The consistency session

Spoken words only - one hook counted, captions and notes excluded, at 130 wpm.

Hook

• Your deck, your site, your LinkedIn, your product. Four touchpoints, four different companies. There's one reason, and it isn't your team's taste.
• A founder told me every part of their business looks like a different company made it. They blamed their team. It isn't their team.
• Everything you make looks like a different company made it. The cause isn't talent, and the first fix takes an afternoon.

Body

The session (top-down on the sofa, the founder's own words, first person)

So, every part of my business looks like a different company made it.

The pitch deck is one thing. The website is another. The LinkedIn is off doing its own thing entirely. And the product UI, don't even get me started on the product.

Each bit was made by a different person, at a different time, and it shows. I hire good people. Genuinely good. But I can't keep the work consistent across the team, and it's starting to make us look smaller than we actually are.

So how do I get everyone to just... make it match?

The diagnosis (sit up, straight to camera)

Right. Sit up a second.

Here's the good news. You don't have a talent problem. Your people are fine. You said it yourself, you hire well.

What you've got is a memory problem.

Listen to what you just described. Four touchpoints, four people, four different days. And every single one of them started from a blank page. No shared reference, no agreed decisions, just their best guess on a Tuesday. Of course it doesn't match. You've asked four people to draw the same face from memory, on four different days, and you're surprised you got four different faces.

Consistency isn't a thing a team feels its way into. It isn't a standard you can nag people up to. The moment you're not in the room, everyone falls back on their own taste. And their own taste is all over the place, because that is what taste is.

So the thing making you look smaller than you are isn't the quality of any one piece. It's that nothing agrees with anything else. And you can't fix that by hiring better. You fix it by giving the good people you've already got one place to copy from.

The treatment (cut to the desk, working on screen)

So here's what we actually do. And it isn't a rebrand.

I open one file. This becomes the single place everything gets made from. Some people call it a design system, some call it a brand kit. I don't care what you call it. It's the team's shared memory, written down once.

And I only put the decisions in it that keep getting re-made. Watch.

The colours, with the exact codes. Not "the blue", the actual blue. The two typefaces and the sizes. The spacing. The logo and the three ways it's allowed to sit. The tone, a few real sentences of how we sound. Then a handful of ready-made blocks: a title, a button, a slide, a post. Built once, properly.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Now watch what changes. The next person who makes a deck doesn't start from a blank page. They start from this. The next social post pulls from the same colours and the same two fonts as the website. Nobody's guessing, because the decision was already made, once, in here.

And that standard you were trying to hold in your head, chasing everyone to match, it just becomes the path of least resistance. The easiest thing to make is now the on-brand thing to make. You've stopped policing consistency and started getting it by default.

The prescription (to camera, one line)

So the prescription is this. Stop trying to hire consistency into your team. Build the system that makes it the default.

Your people aren't inconsistent. They're each guessing, alone, from a blank page. Give them one page to copy from, and the whole business starts to look like one company again. Because it finally is one.

Homework

A one-page starter for your single source of truth. The same sheet I open on day one with a new studio client, before we make anything.

1. List every place your brand shows up: deck, site, socials, product, email, invoices, all of it.
2. Screenshot each one and lay them side by side. This is the honest bit. This is what your customer actually sees.
3. Write down the decisions that should be the same across all of them but aren't: the exact colours, the fonts, the logo, the tone.

That last list is your system's first page. Every item on it is a decision you're currently making five times instead of once. That's the free version of what we'd build with you, and it shows you exactly where the business is leaking consistency.

CTA

• Comment SYSTEM and I'll send you the one-page starter from this session, then tell me which of your touchpoints is the worst offender.
• Which one lets your brand down the most: the deck, the site, the socials, or the product? Drop it below and I'll tell you where I'd start.
• Send this to the founder you know whose brand looks like five different companies, and tell them it's fixable.

Post image text

• one brand. four touchpoints. four different companies.
• your team isn't inconsistent. they're guessing.
• consistency isn't a standard you police. it's a system.

LinkedIn adaptation

Hook line

A founder told me every part of their business looked like a different company made it. The deck, the site, the socials, the product. They thought they had a talent problem.

Body

They didn't. They hire well. That was never it.

What they had was a memory problem.

Four touchpoints, four people, four different days, and every one of them started from a blank page. No shared reference. No agreed decisions. Just each person's best guess, made alone.

Of course it didn't match. Taste is personal. The moment the founder left the room, everyone fell back on their own, and their own was all over the place.

You can't hire your way out of that. Better people still guess if you give them nothing to copy from.

The fix isn't a rebrand. It's a single source of truth. One file holding the decisions that keep getting re-made: the exact colours, the two typefaces, the spacing, the logo rules, the tone, a handful of ready-made blocks.

Make each decision once. Then every deck, post and screen pulls from the same place.

Consistency stops being a standard you police and becomes the easiest thing to make. The path of least resistance is now the on-brand one.

That's the whole trick. You don't chase consistency across a team. You remove the need to.

Close

Most "brand consistency" problems aren't about taste. They're about memory. What's the one decision your team is currently making five times instead of once?