One Person, Two Websites. Why I Didn't Rename This One.

Part 2 of a short series on formalizing my consulting business. Part 1: forming the LLC.

I went back and forth on this for two weeks: should this site become the consulting site? It already has the blog, the shared guides, the inbound links. Renaming it would be faster than building something new.

I decided no. Here's the reasoning, and the surprisingly long list of things "the business gets its own domain" turned out to mean.

Why two sites

• Clients hire the person, but they pay the company. The relationship lives here. The invoice, contract, and liability live at the LLC. Two domains makes that boundary visible instead of blurry.
• This site already works. It has months of content and real search traffic. Rebranding it would throw away exactly the asset a new business needs to borrow from.
• Optionality. If Clarent is ever sold, paused, or renamed, nothing about my personal presence has to change. If I stop writing for six months, the business site doesn't look abandoned.
• Different jobs. This site explains how I think. The business site needs to answer three questions in ten seconds: what do you do, for whom, how do I reach you.

So: brettchereskin.com stays personal. clarentconsulting.com is the business. They cross-link both ways and share nothing else.

The personal site is the reason someone trusts you. The business site is the thing they can pay. Keep them separate and let each do its one job.

What "its own domain" actually meant

This is the part I underestimated. The domain was eleven dollars. Everything downstream took an evening.

• Registrar and DNS on Cloudflare. Cheap, fast, and the DNS console is the one I already knew from this site.
• Google Workspace on the new domain. A real brett@clarentconsulting.com mailbox, with hello@, billing@, and dmarc@ as aliases pointing to the same inbox. One person, several front doors.
• Email authentication on day one. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC before the first client email goes out. This is what keeps you out of spam folders, and it's ten minutes if you do it at setup and a miserable afternoon if you do it after a client says "I never got your invoice."
• Admin account locked down. Two-step verification with a passkey, recovery email, recovery phone. The Workspace admin login is the keys to the business now.
• Shared drives by department. Legal (formation documents), Finances (receipts and the ledger), Marketing (headshots, brand work). Not a personal Drive folder called "Business stuff." Actual shared drives, so the files belong to the company, not to me.

None of it is hard. All of it is the difference between a business that has a domain and a business that's set up.

The business site itself

It's a coming-soon page right now, and it's going to stay that way for a bit. That's deliberate. I don't need a site to invoice; I need one to be findable, and I'd rather build it once the logo exists and I know what the first three engagements taught me about how to describe the work.

The stack will be the same as this site — Next.js on Vercel, Supabase behind it — because I already know how to operate it and because I'll build it the same way I built this one: describing what I want to Claude and reviewing what comes back.

The one thing I haven't decided

Whether the two brands should look related. This site is warm paper, serif type, ink blue. The business mark is heading somewhere cleaner and more geometric. My instinct is to let them diverge — different jobs, different clothes — but I can argue the other side.

If you run a personal brand and a business, tell me how you handled it. One site or two? Same look or different? And if you're about to set up a business domain and want the checklist above in more detail, ask — I'll write it up.