Converting Without Being ‘In the Room’

If your authority only works when you’re present, it isn’t authority yet.

Most of the people I meet who sell their thinking are still selling time.

They might believe they are selling Authority but in reality, if you have to be on a long call to convert, if you have to explain your thinking from scratch, and if you need chemistry to close a deal… you are selling relational proximity.

And proximity is valuable, we all want to work with people who we know, like and trust, but it ultimately has a ceiling.

As you’ll know if you’ve been reading for a while, I believe a more entrepreneurial work is coming. It’s already arrived. More and more people enter the self-employed arena each and every day, whether they planned for it or not.

The future of work is not a stable ladder but more like a marketplace.

The definition of a marketplace? Commoditisation of goods and services, for the benefit of the buyer.

When you’re in a marketplace, your skills and time quickly get commoditised.

Authority does not.

Authority remains a key career currency that you can leverage. It is what allows you to charge for how you think, not just how long you sit in a Zoom room.

Most experienced founders do not lack expertise.

They lack a coherent and compelling articulation of that expertise.

Their ideas live in:

• Old blog or social posts

• Client session conversations, documents and notes

• Workshop slides

• Voice notes

• Half-formed frameworks.

When this is the case, whilst clients can absolutely sense the depth of thinking, they cannot fully grasp the shape of it.

And new, prospective clients… they have no idea. You’re another name in the marketplace in their eyes.

So if your authority only works when you are there in person to interpret it, that is the bottleneck.

And short-form content can’t fix that.

The very nature of the short-form scroll rewards speed, reaction, and marketing hooks. It asks for bright visuals, smiling faces and moving GIFs to be discovered.

The crowded nature of short-form platforms inherently aren’t designed to reward synthesis.

Yes, they can absolutely circulate ideas and build some traction around them, but there’s a reason the most ‘obvious’ ‘basic’ ideas travel…. because they are fast to digest, like, laugh or become enraged by.

Authority-led business owners need a heavier anchor for their ideas.

Top thinking requires depth and substance, both of which take time. It takes time to do the thinking, the creating, the publishing. But, when you do, your ideas last longer. Your depth is rewarded by the compounding impact of ideas outliving you.

My own writing lives on for years, and is often what gets referenced in discovery calls or new enquiries. My posts were never optimised for an algorithm or went ‘viral’. Instead, they were deliberate in making intangible concepts, feelings and ideas, concrete.

So many smart founders continue to survive without any long-lasting leverage created. They continue to survive based on interesting conversations that come in cold, but without any pre-education, sales cycles take longer and convert less regularly.

Long-form writing becomes a solution

It demonstrates your expertise without you being in the room.

The act of writing (and thinking) long-form, forces you to:

• Decide what you believe, in its deeper, more grounded form

• Connect the dots of your experience

• Make your reasoning visible and legible for people who are new to your work

When you do that thinking, something shifts. People start spending real time with your thinking before they ever speak to you. They arrive pre-aligned, primed and ready for you even if (or especially if) other options on the marketplace are cheaper.

Long-form writing has allowed readers to invite themselves into the frame. To sit with the thinking, and to arrive at the conclusion: “This is what I need.”

So many nod along at the theories I share here, but continue to avoid doing this work. Not because of laziness, but for being too busy to create clarity.

That leaves them sitting with the uncertainty of answering “what exactly does my work stand for?”

I want to help you answer this question.

Because with absolute clarity, you move from something palatable and vague, to something powerful and compelling.

Without clarity, your growth depends on you being in the room.

I’m not here to peddle you creating “more content.” If I am a salesman? I’m peddling definitions. I want you to define the one clear idea your work revolves around.

A One Big Idea.

This is way more than a tagline. It’s your organising principle.

Because when that is clear for you, everything else you create orbits around it.

Your offers, your content, your workshops, and importantly, your referrals.

Come start this process with me? In two weeks, I am running a live workshop and have been selected by the course for professional learning, Maven, to run it. I’m very excited.

Inside this session you’ll:

1. Define your One Big Idea

2. Apply it to your current work

3. Outline the authority piece that gets to convert others without you present

I want you to build leverage into your expertise and convert without being in the room.

Join me in two weeks?