Bethany Neilens

When your brand is built around disability humour, you learn very quickly that context is everything.

The same joke can land brilliantly, or fall completely flat, depending on who’s in the room, what they’ve experienced, and how clearly you’ve framed it. Humour isn’t just about timing; it’s about translation.

What surprised me most is how much that lesson applies inside business too.

Accessibility Isn’t Just for Customers

When accessibility sits at the heart of your brand, you start noticing barriers everywhere. Not just physical barriers. Not just digital ones. Communication barriers.

Early on, I’d walk into meetings armed with dashboards, acronyms, and e-commerce shorthand.

“LTV is climbing but CAC is steady.”
“CVR dipped after the CRO test.”
“Our AOV’s up but returning customer rate needs work.”

In my head, I was telling a clear story.

In the room? People were staring at a graph that may as well have been written in another language.

The punchline? No one laughed. 😅

The Hidden Cost of “Expert” Language

As founders, we spend so much time immersed in our metrics that we forget they aren’t universal. We live in the data. Others visit it occasionally.

Acronyms create hierarchy.
Jargon creates distance.
Complex graphs create silence.

And silence in a meeting is rarely agreement, it’s often confusion.

The irony? I ran a brand rooted in making things accessible and relatable. Yet internally, I was unintentionally creating inaccessibility.

That was a wake-up call.

Simplicity Wins

Data is powerful. But only if people understand it.

A graph doesn’t tell a story on its own. It needs context:

• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• Why does it matter?
• What are we doing next?

When I started translating metrics into plain English, everything changed.

Instead of:

“Our CVR increased 0.8% week-on-week.”

It became:

“For every 100 people who visit our site, almost one more person is buying than last week. That’s working.”

Instead of:

“Our retention curve is flattening.”

It became:

“Customers are sticking around longer which means they like what we’re building.”

Same data.
Completely different energy.

Cross-Functional Clarity Is a Growth Lever

When everyone understands the numbers, everyone can contribute to the solution.

Operations can spot process improvements.
Marketing can adjust messaging.
Finance can model smarter decisions.

Clarity turns spectators into collaborators.

And collaboration compounds.

The Real Founder Lesson

We talk a lot about product-market fit.

We don’t talk enough about communication-team fit.

If your team doesn’t understand the story behind the numbers, they can’t help you write the next chapter.

So now, I ask myself one simple question before every meeting:

If someone new walked into this room, would they understand what I’m saying?

If the answer is no, I simplify.

Because fabric frays.

Dashboards change.

Strategies pivot.

But insight — when it’s shared clearly — stays.