person, one location, or one offer making decisions in your name, this is the calculation worth running before you change anything. You are carrying an asset right now. The question is whether it comes with you.
Application
Change what people can see, and keep what they came for. If your name is the brand, your clients bought reputation, and your reputation is usually narrower than you believe. Write it down in one sentence, in the words a client would use to describe you to a friend. Then let everything around it move: the offers, the format, the price, the next audience you speak to. Change the sentence itself only when you have decided to pay for a new audience, because that is the moment the equity stops carrying.
Find out what your equity is actually attached to. It is not your name. Write down the last ten clients who came to you without a pitch, and beside each one write where the relationship started and what that person believed about you before the first call. That list is the asset. If most of the names trace back to one room, one referral partner, or one thing you are known for, then that is the thing that transfers, and any change that takes you out of that room costs you more than the change itself does.
Price the rebuild before you commit to it. If you are weighing a new direction, a new category, or a new audience, cost the acquisition honestly. Count the months you will spend with no pipeline. Count the marketing you have never had to pay for. Count the referrals that will not come, because the people who usually send them do not yet know what to say about the new thing. Then hold all of that against what the current business would have produced in the same window. That is the real price of the change, and it is almost always bigger than the number a founder puts in her plan, because she prices the launch and forgets to price the relationships.
A note especially for women founders. We are trained to be nervous about the gap. Time out for children. A business that did not work. A season that does not fit neatly into the story. The instinct is to smooth it over, tighten up the timeline, and hope nobody asks. I spent about five years building a business in the health and fitness space before I came back to finance, and nobody asked. Not once. And my first several clients came directly from relationships in the health and fitness space. So if you are weighing a change right now and the thing slowing you down is how it will look on paper, that is the wrong variable to be solving for. Ask what it costs instead, and what comes with you.
Takeaway
Brand equity is an asset, and it does not transfer automatically. You either protect it or rebuild it. And rebuilding is expensive: time you do not get back and a relationship count that restarts at zero.
Protecting the core can quietly turn into never moving at all, and there are founders sitting inside businesses that stopped fitting them years ago because leaving felt too expensive to even price.
Which brings me back to Meghan Markle. She has moved through several very public versions of her career, and I think her brand and reputation have paid a significant price along the way. Whatever her next act is, she does not get to start it with a blank slate. None of us do. The question is how much of what she built before still carries with her.
Madonna moved constantly. The point is not to stay put. The point is to know what you are actually carrying, so that the cost of the change is a number you chose going in rather than one that shows up later.
“Change everything they can see. Keep the promise, and the audience comes with you.”
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