Our mission
To make expertise visible.
So that people are chosen for what they know, rather than for how easy they happen to be to find.
Every buyer builds a shortlist before they compare anyone on it, and that shortlist is made of whoever they can see. The decision that matters is taken on the wrong question, before the comparison begins.
Firms sell the judgement of particular people and then publish as though those people do not exist. So the best adviser in a market loses work to someone who knows less and is easier to find, and the client takes advice from the best marketer in the room. Closing that gap is the whole of what we are for.
What we are for
Mission and vision.
One says what we do every day. One says what the world looks like if enough of us do it for long enough. The line under them says how we would know.
To make expertise visible.
Find the people in a firm who genuinely know the most, get what they know out of their heads and into a form somebody can read, and make sure it is there at the moment the question is asked. Every day, for every expert, not once a quarter for the loudest one.
A market that chooses on merit.
Where a shortlist is built from who is genuinely best rather than who was easiest to find. Where being excellent at the work is enough to become known for it, and where a buyer can tell the difference before they commit rather than after.
We make you findable, and worth finding.
We will know it is working when the firms winning the work are the firms doing the best work, and nobody has to be the loudest to be the obvious choice.
What follows from it
Four things we will not trade away.
A principle only counts if somebody could sensibly do the opposite. Each of these is a thing most of this industry does differently, on purpose, and each one follows from the argument above.
Expertise belongs to people. Published under a firm's name it hides the one thing a buyer is actually trying to assess, which is who here knows this. Safer for the firm, and useless to the person choosing.
Visibility you have to buy with your email address is not visibility. The person you most want, the one with the problem and the budget, reads two lines, decides they are being sold to, and leaves.
You cannot make expertise visible by generating text that resembles it. The thing that makes a piece worth finding is the sentence they say twenty minutes in, when they stop being careful.
Attention can be bought and it stops the day you stop paying. A page that answers the question a buyer is genuinely asking keeps answering it, and each one makes the last one worth more.
Where it came from
The observation underneath all of it.
Not a strategy that produced a slogan. Something that was obvious from sitting in the room while buyers chose, over and over, for years.
“Nobody hires a firm. They hire the person they believe knows the most, and they look that person up long before they pick up the phone. If there is nothing to find, you are asking them to take your word for it.”
Jordan GreenawayFounder and CEO, Profile
See what it looks like on one of your people.
We will make one of your experts visible before you commit to anything, so the first thing you judge is the work rather than the argument.