Episode 261 | Watch on YouTube | Listen on Buzzsprout
You have spent 25 years learning your industry, solving hard problems, and becoming the person everyone calls when something goes wrong.
Here’s the uncomfortable question: if you left your job tomorrow, how much of that experience could you actually sell? Not put on a resume. Not talk about in an interview. Sell.
For a lot of experienced professionals, the honest answer is no. That doesn’t mean the experience is worthless. It means their employer has been the only customer who ever learned how to buy it.
This isn’t a pitch to quit your job or start a business. It’s about proving that one small piece of what you know has value outside the walls of your current organization.
Your Job Hides the Product
A job hides the product. Someone gives you a title, defines your responsibilities, and hands you problems to solve. The organization supplies the customers, the context, and the work. You get paid every month without ever having to explain which problem you solved to earn the check.
After 25 years, it’s easy to think the title is the value. Director. Engineer. Professor. Vice president. But nobody outside your organization wakes up wanting to buy a director. They buy a result — a delayed project brought back under control, a cost reduced, a risk avoided.
Your title describes where you sit. It doesn’t describe what you can sell. The first shift is to stop inventorying titles and start inventorying problems.
Experience Is Not the Offer
Experience is valuable, but by itself it isn’t an offer. Saying “I have 25 years of experience in higher education” might sound impressive, but it doesn’t tell anyone what to buy. Saying “I help universities build graduate programs for working adults” gives them a result to picture.
Same experience. Translated into a problem, a customer, and an outcome.
Most people list skills instead: leadership, strategy, communication. Those are ingredients, not the meal. Nobody pays for leadership. They pay when that leadership produces a specific result for a specific person.
Don’t Build a Business Yet
A business name, a website, and a logo don’t prove your experience has market value. Only a customer proves that.
So run a small test first. Write down five problems people repeatedly bring to you — not five things you enjoy, five actual problems. Pick the one that is painful, costly, and common. Then find five people close to that problem and ask what the hardest part of it is, what they’ve already tried, and what happens if it never gets fixed.
Their language will teach you more than another month of thinking about a business idea.
Experience Versus Evidence
Build the smallest useful offer you can — an assessment, a workshop, a written plan, a half-day session. Not a six-month program.
The goal isn’t to replace your salary. It’s to answer one question: will someone other than my employer pay for this result? That first payment, even if it’s small, changes how you see yourself.
Before that payment, you have experience. After it, you have evidence. Your knowledge can travel. It isn’t trapped inside your job title.
Why This Matters Before You Need It
The worst time to find out what your experience is worth is after you lose the job. Urgency makes people desperate, and desperate people chase vague opportunities and take work that doesn’t fit.
Test your value while you’re still employed and you have time to experiment, learn which problems people will actually pay to solve, and build relationships without looking desperate. You don’t have to know where it ends before you take the first step.
This week, pick one problem you’re good at solving and talk to one person who has it.
Need Help Getting Started?
📍 If you want a place to start, and you’re just at a loss, go below to the link for Moving Past Obstacles assignment. It walks you through the first step..
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