Vector & Verse

09/10/2026

Every business has things that are completely obvious to the people inside it.

Of course that’s the package you need.
Of course you click there to book.
Of course that phrase means this.
Of course everyone knows you can ask Susan.

Susan knows.
The rest of us have never met Susan. 😂

That’s one of the strange things about knowing your own business incredibly well. Knowledge helps you run it, but it can also make it harder to see the little gaps somebody encounters when they arrive without any of it.

I spend a lot of time deliberately trying to lose that knowledge for a while. Not because everything needs fixing, and not because customers need every tiny detail explaining to them, but because I want to know whether the journey still makes sense when you don’t already know the route.

It turns out this isn’t something I learned when I started V&V. Looking back, I’ve been doing versions of it across a fairly ridiculous collection of careers.

Different work. Same brain.

So I wrote about that here:

Words . Design . Strategy . Sorted I've spent the last 15 years building businesses where people choose to spend their time.Some have been brilliantly successful. Some have taught me lessons the hard way.Now I help other business owners build places people remember, recommend and come back to. Talk...

07/10/2026

When I teach, it’s fairly obvious when my communication hasn’t worked.

I go left.
Half the room goes right.

There are suddenly people facing one another who absolutely weren’t expecting to be.

Useful information. 😂

In a business, the equivalent can happen without you ever seeing it. Somebody can’t find the information they need, doesn’t understand an option, gets halfway through trying to book or buy something and quietly gives up.

Nobody turns the wrong way in front of you. Nobody necessarily complains.
They just disappear.

Which is one of the reasons looking at a business from the inside and experiencing it as a customer can produce two completely different pictures.

One has all the background knowledge.
The other just arrived.

And sometimes the most interesting stuff happens in between.

06/10/2026

I’ve discovered that my working life makes slightly more sense than I thought it did.

This is inconvenient because I was quite attached to the theory that I’ve simply spent several decades wandering professionally towards whatever looked interesting. 😂

I’ve worked in performance, dance, fitness, teaching, business development, marketing and consultancy. These days I have two businesses which, from the outside, appear to have been assigned to me by some sort of occupational random-number generator.

But while writing something this week, I realised there actually is a thread running through all of it.

I’m fascinated by what something feels like from the other side.

What does the audience receive? What does the person at the back of the class experience? What does the customer understand when they don’t already know everything the business knows?

Apparently the jobs have changed quite dramatically, but that bit of my brain has just kept turning up for work.

I wrote about it properly here: The View From the Other Side.
www.vectorandverse.co.uk

There’s even a career climbing frame and a sports bra involved, because obviously there is.

Words . Design . Strategy . Sorted I've spent the last 15 years building businesses where people choose to spend their time.Some have been brilliantly successful. Some have taught me lessons the hard way.Now I help other business owners build places people remember, recommend and come back to. Talk...

01/10/2026

People very rarely tell you when your customer journey has mildly pi**ed them off.

Which is quite inconvenient, really.

Nobody sends you a message saying:

“Hi! I was actually quite interested in giving you some money at about 11.07 this morning, but by 11.14 I had seven tabs open, couldn’t remember which package I needed and decided to make toast instead.”

They just make the toast. 😂

And from your side, everything looks fine.

Website worked. Links worked. Form loaded. Nothing caught fire.

You just didn’t get the customer.

It’s usually pretty obvious when something is properly broken. The harder stuff to spot is all the tiny bits of effort — hunting for a price, rereading something because you’re not quite sure what it means, comparing three options that sound suspiciously similar or trying to work out what you’re actually supposed to do next.

One of those probably won’t lose somebody.

Add enough of them together and apparently toast starts looking like the better option.

Sometimes “nothing is broken” and “this is working really well” are two different things.

29/09/2026

Let’s say something in your business used to take a customer nine steps.

It was a pain in the arse.

So you’ve worked on it, removed three steps completely, automated something horrible and finally got rid of that bloody form everybody hated.

It now takes six.

Excellent. 🎉

Except your new customer has absolutely no idea it used to take nine.

They’ve just been given six things to do.

And I think this is something we can easily miss when we’re improving our own businesses. We naturally compare the new version with the old one because we know how much better it is.

The customer doesn’t have the old version to compare it with.

They’re just standing there looking at six steps.

That doesn’t automatically mean six is too many. They might all need to be there. But it’s worth occasionally forgetting how much better something is than it *was* and asking how it feels to somebody meeting it for the first time.

Because “we’ve made this loads easier” and “this is easy” aren’t necessarily the same thing.

27/09/2026

Slightly harsh business thought for the day…

Your customer doesn’t really care how difficult your business is to run. 😂

They don’t know that the form they’ve just filled in used to be three forms, that you spent two months getting your booking system to talk nicely to your CRM, or that the innocent-looking button they’ve just pressed is being held together behind the scenes by four bits of software, seventeen automations and Steve from IT performing what can only be described as witchcraft.

They just care whether the button works.

And that’s not because customers are ungrateful. It’s because all the stuff happening behind the scenes isn’t their job.

We see our businesses from the inside, so we see all the work, the improvements and the things we’ve made SO much easier than they used to be.

