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You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.

Angie Jones knows that firsthand. Even when she spent most of her career as a marketer, it was still a big challenge to figure out how to tell people about what she really does.

Before founding Suite Ghost, Angie spent years in publishing and marketing. She led marketing teams and interviewed hundreds of people as a journalist.

Today, she’s an executive narrative strategist and fractional Head of Content helping B2B leaders put words to the expertise, stories, and perspectives they’ve built over their careers.

This episode kicks off our three-part series on how consultants can build a trusted brand.

Angie talks about narrowing what you want to be known for, uncovering the beliefs hiding underneath your expertise, and turning the way you think into a narrative that builds trust.

Did you always know you’d end up building something of your own?

Angie: I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I think I always had that entrepreneurial bug. I started working for my parents when I was about eight, cleaning their appliance store. I was also a classic lemonade-stand kid.

Right out of college, I took out a loan and built a couple of magazines. I did that for about six years. Eventually, I went into corporate marketing because running a business is hard, and I think I was ready for something else for a while.

But it only took about three to five years before I started getting the itch to build something again. I landed somewhere I really loved working, so I used that time to learn everything I could about business. I thought that I’m going to file all of this away for whatever comes next.

When I finally went out on my own again, I felt pretty good about it. I already had the experience of building my magazines, and a service business felt much simpler than a publishing company. I’d also been consciously growing my network for a couple of years leading up to leaving.

What I didn’t have figured out yet was positioning, which was frustrating because I should be able to do it. I do it for companies, so why can’t I do this for myself?

Why do you think consultants struggle so much to figure out what their own story is and what they should be known for?

Angie: You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. And that’s true even for career marketers.

A lot of mine was trial and error. And to be honest, I’m still tweaking it and figuring it out two and a half years in. Maybe I always will be.

For my clients, one of the things I see is that they are so talented and so smart. There are 50 different things they could do, so they have 50 different ways they could position themselves. When you’re doing this on your own, you actually have the power to choose – but I think that’s exactly what makes it hard.

It also changes depending on where you are in your business. Early stage consultants don’t know what they want. If they do, they want to tell people that they can do specific things for specific people. As you move on to the next phase, your problem becomes is what you do unique, interesting, or differentiated enough?

Imposter syndrome plays a hand too, because some of my clients think they don’t have anything interesting to say. But if you’ve been in the industry for 20 years, there’s definitely something to uncover.

If somebody has a basic idea of the problem they solve, how do you get underneath their actual perspective?

Angie: Everybody has their positioning statement: “I help X do Y so they can Z." But the Content Question flips that on its head and asks, “How can X do Y so they can Z?” It puts the audience at the center and if you spend 80% of your content answering that question, you become a valuable resource.

Then we start unpacking it and see if it’s specific enough.

A good test is “can you write a book about that?” If they say yes, then that’s great. We'll move to the next level: “can you write ten books about it from different angles?” If the answer is still yes, then their perspective is too broad.

Your perspective needs to be something you can unpack in your content over time, but specific enough to resonate with certain individuals. 

Another question I usually ask is, “How has your thinking about that changed over the years?” or, “What’s something people get wrong about that?”

Almost always, there’s a worldview that sits underneath the problem they solve.

And their energy shifts when they start talking about it – they talk faster, more passionate, or more animated. They might even apologize for going off on a tangent or getting on their soapbox.

But no – we need you to go back to the soapbox because that’s the good stuff. That’s going to tell us so much about what you should be talking about.

I love walking people through this part because I think it’s deeper than the traditional advice of manufacturing a spiky point of view – it works if you’re trying to sell a $99 course, but not if you’re trying to build enough trust.

Let’s be authentic because your worldview informs how you think about the problem you solve.

Once you’ve uncovered that perspective, why does talking about how you think matter so much for building trust?

Angie: At the end of the day, a business owner wants to know if you can help them solve their problem. If you can say that you’ve seen it before and you’re used to working in that context, then there’s going to be trust there – because you’ve seen around the corner that they haven’t seen around yet.

I think that’s what people are looking for more and more: judgment and discernment. That’s the value of a consultant. And that’s why I think you need to talk about more than just what you do.

You have to give people something to grab onto that’s deeper than your elevator pitch. Talk about why you believe what you believe, or talk about how you think about the problem you solve.

That’s also where stories become really important. You can go to ChatGPT and ask it how to put together a marketing strategy, but it can’t catch the nuance of why you believe something because of an experience you had early in your career.

When you start talking about those things, you become a real person. And that’s who people want sitting around their leadership team table.

Start talking about how you think about the problem more. It’s way more interesting.

What We Can Learn from Angie Jones:

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