Fill this in and you will know exactly what your brand is known for, who repeats it, and who on your team keeps it running.
By Lucas Jansen and Gabriely · JansenLucas.com
25+ builds delivered across 12 countries
You are not short on quality. That is not the problem we are solving here.
The problem is the gap. Someone who has never heard of you decides whether you are worth their money based on a website, a search result, and maybe nine seconds of a Reel. If what they find looks like every other business in your category, they shop on price. Not because they are cheap. Because you gave them nothing else to compare.
A brand closes that gap. It is not a logo and it is not a colour palette. It is the answer to one question your customer is silently asking: why you, and not the one next to you?
This workbook makes you answer it in writing. Part One builds the brand: what you are known for, the story that carries it, and the content system that repeats it without eating your weekends. Part Two builds the team that keeps it running once you stop being the only person doing it.
Free, live, and we audit real websites on screen. It is the same conversion framework behind 25+ builds across 12 countries. Bring your filled in Part One and it will make far more sense.
Four questions, answered backwards from where you want to end up.
Most businesses build a brand forward: post something, see what happens, post again. That is guessing with a camera. This worksheet runs it backwards. You start from the outcome you actually want, then work down to the reputation that produces it, the actions that earn that reputation, and the skill you are missing to do those actions well.
Answer honestly and the four answers become a filter. Every future decision about content, hiring, or spend either serves line one or it does not.
1. Outcome: $60K a month in direct orders, no discounting, no marketplace listings.
2. Known for: The brand whose pieces still look right in ten years, with the joinery shown rather than claimed.
3. Actions: Film the build of one piece every month. Publish two customer homes a month. Rebuild the product pages so they answer lead time, cost, and care without being asked.
4. Learn: How to shoot in the workshop without a crew, and how to write a page that sells a $4,000 table to someone who has never sat at one.
Catalyst, Conviction, Proof. Three parts, and the third one is the only one that compounds.
A story is not the testimonial on your homepage. It is a pattern a customer can predict. Brands that feel trustworthy have three things running at once: a reason they exist, a belief that separates them, and a visible track record that keeps proving both. Miss the third and you have a slogan.
Something made you build it the way you did. Usually it is a customer you could not help inside somebody else's system, a standard you refused to drop, or a gap you kept seeing in how your category treats people. It does not have to be dramatic. It has to be true.
Ask yourself: What did I see that the businesses around me did not, or did not care about? What made me act on it?
This is a belief, not a feature. Free next day delivery is a feature. "Nobody should have to wait at home for a delivery window" is a conviction, and it explains the feature. Convictions are useful precisely because not everyone shares them. If every competitor would sign your sentence, it is not doing any work.
Ask yourself: What do I believe about serving customers that a lot of businesses in my category clearly do not? What do customers compliment me on that I keep brushing off? Why would that matter to someone weighing a real spending decision?
A story is not what you say once. It is what you demonstrate on a schedule. Proof is finished work, reviews that mention the specific thing you claim, the same standard visible on the website and in the packaging and in how somebody answers an email at 6pm. One testimonial is a nice moment. Twenty four months of the same claim being backed up is a brand.
Ask yourself: Does every post, page, and customer interaction reinforce the association I want? Which examples prove the conviction rather than just looking good? If someone hears my name, what is the first thing I want in their head?
Lucas spent four years emailing companies and waiting for work to arrive. It never did. So he stopped waiting and started building things people could see: a run club, then podcasts with founders and a billionaire. The lesson was that access is not the bottleneck. Applying is.
Give more than you take. Give away the frameworks, sell the implementation. The knowledge was never the hard part for a business owner. Time and execution are.
$7,200 collected in the opening weekend after leaving a restaurant job in January 2026. Then 25+ builds across 12 countries in six months. Every playbook on our site is the one we use on paid work.
Say all three out loud in under thirty seconds. If it takes longer than that, it is not a story yet, it is a paragraph. Cut until a customer could repeat it to a friend.
Give more than you take. Give away the frameworks, sell the implementation.
Stop treating content as a daily task. Treat it as one recorded session per month that gets cut into everything else. A business owner has roughly two spare hours a month for this. This playbook fits inside them.
