Brand is not design. It's the headwaters: everything visual and every marketing message flows from it, not the other way around. The reason most companies struggle with their marketing is that they've never done the upstream work of understanding who they actually are. Matt calls what buries that clarity operational sediment: the layers of just doing the work that pile up until a founder can no longer see or name the identity underneath. And the founder's personal identity is almost always woven into the brand, whether they know it or not.
Matt Steinruck spent thirty years as a designer before he realized he was really doing brand work all along. Every time a client came in wanting a website, he'd look at the messaging and find it wasn't connecting. He'd reshape it, do a fast rebranding project, and send them back out with something that actually worked. Eventually the pattern became obvious: brand clarity is the headwaters. Everything else flows from it. Big Picture Consulting is what came out of that realization.
This conversation covers the water cycle of brand, design, marketing, and culture, why operational sediment buries the identity every business already has, the magic question Matt uses in brand explorations about what makes you cry at movies, the deep tie between a founder's personal identity and what a brand can become, and the formation that happens in desert seasons when nothing seems to be moving forward.
- Brand is the headwaters, not the logo. Design, marketing, and culture are what flow from it. If your marketing isn't connecting, don't throw more money at it. Go upstream. That's where the problem almost always is.
- Operational sediment is what buries a brand. Layers of just doing the work pile up until leaders can't see or name who they actually are anymore. Stopping to ask is the first step, but most people never do because it doesn't feel like it has an ROI.
- It's hard to see the label from inside the bottle. Even highly self-aware leaders with the right tools and thought processes will get clearer results with outside perspective. You can't evaluate your own identity the same way someone else can.
- What makes you cry at movies? The theme that makes your heart leak out of your eyes tells you something true about who you are. And very often, for a founder, that theme is the same one that drove you to start the business.
- When you own your identity and stop borrowing someone else's, everything in your business gets easier. You stop putting Saul's armor on David. Decisions flow from who you actually are. Your messaging and your culture sync up.
- Desert seasons are formation, not punishment. The Israelites left Egypt but their mindset was still in slavery. Moses spent forty years in the desert before his ministry began. Joseph sat in jail for twelve years. None of that was wasted. God cares more about who you become through the process than what you produce in it.
- The key question in any stuck season: what am I afraid of? The fear hurdles in front of you, when named and examined, often reveal where the identity work still needs to happen.
What is brand actually, if it's not a logo or a color palette?
Brand is the headwaters. Everything else flows from it. Matt uses a water cycle to map the whole ecosystem: brand is at the top of the mountain. Brand design, the logos and websites and visual artifacts that tell your story, flows down from it. Marketing is the river that carries everything to your audience. And brand culture is what evaporates back up: where your identity seeps into the fabric of the organization, into how decisions get made and how people behave day-to-day.
The implication of this model is significant. If your Facebook ads aren't converting or your marketing isn't connecting, don't throw more money at the river. Go back to the top of the mountain and figure out what's missing there. The problem is almost always upstream.
Matt also runs a domain called don't redo your website dot com, because when someone comes saying they need a new website, the real question is: why? What problem do you think a new website will solve? If you trace it back, there's almost always an identity issue at the root. Fix the identity and everything that flows from it becomes a lot easier and a lot more effective.
I call it the headwaters. Brand starts at the top of the mountain. If your marketing sucks and you're having a really hard time connecting with your audience, don't throw more money at your marketing. Go back up to the top of the mountain and figure out why.
Matt Steinruck, Episode 51Why do so many businesses never do the foundational identity work?
Matt calls it operational sediment. Layers of just doing the work pile up over time. Leaders get into business and just start going because that's what they know, that's what they're good at, that's what they're passionate about. They race forward. And they never stop to ask who are we, really? What do we actually stand for?
When they do stop and think about it for two seconds, it feels frilly and froofy and fluffy. Like it doesn't have an ROI. Why would I stop to explore my brand identity when I have projects to run and staff to take care of and a business to grow? So they don't do it.
The other piece is that it's hard to see the label from inside the bottle. Even a highly self-aware leader with good tools and a good thought process will take a lot longer doing it alone than with outside perspective. Matt has the benefit of having seen inside hundreds of organizations. That context lets him reflect back what a founder can't see from the inside: you have a very specific identity, and here's what it actually is.
What is the 'what makes you cry at movies' question and what does it reveal?
