The brand review every MD should do in 20 minutes

You know your firm too well to see it clearly. That's not a criticism. It's an unavoidable consequence of having built something over a long period of time. Familiarity with your own business creates a kind of perceptual blindness that no amount of good judgement can fully correct for. You stopped seeing your brand the way a stranger sees it a long time ago, probably around the time it stopped feeling new.

That blindness has a commercial cost. And it's correctable.

The exercise is simple in principle and harder in practice. You're going to look at your firm as if you've never encountered it before. Not as the MD who knows what the team is capable of, who remembers why certain decisions were made, who can fill in the gaps between what the brand says and what the business actually is. As a prospective client who has heard your firm's name once, from a contact whose judgement they trust, and is now going to spend a few minutes working out whether it's worth getting in touch.

Start with a search. Type your firm's name into Google as that stranger would. Don't click anything yet. Look at what appears. The description beneath your website link, any other results on the first page, how recently anything has been updated. Ask yourself what this tells someone who knows nothing about you. Does it suggest a firm that's active, credible and worth clicking through to? Or does it suggest something harder to define but equally real, a firm that's present but not particularly alive?

Now click through to the website. Give yourself the amount of time a time-poor senior professional would actually spend, which is less than you think. Thirty seconds on the homepage. A quick look at the about page. Maybe a glance at recent work or news if it's easy to find. Pay attention to the immediate impression, not the content. Does the overall feeling match the quality of the firm you know it to be? Does it look like a business operating at the level you're actually operating at? Does anything give you a clear sense of what makes this firm worth choosing over the alternatives?

Then go to LinkedIn. Find the firm's page. Look at the profiles of the two or three most senior people. Look at what's been posted recently, or note the absence of anything recent. Ask what this collective presence communicates about the organisation behind it. Confidence? Engagement? A team that takes its professional reputation seriously? Or something more passive, a firm that exists on the platform without really inhabiting it?

Finally, step back and hold the overall impression. Not the individual elements but the cumulative effect of having moved through those touchpoints in sequence. What does this firm appear to be? What level does it seem to operate at? What kind of client would feel at home engaging it? Is that an accurate picture of your firm, or is it a version of your firm that's fallen some way behind the reality?

Most MDs who do this exercise with genuine honesty come away with the same feeling. Not shock, not crisis, but a quiet recognition of something they'd been half-aware of for a while. The brand is fine. It does the job well enough for the clients who already know the firm. But it isn't working hard enough for the ones who don't. It's not making the case clearly enough. It's not giving a cold prospect the confidence to make contact. It's leaving the heavy lifting to relationships and referrals that aren't always there.

That recognition is useful. It's the starting point for a more structured conversation about where the gap actually is and what it would take to close it.

Twenty minutes, honestly spent, tends to make that conversation feel less optional.

Want a more structured version of this exercise? The Growth Gap Assessment  takes you through it properly, covering every dimension of how your brand is performing and where it might be working against you. It's free and takes around 20 minutes.

If you'd rather just talk it through, we're easy to reach at hello@vove.agency