Make your business heavy
Everything I believe about building a business that stands for something, in one place.
As a coach or consultant, your thinking IS the product you sell.
That is: your lived experiences, education and training in your field.
Clients pay for your ideas, beliefs and perspectives, and there are many benefits to running this kind of operation. From location independence, low overheads, minimal set-up fees, and a lack of physical ‘stuff’ to manage, carry around and keep track of.
But I've seen a very common problem under the surface of these businesses, having run one for six years and supported many founders to run theirs.
Founders of ideas-based businesses often struggle to hold onto their business.
They can feel amorphous. Ephemeral. Flimsy.
Without hard, physical edges, teams, offices or equipment to hold onto, they can evade even the person in charge.
Where does this business start? Where does it end? Where does it live?
A business like this shape shifts. Its weight, shape and gravity depend on the day or month in question. As its founder, your brain, self-belief and energy are the very make-up of the business.
Take a client, let's call her Rachel (she's one of many similar conversations). We'd landed on her positioning, her One Big Idea (the unique perspective at the centre of her business, the sun everything else orbits around), plans for an event series, a launch campaign and how to reach the people she most wanted to serve. The momentum was palpable.
Then she took a break, went away with her family, and came back to our sessions feeling a bit lost. Not a complete 180 turn, but a feeling of distance had crept in.
She told me: “I feel like I lost touch with this mission and my role, but I've been reminded of it again today in this session.”
A short break, and the entire foundation of the business faltered.
That's possible because when the business lives in your head, it's liable to float away if you don't weigh it down.
I know this first-hand. In 2020 I said to my own coach, “I don't really know what constitutes my business. Is it just this Instagram page?” She laughed and asked me, “Well, where does your business live?”
That moment stayed with me and from then on, I vouched to ensure my business lived in many, concrete ways and places.
Here's what I believe, after six years of asking that question of both myself and of my clients.
Until you stand for something, your business will stay flimsy.
Until you make a stance, and lock in a few decisions about what you do and what you believe, you'll keep shape-shifting.
And a shape-shifting business doesn't become a profitable, viable one.
There are four parts to fixing that which we’ll get into in today’s essay:
Stop freelancing and start building a business
Lock in your positioning statement, your One Big Idea, and your Hero Piece
Write it down, so your thinking travels without you
Codify and anchor it, so it compounds
Let’s dig in
1. Stop freelancing. Start building a business.
To become an Authority Entrepreneur, you first have to cross the threshold into business building; a distinction I don't talk about enough.
When you're a freelancer, you're responding to briefs. You are a malleable, smart, reliable pair of hands. A pair of hands who says “yes, sir” or “no, sir” to your client. In doing so, you are ultimately making their business dreams come true.
I'm not against freelancing.
It's an incredible opportunity for anyone who feels hamstrung by the traditional 9–5, and is ready to escape the same employer, routine, fixed salary and office politics for years on end.
But there comes a point where freelancers want more. They want what a business owner has: ownership.
When you own and operate a business, you're committed to creating a certain, defined value in the world. Very often a type of value that the business owner finds personally significant. A mission, purpose or cause you can stand behind and own in the world. One you are committed to developing and being recognised for.
Business owners have to choose what that value is. They must decide what their lane is, aka the product or service this value revolves around.
The hidden cost of a shape-shifting service
When you have a product that needs manufacturing, you can't willy-nilly change your mind about what you're building from one day to the next. You've already got the goods. The warehouse. The supply chain. The machine is built.
With a service, that isn't the case.
So what happens all too often is the service gets chopped and changed beyond recognition, because it isn't flying off the proverbial shelves.
Or it gets offered alongside a raft of others… in the hope that something will land.
This happens because there's no overt cost to the person offering the service.
Except there is…
Until you build a machine around your service, your business cannot compound.
