Positioning & Messaging for Founders
Simplify your offer before your next redesign.
I help founders work out what their brand needs to say, so the right customers get it immediately, and buy.
Here’s the thing: if people don’t get it, they don’t buy it.
Reads your site the way a customer’s brain does. Takes 30 seconds. No sales pitch.
The better the business, the harder it is to explain.
Founders usually get in touch at a turning point. A redesign is on the table. The next generation is taking over. Growth has slowed and nobody can quite say why. The trigger is different every time. Underneath, it’s nearly always the same thing: a business described from the inside, by people who know it too well to see what a customer sees.
Maybe you know exactly why you’re different, but saying it out loud feels like handing competitors the blueprint. Maybe everyone on your team describes the business a different way depending on who’s asking. Either way, it shows up in the same places. The homepage and the sales pitch open with what you sell instead of the problem your customer has.
Most of the founders who call me, usually running a business between £5m and £50m, have already spent money on a new website, packaging, or brand guidelines. The problem is still there, because it was never a design problem.
Most rebrands start with how things look, because that’s what founders ask for. Very few start with what the business needs to say.
“My problem was I came at everything from the perspective of the product. It's taken me 30 years to work out that doesn't always work.”
Nobody’s ever explained it in a way that makes people act.
You know your business inside out. But every time you try to explain it, you watch people’s eyes glaze over, or you get the same clarifying question for the hundredth time. That’s a messaging problem, and it’s fixable.
Easier to understand
A prospect reads your site once and already knows what you do and why it matters to them, no call needed to explain it. The confusion that used to slow down every first conversation is gone.
Easier to buy
The hesitation goes. A prospect stops comparing you to five other options and knows what to do next to get started.
Easier to brief
Once the offer is simplified, every decision after that gets easier. Your team and your agency already know what to say, because you told them once.
That’s the shift. From the only one who can explain it, to a founder whose brand explains itself.
Why you can’t see it from the inside.
You’re too close to your business to see it the way a customer does. Everyone is. I’ve spent 30 years on both sides of the table, inside agencies and large organisations, now working directly with founders. I know where your brand will earn its cost back fastest, and how to simplify the story so customers understand what you offer. Twenty of those years were spent leading agency projects, so when the design work starts, I know how to brief it and get the best out of whoever does it. That’s the judgement I bring to your business before a single design decision gets made.
My approach is grounded in how the brain actually makes buying decisions, and why most brand work misses that entirely. The method walks your offer through the customer’s eyes, not yours. Plain English. The work is rigorous. The output is simple.
I work across consumer, sport, health, and professional services, directly alongside your marketing and sales teams, to simplify the messaging so people ‘get it’.
“I'm saying this before we've even seen the first visual, but we're already very confident that the messaging going onto those visuals is precise. That's made all the difference.”
How the work goes.
See it from outside
I step back from the business and look at it through customer eyes, not founder eyes. A long conversation with you about the business. Then what your customers actually say, in reviews, forums and on competitor sites.
Say it simply
I work out the one true thing the business should be known for. Then we agree the five lines: plain English that the founder, the team, and the customer can all repeat.
The rest follows
You walk away with five lines and a clear plan for where they go: the website, the deck, the sales conversation, the brief to your designer or agency. One message, repeated everywhere.
Depending on what’s needed, that might mean a messaging roll-out plan or ongoing support into execution. But it always starts with getting the five lines right.
Five lines sounds small. Getting there is the hard part, because it means deciding what’s worth saying in the first place, and what to leave out.
They’re what actually gets used, in sales calls, on your website, in your pitch deck and in your email sequences.
Every week without them is a week your site, your deck, and your sales calls are working harder than they need to.
“In four words, you summed up what we do, why we do it, and why we're good at it. It was all too simple and too obvious, and we'd completely missed it. All of us looked at each other and went, yeah.”
When the right people get it, they buy it.
Prospects turn up already knowing why it should be you, so sales conversations start further along and you spend less time explaining. The design work that follows has something solid to build on.
Not sure what’s getting in the way? Start here.
Find out what your customers see, before your next redesign.
Four scores. Five findings. One summary. The Brand Simplicity Audit reads your website the way a customer’s brain does. No pitch. Just diagnosis.
Already know it’s a messaging problem?
Skip the audit and book a call, or send a message below and I’ll come back to you.