The more experience you have, the harder it is to talk about yourself… and the more it hurts to fix it.
I just got off a call with a client I’ve been working with for a few weeks now, trying to nail his unique value proposition. We keep hitting the same wall.
He wants to keep it broad to not limit his opportunities, and I keep pushing him to narrow to resonate more. One target employer, one clear message, one compelling reason to hire him over everyone else.
The difference looks something like this:
Option 1: “Accelerating revenue growth through operational efficiency and data-driven sales execution.”
vs.
Option 2: “Helping B2B scaleups reach profitability — not by optimizing sales in isolation, but by aligning sales, product, and unit economics as one system.”
Same person. Completely different signal.
Today, when I pushed him toward the second version, he said something that stopped me:
This is very tough for me. It’s like letting go. Like Frozen, you know?
That’s it. That’s the real tension.
It’s not that he doesn’t understand the logic. He does. It’s that narrowing feels like loss, like you’re erasing chapters of your life. 20+ years of experience. FMCG, marketplaces, energy tech, fintech, startups, enterprise. All real. All part of who he is. And now someone is telling him: pick one thread. Tell one story.
Before this call, I thought people resisted niching down because they didn’t understand the benefits. Now I think the resistance is emotional, not intellectual.
But here’s what I kept coming back to: broad messages do not create more opportunities. They create confusion. As Jay Acunzo keeps having to remind us, when you try to resonate with everyone, you end up mattering to no one. The hiring manager reads your profile and thinks — okay, but what does he actually do? — and closes the tab.
Narrowing isn’t deletion, it’s narration.
You’re not cutting your experience, you’re choosing which lens to look at it through. The lens of where you’re going next, not everywhere you’ve been.
The candidates who get responses have one clear message. You immediately understand what they do, who they do it for, why they’re the right person — not because they’re the “best” (whatever that means), but because they’re the right fit.
And you can’t be the right fit if you have no shape.
That’s what we’re building toward. Not the broadest possible story, but the most resonant one.
