Notes on positioning, brand drift, and what actually works.
Long‑form essays, written when I have something useful to say. Short provocations, written when I don't have time to write the essay yet.
You think you need more enquiries. You need fewer, and better. The ones you get lead with price because your reach catches everyone, and a stranger who only sees your breadth can only compare you on one thing.
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You don't have a lead problem.
A security firm I work with was paying to be found by everyone. The enquiries were garden parties. We turned the ads off. You don't have a lead problem. You have a breadth problem wearing its clothes, and more reach only makes it worse.
Two audiences. One of them leads.
A founder wanted his website fixed. The real problem was two audiences, councils and investors, who had to believe opposite things. The voice that soothed one lost the other. The average of two audiences is no audience. One of them has to lead.
Everyone needs it. That's the problem.
A product every family needs should sell itself. It doesn't, because everyone never feels addressed. Why The Open Journal is going to own one community first, and why your business should too.
You're not competing with no.
The Open Journal makes films everyone agrees are worth it. It still sells slowly. The rival was never a cheaper option or a phone. It was "not yet", and not yet is undefeated.
You already proved the point.
Plenty of good businesses were built to prove someone wrong. It's real fuel. Then you win, and the brand keeps arguing with a person who left years ago.
The words that make you invisible.
Your whole category says the same three words. Exceptional care. The claim feels safe because nobody can argue with it. Safe and invisible are the same thing.
First, they look you up.
You can automate finding new clients. You can't automate the vouch a referral used to carry. The stranger arrives cold and judges you on a website you last touched in 2023.
The AI keeps getting you wrong.
If you rewrite every draft the machine gives you, the tool isn't the problem. Your positioning was never written down anywhere it could read.
Nobody gets fired for bland.
Hand your brand to someone paid to avoid downside and they'll make it safe. Safe and forgettable are the same thing. A position is a risk only the founder can take.
Scale the reach, scale the gap.
Automating your lead generation doesn't fix a weak brand. It scales it. Every tool that manufactures reach also manufactures strangers, and strangers check.
The brief is always wrong.
Clients brief you for a deliverable. Nobody wants the deliverable. Sell what they asked for and price decides it. Own the outcome and you set the number.
The guard was asleep. The spec sheet said present.
A security firm loses tenders to a cheaper rival whose guards sleep on shift. A form can't count whether a guard is awake. Compete on the form and the worst firm wins.
You asked me to price a guess.
A founder asked me to quote a new website. I said no. Pricing the build before anyone decides what it's for isn't a quote. It's a guess with a decimal point.
The software won't vouch for you.
Referrals sent belief, not just leads. Automate the pipeline and the vouch disappears, and a brand built to confirm now has to convince strangers from zero.
You're too careful to be heard.
Your best thinking only comes out in private rooms. In public you hedge to keep everyone onside. That caution is exactly why strangers can't tell what you stand for.
A machine, plodding along.
Say yes to every brief and you become a pair of hands. The market haggles on price and the work stops being yours. A premise is the refusal that fixes both.
Whoever's free is not a strategy.
Let availability pick your guests, or your clients, and circumstance builds a brand you never chose. Pick the ten you actually want first.
You started it for yourself. Say so.
Most founders bury the real reason they started and lead with a cleaner mission. The buried, slightly self-interested reason is almost always the better brand.
Not bigger. Different.
Most founders aim at the next round number and can't say what it actually changes. A GP practice showed me the difference between a target and a threshold.
Five people. Five answers. One problem.
Ask five people inside your business what it does. If you get five different answers, the positioning hasn't failed. It was never built.
The company isn't the brand. You are.
Most founders invest in the brand identity and keep themselves out of it. The container looks right. It just doesn't say anything a stranger can believe in.
The work was good. That wasn't the problem.
Aperture X Media had a real brand identity. What it didn't have was a premise. Every direct prospect still asked the same first question: how much? Here's what that gap taught me.
I know what it costs. I don't know if it's right.
I went to private school. My wife didn't. She wants private for our daughter. I'm the one asking questions. The person with lived experience of private education is the sceptic.
Everyone knows it. Nobody says it.
In a commoditised market, the brand that wins isn't the best-kept secret. It's the one willing to say what everyone knows but no one will put in writing.
Word of mouth scaled you to here. It won't scale you to there.
The inflection point most growing businesses hit and don't name. Referrals built it. Strangers won't follow the same path.
Your website isn't underperforming. Your positioning is.
The brief almost every founder arrives with is "fix the website." The website is almost never the actual problem.
The wrong half of the problem.
For years, my production business solved one half. Clients loved the content and sat on it. Nothing happened. What I missed, in plain terms.
The accidental brand problem.
Cardboard Creative drifted for eighteen months. I had the same disease I now treat. Here's what it looked like from inside it.
What 8,488 new patients actually taught me about brand.
The North London GP practice. The brief was photography. The real problem was digital visibility. 8,488 more registered patients since April 2024. The insight is the thing that travels.
The essays diagnose. The workshop is where we actually fix it.
Four hours, the founder, a written report. £1,500, fixed. If we're not the right fit afterwards, you keep the clarity anyway.
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