Your experience has a market price
Here's Issue #7, ready to publish:
SUBJECT LINE OPTIONS
- What 25 years of work is actually worth
- The skills younger people are desperate to buy
- Your experience has a market price
PREVIEW TEXT
You've been undercharging for decades. Not in salary — in understanding what you actually know.
OPENING HOOK
There's a question I ask people when they tell me they don't have anything valuable enough to sell.
I ask them what they get called about.
Not what their job title says. Not what's on their resume. What do colleagues, friends, former coworkers, or family members actually pick up the phone and ask them about?
Because that thing — the thing people seek you out for without being asked — is almost always closer to a business than they realise.
THIS WEEK AT A GLANCE
★ The Feature — How to identify the specific knowledge people will actually pay for — and why your instinct is probably undervaluing it
⚡ Quick Win — The "what do people call you about" exercise
💡 Opportunity Spotlight — Packaging experience into an advisory offer that sells
❝ Reader Story — How a former compliance officer discovered her most valuable skill was the one she'd taken for granted
★ THE FEATURE
The skills you built over 25 years that younger people are desperate to buy
Here's something that takes most people a while to accept.
The knowledge you've accumulated over a 25-year career feels ordinary to you. Not because it is ordinary — but because you've had it so long it's become invisible. Like the layout of a house you've lived in for decades. You stop noticing the rooms.
But someone walking in for the first time? They see something completely different.
Let me give you a concrete example of what I mean.
A woman I know spent 22 years in corporate compliance — the kind of work that sounds dry from the outside but is genuinely complicated from the inside. She knew how to navigate regulatory frameworks, manage audit processes, keep companies out of trouble, and communicate complex legal obligations to non-legal people in plain English.
To her, it was just Tuesday.
To a small business owner trying to scale without accidentally breaking half a dozen employment laws? It was gold. Expensive gold.
She hadn't thought of it as something anyone would pay to access outside of a salary. Once she did, her consulting practice was off the ground in about three months.
That gap — between how experienced professionals see their own knowledge and how the market values it — is one of the most consistent things I've observed. And it runs in one direction almost every time.
People underestimate what they know.
Here's why that happens.
When you've spent 20 years solving a particular type of problem, you forget what it was like not to know how. The solution that took you six months to figure out in 1998 now takes you twenty minutes. So it feels like nothing. Routine.
But for someone facing that problem for the first time — without your context, your pattern recognition, your accumulated judgment — it's not routine. It's overwhelming. And they will pay, often handsomely, for someone who can compress their learning curve from months to a single conversation.
That's what you're selling. Not your time. Not your job title. The compression of experience.
Now here's the practical question: which parts of your experience are most valuable?
The answer usually lives at the intersection of three things.
First, specificity. The narrower the problem you can solve, the more valuable you are to someone with that exact problem. "HR consulting" is a category. "Helping manufacturing companies reduce first-year employee turnover" is an offer.
Second, stakes. The higher the cost of getting it wrong, the more someone will pay for expertise. Compliance, legal risk, financial decisions, operational crises, hiring senior people — these carry consequences. Consequence drives willingness to pay.
Third, scarcity. How many people with your specific combination of experience and judgment are out there and available? In most specialised fields, the answer is fewer than you'd think. And the ones who are available are often locked inside organisations, not accessible to smaller companies at all.
That's your opening.
You have specific, high-stakes, genuinely scarce knowledge. The question isn't whether there's a market for it. The question is whether you're willing to start treating it like what it is: an asset with real value.
One more thing I want to address directly, because I hear it a lot.
"But my industry is so specialised — there can't be that many potential clients."
The counter-intuitive answer is that specialisation is a feature, not a limitation. You don't need hundreds of clients. You need two or three who are a genuine fit for what you know. In almost every professional field, that market exists. It just requires going to find it rather than waiting for it to find you.
