OUR PURPOSE
PURPOSE, MADE PRACTICALPeople sometimes ask how CALLCUT began. The truthful answer is that it didn’t begin with a grand plan.
It grew out of more than 30 years of working with businesses, brands and people. My career took me from computers to sales, then into marketing strategy and communications, working across a fairly eclectic mix of sectors.
I loved the creativity, the problem-solving and, above all, the people. What I became increasingly uncomfortable with were some of the contradictions. Businesses saying one thing and doing another. Marketing making promises the organisation couldn’t deliver. People being treated as a resource rather than as people. Sustainability becoming something to talk about rather than something to practise.
Somewhere amongst all of that, I became less interested in how businesses looked and much more interested in how they actually worked.
CALLCUT grew from there.
Over the years, I’ve also learnt that business problems rarely stay politely in their own lane. What starts as a marketing question can lead somewhere completely different once you begin pulling at the thread. The answer might sit in the strategy, the culture, the way a decision is being made or simply in something nobody has thought to question before.
That is why CALLCUT brings together coaching, mentoring, consultancy, responsible business, marketing strategy and communications. I don’t start by deciding which one you need. I start with what is actually going on.
And sometimes nothing is particularly wrong.
You can be running a perfectly good business and still know there is something you aren’t seeing.
Looking at the same wall every day will limit how you see it. Working with CALLCUT creates the opportunity to view that same wall from different perspectives.
A different perspective can change the question, not just the answer.
And that brings me to the name.
If I were looking at my business purely from an outsider’s marketing perspective, I would probably never have called it CALLCUT.
Which is precisely why I did.
I believe in honesty to the core. Honesty in thought, kindness, conversation, business and the promises we make. Short of calling the company HONEST, I couldn’t think of anything more transparent than putting my own name above the door.
If I ask other businesses to stand behind what they say and do, I should be willing to do the same.
There was also a slightly silent, passive-aggressive motive.
After a lifetime of hearing my name mispronounced, I thought that putting it on a business might finally teach people how to say it.
Call. Cut.
Very simple. Apparently quite hard to master.
That combination probably says more about CALLCUT than a carefully manufactured purpose statement ever could. Take the work seriously. Question things. Say what you mean. Be kind. Don’t pretend to know something you don’t. And be prepared to put your name to what you do.
CALLCUT exists to bring an outside perspective to businesses and the people running them — helping them see what they may no longer be able to see from the inside.
Not to tell them what to think.
To help them see differently.