From Sign Shop to Strategist: The Story Behind Third Raven & Co

I built my first website when I was eleven. It was a Harry Potter fan site with a sorting hat, chat rooms and, almost certainly, a terrible colour scheme. I thought it was extraordinary.

Looking back, it was the first time I realised you could make something from nothing, put it online, and have strangers find it and feel something. That idea never really left me. It just took a very long way round to become a business.

This is the origin story of WQ Creative, the business that is now Third Raven & Co. If you want the story of the name change itself, that has its own post. This one is about how I got here, and why the work I do now looks the way it does.

Where did WQ Creative actually start?

WQ Creative started as a side business in 2015, alongside a full-time job. It was design work for small businesses, done in evenings and weekends. But the skills behind it were built much earlier, in two jobs that had nothing to do with "branding" on paper and everything to do with it in practice.

Eight years in a sign shop

My first real job was as an apprentice signwriter. Over eight years in that sign shop I was the signwriter, the designer, the project manager and, eventually, the marketer.

A sign shop is a brilliant education in how businesses see themselves. People would walk in wanting a new sign for their van or their shopfront, and within five minutes you could tell whether they knew who they were. Some had a clear answer to "what do you want people to think when they see this?" Most didn't. They wanted it to look good, and they could not tell you what good meant.

The ones with a clear answer got signs that worked. The rest got signs that were technically fine and said nothing in particular. The difference was almost never budget. It was clarity.

What did seven years of running ads teach me?

After the sign shop, I spent around seven years running Meta and Google Ads for a large university. Big budgets, lots of data, and a very honest scoreboard. You find out quickly what actually makes people click, enquire and commit, and what only makes the marketing team feel good.

The biggest lesson: ads amplify whatever is already there. If the message is clear and the page it lands on is convincing, paid traffic works. If the message is muddy, you are just paying to send more people to a confusing page. I watched plenty of money disappear that way, and it is the reason I now tell people that the real reason marketing isn't working is usually upstream of the marketing.

Then the role was made redundant. It was not the plan and it was not fun, but it did force a question I had been avoiding: was the thing I had been building on the side actually the main thing?

It was. In time I went full-time in the business, and everything I had learned in the sign shop and the ad accounts finally had one place to go.

Why did WQ Creative change?

For a long time WQ Creative was a design business, and the name suited it. People came to me for logos and websites and that is what they got.

But the work kept moving. The part of every project that made the biggest difference was never the visual bit. It was the thinking before it. Who is this business actually for? What does it need to be known for? Why would someone choose it over the other three tabs they have open? Once those questions were answered, the design was the easy part. When they weren't, no amount of design could save it.

That is the difference I write about in brand designer vs brand strategist, and it is the difference I ended up living. I stopped being a designer who did a bit of strategy and became a brand and website strategist who makes sure the build gets done properly, with a small team of contractors who are very good at the parts I shouldn't be doing myself.

The old name belonged to the old business. So in September 2026, WQ Creative became Third Raven & Co.

Who do I work with now?

The businesses I am best for are established service businesses: consultants, advisors, fractional executives, boutique professional firms, multi-practitioner health clinics, and some coaches and creatives. Typically they are turning over $15k to $20k or more a month, they are excellent at what they do, and most of their work comes through referrals.

And something feels off. Prices get questioned more than they should. The enquiries that do come in are often the wrong fit. They wince a little when they send someone to their website. The business grew and the brand didn't.

That is the gap between how good you actually are and how the market experiences you. It is the same thing I saw at the sign shop counter all those years ago, just with higher stakes. My pitch hasn't really changed since then, I just have a better way of saying it: I close the gap between how good you are and how you're perceived.

How can you work with me?

There are three ways in, depending on where you are.

• A brand & web audit ($500). I record a walkthrough of your website, give you an ordered list of what to fix, and rewrite one section so you can see the difference. Good if you want to know what is actually going wrong before you commit to anything bigger.
• True Bearings. A four-week brand strategy and website engagement, done for you. One deep dive with me, a handful of approvals, and you come out the other side with a clear position and a website built to do a specific job.
• Site Success Plans. Ongoing Webflow maintenance plus SEO and AEO care, so the site keeps working after launch.

If you are relying on referrals and can feel a ceiling coming, it is worth reading why referrals stop scaling before you decide which of those fits.

What has stayed the same since the fan site?

Quite a lot, honestly. I still get the same buzz from watching something go live and seeing the right people find it. I still care more about whether a thing works than whether it wins awards.

And I still believe what I believed at the sign shop counter: most businesses don't have a design problem or a website problem. They have a clarity problem that shows up in their design and their website. Fix the clarity, and the rest has something to stand on.

The proof is in the clients. Beneath the Palms Midwifery went through strategy and a website rebuild and was booked out for the rest of the year, adding two new services along the way. Bossy Boots Kingscliff got a new brand and website and started getting more enquiries and tour bookings, and it attracted new educators too. You can see more of that work in the portfolio.

The name out the front is new. The person doing the thinking is the same one who built that very questionable Harry Potter site. Just with a lot more practice.