Your resume is costing you clients

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

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

Issue #26

Two weeks ago, Kenneth flew in from Silicon Valley and sat down with me in my co-working space. He has forty-five years at the top of the tech world in his pocket.

Nvidia. Google. Patents with his name on them. A company he took public in 2005. He's been building AI since 2016, back when most people still thought of it as science fiction.

He's one of the sharpest technical minds I've ever shared a room with.

And the first problem we had to solve had nothing to do with technology.

His resume was killing his conversations.

Now put yourself at the last networking event you walked into. Did someone ask, "What do you do?" And what you said next just came out lumpy and awkward and in your heart you knew it wasn't the best answer?

In this issue:

• Why leading with your credentials makes buyers tune out... and what to open with instead
• What one ultra-focused day can pull out of forty-five years of experience
• The five-word question that tells your positioning finally works

Okay, so someone asks what you do. You know you've got decades of experience behind you, so you reach for them. The titles. The companies. The years. It feels like credibility while it's leaving your mouth.

Kenneth said it more plainly than I ever could: "I worked for Nvidia, and I have a patent, and blah blah blah... it does sound like bragging if you do it too early."

Then came the number that costs every consultant their peace of mind. He figures about 75 percent of the business owners he talks to "immediately turn off the conversation switch." They nod. They smile. And they're gone.

Here's why that matters to you.

If a man with that resume watches three out of four prospects glaze over when he leads with it, your problem was never their credentials. The resume that took decades to build can bury the very thing a buyer needs to hear. A busy owner isn't shopping for your history. Her brain is full, her day is long, and she's asking one question in her mind the whole time you're talking: what does this mean for me?

Last week I told you about leading with your range. Leading with your resume is the same trap through a different door. A list of skills, a list of employers... the market couldn't care less about either one.

So here's the mental reframe I shared with Kenneth. Your credentials are how you deliver. They are not how you open. The years are the means. The change you cause...the transformation you create...is the message. Nobody hires the forty-five years. They hire what the forty-five years can do to their margins, their hours, their sleep.

But knowing that and fixing it are two different jobs. And this is where most experienced consultants get stuck in mental mud.

They don't know how to fix their positioning, and even if they had a few clues to experiment with, they try to fix it in the cracks of a normal week. Twenty minutes between client calls (or job searching...you know what I'm talking about). A half-written document open behind six other tabs. Three months later the words still aren't right, and they keep going down in a ball of flames at networking events, on calls with prospects, and online.

Back in April I told you about the one-day month... the idea, from Rian Doris and the Flow Research Collective, that four hours of true flow can outwork twenty fragmented ones. The week is the wrong unit of work. The day is.

Kenneth and I ran that play on his business, as I do with most of my clients. I call it my VIP Day experience. One defended day. One outcome. He flew in the night before, we had dinner and got to know one another a bit, and by eight the next morning there was one question on the whiteboard: When a stranger asks what you do, what happens in the next sixty seconds?

The product could wait. The tech stack could wait. The whole day belonged to that one question.

Now comes the good part.

Ninety minutes and dozens of questions later, the positioning work surfaced a story from Kenneth's lived experience that was pure gold, but unused.

Turns out his first joint venture partner had asked Kenneth about AI and how to deploy it in his business. One honest conversation later, after Kenneth explained his new product and his consulting offer, the man made a significant investment in Kenneth's company. No pitch needed. It had been there the whole time... solid positioning, already his. When it landed on the page he stared at it for a second.

"I was blown away that it pulled that out."

That's what a defended day does. It finds the hidden stories, experiences, and puzzle pieces that get lost in a fragmented week.

He left with an opener built to earn a single question... one plain sentence about who he helps and what changes for them, sharp enough that the other person leans in and asks: "How do you do that?"

Five words. When a stranger asks "how do you do that?", your positioning is working. They gave you permission to talk about the method, the years, even the patents...now you're answering a question they asked.

Think about it this way. The credentials moved... from the front door, where they were blocking traffic, to the proof pile, where they do their best work.

And in case you're wondering whether this holds up outside one VIP day in Louisville: a client of mine named Brian Denning runs the same play in Chattanooga. We built his talk track the same way, one day, one outcome. He memorized it and took it into every room he could find. He books two or three appointments a day now. No ads. A clear opener and a lot of reps.

When Kenneth and I wrapped up, I asked him whether the day delivered what he came for. "I wanted to understand the processes and the thinking patterns," he said. "I think it knocked it out of the park."

But the thing I'll remember most came when he talked about actually using the talk track. "It's not sales. It's an informational, win-win, how-can-we-help-each-other thing."

A man who hates the car-salesman routine found a way to open a conversation that feels natural, in complete integrity, and gets results.

P.S. At the end of the day I asked Kenneth what mattered most. Closing the gaps in his process, he said. Then he added something I didn't expect: "It is very lonely... it's nice to talk to somebody that has similar experiences." A good stretch of that day was two guys talking about kids, careers, and life. The business stuff exists so the life stuff can happen. Don't build yours alone.

P.P.S. One more thing, and it's only for you if consult businesses with point-of-sale systems... restaurants, retail, service counters. The product Kenneth spent forty-five years getting ready to build does something most owners don't know is possible yet. It puts AI to work on the hardware already sitting in their building...their POS terminals, their back-office computers... instead of renting intelligence from some tech giant's data center at a monthly price that never stops climbing. Kenneth's math puts the savings around 90 percent. And he won't install a thing until a short analysis proves the profit is there first. Big-chain smarts, running on boxes your clients already own, proven before they spend a dime. If you want to know more, hit reply with the word KENNETH and I'll introduce you personally.

"Well done is better than well said." ... Benjamin Franklin

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #25
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #24

You might also find these interesting:

🔎 The "Message Transformation" Prompt
🔎 Client Value Journey: Stage 2 – Engage

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