Assembly Required.

Great work starts with great listening.

I read a story about a woman who hired a piano tuner to come to her house to tune the baby grand she’d had in her house for over a decade. The man showed up in a van driven by his assistant. As he got out of the van with his cane and glasses, it became clear the man was blind.

The tuner came in and listened for a few minutes after trying a few keys, and announced that he’d have to take the entire piano apart. This seemed like a bridge too far for the owner; she was concerned about how the man would perform this complicated task without the ability to see. But she kept her mouth shut and let him work.

A few hours later, she returned to find the piano was still assembled. She asked him when he was going to start, and he replied that he was nearly finished. He had already taken it apart and found a piece inside that needed repair. He’d replaced the part, and then reassembled and tuned the instrument.

He invited her to sit and play. As she touched the keys, she felt the most profound sense of being lost. She didn’t recognize the sounds coming from her piano.

She realized she had been listening to an out-of-tune piano for so long, she didn’t know what an in-tune one sounded like anymore.

Insights that create breakthrough work come from hearing the sounds between the notes. The hesitation when a CEO talks about their target audience. The slight edge when they mention a competitor. The way their voice changes when they describe their product's real benefit versus the one in their positioning document. And if you’re lucky enough to see, sometimes it shows on their faces.

These are the two-cent discrepancies (in piano tuning, cents are used as a unit of measurement for pitch differences, specifically representing fractions of a semitone) that some people miss because they're listening for the expected notes, not the discordant pips that are slightly off. Sometimes, we get so used to the discrepancies that they seem normal. And it can be challenging to hear something in tune when we’ve been listening to it off-key for so long.

Many piano tuners are blind, and the reason they’re so good at their job is that they rely on their ears for their livelihood.

Your brand needs partners who can hear two-cent discrepancies. You need someone objective who can listen not just to your words, but to the sounds behind and in between them.

We’ve got the ears to get you back in tune, so you can focus on doing what you love: growing your brand.