THE Scoop
Last issue, we talked about your who.
If you sat with those questions and started sketching out the real human being your work was built for — you've already done something most founders take years to do or skip entirely.
But knowing your who is only the beginning.
The next question is one most people rush past: what are you actually saying to them?
Not your tagline. Not your elevator pitch.
But your mission — what you’ve been entrusted to build, written plainly enough that someone else can pick it up and move.
The tension
Here's what I see often: faith-driven founders understand their own work deeply.
The problem isn't that you don't know what you do. The problem is that you're communicating from the inside of your expertise rather than from the edge of your audience's experience.
You're writing for where you are. You need to write for where they are.
the faith factor
Here's where I want to go a little deeper...
Habakkuk 2:2 is a familiar verse, but only recently did it start making sense to me strategically.
"Write the vision and make it plain on tablets that he may run who reads it."
God didn't just tell Habakkuk to write the vision. He told him to write it plainly. On tablets. So that he may run who reads it.
Now, in Habakkuk’s context, “it” was a prophetic vision from God — and it’s important for us to name that context. However, I find it compelling that the urgency of the prophetic warning did not eliminate the call for clarity.
“Writing the vision” meant making it public, visible, permanent. “Make it plain” meant writing it in such a way that it could be proclaimed clearly with efficiency and urgency.
Today, the scale and stakes are different, but the communication principle still holds – the thing God entrusted you to steward deserves the same intentionality God instructed of Habakkuk. Posting about it is only the first half of the assignment.
What you say when you post — aka your message — should mobilize those who come into contact with it. The standard isn't whether you understand it — it's whether someone else can pick it up and move with it. Whether a potential client reads your "About" page and immediately knows if they're in the right place. Whether someone who encounters your work for the first time can explain it to a friend.
That's the bar. Not clarity for your own sake — clarity that creates momentum in others.
Most of us aren't there yet. And Q2 is a good time to close that gap.
Put it in practice
Confession: I never used to buy into the idea of creating personal goals.
Even in my career, I struggled to create goals around professional development or growth; not because I didn't care about those things, but because I had never really considered the importance of measuring them.
Recently, however, I've been working on being more intentional, and I'm discovering that setting quarterly benchmarks helps. Because focusing action around achieving a specific outcome means less wasted effort.
That said, I've got an assignment for us — one I'll be completing with you — to help us all achieve our communications goals in Q2.
And before you start to protest, it's just two things:
Before Q2 gets away from you
-
Audit your current message against the mobilization standard.
Pull up your website, your LinkedIn bio, or whatever you'd hand someone if they asked what you do. Then ask yourself honestly: if someone who didn't know me read this cold, would they immediately know if this was for them? Would they feel seen? Would they know what to do next? If the answer to any of those is no, you've got a starting point.
- Write one clear paragraph you could hand to anyone. Not a full rewrite. Just one paragraph that: names the struggle your audience is in, describes the transformation your work creates, and tells them what the next step is. Write it on a tablet, so to speak. Something you could hand to a referral partner, drop in a DM, or read aloud with efficiency. If you can do that — you're further along than you think.
|