She says it with confidence, and she probably does know. She has been doing this work for years, has solved enough problems to recognize patterns quickly, and can walk into a complicated situation and begin making sense of it before someone less experienced even knows what questions to ask. “It depends.” “On what?” “The client.” “Okay. What happens first when someone hires you?” “That depends on what she needs.” “How do you determine what she needs?” There is a pause before s

“What do you want me to say?” She had been explaining her business to me for several minutes, and she knew the service well. She could tell me what was included, how long clients worked with her, why she created her framework, what happened during each phase, and how much experience she had accumulated before developing the methodology. The problem appeared when I stopped asking about the service and asked about the person buying it. “What does your client say she wants when

A client sends you an email with a question you know you have already answered. You remember answering it because you spent an unreasonable amount of time making sure nobody would ever need to ask. You wrote the instructions, created the welcome email, recorded the tutorial, and placed the resource inside the client portal under a heading that seems perfectly obvious to you. Somewhere between irritation and disbelief, you wonder how she missed it. You answer politely and move

A woman can spend twenty years becoming exceptional at something and reduce the entire body of work to the word just in less than ten seconds. “I just help companies…” “I just created…” “I’ve been fortunate enough to…” “I don’t want to brag, but…” Then she spends the next six months wondering why the market does not seem to understand the value of what she does. There is a difference between humility and making yourself commercially difficult to understand. Humility does not

Somewhere in your business, there is probably something you spent months building that your clients think is perfectly fine. And somewhere else, there is something you can do in five minutes that makes them wonder how you knew. Guess which one is more likely to be on your sales page. We have a habit of assigning value according to effort. The framework took six months to develop, so it must be valuable. The workbook has 47 pages, so surely it belongs in the offer. The process

There is a peculiar thing that happens when you have been in business for a while: you become an unreliable narrator of your own expertise. You have years of evidence, experience, client work, opinions, successes, disappointments, and habits shaping the way you see your business. That history can make you fiercely confident about something that is no longer particularly exceptional. At the same time, it can make you completely overlook something you do extraordinarily well be

There is a point at which more marketing stops being the responsible answer. You can rewrite the website, increase your posting schedule, work on your SEO, build another funnel, attend more networking events, or create a marketing plan impressive enough to require its own binder. But none of those things can compensate for a business you have not examined closely enough. Before you decide how to sell it, you need to know what you are selling. I call this curating reality. Cur