And if you keep changing the service, you never give that machine the chance to work. You miss the benefits of repetition:
Deepening your expertise and practice
Streamlining operations and delivery
Productising your methodology into scalable IP
Increasing demand, referrals and fees
Building brand recognition and Authority
Creating predictability and profitability
Until you decide what service you deliver repeatedly, who it's for, why it works, and why you're specifically positioned to lead it, you'll stay in freelance territory (regardless of your income).
Are you ready to be bored?
One of the biggest (and least spoken about) objections to choosing a lane is what it implies: that you'll have to stop being quite so… interesting.
If you looked at my bookshelf, my YouTube history, or my music library, you'd see someone who loves variety. Who has, over the years, developed a very well-worn habit of beginning new projects with great enthusiasm and not always finishing them.
And yet the best business decision I've made (and the one I now help clients make) is to go in one coherent direction. To stop creating new things, and get better at refining existing ones.
I still love the 0–1 of a new beginning, but I've trained myself to stay in my lane and innovate within it.
For a certain type of founder, this can feel like a kind of slow death.
Take a client, let's call her Maya. She'd been circling the decision of what her business's core promise would be for the better part of a year before we worked together. Sharp, credible, and excellent at what she does. But every time we got close to naming the lane, another new idea would appear. Another “but what about…”
When we finally got underneath it, she said: “I think I'm scared it'll get boring.”
I do get it. There's some truth there. You'll say similar things more consistently. You'll refine the same frameworks instead of building new ones. You'll resist the shiny new idea in favour of the thing that's already proven.
But the cost of keeping things ‘interesting’ is that nothing builds.
Freelancing is freedom. Business building is commitment. And Authority is what you earn as a result of that commitment.
2. Lock in three things
You have years of insight, instinct and expertise. But it's all in fragments. Conversations, client work, old posts, half-finished ideas, scattered both literally and metaphorically.
There's no shortage of ideas here. They just exist in too many places, at too many levels of development, and nobody, including you, can see the whole picture at once.
Most business advice tells you to niche down, run ads, build a course or create a content strategy. But it’s often in vein because it won’t solve the true problem many coaches and consultants actually have: Your expertise isn't yet a system. And until it is, everything else is just more work.
The work starts with Cohesion: pulling those threads together and finding the through-line. Stop adding. Start auditing.
The answer to your ‘scale’ problem is almost certainly already in your business.
Cohesion comes down to locking in three things.
i) Your Authority positioning statement
A short, sharp way of explaining what you do, for who, and what happens as a result. It also shows a little of your uniqueness along the way.
With this, strangers instantly understand your business's focus, and your thinking becomes legible enough to become a line item on someone's budget.
You go from ‘interesting’ to ‘needed’.
My Authority positioning statement shows up in my social media bios, email sign off, intros to new people and media pitches.
ii) Your One Big Idea
A message that explains your unique view on the world, in a way that captures people's attention far and wide.
Your One Big Idea bridges what you do with why you do it.
It's a conversation starter that gets you booked on podcasts and asked for your opinion. And it becomes the editorial backbone of your myriad ideas and perspectives.
If your business were a solar system, your One Big Idea is the sun everything else orbits around.
You don't need to invent it. What are the three or four ideas that keep showing up in your client work, regardless of the brief? Is there one idea that sits across all of them? If you can't answer that in under a minute, that's your starting point.
Selena Coles, of BUILD Networks for Good, knew there was traction in her business but struggled to explain it succinctly. Together we found the thread: One Big Idea, a solid argument behind it, and offers that build on each other. Once it was out in the world, people started using her language back to her, tagging her and saying they'd seen BUILD everywhere.
As she put it: “My work is taking on a life of its own.”
iii) Your Hero Piece
A piece of writing that showcases your One Big Idea, your Authority, and what you stand for.
Think of it as a sales letter that educates and persuades without ever feeling salesy. It does your positioning before you're even in the room. People want to share it because it’s so narratively engaging in its own right.
A Hero Piece works on your behalf for months, if not years, to come.