One long piece per month that carries real substance. If a customer could only see one thing from you this month, this is it.
Choose something still true in a year. Evergreen anchors can be re-cut forever.
Watch the anchor back once with a notepad and pull out the pieces. In a twenty minute recording there are usually eight to twelve.
The same idea, shaped for where it lands. Nothing gets uploaded identically to two places.
Deciding what to post is what kills consistency, not filming. Fix the slots once.
| Week | Monday | Wednesday | Friday |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Publish anchor | Clip 1 (short) | Listing or local post |
| 2 | Carousel: the objection | Clip 2 (short) | Email to the list |
| 3 | Product page live | Clip 3 (short) | Review request push |
| 4 | Clip 4 (short) | Best performer, re-cut | Film next anchor |
Book the filming date in the calendar now, as a blocked commitment. Not a reminder. An appointment.
You do not need a production crew. You need one repeatable corner of your workshop, studio, showroom, or office where the light and sound are already solved, so filming is a decision that takes zero setup. And you need your permissions sorted before a customer or a staff member appears on camera.
Whether it is a customer or somebody on your own team, the first two minutes decide the quality of the next twenty.
A first answer is almost always the surface. Three follow ups get you to the version worth publishing.
"What specifically changed for you between looking and buying?"
"Would you tell someone in a completely different situation to do the same thing?"
"If someone is where you were six months ago, what is the one thing you would tell them?"
Customer says: "I put it off for years." Weak follow up: "Why?" Strong follow up: "What finally made you order that week and not the year before?"
Somebody's face, voice, home, and name are theirs, not yours. Verbal permission on the day is not enough, and it does not survive a fallout eighteen months later when the clip is still running as an ad.
This is general guidance from a marketing team, not legal advice.
Nobody buys because of a specification. They buy because a story let them picture themselves on the other side of it. Story is not decoration on top of the useful content. It is the delivery mechanism.
Two seconds. Lead with the tension, never with a greeting. "She had not had people over in four years."
Cut every "hey guys, so today I wanted to talk about".
What it was actually costing. Specific and recognisable. Three suppliers who all missed the date. A room nobody used. Two years of buying the cheap version twice.
The messy part. What was hard, what nearly went wrong, what you changed. Perfect journeys are not believable and they do not build trust. Progress does.
One takeaway the viewer can use even if they never buy from you. This is what makes it worth watching instead of feeling like an advertisement.
One small, low commitment next action. "If you have been putting this off, the quote is the cheap part. Send us the room measurements and get a straight answer." Not "contact us today for a free consultation".
"Four years of not having people over" does more work than "life changing results". A number, a place, or a detail a stranger could not have invented is what makes a story believable. Vague praise reads as marketing, and people have been trained to discount it.
If you are making three points, you have three pieces of content, not one. The moment a story tries to cover price, process, and aftercare at once, the viewer stops tracking and leaves. Pick the single thing you want remembered and cut everything that does not serve it.
| Type | What it does | Opening line that works |
|---|---|---|
| Origin Why you built it this way | Explains your conviction without you having to claim it | "I left my last job because I kept being told good enough was good enough." |
| Failure The one that taught you | Builds more trust than any success story. Vulnerability reads as competence when it comes with a lesson | "I remade that order twice at my own cost. Here is what I had missed." |
| Customer transformation Release first | Lets the viewer see themselves in it. Your highest converting format by a distance | "Four years of not using that room. Six weeks." |
| Behind the standard Proof of the claim | Shows the work nobody sees, which is where your price is actually justified | "This is the step most people skip, and it is why these fail at year three." |
| Industry Position yourself | Makes you the person who explains the category, not just the person selling in it | "Cheap imports are not the problem. This is." |
Tell one of these on camera this week, in one take, without a script. Ninety seconds. Do not delete the first attempt.
Everything in Part One works exactly once if you are the only person doing it.
A brand that depends on the founder having a good week is not a brand, it is a mood. Part Two is about the boring machinery: writing a role so the right person self selects, filtering candidates properly, deciding between hiring and outsourcing, onboarding without babysitting, and the weekly conversation that keeps good people from leaving.
