He says you work with computers. He isn’t being careless — he has simply never been given the words. Neither has anybody else.
Someone asks your son what his father does for a living.
He says you work with computers. Or that you’re in insurance. Or he does the small shrug children do when they are embarrassed not to know, and says something vague about an office.
He isn’t being careless. He has simply never been given the words. You have spent twenty years becoming one of perhaps forty people in this country who properly understand a particular thing, and almost all of that understanding lives in your head, in meeting rooms, and in conversations that end when the call ends.
It is a small moment and it passes. But it is worth sitting with, because the same thing is happening everywhere else.
A buyer hears your name from someone who rates you. They look you up.
They find a website with a list of services, a page about your values, and a news section with four items on it. They read for about forty seconds. Nothing there tells them what you actually think, how you work, or why the last client with their exact problem was glad they called you.
So they give the same shrug your son gave, and they move to the next name on the list.
You never hear about it. That is the part most people underestimate. There is no email, no feedback, no lost-deal report. The work you didn’t win simply never arrives, and the quiet quarter gets put down to the market.
Here is what strikes me most when I sit with firms like yours.
Get the founder talking and within ten minutes they say something genuinely valuable. A rule of thumb earned over fifteen years. A reason a popular approach quietly fails that nobody writes about. A way of reading a client’s situation that took three difficult projects to learn.
Ask where that is written down and you get a blank look. It isn’t. It has been said hundreds of times — on calls, in boardrooms, over coffee, to one person at a time — and each telling disappears the moment it lands.
This is not a failure of effort. It is the natural state of expertise. Knowledge lives inside the people who have it, and the people who have it are busy using it.
The obvious answer is deals, and deals are the least of it.
The first real cost is that your people cannot sell you properly. Your consultants repeat what they have overheard, approximately, in their own words, with the best parts missing. Everyone describes the firm slightly differently because nobody has ever written down what the firm believes.
The second is that your reputation stops at the edge of the people who have already worked with you. Referrals carry you a certain distance and then simply run out of reach. Every year you start again from roughly the same place, with roughly the same network, wondering why growth feels like pushing.
The third is the one nobody says out loud. When someone good leaves, everything they knew leaves with them. There is no record. The next person spends two years learning what the last person already knew, and the firm pays for the same education twice.
Three things get tried, and all three fail in the same place.
The first is hiring someone junior. A marketing coordinator, a graduate, occasionally an intern. They are capable and willing, and they cannot do this — because what makes your firm worth reading is twenty years of judgement they do not have. So they produce work that is competent and generic. Nobody reads it. Eight months later they move on, and the page goes quiet again.
The second is an agency. They write well, and they do not know your business. They interview you once, produce four pieces off that one conversation, and then the briefs dry up because nobody at your end has the time to brief them. The retainer runs for a few months and then quietly stops.
The third is the most common. The partners agree that someone will write something when there’s a gap. There is never a gap. And on the rare occasion an article does get written, it costs a senior person six hours they could have billed — which makes it, by any honest measure, the most expensive piece of content the firm has ever produced.
Look at what those three have in common. Every one of them ends with somebody who knows the work sitting in front of a blank document. That is the step that never survives a busy quarter, and every quarter is busy.
The mistake underneath all of it is treating this as a writing problem.
It isn’t. The thinking already exists, and it already exists in the right words — the words you use on a call when a client asks a hard question and you answer it properly, without jargon, because you are talking to a person rather than drafting a document.
What is missing isn’t the expertise. It’s the capture.
So we invert it. Someone sits with one of your people for an hour and has a conversation — not an interview, a conversation, the kind that happens naturally when a knowledgeable person is asked a good question. That hour is recorded. Everything after that is our problem.
Capture. Shape. Multiply. Publish. Nobody at your firm opens a blank document, because writing was never the hard part.
One hour a month. Usually the person who knows the most about whatever is live at the time.
From that hour comes an article in your voice, the posts that carry it, and material your consultants can actually send a prospect after a meeting. You read everything before it goes anywhere — it carries your name, so it is checked with you, corrected, and only then published.
Then next month, the same hour.
After a year that is twelve pieces, dated, findable, under your firm’s name. Not a campaign. A record. The difference between those two things is that a campaign ends and a record compounds.
The test is not whether a buyer can find you. Most of them can.
The test is whether anyone can explain you when you are not in the room — the client who recommends you to a colleague, the consultant who joined in March, the procurement manager summarising three proposals for a board that will never meet you.
Right now, every one of those people is doing what your son did. Reaching for the words, not finding them, and saying something approximate.
They aren’t being careless. Nobody ever gave them the words.
That is a solvable problem, and it is solvable in an hour a month.
We sit with one person for an hour a month, record it, and turn what they said into published work. Nobody at your firm has to write anything.
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