Field Notes · Storytelling · Strategy · Business
Your Company Is Probably More Interesting Than Your Website
Most businesses contain years of risk, invention, strange customer problems, hard lessons, brilliant people and stories nobody could make up. Then somebody opens the website and writes “innovative solutions.” We can do better.
I have yet to meet a genuinely interesting company that could not be made boring by a committee with access to a website.
That may sound unfair to committees. Some of my favorite people have served on them. A few have even escaped with their personalities intact. But there is a peculiar thing that happens when businesses try to explain themselves publicly. The interesting parts begin disappearing.
The founder's reason for starting the company becomes a mission statement. The engineer's obsession becomes “innovation.” Thirty years of hard-earned judgment becomes “experience.” A relationship with customers becomes “customer-centric.” A product that solves a maddeningly specific problem becomes a “comprehensive solution.” Eventually, a company full of people, scars, discoveries, arguments, breakthroughs, mistakes, rituals and knowledge sounds exactly like the company three doors down.
Then everyone wonders why the website is not converting. I do not think this is primarily a copywriting problem. It is a failure to notice what is already interesting.
The business is usually better than the brochure
When I talk with owners, executives, scientists, engineers, marketers, operators and people who have simply been doing a job long enough to know where the bodies are metaphorically buried, the conversation rarely sounds like the website.
They tell me why a particular customer is unusually difficult to serve. They explain the mistake everyone new to the industry makes. They tell me why the expensive machine is actually cheaper, why the beautiful hotel feels different before you can identify why, why a museum exhibition that looks effortless took eighteen months of negotiation, or why a home-services company can tell within ten minutes whether a job is going to become a three-day headache.
That is knowledge, but more importantly, it is specific knowledge. Specificity is where expertise becomes visible, because expertise is much easier to recognize when somebody tells you something only an experienced person would know.
A business does not become authoritative because its website says it is an authority. It becomes authoritative when the reader encounters something that could only have been written by someone who understands the work.
This matters whether you are a family business, a professional practice, a scientific organization, a luxury brand, a manufacturer, an attraction or a company with a marketing department large enough to have meetings about the meetings. The raw material is already inside the organization. The challenge is getting it out without sanding off everything that makes it worth reading.
Professional does not have to mean personality-free
Somewhere along the way, businesses learned to confuse professionalism with emotional neutrality. I understand why. Specific statements can be challenged. Personality can divide opinion. Stories can feel less controllable than bullet points. An executive can approve “world-class service” in twelve seconds because nobody has to prove what it means.
But safe language has a cost. If every competitor can say the same thing, the sentence is not differentiating you. It is consuming space.
This is one reason I care so much about writing and storytelling as business tools. Good writing is not decoration applied after strategy. Language is one of the ways strategy becomes understandable. It tells people what matters, what is different, what you believe and why they should care.
The objective is not to make every corporate website quirky. A pathology laboratory probably does not need a mascot with a TikTok account. Authority matters. Context matters. Tone matters. But authority is not the absence of humanity. In many industries, humanity is part of what makes authority believable.
People are trying to reduce uncertainty
My scientific training probably makes me think about this differently than some marketers do. Information has value when it helps us distinguish among possibilities. If a sentence could accurately describe 5,000 companies, it has not reduced much uncertainty.
“We deliver innovative, customer-focused solutions” tells me almost nothing about you.
“Our technicians carry the part most likely to fail on this model because we got tired of making customers wait two days for a second visit” tells me quite a lot.
The second sentence contains evidence of experience, customer understanding, operational thinking and a point of view. It also gives me a tiny story. Somebody noticed a recurring problem and changed the system.
That is business.
It is also how trust often develops. Not through grand declarations, but through a series of small signals that tell another person, “These people understand what happens after the brochure ends.”
Relationships are hiding inside most business decisions
Marketing has developed an impressive vocabulary for describing people without having to talk about them as people. We have leads, segments, cohorts, personas, users, audiences, accounts, opportunities and conversions.
Those concepts are useful. I use them. I have spent a substantial part of my career helping organizations understand who they need to reach and how to reach them. But every once in a while, it helps to remember that a conversion is a person deciding to trust another organization enough to do something.
