Keeping It Simply Spoken: Learning to Explain What I Do

Over the past several months, I've spent countless hours developing Operational Growth Advisors. I've immersed myself in understanding how businesses operate, why challenges develop, and how we can help leaders better understand what's happening within their organizations.

But somewhere along the way, I encountered a challenge I hadn't anticipated. The deeper I became involved in understanding and developing OGA's work, the harder it seemed to become to explain what we actually do in simple, everyday language.

It was a frustrating realization. Here I was, building a business around helping others gain clarity, yet I was struggling to communicate that very value clearly myself.

When Understanding Something Makes It Harder to Explain

I suspect this is something many professionals experience. The more deeply involved you become in your work, the more familiar you are with its terminology, processes, and underlying concepts. You recognize details and relationships that others may not immediately see, and because you understand their importance, you naturally want to explain them.

That's exactly where I found myself. I could discuss operational assessments, diagnostic reasoning, organizational conditions, and the importance of understanding what contributes to recurring business problems. I understood how those elements fit together and why they mattered to the quality of the work OGA would deliver.

But when someone asked me a seemingly simple question like, "What does Operational Growth Advisors do?" I often found myself searching for the right words. I wanted to communicate the depth and value of the work without leaving anything important out. The result was sometimes an explanation that was far more complicated than the question required.

I wasn't struggling because I didn't understand the business. I was struggling because I had become so immersed in developing it that I was approaching conversations like a technician explaining how something works rather than a business owner explaining why it matters.

A Conversation That Changed My Perspective

Recently, I spoke with a marketing professional about the challenges I was having communicating OGA's value. The advice was straightforward: Keep it simple. Speak in language people naturally understand, and focus on what matters to them rather than everything you know about the work you perform.

The recommendation wasn't to diminish the expertise behind OGA or oversimplify the challenges businesses face. It was to recognize that effective communication begins with the listener's experience, not the speaker's technical knowledge.

That conversation made me realize I had been approaching things backward. I was trying to explain how we help business owners understand their operations before helping them recognize why that understanding might be valuable.

Most business owners don't begin their day thinking about operational dependencies, workflow conditions, or organizational capacity. They're thinking about employees, customers, deadlines, responsibilities, and the many things competing for their attention. They may be frustrated because the same problems keep returning, because decisions continually come back to them, or because something that should be relatively simple takes far more effort than expected.

Others may be doing quite well. Their businesses are operating successfully, and they're considering what comes next. Perhaps they're thinking about expanding, adding employees, opening another location, or determining whether their current operations can support greater demand.

Those are the experiences and questions that matter to them. And those are the conversations I should have been starting.

Recognition Before Explanation

One of the most valuable lessons I've taken from this experience is that people need to recognize why something matters before they're likely to appreciate the process behind it.

Consider a business owner who feels as though they're constantly putting out fires. They begin the morning with a plan, only to spend the day responding to unexpected problems, answering questions, resolving issues, and handling things they thought had already been addressed. By the end of the day, they've been busy from morning until evening but haven't accomplished much of what they originally intended.

That owner doesn't need me to explain what putting out fires feels like. They already know. What they may not have considered is whether those recurring interruptions have something in common or whether there are underlying conditions contributing to them.

That opens the door to a much more meaningful question: What if you understood why those fires keep happening in the first place?

The answer isn't something we should assume. Those interruptions might involve unclear responsibilities, delayed information, or the way work moves between people. They might have entirely different explanations, and some may simply be unavoidable parts of operating that particular business.

Understanding what's actually happening requires looking beyond the immediate experience and examining the evidence. That's the work OGA is designed to perform, but the conversation begins with something the business owner already recognizes.

Keeping It Simply Spoken

As I continued reflecting on this experience, an idea began taking shape: K.I.S.S., which stands for Keeping It Simply Spoken.

For me, it's more than a name for a content series. It's a reminder of how I want to communicate, especially when discussing subjects that can become unnecessarily technical. The objective isn't to remove the substance or complexity from the work itself. It's to explain its relevance without requiring someone to understand every detail of how it's performed.

We've begun developing a collection of everyday business experiences around this principle. They include familiar frustrations such as repeatedly fixing the same problems, having responsibilities continually return to the owner, waiting on other people to complete work, and struggling to find time for longer-term priorities. They also include questions about future growth and whether a business is prepared for the opportunities its leadership wants to pursue.

The idea is to begin with something recognizable, offer a simple perspective on what might be happening, and encourage people to consider why understanding it could be valuable.

We're not trying to diagnose a business through a social media post or suggest that every frustration has the same underlying cause. We're helping people recognize situations they may want to understand more clearly, while remaining true to the professional discipline behind OGA's work.

A Lesson That Extends Beyond Marketing

The more I've thought about this experience, the more I've realized that the lesson reaches well beyond marketing or explaining Operational Growth Advisors.

Professionals in nearly every industry can become so familiar with their work that they unintentionally make it difficult for others to understand its value. We explain technical features when someone wants to understand the benefit. We describe processes when someone is interested in outcomes. And sometimes we use terminology that feels perfectly natural to us but means very little to someone outside our field.

I don't believe the solution is to abandon technical depth. Expertise matters, and in OGA's case, the ability to examine evidence carefully, challenge assumptions, and distinguish symptoms from underlying conditions is essential to delivering meaningful value.

The lesson is recognizing when that depth is necessary and when it isn't. Someone considering whether OGA might be useful doesn't need the same explanation as someone actively participating in an operational assessment. Those are different conversations, and effective communication should reflect that difference.

There's also a degree of humility involved. I've invested a great deal of effort in developing OGA's capabilities, but this experience reminded me that knowing something well doesn't automatically mean I'm communicating it effectively. Sometimes improving requires acknowledging that the way we've been approaching something isn't working as well as it could.

What I've Come to Understand

This experience has helped me become clearer about something fundamental to Operational Growth Advisors. Our purpose isn't simply to identify problems or tell business owners what they should change. It's to help leadership develop a reliable understanding of what's happening within their organization, why it's happening where the evidence supports that conclusion, and what deserves their attention.

For an owner dealing with recurring frustrations, that understanding can provide a better foundation for deciding how to improve the business. For someone preparing for expansion or future growth, it can provide greater clarity about existing capabilities and what additional demands may require.

The work behind those outcomes can be detailed and technically demanding, but explaining why they matter shouldn't have to be.

Building OGA has taught me a great deal about business operations, diagnostic thinking, and the importance of understanding before recommending action. This experience has taught me something equally important about communicating that work to the people it's intended to help.

I've spent months learning how to better understand the challenges businesses experience. Now I'm learning how to explain that work in a way business owners can immediately relate to.

That's what Keeping It Simply Spoken means to me. It's a lesson I'm grateful to have learned, and one I intend to keep practicing.

I'm Peter Daniel with OGA, giving you something to think about.