Message Matters Co.
Most businesses are better than the way they read online. This side of the desk is where that gets fixed. What you do, who it is for, what to lead with, and what somebody should be doing about it on Monday.
How the work runs
Message, offer, audience, positioning, and the next practical decision. We find the sentence your business has been circling for two years and write it down. This is where the $60 session lands, and for a surprising number of people it is the only stage they need before things start moving.
Campaign concepts, content plans, service language, website direction, launch sequencing. The message gets turned into something with dates on it. You end up with a document you can hand to a staff member and have them know what to do on Monday.
Direction, photography, video, commercials, reels, editing and delivery. This is the Driven by Story half, and it is the reason the strategy does not stall out. Rates and deliverables sit on the production page.
Rates
A thirty minute working session. Bring the thing that is not connecting. Leave with a practical next step, not homework.
The full package. Message and positioning, the offer written out, a content or launch plan with dates on it, and the website or landing page direction to carry it. Priced complete, not as a starting point, so nothing gets added on later.
Monthly strategy, site care and small updates for existing clients. Domain and Google Business Profile setup, plus analytics reviews, sit here too.
Who this suits
The work is good, the reputation is good, and none of that comes across to somebody who found you on a phone at ten at night.
Somebody who shapes the message and then produces the work.
Not a folder that sits there. Work that arrives with somewhere to go, a date to go up, and a reason for being made in the first place.
Questions about the plan and questions about the shoot go to the same phone number, and get answers from the person in charge of both.
Having Mindy means having a person in your corner, someone who believes in you and your message.
Tessa, Founder and Owner, Cascade Vows
That is the part that will not fit on any rate card. Most of the people I work with are the sole person thinking about these things in their business. This gives them someone else in the room who does.
Who I have worked with
No two of these look the same from the inside. For some I build and look after the website. For others it is the whole picture, the message, the site and the images that go on it. A couple want reels every month and a site that keeps up with them. The Route 66 events want photographs, video and reels turned around while the weekend is still going. Every one of them is already good at the thing they do. My job is the telling of it.
Some of this comes from having been the client. For eight years my family owned the Skyview Drive-In in Litchfield, a 1950 Route 66 landmark and the last of the road's original drive-ins running in Illinois. I ran its schedule and invented its events, including graduations on the lot in 2020 when the schools had nowhere else to hold them, and a Guinness World Records night in October 2022 that set the mark for the most dogs at a film screening with 199 of them. That story is on the about page. Promotion, programming and pricing were mine to get right or get wrong, in public, every weekend of the season.
Message Matters Co. is the strategy practice and Driven by Story is the production arm. Both are the same person, which is why the message and the images do not argue with each other. If you found your way here looking for Message Matters Co., this page is it.
Where the work shows up first
Follow along between jobs.
Festival days, work in progress, new frames straight off the card, and whatever the six in the morning walk turned up. The Facebook page is the running feed. YouTube is where the reels and behind the scenes footage live.
Live from Facebook
This frame is the page itself, so a post shows up here the minute it goes up there. Blank frame means a tracker blocker is holding it back, in which case go straight to the page (opens in a new tab).