A vague job post is not a small problem. It is the reason you interviewed nine people and hired the least wrong one. A good description does the filtering before anyone applies: the right person reads it and thinks "that is me", and the wrong person quietly closes the tab. That is the whole job of the document.
Two sentences on why this role exists at all. If you cannot write it, the role is not ready to hire.
What they actually do on a Tuesday. No fluff verbs. They should be able to picture the day.
Only the genuine non negotiables. Every fake requirement removes a good candidate.
What success looks like in numbers at 90 days. Outcomes, not activities. This is the section most businesses leave out.
Real days and hours, including the weekends. Say it now or lose them in month two.
Publish it. Hiding it filters for people who will negotiate hardest, not people who fit best.
How your business behaves when it is busy, when a customer is upset, and when someone makes a mistake. Skill is teachable. This is what you cannot train, so screen for it in writing.
Write it once properly and it does double duty: it becomes the job post, the interview structure, and the first page of the 30/60/90 plan in Section 09.
Common first hires in a growing brand: someone to run sales conversations, an operations or fulfilment lead, a customer support lead, a marketing generalist, or a part time content person.
Most businesses hire reactively: someone quits, panic, post an ad, hire whoever is available and pleasant. Then repeat in nine months. A funnel replaces urgency with a process. Same idea as your customer funnel, pointed inward.
Hire against the constraint, not against the noise. Work out where the money is actually leaking.
If you have never written down where the leak is, you are about to hire for the wrong role at full salary.
You can teach software, scripts, and process. You cannot teach warmth with a stranger, or the instinct to notice a problem before it reaches you. Weight the traits you cannot install.
If your systems are broken, another person makes the breakage faster, not smaller. Written process first, then headcount. This is the single most expensive lesson in growing a business.
Score each row 1 to 5 for how important it is to you, then write that same score into the columns where the option genuinely delivers it. Total each column. The highest total is your answer, and the gap between the top two tells you how confident to be.
| What matters to you | In house | Contractor | Agency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ongoing, long term need | |||
| Needs deep specialist skill | |||
| Needs to flex up and down | |||
| Budget covers salary plus benefits | |||
| Has to move fast, starting now | |||
| Must sit inside your culture | |||
| Customer facing or handles sensitive data | |||
| Needs several skills at once | |||
| Low fixed overhead preferred | |||
| Time you can spend managing it | |||
| Total |
New people fail from unclear expectations far more often than from lack of ability. A written 90 day plan moves them from learning to contributing to owning, and it means you are judging performance against something you both agreed to rather than against your mood. Write it before their first day.
Focus: how this business actually works, who does what, and the standard they are joining. They are not expected to produce yet.
Focus: doing real work with a safety net. First measurable wins.
Focus: running their area without you checking. Bringing you solutions rather than questions.
Do this retroactively for whoever you hired most recently. If you cannot state what they own and what number they are accountable for, that is not their performance problem. It is yours.
This is the highest leverage thirty minutes in your week and the first thing to get cancelled. It is not a status update. It is where you find out what is quietly broken while it is still small, and where good people decide whether to stay.
Weekly for anyone whose work you depend on. Fortnightly at the absolute least.
Thirty to forty five minutes. Long enough to get past the surface, short enough to protect.
Same day, same time, same place. Predictability is most of the value.
| Block | Time | What you are actually doing |
|---|---|---|
| Wins | 5 min | Name something specific they did well. Specific, or it counts for nothing. |
| Roadblocks | 10 min | "What is slowing you down that I could remove?" Then remove it, visibly, this week. |
| Priorities | 10 min | Are they clear on what matters most before next week? Most misalignment dies here. |
| Feedback | 5 to 10 min | You give one piece. Then you ask for one, and you sit in the silence until you get it. |
| Growth | As needed | What are they trying to become good at, and what would help. |
Numbers and updates belong in a shared doc or a morning huddle. Use this time for the things they would not put in writing.
Rescheduling twice tells them clearly where they sit on your list. Treat it like a booked customer meeting.
