On my messaging work
This is a long-form thinking about how over 10 years of experience and 100+ user interviews have influenced my work approach
Quick links:
About my strategy work
About my implementation
Most professional service companies start with a strong impulse.
They are founded by people who want to do things better, more thoughtfully, or simply differently. Some care deeply about quality. Some want to fix what frustrates them about their industry. Some have a mild resistance to authority and want to do it their way.
Initially, things move quickly. A simple website goes up, a Linkedin page is created. Early clients come through networks, referrals, or early content.
Then the company gets bigger.
More people sell, and more people deliver. The client mix changes. Language stretches to fit more cases. Services become broader, safer, less precise.
Yet, the hunger grows.
That is when things start to feel off. The founder, tired of being in the weeds all the time, recognizes they need a stronger foundation:
Something that allows them to speak to the right clients in the same language, across marketing, sales, and delivery.
They want words they can actually use to describe what they do and why it matters.
They want to understand what their clients are thinking when they assess them, when they choose them, and when they quietly decide to leave.
That is when I come in.
The project structure
In situations like these, the answers rarely sit inside the team alone.
Internal views are biased. Teams spend more time with clients they have good chemistry with, and uncomfortable truths tend to stay unspoken. Convictions are shaped by legacy wins and stories repeated often enough to feel true.
That is why my job is to listen to external voices: those who chose them, people who stayed, people who left, and people who never did.
With that in mind, the project structure looks like shown on the right. And let’s take a closer look at each step.
onboarding before the market
Before I speak to clients or prospects, I spend time with the internal team.
We do a long onboarding session, usually one to two hours. I want to understand what they believe to be true, what they are optimising for, and what they are quietly unsure about.
This is not about alignment. It is about surfacing assumptions.
market and competitor context
From there, I look at the market.
Depending on scope, I analyse four to eight competitors. I study their messaging, their page structures, and the language they use to explain their value.
There is a nuance in service marketing that often gets overlooked. The more established a brand is, the more it can get away with. Strong pipelines change what a website needs to do. Smaller or less visible firms do not have that luxury.
That is why I look at companies of similar size, and slightly larger ones. Not to copy them, but to understand what buyers are already used to seeing and what expectations are being set.
sales calls and interviews
If sales call recordings exist, I ask for them. Many teams now use note-taking tools, but those notes tend to disappear into folders no one revisits.
Then we move into interviews.
For agencies and consultancies, six interviews is usually enough. More rarely adds new insight. Fewer risks missing patterns.
I aim for a mix of current clients, former clients, and prospects who chose someone else.
These conversations last between 45 minutes and an hour. I work from a structure, but I follow what people are trying to say, not just what they answer. When someone hesitates or circles a point, that is usually where the useful information sits.
At this stage, people are generally honest.
The harder part comes later.
what tends to surface
After close to 150 interviews with service buyers, certain patterns repeat.
Onboarding is rarely the issue. Most clients feel fine at the beginning.
What causes friction is delivery over time. Momentum slows. Ownership blurs. Work starts to feel heavier than expected.
Clients are not just looking for someone to think with them. They want partners who help them move faster, not slower. Pragmatism matters. Progress matters.
Another thing shows up consistently. People matter more than services.
Buyers care deeply about who they will work with. In several interviews, stakeholders told me they primarily read team bios before committing. They want to know who will be involved, not just what the service is called.
This has very real implications for how agencies present themselves.
synthesis and strategy
Once research is done properly, strategy tends to be straightforward.
Most projects come down to positioning and the value story. I have worked with companies whose own clients could not explain what their value proposition was. What those buyers wanted was not big ideas, but language they could use internally.
People need tools to advocate for you.
Based on the questions we defined during onboarding and the themes that surfaced during research, I build a strategy recommendation. I call it that intentionally.
It is not a decree. It is a reflection of what the market said back.
There have been cases where clients chose not to act on it. That happens. The research does not force decisions. It simply makes them harder to avoid.
The output usually includes positioning, value proposition, differentiators grounded in buyer language, proof points buyers explicitly asked for, and guidance on how this should show up in practice.
why this usually leads to a website
Most of my work eventually leads to a website.
Not because websites are the goal, but because they are where all of this either comes together or falls apart. When the underlying thinking is sound, the site becomes easier to shape. When it is not, no amount of copy or design can compensate.
This article is not meant to convince anyone.
It is simply an account of how I work, why I work this way, and what years of doing this have taught me.
If this resonates, we will probably work well together. If it does not, that is useful too.