The guiding questions
Between five and seven questions you need to be able to answer. They aren't inspiration: they're the session's agenda.
The twenty-one-station workshop that goes from who you are to what you post on Tuesday
A complete method for defining a brand and carrying it down, with no leaps, to what gets published on each channel. Four phases, twenty-one stations and one rule: no station is closed with a conversation; it's closed with a written sentence.
Almost every company has both ends. At the top, something resembling a brand: some values, a logo, an idea of who they are. At the bottom, a publishing calendar that has to be filled every week. What's missing is the middle stretch, and that's why the content ends up looking like anyone else's.
This workshop is that stretch. Each station produces a written decision, and that decision is the raw material for the next one. When someone asks “why are we publishing this?”, the answer has to be able to trace the map back to a box in phase 2. If it can't, the piece doesn't belong.
A brand isn't what you say about yourself: it's what someone is able to repeat about you when you're not in the room.
The bottleneck is always station 05, positioning. If that box stays blurry, everything that comes after it turns into an argument about taste—and arguments about taste are won by whoever talks loudest, not by whoever is right.
They're worked through in order. What's decided in one feeds the next, and the arrow is a real dependency, not an aesthetic order. Each station closes with what its bottom line says: if that isn't written down, the station isn't closed.
What the business lives on, who decides and what you're really competing against. Without this phase, the brand gets written in internal-meeting language and nobody outside recognises it.
“We make money when , and twelve months from now we want to account for % of revenue.”
The company filter, one persona per column and five verbatim customer sentences, with their quotation marks and their repetitions.
“The gap we occupy is , and we can hold it because .”
The six decisions that don't get reopened afterwards. It's the most expensive phase to change and the cheapest one to close properly.
One page with purpose, vision, mission and three to five values, each with its trade-off written next to it. A value without a trade-off isn't finished.
One single sentence, voted on and signed by whoever is in charge. From then on, any piece that contradicts it goes, however good it is.
“We promise that . You can believe it because . We don't promise .” All three sentences together, or none.
One dominant archetype and one supporting one, four tone scales marked away from the centre and three rules for how the tone shifts with the context.
Claim, master message, three supporting messages, a yes list and a no list of vocabulary, and five before-and-after pairs.
A one-page brief and a twelve-image moodboard, each image with a sentence on what's taken from it.
The bridge. It turns the brand into objectives, funnel, offer and channels. It's the phase almost everyone skips and the reason the content doesn't sell.
A written chain of five linked numbers: business → marketing → stage → channel → a single North Star.
The five stages with their question, their content and their metric, and the broken step circled.
A defined entry offer, one dominant CTA written out word for word and a single link with its parameter convention.
One row per stage: what's said, with what proof, in what format and where it pushes towards.
One main channel, one supporting and one on maintenance, each with its role, its KPI and its named owner.
One page, signed by one person—not by a committee—with a review date.
Putting it into practice: pillars, the voice of each place, calendar and measurement. Nothing new gets decided here; what's been decided gets done.
Three to five pillars, each with its origin written next to it and twenty possible titles underneath. Those titles are already the calendar.
The rules of register, length and format for each channel. The register changes; the vocabulary, the enemy and the promise never do.
One sheet per active channel, and a “closed, not publishing” note for each channel you decide not to feed.
A fixed day per channel, a production block in a named person's calendar and four weeks already planned.
A written parameter convention, a dashboard with five numbers and the three meetings already in the calendar.
The checklist stuck up wherever anyone writes, including the prompt used to ask a model for text.
They all carry the same things, in the same place. That repetition is what lets the workshop be run by someone who didn't design it.
Between five and seven questions you need to be able to answer. They aren't inspiration: they're the session's agenda.
A real, specific answer, to calibrate the level of detail. It lets you argue against something rather than against a blank sheet.
The specific mistake people make in that box. It's written before you start because reading it afterwards is no use at all.
The exact sentence that has to be left written down. Until it exists, the station stays open, however good the conversation has been.
Under each station there's a blank space, and a colour code that's respected all the way through: yellow is your draft, green is a closed decision that isn't reopened, and pink is a doubt or an inconsistency that's taken to the next session. Whatever isn't decided is coloured pink; it isn't left in grey waiting for it to sort itself out.
The quality of everything that follows depends on this. Gathering it takes a week and it's the part people skip most.
Revenue mix by line and by client. Average deal size, margin and length of the sales cycle. The real source of the last thirty clients, one by one. Web analytics and CRM volume by stage.
Five good clients—why they chose you and the words they use to say so—two lost ones and three internal ones: founders, sales and delivery. Recorded and transcribed: the verbatim sentences are the raw material for station 08.
Website, landing pages and sales decks. The last five proposals sent. The social profiles as they are, with screenshots. Five direct competitors and two reference points from another sector.
The last filter before publishing. If a piece fails two of these ten points, it doesn't go out. Copy it wherever anyone writes—including the prompt you use to ask a model for text.
What to do when it fails: a piece that fails point 1 isn't fixed by writing better—it gets thrown out, because the problem is one of strategy, not of writing. The ones that fail 3 to 9 are corrected in five minutes. The one that fails 10 is set aside and talked about in person.
If, on reading it, no potential client thinks “this isn't for me”, you haven't positioned: you've described. Without a trade-off there's no position.
Excellence, innovation, commitment, closeness. Anyone would sign up to them, so they filter nothing. A good value sounds odd outside your company and sometimes uncomfortable inside it.
“Raise awareness” isn't an objective, because nobody knows what to do with that sentence on Monday morning. If you can't draw the chain from “bill X” to “publish Y”, it's activity, not strategy.
Nobody sticks to it by March. Four weeks in detail and the quarter in headlines only. And choose the frequency you can sustain in the worst month of the year, not the best.
Six files. If they don't exist at the end of the four phases, the workshop has been a pleasant conversation and nothing more.
Afterwards it's reviewed in layers, each at its own pace: phase 4 every month, phase 3 every quarter, phase 2 every two years. The lower down the map, the faster it changes. The higher up, the more expensive it is to change. Changing channel is fine; changing the positioning every quarter means it was never really decided.
PDF workbook, with the twenty-one stations and their blank spaces
The twenty-one stations with their guiding questions, the trap in each one and the sentence that closes it. Designed to be printed out and written on.
Everything in the file is also on this page, open and without asking for anything. The email is so we can send you the version you can print and take to a session.
Done. Here it is.
Download the workbook as a PDFIf the file doesn't open, save this link: it will keep working.
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