A short report for coaches & consultants
Why the best expert in the room is rarely the one who gets hired, and the five things that decide it.
By Steve Hackney · Author of The Formula, The Machine and Business Mentoring Success
There is a particular kind of frustration that only happens to people who are genuinely good at their job.
You watch someone with half your experience win the work. You hear your own ideas repeated back to you at a conference by somebody who is being paid to say them. You get asked to justify a fee that you know is fair, by a client who has already agreed a bigger one with a firm that will do worse work.
None of that is a competence problem. You're not losing because you're not good enough.
You're losing because nobody knows how good you are before they meet you.
This report is about why that happens, and about the five things that fix it, in the order they have to be fixed.
Most established consultants and coaches have built a business that runs almost entirely on referral. That's usually presented as a good thing, and in one sense it is, it means the work is good enough that people pass your name on.
But look at what it actually means.
of consultants generate zero leads from their website in a typical month. Over half say roughly 60% of their business comes through referral alone.
Consulting Success, 2025
Referral is a wonderful way to get clients and a terrible way to grow. Three reasons.
It's capped by other people's memory. You only get referred when somebody happens to be in a conversation where you happen to come to mind. You cannot increase that. You can only wait.
It arrives cold anyway. A referral means someone has vouched for you. It doesn't mean the prospect knows what you do, why you're different, or why you cost what you cost. You still start from near-zero, you just start with permission.
It doesn't compound. Every quarter, you rebuild. Nothing you did last year is still working for you this morning.
Meanwhile, the market is not rewarding quiet excellence. It's rewarding visible expertise, and it's paying a premium for it.
of senior executives said they would pay a premium to work with an organisation that produces high-quality thought leadership. 86% said they'd be more likely to invite that organisation into a tender.
Edelman & LinkedIn, B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report 2024. Sample: 3,484 executives, margin of error ±2.8%.
Read those two numbers together and the situation is quite stark. The people who buy what you sell have told researchers they will pay more for demonstrated expertise. And most experts are demonstrating theirs one conversation at a time, in private, to people who already know them.
Before any of that, I was a professional rugby player. Elite sport teaches you fast that being good is not enough, you have to be seen to be good. Over the last fifteen years I've written four business books and used every one of them to build a business. I've also worked with a lot of coaches and consultants on the same problem.
What I've come to believe is that being known for what you do isn't one thing. It's five, and they run in a specific order.
Not a list of services. One idea. Something a client could repeat accurately to a colleague eight weeks after meeting you, without notes.
Here's the test that catches most people out: if you asked three of your clients what you're known for, would they all say the same thing? Usually they don't. Usually they each describe the bit of you they happened to buy.
Most experienced people have a process. Far fewer have one that exists anywhere outside their own head.
The test: could a client draw your process on a napkin from memory? If the answer is no, you don't have a method, you have judgement. Judgement is valuable and it's also unsellable, unteachable, and impossible to write down.
The encouraging part: if you've been getting consistent results for years, the method already exists. It has simply never been named. Which means this isn't a gap you have to go and fill, it's a pattern you have to go and find.
Can a prospect read your thinking before they meet you? Is there something substantial to find when they Google you the night before?
This is the gap that costs the most, because without it every single relationship starts from nothing and you spend the first half of every meeting establishing that you know what you're talking about.
Plenty of experts have a message, a method and even a book, and no way of catching the people who encounter them.
No capture. No follow-up. Nothing that stays in front of somebody who is interested but not ready. You pay for attention, in time or money, and then you let it walk away.
Are you raising fees? Being invited rather than pitching? Turning work away? Getting approached to speak or comment because of something you put out?
Momentum is what the other four buy you. If you've built them properly, this looks after itself. If you haven't, no amount of effort here will stick.
These five aren't a menu. They're a chain, and you cannot fix a link further down the chain than the one that's broken.
This is the single most useful idea in this report, and it's why so much marketing effort gets wasted.
So when people ask me where to start, the honest answer is: start at the earliest broken link, not the most obviously broken one.
I meet a lot of consultants who are convinced they need better marketing. Usually they need a clearer message. I meet others convinced they need a book. Some of them do. A good number of them need to name their method first, because a book written on a half-formed method is worse than no book at all, it fixes the vagueness in print.
Answer these five honestly. One point for each yes.
0-1: the foundations aren't in place yet, and that's the good news, it's the cheapest thing to fix.
2-3: you're most people. There's one specific link broken and everything downstream of it is being wasted.
4-5: you've built more than most. The gap is probably narrower and more expensive than you think.
Five questions will tell you roughly where you are. They won't tell you which link is broken, and that's the only thing worth knowing, because that's what determines what you do on Monday.
So I built a longer version. Forty questions, eight for each of the five, and it takes about four minutes. It gives you a score for each element, tells you which one is holding you back, and, genuinely, tells you if the answer isn't a book.
Roughly half the people who take it shouldn't write one yet. The report says so.
Forty questions. Four minutes. A score for each of the five, and a written report telling you which link to fix first and how.
Start the Scorecard →Free. No call, no pitch. Your report arrives by email in about five minutes.
I should be straight with you about who wrote this.
I run a business that publishes books for coaches and consultants. So when I tell you a book is powerful, you're entitled to notice that I have a stake in you believing it.
Here's what I'd say to that. I didn't start a publishing business and then decide books were useful. I wrote four of my own, watched each one bring in a six-figure income, spent years being asked how I'd done it, and eventually built a business around answering.
And the reason the scorecard exists, rather than a "book a call" button, is that a book is the third link in a chain of five. If your message isn't clear or your method isn't named, I'd be selling you something that won't work, and you'd rightly tell people so.
Find out which link is broken first. Then decide.
Steve Hackney
The Authority Machine, published by TCA Publishing
The company he keeps
Being the best isn't enough. Being known is. That is as true in elite sport as it is in business, and Steve has lived both, as a former England A player and now as the person experts turn to. The coaches who turn talent into world champions have put their name to his work. You won't need endorsements like these for your own book, though. They're the standard we hold ourselves to, not a requirement for you.
“He has given you what I would call a 'success blueprint'.”
“It will give you the 'point of difference' that we are all hoping to find.”
“Steve's work in the boardroom and my work on the water is so similar.”
And it works in business
“Steve taught me the lesson that changed everything: in a professional firm, being the recognised authority is what really wins, not just being good at the work. I co-authored a book with him, and saw first-hand what becoming known does for your standing. It completely changes how clients and buyers see you. That authority is what let me sell my firm on a strong multiple, and it’s the foundation of the advisory business I run today.”
Richard Brewin, FCA · Sold his firm, now mentors accountancy practice owners