That human dynamic is especially obvious in consulting, professional services, luxury, healthcare, home services and complex B2B sales, but it exists almost everywhere. People are assessing competence, risk, fit, credibility and whether dealing with you is likely to make their life better or worse.
A website participates in that relationship before anyone from the company knows the visitor exists.
Does it sound as though you understand the reader's world? Does it answer the uncomfortable question? Does it explain the part competitors avoid? Does it respect the reader's intelligence? Does it give them a sense of the people behind the organization?
Or does it say “our commitment to excellence sets us apart” and hope nobody asks for supporting documentation?
Three businesses, three better stories
Consider a precision manufacturer. The generic version says it provides high-quality precision manufacturing solutions using state-of-the-art technology.
The interesting version starts somewhere else. Perhaps the company has spent twenty-three years learning how to hold a tolerance on a component that lives inside a machine vibrating at thousands of revolutions per minute. Perhaps the owner can tell you why a drawing that looks perfectly reasonable on paper becomes a nightmare at the machine. Perhaps the quality manager has rejected parts that looked beautiful because she knew exactly how they would fail six months later.
I want to hear from those people.
Now consider luxury hospitality. “Creating unforgettable experiences” is not wrong. It is simply so broad that it has become nearly invisible.
The better story may be the employee who knows the guest requesting the same table every February is not really asking for furniture. He is asking for the place where he and his wife celebrated an anniversary. The operational act may be reserving a table. The human act is recognizing meaning.
That distinction is luxury.
Now take a scientific instrument company. “Innovative analytical technology” is technically respectable and emotionally comatose. Tell me instead that a researcher can now reliably measure something that was extraordinarily difficult to see a decade ago. Explain what becomes possible because of that. Let the scientist inside the company explain the problem without forcing her to sound like a brochure.
That is not dumbing down science. It is giving the science a reason to matter.
Search engines have not made this less important
For years, bad SEO taught some businesses to write as though search engines were easily impressed librarians who needed the same phrase repeated every few paragraphs. Modern search is considerably more sophisticated, and the direction is increasingly aligned with what good communicators should have been doing anyway.
Google's own guidance asks creators whether content provides original information or analysis, goes beyond the obvious, demonstrates expertise, and is the sort of thing someone might bookmark or share. It explicitly recommends creating content for people rather than producing pages primarily to attract search traffic. Google's people-first content guidance is worth reading because the questions are surprisingly close to the editorial test I would use even if Google did not exist.
The same principle carries into AI-driven discovery. Google's documentation says its established SEO fundamentals remain relevant to AI features and emphasizes helpful, reliable, people-first content rather than some secret second set of rules for AI answers. Its guidance for AI features in Search is refreshingly boring in that respect. Make the site technically accessible. Make the information useful. Make it understandable. Give systems and people enough substance to know what you actually know.
I spend a great deal of time working on search, AI visibility, strategy and growth, and one of the things I keep coming back to is that discoverability and differentiation are not opposing goals. The strongest content often does both.
A page can clearly answer a question while still sounding like a human being wrote it. It can use the language customers use without becoming a keyword casserole. It can be technically structured without reading like technical documentation. It can help an AI system understand what an organization knows while giving a human reader a reason to remember who said it.
That last part matters more than many companies realize, because being understood is useful, but being understood and remembered is considerably more valuable.
AI makes competent blandness incredibly cheap
We have entered an interesting period in which almost anyone can produce competent prose quickly. That is useful, but it is also going to create an astonishing quantity of language that is technically fine and emotionally disposable.
If the competitive advantage of your content was correct grammar and reasonably organized paragraphs, I have some unfortunate news.
The scarce thing is shifting toward judgment. What did you notice? What do you know because you have actually done the work? What connection did you make that other people missed? What do you believe that you can defend? What story makes the complicated thing suddenly obvious?
AI can help with research, structure, analysis and a growing list of useful tasks. I work deeply in AI and believe organizations should understand it rather than either worship it or panic about it. But tools do not eliminate the need for a point of view. They make the absence of one easier to see.
The more generic content becomes available, the more valuable genuinely specific expertise becomes.
The interesting material is usually hiding in plain sight
If I were trying to make a company's website more interesting tomorrow, I would not begin by opening a keyword tool. I would talk to people, especially the people who have been close enough to the work to stop noticing how much they know.
