The Art of the Brief
The Art of the Brief
WHAT RETAIL TAUGHT ME ABOUT BUSINESS – POST 1 OF 4
Before I became a Regional Director for Get Ahead, I spent years as a Buying Director for major UK retailers including Ryman and Signet. This series isn’t a career retrospective. It’s about the skills, instincts, and lessons from that world that still shape how I work today, and why they matter for the business owners I support.
In retail buying, the brief is everything.
Before a single product is selected, before a supplier meeting is booked, before a range is built, there is a brief. What does the customer actually want? What problem are they trying to solve? What does success look like for this category, this season, this store format? Get the brief right and the rest of the process has a chance. Get it wrong, and you can spend months pursuing something that was never going to work, however good it looked on paper.
I learned this early in my buying career, and I learned it the hard way. A range that made perfect sense in a meeting room could fall completely flat on the shop floor, not because the products were poor, but because they answered the wrong question. The brief had been assumed rather than established. And assumptions, in buying, are expensive.
The question beneath the question
What buying teaches you, over time, is to listen for what someone actually needs rather than what they say they want. Those two things are often related. They’re rarely identical.
A supplier might tell you they have a product that will transform your stationery range. What they mean is: they have a product. Whether it transforms anything depends entirely on what your customers are actually looking for, and that’s a question only you can answer, if you’ve done the work to understand it properly.
The discipline this requires isn’t complicated. But it does require slowing down at the point where most people are tempted to speed up. When there’s pressure to fill a gap, to make a decision, to move forward, the instinct is to reach for the nearest available solution. The brief disciplines you to pause and ask: is this actually the right solution, for these customers, at this moment?
That pause is where the real value is created. Not in the selection itself, but in the clarity that precedes it.
What this looks like when a business owner comes to me
The conversations I have as a Regional Director for Get Ahead often begin in a very similar place to those supplier meetings. A business owner knows they need help. They can feel the weight of what they’re carrying: the tasks that aren’t getting done, the skills that are missing, the hours that are disappearing into things that aren’t really their job. What they’re less clear on, often, is exactly what kind of help would make the most difference.
That’s not a criticism. It’s completely understandable. When you’re inside a business, running it day to day, it’s genuinely hard to step back and identify the precise point where external support would have the greatest impact. The pressure creates noise. And noise makes it hard to brief clearly.
In retail buying, the brief was everything. Get it wrong and the whole range suffered. I’ve taken that same discipline into every conversation I have with business owners today.
So the first thing I try to do, before any conversation about Virtual Experts or matching or how Get Ahead works, is ask the questions that help establish the real brief. Not ‘what tasks do you need doing?’ but ‘what would a good outcome actually look like for your business in six months?’ Not ‘what skills are you missing?’ but ‘where is the gap that’s costing you the most, in time, in energy, in lost opportunity?’
Those questions slow things down, briefly. But they save an enormous amount of time and frustration further down the line.
Why getting the brief right changes everything downstream
In buying, a poorly established brief has consequences that ripple through the entire process. The wrong product gets selected. It takes up space on the shelf that a better product could have occupied. It delivers disappointing sales. It damages the relationship with the supplier who was briefed incorrectly in the first place. The cost of the initial misalignment compounds at every stage.
The same is true in business support. A Virtual Expert matched to the wrong brief, even a talented, experienced one, will struggle to deliver what the business actually needs, because what the business actually needs was never clearly established. The hours get spent. The invoices get paid. But the outcome falls short, and nobody is quite sure why.
Getting the brief right upfront protects everyone: the business owner, the Virtual Expert, and the working relationship between them. It creates the conditions for genuine success rather than a technically-fulfilled arrangement that doesn’t quite hit the mark.
This is one of the things I value most about how Get Ahead approaches matching. It’s not a transactional process – here’s a list of available VAs, take your pick. It’s a conversation. A careful one. One that starts with the brief, and takes the time to establish it properly before anything else happens.
What I’d ask any business owner to consider
If you’re thinking about bringing in support, whether that’s a Virtual Expert, a specialist freelancer, or any form of external help, the most useful thing you can do before that conversation is spend some time getting clear on the brief yourself.
Not a job description. Not a list of tasks. A genuine answer to the question: what would need to be true in three or six months for this to have been the right decision?
That answer is your brief. Everything else follows from it.
And if you find the answer hard to articulate, if the pressure and the noise make it difficult to see clearly what the real gap is, that’s a conversation worth having too. Sometimes the most valuable thing a buying conversation does is help you understand what you actually need. The same is true here.
WHY THIS MATTERS NOW
This applies, perhaps more than anywhere right now, to how businesses are approaching AI. The temptation is to adopt a tool because it’s available, because everyone else seems to be using it, because not using it feels like falling behind. But a poorly briefed AI implementation is the same as a poorly briefed buying range: it answers the wrong question efficiently.
The discipline of the brief – what problem are we actually solving, for whom, and what does success look like – is exactly what most AI conversations are missing. The businesses getting the most from these tools aren’t the ones who adopted them fastest. They’re the ones who were clearest about what they needed before they started.
A Final Thought
Retail buying taught me that the brief isn’t a formality. It’s the foundation.
Get it right and everything that follows has a chance to work. Get it wrong and even the best people, the best products, and the best intentions won’t save you.
That’s as true for a stationery range in a Ryman store as it is for the decision to bring in support for your growing business.
The question is always the same: what do you actually need? Not what’s available. Not what’s easiest. What would genuinely make the difference.
If you’re wondering what kind of support might make the most difference for your business right now, and you’d find it useful to think that through with someone, I’m always happy to have that conversation.
I’m Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Get Ahead in Oxfordshire.
Next in the series: Relationships Are the Real Margin.
What Retail Taught Me About Business
What a career in retail buying taught Vicky McKenna about business, and why those lessons matter more than ever.
- The Art of the Brief
- Relationships are the Real Margin
- Knowing when Something doesn’t fit
- The Weight of the Decision
