Michael Ashley

How do you make your track record legible to the right clients without it turning into a highlight reel? You spent a career making good calls. Now you're out on your own, and here's the trap: a list of wins is a highlight reel, and coaches and consultants who go independent learn fast that buyers are suspicious of those. A highlight reel shows outcomes. It hides what a prospective client actually wants to see — how you think. Your judgment is what you're really selling. So show the calls, not just the trophies. The bet you made when the data was thin. The client you turned away. The problem you named before anyone else saw it. When you narrate the decision — the options, the reasoning, what you'd do again — a stranger can watch how you decide. That's credibility someone can verify, not applause they take on faith. Want help turning your judgment into a body of work the right clients can actually read? Start here: https://mashley.com #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #GoingIndependent #ThoughtLeadership #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

Everyone building something of their own is told to be the visionary. Set the standard. Be the culture. Tom Shen spent nearly 20 years running SDI and holds almost the opposite as a core principle of building something that lasts. His point: build a culture that can push back on you. Every person you bring in should enrich the culture, not just fit it. And the ones worth having are the ones who will say, plainly and kindly, "I know you believe that — but here's why you're wrong." Here's why it matters. If you're the ceiling, a single bad decision can bring the whole thing down. A culture that can correct you is insurance against your own worst call. It's easy to file this under big-company problems. It isn't one. If you're running a small practice, you may not have employees, but you have advisors, partners, and communities you've chosen to surround yourself with. The real question is whether any of them can actually tell you no. Tom put it better than I can, in Episode 7 of the Inspiring Founders podcast: "The culture needs to be better and richer than the founder." Worth a watch — link in the first comment. So here's mine to you: who in your world will tell you plainly when you're wrong? If you can't name someone, that's the gap to fill. #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #GoingIndependent #ThoughtLeadership …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

Tom Shen said something in our conversation that I keep coming back to. He drew a line between answers and questions. Answers, he said — everybody's got one: "answers. Everybody's got one sometimes. And we've all worked with people like that. They got two or three. But questions," That last word hangs there for a reason. Good questions are rare. And the person who asks the right one often adds more value than the person with the ready answer. I think about this a lot with coaches and consultants. There's a quiet pressure to prove you belong in the room by having every answer, deck loaded, solutions ready before the client finishes talking. It feels like expertise. Often it's the opposite. The sharper move is to show up curious. A good question does more than fill a silence — it shows you already know what actually matters here. That's not uncertainty. That's judgment made visible. Tom Shen made this point better than I can, in Episode 7 of the Inspiring Founders podcast. Worth a watch — link in the first comment. So I'll ask you one: what's the best question you've been asked in a client conversation — one that changed how you saw the problem? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #ThoughtLeadership #GoingIndependent …more

Your reputation compounds while you sleep — or it doesn't exist yet. There's no third option. Which is true for you right now? …more

When a coach or consultant tells me their positioning is fuzzy, they usually want to fix the words. A better tagline. A sharper sentence. A cleverer hook. That almost never works, because vague positioning isn't a writing problem. It's a customer-understanding gap. You can't describe who you help clearly when you're not yet clear on who they are. No amount of wordsmithing rescues a message you haven't earned by knowing the person on the other end. Positioning is an output of customer discovery, not a copywriting exercise. So when someone's stuck, I don't ask "what do you do?" That question sends people straight back into their own head — to titles, methods, and adjectives. I ask two different ones instead. Who is this actually for? Not a demographic. A person you could name, with a problem they'd describe in their own words. And what were they doing about it before they found you? The workarounds, the half-measures, the thing they already tried that didn't stick. That's where the real language lives — the words your best clients use for their own problem, before you dress them up. Answer those two honestly and the positioning tends to write itself. You stop reaching for clever and start repeating what you've actually heard. Evidence beats invention. A sentence built from a real client's words lands because someone already lived it. The clever version impresses you. The accurate version gets remembered by the person it's for. So here's the question I'd genuinely like you to answer: what's the one client you do your best work for — and what were they doing before they found you? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #Positioning #CustomerDiscovery #IdealClient …more

