Good, and Known to Be Good

Late last year I went back to school, and at the same time I started rebuilding.

I was setting up to consult properly, which meant looking honestly at what a prospective client would find when they went looking for me. So I ran my own instrument against myself. The Market Authority Diamond™ scores what a market can actually verify about you rather than what you know to be true.

I scored low.

Not because the work was not there. Because almost none of it was visible to anyone who had not been in the room with me.

Why isn’t anyone noticing your work?

Because good work and visible proof are two different assets, and only one of them compounds.

I had years of private credibility. The clients I worked with knew exactly what we had done together; several of them would have said so to anyone who asked. But nobody was asking them, and nothing about that record existed anywhere a stranger could find it.

That is not a vanity problem. Private credibility sits with the handful of people who experienced it, and when they move on or the company changes hands, it goes quiet. Visible credibility travels without you in the room, which is the only version that scales.

What can you say about work you did under an NDA?

Less than you want, and usually more than you assume. The agreement decides, and reading it is the work.

The main reason my record was invisible is that a lot of my work sits under confidentiality agreements. I want to be careful how I say this, because the way this subject usually gets written is as though an NDA were an obstacle to route around. It is not. It is a commitment I made, often to people who had good reasons for asking, and I would rather say nothing at all than say something I agreed not to.

So the work was not to find loopholes. It was to find out what I already had permission to show. Four things are worth checking in your own agreements:

1. Scope. Many obligations cover proprietary information specifically, which is a narrower thing than the whole relationship.
2. Duration. Some obligations expire. A contract signed years ago may not bind the same way today.
3. Which agreement applies. The same client can sit under more than one contract across different years, with different terms in each.
4. Naming versus describing. Being permitted to say you worked with someone is not the same as being permitted to describe what you did.

I am not going to tell you what any particular contract permits, because the agreement controls and I am not your lawyer, or mine. What I will say is that the reading itself is the work, and most people skip it in both directions. They either assume they can say nothing, and stay invisible for years longer than necessary, or they assume nobody will mind, which is how people breach an obligation without ever intending to.

Strategy has its own sensitivity here, which took me a while to appreciate. If competitors learn who advises a company, some of them will approach you, and the conversation will go somewhere you do not want it to go. A client may also simply not want its strategic advisors seen standing next to its rivals, because an advisor carries a working understanding of how the business actually operates. That is a reasonable thing for them to protect.

Read your contracts. Do not sign what you have not understood.

How do you build a portfolio when you can’t show your work?

Start with what is already public, then ask for the rest.

• Recommendations clients wrote on public platforms. Written on their own initiative, in their own words, already published where anyone can read them. Not confidential, and easy to overlook for years.
• Published feedback on professional platforms. The same principle. It is already in the world; gathering it is not disclosure.
• Case studies with written consent. For everything new, I ask. My feedback forms and my case study process request consent and attribution explicitly, even where participation might reasonably imply it.

That last one removes the ambiguity for both sides. It protects the client, it protects me, and it makes the resulting proof stronger, because I am never wondering whether I am allowed to use it.

None of this is about manufacturing proof. I am not writing testimonials or putting numbers in anyone’s mouth. I am finding the evidence that already exists, working out what I am actually permitted to show, and then putting it where a stranger can find it.

I spent years doing good work quietly. What I understand now is that good work and visible proof are two different assets, and building one does not build the other.

You do not need to get louder. You do not need to disclose anything you agreed to protect. You do not need to turn every client relationship into content.

But if nobody outside the room can see evidence of what you can do, your expertise has a much harder time traveling than it should.

You do not have to be loud. But you do have to be visible in all the right places.