Hayley Dawson, of Let's Talk Human Skills, wrote hers and found it gave her “a repeatable way to write long-form content with confidence.” It shaped her entire 2026 content strategy. And the Hero Piece itself led to three people booking calls with her in the first week of sharing it, plus an invitation to be interviewed for a book as a human skills expert.
That’s just one piece of writing.
Lock these three in, and you stop shape-shifting. You have something to stand on, come back to, and build from.
3. Write it down, so it travels without you
Every practitioner's work has three layers. (And too many people only tend to two of them).
The Doing. The client work itself. Coaches love the poignant questions. Consultants love finding the answers. Speakers love the penny-drop moments.
The Thinking. Stepping back to ask, “How could I do this better?” Books, mentors, mapping out a process. Stephen Covey called this ‘sharpening the saw’.
The Writing. The layer that often gets overlooked, and the one that strengthens the other two.
Without Writing, the Thinking stays untethered. Floating, easily forgotten. Writing gives it a home, and sharpens it as it captures it.
Because writing is thinking clearly.
And once it's written, it serves the Doing too.
Your clients can access your Writing in a way they can't your Thinking. I noticed my own clients getting better results once I started a weekly newsletter, because I was always thinking deeply about a problem I saw in sessions, and they had something to come back to between them.
Lis Best, of Girls Club Collective, described working with me on this process as a great way to organise your Big Thoughts into long-form content “that actually serves you and your business.”
But the biggest thing Writing does is reach people who aren't your clients yet. It lets your Thinking leave the room.
One essay can reach further than a career of private sessions
For years, Esther Perel was doing the work behind closed doors with clients. Gathering insights and spotting patterns. Not many knew her name. Until she wrote one essay: In Search of Erotic Intelligence. That one piece turned a private insight into a public idea, and an idea that spread.
In a meta way, I wrote about Esther Perel as an example of someone who’d built Authority using long-form writing, in my own long-form article The Authority Economy.
That article set my direction and, in turn, built my own Authority.
Then in a weird full circle moment a client Donatella Caggiano wrote her Hero Piece with me: Change doesn't have to break us apart, it can be what binds us. A beautifully written piece on belonging design.
Donatella then messaged me: Esther Perel had read her work! Someone with millions of followers, a TED talk with 30 million views, and a waiting list most therapists would retire for.
And it didn't stop there.
Donatella told me the Hero Piece writing process helped her “stay obsessed with my own ideas long enough to open them up to others.” Her work became a talking piece, reconnecting her with her old network and starting conversations with new people. It gave her the confidence to trademark her listening framework and open new streams of business.
“For years I did what the work needed of me. Now the work sounds more like me.”
See the pattern? All of our ideas, once put into writing, travelled far enough to land in front of the people who could make a difference to our businesses.
All without us in the room, explaining.
What it takes
If you commit to writing longer-form pieces regularly, you will get more clients. But only when you can say yes to all of the following:
Your writing references your Doing, not just whatever's on your mind
It's high quality, with the right balance of narrative and sales-led
It has enough intrigue to get people to read it in the first place
It keeps their attention (as a client kindly told me, “one of very few that I tend to read, not just skim through but read-read”)
It names the challenges and opportunities your clients care about
It gets discovered by the right people, aka prospective clients
I find many practitioners get 80–90% of the way there and stop themselves short. The overthinking, perfectionism, or indecision gets in the way.
(Prefer podcasting or video? You're welcome to. I'm long-form agnostic, as the same principles apply. I focus on writing because it's free, fast, and needs little set-up.
And for practitioners who do thoughtful, nuanced, values-led work… it captures the depth of what you do in a way short-form mediums cannot.)
4. Codify and anchor it, so it compounds
Once your thinking is cohesive and written down, the next step is making it tangible. Codification.
Here your thinking leaves your head and lives a life of its own: frameworks, documented methodologies, long-form essays and guides.
Things that carry your expertise forward without you reconstructing everything from scratch each time.
Many confuse this with building a passive income empire.
It's not about removing you from the equation. It's about making sure that when your ideas are discovered, the natural next step is working with you on your unique method.
