I've come to the conclusion that one of the biggest problems in business is that we know far too much about our own businesses.
Which sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, doesn't it? Surely knowing your business inside out is rather the point? You spend years developing your expertise, learning your industry, understanding your customers and becoming exceptionally good at whatever it is you do.
And then, somewhere along the way, you become completely incapable of explaining it to somebody who doesn't already know.
It's a bit like being married to somebody for twenty years and forgetting that other people don't automatically know what you mean when you say, "You know, the thing, in the cupboard, next to the other thing."
You know exactly what you mean. Your partner probably knows exactly what you mean. But a complete stranger would be standing in your kitchen wondering whether they'd accidentally wandered into a particularly badly organised escape room.
Businesses do this ALL THE TIME.
They develop their own language, their own processes and their own understanding of how everything fits together. And because everyone involved knows how it works, they assume it's obvious to everybody else.
Then somebody who has never encountered the business before arrives on the website, looks around for thirty seconds and thinks, "What the bloody hell am I supposed to do here?"
And the really frustrating thing is that the business itself might be absolutely brilliant.
I've seen this happen in all sorts of organisations, from independent businesses to established agencies and large events. The expertise is there. The product is good. The people genuinely care about what they do.
But somewhere between the business and the customer, the message gets lost.
I remember working on a large event in the that had an enormous amount going for it. An established audience, a packed programme and all sorts of experiences that people would genuinely enjoy.
The organisers knew exactly why it was special. They'd lived and breathed the event. They understood the atmosphere, the community and all those little things that make an experience memorable.
But when I looked at how it was being presented to somebody who hadn't already fallen in love with it, I realised we were essentially trying to sell an experience by giving people a timetable.
And I don't know about you, but I've never booked a holiday because somebody handed me a spreadsheet detailing the precise number of available sun loungers.
I want to know how it's going to FEEL.
Am I going to have a brilliant time? Is it worth the money? Will I come home with stories to tell and possibly a slightly questionable collection of photographs?
The event had all the ingredients. We just weren't giving people enough reason to want the finished meal.
And even when they did want to attend, the route to buying tickets wasn't particularly straightforward. Which is another peculiar habit businesses have. We'll spend weeks trying to persuade somebody to buy something and then make the actual purchasing process resemble an obstacle course.
So we looked at the experience from the audience's perspective, recommended changes to the messaging and ticket journey, and supported the marketing campaign.
Over five weeks, the organisers reported an extraordinary amount of additional ticket sales.
Now, I can't tell you that every single one of those people bought a ticket because of one particular change. That would be ridiculous. Marketing doesn't work like that, however much some people would like to convince you otherwise.
But it was a very good illustration of what can happen when you stop concentrating entirely on what you're selling and start thinking about what somebody is actually buying.
And I've encountered the same fundamental problem in completely different circumstances.
I once worked with an independent creative business whose website needed to do rather more than simply look attractive. There were products to sell, specialist services to explain, bookings to manage and customers who needed to understand what was available.
The business had plenty to offer, but its existing website wasn't providing the sort of straightforward, functioning shopfront it needed.
Now, I have nothing against a beautiful website. I love good design. I can become quite unnecessarily enthusiastic about typography, photography and the way things sit on a page.
But if I arrive on your website wanting to buy something and can't work out how, I'm not going to sit there admiring your font choices until divine inspiration strikes.
I'm going to leave.
Which is why that project became about building something that actually worked for the people using it. A proper online shop, a way to arrange services, clear information and the practical systems the business owner needed behind the scenes.
Not simply a digital brochure that looked lovely in a portfolio.
A website that could do its bloody job.
And sometimes the problem isn't even the website. Sometimes the entire business has evolved while the brand is still wandering around wearing an outfit it bought fifteen years ago.
I've experienced that one personally.
My own movement business used to be called Carodance Fitness Professionals, which made perfect sense when it reflected what I was doing at the time. But businesses don't necessarily stay where they started, particularly when the person running them has a brain that regards standing still as a deeply suspicious activity.
