It’s fine. She tells her friends you “work in computers,” or “do something with marketing,” and everyone nods and moves on to the cricket. You stopped correcting her years ago.
But here’s the uncomfortable bit. If the people who love you can’t explain your business, the strangers you’d like to pay you have no chance at all.
When business goes quiet, we reach for the obvious fix: more marketing. More ads, more posts, a new logo, a website refresh. It feels productive. It’s usually the wrong fix, and an expensive one. Because most of the time you don’t need more marketing. People just can’t tell what you do. Your marketing isn’t bad. Your message is blurry, and no amount of money spent getting attention helps if people squint and wander off.
What blurry actually costs you
You never get the bill for this in one place, which is why it’s easy to miss. It turns up in bits. People land on your website, give it the five-second skim we all do, find nothing that tells them what this is or who it’s for, and leave. You pay the same for an ad whether or not anyone understands it. You spend whole sales calls explaining what you do instead of what it would do for them. And your mum, bless her, still tells people you “do something with computers.”
It’s all the same problem in a different outfit: one blurry sentence in the middle of the business, quietly making everything around it harder and more expensive.
The three usual suspects
When a message is blurry, it’s almost always one of three things. Once you’ve met them, you’ll spot them everywhere, including, sorry in advance, on your own website.
You’re trying to be for everyone. It feels safe. Wide net, more fish. In practice, “we work with businesses of all shapes and sizes” lands with absolutely no one, because no one feels spoken to. The bookkeeper who says “I help tradies stop dreading tax time” will beat the one who says “accounting solutions for all industries” every day of the week. Specific isn’t smaller. Specific is stickier.
You’re listing what it does, not what people get. This is the big one. We’re so close to our own work that we describe the machinery. “It has a dashboard, automated reports, and live tracking.” Lovely. But nobody lies awake at night wanting a dashboard. They want to stop spending Sunday evening doing the roster. So tell them they’ll get their Sundays back. The feature is the how. The payoff is the why, and the why is what people actually buy.
You’re making big claims with nothing behind them. “World-class.” “Industry-leading.” “The best in the business.” These words have been said so many times they’ve stopped meaning anything. They’re the business version of “trust me.” If you can’t put a number, a fact, or a real customer’s words next to a claim, a sceptical buyer won’t believe it. And your buyer is always a little bit sceptical.
(Marketers have a fancy word for all of this, by the way. Positioning. Don’t worry about the word. It just means being clear on what you do, who it’s for, and why you’re worth it.)
A ten-second gut check
You don’t need an audit or a strategy day to work out if this is you. Try these.
Tell someone what you do, once, then ask them to say it back to you. If they can’t, your sentence is carrying too much.
Look at your homepage and ask whether a total stranger would know, in five seconds, who it’s for. If it could be for anyone, it’s landing with no one.
Read your own description and ask whether you’re telling people what they get, or just what you’ve built. If it’s all features, you’ve left the good part out.
If you flinched at any of those, good. That’s the leak, and it’s a cheap one to fix.
The fix costs less than more marketing
Sorting this out sounds like a big, pricey project. It isn’t. It comes down to one clear sentence, and a few honest ones that back it up. No degree, no budget. Just the right questions, in the right order, and an honest look at your answers.
That’s why I built a free tool to walk you through it. It asks the questions, shows you where your message goes blurry, and hands back wording you can use. An afternoon, and it costs nothing.
Clear beats clever. Sort the sentence first, and everything after it gets easier, cheaper, and a good deal less tiring.
Your mum might even get it right at the next family dinner. No promises.