It's a question Matt uses in brand exploration. The idea is that there are moments in a movie, a show, a scene you've seen a hundred times, where it gets you again. Your eyes leak without warning. And whatever that theme is, it's telling you something inherently true about who you are.
If you can find that thread, you often find the reason the founder started the business. Whether it's restoration, hardship overcome, belonging, justice: whatever the theme is that moves you as a person, that's very likely the same thing your brand is actually about at its deepest level. Finding that connection, between the deep heart of the person and what their business is trying to do in the world, is one of the most powerful things that can happen in a brand exploration.
This is also why founder identity and brand identity are so connected. When you stop borrowing someone else's identity and just live into who you are, everything else in the business becomes easier. As Matt says, you stop putting Saul's armor on David. You're making decisions and operating and messaging from something true to you at the core. And that changes everything.
If you can find that thing, that theme that suddenly makes your heart leak out of your eyes, there's something inherently true about you that moves you as a person. And when you find that theme, you often find the reason that they started the business.
Matt Steinruck, Episode 51What does identity formation in hard seasons actually look like?
Matt describes ten years as a solopreneur that included anxiety attacks, crumpled messes, and the question shifting from what project does God have for me to who does God need me to be? He leans into the image of the Israelites in the desert: led by a pillar of fire, God clearly present, and going through an incredibly hard time anyway. They left Egypt but their mindset was still in slavery. They weren't yet ready for the promised land. The formation required to get them there was part of the journey, not a detour around it.
Moses spent forty years in the desert before being called back into the ministry that defined his life. Joseph sat in jail for twelve years. Neither of those seasons was wasted. The waiting was preparation. God cares more about who you become through the process than what you produce in it.
The practical question Matt is sitting with now: what am I afraid of? The fear hurdles that prevent full connection with what God has called you to, when named and examined honestly, often reveal exactly where the identity work still needs to happen. Putting truth into those fears, dispelling the lies and the falsehoods, is where the next steps are.
God was trying to evolve them through what they'd been through, out of years of captivity. Now they're in a place of freedom, but wrestling between who they used to be for 400 years and who he's calling them into. That's the desert.
Matt Steinruck, Episode 51Resources mentioned
- Matt Steinruck — Big Picture Consulting — Brand and culture guide; connect with Matt on LinkedIn at Steinruck
- Free Interview Questions and Hiring Training — clearauthenticbrands.com/resources and /training
- Ep 47 — Brand Identity, Marketplace Calling, and the Power of Showing Up as Who God Made You with Latricia Morris — Another brand identity and faith conversation with similar themes
- Ep 44 — Story, Identity, and Why the Right Hire Changes Everything — The episode on how personal identity drives brand and hiring decisions
Full transcript
Matt Steinruck is a brand and culture guide, owner of Big Picture Consulting, specializing in helping businesses, nonprofits, and ministries zoom out to find their big picture so they can recover what's been buried and get a clearer sense of their own purpose and identity. He spent about 30 years as a designer making everything from print to slides to websites. When clients would come with a design request, he'd look at the messaging and realize it wasn't connecting. He'd reshape it, do a fast rebranding project inline with the design work, and eventually realized: brand identity is the headwaters. That's where everything starts. Rather than do it quickly in the course of design, why not make brand the official starting point?
Matt describes brand as the top of the mountain, the headwaters of a water cycle. From there flows brand design: the visual artifacts that tell the story, including logos, websites, print, and video. Everything visual flows out of brand, not the other way around. From there the water flows into the river, which is marketing: the activation of brand, figuring out who you're talking to and how to reach them. And then Matt adds what he calls brand culture: where the brand seeps back into the fabric of the organization, where identity floods into how decisions are made, how people behave, how the company operates. If your marketing isn't connecting, don't throw more money at it. Go back to the top of the mountain. That's generally where the problem lies.
Business owners rarely stop to ask who they really are. Matt calls this operational sediment: layers of stuff that happen over time as they race forward building the thing, taking care of staff, showing up every day. When people stop and think about identity for two seconds, it feels frilly and froofy and fluffy. No ROI. So they don't do it. But what Matt sees is that when a company does this work properly, from the top down, it transforms how they message, how they operate internally, and how they understand themselves. Everything else that gets produced after that becomes a lot easier and a lot more effective.
