Preserving legacy. Why company history matters.

Most organisations don’t lose their way in a single moment. They drift.

Growth happens. New leadership arrives. Investment changes the cadence. Systems get upgraded. Teams expand. Each move is rational. Often necessary. But taken together, they can slowly erode the thinking that made the business distinctive in the first place.

Change isn’t the problem. But change without memory is.

We recently watched the film Hamnet. It’s a quiet, atmospheric adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, centred on the death of William Shakespeare’s young son, Hamnet, in the late 1500s. It isn’t a film about Shakespeare’s fame or success. It’s about grief, absence, and what remains when a life ends before it has had the chance to leave its own mark.

Hamnet died young. His name still echoes, not because the world preserved him, but because his father transformed loss into language when he wrote Hamlet. And there’s another, lesser known detail. William Shakespeare has no living descendants. No direct bloodline carrying his name, his memories, his personal story forward. The family tree ends.

And yet, the work remains.

That doesn’t happen by default. Legacy doesn’t survive simply because something mattered. It survives because someone chooses to record it, shape it, and protect it. Because they decide, consciously, that this story is worth holding onto.

The same principle applies to companies.

Many businesses are successful, sometimes for decades, yet quietly lose sight of why they exist in the first place. What problem they were set up to solve. What belief or frustration triggered the first step. What made them special enough to earn attention in a crowded market.

As organisations grow, that founding intent often fades. Founders step back. Early employees move on. New teams arrive with no connection to the original story. Ask people inside the business why the company was started, and you’ll often get silence, or a vague answer about products, markets, or revenue.

That’s a problem.

Because when people can’t articulate why a business exists, it becomes harder to articulate why it’s different. The brand still operates, but the story flattens. The proposition becomes interchangeable. Decisions start to default to what competitors are doing, or what feels safest in the moment.

We see this frequently. Context disappears. Documents get forgotten about. Strategy decks replace lived experience. Choices are made without understanding why earlier ones mattered. Slowly, the organisation becomes like an old house that’s been renovated too many times. Everything works. Nothing feels quite right.

Preserving company history isn’t nostalgia. It’s continuity.

It’s how organisations retain a sense of self through leadership change, market pressure, and scale. History gives a brand its internal compass. It anchors teams in intent, not just output. It turns values from words on a wall into something practical and usable.

This is why brands like Patagonia can grow without diluting their purpose. Why LEGO was able to rebuild its business model in the early 2000s without losing its belief in learning through play. They didn’t just innovate. They remembered what had to stay true.

When a company’s story disappears, the brand becomes easier to rewrite. Not maliciously. Gradually. A tweak here. A shortcut there. A campaign that performs, but doesn’t quite fit. Over time, those small edits accumulate, until the brand feels unfamiliar to the very people building it.

That’s when legacy becomes a strategic concern.

At Propellant, this is often where the most valuable work begins. Before identities, platforms or campaigns, there’s the task of understanding what an organisation has already earned. Why it exists. What it believes. What it refuses to compromise on. And what should still be recognisable long after the current leadership has moved on.

Shakespeare left no descendants. But his work endured because it was given structure, language, and stewardship.

Preserving an organisation’s history is the same decision. It’s choosing to make meaning last longer than the people who were there to witness it.

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At Propellant, we work with founders, CMOs and boards to build brands that stay true as they scale. We uncover what an organisation has earned, protect what must remain recognisable, and create new permission for growth.