Leave the Scrabble bag at home

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #35

I want to tell you about two men I talked with last week.

They have a lot in common. Both are consultants. Both spent decades inside respected companies. Both are smart, likable, and better at their craft than almost anybody who will ever sit across a table from them.

And both stood in front of a room full of strangers recently and got asked the same question.

But there is one difference. One of them hasn't had reliable money coming in all summer. The other one had five people chase him down after a networking meeting, business cards in hand, saying some version of "we need to talk."

A fifth of the room.

What made the difference?

It wasn't talent. If anything, the man without the cash flow has the deeper resume... forty years, products you've probably had in your house, one founder telling him "you're far more than what we originally hired you for."

The difference is one practiced sentence. One of these men can answer "What do you do?" in words a fifth grader could repeat. The other man is still answering it with his resume... and the market can't hear a resume.

Now put yourself in the room for a second. Somebody turns to you and says, "Stand up and tell everybody what you do."

What comes out?

If you’re like most of the folks I work with... twenty, thirty, forty years of experience and battle scars... what comes out is a pile of characteristics. The industries you’ve touched. The size of the teams you’ve led. The word “versatile” makes an appearance. Maybe you have a line about being well rounded, because you are, and it took a lifetime to earn.

And the person across from you nods politely and moves on to the shrimp tray.

Here’s what that pile of characteristics is costing you. The market wasn’t rejecting my first friend... it was mishearing him, slotting him under the nearest job title it recognized. Companies kept trying to hire him as their VP of engineering when what he sells is something far more valuable. When your message is fuzzy, the market doesn’t work to figure you out. It files you and forgets you.

And those moments don’t schedule themselves. The question comes at you in a church lobby, at a wedding reception, in the bleachers at a ballgame, thirty seconds after you sit down at a networking table. They’re high leverage money moments, and they never call ahead. You either have the answer ready or you watch the moment walk over to the shrimp tray too.

Here’s what I want you to see.

Your message isn’t a paragraph on a website. It’s one idea that has to live in six different sizes.

Think about it this way. There’s the handshake size... one person, face to face, “so what do you do?” You say a sentence, they respond, you go back and forth. There’s the stand-up size... a whole room, sixty seconds, nobody interrupting you. There’s the direct message you send a prospect. There’s your LinkedIn About section, doing its work at two in the morning while you sleep. There’s the two-minute talk. And there’s the long form... the workshop, the keynote, forty-five minutes with a room that came to hear you.

Six containers. One idea.

Build the smallest one first. Get the handshake answer so solid it rolls off your tongue without a single wasted word, and every bigger container gets easier to fill, because they’re all the same message wearing a bigger coat.

Now comes the good part. The man who got chased across the room built his answer the slow way. We worked on it together, and then he practiced it. Over and over and over, at meeting after meeting where nothing much happened. He’ll tell you straight that his first few rooms didn’t go like this one did.

But here’s what made the biggest difference. His answer doesn’t describe him. It paints a picture of their problem. It talks about owners who can’t take a vacation without dreading the phone. About years of hard work that haven’t turned into financial peace. There’s not one word in it a fifth grader couldn’t follow.

That’s the test, by the way. If a fifth grader overheard your answer, would he tug on his dad’s sleeve and say, “Daddy, you need to talk to that guy”? If not, the message needs work. And the good news is a message is a lot easier to fix than a career.

Leave the corporate speak at home. Leave the acronyms at home. A man in our group calls that the Scrabble bag, and I’m keeping that one. Nobody ever chased a consultant across a room because he said he optimizes cross-functional synergies.

And how do you know when it’s working? You’ll start to hear your own answers coming out of your prospect’s mouth. They’ll describe their problem to you in your words. A stranger will leave her seat with a business card in hand to find you by the water table. And opportunity will start showing up from directions you never planned... because a clear message travels. The real estate broker who’s wrong for you has a brother-in-law who’s exactly right.

P.S. A friend of mine named Adrian had the patience of Job in the bible. I used to watch him answer the same question, sometimes from the same person, for the fortieth time... and he’d answer it like it was the first time anybody had ever asked. I admired that so much. I’ve made peace with repeating myself the same way, and if you build your message right, you’ll get to make that peace too. You’ll say it a thousand times. The person hearing it will hear it once.

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #34
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #33

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🔎 The "Connect" Call Prep Checklist
🔎 Sales Series Part 3 of 7: Discover

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...