If your feedback is always bad news, they will start managing your perception instead of doing the work.
Gets "fine" forever. Ask about a specific job, call, or customer from this week.
Print one per person per week. Keep them. The pattern across six weeks tells you more than any single conversation.
Problems arrive as small conversations instead of resignations.
Feeling heard outranks a small pay rise for almost everyone. Replacing someone good costs vastly more than keeping them.
Which is the actual test of a brand. Not the logo. The Tuesday you are out of the building.
Your Section 02 conviction is only real if the team delivers it on the phone, in the inbox, and in the box that turns up.
Book recurring one to ones with your key three people right now, for the next eight weeks. Then do not move them.
A brand that only works when the founder has a good week is not a brand. It is a mood.
Two kinds of work run your week and they destroy each other when mixed. Making things needs uninterrupted blocks. Running a business needs conversations and decisions. Most founders lose both by letting the second bleed into the first.
Building, designing, writing the copy for a product page, filming your anchor, solving the hard problem nobody else can. Needs long, protected, interruption free blocks. One interruption costs far more than the minutes it takes.
Team check ins, supplier calls, marketing reviews, one to ones, hiring, numbers. Needs other people and short slots. Fills every gap you leave open.
| Day | Shape | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Admin heavy | Stack the meetings, the huddle, and the week's decisions into one day and buy back the other four. |
| Tuesday and Thursday | Deep mornings, admin afternoons | Your highest value production days. Protect the first half hard. |
| Wednesday | No meetings at all | The hard problems, or the brand work from Part One. This is the day the workbook actually gets used. |
| Friday | Deep, with flex | Finish, review the week's numbers, and set Monday up so it does not eat itself. |
Put one protected block in the shared calendar for the next four weeks before you close this workbook. Name it. Do not move it.
Most people download something like this, read the first two pages, and never write a word in it. If your boxes have handwriting in them, you are already doing something almost nobody does.
Here is the honest bit though. None of this earns you a single customer until it shows up where they can see it. A conviction that only exists in this workbook does nothing. It has to be on the homepage, in the sales conversation, in the follow up, and in what your team says when you are not in the room.
That is the gap we spend our days closing, and it is the whole subject of the workshop.
Free and live. We audit real websites on screen and walk through the conversion framework behind 25+ builds across 12 countries. Bring your Part One answers. You will see exactly where they belong on your site.
jansenlucas.com/webinar/registration · Seats capped
If the strategy is clear and time is the actual bottleneck, apply to work with us. Takes two minutes. We look at your site, your brand, and how you get customers today, then tell you straight whether we can move the needle. If we cannot, we say so.
jansenlucas.com/work-with-us
Spent four years sending emails and waiting for business to arrive. It did not. Founded the 365 run club instead, which led to podcasts with billionaire Tom Cummins and a run of founders, and to the realisation that successful people are not different. They just apply. Left a restaurant job in January 2026 and collected $7,200 in the opening weekend on one principle: give away the frameworks, sell the implementation.
Runs operations. Filters every brand we take on, manages every project, and is the reason things actually ship on the date we said. If your build lands on time, that is her. She is also the reason Part Two of this workbook exists, because she has fixed more broken processes than most people ever see.
Together: 25+ projects delivered across 12 countries in the first six months, for brands from the US, Dubai, and Singapore to Brazil, Mexico, Japan, South Africa, and across Europe. Furniture, skincare, fashion, franchises, coaches, service businesses. Most agencies charge $50,000 and up for this level of work. We publish the frameworks free, because the brands that learn from us first tend to become the clients who trust us most.
Lucas and Gabriely's results are not typical and are not a guarantee of your success. Lucas and Gabriely are experienced website and marketing builders, and your results will vary depending on your market, your competition, your effort, and your existing customer base. We do not guarantee specific revenue increases or customer acquisition numbers. Case studies and testimonials reflect individual client outcomes and should not be interpreted as typical results. Nothing in this workbook is legal or financial advice. Confirm your own consent, release, and advertising obligations with your counsel.
JansenLucas.com · The Brand Workbook · 2026