Making Invisible Value Visible
I’ve noticed something after years of making films for businesses.
The things a company is most proud of aren’t always the things I find most interesting.
I’ll arrive for a recce and somebody will naturally want to show me the new building, the latest piece of equipment or the finished product.
And I’m interested.
But quite often, something else catches my attention.
It might be the way somebody on the factory floor solves a problem without really thinking about it.
A conversation between an employee and a customer.
Something that’s been made by hand when I’d assumed it was automated.
The amount of checking that happens before something leaves the building.
Or somebody casually mentioning they’ve been doing their job for twenty-five years.
I’ll ask about it.
And quite often the response is:
“Oh that? We’ve always done that.”
That’s usually when my ears prick up.
Because there’s a reasonable chance I’ve just seen something the business stopped noticing years ago.
When Remarkable Becomes Normal
I think this happens in almost every organisation.
If you do something every day, eventually it stops feeling particularly special.
The engineer who can hear that something isn’t quite right with a machine doesn’t think of it as expertise.
He just hears it.
The person who has spent twenty years working with customers knows which questions to ask almost instinctively.
The craftsman runs a hand across something and knows it isn’t finished yet.
A nurse notices that somebody is frightened before they’ve said a word.
None of them necessarily goes home thinking:
“I demonstrated some extraordinary value today.”
They’ve just done their job.
But to somebody on the outside, those little moments can tell us an enormous amount about an organisation.
That’s the strange thing about expertise.
The better you become at something, the easier it can be to forget that other people can’t do it.
Your Customers Usually See the End
There’s another reason value becomes invisible.
Customers often only see the result.
They see the finished component.
The completed building.
The treatment.
The software.
The report.
The product arriving at their door.
What they don’t necessarily see is everything that had to happen for that result to exist.
The mistakes that were prevented.
The judgement calls.
The years of experience.
The person who spotted something at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon and decided it wasn’t good enough.
The conversation nobody charged for.
The extra check.
The problem that never became a problem because somebody dealt with it before the customer even knew it existed.
That stuff is incredibly difficult to put on a price list.
But very often that’s exactly what the customer is paying for.
The Wheelchair Wasn’t Really the Story
I encountered a particularly powerful version of this some years ago while making a film involving Phil Eaglesham.
On paper, we were filming an electric wheelchair.
And there was plenty we could have talked about.
Engineering. Features. Controls. Technology. Design.
All perfectly legitimate things to communicate.
But once I started listening to Phil, something else became much more important.
The wheelchair was the product.
Independence was the value.
Those are not the same thing.
If we’d concentrated entirely on explaining the chair, we could probably have made a perfectly good product film.
But we’d have missed the reason anybody should care.
And I’ve seen different versions of that same problem many times since.
Sometimes Businesses Describe What They Sell
Go onto almost any business website and you’ll find lots of information about what the company does.
Services.
Products.
Capabilities.
Accreditations.
Years of experience.
Locations.
Equipment.
All useful.
But imagine two companies can both make the same thing.
Both have good machinery.
Both have ISO accreditation.
Both deliver throughout the UK.
Both have been trading for twenty years.
Why should I choose one over the other?
That’s where businesses often struggle.
Because the answer may not be sitting on the Services page.
It might be walking around the factory in overalls.
It might be in the way the company responds when something goes wrong.
It might be buried inside a story everyone in the business knows but nobody thought a customer would care about.
It might be the reason a customer has quietly stayed with them for fifteen years.
It might even be something the business has never thought to mention.
“We’re Just Doing Our Job”
I’ve heard versions of that sentence countless times.
And I understand it.
Nobody wants to sound as though they’re blowing their own trumpet.
Particularly, perhaps, in the sort of businesses I encounter around Somerset and the South West.
There’s often a quiet pride in simply getting on with things.
I rather like that.
But there’s a downside.
If you don’t explain where the value lies, the customer has to work it out for themselves.
And they may not.
They might look at two businesses and assume they’re broadly the same.
At which point the easiest thing to compare is price.
That’s not necessarily because the cheaper competitor is better.
It may simply be because the more valuable business hasn’t made its value visible.
Film Can Help. But It Can’t Invent It.
This is where film can become incredibly powerful.
A camera can take somebody somewhere they would never normally be allowed to go.
Behind the factory door.
Into the operating theatre.
Alongside the engineer.
Into somebody’s home.
It can allow us to hear directly from a customer, patient or employee rather than reading another carefully polished claim on a website.
It can show the tiny human moments that are almost impossible to communicate in a brochure.
But there’s a catch.
We have to know what we’re looking for.
Turning up with a camera and filming the obvious things doesn’t necessarily reveal value.
Sometimes it just gives us beautiful pictures of the obvious things.
That’s why I’ve become much more interested in the conversations before filming begins.
What are customers really buying from you?
Why do they stay?
What would disappear if your business disappeared tomorrow?
What do your best people know that isn’t written down anywhere?
What happens behind the scenes that customers would be surprised to discover?
And perhaps my favourite:
What do you consider completely normal that somebody on the outside might find remarkable?
That’s often where the story is hiding.
You Might Be Too Close to See It
There’s an irony in all of this.
The people who know a business best aren’t necessarily the best people to recognise what makes it valuable.
Not because they don’t understand their business.
Quite the opposite.
They understand it too well.
They’ve lived with it for years.
The unusual has become routine.
The difficult has become second nature.
The remarkable has become Tuesday morning.
Sometimes it takes somebody from outside the organisation to ask the stupid question.
I’ve built quite a career out of stupid questions.
“What does that do?”
“Why do you do it that way?”
“Why did that customer stay?”
“Why does that matter?”
“What would happen if you didn’t do that?”
Often the first answer isn’t particularly interesting.
So I ask another one.
And another.
Eventually somebody says something and I think:
There it is.
Making the Invisible Visible
This is increasingly what I think a large part of my job is.
Not inventing stories.
Not dressing businesses up as something they’re not.
And certainly not creating clever marketing language to make something ordinary sound extraordinary.
It’s almost the opposite.
Find what’s already there.
The expertise.
The judgement.
The care.
The knowledge.
The people.
The reason customers stay.
The difference everybody inside the company has become so accustomed to that they’ve stopped talking about it.
Then work out how to help somebody outside the organisation see it too.
Sometimes film is a wonderful way of doing that.
Sometimes it isn’t.
But either way, we have to find the value first.
That’s increasingly where my approach to making films begins.
So perhaps there’s a useful question to take back into your own business:
What have you become so used to being good at that you’ve forgotten other people might find it remarkable?
Because there’s every chance your customers can’t see it either.