The Work
Doesn't
Speak For
Itself.
Let me tell you a story. I found a document while packing up the house last week.
A Dent scorecard. Key Person of Influence assessment. September 2024. I remembered it vaguely – I'd done it, found it interesting, and then filed it somewhere it couldn't bother me. The way you do with things that are useful and uncomfortable in roughly equal measure.
I took it on a plane. Read it properly for the first time. Talk about eye-opening.
The scores told a story I recognised immediately.
Product: 7. The PTL core business, the training offering, the way we think about system design rather than component supply. Strong, and getting stronger.
Profile: 1. One.
I sat with that for a while. Because it was exactly right.
I've been building things – genuinely good things, things I'm proud of – and not telling anyone about them. Not through modesty, exactly. More through a default assumption that the work speaks for itself and the right people will find it.
They don't. It doesn't. Or not as much as it could.
"If you lack a profile you will forever need to chase the things you need."
That rang a bell. It's partially true for me. Not paralysingly so – but true enough to be worth taking seriously.
Not a rebrand. Not a content strategy with KPIs and editorial calendars. Something simpler: I'm going to say the things I've been saying in meetings and on sites and on long rides for twenty years – and say them in public. It's not boasting, it's being true to the hard work I'm putting in and the changes I want to make.
- What I see in pharma manufacturing – and what keeps going wrong
- What building a business for twenty years actually teaches you
- The parallel between a long cycling climb and a difficult Q3
- The gap between what a procedure says and what happens on the floor
- The conversations that happen in meetings but not in public
I've got twenty years of material. Some of it is technical. Some of it is about running a business. Some of it is about the gap between how you're perceived and how you feel. All of it is real. None of it has ever been written down where anyone else can read it.
That's the bit I'm changing.
Follow along. Push back when I'm wrong. Share it if it's useful.
That's the whole plan.
The work doesn't speak for itself. You have to say it out loud. I'm finally saying it out loud.
Say it out loud.
PTL – twenty years of doing. Now, finally, twenty years of saying.
Follow along
