A client came to No.10 recently.
He was starting a new business – aerial surveying, mapping work and landscape documentation.
I’d worked with him many years before, for a previous venture. Back then, the brief was simple: a good-looking logo and a pretty website … and that got you a long way.
We started the conversation by admitting that world doesn’t really exist anymore. Today, a logo and a nice website are the minimum you need to be taken seriously, but not what wins you customers.
What was needed – especially in a specialist, relationship-led field like this – was clarity about who he is and why anyone should choose him over the next operator with a drone.
So before we talked colours or fonts, we had a proper conversation. Not a pitch meeting, but a discovery call: an hour or so working through his ‘why’, what made his approach different, and how he wanted to be seen.
Following on from that conversation, he felt ready to carry out a half day brand discovery workshop, which did more work than any mood board could. It surfaced things he hadn’t put into words before – the values behind the business, the niche worth leaning into, language that was genuinely his rather than borrowed from a similar business.
All of it went into a short strategy document – a blueprint that the logo, the website and everything else could be built on, instead of guessed at.
He summed up the process better than I could:
“I have very much enjoyed mulling over the Brand Strategy Blueprint over the past few days, and appreciate the focus and clarity you have brought. I’m very grateful for the chance to think about issues I wouldn’t have otherwise considered.”
That’s really the point of a discovery workshop. It’s not a formality before the real work starts. It is the real work. And it’s telling that part way through the project, he changed the business name itself, to one that better matched the story we’d uncovered together. That’s not a rebrand mid-flight. That’s a business getting clearer on itself, and the identity simply catching up.
The logo came after – as it always should.
Book a Discovery Call
More client stories are on the way, but if you’d like to talk through your own brand – I offer a free 30-minute discovery call. No pitch, no obligation. Just a good look at what needs doing.