Consultant Couldn’t Explain What She Does. Then She Found 9 Magic Words.

Alzay CalhounCoveted Consultant · 4 min read

Nicole Girouard had been running a successful consulting practice for years. Clients found her through referrals. They stayed because she delivered. GNIC Consulting Services was profitable and growing.

But every time someone asked "So what do you do?" she froze.

She'd reach for language that sounded impressive: "I'm a business consultant and strategic video social media strategist." The words were technically accurate. They were also impossible to follow. Prospects would nod politely, change the subject, and move on.

As she put it: "I feel like I've been stuck there for years even though I'm doing well, even though people are being referred to me, even though I'm helping people."

Years of that. Years of watching conversations stall before they started, knowing the expertise was real but unable to get it across in the thirty seconds that mattered.

What Was Actually Going On

Nicole's problem looked like a messaging issue. It wasn't.

She had two decades of corporate experience across sales, marketing, communication, and leadership, and she was trying to communicate all of it at once. Her expertise was so broad that distilling it felt like betrayal. Picking one thing meant abandoning everything else.

Every time she was asked to narrow her offering, she described feeling "internal panic." She'd been through avatar exercises before. Done the webinars, done the worksheets. None of them stuck because the exercises asked her to pick a lane without helping her understand why picking a lane would actually serve her better.

She wasn't confused about her skills. She was confused about which skill to lead with.

What Happened

Nicole joined a group coaching program where the central exercise was deceptively simple: stop thinking about what you sell and start looking at what clients actually hire you for.

The exercise asked her to go back through her client history and analyze the work she'd actually been doing. Not what her website said. Not the titles she'd collected. The real engagements, the ones where she'd delivered results and clients kept coming back.

Nicole expected to see broad strategic consulting. That's the story she'd been telling about her business for years. What the evidence showed was different. Every client who'd come to her, every engagement that stuck, had the same thread running through it: they were hiring her for her expertise in video communication, presentation skills, and leveraging technology for distributed teams. All of them. She just hadn't named it.

As she described it: "I found that all of my clients were actually coming to me for my expertise in video communication, presentation, how to speak, and how to leverage the tech." The pattern had been there all along. She'd been living inside it without seeing it.

Letting the evidence lead instead of her ego wasn't effortless. It bruised a little to realize that not everybody needed what she had. But the evidence was clear, and Nicole followed it. The group format helped. Showing up weekly with peers who were doing the same hard work kept her moving forward rather than retreating into the broader story that felt safer.

"You're wasting time trying to convince people of what they need as opposed to going to the people that already know they want it."

— Nicole Girouard

The turning point came when the distinction finally landed. In her own words:

"You're wasting time trying to convince people of what they need as opposed to going to the people that already know they want it. That got very clear for me and it clicked."

From that shift, Nicole distilled her entire practice into nine words: "I'm going to help you use video to communicate better."

The Results

The nine words changed more than her introduction. They changed how every client conversation flowed.

Before the clarity, Nicole would over-explain, watch eyes glaze, and lose the moment. After: "I get that, and then the conversation continues, how might that work? And then now we can figure out what happens after that."

Prospects who resonated were already the right people. They didn't need convincing. Prospects who didn't resonate self-selected out.

Eighteen months later, the clarity had stuck. Nicole had started applying the same process with her own clients, helping them find the language that unlocks their conversations instead of blocking them.

What This Demonstrates

Nicole's story illustrates a pattern that shows up constantly with experienced consultants: the more you know, the harder it becomes to explain what you do.

The instinct is to lead with breadth. List every capability, cover every base. But breadth overwhelms. It forces the person across from you to sort through your entire career and decide for themselves what's relevant. Most won't.

What unlocked Nicole wasn't a new marketing technique. It was looking at her own client history and discovering that her best work already had a pattern. Once she named it, the language came naturally. Nine words, built from evidence, not invention.

The breakthrough came when she stopped asking "how do I explain what I do?" and started asking "what do my best clients actually hire me for?"

That question is the foundation of how client acquisition begins. Read More -> How Real Experts Attract the Best Clients

Find Your Best Work.

You've done the work. You've gotten the results. You just haven't had a way to organize what you know so it's ready when the moment arrives.

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