Empty issue

so I have an object (not rigged or anything just a mesh) that I have animated using transform and I want to use an empty to also rotate the mesh. But because the object moves from the animation the empty doesnt follow it and rotation becomes weird because the empty is so far away. How do I make an empty follow an object while also being able to use transform on the empty?

How do you influence the object’s rotation with the empty?
If you use a Copy Rotation constraint (on the object with the empty as target), the distance between the object and the empty doesn’t matter.