Positioning isn't who it's for. It's who you're willing to turn away. Can't name that? You haven't positioned it yet. …more

This is how you create great content for your customers - be specific, generous, and valuable. Elizabeth Greenfield runs a functional wellness practice. Her ideal clients are people dealing with exhaustion, weight gain, and feeling wired despite doing everything right. Classic signs of chronic stress. She could post generic wellness tips. Drink more water. Get more sleep. Eat better. Instead, she publishes content that connects stress to something most people don't know about: how cortisol alters DNA methylation and accelerates biological aging at the cellular level. That level of specificity does two things. First, it signals expertise. It shows she understands the root cause, not just the symptoms. Second, it attracts the right people. Someone who's tried everything and still feels terrible is going to stop scrolling when they see content that explains why nothing has worked. This is the pattern I see in content that actually converts. It's not about being everywhere or posting every day. It's about understanding your audience well enough to name the problem they're experiencing in a way that makes them feel seen. If you're struggling to figure out what to post, start here: What's the specific problem your ideal customer is dealing with right now? Not the surface-level frustration. The underlying issue they might not even have words for yet. Then create content that connects the dots. You don't need a big budget or a content team. You need clarity on what your audience is trying to solve. If you want help translating that into a repeatable content workflow, comment and I'll reach out. https://www.lizgreenfield.com/blog-1-1/h08r5dhgllb0kfyalh0zrty7ukbgic …more

A resume is a list of claims. A body of work is evidence. The market has quietly stopped trusting the first and started reading the second. For most of your career, your judgment was vouched for by things around you. The title said you were senior. The company's name meant the work found you and the brand stood behind it. Your reputation lived inside the building, in the heads of the people who watched you do the work. A resume was enough because it pointed back to institutions that carried the weight for you. Then you left. The title, the brand, the internal reputation — that whole apparatus stayed behind. And a resume, on its own, is a set of assertions a stranger has no reason to believe. Here's the shift underneath it. Professional identity moved from private to public. People used to bring you in on the strength of where you'd been. Now they want to see how you think before they ever reach out. Not a claim that you're good. Evidence, out in the open, that they can read for themselves. That's what a body of work is. A post that walks through how you'd approach a messy problem. A talk. A teardown of something in your field. Each one is a small piece of proof, and over time they add up to something a resume can't produce: a picture of your judgment that the right client can study before they spend a dollar. This is why visibility isn't vanity. You're not performing. You're building the evidence that used to be someone else's job to provide, so the right people can see how you think and decide they want you in the room. What's one piece of work that brought you a client — a post, a talk, a teardown? And what made it land? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #GoingIndependent #PersonalBrand #ThoughtLeadership …more

Your first clients came easy. That's exactly why the next ones feel impossible. When you went independent, the phone rang. A former colleague needed help. Someone who'd watched you work for years passed your name along. Within a few months you had your first handful of clients, and it felt like proof the whole thing would work. Here's what actually happened. You didn't build a way to win clients. You cashed in years of goodwill, all at once. Every person who'd seen you deliver inside the org, every bit of trust you'd earned over a career, converted into work the moment you were available to hire. That's a stockpile, not a pipeline. A stock is finite. It draws down. You spend it faster than you notice, because it arrived without any effort you could repeat. When it runs low, there's nothing underneath to refill it. The well was full the day you started on your own. It doesn't refill on its own. A pipeline is different. It refills because you built the thing that fills it. Two parts do most of that work. Positioning people can repeat. Your old network vouched for you from memory. Strangers can't. If someone can't say in one sentence what you do and who it's for, the recommendation stops at "they're great" — which wins no one. Visibility beyond your circle. The people who already know you are a fixed number. Growth lives with the people who don't, and they only find you if you're somewhere they can watch how you think. The trap isn't that you did anything wrong. The first wave working is the very thing that convinces you nothing needs to change. Then it quietly runs dry, and it looks like the market cooled, when really the well just emptied. Genuine question: how did your first three clients actually find you, and has that kept working? #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #GoingIndependent #Positioning #PersonalBrand …more