Why Your Portfolio Companies Are Invisible (And Nobody Is To Blame)

Every brief starts the same way.

Someone in the business gets the remit to do something creative. A campaign, a brand film, an event. The energy in the room is good. The ideas are ambitious. There’s a real appetite to do something different.

Then the stakeholders arrive.

Not all at once. That would be too obvious. They come in one by one, each with something they need represented, each with a piece of the company they’ve been working on for months and feel should be front and centre. They’re not wrong to want it. Their concern is entirely reasonable. But by the time every corner of the business has been accounted for, the thing that was supposed to make someone pay attention has been sanded down into something that makes no one uncomfortable and no one curious.

I’ve seen it so many times. Not because the people in those rooms were bad at their jobs. Because the process is designed, structurally, to produce that result. Nobody wants to be the person who signed off on something that landed badly. In markets like the GCC, where reputation isn’t just a soft metric but a commercial one, that fear is proportionally larger. So the instinct to protect, to stay close to what the industry expects, to do what everyone else is doing, is not irrational. It’s just expensive.

Here’s what that caution costs: attention.

I started out as a film director. TV commercials, documentaries, broadcast. I worked in the Middle East in my early twenties, directing business programmes for broadcast across Europe on infrastructure, property, technology. What I was making back then was exactly the format I’d argue against now: top-down, broadcast-style, authority-signalling content that assumed the audience would pay attention simply because the subject matter was important. That model worked when there were three channels and a newspaper. It doesn’t work when everyone is carrying a screen and skipping everything that looks like it’s trying to sell them something.

The second thing I’ve come to believe, and this is the one that tends to make people shift in their seats, is that the gap between consumer communication and business communication is much smaller than most companies think. The person reviewing your investor materials goes home and spends four hours on the same platforms as everyone else. Conditioned by the same formats, the same rhythms, the same patterns that make them stop scrolling. Treating them like they live in a separate, formal register isn’t respectful. It’s just inaccurate.

I’m not saying every business communication should look like a consumer ad. I’m saying the principles that make someone stop, pay attention, and actually receive a message don’t change depending on whether they’re wearing a suit when they read it.

The companies that get this right tend to share one thing: they’ve stripped the message back rather than loaded it up. They’ve made a decision about what the one thing is, and they’ve built everything around that. The ones that struggle are usually trying to use a single piece of communication to say everything to everyone and satisfy every stakeholder in the process. The output isn’t a message. It’s a document.

At 47X, this is one of the things we sit inside portfolio companies to fix. Not by arriving with a new brand and a new logo. By getting close enough to the business to understand what is actually true about it, finding the version of that truth that a real person would care about, and building the communications around that. It takes time. It takes people being willing to be brave about what gets cut. But the alternative is spending money on content that functions as wallpaper.

Your portfolio company has something worth saying. The question is whether anyone outside the building will ever hear it.