Twelve questions. You'll find out whether your message is actually ready to scale — and which of three constraints is the one holding you.
No purchase, no call. If these are enough, you don't need us — and I'd rather you knew that now.
Ask five people separately — mixed seniority, including someone who joined this year. Separately is the whole method; in a room they converge on whoever speaks first.
Quick favour, and there's no wrong answer. In your own words: what do we do, and why does it matter? Two or three sentences is plenty. Don't overthink it — I'm after your honest version, not the official one.
How to read it: count the distinct answers, not the wrong ones. Then put all five in one document and show your leadership team. The exercise makes the argument for you.
The claim underneath everything. Not a tagline — the assertion that stays true whether or not you're in the room, and that a competitor couldn't paste onto their own site.
The test: read it to someone outside your industry. If they ask "what does that mean?", it isn't finished. If they say "oh — who do I know who needs that?", it is.
Send your sentence to five people. Collect objections for three days without defending it. Then rewrite once. A sentence that survives this is worth more than a positioning deck nobody opens.
Here's one sentence about what we do and why it matters. I'm not looking for encouragement — I'm looking for what's wrong with it. Vague? Overclaiming? True of our competitors too? Anything you'd push back on. No need to soften it. I'll take everything for three days and then rewrite it once.
Then the real unlock: give that sentence an owner who isn't you. Their job is to notice when something goes out that contradicts it, and say so. The bottleneck breaks the day somebody else is allowed to hold the standard.
Print this page or save it as a PDF — your score, your constraint, and all three worksheets.
The other question leaders ask us: if we build an AI version of you, what should it actually be allowed to make? We wrote down our real answer, including the parts that argue for using it less.
Leave an address and I'll send you occasional material on the same subject — the kind of thing that's in this page, not a pitch sequence. Entirely optional; you already have everything above.
Nothing else required. If you want to talk through your score with a person, just reply to anything we send.
