For years, clients hired me to build the visible thing – a website,
a LinkedIn profile, a sales page, a follow-up email sequence.
But before I could do that work well, I first had to help them clarify
what they were trying to create, who they were selling to and why it mattered.
Then I could determine how the pieces needed to fit together.
That upstream strategic work is where I begin now.
Only recently have I recognized that as a distinct progression
of how my work succeeds.
The visible deliverable is only part of the work.
When someone tells me they need a LinkedIn profile, a website,
a sales page or an email sequence, that tells me what they want built.
It doesn’t necessarily tell me what that asset needs to communicate.
Before I can determine that, I need to understand the expertise behind the business.
What are you really bringing to the work?
Who are you selling to?
Why does what you offer matter to them?
What needs to be understood before someone can recognize the value?
Once those things become clearer, I can begin organizing the pieces
and determining the structure the implementation needs to express.
That is why I don’t begin by selling implementation.
Sometimes the expertise itself is difficult to see.
After years – sometimes decades – of doing your work,
much of what makes you good at it can become difficult to recognize from the inside.
The skills, services and deliverables may be easy to name.
The judgment behind them may not be.
The patterns you recognize, the questions you know to ask,
the way you make decisions and the experience informing those decisions
can remain much harder to describe.
And when those parts of your expertise remain difficult to see,
they are also difficult to express clearly in the marketplace.
The Capability Trap
You can have years of experience and still find it difficult
to explain the full value of what you do.
The Capability Trap is a short guide that explores why this happens.
