There was a time when being good at what you did was enough to build a professional reputation. You did your work well, people noticed, and eventually someone introduced you to someone else who needed the same kind of help. A recommendation carried considerable weight because professional reputation travelled through relatively small networks. You did not necessarily need to explain what you knew. Someone who trusted you had already done that on your behalf.
That world has not disappeared, but it is no longer sufficient.
For professionals building an expertise business, the problem is not simply that competition has increased or that social media has become important. Something more fundamental has changed: expertise that remains invisible has become increasingly difficult for potential clients to trust before they buy it.
This creates an uncomfortable situation for people who have spent years becoming genuinely good at something. Their competence is real. Their experience is real. Their ability to solve difficult problems is real. Yet the market cannot directly observe any of those things. It can only observe the evidence that professionals choose to make available.
That is why I have come to see visibility differently.
I used to think of visibility primarily as a marketing problem. You became visible because you needed attention, and attention was something businesses competed for. The obvious response was to publish, network, speak, comment, build an audience and generally make yourself known.
I am less convinced by that interpretation now.
The more I look at expertise businesses, the more I think visibility is fundamentally a trust-building mechanism. It reduces the uncertainty surrounding an invisible product: the judgment of another human being.
That changes the question considerably. The question is no longer, “How do I promote myself?” It becomes, “How do I give people enough evidence of how I think that they can make a sensible judgment about whether I am useful to them?”
That is a very different proposition.
Expertise businesses have an unusual problem
An expertise business sells something that is difficult to inspect before purchase.
If you buy a chair, you can look at it. You can sit on it. You can compare its dimensions, materials and price with other chairs. If you buy a camera, you can examine its specifications and perhaps test it in a shop. Even a complicated piece of software can be demonstrated.
Expertise is different.
When someone hires a consultant, trainer, adviser, coach, designer or specialist, they are buying an anticipated outcome produced through another person’s judgment and capability. The thing being purchased is partly intangible and partly uncertain.
A client may know that something is wrong without knowing exactly what the problem is. They may know they need a training programme without knowing what good training should look like. They may recognise that a process is inefficient without knowing whether the problem lies in the process, the information, the technology, the roles or the decisions surrounding it.
This is precisely why expertise has value.
It is also why expertise is difficult to sell.
The buyer is not simply asking, “Can this person do the work?” They are trying to answer a collection of questions before they have enough information to answer them confidently.
Does this person understand my situation?
Will they recognise the problem beneath the obvious problem?
Do they know what they are talking about?
Will they make things unnecessarily complicated?
Will they actually listen?
Will their way of working fit the way we work?
Will I have to spend half my time explaining things they should already understand?
And perhaps the most important question: Can I trust their judgment when the situation becomes more complicated than the description on the website?
A referral used to answer a surprising number of these questions.
“Speak to her. She knows what she’s doing.”
That sentence contains an enormous amount of trust.
The person making the referral effectively lends their reputation to the expert. The buyer does not have to inspect the expert’s competence from scratch because somebody they already trust has performed part of that assessment.
This explains why referrals remain so powerful.
It also explains their limitation.
A referral is a trust mechanism that depends on being connected to the right people.
Visibility is a trust mechanism that can operate before the relationship exists.
That is one of the fundamental changes affecting expertise businesses.
The referral economy was built on proximity
For much of professional life, expertise travelled through relationships.
You worked somewhere. You met people. You attended conferences. You joined professional associations. You changed jobs. Someone remembered you. A former colleague moved to another organisation and eventually called you.
This created a relatively contained professional network in which reputation accumulated gradually.
I recognise this pattern from the environments in which I have worked. In complex organisations, there were always people whose names carried a particular meaning. You might not know exactly what they had done recently, but you knew what happened when a difficult problem landed on their desk. They were the person people called when something was unclear, politically sensitive or simply refusing to behave as neatly as the process documentation suggested it should.
Their competence was rarely packaged.
It did not need to be.
The organisation already knew where to find them.
That is a very different environment from the one faced by an independent professional trying to build an expertise business today.
The potential client may never meet you.
They may discover you through a search, a recommendation from someone they barely know, an article, a presentation, a podcast, a training resource or a social platform. Before they speak to you, they may already have encountered dozens of alternatives.
