Your Power Hour

First, the thing you are probably wondering about

This is private. Completely.

No recording is shared with anybody. No part of it appears in my content, anonymised or otherwise, ever. I do not mention that you spoke to me.

Most of you are still employed and running a search you cannot afford to have discussed, and I am not going to ask you to trade discretion for a lower price. You get a recording for your own use if you want one, and that is the only copy that exists.

What happens in the 60 minutes

1. I tell you which of the 4 is broken

Four things decide whether you get the role and the number.

Believability. Whether people believe what you are worth before they meet you. Networkability. Whether you are in the rooms where roles get decided, before the role exists. Marketability. Whether you can package what you are worth so the decision is easy. Hireability. Whether you win the room you are in, and hold the line on the money.

Almost nobody has all four broken. Most people have one badly broken and a second half-working, and have spent eighteen months working furiously on a third that was never the problem.

I will name yours. One of the four, in a sentence, with the reason it is that one and not the others. For a lot of people this is the part that lands hardest, because they have felt something for two years without being able to say it out loud.

2. We dig out what your record is missing

This is the part people find strange, because I am not going to ask you what you did.

I am going to ask what it costs. What would have happened if you had not been there? What you have quietly filed under normal.

Twenty years in, that last category is where the good material is. The business unit that had missed target six quarters running before you got it to plan. The three years you did your boss's job after they left and were never replaced. The number you would never think to mention because to you it was just Tuesday.

One client had run a turnaround during a crisis year and had never thought to put it anywhere. Another had been doing most of a COO's job for three years and had written it on her CV as "supported the leadership team through a period of transition." She is a COO now, at roughly double.

I do not start by making you sound more impressive. I start by showing you what already is.

3. We settle what you are actually going for

About half the people I do this with are aiming a rung below what their record already justifies, and most of them argue with me about it in the first hour.

We agree on the level and the shape of the role, and I will tell you honestly if I think you are underselling yourself, including when you would rather I did not.

You leave with that written down, which matters more than it sounds. Vagueness costs money. One client wrote a stretch number down, forgot she had written it, and beat it by 26%.

4. I give you the words

Building the record is half of it. Being able to say it out loud is the other half, and it is the half nobody teaches.

You will get the language for what you are worth, in your own voice rather than mine, so that it survives a room. Because anyone can write your CV. Nobody else can learn to say what you are worth out loud.

What you walk away with

• The name of the thing that has been costing you roles
• The evidence buried in your record, surfaced and written down
• A decision about the level you are going for, and why your record justifies it
• The opening lines of a record that reads at your level
• The language to say it out loud without your voice changing
• A recording, yours alone, if you want one

This is not a consultation

I am not going to spend 60 minutes explaining my process to you and then ask you to buy something.

You get the work. If we never speak again, you still leave with the things above, and plenty of people have taken exactly that and gone off and used it. That is a good outcome and it does not offend me.