The trust you never get to earn

Your profile can account for an entire career and still leave a potential client with very little sense of your judgement. They know where you have worked and what you were responsible for. They have much less to go on when trying to imagine putting their own problem in front of you. That is an omission a list of further credentials may do very little to repair.

It is difficult to see this in your own writing because you already know the work. A phrase that looks precise to you may contain years of experience you have never explained. You supply that knowledge as you read, so the sentence seems to say more than it does. A prospective client has to make sense of it without that assistance, while deciding whether you understand a problem they need help with.

What a referral supplies

A good referral does some of that interpretation for you. Somebody the potential client trusts has connected your expertise with their situation and given them a reason to speak to you. You arrive with a degree of credibility that would otherwise have taken time to establish.

That is a valuable way to find work. The opportunity for your writing is to support the introduction, and to help potential clients who have not yet received one. Even somebody with a recommendation may look you up before getting in touch. What they find can help them understand why the recommendation makes sense, or leave them with much the same questions they had before.

Before the first call

Two founders who later became clients told me that they had kept seeing my posts. People in our mutual networks were interacting with the writing, which was how I came onto their radar. During our first calls, both said that they were comparing service providers. Both came back within a few days asking for a contract.

The comparison was still theirs to make. What interested me was how much of the introduction had already happened before we spoke. They had encountered the work through people they knew and had been seeing it often enough to remember me when they needed help. We could begin a conversation from there.

That experience influences how I think about a founder's writing. A potential client may be paying attention without commenting or announcing that they are considering you. An enquiry can be the first visible sign of a much longer acquaintance with the work. We cannot see all of that process, which makes it tempting to judge the writing only by the reactions that appear beneath it.

Writing gives a client something to judge

The useful question is what a potential client can learn from reading you. A general observation about your industry may be unobjectionable and still reveal very little about the decisions you would make. An explanation of why a familiar approach fails under particular conditions gives them more to consider. They can recognise the situation and begin to assess whether your understanding would be useful in their own business.

The qualifications are often part of what makes that writing persuasive. An experienced person knows where a recommendation stops being reliable, or which detail would change their advice. Removing those distinctions can make a post sound confident while taking away the very judgement a potential client needs to see.

This is one reason I ask follow-up questions in an interview. I want to understand what you have learnt through doing the work and how that experience affects the answer you give now. The first explanation can be so familiar to you that you leave out the interesting reasoning. We need enough of it on the page for a prospective client to follow.

The knowledge you have stopped explaining

Expertise changes your sense of what needs saying. Something you learnt with difficulty can eventually feel like common sense, and you may assume that nobody would find it worth reading. A potential client facing that problem for the first time is in a different position. The distinction you now make almost automatically may be exactly what helps them understand why their own attempts have stalled.

The work is to explain that distinction with enough care to make it useful, while keeping the reasoning recognisably yours. It takes conversation and repeated editing to find the point at which the explanation is clear without losing the experience inside it.

Start with the clients you could help and the problems they are trying to understand. That gives you a reason to choose what to write about, and a way to judge whether a finished piece gives them something useful to consider. Over time, the work can become part of how those potential clients recognise your relevance, including the ones who have yet to introduce themselves.