For consultants, coaches and independent advisors
You Have the Expertise. The Platform Is Missing.
You are not starting over. You have spent years developing judgment other people rely on. What is usually missing isn’t experience — it’s somewhere that makes the experience legible to people who don’t already know you.
For independent consultants, coaches, advisors and experienced professionals building something in their own name.
Five minutes to see where you stand. No cost, no obligation.
Who this is for
Experience isn’t the problem.
Most of the people we work with are already good at the work. The difficulty is that their expertise is easiest to understand in conversation, and conversations don’t scale.
- Independent consultants
- Business consultants
- Coaches
- Advisors
- Strategists
- Mentors
- Fractional executives
- Subject-matter experts
- Experienced professionals going independent
Take inventory
You already own more than you’re showing.
Before anything gets built, it helps to see the material clearly. None of this needs to be invented. It needs to be found, named and put somewhere it can work for you.
Judgment
Knowing which problem is the real one before anyone has named it.
Pattern recognition
You have seen this situation before, in more than one organisation.
A point of view
Opinions you have earned about how this work should be done.
Relationships
People who already return your calls and remember how you work.
Reputation
What colleagues and clients say about you when you are not in the room.
A way of working
A method you follow, even if you have never written it down.
Problems solved
Real situations you improved, with the reasoning behind how you did it.
Expertise that can’t be found is expertise nobody can hire.
The defining work
Six questions your platform has to answer.
A professional platform isn’t a set of pages. It is six answers, in order, each one making the next easier to give. Most independent professionals can answer one or two of them clearly. The work is answering all six.
- 01
What do you know?
The expertise itself, stated plainly enough that a stranger can understand its shape.
- 02
Who do you help?
The kind of organisation or person your experience is genuinely built for.
- 03
What problems do you solve?
The situations people are actually in when they start looking for someone like you.
- 04
How do you think?
Your reasoning, made visible — the part that separates you from a similar résumé.
- 05
Why should someone trust you?
Evidence of how you work: your method, your writing, the way you frame a problem.
- 06
How can someone work with you?
Defined ways in, so interest has somewhere to go besides an open-ended enquiry.
Answer them well and almost everything else — website, LinkedIn profile, writing, introductions, proposals — becomes a matter of expression rather than invention.
Where it currently lives
Right now it lives in other people’s systems.
- A LinkedIn profile shaped by roles rather than expertise
- A PDF deck you rewrite for every conversation
- Proposals that only one person ever reads
- Referrals that can't travel further than the person making them
- Conversations nobody else can see
- Platforms and directories owned by someone else
None of it is wasted. It simply isn’t yours, and it can’t be read by someone who hasn’t met you yet.
From general to specific
Clarity comes from narrowing.
Broad descriptions feel safer and say less. Each step below is more specific than the one before it, and easier for someone to act on. This is one example of that movement, not a positioning we would hand you.
- 01Consultant
- 02Operations Consultant
- 03Operations Consultant for owner-led service businesses
Your version will come out of your own history — the engagements you kept being asked for, and the problems you are unusually good at solving.
Start here
Two free ways to begin.
One shows you where you stand today. The other shows you what to build, and in what order. Most people do both, in either order.
The assessment
See where your brand stands.
The Personal Brand Assessment scores the dimensions of a professional brand — position, story, authority, presence, audience, lead generation and ownership — and shows you which gaps are holding back the rest.
The Blueprint
Learn what to build, and in what order.
The Personal Brand Blueprint is a practical working guide: the questions to answer, what good looks like, and a short self-review you can do on your own. Free, and yours to keep.
Who you’d be working with
Meet Eric.
I’ve spent more than 30 years helping people grow — through teaching, coaching, leadership and building things from nothing.
Design Yourself exists for one reason: to help people believe their best chapter is still ahead of them, and to build something that reflects it.
Every engagement starts the same way — a conversation about your experience and the opportunity in front of you. No templates, no scripts.
For consultants, choosing the right conversations matters as much as presenting your expertise well. You shouldn’t have to spend hours every week researching prospects just to figure out who might be worth contacting. Read You Don’t Need More Leads. You Need Better Opportunities.
Working together
When you’re ready to build it properly.
You’ve built the expertise. Now build the business around it. Design Yourself works in three stages — START, BUILD and GROW — and you begin wherever you actually are.
START — Find the opportunity
Identify and validate the strongest opportunity around your experience and your market.
BUILD — Make it real
Turn that opportunity into positioning, an offer, a personal brand, a digital presence and the business systems it needs.
GROW — Keep finding what’s next
Build visibility, customer intelligence and a repeatable way to identify and act on new opportunities.
Personal branding is one of the capabilities delivered within BUILD. See how it works on the Personal Brand page →
Your experience is the asset. If you’d rather that work were handled for you, Design Yourself Launch is a managed digital-presence option within BUILD — your personal brand and website built, maintained and kept current while you stay on client work. Explore Design Yourself Launch →
See it built
What six clear answers look like.
Daniel Mercer is a fictional consultant. His brand is a demonstration we designed to show what this work produces — and the simplest way to read it is as those six questions, answered.
You can see what he knows, who he helps, the problems he works on, how he thinks, why someone would trust his reasoning, and exactly how to begin working with him. Nothing on it names a real client, result or figure.
Keep exploring
Build the person behind the practice.
A stronger professional brand begins before the website. Ideas on positioning, independence and building something of your own.
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You may already have LinkedIn, social media or a company website. So do you really need one of your own? The answer depends on who is being evaluated — and on how much of your reputation currently lives somewhere you don’t own.
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Your next chapter
Now design yourself.
Start with a conversation. If there’s a fit, we’ll take you through the Design Yourself Brand Discovery.