They thought the problem was their brand. So I started looking underneath it.

A school hired me to fix their growth blocks. Seven years old, doing fine, teaches an international syllabus online to families in a few different countries. They wanted a new logo and a redesigned website, and that was the brief.

The rebrand is now the last item on their nineteen step plan. And only if they are still keen on it by then.

So let me explain how that happened.

What is this series?

Normally I write about patterns, the stuff I see turning up in business after business. In this article I’m going to walk you through an actual job while it’s still going on.

Most people only share the version where everything worked and the consultant comes out looking clever. But I’m sharing the journey as the work is being done.

You’ll see what I found, what I told them, and the four separate times they came back and told me I was wrong. They were right all four times, which I’ll get to.

And because I’m writing this as I go, you’ll see me get something wrong at roughly the same time I notice. I’m sharing one such occurrence near the end of this article.

So who are they?

They started small, an at-home tutoring service. Covid pushed them online and they never went back, which is a story plenty of online businesses have.

Seven years on they teach an international syllabus from the first year of primary all the way through to the final school-leaving qualification, across a few countries in one region. One flat fee, and here’s the bit I like, it’s the same pricing whether your child is six or sixteen. Work goes out weekly with a deadline and comes back marked. If you message them, a real person answers.

Besides the teachers offering marking and tutoring, two people run the whole thing. The owner does the outside: managing finances, the website, anything facing the public. The operations manager does the inside: prospect communications, assessments, and all the contact with parents.

And before I go any further, it works. This wasn’t a rescue job. Good business, sensible people, real demand for what they do.

I need to mention that because almost everything written about this kind of work assumes the business is on fire, and most of the time it isn’t.

A business in trouble and a business that’s simply outgrown the way it’s run are two completely different animals, and you want to know which one you’re looking at before you start pulling things apart.

So what was actually wrong?

Nothing was written down. That’s most of it.

Seven years of perfectly sensible decisions made one at a time, and nobody had ever recorded which ones were commitments and which were just habits they’d fallen into.

You could see the friction and inconsistencies from outside. The school had changed its own name more than once. The website said one thing, the social page said another, the stamp on their documents said a third. If you were a parent researching them over three or four months, you couldn’t really be sure you were looking at the same school.

Inside, almost every unresolved question in the business sat right on the line between the two people responsible for the whole thing. Both of them were right about their own half and neither could quite see the other half, so the questions never closed.

How does a business end up like that?

It’s not that anyone’s disorganised. It’s that in a small business decisions happen in conversations, but they are only implemented consistently when there is documentation to keep people accountable.

Someone asks you something, you answer, you both get on with your day. Six months later it comes up again, one of you remembers it slightly differently, and now you’re having a discussion. Nothing got written down, so nothing was ever really decided. It was just sort of agreed for a while.

When there is one of you that’s completely fine. But seven years in with a business to run and a team to manage, it’s a tax you’re paying every week that nobody has ever added up.

What did I actually find?

This is where I’d have gone wrong if I’d taken the brief at face value.

They asked for brand work, and fair enough, there was plenty of brand work to do. But I don’t really look at a business as a set of departments. I look at the whole thing as one connected system, marketing into sales into delivery into retention, and then how much of all of it runs back through the owner. What I’m hunting for is where the friction crosses from one part into the next.

Here are the biggest growth blocks I’ve found so far:

• Communication gaps between staff and students or parents.
• Their biggest differentiators were not communicated often and clearly.
• Student progress was being tracked but many parents didn’t even know this information was available.
• Inconsistencies in branding.
• Very low retention rates. This is more a symptom, and we’ll dig into it in future articles.
• Low website conversion rates. Again, another symptom for later.

One thing sat well above everything else.

The main promise of the whole business was true inside the system, and invisible to the person paying for it.

The school promises a parent they’ll know whether their child is on track, and it keeps that promise. Work gets set, submitted, marked, returned. Every bit of evidence a parent could want is real and it’s all there.

It just lives inside the platform they teach on. And both of them already knew that most parents never open it.

Why did that matter more than the rest?

Because once you spot it, a whole pile of separate complaints turns out to be the same complaint in different clothes.

Parents saying they’ve no idea whether their child is progressing. That isn’t really on the parent. The school isn’t taking initiative to ensure this information is being shared proactively.

Families going quiet and drifting off. If you never see any proof that something’s working, leaving is quite a reasonable thing to do.

