This week in the Membership, more than 50 participants went through my new “Call Me When” workshop.
The premise?
Most positioning statements start with some version of: “I help X do/get Y through Z.”
Which gives us statements like:
- Business consultant: “I help small business owners grow sustainable, profitable businesses through strategic planning and operational support.”
- Executive coach: “I help ambitious leaders become more confident and effective through personalized coaching and leadership development.”
- Marketing consultant: “I help service-based businesses attract more of their ideal clients through strategic, authentic marketing.”
This is a good first starting point.
I generally know what job you do. But I still don’t know when to call you.
That’s increasingly important in a crowded market. When clients have more providers, more content, and more possible solutions competing for their attention, our positioning can’t just tell people what we do.
It needs to make us recognizable and retrievable.
- Recognizable: A potential client hears the problem, situation, symptom, or goal you work with and thinks, “That’s me.” Or a referral partner hears it from someone else and thinks, “I know a few people who solve that problem.”
- Retrievable: Once the problem is recognized, they know who to call and why. Your name comes to mind among all the people who could plausibly help.
When we’re both recognizable and retrievable, referrers can recommend us for specific situations—not simply because they know we’re a coach, consultant, designer, or strategist.
But getting specific about those situations can be hard, especially when you’re earlier in business, your client base isn’t entirely ideal, or you’re capable of solving a fairly broad range of problems.
You look at all the work you could do and struggle to articulate what you want to be called for.
So instead of trying to define the center, start by defining the edges.
If it’s hard to specify when to call you, start with narrowing down when not to call you.
Your “Don’t Call Me's” are not personality traits.
“I only work with people willing to do the work.” “I only work with growth-minded individuals.” “I only work with values-aligned companies”.
Those don’t tell me much unless you can translate them into something concrete about the work.
Instead, you’re identifying situations that might reasonably look like a fit—but aren’t actually where you get the best results.
Just because you can solve a problem doesn’t mean you need to teach your network to call you for it. You may ultimately take the work (because money yay!), but you don’t advertise for it.
Size, Stage, or Industry
Maybe you struggle to “niche down” to a type of client or industry. But you probably know some contexts far better than others.
A business consultant might work primarily with companies under 200 employees—or only with companies above $100M.
They might deeply understand manufacturing and tech but have little experience with service agencies, education, or nonprofits.
This applies to individuals, too. A career coach might work best with staff engineers, Directors+, people returning after a sabbatical, or executives navigating their final one or two roles before retirement.
Those boundaries make someone more retrievable, not less.
Scope
Some problems are simply outside your scope. Others are well within your capabilities—but aren't what you want to be known for.
An executive coach might work with leadership transitions and team dynamics, but know that situations requiring clinical mental-health support belong with another practitioner.
A business consultant might understand marketing well enough to address it as part of a broader business engagement, but not want to be called when the primary problem is lead generation.
A marketing consultant might understand the entire marketing landscape, but choose to specialize in organic social and email rather than paid advertising.
Capability is not the same thing as positioning.
You don’t have to market every problem you’re capable of solving, but you do need to be clear about what falls outside your scope of practice.
Process, Speed, or Support
How you work can also create an important boundary.
Some executive coaches work exclusively through intensives or on-site workshops with little or no asynchronous support. Others require a six-month commitment and provide generous voice-note and document-review support between sessions.
Some business consultants embed themselves in an organization and participate in day-to-day implementation. Others provide high-level advisory or short-term strategic sprints.
Some marketing consultants develop fully formed campaigns and present them for approval. Others build the strategy and campaign collaboratively with the client.
These aren’t just delivery choices.
They’re part of what makes someone right—or wrong—for your work.
Theory of Change
Sometimes the boundary is about what you believe actually produces the result.
Every developed practice eventually contains beliefs about how change happens: the sequence, approaches, tools, or behaviors required to get from Point A to Point B.
And it contains beliefs about what doesn’t work.
If a client fundamentally disagrees with your theory of change—or isn’t willing to participate in it—you may both be better served by someone else.
Readiness
And sometimes the client simply isn’t ready yet.
They might lack the necessary time, capacity, infrastructure, resources, authority, or prerequisites for your work to succeed.
A business consultant might require a company to have multiple layers of management because that’s when the organizational problems they solve actually emerge.
A marketing consultant might only work with businesses with 10,000+ email subscribers because their methodology requires an audience of that size to work.
My “Don’t Call Me's”
I’ve been doing this work long enough that my own edges are pretty clear.
- Size, Stage, or Industry: I work with experts who sell their own expertise, primarily below the $1M mark. Don’t call me for brick-and-mortar businesses, product-based businesses, or larger expertise businesses where managing a growing team has become the primary challenge.
- Scope: I’m a deep generalist across many aspects of expertise-led businesses. But I’m not who you call for specialized financial questions, technical systems setup, or high-volume course businesses. And while the personal and emotional parts of business inevitably show up in our work, I’m not primarily a mindset coach.
- Process, Support, and Speed: I believe building a business is a long-term endeavor and that we can only meaningfully integrate so much at once. I don’t teach six-week intensives spanning multiple disciplines. In fact, I don’t offer standalone strategy intensives at all anymore.
- Theory of Change: If you don’t believe in consistent rhythms, recoil from relationship-led marketing and sales, or have no interest in developing a body of long-form authority work as a calling card, I’m probably not your gal.
- Readiness: The Deeper Foundations approach works best once you’ve decided to build a service-based business around your expertise and have gotten your first client. For my 1:1 work, approaching the $50K–$100K revenue range usually means we have enough real-world data to take advantage of the depth of the consulting.
Notice what happens as I tell you who not to call me for.
The inverse starts becoming much clearer.
You can probably picture the kind of business I do understand. You can see the problems I solve best and the kind of business owner my work is a fit for.
The edges start to reveal the center.
So if you’re struggling to articulate your “Call Me Whens,” don’t force yourself to come up with the perfect positioning statement.
Start with your Don’t Call Mes.
When to call me!
Call me when you’re an expert at your work but not yet as skilled at building and running the business around it.
Call me when you’re tired of winging the business side of your expertise and you know it’s keeping you from making the money you could be.
Call me when you're a coach, consultant, or service provider who's been told 15,000 reasonable things you should be doing to grow your business and still don’t know what your business needs next.
Call me when you want to build a durable expertise business—not a giant company—and do it without getting trapped in the Entrepreneurial Casino.
Those are the situations I increasingly want people to associate with my name.
Want to work through the full Call Me When exercise? The workshop replay is available inside the Membership.