
Your Invoices Might Be More Important than Your Ads
Your brand lives in invoices, contracts, and handbooks. Make every document on-brand, human, and unmistakably yours, with a clear positioning line and a next step. Trust grows in the details.
Short, practical perspectives on market stance, differentiation, and brand strategy — focused on what actually moves the needle for founder‑led service firms.
Your brand lives in invoices, contracts, and handbooks. Make every document on-brand, human, and unmistakably yours, with a clear positioning line and a next step. Trust grows in the details.
Your brand story might be a glossy promise your operations can’t cash. Peek behind the ads to the tiny moments that prove who you are and decide whether you’re different.
Customers will not study your product. This piece shows how sharp positioning, emotional cues, proactive feedback, and relentless messaging create attention fast and convey your value proposition before interest fades.
It’s a little disturbing to realize how much of what we do is simply imitation. If you start analyzing your business objectively, you’ll probably come to the (somewhat depressing) realizing that a lot of it is simply rehashed ideas and behaviors adopted from your competitors, the way you did things …
Skip vanity metrics and chase real relationships. Engage, listen, and give value. Grow steadily without viral fantasies. Show up where your audience lives. Create original work people actually care about.
At larger companies, the phrase “maximize shareholder value” has become a trite summary of what they believe is their core purpose. At smaller companies, it’s usually translated into plain English: “Make the owners a bunch of money.” If you dig deeper, the actual purpose is almost always different. …
Stop hemming and hawing. A clear purpose turns messy choices into reflex, rallies your team, justifies tough sacrifices, and keeps you advancing like a disciplined chess player while competitors scramble.
A slogan won't cut it. When purpose saturates every role, performance explodes. The data's staggering and the wake up call stings. Get uncomfortable, get aligned, and watch revenue multiply.
Rediscover roots. Trade trend chasing for clarity by answering tough questions about purpose, values, positioning, audience, style, and vision that realign teams, sharpen decisions, and build momentum.
Picture this: You’re standing in the middle of a beautiful meadow on a sunny day. In the middle of this meadow is a large, heavy rock. Your assignment is to move that rock. So, you tie a rope around it, and you start pulling to the north. It’s heavy, but you’re determined to make it happen, so you p…
Purpose isn't a slogan. Assemble a team, share stories, ask whys, and craft a bold phrase. Keep it short, stop committee creep, and make it worthy of a flag.
One of the hardest questions we ask in our discovery workshops is also one of the simplest and most fundamental: “Why does your company exist?” You’d think most CEOs would have a ready (and passionate) response to that question, but most don’t. When asked that question, they usually keep their compo…
There’s a common thread between companies like Tesla, Airbnb, Uber, SpaceX, Spotify, Square, Netflix and others that have successfully overturned decades of convention and built business empires around solutions that rendered their competitors almost instantly obsolete. It’s called “design thinking,…
Far too many experiences are designed around the assumption that people want to be engaging with them. It’s an easy mistake to make. If you’re designing, say, an ecommerce site, it would be natural to assume your customers have an internal drive to find a product they want, add it to their cart, a…
While working on a branding project a few weeks ago, I happened to wonder what colors were most frequently used in brand identities. I started poking around online, feeling sure someone had already done this research and neatly organized the results. However, I wasn’t really satisfied with what I fo…