"No really, why am I valuable?"

This was the question I had chosen to ask myself recently. Sometimes it’s good to run some humble stock-taking. So I’d laboriously assembled a reel of the work I’d helped developed over the many, many years. Watching it I’d found myself feeling damn proud of a very great deal of it. And I counted myself as immensely lucky and spectacularly privileged to have worked with the very best of the best for so long

But helping get to the work has never been the source of my value. I think back to all the gnarly, knotty problems that my clients have asked me to help solve with them…

The beauty brand that had been using celebrity endorsement for almost a hundred years and had run out of ideas.

The brand that wanted to escape relying on an executional formula and and unlock a real brand platform

The client wanting a consistent promise for a brand whose product proposition needed to change every year, and for good reason.

The client whose brand had built a user base that was setting a standard a new generation had no interest in.

The client in the efficiency business who wanted to move their brand into the entertainment business.

The client with a brand whose accessible pricing meant that its engineering and innovation brilliance wasn’t getting the respect it deserved.

The client whose brand had got its value proposition back to front.

The client who was finding that a deeply authentic, one hundred year-old story of craft and tradition wasn’t enough of a reason to buy in an ocean of a deeply authentic one hundred year-old stories of craft and tradition.

The client with a brand that had become addicted to innovation and whose core business was collapsing.

The client with a brand and business that was changing the world but was crippled by humility.

The client wanting to turn a fractured global brand into a unified and coherent one but whose only distinctive association was that it was found everywhere in the world.

The client facing two immense fronts of competition with a bag of features and no compelling promise.

The client who was wanting to extract a true cultural agenda from what had descended into a well-branded advertising cliche.

The client who no longer wanted their business to be the biggest spender on paid search in the world.

The client at a multi-billion dollar enterprise that couldn’t articulate in human terms why they were building what they were building.

Et cetera.

I absolutely love helping develop and deliver exceptional creative work. Done right, it’s a wild, wild ride (done wrong its like sitting in a self-driving vehicle going to Dullsville).

But what I find even greater pride and satisfaction in is wrestling big, unwieldy, critical, or complex problems to the ground to actually get to a lasting, better, and more valuable future for my clients. For the fact is that each and every one of these problems yielded not just “work” but a business-transforming brand platform.

We say that it’s all about “the work” as if (in a world that’s just had certainty and predictability vacuumed out of it) clients are merely shopping for outputs and assets, not outcomes. And then complain about squeezed revenue and margins.

But it becomes ever more clear to me. Point to what you are proudest of, and you’ll find the scope of your value.