You’ve accumulated valuable skills, knowledge, and experience – both through your career and through life. But when it comes to working out what you could actually turn into a coaching or consulting business, the answer isn’t always obvious. In this week’s newsletter, I share where I would start looking and how to identify the directions worth exploring.
After 10, 15 or 20 years in a career, it can be surprisingly difficult to recognise what you are actually good at.
You have accumulated plenty of experience, and have been doing certain things for so long that they don’t feel particularly impressive anymore. You can walk into a difficult stakeholder meeting and work out fairly quickly what is really going on. You can look at a piece of work and immediately see what’s missing. Sometimes you can see what is likely to go wrong before someone less experienced has even realised there is a problem.
But when somebody asks what you’re particularly good at, you might still struggle to answer.
Because to you, a lot of it is just what you do.
I see this as one of the reasons experienced corporate women can find it surprisingly difficult to work out what they could build a business around. They assume they need to come up with a new business idea, or get a new qualification, when actually I think the better place to start is by looking much more closely at what they have already accumulated.
And after 15 or 20 years, there is usually a lot more there than they realise, inside and outside their jobs.
Start with what you already have
There are four areas I would look at.
The first is what you know. This includes your professional expertise, technical knowledge, industry understanding, but also knowledge you’ve developed deeply outside your career.
The second is what you can do. Think beyond your job description. Maybe you’re particularly good at simplifying complicated problems, influencing difficult stakeholders, developing people, negotiating, facilitating conversations or creating structure when things are messy.
Then look at what you have achieved and experienced. What have you built, improved, fixed, grown or changed? What results have you helped create? And what have you personally navigated or learned that has given you insight other people may find valuable?
And finally, what do people already come to you for? What do colleagues, clients, friends or people in your network repeatedly ask for your advice on? What are the situations where people already trust your judgment?
Sometimes the most interesting possibilities aren’t sitting neatly inside one of these areas. They come from the intersection between them.
Your professional expertise combined with something you’ve experienced personally. A skill you’ve developed at work applied to a different type of problem. Or something you’ve become unusually knowledgeable about because you’ve lived through it yourself.
If you do this exercise properly, you’ll probably come up with quite a lot.
But I wouldn’t look at that list and immediately ask, Which one should I monetise?
Because having valuable skills and experience is only one side of the equation.
You also need to know the problem
Once you have a clearer picture of what you could potentially use, it’s time to turn your attention outwards.
Who could you help with what you know? And what problems are those people trying to solve?
Let’s say you’ve spent 20 years in HR. You have led company restructures, developed senior leaders, managed difficult employee situations, and coached new managers through challenging conversations.
You could take that experience in many different directions.
But being good at leadership doesn’t automatically mean you should become a leadership coach. Being a great facilitator doesn’t mean you should sell facilitation.
Instead, look at the problems you’ve seen repeatedly.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that technically excellent women often struggle when they first move into senior leadership. Suddenly they need to establish authority, influence at the executive level, navigate politics and lead through other people. You’ve helped people through that transition many times, so you already understand the problem and have credibility in helping solve it.
Now there is something worth exploring.
You have a person you understand, a problem they experience and the expertise that could potentially help solve it.
But there is still one more question:
Is the problem important enough that someone would pay to solve it?
Because not every problem makes a business.
People can find something frustrating or inconvenient without being willing to pay to fix it. A commercially interesting problem usually has some consequence attached to it. It might be costing someone money, time or opportunities. It might be affecting their career, their business or an outcome they care deeply about.
That’s why the best business ideas don’t come simply from asking, What am I good at?
They start to emerge when you find the intersection between what you know and have experienced, who you can help, and a specific problem important enough to solve.
From there, you have something worth testing
You may end up with two or three possible directions rather than one obvious answer.
That’s fine.
At this stage, you’re not trying to decide what your business will be for the next ten years. You’re trying to identify where there might be a real opportunity between what you bring and a problem someone is willing to pay to solve.
The next step is to take those possibilities into the market.
Talk to the people you think you could help. Understand how they experience the problem, what they’ve already tried, how important it is to them and whether they are actively looking for a solution.
Because ultimately, you can’t work out whether you have a viable business idea by thinking about it alone.
Your experience gives you somewhere credible to start.
Only the market can tell you which direction is worth pursuing.
If you work through this properly, you’ll have a much clearer idea of which business directions are actually worth exploring.
If you’re also thinking about why you would want to build something of your own when you already have a successful career, I wrote about that last week. You can read Why successful corporate women still want to build a business of their own here.