Hey —
Did we forget about each other?
It's been a minute since I sent a thing. That's partly because I was heads-down rebuilding — new website, new positioning, new ways of working. Some epic-sized side quests. But it's also because sending something out means being seen. And if there's one thing I've learned from the work I do, it's that the people who help others be visible are often the worst at it themselves. 🙋♀️
So here I am, leading by example. Because if I'm going to spend my days telling business owners to stop hiding in plain sight, I should probably stop hiding in plain sight.
Let's get into it.
The pattern
Here's something I've been noticing....
A business owner sits across from me — or on a Zoom call, or at a dinner party — and explains what they do. And it's fascinating. The way they talk about their work, you can feel the specificity. The judgment calls they make. The thing they see that nobody else sees. The reason their clients come back. Faces all lit up, with incredible stories underneath the taglines.
Then I look at their website. And it could belong to literally anyone in their industry.
"We deliver innovative solutions for forward-thinking businesses."
"Helping you achieve your full potential."
"Bold strategies for businesses who give a damn."
That last one was mine, by the way. For three years.
If you can explain what you do in conversation, why does your website sound like everyone else's?
Why it feels safe
Because specific is risky. Generic feels professional. When you write "we deliver results-driven strategies," nobody's going to argue with that. Nobody's going to say "that's not for me." But nobody's going to remember it, either.
We default to generic because it feels like a wider net. If we don't say exactly who we're for, we can't accidentally exclude anyone. If we don't name the specific thing we do better than anyone else, we can't be wrong about it.
The problem is: safe is invisible. A wider net catches nothing if nobody is enticed into the water.
Weirdly, most of us know this. We know our copy is vague. We know it doesn't sound like us. We tell ourselves we'll fix it later. But the real reason we don't fix it isn't time or budget.
It's that writing the specific version means deciding who we are..... And that's terrifying.
What courage looks like
I'll go first.
For my first three years working for myself, my homepage said "Bold Strategies for Businesses Who Give a Damn." It sounded punchy. It felt like me. But it could have been any consultant, any strategist, any agency with a social conscience and a Squarespace template, with literally just about any offering you could imagine.
I got away with it because I worked almost entirely on referrals. People who'd worked with me would send others my way. But here's the thing — those referrals often didn't know what to refer me for. They'd say "you should talk to Kate, she's great." Great at what? It was warm, but it was vague. And I was leaving opportunity on the table because people couldn't articulate my value when I wasn't in the room.
Earlier this year, I changed it. My site now says "I Make the Invisible, Seen." It tells a specific story about the kind of work I do — taking the expertise, instinct, and judgment that business owners carry but can't articulate, and making it visible to the people who need to find them. I still do the broader work. But now people know what to come to me for. And more importantly, they know what to tell others.
That shift — from "bold strategies" to "making the invisible seen" — wasn't a copywriting exercise. It was a courage exercise.
I'm not the only one.
If you've been to the Inn at Bay Fortune on PEI, you know it as one of the most extraordinary culinary experiences in the country. But one of the people who's made it unforgettable isn't the famous head chef — it's a chef named Nick.
Nick had a passion for foraging. He'd been quietly bringing foraged ingredients to the kitchen — wild herbs, mushrooms, plants most people walk past without noticing — and working them into the evening menu. It was a quiet contribution. Good work, done well, inside someone else's story.
Then he found the voice to ask: what if he took guests on foraging walks during the off-season? When the farm was quieter, when there was space for something different?
He stopped being "a chef at the Inn" and started being the chef who forages, ferments, and preserves the food that's all around us. The engagement exploded. People started following him specifically — not the Inn, not the head chef, him. They knew what he was about. They knew what to tell their friends. He's got a book deal now. Not because he became a different person, but because he let a specific part of himself become visible. (@nickofnorth on Instagram if you want to see what it looks like when someone stops being generic.). And because it is the most cutely Canadian thing I can think of, when he summoned the courage to ask, the head chef's response was..."I've been waiting for you to ask."
And if you want to see this play out at massive scale: Oatly.
For twenty years, Oatly was a forgettable Swedish oat milk in a forgettable carton. Revenue was rumoured to have hovered around $30-40 million. The product was fine but the brand was invisible.
Then in 2012 they hired a creative director and blew the whole thing up. The new packaging read like a person, not a brand. They printed things like "It's like milk but made for humans" right on the carton. They put the creative director's personal phone number on the packaging. When the Swedish dairy industry sued them over their tagline, they published the entire legal ruling on their website. Sales spiked.
The oat milk was the same oat milk, different font. What changed was they stopped trying to appeal to everyone and started having an opinion.
By 2021, revenue hit $643 million. They IPO'd at a $10 billion valuation. Their CEO sang "Wow, wow, no cow" badly in a Super Bowl ad — on purpose — and website traffic jumped 212%.
From $40 million to $643 million. Just took some courage.
The reframe
The things we're afraid to say are the things that make us unforgettable.
It might be the weirdo who REALLY loves orange and also builds really performant infrastructure. The philosopher electrician. The foraging chef. The oat milk company that talks like your weird friend. The introvert who loves shining a light on others. The collector of hobbies.
The weirder the better in the age of AI. Our pimples make us human, friends.
We all carry some combination of skills, interests, and perspectives that are genuinely and uniquely ours. The instinct is to smooth it out, make it "professional," file off the edges until it could belong to anyone. But the edges are the point. Nobody remembers the smooth version.
Your invisible expertise... the judgment calls you make without thinking, the thing clients come to you for that you've never named, that's not a quirk to hide, no friend, it's the whole value proposition.
One thing to try
Pick one. Any one. Do it this week.
- Ask three people who've worked with you: "What do you tell others I do?" Compare their answers to your website. Sometimes the best next step is to see how wide the gap is between what you're comfortable saying, and what people already see.
- Find the sentence on your website that could belong to any competitor. "Results-driven." "Innovative solutions." "Passionate about helping businesses grow." That's the sentence to kill first. Grab that red pen. (don't write on your monitor)
- Describe what you do to a stranger — out loud, not written. Record yourself on your phone. Play it back. The version you say is almost always more specific, more alive, and more you than the version you wrote.
- Write down the weirdest, most specific thing about how you work. The thing you'd never put on a website. The obsession, the quirk, the thing that lights you up. Now ask: what if you did?
That's the first issue. My goal this year: be in your inbox every two weeks with another pattern hiding in plain sight.
If this landed, forward it to someone whose website doesn't sound like them. (They already know — they just haven't done anything about it yet)
— Kate
Kate Dole runs Growth Grove, a strategic consulting & design practice for good folks & businesses looking to beat the plateau. She makes the invisible, seen.