The carpenter works barefoot

In the consulting and brand design industry, there is a semi-official saying: "The shoemaker's children go barefoot." This saying is not just a tale. It accurately describes one of the most enduring paradoxes of the creative industry: those who teach clients how to build strong brands often have their own brand in the worst condition among all types of businesses.

A paradox that no one wants to acknowledge

Call this a paradox because capability is not the issue. An agency that excels at branding for clients, by definition, must understand positioning strategy, identity systems, and brand language. They have the necessary tools. They lack something else: distance.

When working for clients, a professional brand strategist sits outside the business. They view someone else's enterprise through the eyes of the target customer, asking questions that are not answered by internal habits or emotions. That is precisely the value they offer. But when looking inward, they sit inside. Every decision is filtered through personal experience, individual aesthetic preferences, and memories of past projects. Without that distance, technical skills alone are not enough to compensate.

A brand is not a logo. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or company.

Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap

Neumeier defines a brand as the perception in the gut of others, not something the subject creates for itself. Agencies understand this very well when advising clients. They often forget to apply it to themselves.

Short-term revenue beats long-term strategy.

The second reason is not psychological but rather about the economics of the service industry. Every hour worked in an agency can be billed to a project with an invoice. This is the concept of "billable hours" that directly determines cash flow. When the team is running three projects simultaneously for clients, no one voluntarily sits down to create a brief for the agency itself because there is no deadline, no client pushing, and no invoice waiting to be signed.

Internal branding is continuously pushed down to the "will do when there is time" category. Yet time never naturally appears in an agency running continuous projects. As a result, their website uses an outdated template from three years ago, their identity system is not updated, and their positioning statement is still the hastily written version from when they were first established.

When there is no positioning, price is all that remains.

The actual consequences are not just superficial. An agency without a clear positioning will attract clients in the way it deserves: customers comparing prices among various agencies, choosing the cheapest or the most familiar. There is no other reason to choose.

Meanwhile, an agency with sharp positioning, a public perspective, and a recognizable "signature" in their work will be sought out by clients who believe in that specific method. These two types of clients are entirely different in terms of project quality, fees, and long-term collaboration potential.

Byron Sharp in his research on how brands grow points out that the ability to be remembered at the right moment of purchase is the deciding factor in choice. If an agency is not clearly present in the minds of potential clients when they need to find a branding design firm, the chances of being mentioned or referred will be very low, regardless of how good their actual capabilities are.

Losing objectivity or lacking courage

There is a less frequently discussed aspect. Branding for oneself requires the agency to answer the tough questions they often pose to clients: Where do we truly differentiate ourselves? Who is our ideal customer and who is not? What types of projects are we willing to decline? These are not easy questions to answer when revenue is thin, when wanting to keep all doors open, and when the founding team has differing views on the direction.

True positioning requires exclusion. An agency that claims to do everything for every client lacks positioning; they only have a list of services. But exclusion means refusing short-term revenue, and that is a much more painful decision than advising clients to do the same.

Escape the paradox: do for yourself what you do for clients.

There are no shortcuts. The only way to escape this paradox is to treat your own brand just like a real client project. This means having a clear brief, having someone play the role of "client" to ask tough questions, having a timeline, having a dedicated budget that cannot be used for other projects, and having someone from outside who is brave enough to speak frankly when internal proposals only satisfy the founder's taste and do not answer the buyer's questions.

Some large studios address this issue by forming a completely separate small team, solely responsible for internal branding, and prohibiting those members from working on client projects during that period. This approach is costly, but it forces the organization to take it seriously.

For smaller studios, a more practical starting point is to acknowledge the limits of internal objectivity and seek a third party, not necessarily a large agency, but someone who can sit across the table and ask the right questions that you usually ask your clients.

The final question is not "Does your agency have the capability to brand itself?" The right question is: "Do you have enough distance to see yourself clearly?" If the answer is uncertain, then you already know where the problem lies.