On Founder Positioning

I would put the sentence "Positioning is a commercial act, not a creative one" on a sign in the office if I had one. Almost every positioning failure I have seen begins when this sentence is left unsaid.

Positioning is the answer to four questions, asked in order. What frame are we operating in? Who is this for? What will we win on? What will we deliberately concede? The answers determine who buys, who refers, who passes, and at what price. They are not adjective choices. They are not colour palettes. They are not, despite what the industry has spent twenty years insisting, "brand work."

The reason this misclassification matters is that it tells the founder who should do the work. If positioning is creative, you hire a creative agency. If positioning is commercial, you do it yourself, in writing, next to someone who knows how to ask the right next question. The agency model — the one most founders default to — is a model for executing creative work. It is a poor model for making commercial decisions. Agencies produce artefacts. Positioning is not an artefact. It is a series of refusals.

A founder once described his repositioning project to me as follows. He had given the brief to three agencies. Each had returned a deck. Each deck contained roughly the same vocabulary, the same diagram, and three names for the new positioning. None of the three positionings was actually a position. They were product descriptions with the verbs swapped out. The founder asked me to choose one. I told him the issue was that he had asked the wrong question in the wrong room.

The pattern is: the founder sensibly wants to delegate. The team, sensibly, wants to help. The agency sensibly wants to deliver. What none of them can do is sit in the founder's chair, the only chair from which it is possible to say, with conviction, this is who we are; this is who we are not; this is what we will refuse — saying that requires authority and information that lives in one place. Outsourcing the question to a room that lacks both produces, every time, a deck that does not commit to anything in particular and could be re-skinned for any competitor in the category.

Positioning, therefore, cannot be delegated, only assisted. And the form of assistance that actually works is very different from a typical agency engagement. Instead of working with an agency, founders work with one single experienced partner sitting next to them, asking the right questions, drafting the answers in writing, and pressure-testing them until the positioning is right.

I do this work.

The deliverable, when it lands, is not a deck but a conviction. A founder knows the position they have taken and the position they have refused. A founder can write the homepage in one sitting, brief the deck designer in one paragraph, answer the analyst's question in one sentence, and respond to the board member's drift in one line. Once a founder makes the upstream decision, the downstream effects of conviction — homepage, deck, sales call, board update, hiring pitch — fall out almost cleanly.

Conviction is also why I write memos and not decks. A memo forces the position into prose which cannot hide behind iconography. If the position is muddled, the prose is muddled, and the founder can see it. A deck, by contrast, will absorb almost any amount of unresolved thinking and present it as a sequence of confidently typeset bullets. I have been on calls where founders read aloud the bullets from their own positioning deck and surprise themselves by not knowing what each one meant. It's a structural failure of the medium, not of the founder.

Three operating rules result from all of this that the practice follows. My undivided attention is necessary for the quality of positioning work, so I work with one company at a time. I do not subcontract because the agency model is precisely the one that has failed us. I do not write decks for founders to review and approve. I act as the CEO's sparring partner. I sit in the same chair, and we work together as a team.

If you are reading this and a sentence in your head is forming the objection we have been working on positioning for a year, and we still don't have it, this is the post for you. Delegating a question to the wrong room is almost certainly why it is taking a year. Move it back to the founder's chair. Sit there with one trusted partner. Refuse to leave the chair until you answer the four questions. What took a year can take a month.

That is the practice.