A founder told me last week that his business feels like a machine, plodding along. He makes video. He is good at it. The calendar fills, the invoices clear, the referrals keep coming. On paper it works. But when he said the word plodding, he was not describing a slow month. He was describing the shape of the whole thing. A business he built on purpose that had somehow stopped feeling like his. The reason was not the workload, or the market, or the clients. It was that he had said yes to everything for so long that the business no longer stood for anything, including to him.
You said yes to everything
He did not set out to be a generalist. Nobody does. It happens one reasonable decision at a time. A wedding, because the money was good. A corporate explainer, because a friend asked. A product shoot, a talking head, an event recap, a quick social edit. Each yes made sense on the day. None of them was wrong. But stack five years of them and you are not a filmmaker with a point of view. You are a pair of hands that can be pointed at anything, which is a description most founders would flinch at, because it is accurate.
The phrase he used for himself was jack of all trades. He said it like a strength. It is how a lot of good operators describe themselves, with a small note of pride, because being able to do everything feels like resilience. Never turn work away. Never depend on one type of client. Spread the risk across whatever comes in. It sounds like the safe position. It is actually the most exposed one there is.
The market only asks one question
Here is what being able to do everything does to the person on the other side of the table. It leaves them nothing to hold on to except price. When a founder cannot tell you what they are specifically for, the only variable left to compare is cost. So every conversation starts in the same place. How much. Not what makes you different, not what outcome you get, not why you and not the other three quotes sitting in their inbox. Just how much, because you have handed them no other axis to judge you on.
He felt this and had never named it. His enquiries were price-sensitive. People wanted a videographer, a set of hands to execute a brief they had already written, and they shopped that brief around on rate. What he actually wanted was to be brought in earlier, as the person who works out what the video should even be. But you do not get invited into that room by being available for anything. You get invited by being known for something. The generalist never gets the strategic seat, because the strategic seat is reserved, by definition, for a specialist.
Tell the market you can do anything and the only question it has left is how much. You built the haggle yourself. — on the cost of being a generalist
The work stops being yours
There is a second cost, and it is the one that made him reach for the word plodding. When you take every brief, you slowly lose contact with the reason you started. He got into film because he wanted to make things that meant something to the people in them. Somewhere in the yeses, that got buried under a queue of jobs that were fine, and paid, and forgettable. The business became a machine for converting his hours into money. Efficient enough. But a machine is exactly what it felt like, because he had removed himself from it one compromise at a time.
This is the part founders do not connect to positioning, so I will say it plainly. Vague positioning does not only cost you in the market. It costs you your own motivation. A business with no premise cannot be a vehicle for anything you care about, because it has been shaped, deliberately, to care about nothing in particular. You made it able to do everything, and in doing so you made it about nothing, and then you wondered why turning up to it feels like maintenance instead of building.
A premise is a refusal
The fix is not a new logo or a tighter website. It is a decision. A premise. A short, specific claim about what you are for and, just as importantly, what you are not. The reason most founders resist it is that a premise is fundamentally a refusal. To stand for something is to hand back the work that does not fit it. That feels, in the moment, like turning down money, which is why almost nobody does it.
But watch what happens when someone does. A GP practice came to me years ago asking for photography of their new building. I refused the brief as written and treated it as a visibility problem instead. That refusal, one narrow decision about what the work actually was, is the only reason a £20k-a-year retainer turned into 9,559 new patients. Owning a premise is not smaller than taking everything. It is how the work finally gets to matter, and gets priced, on the outcome rather than the rate.
For him, the premise was already there. He said it without noticing, halfway through the call. He does not want to make videos. He wants to make videos that people feel on a level they cannot quite explain. That is a position. It excludes most of what is currently in his calendar. That is not a problem with the position. That is the position doing its job.
One thing to do this week
Take the last ten jobs you said yes to and mark each one honestly. Would you put it in the window as the work you most want more of, yes or no. Do not soften it. Most founders find that four or five are noes, work they took because it was there, not because it was them. That ratio is your positioning, measured. It is also the reason the business feels like a machine rather than yours.
Then write the one sentence the noes have in common. The thing those jobs are missing that the yeses have. That sentence is the start of your premise, and it was in the room the whole time, sitting underneath the plodding. Naming it, out loud, in front of someone who will not let you hedge, is most of what happens in the Brand Clarity Workshop. Four hours, the founder, a written report. £1,500, fixed. Book it at kevaltanna.com/workshop.