You have twenty-five or thirty years of experience behind you. You know where you’re strong, you’ve built judgement that only comes from doing the work repeatedly, and there are problems you can probably solve much faster today than you could ten years ago.
Then you decide to build something of your own and face a surprisingly difficult question: What exactly am I selling?
The natural place to start is your experience. Strategy, leadership, transformation, finance, HR, operations, marketing, whatever your career has been built around. You look at what you know, what you’ve done and what people have historically valued you for.
All of that matters. But there is a step missing.
Your experience explains why you are capable of doing the work. It doesn’t necessarily tell somebody why they should buy it.
Your career used to explain your value for you
Inside an organisation, a surprising amount of context is already provided.
Your title says something about your expertise. Your position tells people something about your authority. The projects you’re trusted with, the size of the decisions you make and the reputation you’ve built over time all help other people understand why your judgement matters.
You rarely have to walk into a meeting and explain from the beginning what you know, why it is valuable and what problem you’re qualified to solve. The organisation has already done some of that work for you.
Build a business around your expertise and that context disappears.
Now someone who has never met you needs to understand relatively quickly why what you know matters to them.
This is where experienced people can become surprisingly vague. They describe themselves accurately: twenty years in HR, extensive leadership experience, organisational transformation, international strategy.
But those descriptions tell me about you.
An offer needs to help me recognise something about me.
The expert describes the source of the value. The customer needs to understand the effect of the value. That’s the shift. What you did stops being the point. What changes for them because of it becomes the point.
Start with what your expertise can solve
Instead of asking How can I package my experience?, I would work through the problem in a different order.
1. What do you know unusually well?
Not everything you’ve ever done belongs here. Look for the areas where experience has become judgement. The problems you’ve seen repeatedly. The situations you understand faster than most people. The things people consistently trust you to work out.
That is closer to expertise than a list of skills.
2. What problem does that expertise allow you to solve?
This is where you move to the customer’s side of the table.
Twenty-five years of organisational change is experience. Helping a founder whose growing company still depends on them for every significant decision is a problem you may be able to solve because of that experience.
The distinction matters because people rarely go looking to buy somebody else’s expertise. They go looking for help with something they cannot solve themselves, cannot solve quickly enough or no longer want to solve alone.
3. Who has that problem badly enough for it to matter?
A problem is not automatically one enough people will pay to solve.
Who experiences it? When does it become important? What is happening in their business or life when they start looking for help? What does leaving it unresolved cost them?
You don’t need to invent urgency that isn’t there. You do need to understand whether the problem matters enough for somebody to invest in changing it.
4. What becomes different when you solve it?
This is where many descriptions remain too close to the work being done.
A client isn’t buying ninety minutes of your thinking, six modules, a framework or four calls. They are buying the change those things are designed to help create.
Be clear about that change. Not an inflated promise you cannot control, but a meaningful difference you can credibly help them make.
Only once those four things are becoming clear would I start asking what the offer itself should look like.
An offer is not a format
This is another place where I see people moving too quickly.
They decide they want a course, a masterclass, a six-week programme, a strategy session or a membership and then try to work out what to put inside it.
I would reverse that.
First understand the problem and the change required. Then ask what kind of help will actually create that change.
If the client needs knowledge they can apply themselves, teaching may be enough. If they need your judgement applied to their particular situation, that probably requires your direct involvement. If they already understand what to do but struggle to implement it, they may need support over time.
Those are different problems. They should not automatically be packaged the same way.
How you deliver it has to work for you too. There is little point leaving one corporate routine you no longer want and building another business that recreates the same constraints under your own name.
But “I want to create a course” is not yet a reason for anybody to buy one.
The customer’s problem comes first. What you build around it follows.
Follow the value all the way through
When I look at expertise this way, this is the sequence I use:
Experience → Expertise → Problem → Person → Change → Offer
Your experience gives you the raw material.
Your expertise identifies where that experience has become valuable judgement.
The problem tells you where that judgement becomes useful.
The person tells you who needs it.
The change tells them why it matters.
The offer is how you bring those things together in a way that works for both of you.
You may move backwards and forwards between them several times. In reality, strategy is rarely as tidy as the diagram. But if you cannot make the connections, designing another product will not solve the problem.
Your experience is not the thing you’re trying to sell. It is the evidence, judgement and capability underneath what you’re able to solve.
The real work is translating that into something specific enough that the right person can recognise their problem, understand the change and see why your expertise is relevant to getting them there.
That’s when experience starts becoming an offer.
Talk soon,
Pia
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