Positioning & Messaging for Founders
Simplify your offer before your next redesign.
I help founders grow their business by finding the one thing they should be known for, and the five lines customers need to hear.
Here’s the thing: if it’s hard to explain, it’s hard to buy.
Do you stand out or blend in? Five scores and the gaps that stop customers getting it. Takes about 30 seconds. No sales pitch.
The better the business, the harder it is to explain.
Founders usually get in touch at a turning point. Growth has slowed and nobody can quite say why. A redesign is on the table. The next generation is taking over. 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. It has a name: the founder’s curse of knowledge.
Chances are everyone on your team describes the business a different way, depending on who’s asking. And your homepage and sales pitch open with you and what you sell.
But customers are thinking about what they want to fix or achieve. They only start listening once they can see you understand it.
Many founders I talk to, typically 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.”
You can explain it. Just not in one sentence.
You know your business inside out, and given ten minutes you can explain it brilliantly. But your website and your marketing materials don’t get ten minutes. They get a few seconds, and that’s when you lose customers. 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.
Five lines. Here are mine.
- The problem
- In conversation, you can explain your business in detail. Just not in one sentence everyone gets.
- Why it happens
- It’s the founder’s curse of knowledge. The more you know, the harder it is to see the one thing that matters most to your customers.
- What I do
- Before you spend on another redesign, we simplify your offer to the one thing you should be known for, and agree five lines that say it.
- What changes
- You go from being the only one who can explain your offer, to a founder whose brand explains itself.
- The result
- Customers get it first time, and your whole team know exactly what to say.
Everything I write, from this website to a LinkedIn post, starts from these five. Yours would too.
The founder’s curse of knowledge.
You’re too close to your business to see it the way a customer does. Every founder is. I see it from the outside, and help you find what your customers need to hear.
I’ve spent 30 years on both sides of the table: twenty years leading agency projects, then ten running brand design client-side at Tesco and ColArt. So when the design work starts, I know how to brief it and get the best from whoever does it. My approach starts from how people actually decide to buy, which is rarely how they say they do. It’s grounded in behavioural science. Customers don’t stop to work out what you mean, they choose what feels simplest. So that’s what the five lines are built to be.
I’ve also seen what happens when the message comes first. For Snazaroo’s children’s face paints, just simplifying the messaging and imagery online lifted conversion by 30% to 200% across the range, and sales value by up to 118%.
That’s the judgement I bring to your business before a single design decision gets made. The work is rigorous. The output is simple.
“The other agencies were all very good, but they came at the project focused on design. Their starting point was how it’s going to look. You started from a completely different position: what is the message? Others paid polite lip service to messaging. You said, before we build vertically, let’s dig down and get our foundations right.”
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.
Finding the one thing you should be known for and agreeing the five lines usually takes six to eight weeks, for a fixed fee agreed before we start.
Depending on what’s needed, that might lead to 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.
Stand out or blend in. Five scores. The one thing holding you back.
The Brand Simplicity Audit reads your homepage copy the way a first-time customer would. No pitch. Just diagnosis.
Rather just talk? Email lawrence@lawrencehutchison.com.