Sarah has been an HR consultant for eleven years. Her clients stay with her for a decade. They refer their friends. One of them once told her she’d saved his business.
Last March, she was at a networking lunch when a managing director turned to her and asked, simply, “So what do you do?”
And Sarah, who could fix a toxic team culture in her sleep, heard herself say: “Oh, a bit of everything really. HR support, people stuff, it depends what you need.”
He nodded politely. Then he turned to the woman on his other side, who said she helped growing businesses stop losing their best people in the first year. By dessert, they’d swapped numbers.
Sarah drove home furious. Not with him. With herself. She was better at the job. She knew she was. But in that moment, being better hadn’t mattered at all.
If you’ve ever had a moment like that, you’re in very good company.
Why the experts are often the worst at explaining themselves
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the better you are at what you do, the harder it often is to explain it.
Psychologists call it ‘the curse of knowledge’. Once you know something deeply, you can’t remember what it was like not to know it. So you skip the steps that matter most to a buyer. You say “it depends” because, to you, it genuinely does. You reach for “bespoke” because every client really is different.
All true. All useless to the person standing in front of you, who has about ten seconds to decide whether you can solve their problem.
I call what happens next ‘the vague tax’. You don’t get an invoice for it. You just quietly lose the introduction, the referral, the proposal that went to someone who explained it better. And because nobody tells you why they didn’t buy, most founders pay it for years without ever seeing the bill.
The most expensive thing your brand can be is vague
Why a shiny rebrand won’t save you.
When sales go flat, the instinct is to change something visible. A new logo. A website refresh. A fresh colour palette that finally feels like you. More shiny shiny.
I understand the appeal. It feels like progress, and you can see it. But Sarah didn’t lose that MD because of her logo. He never saw it. She lost him in a single sentence, spoken out loud, over a plate of chicken.
Your visual identity gets people to look. Your words are what get them to buy. And the words that matter most usually aren’t on your website at all. They’re the ones you say on calls, at events, in DMs, and in the first ninety seconds of a discovery meeting.
Nine times out of ten, your brand doesn’t need replacing. It needs you to start talking about it properly.
Five things you can try this week
You don’t need a strategy day to start closing the gap. Try these.
Say it out loud and record it. Answer “So what do you do?” into your phone, unprepared. Play it back. Most people are shocked by how long, hedged and apologetic their first answer is. That recording is your starting point.
Hunt down your fuzzy words. Look through your website and LinkedIn bio for “bespoke”, “solutions”, “support”, “tailored” and “it depends”. Each one is a gap where a specific outcome should be.
Swap what you do for what changes. Sarah “does HR”. Her clients stop losing good people. Write one sentence that starts “I help [who] to [result]” and make the result something a buyer would actually feel.
Name the question you dread. Everyone has one. “How much do you charge?” “Why should I pick you?” “What makes you different?” Write it down, then answer it out loud until your answer stops wobbling.
Test it on a real person. Not your partner, who already loves you and thinks you’re brilliant. Someone who doesn’t actually know your business. If they can repeat back what you do in their own words, it’s working. If they can’t, it isn’t yet. My personal tip – make it so a six year old could get it.
None of this is complicated. It’s just uncomfortable. And the discomfort is exactly where the improvement happens.
What happened to Sarah
Sarah didn’t change her logo. She didn’t rebuild her website.
She practised. She said her answer out loud, got feedback, and said it again. She cut “a bit of everything” and replaced it with one clear line about the problem she solves. It took a few weeks before it stopped feeling rehearsed and started feeling like her.
At her next networking lunch, someone asked the same question. This time she said: “I help growing businesses keep their best people, so they stop paying to recruit the same role twice.”
The person opposite leaned in and said, “Oh, we need to talk.”
Same Sarah. Same expertise. Different words.
That’s the bit most founders miss. Clarity isn’t something you think your way into. It’s something you practise your way into, out loud, with people who’ll tell you the truth.
If that’s the kind of room you’ve been looking for, it’s exactly why I built The Competitive Advantage, my six week programme for scaling founders who are ready to turn clarity, consistency, credibility, connection and conversion into the reason people choose them. But whether you join us or not, start with the five steps above. Your brand has been waiting for you to speak up.
