You Can’t Scale When Everybody Rewrites the Story.

Four Businesses. Four Versions of the Company.

Viasat is a multibillion-dollar satellite company with several distinct businesses. Defense. Commercial aviation. Enterprise broadband. Telecom.

Each serves a different audience. That matters. A government program officer should not hear the same message as an airline executive. The needs are different. The risks are different. The proof is different.

So the issue was not that the divisions had developed their own language. They should have.

The issue was that there was no clear structure connecting those versions back to one company.

Internally, that showed up as recurring debate over language. Externally, it showed up as complexity.

The Cost Was Clarity.

The company’s own investor research made the issue explicit.

That was the problem in fairly direct terms. The individual businesses were understandable. The relationship between them was not.

That matters when customers, analysts, investors and employees all encounter the company from different entry points.

The breadth of the portfolio was an asset. It needed a clearer structure around it.

One Story, With Room for Different Buyers.

There were two obvious ways to simplify the problem. Neither worked particularly well.

One was to impose a single corporate message across every division. That creates consistency, but usually at the expense of relevance.

The other was to let each business operate independently. That preserves local credibility, but makes the parent company harder to understand.

So we built a framework between the two. At the top was the corporate belief: unlocking opportunity for everyone, everywhere. Under that, the promise: we unlock opportunity by empowering critical connections where and when they are needed most.

Then three shared pillars: People, Products & Services, Principles. Each pillar had a common truth the company could stand behind, with annual themes underneath to guide what teams actually talked about.

The point was not to script every sentence. It was to give every team the same starting point.

The Framework Had to Work at the Business Level.

The corporate structure only mattered if each division could adapt it without losing the connection back to Viasat. So the framework included audience-level messaging for the individual businesses.

For Enterprise & Mobility, the customer problem centered on reliable connectivity in difficult environments. The practical issue was business performance. The emotional issue was frustration. The underlying expectation was simple: connectivity should work wherever the business needs it. The proof came from decades of experience connecting customers across land, sea, air and space.

For Commercial Aviation, the structure stayed the same, but the buyer changed. The issue was confidence. Airline leaders needed connectivity that had already been proven at scale. The supporting evidence changed accordingly: aircraft connected, airline relationships and operating history.

Same framework. Different customer. Different pressure. Different proof.

That was the intended model, and it is easiest to see in the work itself. Below is the same structure showing up across defense, consumer, enterprise, employer brand and out of home. Nothing here looks alike. Everything here belongs to the same company.

The filmThe whole argument in one piece. Review cut, timecode and all.

Eleven surfaces. Four audiences. One company.More of the work →

The Hard Part Was Adoption.

Writing the framework was only the first half of the job. The second was getting people to use it.

I was working in-house with the brand and content team, which meant the work did not end with a presentation. We worked with the divisions directly. The messaging was developed with the people who would actually have to use it in campaigns, sales materials and internal communications.

The framework also included decision rules. What stays fixed. What can change. What needs review. That reduced the number of situations where every new asset became another discussion about the fundamentals.

The goal was not compliance. It was to make the framework easier to use than starting over.

Not Sure What’s Actually Holding Growth Back?

That’s what the Outside Read is for: a senior outside diagnosis of why growth stalled. One focused week, a clear diagnosis, and the first move.

Ideas, teardowns, and field notes. The stuff we use to help companies make sharper decisions.

Occasional offers. Mostly stuff worth stealing.

This is an Install. Not a project handed back at the end, but a capability the business owns and runs after we leave.