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Here's something nobody prepares you for when you leave Amazon: ​ You've spent years communicating to people who already know you. Your VP knows your scope. Your skip-level knows your track record. Your peers were in the room when the decision got made. You've never had to explain what you do from scratch — because your audience always had the context. ​ And then you're out. And suddenly the audience is... everyone? Hiring managers you've never met. Recruiters who've skimmed

I want to show you something I see constantly. Here’s a LinkedIn headline from a real client (details changed, but the pattern is exact): “GTM Leader | Cross-functional Collaboration | Passionate About Innovation | MBA” You read that and you think... OK? Could be anyone. Could be any level. Could be any company. There’s no reason to click, no reason to reach out, no signal about what this person actually does or why they’re worth talking to. Now here’s what it looked like aft

I've written a lot about LinkedIn profiles in this newsletter. How your profile is a cheat sheet for the people trying to help you. How the language you used inside Amazon doesn't travel outside the building. How most senior people have never actually had to explain what they do to someone who doesn't already have the context. And a lot of you have taken that and done something with it. Updated your headlines. Rewritten your About sections. Tightened up the language. Some of

Most of my clients don’t come to me at the worst moment. They come to me about a year after it. They’ll say something like “I’ve been thinking about this for a while” or “I probably should have started sooner.” And when we unpack the timeline, there’s almost always a moment — a conversation, a reorg, a review that didn’t go the way they expected — where they knew. Not knew-knew. But felt it. The thing that told them this wasn’t going to get better on its own. And then they wa

Many senior clients aren't signalling their scope and impact in a way that the market understands. See how well you're signalling the market and how to fix it.

Last week I talked about the difference between a contact list and an actual network. A few of you replied (thank you — keep doing that), and there was a theme I want to pull on. Most of you have done the work. You’ve had the conversations. You’ve told people what you’re looking for. Great. But here’s what’s happening next, and nobody’s telling you about it. ​ After that conversation, the person you spoke to runs into someone at a team offsite, or they’re in a Slack thread wh