When Your Name Is on the Door
What changed when my name was finally on the door.
For three decades, I never once had to ask anyone to say yes to me. I led organisations. I built teams. I made the case, in boardrooms and town halls, for strategies that would take years to prove right. But asking someone to buy something I had created? That was always somebody else’s job.
I hired people for it. Good ones. I trusted them completely and, if I’m honest, I never envied what they did.
I told myself that was simply how a well-run organisation worked. I built the thing. Someone else sold the thing. Everyone did what they were good at. It’s a perfectly sensible way to lead. What took me much longer to notice is that it also allowed me to avoid something, quietly, for thirty years.
Then this spring I priced my own judgement for the first time.
Nobody else was going to sell the Blueprint for me. There was no Head of Sales to hand it to, no pipeline, no department whose job title made the asking theirs instead of mine. If it was going to sell, I had to be the one to say, plainly, to someone I couldn’t see: I built this. I believe it’s worth paying for. I’d like you to buy it.
I won’t pretend that was comfortable. There’s a particular kind of exposure in it that leading a team never quite required. When you’re employed, a company has already decided you’re credible. You walk into the room carrying its reputation alongside your own. When your name is on the door, none of that comes with you. It’s just you, the work you’ve created, and the quiet question of whether someone else believes it’s valuable too.
But here’s what I got wrong for thirty years. I thought selling was a different skill from leading. A separate muscle. One I’d simply never trained.
It isn’t.
The things that made me effective as a leader, being clear about the problem, having genuine conviction in the solution, caring more about the outcome than about being liked, are exactly the things asking for the sale requires. It isn’t a different skill aimed at a different task. It’s the same one, finally aimed at myself.
I’m still not completely at ease with it. I don’t think that discomfort disappears, and I’ve stopped expecting it to. But I’ve noticed something changing underneath it. The asking feels less like a performance now and more like an extension of the work itself. Not a departure from leadership, but simply the last room in the house I’d never walked into.
It turns out I wasn’t learning how to sell.
I was learning how to stand behind my own name.
If you’re building something of your own, I’d genuinely love to hear what it is. Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
Warmly,
Pia
P.S. If you’re curious what came out the other side of learning this, The Second Act Blueprint is the toolkit I built from it.