​🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here​.​​
Last week, I made a fairly big change.
I stripped almost everything about The Solo Sauce out of my LinkedIn profile.
The headline changed, the about section changed and pretty much everything now points back to The Magic Sauce.
Which is slightly strange when you consider that you’re reading this on The Solo Sauce newsletter.
So let me explain.
I finally accepted something I’ve probably known for a while.
I’m not running one business; I’m running two. Under one roof.
The first is The Magic Sauce, where I’ve spent the last fifteen years helping organisations navigate complexity.
Sometimes that’s helping a team get aligned around a difficult decision. Sometimes it’s helping a business figure out what to do with an idea that’s gone nowhere.
Sometimes it’s helping people move forward when they’re stuck and can’t quite see the next step.
The second is The Solo Sauce, where I help experienced independent professionals get found, stand out and win more business.
At first glance, the two businesses seem related. Both are built around helping people get unstuck, think more clearly and move forward, so for years I kept trying to make them live under the same roof.
The problem is that similar skills don’t automatically mean the same business.
The audience is different, the problems are different and the way the business makes money is completely different too.
The funny thing is that I got confirmation of this almost immediately.
A few days after I'd cleaned up my LinkedIn profile, somebody in my network sent me a message saying:
Oh, you're back in facilitation. Cool!
Which made me laugh because I never left, though it was probably the clearest sign that I'd created more confusion than clarity.
The moment I started talking more about The Solo Sauce, some people assumed I'd left The Magic Sauce behind.
I hadn't.
I'd just accidentally made it harder for people to understand what I actually did.
The Magic Sauce operates more like a consulting business, which means the projects are bigger, the sales cycles are longer and most of the work comes through warm introductions.
Usually, a former client recommends me to someone else. Or somebody I’ve worked with moves companies. Or a contact gets in touch because they’re wrestling with a challenge and somebody suggested they give me a call.
By the time those people arrive at my LinkedIn profile, they’re usually not looking for content. They’re trying to answer a much simpler question:
They’re looking for reassurance.
They want to know whether I’ve done this before, whether I understand their world and whether bringing me into the organisation feels like a sensible decision.
In that context, LinkedIn isn’t really a lead-generation platform for me, but rather a credibility check.
The real work happens later, when I’m sitting across from somebody talking about an actual challenge. That’s where I’ve spent years honing my craft, and that’s where most of the business gets done.
The Solo Sauce works differently.
The goal isn’t to get somebody onto a call next week.
It’s to build an audience over time, grow a newsletter, create trust and share enough useful ideas that a small percentage of people eventually decide they want more help.
It's a slower burn, but it's also a business model with more scale.
And that's important because while I genuinely enjoy facilitation and consulting work, that model comes with a ceiling; there are only so many projects, workshops and client conversations one person can do in a year.
Also, if you fall ill, take some time off or simply decide you want a bit more freedom, the machine largely stops.
So for a long time I tried to blend both businesses together, using the same LinkedIn profile, the same positioning and the same messaging in the hope that people would somehow connect the dots.
One week I’d be talking about helping large organisations make decisions. The next I’d be talking about newsletters, positioning and content for solo professionals.
It all made perfect sense to me. Looking back, I'm not entirely convinced it made much sense to anybody else.
And that's when it hit me.
I wasn't really trying to market one business. I was trying to market two different businesses through the same doorway.
A little bit of everything is usually a lot of nothing, I can hear my old man say.
So I made a decision.
LinkedIn became The Magic Sauce. The website became The Magic Sauce. The Solo Sauce now lives in this newsletter, on the podcast and on YouTube.
Everything has a clearer role, a clearer audience and a clearer purpose.
Whether it's the perfect solution remains to be seen, but it already feels like the right one.
So What Do You Do With This Then?
Take a look at your own business, particularly if you’re building something new alongside something established.
Ask yourself whether you’re trying to make one thing do too many jobs.
Maybe it’s your website. Maybe it’s your LinkedIn profile. Maybe it’s your newsletter. Maybe it’s your business itself.
I see this all the time.
Someone starts as a consultant and launches a course. A coach starts building a community. A service business starts creating products.
None of those things are wrong, but they often require different audiences, different buying journeys and different ways of building trust.
Trying to squeeze them all into the same box can create more confusion than clarity. And when people are confused, they tend to do nothing.
The funny thing is that making this split felt like giving something up.
In reality, it might just create that bit of space you really need for each business to become what it’s supposed to become.
And sometimes that’s exactly what growth looks like.
Not adding more, but rather choosing.
Make it a great day.
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