The old professional reputation was largely relationship-based.
The new professional reputation is increasingly evidence-based.
This does not mean relationships have become irrelevant. Quite the opposite. Relationships remain one of the strongest forms of trust.
The change is that relationships no longer have a monopoly on trust.
A person can now observe your thinking before they know you.
That is a profound shift.
Hidden competence has a ceiling
There is a particular kind of professional who struggles with this change.
They are usually not inexperienced. They are often the opposite.
They have spent years acquiring knowledge, solving problems and becoming reliable. They have little interest in performing expertise for an audience because they see the work itself as the important thing.
There is something admirable about that attitude.
It also creates a commercial blind spot.
A professional can become so accustomed to being recognised by people who already know them that they underestimate how invisible they are to everyone else.
This is the hidden competence problem.
The professional thinks, “If someone needs this, surely they will find me.”
But the market does not work from the perspective of the professional. It works from the perspective of the person experiencing the problem.
That person does not begin with a list of competent experts. They begin with uncertainty.
They search for an explanation.
They compare approaches.
They look for language that describes what they are experiencing.
They try to determine whether someone understands the problem.
Only then do they begin looking for a person who might help.
This means expertise is increasingly discovered through interpretation, not merely through credentials.
A certificate tells me that you completed something.
A job title tells me what you were called.
A client list tells me where you worked.
But your explanation of a difficult problem shows me something different. It gives me a glimpse of your judgment.
That is much closer to the thing I am actually considering buying.
Visibility is not the same as self-promotion
This is where discussions about visibility tend to go wrong.
Professionals hear that they need to become more visible and immediately imagine becoming louder.
They are told to publish constantly, build a personal brand, share their achievements, tell their story, grow an audience and position themselves as a thought leader.
Some of this can work.
But it confuses the mechanism with the behaviour.
Visibility does not create trust merely because someone sees you.
If that were true, advertising would solve every problem.
What matters is what becomes visible.
A professional who repeatedly talks about how experienced they are gives me information about their confidence. A professional who consistently demonstrates how they approach difficult questions gives me information about their competence.
Those are not the same thing.
This leads to a distinction I consider increasingly important: visibility of identity versus visibility of thinking.
Identity visibility answers:
Who are you?
Thinking visibility answers:
How do you see the problem?
The second is far more useful when selling expertise.
Suppose I am looking for someone to help design professional training. One person tells me that they have twenty years of experience, have worked with major organisations and have delivered hundreds of workshops.
Another person explains why adding more content to a training programme can make it less useful, why subject-matter experts frequently mistake completeness for usefulness, and how to decide what should be removed from a programme.
The second person has given me something much more valuable than a résumé.
They have allowed me to inspect their judgment.
I may disagree with them. That is not necessarily a problem.
In fact, disagreement can be useful because it gives me something to evaluate.
A visible point of view allows a potential client to decide, “This person thinks in a way that fits how I see the problem.”
That is the beginning of trust.
The real product is judgment
This is perhaps the most important implication for expertise businesses.
Professionals tend to think they sell knowledge.
They rarely do.
Knowledge is increasingly abundant. Information is everywhere. Search engines, online courses, books, communities and increasingly capable AI systems have made access to information extraordinarily cheap.
What remains difficult is knowing which information matters, how it applies to a particular situation, what should be ignored and what decision should follow.
That is judgment.
A client does not usually hire an experienced professional because information is unavailable. They hire them because the situation is messy.
The problem has dependencies.
People disagree.
The available information is incomplete.
There are competing interests.
The obvious solution has consequences nobody considered.
The organisation has tried something similar before.
The technically correct answer is politically impossible.
The best theoretical solution is too expensive to implement.
This is where expertise earns its money.
It is the ability to make sense of complexity and turn it into a decision, action or outcome.
Once expertise is understood this way, visibility takes on a different function.
You are not primarily publishing information.
You are making your judgment observable.
That is why a useful article can be commercially more valuable than a carefully polished list of qualifications. The article lets a potential client see how you think.
It gives them something to recognise.
And recognition matters because people do not always know how to evaluate expertise directly. They look for evidence that someone understands the world they are dealing with.
