How an idea leaves the room

A prospective client reading your profile is being asked to make a judgement from an account you have written about yourself. That is an ordinary starting point. Your writing can show them how you approach a problem and whether the explanation makes sense. But they may also want to know how your work is understood by people who have encountered it in another setting.

The distinction between those sources is worth examining. When several places repeat a biography you wrote yourself, the apparent corroboration can amount to the same claim circulated under different headings. A client describing what it was like to work with you adds something you cannot supply through your own introduction. The useful question is what each source helps a prospective client understand about your ability to help them.

Your own body of work

This is where a potential client can examine your judgement directly. A considered article lets them follow an argument far enough to understand why you hold a view, including the conditions under which you would change it. They can bring their own experience to the explanation and decide whether you have noticed something useful.

A short post can begin that process, particularly when it gives a precise account of a problem the reader recognises. Longer writing can take the explanation further when it needs more room. The format should allow the idea to develop properly. There is little gained by turning an argument into a sequence of memorable lines if the connection between them has disappeared.

External recognition

An invitation to speak, an interview or publication places your work in a setting you do not control entirely. It may give a potential client another way to encounter your thinking and understand where it is relevant. A recorded talk, for example, allows them to hear the explanation rather than relying on a description of you as a speaker.

The context still needs to be examined. A title in an event programme tells a reader that you appeared there. The talk itself may tell them much more about your expertise. A useful account makes it possible to follow that connection, rather than leaving the name of the event to do all of the persuasive work.

Independent corroboration

A client can describe an aspect of your work that would be difficult for you to demonstrate through a claim about yourself. They might explain how you approached a problem or what changed in their understanding during the work. Specificity gives a prospective client something they can relate to their own situation.

Peers can contribute another kind of evidence when they refer to an idea and explain why it is useful, or disagree with it in a way that develops the discussion. The value lies in what their account adds. A collection of general compliments may be pleasant to receive while giving a potential client very little help with the decision they are trying to make.

Triangulation of Authority

These are the three kinds of evidence I examine through the Triangulation of Authority framework: your own body of work, external recognition and independent corroboration. They give us a way to look at a founder's professional presence beyond a single profile.

The framework is useful because the sources can answer different questions. Your writing allows a potential client to examine your thinking. A relevant appearance can show that thinking in another context, and a client's account can help them imagine the working relationship. Their usefulness depends on the substance of the evidence and its relevance to the reader. A count of mentions cannot tell us that.

Those sources can also lead a potential client towards one another. Somebody who hears you speak may want to read the argument in more detail. A client recommendation may lead them to an essay that helps them understand why the recommendation fits. The connections are useful when they make it easier to find a fuller account of the work.

What can a potential client actually find?

When reviewing a founder's presence, I look at the expertise they want to be known for and what a potential client could find that supports it. Sometimes the thinking is well developed in conversation and barely represented in the writing. Sometimes there is considerable work to read, but the connection to the client's problem remains difficult to see.

That diagnosis gives us somewhere specific to begin. We may need to develop an argument from an interview, make an existing piece easier to find or explain the context of a recommendation. The point is to give the potential clients you could help enough relevant evidence to assess that possibility.

LinkedIn is often a useful place for this work to begin. In my own experience, prospective clients have encountered my posts through interactions in our mutual professional networks. An email subscription can give an interested reader a way to stay in touch directly, while a website gives them somewhere to read at greater length. Each has a job to do in helping that person understand your work, and its usefulness should be judged in relation to that job.