Chapter two: unnammed
What people say about you when you leave the room is your reputation. What you put on the billboard is your brand. Only one of them can you control. — Janine Hills
Reputation is not what you say about yourself. It is what persists in the room after you have left it. — Janine Hills
The words we repeat become the truth others believe about us. — Janine Hills
We will choose one
Midrand sits between Johannesburg and Pretoria, forty minutes from both, belonging to neither. Its car parks fill by eight and its buildings are filled with glass, all new, none of them has an echo of historical attraction, just not old enough to have a story worth telling. On an ordinary Highveld morning I pulled into the car park of a large British logistics company and sat for a moment before going in.
Almost a year of visits by then. A year of calls, of interviews placed, of articles that ran in the right publications and landed in the right inboxes. The client was happy. Andrew was happy. Something was sitting wrong with me every single time I drove away.
I gathered my things and went in.
Andrew was already in the boardroom. Big man. His presence adjusts the temperature of a room without him doing anything deliberate about it. Partially deaf, which meant he leaned forward when people spoke. Right forward, elbows on the table, head tilted, closing the distance between himself and whatever he might otherwise miss. That lean was a constant across the past year. Something quietly admirable about it. A man who knows what he cannot fully hear and moves toward it anyway.
You would think a man like that would understand instinctively what it means to make your message clear enough that nobody misses it.
And yet here we were. Still.
The others filed in. Six of us around the table that morning. I opened my notebook and looked at Andrew.
Right, I said. We are doing this today.
He smiled the same smile he had been giving me for eleven months. That smile told me everything about the year we had just come through.
Every interview Andrew did was good. He was articulate, knowledgeable, genuinely proud of what his company had built in South Africa. But a financial journalist would write about market positioning. A trade publication would write about supply chain. A third piece that month would land on the British parent company and its African ambitions. Three stories. Three different versions of the same organisation. No thread connecting them.
If you were a potential client who had read all three you could not tell me in one sentence what this company stood for. You would know they existed. You would know Andrew was credible. You would know almost nothing about the organisation itself.
That was the problem.
The story lived entirely inside Andrew. His credibility. His relationships. His ability to show up and perform well in a room or on a call. The company had no voice of its own. If Andrew walked out tomorrow, the reputation walked out with him.
Andrew was not assuming badly. He was assuming the way most leaders assume. Because things felt like they were working, he believed they were. Because the coverage existed, he believed the reputation was accumulating. It was not. It was scattering.
I kept going back to him. We need a key message workshop, I said. We need to sit down and decide what this company actually says about itself. Not what you say about it. What it says. Not the brand. The reputation. The story that lives in the organisation and not only in the man at the top. There is a gap between those two things and it is exactly the size of a crisis waiting to happen.
I tried different ways of explaining it to him across that year. You know the Starbucks brand, I said to him once. The logo, the green aprons, the same cup in every city in the world. But will you like the coffee when you walk in. Will you go back. Will you pay that price a second time. That is reputation. Nobody at Starbucks controls it. They can only influence it through what they consistently do and consistently say and how reliably those two things match. I said, that is what we are building. Or trying to build. Andrew nodded. His diary filled. The workshop did not happen.
There was a morning in March when I thought we had it. Andrew called me himself, which he rarely did, and said he had blocked out a Friday afternoon. Four hours, he said. Let us do your workshop. I drove to Midrand that Thursday to prepare the room, to set up the materials, to make sure everything was ready. Friday morning he sent a message. Something had come up. The regional director was flying in from London. Could we reschedule.
We rescheduled.
Three weeks later his PA called to say Andrew was travelling. The week after that there was a board meeting that ran long. I kept the date in my diary each time. I kept moving it forward.
Professionally I was patient. Internally a year was going by while a company's story remained entirely dependent on one man's ability to show up and perform.
It took twelve months.
That Tuesday morning I walked in and I was not leaving without the work done.
Four hours. Six people. Andrew leaning forward at the head of the table, this time not because he could not fully hear but because he was listening in a way I had not seen from him before.
I opened with a question I always open with.
Tell me, I said, what is the difference between your brand and your reputation.
Andrew looked at me the way leaders look when they believe they already know the answer.
Brand is what we put out there, he said. Our marketing. Our communications.
I said, correct. And your reputation?
He thought for a moment. Same thing, he said. More or less.
I shook my head. Brand is everything you control. Your logo. Your advertising. Your press releases. The narrative you build in the good years when nobody is asking hard questions. You design it, manage it, spend money on it, point to it in a boardroom and say here is who we are. Reputation is what happens when you leave the room. You do not control it. You earn it or you lose it through what you consistently do and consistently say over time.
The room was quiet.
I said, Romano's Pizza. You know the brand. It was everywhere. Awards. Advertising. Customer service recognition. And then they went into liquidation and the US office refused to acknowledge they had ever operated in South Africa. Their suppliers were not paid. Their employees were not paid. The brand was polished. The reputation was hollow. And no amount of advertising could close the gap between those two things once the market found out.
Andrew said nothing.
That, I said, is what has been happening here. Not to that degree. But the gap exists. Every interview you do lands somewhere different. There is no thread. No consistent story. Your reputation lives inside you and when you are not in the room it does not exist.