Over time, the business was moving in a different direction. Pilates had become an important part of the offering, the approach to movement was changing and I wanted something that could accommodate different experiences without having to reinvent the whole identity every six months.
The old brand wasn't wrong. It had simply stopped fitting.
And there's an enormous difference between those two things.
So Real Life Movement Club was born, with a different name, identity, website, booking experience and a much clearer sense of what the business was actually there to do.
It wasn't a case of waking up one morning, deciding I fancied a new logo and spending three weeks arguing with myself about shades of purple.
Although, to be fair, I am perfectly capable of doing that too.
It was about making sure the outside of the business reflected what was actually happening on the inside.
Which brings me to one of my favourite ironies.
Years ago, I worked in business development and marketing for an established promotional marketing agency. A company full of people who understood branding, promotional products, design and marketing.
And yet its own website wasn't particularly good at explaining what made the business worth choosing.
I know. A marketing agency with a marketing problem. You couldn't make it up.
Except you absolutely could, because it happens everywhere.
The people inside the business understood its capabilities perfectly. They knew what it could deliver, how the different services fitted together and what made the agency different from its competitors.
But that understanding wasn't translating particularly well to somebody arriving from the outside.
The website was organised around how the business understood itself, rather than how a prospective customer might approach it.
And those aren't necessarily the same thing.
So we reconsidered the structure, the language, the presentation and the way customers could explore the services, working with the agency's design and development teams to put those changes into practice.
Afterwards, the agency experienced an increase in enquiries, and importantly, more of those enquiries were from people whose needs actually matched the services it wanted to provide.
Because getting more people to contact you is lovely, but if they're all asking for something you don't sell, you've essentially created yourself a very busy new administrative problem.
And this is what I keep coming back to.
Businesses are often so busy concentrating on being good at what they do that they forget there's an entire world of people who don't know what they know.
Your customers don't understand your internal processes. They don't know the history of your business, why you made certain decisions or which services are the ones you're particularly proud of.
They haven't attended your meetings. They haven't read your business plan. They certainly haven't spent the last six months listening to you explain why you've rearranged the website navigation for the seventeenth time.
They're just people with a problem, a need, a desire or a bit of money they're considering spending.
And they're trying to work out whether you're the right person to help them.
That's it.
Which is why I get a little twitchy when businesses immediately assume they need a new website, a rebrand, a bigger advertising budget or a complete overhaul of everything they've spent years building.
Maybe they do.
But maybe they don't.
Maybe the problem is that the customer can't find the booking button. Maybe the service descriptions make perfect sense to the person who wrote them and absolutely nobody else. Maybe the business is selling something wonderful but concentrating on all the wrong reasons for buying it.
Or maybe everything is actually working rather well, in which case I'd strongly recommend leaving it alone and spending the money on something more enjoyable.
A holiday, perhaps. Or a really good lunch.
The point is that you can't know what needs fixing until you've worked out what's actually wrong.
And sometimes that requires somebody who isn't already standing in the middle of the business, surrounded by years of accumulated knowledge and completely unable to see the obvious.
That's really where Vector & Verse comes in.
We look at businesses from the outside in. Not because the people running them don't know what they're doing, but because knowing your own business and experiencing it as a customer are two very different things.
Sometimes we identify the problem. Sometimes we help develop the solution. Sometimes we get involved in actually making the changes.
And sometimes the most useful thing we can do is tell somebody that the thing they're worrying about isn't actually the thing that's getting in their way.
Because being brilliant at what you do is a wonderful achievement.
But if the people you're trying to reach can't understand what makes you brilliant, or can't work out how to become your customer, you're making life unnecessarily difficult for everybody.
Including yourself.
And frankly, running a business is complicated enough without voluntarily introducing additional obstacles.
There's already HMRC for that.
Vector & Verse — Where Design Meets Story