The Man Nobody Could Describe

Last month I had lunch in St Helier with a client of mine who’s been in my network for years.

He’s the person businesses call when something’s in a mess and they need it fixed properly. He’s brilliant at it. The trouble is, nobody can say exactly what he does. His clients can’t, the people who refer him can’t, and if I’m honest, neither could he. He’d explain it, people would nod politely, and he’d end up filed under “something in business consulting”.

So over lunch I ran him through the same conversation I have with every client before I open a design file. No brief, no form to fill in. Just me asking the questions nobody had thought to ask him.

Who’s your best client? What’s going on in their business the week before they ring you? And once you’ve finished, what’s different for them?

About half an hour in, he told me about a government agency he’d worked with. They had a cleaning contract worth a couple of million a year. On paper it looked fine but when he dug into the data, they’d been getting roughly half of what they were paying for, and had been for years.

He sat down with the contract, compared what it promised with what was actually turning up, and renegotiated. Same service, delivered properly this time, for a fraction of the original cost.

That’s his job. He finds where a business is paying for something it isn’t getting, and he sorts it.

When I said that back to him, he went quiet for a second. Then: “I’ve never quite heard it put like that.”

That little pause is what I’m listening for in every one of these conversations. It’s the moment something you’ve known for twenty years suddenly sounds like something a stranger would pay for.

He has twenty years of happy clients who keep calling him back. What he didn’t have was a way of describing his work that made someone new think “I know exactly who needs him.” That happens to loads of people who are very good at what they do. You get so close to your own work that you can’t see it any more.

A new website on its own wouldn’t have sorted that. Neither would a new logo or a positioning statement. They all need something true to say first, and that came from an hour of questions about his clients.

I’ll share how the site turns out once it’s live. But honestly, the most useful part of the project happened over a long lunch, before I’d drawn a single thing.