So What Do You Do?
file under: PROCESS NOTES
this one is from: LIZ
Last December, Ambika and I took a large roll of paper, unfurled it across my dining room table, and started mapping out our plan for 2024. Our task was to make sure we had a clear plan for transforming Liminal from the one-person LLC it had been into a true partnership and member-run collective. I’d spent my sabbatical year working toward this moment, and despite my hilarious inability to divide a line into twelve equal units, it was perhaps the most successful few hours of strategic planning I’ve ever had. The ideas flowed abundantly, and it felt as easy to sketch out month-by-month specifics as it did to draw abstract representations of how all the work fit together. But getting it all onto paper was just the first step.
Small businesses are like sharks - to stay alive, we have to keep swimming. Even though we were relaunching Liminal in an entirely new form, we had existing clients to support, ongoing projects to manage, and above all, we needed to keep new business coming in the door. Internally, we needed to update old systems and build new ones. Externally, we needed to explain who we are and what we do. And most importantly, we needed to make sure that all those hows and whats were grounded in our unique why.
We started with defining the problem worth solving:
Communication is neither an art nor a science, and it is not merely “an art and a science”, it is many arts and many sciences - a meta-discipline. Because academic training is narrow and deep, when researchers attempt to engage with this meta-discipline, they struggle to navigate profound philosophical, methodological, and stylistic differences. Our clients (scientists seeking science communication help) are struggling - they feel alone and adrift in large volumes of low-value advice.
Then we laid out how we solve that problem:
Which felt great - but what trainings DO we offer, exactly? And coaching… to do what? Our challenge is that we are building something different here, and it takes a lot more explanation than simply offering what people already know they want.
So we wrote a massive list of all the skills we teach. We looked for gaps, discussed all the different ways those core skills get bundled together, and searched for other emergent themes and ways to parse such a long list. It took a ton of work, and it was still just a spreadsheet at that point.
Ultimately, we needed a prospectus to share with our colleagues and potential clients. The point of this key asset is to make a promise: “Hire us to do these things and your life will be better.” Getting that promise right is everything, and we wanted to make ours in a way that is clear, bold, fun, and smart. We think we hit that mark and now you get the first look! In the coming weeks, we’ll be updating our website to match. We’d love to hear what you think.