And finding it, as we've talked about in previous issues, starts not with advertising but with your existing network. The people who already know what you've done, trust your judgment, and are likely to either need you themselves or know someone who does.
Start there. That's where it almost always begins.
⚡ QUICK WIN
The "what do people call you about" exercise
This one takes fifteen minutes and has a way of clarifying things quickly.
- Write down the last five times a colleague, friend, or former coworker asked for your opinion or advice — professionally or semi-professionally.
- What were they actually asking about? Write it down specifically, not in job-title language.
- For each one, ask: is this the kind of thing a small business, a growing company, or someone in career transition might need help with?
- Now ask: if someone hired a consultant to help with this, what would they reasonably expect to pay per hour?
- Look at what you've written. The pattern across those five moments is usually where your most marketable knowledge lives.
Most people are surprised by how specific and consistent the pattern is. You've been giving this away for free for years. That's about to change.
💡 OPPORTUNITY SPOTLIGHT
Packaging experience into an advisory offer — and what to charge
One of the most common questions I get is some version of: "But how do I turn this into something I can actually charge for?"
The answer is simpler than most people expect.
An advisory offer, at its most basic, is this: a client pays you a fixed monthly fee in exchange for a defined amount of your time and attention. Usually somewhere between two and eight hours a month. In exchange, they get access to your expertise — your answers to their specific questions, your review of their decisions, your guidance on their problems.
No deliverables. No lengthy reports. Just access to what you know, applied to what they're trying to figure out.
This model works particularly well for experienced professionals because it doesn't require you to become a project manager or build a delivery process from scratch. You show up, you think, you advise, you get paid.
Pricing varies by field, but a reasonable starting range for most professional backgrounds is $150 to $300 per hour, or $800 to $2,500 per month for a retainer arrangement.
Two retainer clients at $1,200 a month each is $2,400 a month — for roughly eight to twelve hours of your time.
That's not a side hustle. That's a material change to your financial picture.
The promotional opportunities in this space are real, and in a future issue I'll point you toward some specific resources for getting your first advisory offer in front of the right people. For now, the work is identifying what you'd offer and who you'd offer it to.
❝ READER STORY
Sandra, 53, spent nineteen years in regulatory compliance for a mid-sized pharmaceutical company. By her own description, she was excellent at her job and almost entirely invisible outside her organisation.
"Compliance people don't exactly get celebrated," she told me, with some understatement.
When her company was acquired and her position was eliminated in the restructuring, she had six months of severance and a LinkedIn profile she hadn't updated in four years.
She almost immediately started applying for senior compliance roles at other companies. The process was slow, the interviews were discouraging, and after three months she had one offer — at a salary fifteen percent below what she'd been earning.
A former colleague suggested she think about consulting instead. Sandra dismissed it at first.
"I thought consulting was for people who'd been partners at big firms," she said. "Not someone like me."
What changed her mind was a conversation with a small biotech startup whose founder — a scientist with no compliance background — was visibly panicked about an upcoming regulatory filing. A mutual contact had mentioned Sandra's name.
She agreed to a one-month engagement, half expecting it to go nowhere.
It didn't go nowhere. The founder referred her to two other companies in his network. Within five months of being laid off, Sandra had three clients and was earning more per month than she had in her salaried role.
"The thing that floors me," she said, "is that the knowledge I'd been treating as ordinary — the stuff I thought everyone in my field just knew — turned out to be exactly what people couldn't find anywhere else."
She'd been undervaluing it for nineteen years.
She isn't anymore.
CLOSING SIGN-OFF
The market for what you know is larger than you think, more accessible than you assume, and far less crowded than it should be given how many experienced people are sitting on exactly this kind of expertise.
You just have to be willing to start treating your knowledge like what it is.
Next issue, we're talking about something a little different — the mindset piece that quietly keeps most people stuck. The "I'm too late" belief, where it comes from, and why the data says otherwise.
Until then,
Richard
