Diagnose Today. Grow Tomorrow.

1 hour ago

8 min read

Leaders. Your next stage of growth starts with understanding where you stand right now.

I hear this kind of thing all the time:

“We’re ambitious. We want to grow. But we’re not aligned or clear on what we stand for in the market.”

This is often where my conversations with leadership teams begin. The business has evolved. The offer has expanded. Perhaps there have been acquisitions, new markets or changes at the top.

There are good people working hard. There are plenty of ideas about what should happen next.

But ask the leadership team where future growth should come from, what the business should be known for, what the strategy is to create unique value in the market and why customers should choose the brand(s), and you get different answers.

And that becomes expensive.

Investment gets spread across competing and splintered priorities. Teams receive mixed messages and get confused. Decisions take longer and more heated. Marketing struggles to tell a clear overall story because the people leading the business haven’t agreed what that story should be - so tey focus on short term lead gen tactics, focusing on features and product.

You can feel the potential. But the organisation isn’t pulling together to realise it.

So, where do you start? My answer: "Diagnose today. Grow tomorrow."

Before agreeing your future direction, build a shared understanding of the business you’re growing from. And then use this to fuel positive change.

Give your ambition a solid starting point

In a recent session with my Mastermind community, we explored brand diagnostics: the work that helps us, as brand strategists, understand what is happening before recommending what should change.

For an ambitious business leader, this is valuable groundwork. I'd even say it's essential to good leadership.

You might believe you need clearer positioning. You might see an opportunity to move upmarket. You might want to bring several businesses together under one brand.

Great. Let’s explore all of that.

But let's understand what do customers already value about you? Where do you have credibility? What is changing around you? What could prevent the organisation delivering your ambition? Let's look at what competitors are doing. What the cateogry trends are. And what our point of view is.

I often use a medical analogy. If you told a doctor what you thought was wrong, you would expect them to examine you before recommending treatment.

The same principle applies here.

Your instincts may be right. Diagnosis helps test them, uncover what you haven’t seen and give the leadership team something more useful than competing opinions to work with.

What should you actually do?

I advise my clients they need to explore four connected perspectives: the category, the company, customers and competition (The 4 Cs).

Here are some of the practical activities and why they matter if you’re preparing for growth.

1. Interview your leaders individually

Before bringing everyone into a workshop or working session, speak to them separately. I always do this as a consultant. It ensures they are heard. Ask where they see the business going, where growth should come from, what makes the organisation valuable and what might hold it back.

One question I particularly like is:

“How aligned do you think your leadership team is on the future?”

The answers can be revealing.

Everyone might support “growth”, while one person means acquisitions, another means entering new markets and another means selling more to existing customers.

Those ambitions have different implications for investment, capabilities and positioning.

Why this matters: you need to uncover the choices and tensions behind apparent agreement. Otherwise, you risk leaving a strategy workshop with shared words and different intentions.

2. Ask a strong salesperson to pitch the business to you

This is one of my favourite activities.

“Imagine I’m a prospective customer. Sell it to me. Show me the offer. Explain how it works.” Listen carefully.

What do they lead with? How do they explain the value? What questions do customers usually ask? Where does the explanation become complicated?

Then compare that with the story your leadership team tells.

You might discover that your salespeople have found a compelling way to express your value. You might discover that winning business depends on them personally translating an offer that nobody else understands.

Why this matters: growth becomes harder when your value is difficult to explain. This exercise shows how the strategy translates into an actual buying conversation.

3. Open the research folder

Before commissioning new research, find out what the business already knows.

Review previous studies, customer feedback, employee surveys, complaints and lost pitches. Its rear view data but it can be helpful.

Look beyond a satisfaction or Net Promoter Score to the comments explaining it.

The number gives you a signal. The explanation helps you investigate what is happening.

What do delighted customers keep mentioning? What frustrates people? Which issues appear repeatedly? And has anyone acted on those findings?

Why this matters: your organisation may already hold evidence that could improve decisions. Diagnosis brings it together, checks its relevance and makes it useful.

4. Listen beyond the leadership team

Your employees see things you don’t. Salespeople hear objections. Customer service teams hear frustrations. Operational teams know where delivery becomes difficult. People in different regions may spot opportunities that haven’t reached head office.

In the Mastermind, I shared an example of inviting employees in a large organisation to contribute through a short survey, introduced at a town hall.

The questions explored what made the business special, what customers loved and where people saw opportunities for the future.

This doesn’t require asking everyone to write the strategy. It gives them an opportunity to inform it. It also signals potential change and ambition. Plus it creates a culture of contribution and listening (which usually is not a bad thing).

Why this matters: you get a fuller picture of the business and begin involving the people who will help deliver the change. A useful idea can come from anywhere.

5. Explore the history before shaping the future

As a brand consultant I love to dive into the heritage of the brand. What made the business worth starting? What did it originally understand about customers? Which beliefs, capabilities or relationships helped it succeed?

Sometimes it’s valuable to speak to a founder, even if they are no longer involved in running the organisation. I did this on a project a few years ago where doing exactly that helped reconnect the business with its origins. I uncovered the grit and reason the elderly founder had started the business in the 70s and this helped us position their brand for innovation and growth into the future.

