Skip to main content
Chapter 1 asks more of you than any chapter that follows, and nearly all of it lands in the first few weeks. That front-loading is deliberate. The interviews are the raw material, and there is no version of this work where we produce a true message without the founder or leading executives in the room. After this chapter, our claim on your calendar drops considerably. Chapter 2 is mostly us building. Chapter 3 is a recurring rhythm you settle into. This is the demanding part.

​
Time

About two hours for the messaging workshop, with the founder or executive team present and not multitasking. If your engagement calls for a series of interviews rather than a single session, expect three to five conversations of roughly sixty minutes. If a go-to-market plan is in scope, add six weekly sessions of about an hour each. Then review time. Two rounds of consolidated feedback on each document, turned around inside a week. This is the single biggest lever you hold on how long Chapter 1 takes, and it is almost always the reason a four-week piece becomes a ten-week one.

​
People

The founder or leading executive, or whoever actually holds the conviction the company is built on. This cannot be delegated to marketing. The message we are going to carry for years has to come from the person who believes it. One named decision-maker who can approve without convening a committee. Everyone can have input. One person approves. Whoever runs sales, for at least part of the messaging conversation. They hear the objections in real time, and they know which sentences make a prospect lean in. If you can facilitate a conversation or two with actual customers, that is the highest-value input available to this chapter, and the one most often skipped.

​
Material

Send whatever exists, including the version you are not proud of. We would rather see the real state of things than a tidied one because the gap between the two is usually where the useful insight lives.
Any prior messaging work, positioning decks, brand guides, or strategy documents, even outdated ones. Knowing what you have already tried and abandoned saves us proposing it again.
Your current deck, the emails that actually get replies, and any objection-handling notes your team keeps. The sentences that work in a live conversation are frequently better than anything on the website.
Closed-won and closed-lost from the last twelve months in whatever form it exists, plus call recordings or notes if you keep them. Patterns are more honest than recollection.
Website access, social accounts, and any analytics you have, even if nobody has logged in for a year. Especially then.
Original source files if they exist, the logo in whatever formats are circulating, current templates, and a list of every place the brand appears. That list is always longer than expected.

​
Posture

One thing that is harder to put on a checklist. The most useful moment in a messaging workshop is when you stop sounding like a CEO and start sounding like a person—when the polished answer gives way to the actual reason you built this. We will keep asking the same question in different words until we get there. It can feel like we are not listening. We are. The first answer is almost always the corporate version, the second is closer, and the third is usually the one worth building a decade of work on.
Everything here is gathered once, at the start, and reused across the whole chapter. If you want a head start before kickoff, the material section above is the list to work from.