Why rewriting your website should be an existential crisis

I was speaking to a client recently who’s in the middle of rewriting his website. Like many businesses, he was getting stuck in the weeds: should the homepage list products? Should it highlight features? 

My advice was simple: don’t start with the website. Start with what your company stands for.

Easy advice to give, but hard to explain and even harder to do.

But once you know what your business stands for, your mission, everything else becomes easier. Your website. Your LinkedIn. Your internal comms. Even your sales pitch. They should all flow from the same core narrative. It sounds wanky, and I promise, I love tactical communications outputs as much as the next person. But before you write another press release, ask yourself, what am I saying and does it matter? 

I always find this concept easy to articulate, but hard to give an example of, which is why I was so excited to read such a great illustration of this in a recent interview from Monocle with Jussi Herlin, Vice-Chair at Finnish lift-maker Kone.

Now, if anyone was going to struggle to make their business sound inspiring, it’s a company that makes lifts. But instead of saying their purpose is “building lifts”, Herlin framed it as “designing how people move through built environments.”

That sounds bigger than a product. It connects Kone to something people can actually relate to: movement, cities, and daily life.

He then takes it further: Kone’s aim is to “shape the future of cities.” Suddenly, a “boring engineering company” is positioned as a player in how urban life works.

And crucially, they link their innovations straight back to that purpose: AI-enabled lifts that predict maintenance before breaking down, mobile-enabled elevators you can call from your phone, energy recovery systems that feed power back into the grid.

Each product is framed as proof of the bigger mission. It’s a messaging house in action: purpose at the top, three buckets underneath, and examples at the foundation (we love a messaging house at Friday).

• Shaping the future of cities.

• Innovation, sustainability, experience.

• Smart lifts, regenerative energy, predictive AI.

  
  

This is where so many companies go wrong. They write endless copy, websites, blogs, press releases, but without a clear through-line it doesn’t add up to anything.

Once you have a core narrative, you’ve got that through-line. Every channel connects back to it. For data-heavy businesses, this is even more important. Data projects, AI tools. They can all look abstract or technical on their own. But when they ladder up to a single story about why the company exists, it clicks.

Instead of “we build data platforms,” it becomes “we give people the confidence to make better decisions.” Suddenly, your website, your LinkedIn, and even your technical architecture documents are telling the same story.

If you’re stuck, start small. Get your core team in a room and ask yourselves these questions:

• What do we do? If we explained it to a 10-year-old, what would we say?

• How do we do it differently?

• Where are we going?

• What do we stand for? 

• What's our point of view?

• What’s our core value proposition in one sentence?

• Who’s your audience?

  
  

All of a sudden you too might move from building lifts, to creating the future of mobility in cities. 

Whether you’re rewriting your website or launching a new product, don’t start with the words on the page. Start with your purpose. What do you stand for? Why do you exist?

If your company runs on data, it’s easy to drown in the detail. But those aren’t the story.

The story is why it matters: the confidence you give leaders, the risks you help manage, the growth you make possible. That’s your anchor. Once you have that, everything else, your website, sales decks, blogs, internal comms, can layer neatly beneath it.

So get the core narrative right, and everything else flows.