The Growing-Up Files, Issue 5
The Tuesday afternoon look-over
A draft lands in your inbox with a note on it.
“Happy with this?”
You read it. And yes, it's fine - the facts are right, the structure's sensible. Someone has clearly spent time thinking about the best-fit audience, and where it sits in the customer journey.
And it isn't right - which you can see within about four seconds.
So you fix the line that's bothering you, and maybe the one under it, and you send it back with a bunch of notes “for next time”, and a thanks.
Then on Thursday another one arrives, and you do the same thing again.
Now, before you begin to feel like I’m just berating you for getting yourself into this inefficient and unhelpful situation, no one in this story has done anything wrong. The person who wrote the content did a competent job, you gave feedback, the work got better.
But, if this happens every week, and everything that goes out under the name of your brand has to come through you, I am going to remind you that you're the most expensive person in the building.
This is not the way you meet your growth goals (or get to your daughter’s afternoon hockey game).
So, what went wrong? And how do we fix it?
The two usual explanations
The first explanation is that you hired the wrong person, or someone not senior enough. So the fix is a better hire, or a more experienced one, or a freelancer who's done this before.
The second explanation is that you're the problem. You’re too precious about it - it’s only content; get over yourself and just ship it. You need to let go.
I’ve worked with dozens of teams over the years, and, in my experience, it’s probably neither of those.
Are there founders who micromanage and don’t trust the judgment of their team? Sure.
Do people sometimes hire completely the wrong person and expect them to be perfect immediately? Definitely!
But, when you’re a founder-led scale-up, it’s not quite that simple. A more senior hire will write you something competent that still isn't right, because seniority doesn't tell anyone what your business sounds like. And letting go isn't an option for you, because there's nothing to let go of.
All the information about what is and isn’t “right” lives in your head.
And there lies the problem.
Harvey Specter, Tony Stark and Alfred
When James at Evolution Engineers filled in my brand questionnaire, I asked him how the brand should sound. His answer, which I have kept because I love it: "a little Harvey Specter (Suits), Tony Stark (Iron Man), and Alfred (Batman)."
And then elsewhere on the same form: "Short. Sentences. We. Love. Think David Cameron."
Both of those are completely accurate. I could pick his writing out of a line-up after reading them. They are also entirely unusable by anybody who isn't James.
The brand voice existed in enormous detail, but it lived in one person's head, so nobody else could act on it. Leaving James spending on average 10 hours a week just providing feedback on content. Hours of redlining emails and social posts and landing pages and LinkedIn newsletters (how meta).
So with no codified brand voice, what did his team reach for instead? James noticed they were confusing conveying expertise with using jargon.
Which makes perfect sense to me. If you put somebody in front of a blank page with no brief and tell them to sound authoritative, they'll reach for whatever sounds authoritative in general, because they've got nothing specific to reach for. Jargon is the nearest available signal of expertise. Of course that's what turns up.
James was concerned that the brand didn’t “give people the framework to summarise Evolution Engineers in a sentence. We don't have that. And we don't have the three points that we'd want people to take away. And because we don't have those, we don't have consistency of messaging."
There's a brand, he said. There just aren't "those brand components across Evolution Engineers: the icons, rituals, language, and superpowers."
This is the adolescent brand problem showing up. The business has grown enough to need other people writing for it, and the thing they'd need in order to do that has never been written down, because for years it didn't have to be. It was you, and you were always in the room.
But now, you’ve got a lot of other things to do.
The brand isn’t just you now
During my discovery process for Evolution Engineers, I didn’t just ask James what he thought the brand was (yes, even though I’ve just said it was all in his head). I also asked the rest of his executive team.
Why? Because the brand was no longer just him. Mostly James had it down. But there were elements of how the brand appeared in the world that his team articulated better than he did.
And, when I interviewed his clients, there were elements they brought up that hadn’t occurred to James - but that were vital for the brand to continue to grow.
All of that needed distilling, and then writing down in one document that the whole team could refer to.
And, if you really want to save time as a founder (and stop having to edit a 2000 word blog post on your phone while you should be watching a swimming lesson), this document needs to be the usable kind.
A list of adjectives won't survive contact with a real draft.
Warm, professional, approachable.
Nobody has ever written a better sentence because of those three words. What people actually need is an understanding of the messaging for the brand, and for each piece of content: who this is for, what we're for, the few things we want somebody to come away with, and the language our own customers use when they describe us.
And they need examples that fit the brand. Show as well as tell.
That's what turns "that doesn't sound like us" into something anybody on your team can check for themselves before it ever reaches your inbox.
With Evolution Engineers, the piece that bought James’ time back was getting the brand voice documented, so that what the business sounds like stopped being something only James could confirm. And then, he could get on with running the business, secure in the knowledge that the brand was out in the world representing him effectively.
So what to do now?
Here’s something you can do now, if you’d love to be able to get your head out of Google Docs and back into bringing in those big contracts.
Grab the last draft that you got tagged in in ClickUp (other PM software is available), and read it through.
When you get to a bit that you can tell is wrong, stop before you fix it and write down exactly what's wrong in one sentence. Not the fix itself - the reason it’s wrong.
And as you continue to go through the doc, keep documenting those reasons. You’ll find that you’ll get better at explaining yourself, and you might even end up with a document you can give to your team to help cut down on those feedback sessions.
Or, if you’ve read through this article and realise the cost of your time (and what else you could be doing instead), book a call with me here. My Brand Voice packages get it out of your head and into something your team can use, all while staying steeped in the messaging strategy and identity of your brand.
(You can find out more about the Brand Voice package at freerangemarketing.co.uk)
The Growing-Up Files goes out once a month, on how a brand's messaging has to grow up as the business behind it does.