Expertise becomes visible through useful interpretation
There is another subtle shift here.
The most valuable public thinking from an expert is not necessarily the most original information.
It is often the clearest interpretation of something the reader has already experienced but has not been able to articulate.
That is why certain experts become memorable.
They say something that makes the reader think, “Yes. That is what has been happening.”
The expert has not necessarily invented a new fact. They have given structure to an existing experience.
This is particularly important in fields where problems are ambiguous.
Consider a subject-matter expert who knows a great deal about a technical process. They might publish detailed explanations of the process. Those explanations demonstrate knowledge.
But suppose they instead explain why organisations keep trying to fix the process when the actual problem is unclear ownership.
That second observation demonstrates something deeper.
It demonstrates that the expert can distinguish between a visible problem and the mechanism producing it.
That is the kind of expertise clients pay for.
It is also the kind of expertise that creates intellectual property.
An expertise business becomes more valuable when its knowledge is not merely stored inside the expert’s head but organised into explanations, principles, frameworks, examples and ways of seeing.
This does not mean turning every thought into a proprietary framework with a trademark symbol attached to it. We have enough of those already.
It means making your accumulated judgment reusable.
That is a very different goal.
The uncomfortable consequence: expertise now has to leave your head
For professionals who have built careers through direct work, this can feel unnatural.
Their competence developed through situations rather than through publishing. They learned by doing, observing, correcting and doing again.
Much of what they know is tacit.
They know when something feels wrong.
They recognise a weak requirement before they can fully explain why.
They know which question to ask in a meeting.
They can tell when a process has been designed around the system rather than the people using it.
They know that the official problem is sometimes not the real problem.
This kind of knowledge is valuable precisely because it is difficult to codify.
But there is a commercial consequence.
If the knowledge remains entirely tacit, people outside your existing network have almost no way to assess it.
You can therefore have deep expertise and weak discoverability at the same time.
That is one of the contradictions of the modern expertise business.
The more experience you accumulate, the more valuable your judgment becomes. But unless some of that judgment becomes visible, the market may have no way of knowing that it exists.
The solution is not to expose everything.
It is to externalise enough of your thinking that people can recognise the shape of your expertise.
That might happen through writing. It might happen through teaching. It might happen through case studies, conversations, demonstrations, workshops, diagrams or practical resources.
The medium matters less than the underlying principle.
Your competence needs observable traces.
Visibility changes the economics of trust
This also changes how expertise businesses grow.
In a purely referral-driven model, trust is largely transferred from person to person.
Someone trusts you.
They introduce you to someone.
That person trusts the introducer.
You then have a conversation and begin proving yourself.
Visibility introduces another route.
Someone encounters your thinking before there is a commercial conversation.
They read something you wrote six months ago. They see how you approach a problem. They recognise a difficulty they are currently facing. They encounter another piece of your work and realise that the first one was not an isolated thought.
By the time they contact you, part of the trust-building process has already happened.
This is why a small body of consistently useful work can have disproportionate value.
It keeps working after you have stopped actively selling.
The distinction is important. A piece of content does not become an asset simply because it exists. It becomes an asset when it continues to help someone understand a problem and, in doing so, creates evidence of your competence.
That is a much higher standard.
It also explains why volume is a poor substitute for substance.
Publishing one hundred generic observations does not necessarily create more trust than publishing ten pieces that reveal a coherent way of thinking.
The buyer is not counting.
They are forming a judgment.
The danger of becoming visible for the wrong reasons
There is a second-order problem here.
Once professionals understand that visibility matters, they can start optimising for visibility itself.
That is where the system becomes distorted.
The professional begins asking what will perform rather than what is worth saying. Topics are chosen because they attract attention. Opinions become sharper because disagreement generates engagement. Complex ideas are compressed into slogans because slogans travel better.
Eventually the expert has become very visible while their actual expertise has become less visible.
This is one of the strange traps of the attention economy.
A professional can build an audience around the performance of expertise without making their underlying judgment easier to evaluate.
That is why I would be careful with the phrase “personal brand.”
A brand can make someone recognisable. Recognition is useful.
But recognisability is not competence.
A person can become extremely recognisable for saying things that sound intelligent without being particularly useful when the situation becomes difficult.
