When a company has changed faster than the way people understand it, execution can become a very expensive form of procrastination.
“We’re building a new website.”
Excellent.
What are we building?
“A new website.”
Yes, I got that part.
The current one is five years old (25 in internet years). Some of the services have changed. There are pages describing things the company barely does anymore. Somewhere in Resources is a pre-COVID PDF that lingers because somebody’s team won the Super Bowl that year.
The company, meanwhile, has been busy.
Revenue has grown from $12 million to $40 million. Clients who originally hired them for one specific area of expertise started asking for other things, and some of those things became meaningful businesses of their own.
They acquired a smaller company. Built proprietary technology. The founder became increasingly visible. Their largest clients now engage them for work that barely resembles the thing that originally made them successful.
So everybody agrees.
New website.
Budget approved. Agency selected. Kickoff scheduled.
There is only one teensy problem.
Nobody agrees on what company the website is for.
This should be fun.
Ask the CEO what the company does and she’ll tell you where it’s going. Sales will tell you what people are buying. The CMO will tell you what the market knows them for. The founder will tell you the larger idea connecting all of it.
Ask a customer and they’ll tell you something completely different.
And OMG don’t ask the COO about AI.
Excellent.
Let’s write the homepage.
This is usually where everyone starts reaching for words.
“We need a stronger value proposition.”
“We need to simplify.”
“We need a new tagline.”
“We need to lead with outcomes.”
“We need to sound more enterprise.”
“We need to sound more human.”
“And authentic.”
“Authentically human.”
Someone will suggest a new category. Someone else will say customers don’t care about categories. The founder will dislike the word “solutions.” Everyone will dislike the word “holistic.”
By meeting four, twelve intelligent adults will have spent six hours debating a headline because they’re trying to solve a strategic question with adjectives.
The copywriter, authentically humanistic, is taking notes.
The audience has one small disadvantage: They missed the last five years.
Everyone inside the company knows how the pieces fit together because they lived the evolution. They remember the client request that opened a new line of business, why the acquisition made sense, what the technology was meant to unlock, and how the founder’s role began to change.
The audience knows none of that. They weren’t there.
Yet we hand them five years of accumulated change and expect them to understand it somewhere between opening a browser tab and deciding whether to close it.
Then, when they don’t, we decide the messaging needs work.
Maybe.
But there is a difference between clarifying an answer and manufacturing one.
So what are we actually building?
Take the technology.
The company has invested heavily in it. Customers like it. Leadership is excited about it.
Great.
Is it a better way to deliver the expertise the company is already known for? A product? A new business model? The beginning of a different company?
All could be good answers.
They are not the same answer.
Which means “make the technology more prominent” isn’t a content note yet.
It’s a strategic decision wearing a content-note costume.
Same with the acquisition. Maybe you acquired capability, a market, talent or a brand worth preserving. Maybe you acquired something that changes the definition of the parent company itself.
The navigation menu is anxiously awaiting your decision.
And then there’s the founder. His visibility is growing, which sounds terrific until somebody has to decide what that visibility is supposed to accomplish for the institution.
You can make his headshot bigger.
That should clear everything up.
This is how execution gets expensive.
A new website feels like action. And action feels good.
Wireframes! Copy decks! Mood boards! A Slack channel with seventeen people in it!
Things are happening.
Meanwhile, every unanswered strategic question gets pushed downstream where somebody else has to make a decision about it.
The strategist guesses, the copywriter interprets, the designer emphasizes, and the web team organizes. Sales eventually creates its own deck because the website “doesn’t quite tell the story,” while the founder develops another version for speaking engagements. The acquired company sticks with the materials that already work, and marketing moves on to the next campaign.
Everyone executes. The company gets harder to understand.
Progress!
Audience clarity starts upstream.
The people inside the company have had years to understand what it has become.
The audience gets minutes.
That’s the problem to solve first.
Before deciding what goes on the homepage, leadership needs a shared understanding of the company it wants the audience to encounter. What business are we becoming? What belongs at the center? How do the newer pieces change the whole? And what should understanding us make possible?
Now you have something to execute against.
And now, please, build the website.
Seriously.
Build a gorgeous one. Give the designers room to do something interesting. Let the copywriter write. Fix the mobile experience.
Delete the pre-COVID PDF.
But give all those talented people something better than a collection of internal opinions to execute against.
Give them a strategic center.
Because the website was never the ridiculous idea. Expecting the website to figure out what the company has become was.
“We’re building a new website.”
Great.
What are you really building?
That answer should probably come first.