What would happen if you weren’t there?

Don’t worry, no need to get superstitious. But since you’re still here, I’d like to take you inside a small part of the Flow Interview we conduct at Alisei before moving on to brand development.

After the first few questions—the ones that help us understand the company, the market, the objectives, and everything that is relatively easy to explain because it belongs to the rational side of the business—we start moving into slightly different territory and ask questions such as:

If your brand walked into a room, how would it speak? Would it be the one that immediately takes over the conversation, or the one that observes first and only speaks when it has something worth saying? How would it move? And so on.

There is almost always a moment of hesitation when I ask these questions, but then people start to surrender to the flow and let their imagination take over, and that is usually when the most interesting things begin to emerge.

Because explaining what a company does is relatively easy. Explaining who it is requires an entirely different kind of effort.

There is, however, one premise we always make clear before starting this exercise: try to answer as the company, rather than as the person I happen to be interviewing.

It may sound like an obvious distinction, but sitting across the table is almost always the founder, the CEO, or someone who has built that company, lived and breathed it, and inevitably infused it with a significant part of their own personality. Separating the two, then, becomes far less natural than you might think.

And that is precisely where a question I have been thinking about a lot lately begins: Do companies perform better when they reflect the people who created them, or when, at some point, they manage to develop a personality of their own?

Because in the beginning, it is almost impossible for a company not to resemble its founder. But what happens later?

When we work on brands, we often tend to describe their personality through three, four, or five adjectives: authoritative, innovative, human, bold, elegant.

You have to start somewhere, of course. But when you think about it, people with truly distinctive personalities are almost always more contradictory than that. You can be extremely self-confident and self-deprecating at the same time, sophisticated yet approachable, rational in some situations and completely instinctive in others. And more often than not, it is precisely these less predictable combinations that make us recognizable.

With brands, however, we have an almost irresistible tendency to smooth out every tension, ultimately creating personalities that are perfectly consistent, perfectly positive, and perfectly interchangeable.

Everyone is innovative, yet reliable. Premium, yet accessible. Bold, but never too much. Friendly, yet professional.

Basically, the kind of people who would never say the wrong thing at a dinner party—and who, ten minutes later, no one would remember.

If I want to understand who you are, I put you on the spot.

And that is why, if I wanted to understand today whether a company truly has a personality of its own, I would not cover up its logo to see whether I could still recognize it from an ad.

It is a perfectly valid exercise, but we are still operating within the realm of communication, and a brand can pass that test brilliantly without ever having truly solved the underlying problem.

Instead, I would take away the ideal conditions.

I would want to see how much the way it treats a small client differs from the way it treats a major one, how much it is willing to sacrifice to keep a promise, and, above all, what it chooses to give up.

Because as long as being bold, transparent, innovative, or people-focused comes at no cost, those are all fairly easy qualities to claim.

And since, as someone pointed out to me a few days ago, there is a certain brutality in me, I would take the experiment one step further and remove the founder.

Not permanently, of course. I wouldn’t want any clients who have made it this far to start worrying.

But imagine the founder or CEO stepping away from the day-to-day running of the company for six months, making it impossible to call them every time a slightly delicate decision needs to be made.

Would the people within the company still know what to do?

This is where, in my view, personality stops being merely a communication tool and becomes something far more interesting: a shared framework for making decisions.

And perhaps this is also why some companies manage to grow while maintaining a strong sense of coherence, while others, once they reach a certain size, seem to lose something that used to feel unmistakably clear. That personality existed in one person’s mind and instincts, but no one had ever really done the work of separating it from them, understanding it, and turning it into something that could belong to everyone else as well.

Perhaps the hardest part isn’t creating a personality, but understanding when it stops being yours.

For an entrepreneur, I imagine that is a particularly delicate transition.