Own Your Expertise: Stop Making People Guess What You’re Good At

Someone else is struggling with the exact problem you know how to solve.

There’s a funny thing that happens when you’ve been doing something for a long time.

You forget that other people don’t know what you know.

You can look at a situation and immediately see what’s wrong. You know which questions to ask. You recognize the red flags. You can tell when an idea needs more work or when everyone needs to stop talking about it and just get moving.

And because it comes easily to you, you start thinking:

Well, everybody knows that.

They don’t. That’s your expertise. You earned this.

Expertise doesn't magically appear because you've been in business for a certain number of years. It comes from everything that happened during those years.

The clients you helped. The mistakes you made. The experiments that worked. The ones that absolutely did not. The difficult conversations. The weird situations nobody warned you about. The decisions you can now make in ten minutes because you once spent three weeks agonizing over them.

All of that adds up.

But here's where I see experienced business owners get stuck: they become so accustomed to what they know that they stop seeing it as particularly valuable.

Meanwhile, someone else is struggling with the exact problem you know how to solve.

Being good at what you do isn't enough. I wish great work automatically led to great opportunities. It doesn't. If it did, so many of us would have a chance to sit back and relax.

People need to understand what you're good at. They need to know how you think. They need reasons to trust your judgment before they ever sit across the table from you.

That doesn't mean you need to become an "influencer." And please don't feel obligated to announce yourself as a thought leader.

You just need to have thoughts.

Share what you've learned and explain why you approach something differently. Tell people what you've changed your mind about. Give them a glimpse into how you solve problems.

That's thought leadership without all the thought-leadership nonsense.

Stop hiding behind your services

This is an easy trap for businesses to fall into. I know because I do it too.

Ask me what I do and I can give you the tidy answer: I’m a business and marketing strategist. I work with independent businesses and organizations. I help leaders get unstuck.

All true. But none of those phrases really explain what happens when I sit down with a client.

A client might come to me thinking they have a marketing problem. After some digging, we realize the real issue is that nobody can clearly explain what they're selling. Or they're trying to market five priorities at once. Or the owner is doing work someone else should have taken over two years ago. Or there’s a perfectly good opportunity sitting right in front of them that they haven't recognized yet.

That's the part that's harder to put on a services page of a website.

And, somewhat ironic given the topic of this blog, I'm working on this myself right now.

My friend Rebecca from Stoned Fruit — who guest-wrote for this blog earlier this year — has been helping me think about the language I use to describe my business. I've been doing this work for almost a decade, and I can still get too close to it to recognize which parts are distinctive.

Apparently, I am not exempt from my own advice.

The more we've talked, the more I've realized that my expertise isn't just in the list of things I can do. A lot of it is in how I see a business.

I've worked in advertising agencies. I spent ten years at Whole Foods Market. I went to pastry school, and worked in the best cheesecake shop in NYC. And now I've spent a decade sitting alongside business owners and organizational leaders.

Those experiences may not look like a straight line on a résumé, but they all come into the room with me.

They've taught me to look at the customer experience and the numbers. The big idea and whether anyone can actually execute it. What the business is saying and what the customer is hearing. What the owner thinks the problem is and what might actually be getting in the way.

That's harder to package neatly than "marketing strategy."

But it's also the reason someone hires me instead of one of the many other people who can put "marketing strategist" on a website.

And that's true for you, too. We tell people what we do:

Marketing strategy. Accounting. Interior design. Catering. Leadership coaching. Commercial real estate. Financial planning.

Your potential client can probably find dozens of businesses offering the same service.

What they can't find somewhere else is your way of thinking about it.

That's where your expertise lives.

Visibility isn't about being everywhere

There's another trap here, especially for small business owners. Visibility can start to feel like a full-time job.

Post more. Make videos. Start a newsletter. Get on LinkedIn. Start a podcast. Be on Instagram. Comment on everybody else's posts. Apparently, we're all supposed to be building a media empire while simultaneously running a business.

No, thank you. You don't need to be everywhere. You need to be recognizable somewhere.

Choose the places where your customers, clients, and referral partners actually pay attention. Then show up consistently enough that people begin to understand what you know, what you believe, and what kinds of problems you solve.

That's very different from simply creating more content.

What do you know that you've stopped noticing?

That's the question I want you to think about this month.

• What has become obvious to you because you've done it hundreds of times?

• What do clients consistently ask your advice about?

• What can you spot quickly that took you years to learn?

• What do you believe about your industry that you're willing to say out loud?

• What mistake would you love to prevent someone else from making?

All of that is your credibility and expertise. There's your content, too.

You don't have to shout about it. You don't have to call yourself an expert. And you definitely don't need to transform yourself into a personal brand.

But you do need to stop keeping all the useful things you know trapped inside your own head.

You've done the work. Own it.