There's a deeply held belief in many businesses that the work should speak for itself. For a long time, it does. You build a reputation through performance. Customers stay because you followed through on what you said you'd do. They refer you because the experience was good enough to put their own name behind. Revenue grows, margins hold, and at some point it starts to feel like the model is working — because it is.

But reputation is local. It’s also relational and fragile. It lives in the heads of the people who've experienced it, but doesn't (often) travel to new markets. It doesn't survive when a decision-maker at your customer's company moves on and their replacement starts fresh. And it doesn't protect you when a well-capitalized competitor enters your space and starts telling a story about themselves, even if that story isn't as true as yours.

Reputation is what people say about you after they've worked with you. Positioning is what people understand about you before they ever pick up the phone. They're related, but they're not the same thing, and the gap between the two is where a lot of strong businesses are exposed.

The Gap in Practice

I've been thinking about this because of something that happened recently during a client engagement. I was presenting discovery findings to the leadership team of an equipment rental business — a company that, by most measures, is winning. Customers told me, independently and unprompted, that the experience was materially better than the alternatives. They described premium pricing as fair — even expected — because the service standard justified it. They talked about equipment showing up clean, configured correctly, and ready to work on arrival. They talked about direct access to real people who solve problems without a ticket queue.

None of that lived anywhere a prospective customer could find it. The company had grown almost entirely on word of mouth, inbound search, and repeat business. The brand promise was real. It just existed only in the lived experience of people who had already chosen them.

During the readout, one of the client's leaders described the business as a duck — everything looks calm on the surface, but underneath, they're paddling like hell. The room laughed, because it was true. But then he said the thing that stuck with me: "We're delivering on all of this today. I'm just not sure we're telling anyone."

That's the gap. And I think it's far more common than most leaders realize.

The Danger of Growing in Silence

You could argue that plenty of great companies have scaled without formal positioning or messaging. And you'd be right. But the environment has changed in ways that make this gap more dangerous than it used to be.

Private equity is pouring capital into industrial and commercial services, and the companies receiving that capital are investing in brand, digital presence, and go-to-market infrastructure in ways that weren't common five years ago. They may not be better operators, but they're getting better at looking like it.

Meanwhile, the buyer has changed too. The person approving the contract is increasingly forming impressions before they ever make contact. If your website says nothing about your service standard, your delivery model, or your equipment condition — and your competitor's does — you've already lost a positioning battle you didn't know you were in.

What You Do Has to Become What You Say

The instinct in many businesses is to wait — wait for the rebrand, wait for the new website, wait until there's time to "do it right." But the gap doesn't require a six-month brand project to start closing. It requires a shift in mindset: treating what you say with the same rigor you bring to what you do.

I've written before that positioning is an act of clarity — a process of naming what's already true about a business so that everyone, inside and out, can see it the same way. What I'm describing here is the inverse problem: a business where what's true is genuinely impressive, but it has never been named, packaged, or made visible to anyone who hasn't already experienced it firsthand.

Closing this gap means naming your standards — making them specific enough that customers can hold you to them and prospects can evaluate you against them. It means translating operational advantages into customer outcomes, because your customers don't care about your internal processes; they care about what those processes produce for them. And it means making all of it findable, so that the next customer doesn't have to discover your value the hard way — by choosing you on faith and hoping for the best.

The businesses I find myself most concerned about aren't the ones with a weak product and strong marketing. Those get found out. The ones that keep me up at night are the ones doing exceptional work in silence — because they're the most exposed to a louder competitor with a less deserving story.

Operational excellence earns you the right to a market position. But it doesn't claim one for you. That part, you have to do on purpose.