On Tuesday, I wrote about the illusion of the blank page. You are not standing at the bottom of a new mountain wondering how to climb it. You are already standing on years of accumulated judgement, hard-won instincts and pattern recognition.
The mountain is already under your feet.
But knowing the mountain is there does not tell you what to do with it. It is a comforting realisation. It is not yet a strategy.
When you sit down at your kitchen table to work out what comes next, whether that is a consulting practice, an advisory business or something entirely your own, you tend to hit a very specific roadblock.
You try to drag your old container into your new future.
You look at your past job titles, your industry language and the responsibilities you used to hold, and try to work out which parts someone would actually pay you for.
The market isn’t buying your former position or the list of responsibilities attached to it. People pay for the problems you can solve and the results you can help them achieve.
Your title describes the position you held. It doesn’t capture the judgement you developed, the patterns you learned to recognise or the problems you became exceptionally good at solving.
That is the part we need to translate.
The Three Columns of Translation
Start by separating your experience into three parts: the position you held, the expertise you developed and the problem that expertise can solve for someone else.
Put them into three columns.
The Old Container
What your old CV, title or industry description says. The corporate box you used to work inside.The Raw Material
Your unfair advantage. The judgement, the pattern recognition or the strategic muscle you developed while you were inside that box.The Second Act Application
How that raw material solves a costly, pressing problem for a specific client today.
Let’s imagine you’ve spent years in operations. You’ve managed people, budgets, deadlines and all the things that come with keeping a business running.
Then one day, a founder tells you she’s exhausted. Her business is growing, but every decision still lands on her desk. Her team is busy, yet nothing seems to move without her involvement.
You recognise the problem almost immediately.
You’ve seen what happens when a business grows faster than the structure supporting it. You know where to look, which questions to ask and how to find out what’s actually causing the bottlenecks.
Now look at what’s happened.
You haven’t offered to become her Head of Operations. You haven’t listed your former responsibilities or presented your CV.
You’ve recognised a problem she wants solved, using judgement you developed over years of doing the work.
And that is something she can pay you to help her solve.
The same principle applies whether you’ve spent your career in finance, communications, human resources, technology or something entirely different.
Perhaps you’re the person who can read a complicated financial situation and immediately see where the numbers don’t add up. Or you’ve spent years helping people navigate difficult decisions, and you know how to get a conversation moving when everyone else has reached a standstill.
The expertise is different. So are the people who need it.
Finding Your Unfair Advantage
Now comes the part that is often harder than it looks: recognising your own unfair advantage.
Over time, experience becomes instinct. You recognise patterns, make connections and spot problems without consciously working through every step. What once required considerable effort now feels perfectly ordinary.
That’s why your own expertise can be surprisingly difficult to recognise. You’ve become so accustomed to using it that you no longer notice how much judgement sits behind it.
Ease is your evidence.
To find the raw material on your own mountain, ask yourself three questions you might normally skip past:
What do you find genuinely easy that others seem to struggle with?
What did people regularly come to you for that was nowhere in your official job description?
If a former colleague described your real strength in one sentence, what would they say?
Then try to write it as one line: My unfair advantage is…
On its own, that line is a sentence, not a plan. But it is the first honest piece of ground you can build on.
Now take that sentence one step further. Identify who has a problem your expertise can solve, what that problem is, and what would change for them if you solved it.
From Experience to Offer
You now have more than a description of what you’re good at. You’ve begun to identify who needs that expertise and what they would pay you to help them solve.
But there is still work between recognising an opportunity and turning it into an offer someone can actually buy.
That’s where The Second Act Blueprint comes in.
The Second Act Blueprint is a strategy toolkit you work through at your own pace. It takes you through the same five questions I work through with women one to one: where you stand, who you serve, what you sell, how they find you, and what you do first.
You start with your unfair advantage. You finish with a one-page plan for your second act and a practical 90-day plan you can actually act on.
I made it because it is exactly what I needed in my own early days, and could not find anywhere.
It costs $59. Take a look at the Blueprint here.
For the first 10 women who purchase The Second Act Blueprint by Sunday, 11 October 2026, I’m offering something extra:
Send me your completed one-page plan and I’ll give you
my personal written feedback.
You’ll have until Sunday, 18 October, to send me your plan. I’ll return my feedback no later than Sunday, 25 October.
The purchase and submission deadlines are 11:59 PM Eastern Time.
And if you are not ready for any of that yet, that is fine too. Whether you are building, considering or simply following along, try the third question. Then hit reply and tell me what your former colleague would say. I read every reply.
