There’s a particular stage of business growth nobody really warns you about, and it’s all about brand consistency – we should be all over it, right? You’ve been doing this for a while, things have changed – mostly for the better – and the business you’re running today bears surprisingly little resemblance to the one you started with.
Your services are stronger, your experience is deeper and you know far more about the kind of work you want to do and the people you want to do it with. You’ve probably changed your pricing, refined your offer and become considerably better at saying no to the things that no longer make sense.
The problem is, your business has left evidence of every previous version of itself all over the place.
Your website was written two offers ago. LinkedIn is still talking about the positioning you adopted during that six-month period when you thought you needed to niche down to within an inch of your life. There’s an old PDF still being sent to enquiries, your Instagram bio mentions something you barely sell anymore and your proposal has been tweaked so many times that it’s become a historical document in its own right.
Individually, none of these things feels particularly urgent. Collectively, they can make a very good business look surprisingly unsure of itself.
Businesses rarely evolve neatly
We like to imagine business growth as a lovely clean progression from one clearly defined version to the next. In reality, most businesses evolve by addition.
You introduce a service because clients keep asking for it. You quietly stop promoting something without ever officially retiring it. You change your prices, rewrite part of the website, create a new lead magnet, refine your positioning and eventually commission some new photography because the headshots from 2019 really have had a good innings.
Each decision makes sense at the time. What we’re much less likely to do is go back through the entire business and ask what that new decision has made obsolete.
So the layers accumulate. Eventually, you can have a website from one era, messaging from another, an offer suite from a third and sales materials that have somehow survived all of them.
We tend to call this inconsistency, but I think it’s more useful to think of it as accumulated business history. And at some point, it needs editing.
Not everything that still exists still belongs
Established businesses can become surprisingly sentimental about things that have simply always been there. A service has been around for years, so it stays on the website. A paragraph has always appeared on the About page, so nobody questions whether it still matters. An offer sells occasionally, so it remains squeezed into the menu even though it no longer really fits where the business is going.
None of these things is necessarily bad. They’re just old decisions, and old decisions have a habit of quietly becoming current strategy when nobody deliberately removes them.
This is why one of the most useful things you can do as your business grows isn’t necessarily to add something new. Sometimes you need to decide what no longer gets to come with you.
Your client doesn’t know the backstory
You understand why everything is there. You remember when that service was your main offer, you know why the PDF looks slightly different from the website and you understand that the package mentioned on one page has technically been replaced by the newer one somewhere else.
Your potential client knows none of this. They simply see conflicting information, and that creates tiny moments of uncertainty. They wonder whether you still offer something, which price is current, whether two similarly named services are actually different and, occasionally, whether they’re even in the right place.
None of those questions is catastrophic, but every unnecessary question asks someone considering working with you to do a little more work. I’d much rather they were using that mental energy imagining what working with you could do for their business.
Coherence is about much more than matching fonts
Brand consistency is often reduced to making sure the right logo, fonts and colours are being used everywhere. That matters, obviously – particularly if someone in the business has recently discovered gradients – but coherence goes considerably further than that.
Your positioning needs to make sense alongside your offers. Your offers need to make sense alongside your pricing. Your pricing needs to feel appropriate for the experience you’re promising. Your website should support the conversations you’re having with potential clients, and the experience after somebody says yes should feel like it came from the same business that persuaded them to enquire in the first place.
Your content matters here too. If you’ve strategically moved away from something, continuing to talk about it every few weeks because you’ve always talked about it keeps an old version of the business alive.
That’s the distinction I’m interested in. Everything doesn’t need to look identical, but it should feel as though it belongs to the same business and is taking people in the same direction.
Sometimes growth needs subtraction
There is an enormous amount of business advice telling us what to add. Another revenue stream, another funnel, another lead magnet, another platform, another way to buy. Before long, you can have a business containing all the things and absolutely no breathing room.
Mature businesses need subtraction too.
That might mean fewer offers with much clearer distinctions between them, fewer messages repeated with more conviction, or finally removing pages and services that are hanging around because deleting them somehow feels more dramatic than adding them did.
This isn’t minimalism for the sake of having a beautifully tidy website. It’s strategic editing. You’re making it easier for somebody outside the business to understand what the business has become.
Have a look at the business they see
Google yourself. Look at your website as though you’ve never seen it before. Check your social profiles, your proposals, the PDFs you send out, your email signature, booking pages, automated emails and anything else somebody might encounter before deciding to work with you.
Then forget, for a moment, everything you know about how the business got here and ask yourself whether it all makes sense as one business today.
Not whether every shade of blue matches perfectly, or whether you could make it all a bit prettier. Does the message make sense? Do the services belong together? Does the experience support the positioning? Does what you’re showing people now reflect where the business is actually going?
Because sometimes the next stage of growth doesn’t need another new thing.
It needs a good edit.
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