Their best selling point being impossible to prove. They assess a child before they place them, and they’ll put a child below their age group if that’s honestly where they are. That’s rare and it’s the right thing to do. But if you’re the parent paying every month it’s something you have to take on trust, and most of these families have already paid for tutoring that didn’t work. They’re done with trust.

Hard conversations happening far too late. If nobody tells a parent for four months that the student’s work isn’t being submitted, month five is a cancellation. At week two it’s just a chat.

Four different-looking problems, same thing underneath all of them.

Why didn’t I push back on the logo?

They wanted the new logo and they cared about it. One of them had been thinking about it for ages and now had a design in mind that she liked.

I could have told them proactive communication matters more than a logo does. But that’s just my opinion against theirs, and honestly I’d probably have lost, because it’s their business and their money and they’ve been running it for seven years.

So I didn’t argue at all. I put the communication fix in phase two, the logo in the last phase.

The order made the argument for me and nobody had to lose it. I’d rather build the solution sequence and let the sequence say it for me.

Why was most of my advice “what not to do”?

Six of my recommendations were under the “do not” list.

• Don’t publish a list of exam centres.
• Don’t write a guide to the home-schooling rules in every country.
• Don’t build automated reporting.
• Don’t make a letter for every occasion.
• Don’t publish a local price guide.
• Don’t publish a table telling parents which age belongs in which grade.

Take the exam centres one. The idea was to help parents by listing where they can register their kid for exams, which sounds genuinely useful. But this list would have needed to be maintained and kept current. That doesn’t really solve anything, it just creates more work.

Centres move, centres close, and nobody phones you to say so. It comes back to bite you the first time you get an enquiry from outside the region. And it puts you in the business of advising on something you don’t control, so when it’s wrong, it’s your fault.

The age-to-grade table is my favourite though. Parents fixate on age: “she’s twelve so she should be in Grade 7”, and a conversation like this is one of the hardest parts of the operations manager’s week.

So I helped them avoid that conversation altogether by advising against it.

Another thing worth mentioning is a sentence that the owner had written at the top of her feedback notes:

Our mantra has always been keep things simple. I think we may be making things more challenging for ourselves rather than easy.

The owner

That sentence did more work than anything I wrote. A rule the client already believes in is a lot harder to argue with than one I’ve brought along with me.

Where they told me I was wrong

They pushed back on four recommendations. This bit normally gets left out of case studies, which is exactly why I’m including it.

Best one first. I’d suggested a short paragraph about the home-schooling rules for each country, “with a link to each”. One of them pointed out that links create problems the moment you get a student from outside the region. The other pointed out that the rules change constantly, so they’d end up policing a set of links instead of doing actual work.

Which is my own rule: don’t publish anything you have to maintain.

Another one. They agreed to a process for students who stop handing work in, then pushed back on the timing. The last step ends with a student leaving, and a school in the middle of trying to grow shouldn’t be building a machine that removes students. They were right, and I hadn’t weighted that properly.

So I split it up. The first three steps are just the school noticing and getting in touch, that resolves most cases, so those steps were agreed to. The last step will be added to the process once the business growth becomes consistent.

So what was the outcome of Phase 1?

Eight decisions that had been open for months closed in a single round during phase 1 of this engagement.

Which isn’t because I’m clever. It’s because I did something fairly obvious that neither of them could do from inside it. I sorted the argument out before I tried to answer it.

The first thing I sent back wasn’t advice at all, it was structure:

1. Here’s everything you already agree on.
2. Here are the eight things you don’t.
3. Here’s my call on each one.
4. Take it or leave it, but please decide.

Two people who had eight separate decisions to close and implement, suddenly had one Decision Pack to finalise instead.

Thirteen decisions are now written down under a heading that says: agreed, and not to be re-opened. Which sounds like admin, because it is. It also happens to be the fixes for several growth blocks.

What’s next?

The project is running and I’m still on it. It’s not a document I handed over and walked away from.

The next phase is the part most assessments skip entirely. I’m sitting down with each of them separately, the owner first and then the operations manager. One conversation each, with nobody else in the room.

And the first thing I’ll say is that this isn’t a review of how well they’re doing. Nobody’s being marked.

What I want to know is what actually happens during a typical week. Small businesses run on two or three people doing far more than their job, and the load builds while nobody ever complains, because to them it’s just how it is. Then they push for growth and it doesn’t happen, because everyone’s already full.

That’s Phase 2. I’ll write it up straight after.