Businesses evolve incrementally, but their communications often remain frozen at an earlier version of the business.
Businesses rarely change overnight. They evolve. Nobody consciously decides to let them become outdated. It happens because a new sector is added here, a different type of project is won there, the team grows, the business becomes more sophisticated, but the website, capability material, and project descriptions are still telling the old story.
But communications don't always evolve at the same pace.
For architecture and design practices specifically, there are some very recognisable symptoms:
The website still gives prominence to sectors the practice is moving away from.
New areas of expertise are represented by a heading and a few projects, but haven't actually been articulated.
The practice has moved upmarket, but the language still sounds like the smaller studio it was five years ago.
Project pages describe what was designed but don't capture the increasingly sophisticated expertise behind the work.
Practice leaders describe the practice one way in meetings, while the website describes it another way.
Capability statements, award submissions, tenders, LinkedIn and the website have gradually developed different versions of the business.
The best explanation of what the practice does now exists primarily inside the heads of the people running it.
Your website may still reflect the practice you were five years ago. Your capability statement may have been updated project by project without anyone reconsidering the overall story. Sector pages may have been added as opportunities emerged, while older messages remain in place around them.
Nothing is necessarily wrong. It's simply no longer an accurate picture of the business.
And that matters, because prospective clients can only assess the practice you show them.
This gap matters most when you're trying to go somewhere new
A new project leads to another in the same sector. A capability that was once peripheral becomes a significant part of the practice. The team grows. New expertise comes in. The scale of work changes. The clients change. Sometimes the ambitions of the business change too.
Outdated communications become particularly noticeable when a practice is trying to change something about the business.
You may want to move into a new sector, pursue larger projects, attract a different type of client or build a stronger profile around expertise that has developed over time. But if your communications still reflect where the practice has been, prospective clients are being asked to make a leap you have already made internally.
You know that you now have significant experience in adaptive reuse, for example. But does someone encountering the practice for the first time know that? Can they see the depth of that experience, the projects that demonstrate it and the particular expertise your team has developed?
The same applies when a practice has grown in scale or sophistication. The work may have changed considerably while the language surrounding it has barely moved.
This creates a disconnect between the business you are operating and the business you are presenting to the market.
And the greater your ambitions for what comes next, the more that disconnect matters.
Start with what has changed
Before rewriting anything, step away from the website.
Look at the business itself.
What work are you doing now that you weren't doing three or five years ago? Which capabilities have become stronger? Where have you developed genuine specialist expertise? Which projects best represent the work you want more of? Has your ideal client changed? Are there sectors you want to grow, and others that are no longer strategically important?
Then look at your communications through that lens. The objective isn't to reinvent the practice or manufacture a new positioning statement. Often, the strongest material is already there. It simply hasn't made its way into the way the business presents itself.
Has your business moved on?
If your practice has evolved but your communications haven't kept pace, we can help you work out where the gaps are and what needs to change.
Talk to us about a communications review.