It's hard to see the label from inside the bottle. Matt has the domain don't redo your website dot com: a landing page to help people think through the real problem, which is almost never the website. When someone comes saying they need a new website, the first question is: why? What problem do you think a new website will solve? If you trace it back far enough, there's something else going on. An identity issue. Fix that from the top down and a lot more becomes possible.
One of Matt's magic questions in brand exploration is: what makes you cry at movies? The theme that makes your heart leak out of your eyes tells you something inherently true about you as a person. If you can find that thread, you've found something deep. And very often, as a founder, the theme that moves you is the same theme that drove you to start the business: restoration, justice, overcoming hardship, belonging. Whatever it is. When you can name that theme, you can make your brand resonate with who you actually are at your core. That tie-in between the deep heart of a person and why they started their business is one of the most powerful threads in brand work.
When you understand and own your identity and just live into who you are, everything else in the business becomes easier. You stop borrowing someone else's identity. You stop putting Saul's armor on David. You're not trying to live out of something that doesn't feel natural. You're making decisions in the way that you operate, the way that you really are. And that seeps into everything: your messaging, your culture, how you show up in the market.
Ten years of running an agency without having this figured out: not knowing yourself well as a person or what you stood for, constantly looking at what everyone else was doing. Fifty thousand website iterations. All that back and forth broke down confidence as a human. What comes out of that experience is the realization that the key to figuring out a brand and business is first figuring out yourself. Matt confirms: focusing on what someone else says you should be doing, spinning up something because someone else thought it was great, taking courses about the right way to do LinkedIn: all of that leads to, well, that doesn't work for me. The deeper route is: what makes your brand unique because of who you are as a founder? Let your brand really represent something true to you.
Brand exploration often moves into something that feels like therapy. Matt has had clients say: nobody has ever asked me these questions before. This has felt so cathartic to be able to explore this stuff and talk about it and get it out into the open. The questions move beyond business analysis into what's really going on under the surface, what's preventing you from moving ahead. When someone comes saying they have a felt problem in their business, you trace it back to an identity issue. And getting into that space, asking questions that people typically don't let themselves think about, is very therapeutic and can push people, in a good way, into new spaces.
Matt's journey as a solopreneur has been ten years. Some years really good, most of the time figuring out what comes next. His first anxiety attacks. Some periods of being a crumpled mess. The question shifted from what project does God have for me to who does God need me to be? He leans into the Israelites in the desert: led by a pillar of fire, God always present, but going through an extremely hard time anyway. They left Egypt but they were still in a slave mindset. Not yet ready for the promised land. God needing to evolve them through what they'd been through, to form them into who they needed to be for the next season. Matt sees his own desert season as a similar formation process: coming out of a borrowed identity, working through fears and hesitations, learning to step into what God has actually called him into.
Contentment: Paul's letter contains the statement I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, which tends to get written on boards and painted on walls. But in context, it's about contentment in little and in much. Paul is saying: I've had a lot and I've had very little, and I've found the secret to being okay in both. Wherever God has called you right now, in this process, you can do that, because Christ has given you the strength to do it. Matt finds that a hard context to sit in, but the one that's actually being taught.
Joseph: the dream given to him young, then sold into slavery, then twelve years in jail with no escape possible, fully reliant on God. The formation happening in Joseph during those twelve years must have been necessary preparation for saving Egypt and stepping into the dream. Pivotal things in life were not our doing. Doors opened, connections were made, opportunities appeared in God's timing. Looking back, we didn't make those things happen. Matt connects this to Moses: forty years in the desert before being called back into his ministry, being formed and trained and made ready for the next journey. These seasons of waiting are formation. Uncomfortable because you don't know how long you're in this space.
What does it look like to come into acceptance and boldness about how God actually made you, not trying to be somebody else or do it the way somebody else does? Matt is still walking that out. He feels closer today than yesterday. One thread he's following: what am I afraid of? What are the fear hurdles in front of me preventing me from being more fully connected to what God's plans are? Looking at those fears, understanding what they mean about how he views God, and putting truth into those situations to dispel the lies and the falsehoods. That's where some of the keys and connecting points are for moving into the next phase of his identity journey.
A concept Matt is exploring: God's unique name for you. The way a shepherd knows each sheep individually by a distinct call or sound. If Jesus were to walk into the room and call out a name that identified you uniquely as a person, not your job title or your role, what would that be? Listening for that, leaning into what that is, understanding it: that's when identity starts to connect at a really significant level.