Questions

“Am I actually good enough to do this?”

Nobody has ever answered that question by thinking about it harder.

The useful version is narrower and it is answerable. In the last three years, how many times did somebody come to you specifically, rather than to your team or to the obvious other person? Write down three. Most people expect that to be hard and find they have three in ten minutes.

That is not confidence. It is evidence, and it is already in your diary.

“Who am I to start a business?”

You are not starting a business. You are selling something you already do, to people who already have the problem.

The people who struggle with this are usually trying to become somebody new. The ones who do not are selling the thing colleagues were already interrupting them for.

“But most businesses fail.”

Most of what gets counted in that number is a business. Premises, staff, stock, borrowing, a thing that has to grow or die.

This is one person selling their judgement. The failure mode is different and it is much less dramatic: you spend a year on something nobody wanted to buy, then you go and get a job. That is a bad year, not a catastrophe.

Twenty days of finding out first is the cheapest insurance against it.

“I can't afford to take a risk right now.”

Then find out what the risk actually is, because almost nobody has.

The number that matters is not what you might earn. It is how many months you can go without earning, which is arithmetic you can do in an afternoon and gets avoided for a year. Soundcheck's third week is that, on your own numbers.

Knowing the number does not commit you to anything. Not knowing it is what makes the decision feel enormous.

I am a chartered management accountant, not a tax adviser, and I will not tell you what your number should be. If the answer needs somebody who knows your country's rules, get one.

“I don't even know what I'd do it on.”

That is the normal starting position, and it is what Soundcheck exists for.

The answer is almost never a new idea. It is something you have been doing for years without noticing, usually the questions people brought you that were not your job. Nobody logs those, because no process captured them. People came anyway.

“Will anyone actually pay me?”

Unknown, and that is the point. Anyone who tells you yes at this stage is guessing.

What can be found out is whether the problem is real for people who do not work with you, what they do about it now, and what that costs them. Soundcheck's second week is that, and it is the week most people stop in.

“I have to leave first, don't I?”

No, and doing this from inside a job is usually the better version.

One task a day, forty-five minutes at a weekly checkpoint. It is built to be done alongside work, and finding out before you hand in your notice is the whole point.

“What if I do it and the answer is no?”

Then you have saved yourself eighteen months and your savings, and you will have a page explaining exactly why.

Some people finish Soundcheck and decide not to go. That is a result. Every other course sold to people leaving corporate is structurally unable to tell you that, because it has already taken your money for the next thing.

“Where do I even begin?”

Not with a website, a company or a name. Those are the comfortable jobs, which is why people do them first.

You begin with a sentence somebody else can repeat, and a person who has the problem. Everything else is downstream of those two.

“I've bought a domain. Now what?”

Nothing yet, and that is fine. A domain costs almost nothing and commits you to almost nothing.

The order that works is position, then offer, then price, then conversations, then the operating base. A website belongs somewhere near the end, and it is much easier to build once you know what it has to say.

“I don't know how to produce content.”

Almost nobody does, and the ones who stop do not stop because they ran out of ideas. They stop because there was never a system.

The Studio covers both parts: the few territories you can own because of who you are, and how a week's worth actually gets made by one person who also has clients.

“Is this coaching?”

No. Coaching happens, but this is closer to having somebody in the room who has seen the thing before and will tell you what they think.

You will be told when something is not working.

“Isn't this market saturated?”

With people who have read about it, yes. With people who have run the thing they are now advising on, much less so.

That is the whole basis of it. Your twenty years is the moat, and it is also the thing people find hardest to describe.

“Am I too old for this?”

This is built for people with twenty years behind them. The floor is ten.

The experience is what is being sold. It is not something to apologise for at the start of a conversation.

“Why you?”

I spent sixteen years inside two banks watching how they decide what people are worth, and then had to work out what I was worth to a stranger with no letterhead behind me.

That is the whole of it. If you want the record, it is on the about page.

“What does it cost?”

Soundcheck is CHF 200 for twenty days. The Decision Call is CHF 550 for an hour on something happening now.

Everything else is on the path.

“You have not answered mine”

Email me: lisa@nextpositionadvisory.com. Two or three lines is plenty, and I answer these myself.