Positioning

A practical way to decide what to work on first, when everything on your list has a real claim on your time: Elizabeth Greenfield described feeling scattered — content, speaking development, client work, all legitimate, all competing for the same hour. Then she named the question she returns to. Her words: "I try to get centered and ask myself like what step today is actually going to help me serve more women one-on-one." Some days the answer is a business-development task. Some days it's serving a current client better. The question doesn't choose for you... it makes the priority visible. And it only works when you're clear on who you serve and how. Without that, every option feels equal, so you spread yourself across all of them and end the day busy and behind. Write down your version of that question, tailored to your practice. Then answer it before you open your task list tomorrow. Want to hear how Elizabeth put it? Link in the first comment. #Coaching #IndependentConsultant #Solopreneur #Positioning …more

Is getting visible actually worth the effort, or just more noise? A practitioner I work with 1:1 asked me a version of that before we started. Brilliant at her craft, mission-driven, the kind of person you'd want in your corner. And almost invisible to the market she wanted to serve. It looked like a visibility problem. It was really a clarity problem. So we didn't start with tactics. We started with her voice and her offer: who she serves, what she actually helps them do, and how to say it in plain words. Once that was clear, consistency did the rest — showing up, in her own voice, again and again. The change was real. More of the right people found her, and they engaged, because the work was finally legible. Yours won't look identical. The clarity is what travels, not the numbers. #Coaching #IndependentConsultant #Positioning #GoingIndependent #CustomerDiscovery …more

I keep having the same conversation. Someone who's genuinely great at what they do, and brand new to getting seen for it. That's the part nobody ever taught them. So, an offer. Give me 30 minutes. Bring the idea you keep circling, the positioning you can't quite put into words, the page you've rewritten four times. I'll listen, tell you honestly what I think, and hand you a quick win or two and a few ideas for where to start. It isn't a scripted discovery call, and it isn't a pitch. Think of it as a feel for what working together is actually like. I've spent 25 years building things and figuring out the next step, mostly by learning the expensive lessons myself. Happy to save you a few of them. Grab 30 minutes... the link is in the first comment. Before you do, tell me: what's the one thing you'd want a second opinion on? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #Solopreneur #GoingIndependent #PersonalBrand …more

Which room are you the most knowledgeable person in? Passion isn't enough anymore. AI already knows the generalist version of what you know, and it answers instantly, which means the floor just rose for everyone. Broad knowledge is a commodity now, and the coaches and consultants who trade only on enthusiasm and general competence are getting squeezed between a search bar and a subscription. What AI can't replicate is genuine mastery. Saeed Amidi put the bar where it belongs: "you have to be the most knowledgeable person in the room for sure more knowledge than my and George's 150 people." Not the most passionate. The most knowledgeable... deeper on your specific domain than a large, capable team. That's the moat. Passion gets you started, depth is what a market can't get anywhere else, and it's the one thing you can defend. Want help sharpening exactly that positioning? Click the link in the first comment to visit my site. #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #Positioning #GoingIndependent …more

How much did you really know the first time you called yourself the expert? Saeed Amidi didn't know much. On his first pitch, he says it plainly: "I honestly didn't know business, but I said to Sabola, Saudi vegetable oil... if I get it to you the same quality or better at 680, would you buy from me?" He didn't arrive an expert. He landed in Jeddah, committed to one specific problem for specific buyers, and didn't leave until he understood it. The knowing followed the commitment. Today he exports $400M of polyethylene from ExxonMobil... all from that one first trip. I keep telling coaches and consultants who are waiting on more credentials: you don't wait until you feel ready. You go deep on one problem until the market sees you as the answer. Hear Saeed tell it himself: https://youtu.be/bb9n-CnDGVA?is=ozsXzdXjyqbYgj1L Then come build your reputation next to people making the same leap — join the free Inspiring Founders community at https://inspiringfounders.com. What's the one specific problem you could go deep on, even before you feel fully ready? #GoingIndependent #IndependentConsultant #Positioning …more

A client asked me this week: how do I explain what I do? The fix is rarely fancier words. Name the problem you solve, and who it's for... not your process. Clarity beats clever. Want to sharpen yours? https://calendly.com/foclarity/30min …more