Pick one framework you've explained on a client call in the last month. Does it exist anywhere outside that conversation? If not, that's a whole asset sitting unleveraged in your head.
Your ideas need anchors
Back to Rachel we met earlier. Her ideas did have a home outside of her. They lived in our shared Notion page, and in my head too.
That's a big part of what coaching offers: another brain to hold your ideas, and a mirror reflecting your brilliance back to you.
But you can build more anchors than that.
Here are the ones I'd consider:
Your clients. Your main anchor. Keep a shared space for reflections and progress notes, for their benefit and yours.
Your network. Everyone who knows about you and your business shares the mental load. How are you tracking them? A CRM? An email list?
Your Body of Work. More than just ‘content’: your thinking as articles, books, whitepapers and series. Above all, your Hero Piece.
Your frameworks. The methodology you take clients through, written down so it outlives any single conversation.
Your offer pathway. One clear sequence from “I've just discovered you” to “I'm a long-term client”. A confused mind never buys, and 15 offers feels like flexibility to you but not to them.
Your events. Any time you bring people together, you create a shared anchor and a reason to share your ideas.
Your space. Books, postcards, client thank-yous and awards in one place give you a sense of pride to anchor from.
Your online presence. Your website and branding exist to showcase your positioning. Without the other anchors, a beautiful brand is pure decoration.
A digital home. The right systems and tools get the work done, and give you a window to see all you've created. I use Notion.
Your team. Hires, mentors, coaches and suppliers remind you of your greatness and bring momentum you can't achieve solo.
Then it starts to compound
When your thinking is cohesive and your IP is codified, the hard work starts to pay back. Content that keeps working. Demand that arrives without you chasing it. A reputation that precedes you.
Content compounds when it connects to your IP, not to the algorithm. It teaches your specific way of seeing a problem: the counterintuitive diagnoses and reframes that make clients say, “I've never thought about it like that.”
Look at your last five pieces of content. Could anyone in your industry have written them?
Referrals are wonderful, and I'm so grateful for them. But you can't control them, predict them, or scale them, so they aren't a strategy.
What you need is simple.
i) One clear place where your best thinking lives.
ii) One consistent way of bringing new people to it.|
iii) One obvious next step for people who want to go deeper.
None of this work really happens in the spare gaps of your time. That’s precisely because you are so good at what you do, and client delivery fills in the spaces.
The businesses that make this shift protect the time for it: a recurring block that exists before the week fills up, treated with the same seriousness as client delivery.
When did you last spend a full half day working on your business rather than in it? If you have to think hard to remember, that's data.
A boring business. An interesting life.
Remember Maya, scared it would all get boring?
Here's the reframe that's helped me, and seemed to land for her too.
Your business doesn't have to be the most interesting, varied part of your life.
When your business is reliable (leads arriving consistently, positioning you're not reinventing every six months, systems you can train people to run, frameworks that hold, content that compounds)… you get something in return.
You get your time and your headspace back.
And then the interesting stuff gets to happen around the edges.
The hobbies, the travel, the projects that have nothing to do with work. The things that have been perpetually deprioritised, because the business kept demanding your full creative energy just to stay afloat.
That's what standing for something gives you, if you let it. Not a restrictive box. A foundation. I’ve experienced this especially in 2026. Lots of travel, improv comedy, time with family, movies, weight lifting.
So here's the promise, with its caveat. If what you deliver to clients is good, and you commit to building your Body of Work consistently, you will fill your practice with the right clients. In time. But you will.
Notice I said you do have to be good at what you deliver. That part's on you.
Anu, who writes Working Theories, put it well in her essay Make Something Heavy: “We're creating more than ever, but it weighs nothing.” We don't just make heavy things, she says. We become someone able to make heavy things in the process.
So stop creating. Start refining. Choose the lane. Build the thing that lasts.
Make your business heavy, so you can point to it, feel its shape, and let it carry you on the down days. Then go and live a very interesting life with the time that frees up.
Just because your business is your ideas, that doesn't make it intangible.