Growth (and modern complexity) can obscure the qualities that made a company valuable in the first place.

Why this matters: your history may contain strengths you can authentically build on. Understanding them helps you decide what to protect, what to evolve and what to leave behind.

6. Speak to different types of customers

Brand is the meaning people attach to you and your offer.

So you need to hear from the people attaching that meaning.

Speak (yes, I mean actually jump on Zoom calls!) to recent buyers, longstanding customers and occasional buyers. Where possible, include people who left and people who considered you but chose something else.

Explore their decisions:

What prompted them to look for a solution?
What were they trying to achieve?
What alternatives did they consider?
Why did they choose you, or decide against you?
What nearly stopped them buying?
What do they get from you they can't get elsewhere?
How did the experience compare with their expectations?

Look for patterns in the customer base too. Which customers generate significant value? What do they have in common? Where might those patterns suggest an opportunity worth investigating?

Why this matters: leaders need to understand the reasons behind buying behaviour. Your next growth opportunity may depend on something customers value that the business currently takes for granted.

A few conversations can reveal useful themes. If a major decision depends on knowing how widespread those views are, test them more broadly.

7. Check the gap between promise and delivery

What does the business say customers can expect? Now examine what happens.

If you promise simplicity, is the buying process simple? If you promise personal service, do people feel looked after? If you promise speed, where do delays occur?

Look across the customer journey, including the handovers between teams. Walk it through yourself. See it and feel it.

This is where brand work becomes relevant to operations, people and product development as well as marketing.

Why this matters: a growth strategy needs an organisation capable of delivering it. Making a stronger promise creates an obligation to support that promise in practice.

8. Investigate the alternatives customers actually consider

Ask your leadership team to name your competitors. Then ask customers what else they considered. You may get different answers.

In the Mastermind, I shared an example from work with a gym. The business naturally thought about other gyms. Customer conversations also brought staying on the sofa watching Netflix into the picture.

That changes how you understand the challenge.

In a B2B business, the alternative might be an internal team, an established process or postponing the decision. Knowing this changes how you pitch your offer.

Why this matters: growth depends on understanding the choice customers are making. If their biggest barrier is the disruption of change, you need to address that.

9. Audit what makes you recognisable

Review the names, colours, imagery, language and other assets the business uses. In brand building we call this the "brand codes".

Are they applied consistently? Do they help people recognise you? Could someone identify your communication with the logo covered up?

Then ask why people want to change them.

Have they stopped working? Or has the internal team become bored?

I find familiarity inside a business can create an appetite for change that customers don’t share. And there may be a need to bring back consistency so you can be recognised and trusted as a brand.

Why this matters: recognition takes investment to build. Leaders need to understand what they already own before deciding what to replace.

Turn the findings into a useful playback

At the end of a consultation "diagnosis", I usually bring the findings together in a presentation and walk the leadership team through it.

I call this a discovery playback. Its value comes from connecting the evidence into a clear picture of the situation and the choices ahead.

IMHO useful playback should contain:

The investigation. What was reviewed, who contributed and where the evidence has limitations.
The context. What is changing around the business and why it matters to the growth ambition.
The strengths. What customers value, where the business has credibility and what deserves protection.
The gaps and tensions. Where leadership intentions, employee understanding, customer perceptions and actual delivery pull apart.
The implications. What each significant finding means for the business, supported by evidence.
The baseline. What current measures tell us about awareness, perceptions, experience and commercial performance, and what still needs to be measured.
The choices ahead. Which opportunities deserve exploration, what they might require and which trade-offs leaders will need to discuss.

Finally, I like to articulate the strategic challenge.

For example:

“How do we become a credible choice for larger customers while protecting the personal service our existing customers value?”

That gives the next phase (usually defining the strategy for the growth ahead) something concrete to solve.

Use today’s diagnosis to prepare for tomorrow’s change

You should leave the playback with a clearer understanding of where you stand and what needs attention.

That creates a stronger basis for leadership alignment.

You can explore growth options against shared evidence. You can distinguish between a communication issue and a delivery issue. You can identify where investment is needed and which strengths should carry forward.

You can also explain change more clearly to the wider organisation. People can see what has been learned, why it matters and how the proposed direction responds.

One important point: keep the commercial picture in view. Look at conversion, retention, revenue and margin alongside what people think and experience. Be honest about other influences on performance, including pricing, distribution and market conditions.

The diagnosis should sharpen your judgement, including where the evidence remains incomplete.

Give yourselves permission to learn

So there you have it. Brand diagnosis and what it sets out to achieve. And yes, the work might confirm your instincts. It might reveal an opportunity you hadn’t recognised. It might expose a gap between your ambition and your ability to deliver it. You need to be willing to hear all three.

For ambitious leaders, diagnosis creates space to think better together before committing the organisation to change.

So before asking, “How do we accelerate?”, ask:

“Do we share an understanding of where we stand and what our next stage of growth will require?”

Diagnose today. Grow tomorrow.