The customer only sees what we’ve put in front of them.

And sometimes those are two very different experiences.

I’ve written more about this on the V&V blog this week - including why making something *better than it was* doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve made it easy.

Words . Design . Strategy . Sorted I've spent the last 15 years building businesses where people choose to spend their time.Some have been brilliantly successful. Some have taught me lessons the hard way.Now I help other business owners build places people remember, recommend and come back to. Talk...

21/09/2026

A little business-owner confession time…👀

Have you ever had a customer ask you a question and your immediate thought has been:

“But that's obvious.”

And then you've gone to show them where the answer is and discovered...

Oh.

It isn't. 😂

Or it is there, but it's buried halfway down a page nobody would reasonably think to look at.

Or you've used an industry term that makes perfect sense to you and absolutely f**k all sense to a normal human being.

Or there are three different ways to get in touch and even you can't quite remember which one you actually want people to use.

It happens ridiculously easily because we spend so much time inside our own businesses that our brains automatically fill in the missing information.

So, purely because I'm nosy:

What's something a customer has pointed out about your business that made you think, “Huh. Fair point actually”?

No judgement. 😂

I spend an unreasonable amount of my working life finding exactly this stuff.

08/09/2026

Somewhere in almost every business is a process that made perfect sense when it started.

Someone fills in an enquiry form. It lands with Jo in Sales, who adds it to a spreadsheet and sends it to Mark in Operations. Mark checks something with Finance, Finance sends it back, Mark sends it back to Jo and eventually Jo emails the customer.

Nobody is entirely sure what Finance checks anymore, including possibly Finance, but everybody knows it has to go there. 😂

There was a reason for all of this once. Maybe the system couldn't do something. Maybe somebody was off. Maybe there was one spectacular incident involving an invoice in 2022 and a process was hastily invented to make sure it NEVER HAPPENED AGAIN. Whatever happened, somebody probably said, “We'll just do it this way for now.”

The trouble is, “for now” has a remarkable habit of becoming “this is how we do it.”

Businesses collect these things without really noticing. Temporary spreadsheets that are now old enough to start school. Extra approvals that were added as a precaution. Manual emails and little workarounds that everybody knows about, so nobody thinks they're particularly strange anymore.

None of it is spectacularly broken, which is probably exactly why it survives. It works. Technically.

Then somebody comes along without years of company history stored in their head, looks at the whole thing and asks, “Why do you do it like that?”

Sometimes there's a perfectly good answer. Other times there's a slightly uncomfortable pause while everybody tries to remember, before somebody eventually says, “That's just how it is.”

And I think that's an interesting sentence, because sometimes “that's just how it is” really means “it's been like that for so long that nobody thinks to ask anymore.”

Maybe the useful question isn't always, “What should we do next?”

Sometimes it's simply, “Why are we still doing that?”

06/09/2026

One of the problems with owning a business is that eventually you forget what its like being a customer of it.

You can't really help it, because you know too much. You know that if you click Services, scroll past the big picture, ignore the first button because that's for something else, click the tiny bit that says More Information and then go into the second tab, there's the price.

Perfectly straightforward.

Except it absolutely f**king isn't. 😂

It's the business equivalent of giving somebody directions by saying, “Turn left where Woolies used to be.” YOU know where Woolworths used to be. They've just moved here.

We do this in businesses all the time. We automatically fill in the gaps because we know what's supposed to happen. We know what the weirdly named service means, which form somebody needs to use and what happens once they've filled it in. We know Sandra from that department will email them afterwards, so it doesn't occur to us that absolutely nowhere have we explained that.

Sandra knows. You know. Your customer does not know Sandra.

So let's try a slightly uncomfortable little experiment. Go and see if you can buy something from your own business. Start somewhere you wouldn't normally start and pretend you know absolutely nothing that isn't actually in front of you.

See how far you get before your brain helpfully goes, “Well obviously you'd just…”

And when it does, stop.

Because “obviously” is usually where it gets interesting...

03/09/2026

Apparently we’ve reached the point where I should probably tell people what it actually costs to work with me. 😂

I know. Revolutionary.

I’ve talked quite a lot recently with a lot of people about what I notice when I look at businesses from the outside. The things that don’t quite join up. The stuff you can’t see anymore because you already know how it’s supposed to work. The marketing you’re doing because somebody once told you that you should, and the perfectly bloody good bits that really don’t need another consultant interfering with them.

So I’ve finally put some proper edges around that work.

It’s called The Outside Looking In.

I experience your business as somebody encountering it for the first time, then we get into what you’re actually trying to achieve, and I go away and work out where those two versions of the business aren’t quite meeting.

You get the diagnosis, my thinking and a clear plan for what I’d do first.

It costs £895.

There. Actual price. On the internet. Nobody even had to book a discovery call to find out. 😂

If your business has got to the point where you suspect you might be too close to it to see what everybody else is seeing, the details are now on the V&V website.

The Outside Looking In is officially a thing.

Words . Design . Strategy . Sorted I've spent the last 15 years building businesses where people choose to spend their time.Some have been brilliantly successful. Some have taught me lessons the hard way.Now I help other business owners build places people remember, recommend and come back to. Talk...