For an expertise business, that is a dangerous trade.
The objective should not be maximum visibility.
It should be useful visibility.
Enough people should encounter enough of your thinking to understand what you see, what you believe, what you are good at and where your judgment is likely to be useful.
That is a much narrower and more demanding objective.
The expertise business is becoming a body of work
This leads to a broader way of thinking about the modern expertise business.
Instead of seeing the business as a collection of services, imagine it as a body of work.
The services are where the commercial relationship happens.
The body of work is what surrounds them.
It contains your observations, principles, explanations, examples, methods, questions and accumulated judgment.
Over time, those pieces begin to reinforce one another.
An article explains an idea.
A workshop lets people experience it.
A template makes part of it usable.
A case study shows what happens when it is applied.
A book develops the broader argument.
A training programme teaches someone else to use the approach.
The individual assets are useful. The system they form is more valuable.
This is where my thinking about Training Stacks comes from.
I am increasingly interested in what happens when expertise is deliberately turned into a stack of useful, teachable components rather than remaining trapped in the professional’s experience. The interesting part is not simply producing more training material. It is making the underlying thinking clear enough that it can be structured, taught, adapted and reused without stripping away the judgment that made the expertise valuable in the first place.
That is a different way of looking at professional knowledge.
It treats expertise as something that can develop a public surface without becoming a performance.
A professional does not need to become a creator
There is a final assumption worth challenging.
The modern discussion around visibility sometimes implies that every expert now needs to become a content creator.
I do not believe that.
An expert needs a way for the market to encounter their thinking.
Those are different requirements.
Someone might write one substantial article a month. Someone else might teach a public workshop. Another might publish practical resources. Someone might speak at industry events or record conversations with peers.
The appropriate form depends on the person, the audience and the nature of the expertise.
The underlying requirement remains the same: make enough of your thinking observable that trust does not have to begin from zero every time.
That matters because referrals themselves are changing.
A recommendation increasingly leads to a search.
Someone says, “You should talk to Ruben.”
The potential client looks you up.
They read something.
They inspect your work.
They try to understand what you actually believe.
The referral opens the door. Your visible thinking determines what happens next.
So the future is not referral versus visibility.
It is referral plus visibility.
Relationships create trust through association.
Visible expertise creates trust through evidence.
Together they are considerably stronger than either mechanism alone.
The unresolved question
There is still a question I do not think we have fully answered.
How much expertise should be made public before the commercial value of that expertise starts to disappear?
There is a temptation to say that generous sharing always wins. I am not sure that is true.
Some knowledge is valuable precisely because applying it requires experience, context and judgment. Turning everything into a freely available instruction manual could create the illusion that expertise is easier to reproduce than it really is.
There is also a difference between making your thinking visible and giving away the entire method.
I suspect the boundary lies somewhere between information and judgment.
You can explain how you see a problem without pretending that the explanation itself replaces years of experience. You can teach a principle without removing the need for someone who knows how to apply it. You can provide useful tools without claiming that the tool is the solution.
I do not have a final formula for that boundary.
Perhaps that is appropriate.
An expertise business should not be built around pretending that complicated questions have simple answers.
What does seem increasingly clear is that keeping everything hidden is no longer a viable strategy for professionals who want to be discovered beyond their existing relationships.
The old model depended on someone else saying, “I know a person who can help.”
The emerging model allows the potential client to say, “I have been reading this person’s thinking, and I suspect they understand the problem I am dealing with.”
That is not self-promotion in the conventional sense.
It is a different form of professional reputation.
The best expertise businesses will probably not belong to the loudest people, nor necessarily to those with the largest audiences. They will belong to professionals whose public work gives a credible glimpse of the quality of their private judgment.
That leaves room for people who never particularly wanted to become visible in the first place.
They do not have to become performers.
They have to become legible.
And perhaps that is the real change taking place. Expertise used to be something other people discovered about you after working with you. Increasingly, the professional has to give people a way to discover enough of it before they work with you.
The challenge is not to put yourself everywhere.
It is to leave enough evidence behind that the right people can recognise you when they are looking for someone who thinks the way you do.
Thanks for reading!
Until next Saturday.
Ruben.