Founder identity and the box you did not choose

I chose a degree that sat across two schools.

Business on some days. Fashion on others.

That was deliberate. I did not want to be one thing.

Then I got the job I had wanted since I was thirteen. Hugo Boss. New York. Leading visual storytelling for a house I had studied from the outside.

I used to pinch myself on the way in.

The better I did the job, the more one thing I became.

Visual merchandising. Fashion. The one with the eye.

All true. Half of what I had trained for.

I had built an education designed to keep me plural, and the success of the work was making me singular.

So I left, and went after the other half.

What I was looking for did not have a name at the time. I know now it was belonging. Not the kind you get from a title. The kind you get from being understood at full size.

On the other side of that, I started noticing something organisations do to themselves constantly, and almost nobody names.

The Cheeky Panda was the bamboo one. It was a sustainability movement with a supply chain behind it.

Nuapay was open the banking one. It was a payments brand that widened to reflect the range of people it served, in depth and in structure.

Qflow was the sustainability one. It was a platform whose value ran across quality and finance as much as carbon.

Each one known for the part that was easiest to explain.

The part that fitted in a sentence, rather than the part that mattered most.

Every one of those descriptions was written from outside the business.

It is a reduction.

And a reduction is harder to fight than a lie, because you cannot correct it. You can only replace it.

Here is the part I did not expect.

While I was pulling Qflow out of its box, I was standing in one.

Oh, you do storytelling, right.

Oh, so you are a copywriter.

I noticed it at the time. That is what made it uncomfortable rather than interesting.

I was doing for them the exact thing nobody had done for me.

There is a version of this that runs deeper, and I went back and forth about whether to write it down.

I am often placed in a category before I have said anything. As a woman. As a Black woman.

Then I speak, and the room stills.

Afterwards people pull me aside to tell me how articulate I am. How grounded. How they wish they could do that.

It is meant warmly and I take it warmly.

But I have thought about it a great deal, because it shows you exactly how the mechanism works.

The category was never accurate. It was convenient.

And it only came apart because I opened my mouth.

Most organisations get one hearing.

A homepage. A line in someone else's deck. Thirty seconds in a meeting they are not in.

Whatever is decided in those thirty seconds tends to hold.

If the category is wrong, nobody finds out, and nobody tells you.

The deal goes quiet and no one can say why. The campaign runs and nothing moves. Someone joins expecting a slightly different company and leaves eighteen months later.

None of it looks like an identity problem.

All of it is.

This is what founder identity means, and it is why I find the word storytelling frustrating. Storytelling is what you do once you know what is true. It is the last step, not all the work.

The work is finding what is true. Giving it language. Making it hold everywhere the business goes, in the pitch, the pricing, the hiring, the decisions nobody writes down.

I started Story Of Me around the time I stopped waiting for rooms to still.

So that being understood stops being the hardest part of the work.

Frequently asked questions about founder identity

What is founder identity?

It is the clarity underneath a business about what it is, before any decision is made about how to describe it. When it is solid, everything built on top holds.

Is founder identity the same as personal branding?

No. Personal branding is about how a founder is seen. Founder identity is about what the organisation is, and how much of that survives contact with the market.

How do I know if my business is being described too narrowly?

Listen for the sentence people use when they introduce you to someone else. If it is smaller than the business, and you find yourself correcting it, that is the signal.

Why does being misunderstood cost money?

Because most organisations get one line and thirty seconds. If the line is wrong, the deal, the campaign and the hire all inherit it, and none of them look like an identity problem afterwards.