I had two exploratory calls with prospective clients recently, and both started with a clear ask. One wanted support around a public launch. The other wanted support ahead of high-stakes funding conversations.
Most engagements start this way, with a founder or marketing lead coming in knowing exactly what they want. But the ask is rarely the entirety of the work, because their idea of what communications is becomes the ceiling on what they think to ask for.
If you believe PR is media relations, a press release or social media posts, that is what you ask for. The request reflects the definition, and the definition is usually narrower than the need.
You can usually hear a company’s definition of communications in the first conversation. And that conversation is critical, because it’s where the offhand comments surface:
- “We have a great leadership team but I’m really not sure who would be willing to speak to media.”
- “LinkedIn is a great tool but I really don’t think I have much to share with my network.”
- “I just wish people appreciated how critical this issue is, but no one is talking about it from this perspective.”
- “Our science is strong, but investors keep getting stuck on the wrong part of the story.”
Those comments are what broaden the scope of what’s possible.
What they see is a list of items to handle: a launch announcement, an investor deck, a website update, a LinkedIn presence, a media strategy. What I see is a set of visible deliverables sitting on a foundation that may be too uneven to support them. The release needs a clear story. The deck needs credibility. The website needs positioning. Executive visibility needs a point of view. Media strategy needs a clear answer to who should care and why.
The work is not always messaging. Sometimes the foundation is uneven because the audience is too broad, the proof points are thin, the sequencing is off, the leadership voice is underdeveloped, the internal story is inconsistent or the company has not yet answered the hard question everyone else will ask. But the pattern is the same: the brief names the visible output. The real work is finding what must be strengthened underneath it.
Consider the alternative. One team sharpens the messaging. Another builds the website. Someone else drafts the announcement. Another person prepares the founder for investor conversations. Each piece may be competent on its own, but if they are not working from the same strategic foundation, the story starts to splinter. The site says something slightly different from the deck, which says something slightly different from the CEO’s LinkedIn, which says something different again in the first interview. Now you’re paying to reconcile four versions of a story that should have started as one.
Run as one program, the same effort travels further. What’s built for one audience feeds the next. Nothing contradicts. The company sounds like itself everywhere it shows up, and that consistency is most of what makes people believe it.
So when a client hands me a brief, I read it as the first visible piece of something larger rather than the whole assignment. The deliverable they name is real. It’s just rarely the job.
