Your weirdness is your competitive advantage

For a LONG time, I was embarrassed by how I got into marketing.

I hadn't studied it. Hadn't been mentored by anyone great. I'd started my career in B2B sales, stumbled sideways into marketing, and figured most of it out through trial, error, and sheer stubbornness. While everyone around me seemed to have a framework or a credential or a clear lineage, I had a sales quota and a gut instinct.

So I hid it.

Not actively, not loudly — but I never led with it. I'd let people assume whatever they assumed. Because I was convinced that the moment they found out I'd come from sales, they'd see me as less legitimate. Less of a real marketer.

I carried that for YEARS.

Then one day, I mentioned it offhand to a client I'd worked with long enough to consider a friend. I don't even remember why it came up. He laughed — not meanly, but with this genuine "are you kidding me" energy — and said: "That's why you're so good at what you do. Your B2B sales background means you think about revenue first, not tactics. And you're not hemmed in by 'best practices' the way other marketers are. You try things other people won't."

I didn't know what to do with that.

Because the thing I'd been hiding? Was apparently the thing he valued most.

Last week we talked about the Swiss Army knife trap — the exhaustion of being everything to everyone and the cost of staying generic to stay "safe."

This is the other side of that conversation.

Because most of us aren't just generic by accident. We're generic on purpose — because at some point, corporate America (or an awkward client conversation, or an industry gatekeeper) told us that the thing that makes us US was a liability.

Too niche. Too unconventional. Too hard to explain. Not how it's done.

And we believed them. Ugh.

Here's what I've seen over and over again working with consultants, strategists, and operators: the thing they've been quietly apologizing for is almost always their sharpest competitive edge.

Not sometimes. Almost every time.

Let me show you what I mean with two people inside the Collective right now.

Meg is brilliant at building AI systems — she can walk into a business and fundamentally transform how it operates.

(I’ll be sharing more soon about how her big beautiful brain is helping me FULLY transform how the Essentialist CEO Collective runs)

But she approaches all of it through the lens of a communication strategist and copywriter. Her whole thing isn't "here's how to use AI to do more faster." It's "here's how to use AI to amplify your authentic voice, not flatten it."

In a space absolutely crowded with AI consultants right now, that distinction is everything. It's not a footnote. It's the entire positioning. And it exists because she didn't erase one half of her background to make the other half more legible.

Gouri spent years as a Director of Brand at a company most of you would recognize. She went out on her own doing what looked from the outside like operational consulting.

But what she eventually learned during our positioning work in the Collective — the thing that became her real differentiator — was that she wasn't just helping people build go-to-market strategies. She was helping them build the execution infrastructure behind the strategy.

Because here's what she'd learned from the inside. The difference between marketing campaigns that worked and ones that flopped almost never came down to how good the strategy was. It came down to how well the team was set up to actually execute it.

That insight? Comes directly from her "weird" background. The brand director who went deep on operational execution. Nobody else has that specific combination. Nobody else sees the problem the way she does.

Both of them spent time thinking their background made their story messier, harder to explain, less clean.

It's actually what makes them impossible to replicate.

Here's the through line across almost every consultant, strategist, or operator I work with who's stuck at inconsistent revenue:

They've been positioning themselves despite their unconventional background instead of because of it.

They're trying to sound like everyone else in their category because they think that's what legitimacy looks like.

They've smoothed out the edges. Hidden the "weird" stuff. The stuff that makes them beautifully, authentically, powerfully THEM.

And then led with the credential they have (which thousands of competitors share) instead of the unique lens they bring.

And what happens? They sound fine. They sound like options. They compete on price.

The ones who break through — who hit consistent $30K, $40K, $50K months — almost always do it by leaning harder into the thing they once apologized for.

Way too often, we treat these like footnotes, instead of recognizing what they REALLY are: the core of their positioning.

What's the thing in your background you've been downplaying?

Not hiding, necessarily. But not leading with either.

Because I'd put money on it being the thing your best clients value most — they just don't know to ask for it because you haven't told them it's there.

The weirdness isn't the problem.

Hiding it is.

If you want help figuring out what your "weird" thing actually is and how to build it into positioning that attracts the right clients consistently — that's exactly what we work on together.

In love, growth, and weirdness,
Kasey