Six places people get stuck writing a BrandScript

You blur your customers together

This is the first one, and it's the one that makes the whole exercise feel impossible.

You start writing for one customer. Then you get to the problem, and without noticing, you're describing a different customer's problem. By the time you reach the solution you've switched again. Not carelessness. You're thinking about your business as a whole, and your business genuinely does serve all of these people.

But a story with three heroes isn't a story. The moment two characters share one BrandScript, every block after the character block has to serve two masters, and the language goes vague trying to cover both. That vagueness is what you feel as being stuck.

One character. One problem. All the way to the end of the sheet. Then start a fresh sheet for the next one. If you serve several kinds of customer, that's not a reason the framework won't work for you. It's the reason you need it more than a simpler business does. I've written a full walkthrough of how to handle several customer types, including how to find the language they share for your homepage.

The internal problem isn't a feeling yet

Almost everyone writes the external problem twice.

You'll get to the internal problem and put down something like "they're stuck." Or "they're overwhelmed with options." Or "they don't have time." Those are all true, and none of them are internal problems. They're situations. They describe the circumstances your customer is in, not what being in those circumstances does to them.

The internal problem is how the external problem makes them feel about themselves. It's an emotion, and it usually sits one question deeper than the first answer you give.

In the rooms, this one always resolved the same way. Somebody would say "they feel stuck," and I'd ask: alright, if you're stuck, how does that make you feel? And they'd say frustrated. Embarrassed. Worried I'm going to look like I don't know what I'm doing. That second answer is the internal problem, and it's the one your customer will recognise themselves in.

The philosophical problem goes blank

This is the one where the room goes quiet.

The philosophical problem is why it's just plain wrong that your customer has to put up with this. It's the "ought" in your business. And it's abstract enough that people either skip it or write something that sounds like a mission statement.

The fix isn't to explain it better. It's to stop explaining and finish a sentence.

Talk directly to your ideal client, out loud, and start with either of these: You shouldn't have to… or You ought to be able to… Then say whatever comes next. You shouldn't have to chase three contractors for a callback. You ought to be able to understand your own marketing. Whatever lands is your philosophical problem, and you'll usually get it on the first try once you stop trying to write it and just say it.

The plan

This is where the wheels come off the cart, and it's the block I get asked about more than the other seven combined.

The plan is three steps that take your customer from where they are now to the thing they want. Three. Not your internal process, not the eleven things that actually happen, not a description of your methodology. Three steps a nervous person can hold in their head.

What makes it hard is that you know all eleven, and every one of them matters to you. Cutting eight feels like misrepresenting the work. It isn't. The plan isn't a description of what you do. It's a set of instructions for what they do next, and its only job is to make starting feel safe.

Step one is almost always the smallest possible commitment. Step three is almost always the outcome they came for. Step two is the work. I've written the whole thing up separately, including the four ways plans go wrong and worked examples from real businesses.

You freeze on failure

Here's the strange thing about this block. Every business owner I've ever met knows exactly what happens to a customer who doesn't solve this problem. They've watched it happen. They could tell you a story about it.

Then you ask for ten examples of failure and the room goes silent. Everybody looks like a deer in headlights, because the brain goes racing off in ten directions at once and comes back with nothing.

Two things break it open.

The first is to split failure into short term and long term. Take a leaky roof. Long term, water gets into the structure and takes the value of the home with it. Short term, there's water running down the living room wall and the drywall is ruined by Thursday. Same problem, two very different fears, and most people can only see one of them at a time until you separate them.

The second is to remember why the block exists at all. Think about baking. You use a lot of flour, and flour is your success section. But you also need a pinch of salt, or the whole thing tastes like nothing. Failure is the salt. Donald Miller puts it more directly: a story without consequences is flat and unappealing. You're not trying to frighten anyone. You're adding the flavour that makes the rest of it matter.

The one-liner turns back into your elevator pitch

You get all the way through the BrandScript. You've done the work. Then you sit down to write the one-liner and out comes the thing you've been saying at networking events since 2019.

It happens under pressure, and it almost always starts with you. "We're a roofing company that's been serving central Iowa since 1998." That's a perfectly nice sentence and it does nothing, because it opens with the business rather than with the person listening.

A one-liner has three parts and they only work in one order. The problem your customer is trying to get out from under. What you do about it. What their life looks like afterwards. Problem, solution, result. If it starts anywhere other than the problem, it isn't a one-liner yet, it's a description.

The reason the order is fixed is the same reason the whole framework works. Your customer is the hero of that sentence. You're not. There's a full guide to writing one here, with the three parts labelled on real examples.