The Great Pivot

My behind the scenes perspective on Blur's recent pivot to being a Web and Digital Product Agency

A frequent topic of conversation for Jeremy and I has been how we talk about what Blur does, and what the real value we bring to the market is. It’s taken us over a year to accumulate the experience and perspective to make a definitive statement, but we are finally there.

While I will always consider myself a designer (and will likely always have some design project going on at any given moment), I realized I needed to let go of my instinct as a digital handyman to bloat the scope and vision of what Blur is.

Coming from a freelancing background (and just by nature), it’s hard for me to say no if I perceive an opportunity to work with someone or help them solve a problem – and not explicitly advertising all of my skills underneath the Blur umbrella felt like saying “no” to a hypothetical client that didn’t actually exist!

After all, one of the primary reasons I wanted to go into business in the first place was to use it as an opportunity to meet other people and build relationships. Overall, this has gone tremendously well for me – I’ve had consistent opportunities to learn new skills and delight my clients with the results.

But it’s not scalable or easy to communicate to new people. It doesn’t encourage going deeper in one specific area, or building the processes and infrastructure it takes to make a service business profitable.

“We do branding, and design, and marketing, and web development, and applications, etc etc etc” is not an elevator pitch. It’s a list of services, without any relation to the result the client is actually looking for.

“We build on-brand digital experiences and software for entrepreneurs, growing businesses, and ambitious startups” is our new pitch – and you can see it on our refreshed, refocused home page.