Heads or tails? Heads.

← Selected work

Level Heads started as a conversation about a problem all four founders had lived. Good projects lose their best people before close-out. Bid teams can’t get specialists released. Firms grow faster than they can recruit. The answer was easy to say and hard to name: a business that supplies proven professionals to construction projects and tenders for the time they are needed, employs them, and carries the risk.

The words that already existed were wrong. “Labour hire” means trades and site crews, and these people are project directors, bid managers and engineers. “Recruitment” means a permanent placement and a fee on a salary. Neither said what the business does, and both dropped it into a crowded field against firms with twenty-year track records.

So before there was a logo, there was a category. We called it professional services talent.

I ran a strategy session with all four founders, then wrote it down. The category. The model: employ-only, the risk sits with Level Heads. The key message: the talent you can’t attract, for the time you need it. Four client scenarios the founders had each sat inside at some point. The project director building a start-up team. The recruitment manager replacing leavers. The MD growing faster than recruitment. The bid manager who can’t get people released.

Then the other side. Why would an experienced professional become a Level Head instead of taking a permanent job? Because they can follow projects instead of an employer, on their own terms, with the business development done for them. That proposition went on the website too, because the site has two readers and both have to see themselves in it.

Four founders means four opinions. The method for the whole job was options side by side, a decision, then on to the next one. Nobody waited on anybody.

I named it. Level Heads says calm, senior and sorted, and it gave me a vein of humour to work with. Humour in a name is a gift and a trap. Most of the obvious taglines read as innuendo once you picture them on a site office wall. I wrote a lot of lines and cut most of them. “Tap us for talent” survived: a shoulder tap, talent on tap, a tap on the head.

The identity is lime, charcoal and sage, with a condensed wordmark that holds at business card size and across a site banner. The visual language came from one idea: a face cut off at level by the bottom of the frame, being picked out by the hair. It is the whole business in one picture. The founders chose it from five options, and it went on the website, the capability statement, the cards, the Teams backgrounds and the LinkedIn banners. Nobody else can use it.

The website is a single page written for two readers. Clients see the problem they have and a button to find people. Professionals see what it means to become a Level Head and a form to register interest. A short set of questions and answers at the bottom covers the things people ask before they call.

The capability statement is built around the four scenarios, A4 landscape, a print version and a lighter one for email. Business cards for four founders, Teams backgrounds, LinkedIn banners, email signatures. And the part most brands skip: Word and PowerPoint templates with the fonts and colours locked, tested on the founders’ own machines. Templates are where brands quietly fall apart, so I treat them as part of the identity.

Four weeks, a fixed fee, every deliverable itemised. In week five the founders had a category, a name, a voice, a look and a kit to put in front of a project director.