The questions to ask yourself before you hire anyone.
Every brand we build at HER begins the same way. Before any moodboards. Before any sketches. Before the team has opened a colour palette. We sit down with the founder for two hours and we ask her a long, structured set of questions. The conversation is recorded. The transcript becomes one of the most-referenced documents in the project.
That conversation is the founder interview, and it is the single most useful piece of work in the strategy phase. It is also the piece of work most founders try to do once, in their own head, and skip on the way to the visible work. They lose a year of clarity by doing so.
This post is the next best thing to sitting down with the studio. It is the founder interview, structured so you can run it on yourself. If you are pre-studio, pre-budget, or pre-decision, this is the work worth doing now. If you are already in a strategy engagement with us or with anyone else, this is the work that will make the engagement four times more useful.
A founder who has answered these questions on paper walks into her first agency conversation knowing what she’s buying. That’s the whole point.
How to run this on yourself
Three logistical notes before the questions begin. Write the answers down. Not in a Note on your phone. In a single document, in full sentences. Brevity flatters thinking that is not yet sharp, and the act of writing in sentences forces you to find the actual thought instead of the shorthand for it.
Give it the time it deserves. Three to four hours, split across one or two sittings. Not five minutes of jotting between meetings. This is the deepest piece of brand work you will do all year, and cutting corners on it produces a brand that has been cut corners on.
Answer as the business actually is, today, and not as you would like it to be. Aspirational answers produce aspirational brands, which are brands that lie. The clearest brands are built on what is true now, and then updated as the truth changes.
Origin
Start with why this business exists. Not the marketing answer, the real one. What did you see, do, lose, or miss that made you decide to build this rather than something else. What’s the moment you think of when you doubt the business, and what restores you when you’re in that moment. Who has shaped your taste most as a founder, three names, three reasons. What does the business cost you, personally, to run. What does it give back.
The work itself
Describe in plain language what you do, imagining that you are talking to a thoughtful stranger at a dinner, not pitching to a room. What kind of customer leaves you the best feedback, and what did you do for her, specifically. What kind of customer is wrong for the business, and why. What is the smallest, sharpest, most defensible thing you do that almost nobody else does in the same way. What part of the work, if you are being honest, do you do better than your competitors, and what part do you do worse.
Audience
Picture one customer. A real one if you can, a composite if you cannot. Give her a name so you stop referring to her in the abstract. How old is she, what does she do for a living, where does she live, what does her week look like. What is she trying to do in her life that your work slots into, and remember, you are describing what she is trying to do, not what your work does. What is she afraid of when she considers buying from you. What is she hoping for. Where does she go to find brands like yours, and whose recommendations does she actually trust. What does she read, follow, listen to, look at. If she was to describe your brand to a friend, in her own words, what would she say.
The market
Name your three closest competitors, and not the aspirational ones, the actual ones, the brands a customer would put in a shortlist alongside yours. What does each of them do better than you. What does each of them do worse. If a customer chose one of them over you, what would her reason be. Where is the white space in the category, and it is worth being specific here, because the answer is rarely an unserved category, it is more often an unserved version of the customer you are already speaking to.
Voice
Pick three adjectives that describe how you want the brand to sound. Then strike one, because three is always too many. Pick three things the brand will never sound like, and often those negatives are more useful than the positives. Read aloud the most recent email or social post you wrote for the brand. Is that the voice you actually want, and if not, what is different. Find a writer, a magazine, or a brand whose voice you admire, and describe what specifically it does that you would like your brand to do.
Architecture
What does the business sell, in order of importance to revenue. Now what does the business sell in order of importance to your heart. Are the two lists the same, and if not, what is the gap telling you. Are there products or services you are still offering that you suspect should be quietly retired. Are there products or services you are not yet offering that you suspect should exist.
The next five years
Where do you want this business to be in five years. Be specific: revenue, team size, the kind of work being done, the kind of life you are living around it. Where do you want the business to never go, and what version of success would feel, in retrospect, like the wrong success. Who are the three people whose careers, ten years from now, you would like yours to resemble most, and what is it about theirs that draws you.
The final question
If the brand had to be summarised in a single sentence that you would be willing to defend in front of every customer, every employee, and every supplier for the next ten years, what would that sentence be. Write it down. Then rewrite it three more times. Pick the version that contains the most truth and the fewest borrowed words.
What to do with the answers
Sit with them for forty-eight hours and don’t read them. Then come back and read the whole thing in one sitting. Underline three patterns you didn’t expect. Cross out three sentences that read like marketing language and rewrite them in plainer words. What is left is the rough draft of your brand strategy. Not the finished document, the raw material. A studio, ours or anyone else’s, will take that raw material and shape it into a position, a voice, an architecture. The shaping is the studio’s craft. The raw material is yours, and it is the half of a strategy that cannot be outsourced.
A note on what this is not
It is not therapy, though it can feel close. And it is not a business plan or a marketing brief either. What it is, really, is a structured way of getting the founder’s brain onto paper, so that the brain’s actual thinking, which tends to be more interesting than the brain’s marketing thinking, becomes available to be worked with. Founders we have run this with often say the same thing afterward, which is some version of “I didn’t realise I knew that.” That is the point. You knew it. The interview just made it written.
If you remember one thing
A founder who has done this work on paper, in advance of any agency conversation, walks into the brief with an unusual kind of authority. She knows what she is buying, she knows what she wants, and within ten minutes of the first conversation she can tell whether the studio across from her is going to do good work or recycled work. The interview is, quietly, the founder’s protection against being sold to.