An hour in, one of the senior managers, logistics background, numbers man, the one who measures everything in units and timelines, looked at me across the table and said, I still do not understand what you are asking us to do.
I said, tell me what this company does.
He said, we move product. We manage supply chains. We deliver on time.
I said, that is what you do. I am asking what you stand for. What does a client feel when they choose you over everyone else.
He looked at me the way people look when they have been asked a question they have never considered. Not because it is a stupid question. Because nobody has ever asked it before.
The room went quiet. Andrew leaned forward further.
And then, slowly, the manager said, they feel like they can stop worrying.
I put my pen down.
That, I said, is your first key message. Everything else we build today sits underneath that one sentence.
Andrew looked at the manager. The manager looked at his hands. Something had shifted in the room that no briefing document had ever produced.
We went through everything. What the company stood for at its core. What it delivered that nobody else delivered the same way. Who their stakeholders were and what each one needed to hear and in what language. We found the five master key messages that sat underneath everything the company did. Then we built the specific language beneath each one. The emphasis for a print interview, the angle for a speaking engagement. The thread for a press statement and the internal message that would make sure every person in the building understood the story they were part of.
By the time we were done, every person in that room could walk out and explain this company the same way. Not the same script. The same truth.
The story no longer lived only in Andrew. It lived in the room. In the organisation. In the five sentences on the page in front of us that anyone could pick up and speak from.
That is what Romano's never built. A story that could survive beyond the person telling it.
Andrew sat back.
He looked at what we had built and he was quiet. I let the quiet sit because something was arriving in him that had not been there before.
He looked at me.
My word, he said. We should have done this a long time ago.
I started laughing. I genuinely could not help it. Not from cruelty. But because I had waited twelve months for that sentence and it arrived with such complete and undefended sincerity that laughter was the only honest thing left to do.
I said, well. I have been trying to do this with you for a year.
He put his hands up. Janine, you are right, he said. It is just one of those things. You do not see it as a priority. And yet, he shook his head slowly, it makes everything so much easier.
Then he said it.
This is music to my ears.
I have thought about that phrase many times since that morning. Music is exactly the right word. When an organisation speaks with one consistent voice, the organisation's voice rather than one person's, what the market hears is something coherent they can follow and begin to trust. One story repeated until the market depends on it. Coverage that builds on itself rather than scattering. Andrew had been generating notes for a year. Good notes. Real notes. But they were not playing the same song.
What changed that Tuesday was not his company's product or its people or its operations. What changed was that the story stopped belonging to one man and started belonging to the organisation. An organisation with its own story is a fundamentally different thing from one that depends on its leader to provide one.
Here is what happens when that distinction is not made. I have walked into companies mid-crisis where the CEO is the only person who can speak coherently about what the organisation stands for. The communications team produces content in twelve different directions because nobody ever sat down and agreed on five. A journalist interviews three people from the same company and comes away with three different impressions of what that company is trying to do.
That is not a communications failure. It is a leadership failure. Because the story starts with the leader deciding what it is. And then it has to leave the leader. It has to become something the whole organisation carries.
Andrew walked me to the lift that afternoon. He shook my hand.
I will not make you wait a year for the next one, he said.
I smiled. I believed him. And I made a note in my diary for the following month to make sure of it.
The Reflections/Notes/Case study sections
Staying in the room when the client is not yet ready is not patience. It is the job.
What that Tuesday in Midrand confirmed is something I have carried since my first year doing this work. The organisations that stand firm when the pressure arrives are not the ones with the most coverage. They are the ones whose story does not depend on any single person to survive. Whose message lives in the walls, in the people, in the five sentences anyone in the building can speak from on any given day.
Assumption is the mother of all big trouble.
The coverage existed and the awards arrived. Both Andrew and Romano's measured the visible output and called it reputation. Neither had built the thing underneath. A story that could survive without someone actively telling it.
Andrew was not a difficult man. He was typical. And typical is the most important word in that sentence. Because the gap he had between his brand and his reputation is the same gap I find in almost every organisation I walk into. Beautiful brand. Scattered story. A leader who is articulate and credible and whose credibility the whole organisation is quietly resting on without anyone having made that decision consciously.
That is thin ice.
This is not only a corporate problem. South Africa has watched what happens when a country's reputation rests on one leader. We rode the extraordinary credibility of Nelson Mandela for years. And then leadership changed. And the story changed with it. And we spent the years that followed trying to rebuild something that should have been embedded in the institution, not carried by the individual.
Organisations are no different. Build your story into the walls. Into the people. Into the five sentences anyone in the building can speak from on any given day to any given audience.
It is how you make a reputation that survives beyond the person who built it.
In the moment of crisis, the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams. What we built that Tuesday morning in Midrand was not dramatic. It was five sentences and the discipline to repeat them. But a bridge does not have to be dramatic to hold. It only has to be built before you need it.
[Janine to add the relevant quote, mentor, or moment that first showed her the cost of a story that lives in one person rather than in the organisation — whether from her years at FNB, her time launching eBucks with Paul Harris, or a moment in her own business that taught her this the hard way.]