The hardest client I ever worked with was me, eighteen months after the world reopened. I had the same disease I now treat. This is what it looked like from inside it.
The business existed before I'd decided what it was.
I started Cardboard Creative young. Engineering background, sound engineering on the side. The first paid job was a wedding video. The second was a corporate event. The kit overlapped enough to make both feel honest. People kept asking. Word got around.
That's not unusual. Most service businesses start exactly that way. You're competent, someone asks, you say yes, the next person sees the work and asks too. The business grows because you keep saying yes. Years pass. The yes‑list gets longer. The business has no clear name for what it is, because what it is has been decided by what people happened to ask for.
That works, until it doesn't.
Then COVID happened.
In the months before the pandemic, we were doing a mix of events, corporate film, some weddings, a few interview‑style brand films. I had a rough sense of what I wanted us to be. We were getting closer to it. Then March 2020 happened and nobody was running an event again for two years.
The business had to become something else, fast. Reactive. Whatever came in, we took. Photography one month. Podcast production the next. The occasional brand consulting job, mostly because someone trusted me to figure it out. We did livestreams for charities. We did remote panels. We did some genuinely odd projects I'd struggle to categorise now.
It kept the lights on. The team got paid. The work was good. I felt, at the time, like we were doing what survival required. We were. The problem was what survival had cost.
The business had to become something else, fast. The problem is what that survival cost in terms of what the business actually was. — On reactive years
What had drifted.
By the time the world reopened, the business was unrecognisable. Not in a glow‑up way. In a "what does this company actually do" way. We had a portfolio that touched fourteen different disciplines and a website that read as though three different agencies had each had a turn writing it. Repeat clients knew us, sort of. New enquiries arrived asking for things we sometimes did and sometimes didn't, and I'd spend the first half of every meeting figuring out which.
The team felt it. Hires we'd made for one thing were doing four. Quotes were ad‑hoc. The pricing had no logic anyone could explain. New clients converted, but slowly, and at rates that made me realise we were being chosen as a backup, not a first choice. The work was still good. The brand around the work had collapsed into a shape nobody could name.
I told myself, for a while, that this was just what services businesses look like. That we'd settle into a clearer story once the next phase emerged. That a rebrand felt premature. The truth was simpler. I didn't want to do the work of deciding what we were, because deciding required cutting things off, and cutting things off felt like risk.
What it looked like from inside.
A typical week.
- Monday. A meeting with someone found through a referral, asking about a wedding film. I'd say yes, because the referral was a relationship I valued, even though we hadn't done weddings in a year.
- Tuesday. A discovery call with a startup founder wanting brand consulting. I'd say yes, because the work was interesting and I knew I could do it.
- Wednesday. A podcast production call. Mine to win, because the production team was excellent. I'd say yes.
- Friday. A "can you help us with content strategy" email. I'd say yes, because the relationship was warm and I didn't want to send them elsewhere.
Each yes felt local. Each yes was reasonable in isolation. Stack the yeses across six months and you have a business with no front door. You have, essentially, four businesses sharing a calendar and an email address.
The thing nobody warns you about.
This is the bit nobody warns you about, when you start a service business on referrals. The drift is invisible until it's catastrophic. There's no quarter where it suddenly tips. It's a slow degradation that's masked by the fact that revenue is still coming in.
You notice you're tired in a different way. You notice the work feels less satisfying, despite being basically the same work. You notice your team asking questions you don't have crisp answers to. You notice new clients aren't quite arriving the way they used to. None of those signals is loud enough on its own. Together, they're the brand telling you something has drifted.
The drift is invisible until it's catastrophic. There's no quarter where it suddenly tips. — On accidental brands
What I had to do.
I had to do, on my own business, what I now do for clients.
- Sit with the question I'd been avoiding. What is this business, specifically, and who is it for. Not what could it be. What is it, today, when I'm honest about who pays us and what they value.
- Cut. Not pause. Cut. Stop selling the things I wasn't the best person to deliver. Stop saying yes to the warm referral that wasn't our thing anymore.
- Productise the repeatable things. Stop bespoking the things that should have been a tier.
- Put my name on the front door of the consulting work and own the accountability for it. The thing I now run as Kev Tanna.
Each of those decisions felt brutal at the time. Two of them lost relationships I valued. One of them I half‑undid for a few months before deciding I'd been right the first time. None of them produced an instant improvement. Together, over about a year, they rebuilt the business into something with a clear front door.
Why I'm telling you all of this.
Because almost every founder I work with is somewhere on this spectrum and doesn't know it. The signs look different in their business than they did in mine, but the underlying thing is the same. The business outgrew the brand that built it. The brand drifted. The drift got named as something else, usually a marketing or sales issue, and the money got pointed at a symptom.
I'm not selling a theory. I'm selling something I had to do for myself, badly the first time and properly the second time. That's the offer.
If you're sitting with the same low‑grade discomfort I had in early 2023, you probably don't need a rebrand. You need a decision.