- What does everyone outside this industry misunderstand about how it really works?
- What problem have you solved so many times that you forget it is difficult?
- What does your best salesperson explain on nearly every serious sales call?
- What did a customer teach you that changed how the company operates?
- What almost went badly wrong, and what did you learn from it?
- What does your most experienced employee notice that a new employee cannot see yet?
- What do competitors routinely get wrong?
- What part of the work are you proud of that never appears in marketing?
- What question do customers ask after they have already decided they trust you?
Then I would compare those answers with the website. In many companies, the difference is startling. The conversation is alive. The website is embalmed.
That gap is not just a writing opportunity. It can reveal positioning problems, sales problems, customer-experience opportunities, misunderstood expertise and entire categories of content nobody has thought to create.
This is why I tend to approach digital marketing as a connected business system rather than a bag of channels. Search, content, websites, reputation, paid media and AI discovery work better when they are expressing something real about the organization rather than compensating for the absence of a clear idea.
You do not need to manufacture a story
The word “storytelling” makes some executives nervous because it can sound like an invitation to embellish. I mean almost the opposite. Good business storytelling is not the art of making a company sound more dramatic than it is. It is the discipline of recognizing what is already meaningful and making that meaning clear.
The strongest business stories are usually true details arranged so that their meaning becomes visible. The challenge is deciding what matters, what can be left out, where the tension is, and why another person should care.
A Marine learns fairly quickly that a plan that only works under perfect conditions is not much of a plan. Business communication has a similar problem. A message that only works while a salesperson is standing beside it explaining what the company really meant is not doing enough work.
Your website has to survive contact with an impatient human being.
That person may be on a phone. They may be comparing three companies. They may have never heard of you. They may already be skeptical. They may be an executive looking for a strategic partner, a homeowner worried about an expensive repair, a scientist evaluating an instrument, or a family deciding whether an attraction deserves one precious day of a vacation.
Different people. Different stakes. Same basic requirement: help me understand why this matters.
The website should sound like the company on its best day
Not its loudest day and not its most self-congratulatory day. Its best day, when competence and character are both visible without anyone having to announce either one.
The day when the smart people are explaining what they know clearly. The day when somebody takes an extra minute with a customer because the problem is complicated. The day when the founder remembers why the company exists. The day when an employee catches something before it becomes a problem. The day when the product does exactly what somebody hoped it would do.
That is the material. The job of strategy is to decide which parts matter commercially. The job of writing is to make those parts understandable and memorable. The job of search is to make sure the right people can discover them. The job of design is to make the experience feel worthy of the ideas. The job of measurement is to tell us whether any of it is actually working.
None of those jobs requires stripping the humanity out of the business.
A simple test before you publish anything
I have a test I want to use more often on my own work and with clients. Remove the company name from the page and ask a slightly uncomfortable question: could a competitor publish it unchanged? If the answer is yes, keep working.
Maybe the missing ingredient is evidence. Maybe it is a sharper point of view. Maybe you have not interviewed the right person. Maybe the page is answering the wrong question. Maybe the writing is technically correct but has no pulse. Maybe everybody was so concerned about sounding professional that nobody noticed they had stopped sounding recognizable.
The fix is not always more content. Sometimes it is better observation, better questions and enough confidence to say something more precise than the category expects.
I have spent years around businesses of wildly different sizes and in industries that, on paper, have very little in common. One thing keeps repeating: the closer you get to the people who actually know the work, the more interesting the company becomes.
That is good news, because you probably do not need to invent a personality, manufacture a founder myth or chase whatever content format is fashionable this week. You may simply need somebody curious enough to ask better questions, experienced enough to recognize what matters, and skilled enough with words to tell the story without ruining it.
Your company is probably more interesting than your website. That is not an insult. It is an opportunity, and in a world producing more competent but forgettable content by the minute, it may be a much larger one than it used to be.
What is your company not explaining yet?
If something in this sounds familiar, you do not need to diagnose the service before reaching out. Tell me what is happening, what your customers seem to miss, what you are trying to change, or where the story has become harder to tell. We can talk about the challenge first and decide whether I can help from there. No hard sell and no perfect brief required.
Tell me what you're trying to figure outSources and further reading
This essay is primarily an argument from professional experience. The external references below support the sections on search and AI discovery.