We’d planned the rebrand to the nth degree. New name, new positioning, new everything. The agency had grown beyond its original identity and we needed a brand that reflected where we were heading, not where we’d started.
The preparation took months. Legal name change documentation. Banking transitions. Domain registrations. Redirect mappings. Client communication templates. Staff briefings. We had spreadsheets for our spreadsheets.
The strategy was to complete all the invisible infrastructure changes first - the legal and banking stuff - before the visible marketing rebrand. Get the foundations solid, then flip the switch on the public-facing elements. Clean. Professional. Controlled.
We filed the Companies House paperwork and waited for it to process. Everything was in place for the marketing launch the following week.
Then the Official Receiver for Kent turned up at our door.
The uncomfortable few minutes
I’ll be honest, my first thought was that something had gone catastrophically wrong that I didn’t know about. Had a client gone under? Had someone filed something they shouldn’t have?
Turns out he was part of the management committee of a charitable organisation we were working with. They’d paid us an initial deposit for a web project - significant enough that he was monitoring it personally. And he’d set up alerts on Companies House.
When he saw our company name change, he came straight to our offices to find out what was going on. Were we folding? Running? About to disappear with his organisation’s money?
The confrontation was heated for a few minutes. From his perspective, a company changing its name right after taking a deposit from a charity looked suspicious. He wasn’t wrong to be concerned.
What I learned
Once we’d sat down and I walked him through our rebrand plans - the full project documentation, the timeline, the reasons - everything calmed down. We then went through the project plan for his organisation’s website in detail. He left satisfied, and the project completed successfully.
But I’d made an assumption that cost me an uncomfortable afternoon and could have cost the agency a client relationship.
I’d assumed that anyone who needed to know about the rebrand would find out through our planned communications. I’d thought about clients, suppliers, staff, the press. I hadn’t thought about the people on the management committees of our client organisations who might have independent reasons to monitor Companies House filings.
The actual lesson
A quick heads-up to client organisations about upcoming administrative changes - even before the marketing rebrand - would have taken five minutes and saved a lot of stress. Not everything needs to be a coordinated launch. Some things just need a phone call.
The rebrand itself went well. The agency grew significantly over the following years. But I still think about that afternoon when I learned that sometimes the most important stakeholder communication is the one you haven’t thought of yet.