Why isn't more content winning you more clients? Often it's not a marketing gap... it's fuzzy positioning nobody can repeat. See how I'd untangle it: https://mashley.com …more

Expertise stuck in your head, sold one custom project at a time... how do you turn it into an offer that compounds instead of a treadmill? Work it out with peers making the same leap: https://inspiringfounders.com …more

My friend Joao de Brito is an artist, and he's the reason I rebuilt a page in Radi8 last week. I showed him the new Create feature. It makes images, you can touch up a photo or drop your work into a different gallery with AI, and Joao started using it right away. Then he kept pasting his photo captions in as prompts and couldn't understand why the thing was behaving so strangely. He wasn't doing it wrong. Create meant something different to him than I had intended it to mean. He read it as where you go to create a post, which is an entirely reasonable thing to read it as, and once I saw it happen in front of me I started seeing it everywhere, the same wrong turn at the same spot. For about a week before that I'd been treating it as a labeling problem. Clearer heading, better button. People kept doing it anyway. That's the moment that used to cost me months. You know what you designed, you can explain it, the explanation is even correct... and being correct is completely beside the point, because the people using it have already decided what it's for. So I stopped defending the design and rebuilt the page to do the whole job. This is why you talk to customers regularly, and why you shouldn't be afraid to let them complain! Joao never filed a bug report. He just got confused in front of me, which is about the most valuable thing a customer can do for you. The signal is rarely in what people say, it's in what they keep trying to do after you've told them not to. Where are your clients repeatedly trying to use you for something that isn't on your services page? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #CustomerDiscovery #Positioning …more

Last week Radi8 put an event on my calendar that I had never agreed to host. I ran one last month, on the last Thursday. So when it laid out this month's content plan it produced a date for the next one, same slot, delivered with total confidence, as though I'd asked for it. It wouldn't have been a disaster, I'd have just forced myself to run the event! But nothing had asked for that date. No calendar entry, no input, no rule that generated it. It filled a gap with something that looked right, and nothing broke, no error, no warning, just a plausible answer that would have gone out looking exactly like the real ones. Earlier in my career I'd have logged that as a bug and moved on. Building an AI product teaches you it's a whole category rather than a defect, because a model has no way to feel uncertain, it produces the most likely next thing, and a fabricated date looks every bit as likely as a real one. I see the same failure when someone hands their positioning to an AI. What comes back is fluent, and it is somebody's positioning, rarely theirs. Fluent is hard to argue with, which is exactly what makes it expensive. The fix wasn't a smarter model, it was making the thing show its work. Every date Radi8 writes now has to name where it came from, and anything that can't gets flagged before a person ever sees it. Ask that of any draft that lands in front of you. Where did this come from? Which client actually said it? If the honest answer is that it sounded right, you're reading fiction in your own voice. What has an AI told you about your business that you accepted a little too fast? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #AIforBusiness #Positioning …more

Which decisions actually define your practice? As it grows, keep the ones only you can make: your positioning, your point of view, who you serve. That judgment is what wins clients, so protect it. Compare notes with peers doing the same: https://inspiringfounders.com …more

A few weeks ago I ran a test on my own company. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the questions our buyers actually ask — "best AI tool for a consultant who wants to post on LinkedIn," "Hootsuite alternatives for a solo founder." Radi8 didn't come up once. That stung. But it confirmed something I've been telling founders for a while: the way buyers form trust has changed, and most of us are still optimizing for the wrong reader. Here's the trap. We spent months building positioning for humans — clever, memorable, deliberately set apart from the category. Great for a landing page. Invisible to the machine doing the recommending. An AI doesn't search your clever sentence. It breaks the question into plain category words and recommends whoever consistently shows up for them. Clever positioning wins the click. Category language wins the citation. But the real lesson isn't an AI trick. It's the thing I keep coming back to: your brand is your promise, and a visible, consistent body of work is now the evidence people — and their AI — use to decide whether to trust you, long before the first conversation. When your story isn't consistent everywhere, the machine has nothing solid to cite. I wrote up the whole thing — what we found, why it happened, and what we're changing — in public: https://www.radi8.com/blog/show-up-when-buyers-ask-ai-for-recommendations A question for the founders here: have you checked what the AI assistants say about your company when someone asks for a recommendation in your category? What did you find? …more