What if your new brand
makes you a little nervous?

You hire an agency because something attracted you. Usually, the work. You saw something you wanted for your own business.

Then the presentation arrives, and suddenly you’re having a very different experience.

You’ve built this company. You have opinions. Probably fairly strong ones. That determination may be a big part of why the business exists in the first place.

Handing someone else this much influence over it is a weird thing to do.

So you start steering. A different color. Another symbol. A few more options. There’s something in your head, and you’ll know it when you see it.

“I’ll know it when I see it” can get expensive.

Think about the brands you encounter every day. Apple is a fruit. Starbucks has a siren on the cup. Neither seems particularly alarming when you’re buying a laptop or a coffee.

Now imagine sitting in the meeting before any of those associations existed.

“A fruit?” “What does a mermaid have to do with coffee?”

Meanwhile, we can present something as simple as a bird and find ourselves discussing whether customers might think the business will fly away from them. Or whether some birds carry diseases.

You can do this to almost anything.

When you encounter a brand out in the world, you experience the whole thing. Its products, its language, its reputation, the people who use it. Those associations accumulate.

In a presentation, you’re looking at something new and asking it to explain itself immediately. It hasn’t had a chance to mean anything yet.

That’s worth remembering before every possible interpretation becomes a revision.

Years ago, we were working with Renaissance Homes, a custom home builder. Five very masculine gentlemen. My art director wanted to pitch them a unicorn.

A contemporary unicorn, to be fair. Still a unicorn.

I thought he was out of his mind.

Before you see it, take a second to picture what you’d expect us to present.

A custom home builder.
Five owners.
A unicorn.

They loved it. I was the nervous one.

Show me the unicorn

We presented it. They loved it.

That stayed with me, partly because I was the one who needed to get out of the way. I trusted my art director enough to present an idea I wasn’t entirely comfortable with, and the clients were more open to it than I’d expected.

It taught me to pay attention to that slightly uncomfortable feeling.

Sometimes you’re seeing a problem. Sometimes you’re seeing something you haven’t seen before. It takes judgment to work out which.

There’s a point where an identity has been adjusted so many times that every possible objection has been addressed.

Unfortunately, nobody feels anything about it anymore.

That carries a risk too. Especially if the reason you hired an agency was to become more distinctive.

When something makes you nervous, try to get specific. Is there a practical problem? Is it wrong for the audience? Does it suggest something we genuinely need to avoid? Or does it feel unfamiliar because the category doesn’t usually look like this?

Those are useful conversations. They give the team something to think about.

I’m wary of treating familiarity as proof that an idea is safe. Sometimes it just means we’ve seen it a hundred times.

The relationship I’m describing starts before the first presentation.

You want to hire people whose work you love and whose judgment you trust enough to let them take you somewhere you wouldn’t have arrived yourself.

If you’re already planning the revisions before they’ve shown you anything, that’s worth a look.

I still have this experience with my own team. They make choices I wouldn’t have made. Sometimes I need to hear the thinking. Sometimes I need to sit with it. And sometimes I need to remember why I hired them.

Ask questions. Expect a reason. Give useful feedback.

But leave some room for the people you hired to surprise you. Otherwise, they can only take the business as far as you’ve already imagined it.