Back on the Rollercoaster Part 3A: Six months in – Salvation

I haven’t posted an update to our story for three months. A lot has happened in this period, but I regret to inform you that I am still none the wiser as to knowing what the purpose of Twitter is.

To not overwhelm or simply bore you, I’ve tried to keep the latest happenings in our little world to a few different posts.

PART A: Salvation comes

My last update became a plea for help. I was struggling to find the words and branding to really explain why we are different and wanted to know how to create a brand that symbolises us. Whilst this series of blogs is a limp effort in that direction, we needed guidance. Within hours of me posting, I received a fantastic offer from my good friend @dave katz

Our slightly bizarre conversation went something like this:

Dave: Are you serious about needing help?

Clueless Bim: Help? I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.

Dave: You just posted a plea for help

Clueless Bim: Oh yeah that – (At this point I’m embarrassed that I have forgotten what I had done literally a few hours ago)

Dave: Well, are you serious?

Embarrassed Bim: Yes, this is definitely something we need help with (I’m also thinking I need help with my memory as I didn’t know that Dave worked on helping companies improve their messaging and brand identity)

To cut a long story short, (and minimise me providing more examples of my senility), Dave, as a friend, offered to help us understand and express our core value proposition. This was a brilliant offer and from a selfish perspective, the way it worked was even better.

For us as founders, the task was simple and enjoyable. We got to sit in a pub, drink beer and talk to Dave about what we do. Maybe it was the magic in the questions he asked or in the way the conversation was guided, but what happened was that all of us talked about the why and how of Elemental Concept in a deeper and more real way than ever before. I know some of you readers are thinking that the magic ingredient was the beer but I disagree – there was none of the gushing nonsense that normally comes with too much alcohol… or maybe there was a little of that as well. Dave understood how to get us to open up on what we understood individually and agreed on collectively in order to help us establish our core identity and brand values.

Though it sounds simple, one of the greatest gains I got was learning that our messaging was confused because we didn’t spell out what we did. Dave listened to us ramble on and asked “Why don’t you say ‘We are a hybrid of three things – we are a software designer and developer; we are a consultancy; and, where relevant, are an investor in our clients businesses’”

He was absolutely right. What he made me realise was that I had been talking about how we helped businesses whilst shying away from saying we did software development. This was because of my random perception of how such organisations are badged. I’m not sure everyone thinks the same way but in my head, saying we were a software development company made me think of cheap offshore development, churning out cookie cutter code and charging over the top for a bloated product. I had become so paranoid about differentiating us from that that I was forgetting to make it clear that we do build technology and love doing so. Instead I should be explaining that we do it differently bringing our customers value economics to the fore because we try to understand their business.

So Dave gave me a reminder about what we do and pointed out that we should explain the elemental concept of our business. So with our initial messaging solved, we moved on to how we express our core values and build a brand around them.

If you remember in The Rollercoaster Part 2.5, I had tried to create 4 words that symbolised us. Though some worked to encompass us, they also had some significant downsides. On top of that, I had arbitrarily decided that there should be 4 words by trying to equate us to superheroes. Whilst we do obviously have phenomenal powers, branding our company was not one of them.

Dave patiently listened to us explain our approach and process to solving a problem. He understood the fact that we believe in testing a hypothesis as quickly and simply as is possible. For him, this was part of our overall scientific approach to helping businesses change and evolve. The reality was our branding should be scientific. We use knowledge and logic to test, measure and learn, all are part of the scientific learning process.

He took it further and helped us take our four words that encompass us and express them in a way consistent with the new branding. So what we now have is as follows;

At Elemental Concept we live by three core principles;

The bonds we build with each-other, our customers and partners,

The distilled solution –  keeping everything as focused as possible

And enabling or providing the spark and willingness to experiment with uncertainty.

There will be much more detail and evidence of Dave’s great work in our soon to be updated website. In our true fashion, it will be an evolving piece. We have been busy (see upcoming posts) so are yet to launch our so called minimum viable product which should simply tell people what we do. It will evolve as we have time and as we listen to feedback.

As usual, we would love your feedback. Watch this space for when we are live and then please visit the site and let us know how we can improve.

For those of you kind enough to have a read of the site when it is live, be grateful that my fellow founders stopped me from taking the science theme too far. If I had my way, you would see pictures of us all holding vials, wearing lab-coats – think Beaker from the Muppets – and giving our processes pretentious names like ‘metamorphosis’ and ‘photosynthesis’