You’ve rewritten the website. Probably twice. You’ve had another crack at the About page, trimmed the services list, and someone — an agency, a mate, your other half — has told you the messaging needs work.
And people still ask what it is you actually do.
Right. So it isn’t the words.
The story we all tell ourselves
It goes like this. What we do is quite nuanced. Our clients are sophisticated. You can’t really boil it down to one line without losing something.
I’ve said a version of that myself. Most people I sit down with have said it too. It always comes from a decent place — the work really is more involved than a tagline, and flattening it feels like doing yourself a disservice.
Here’s the problem. Your buyer isn’t deciding whether you’re clever. They’re deciding, in about four seconds, whether you’re anything to do with them.
If they can’t tell, they don’t go digging. They get on with their day.
Not because they weighed you up and found you lacking. Because working out what you are was more effort than they were prepared to spend on someone they’d never met.
Complicated isn’t an excuse
Worth pulling two things apart here, because businesses hide behind the confusion between them constantly.
Being complicated is not a defence. Nobody is owed patience because the work is layered. If your business is genuinely complex and you haven’t done the work of making it legible at the front, that’s not the market failing to appreciate you. That’s a job you haven’t done.
| Complicated | Vague | |
|---|---|---|
| What’s true | The work is layered | The decision isn’t made |
| What’s missing | The translation | The position |
| Whose job | Yours, and you’ve skipped it | Yours, and you’ve avoided it |
| Do better words fix it? | Eventually, with effort | No. There’s nothing to word |
| If you do nothing | Buyers switch off | Buyers never switch on |
The difference that matters is whether it can be fixed with language at all.
Complicated can be made clear. Plenty of businesses with genuinely layered work manage it — engineers, care operators, specialist contractors, decent professional firms. The work is no simpler. They’ve just accepted that translating it is part of the job rather than an insult to it.
Vague can’t be made clear, because there’s nothing underneath to translate. The business hasn’t decided what it is.
That’s the whole thing. Rewrite the copy as many times as you like; if the decision underneath it is still open, you’re just producing better-written fog.
What it’s actually costing you
None of this shows up in a report, which is precisely why it runs for years unnoticed.
People go quiet instead of saying no
Your sales cycle drags
The wrong people find you
And sooner or later you’re arguing about price
That last one catches good businesses out constantly. They assume they’re losing on price because the price is wrong, so they knock a bit off. The price was usually fine. Nothing else was clear enough to justify it.
I got this wrong myself, for a long time
Would be a bit rich to write all that without saying so.
For ages I described what I do as bridging the gap between marketing, operations and finance to support growth in SMEs.
Accurate. Every word true. Also, apparently, invisible.
Nearly everyone who read it decided I was an agency. They’d arrive expecting campaigns, content, a nice social calendar. I’d spend half the meeting explaining that isn’t the job — that it’s closer to sitting inside the business and working out why marketing, operations and the numbers aren’t speaking to each other, then fixing it.
Some of those came good. Plenty didn’t, and fair enough. Those people wanted an agency and they were right to want one. They’d just knocked on the wrong door, and I’m the one who put the sign up.
The line wasn’t wrong. It described my solution. What it never did was describe their problem in words they’d recognise as theirs.
Accurate means it’s true. Legible means someone reads it and thinks that’s me, that’s exactly what’s been going on here.
Took me longer to spot that in my own business than it takes me to spot it in anyone else’s. Cobbler’s shoes.
Three questions. Ask them honestly.
Not a framework. Nobody needs another framework.
Who is this for — and who is it not for?
Are you naming their problem, or describing your solution?
Could a customer explain what you do to someone else and get it right?
That’s the useful part.
Clear isn’t dumbed down
This is where the pushback always lands, so let’s deal with it.
Getting clear doesn’t mean flattening a serious business into something glib. It means being precise about the handful of things that matter at the exact moment somebody’s deciding whether you’re worth a phone call.
The complexity stays in the work. It should — it’s what they’re paying for. But the signal at the front has to be clean, or nobody gets close enough to find out how good the work is.
Once it is clean, selling changes shape entirely. You stop building the case from scratch every single time. People turn up already knowing roughly what you are and why they’re speaking to you. The job stops being persuasion and becomes confirmation.
and it shows up in the accounts.
The long version of this argument — the behavioural economics underneath it, the research, and what it means for what your business is eventually worth — is over on The Brand Ledger. This is the working end of it.
Recognised your own business in that?
That’s usually the point where a conversation is worth having. We work as a fractional marketing partner to owner-managed businesses — starting with the position, then tying everything downstream of it to a commercial outcome you can actually see in the numbers.
Questions People Ask
