Find Your Message
See the big picture of your business
Abstract
Clarify your message by sketching it. Visual strategist Ingrid Lill will show how to map the big picture of your business—linking your story, audience needs, and offer—into a clear, usable storyboard. After a brief walkthrough, she’ll coach a volunteer live to demonstrate turning scattered expertise into a signature visual framework.
Speaker Bio
Ingrid Lill
Hi fellow visionary, nice to meet you!
I'm a visual artist turned business thinker, working with visionary founders, coaches and consultants all over the world – all from my beautiful studio in a remodeled barn in the Danish countryside.
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Session Summary
This session moves beyond mere drawing techniques to establish a comprehensive framework for entrepreneurs and visionary founders to map their offerings, understand their clients, and ultimately, find their authentic voice.
The Foundation: Drawing as Communication and Thinking
Ingrid Lill, who self-identifies as a "brand strategist with a pencil," begins by establishing a foundational premise: visual thinking for business is not about artistic skill but about clarity and communication. She shares a quick lesson on drawing simple figures, emphasizing that drawing can be really easy if you don't try to do it perfectly. This simple 'how' unlocks the more critical 'what'—the message.
She introduces the "Brand in a Nutshell" template, a simple visual framework designed to crystallize one's identity. This exercise involves sketching a figure and explicitly defining the following elements: Name, Title (e.g., Brand Strategist), Secret Sauce (e.g., "with a pencil"), and a Promise (e.g., "Clarity for visionaries"). The insight here is that presenting an introduction with a visual element captures attention and makes the message pop far more effectively than plain text. Furthermore, the act of drawing the figure and its surrounding elements helps the creator define their identity more concretely.
Ingrid also shares her personal breakthrough moment, which occurred later in her career: realizing that drawing’s value is in its function as communication, not necessarily as art. This discovery allowed her to stop hiding behind her work and fully engage her voice. This lesson translates directly to business, encouraging participants to "Take up space"—both physically and professionally—to approach their work with confidence and energy.
The Big Picture: The Visual Minds Method
The core of the presentation is the proprietary visual strategy model Ingrid developed to help clients gain clarity. She contrasts the 'Before' state—a visionary leader with a confusing jumble of separate categories like social media, website, and products—with the 'After' state: a coherent system where they know who they are, why they are doing it, and how they operate.
This system, the Visual Minds Method, is built around four interconnected pillars, often mapped spatially:
- The Who: Customer Transformation (The "Problem Pit to Paradise" Model): This is the essential marketing blueprint. The visual template casts the entrepreneur as the "pilot" guiding the client from a state of suffering (the Problem Pit) to their desired outcome (Paradise). A key insight is the absolute necessity of being concrete: knowing exactly what the client is suffering from (the 'half-written songs' or the confusion) and what they want to achieve (the 'released, exhilarated' feeling).
- The Why: Your Story and Mission: This involves leveraging the Hero's Journey template to define a powerful backstory, focusing on an obstacle the entrepreneur once faced, the idea that brought them out of it (their secret sauce), and how that experience now informs their mission to help others.
- The How: Your World Models and Process: This defines the unique approach. The entrepreneur's World Models are presented as a direct answer to a systemic, outdated belief or 'enemy' in the client’s industry (e.g., the "superstar culture" of perfectionism). The resulting models and the Signature Service process (ideally 1-3 clear steps) provide the framework for client transformation.
- Business DNA (The Secret Sauce): Inspired by the Ikigai concept, this is defined as the overlap of professional skills, personality, and passion. When this unique blend is applied to solve an urgent problem that people are willing to pay for, it becomes a sustainable business.
Key Insights and Application
The power of the visual model lies in its ability to facilitate deep thought and strategic alignment. The live coaching session demonstrates this: by drawing the client's concrete state (e.g., desperate, constricted, with half-written songs) and their desired outcome (exhilarated, performing in an intimate coffee house), the focus shifts from vague notions to tangible results. The drawing acts as a forcing function, making the entrepreneur define the philosophical enemy or systemic mistake that keeps their client stuck, which then clarifies their service's unique value proposition.
Ultimately, Ingrid Lill argues that the drawings are a tool to find the right words, with copy and naming being critically important. She notes the effective use of AI (like Claude or a custom GPT) to analyze the sketches and discussion details, using the visual representation as a strategic input to generate clear, impactful copy and brand language. For Ingrid, visual thinking precedes and works in parallel with communication; she thinks spatially, using the drawing process as an inseparable feedback loop for structuring information and making sound business decisions.