A few months ago, I was in a place I hadn’t expected to be.
I was looking for a job.
Not because I wanted to leave entrepreneurship behind. I simply needed something steady while I continued building my business. So when I found an opening for a web designer, I applied.
The interviews went great. Better than I expected.
A few days later I got the news that I was one of the top ten candidates. I remember thinking, Man… I got this!
Then they sent me the design assessment.
On paper, it looked simple enough. Build the website home page using the information they provided.
I opened the files, read through the questionnaire, stared at the screen…
…and felt a little stupid, can’t lie.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to build the page. I’ve been designing websites for long time and I’ve built a lot of them. That’s why I was top 10. I know my way around WordPress. I know Elementor. I know layout, typography, user experience, and all the technical pieces.
That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that my brain wouldn’t stop asking questions the questionnaire couldn’t answer.
Who is this business really trying to serve?
What makes them different from everyone else?
Why would someone choose them?
What story are we trying to tell?
There were a handful of answers on a questionnaire, but they only scratched the surface. I think way too deeply for surface level answers. There was nobody I could ask. Nobody to have a conversation with. Meanwhile, the clock kept ticking because the assignment wasn’t about understanding the business. It was about producing the website as quickly as possible.
So I failed.
At the time, that stung.
The pay was good, and honestly, I wanted the job. I remember wondering if maybe I had lost a step. Damn, maybe I just wasn’t fast enough anymore. Maybe the industry had moved on without me.
It’s funny how disappointment has a way of making you question things that were never actually broken.
Looking back now, I don’t think I failed the assessment.
I failed to ignore the part of my brain that needed clarity before it could create.
That realization changed everything.
For years I told people I built websites. That’s what I sold. That’s what people hired me to do.
But when I really looked back over my favorite projects, the websites weren’t what stood out.
The conversations did.
The whiteboards filled with ideas.
That feeling when a client would stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “I’ve never thought about it that way.”
The excitement that came from helping someone finally explain what made their business different.
I realized I had been chasing the wrong finish line.
The website was never the product.
Clarity was.
The website was simply what happened after we found it.
Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.
It also explained something that had frustrated me for years. The projects that dragged on forever weren’t usually suffering from bad design. They were suffering from unclear thinking. We’d move buttons, rewrite headlines, shuffle sections around, and somehow end up right back where we started.
It looked like progress because I was busy. In reality, we were just putting pretty colors on confusion.
That’s why I believe one simple idea now guides everything I do.
Don’t confuse motion with progress.
Designing before thinking feels productive…
…until revision number 6 when you start to hate life.
Now, every project begins somewhere completely different.
Before we talk about colors, fonts, layouts, or animations, we spend time getting clear.
Who do you help? What problems do you solve? Why should someone trust you instead of the next coach or consultant What questions are they asking before they’re ever ready to buy? What story should your website leave behind after someone closes the browser?
These conversations became the foundation of something I now call the Clarity Blueprint.
It’s a process that helps coaches and consultants organize years of experience into a clear story before a single page gets designed. Once the blueprint exists, building the website becomes dramatically easier because we’re no longer trying to figure out the business while we’re designing it.
Ironically, the job I wanted helped me discover the business I was supposed to build.
These days, I don’t describe myself as someone who builds websites.
I call myself a Client Flow Engineer.
I create Clarity Blueprints that help coaches and consultants get clear on their business, then I build the website that brings their story to life.
Turns out, I wasn’t built for an assembly line that measured success by how fast I could push pixels.
I was built to ask better questions.
And looking back, that job I didn’t get may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.
