Sketch Group

GATED — rebuilt from named Drive sources (Sketch Group Gemini session notes, 29 Jan 2025 and 17 Jun 2025, plus the 7 Jun 2024 intake note) on 1 Jun 2026. Honest and qualitative: every claim below is drawn directly from those session records. No outcomes have been invented. approved:false — pending human review before publication.

Where they started

Sketch Group is a Melbourne visual communications studio that turns complex messages into hand-drawn visuals — graphic recording at live events, explainer videos, sketchnoting and visual strategy work. By the time of these sessions the business was fourteen years old, with a small team of illustrators and a side line in high-quality refillable markers (the Graphic Gear brand).

The founder, Matthew Magain, came to coaching capable and creative but spread across too many directions. In his own words, the business had “suffered for a while” from never settling on its one thing — playing in a few areas without going all-in on any of them. Outreach was stop-start: a cold-outreach system that kept getting half-built and parked, tools chosen before the strategy was clear, and a nagging sense that growth was there to be had but the path to it wasn’t sharp.

The real problem

Two problems sat underneath the busyness.

First, positioning. Sketch Group knew it was good at making messy ideas clear, but couldn’t crisply say who it was for or what pain it solved. Prospect lists felt “quite broad still.” Without that clarity, outreach messaging had nothing solid to stand on.

Second, and more costly, the studio sold like a production house at the end of someone else’s pipeline. The default was to “bend over backwards to give the customer what they want” — take the brief, quote the thing requested, deliver it. That left real value on the table and kept Sketch Group positioned as a vendor rather than an expert.

What we worked on

Coaching tackled both.

On positioning, we worked through the business using the Hedgehog Concept and Ikigai as the lens — what Sketch Group is genuinely best at, passionate about, and can be paid for. That produced a clear through-line: the studio exists to help people be understood. From there we mapped the real pain points clients feel (not enough people understanding the message, no clear concept to begin with, and low uptake even when content looks good) and tied each to a target persona: leaders, project/comms managers, and event managers. That work became the backbone of a structured outreach plan — short problem-and-solution explainer videos per pain point, multiple targeted lists, and message variants to test, rather than a generic pitch.

On sales, the bigger shift was mindset: operate as the expert who diagnoses the real need and guides the client to a bolder solution, instead of order-taking. Matthew brought the language of The Four Conversations into it — “I’m the expert, I’m the prize, I’m on a mission to help” — and got his team aligned around it. Later sessions moved into marketing experiments that play to the studio’s unique assets: conference activations aimed at recession-resilient sectors like local councils, and a “lumpy mail” campaign built around Sketch Group’s own illustrations and markers, with the work tracked by sector through a marketing ROI calculator.

Where they are now

The expert-led approach showed up in live deals. In the clearest example from the notes, a client who came asking for a roughly $10k poster was instead presented with three tiered options once the team understood the underlying change-management need — and chose a $50k package. Matthew described it as “a fundamental shift in how we’ve approached sales.”

He named the change himself: after fourteen years in business, the lesson had landed that the job is to find out what the customer actually needs and encourage them to be bolder. His business partner and a new business-development hire were brought on board with the same expert mindset, and the studio sharpened its marketing toward sectors less exposed to the economic climate.

This is an honest snapshot of an engagement still in motion at the time these notes were taken — the positioning and sales shift were real and already producing deals, while the broader marketing experiments (conference activations, the lumpy-mail campaign) were being built and measured rather than finished. The direction of travel is clear: from order-taking production house to a studio that sells, and is valued, as the expert.