The Adult Table
A lot of new faces this month, so a note.
I have been doing this work for 20 years, and I have never once called myself an expert. Every room I walk into picks a label for me. Creative director in one. Sales coach in another. Strategy guy. Thinker. Designer. The only niche I have ever had is curiosity, which is a real problem if you read the consulting playbooks and a real advantage if you do not.
The arc, briefly. Copywriter in Mumbai. Designer always. 7 years running an agency in Chandigarh. 7 years at Deloitte, in the rooms where over $2 billion in deals were won. Now independent, in Toronto, working mostly with founders and CEOs.
Industries the work has touched: frozen yogurt chains, music festivals, sports teams, logistics, airlines, fintech, deep consulting, complex B2B sales. The variety is the point. The pattern spans industries, never one.
~30,000 hours.
That is roughly what twenty years of positioning work adds up to when I count it honestly. Not just the client work. The reading. The dissecting. The nights spent pulling a problem apart because I could not put it down.
That number does not mean I am better than you. It means I have failed more than most of you combined.
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