💡 The Lightbulb

Wes Wheless | Positioning + "Intellectual Headshots" for Post-Corporate Soloists

A daily email about monetizing and visualizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.

💡 [Teardown] 'The Software Shakeout' 2x2

You see a lot of visuals on LinkedIn. Most are forgettable. Some are cheap scroll-stoppers. And a rare few are actually great. On Thursdays, I examine a visual, or “Intellectual Headshot” as I call them, that caught my eye, and break down why it works. Today, it’s from SaaS thought leader and CSO at Faire, Dan Hockenmaier. Last week’s lesson of the-simpler-the-better strikes again. You might look at the visual above and say, “that’s just a 2x2 with logos” And I’d say, that’s exactly why it...

about 15 hours ago • 2 min read

💡 A very meta visual story

You know how you’d want your trainer to be fit? Or your dentist to have good teeth? Or your realtor to have a nice house? It makes sense, right? We want to see professionals we hire actually walk-the-walk. Well, it’s been bugging me for quite a while that while I often wail at-length about how much we as consultants over-rely on talking about our expertise and services… …I, myself, have been relying on a very-text heavy landing page describing my ‘Intellectual Headshots’ sprint. Go figure....

1 day ago • 1 min read

brown hammer on focus photography

💡The old-school pixel-perfect grind

I grew up in what I guess we can now call ‘old school consulting’. Days at the client were spent meeting, greeting, aligning, strategizing. Evenings at the hotel were spent data cleaning, Excel modeling, and of course, deck building. Tedious, pain-staking, ‘don’t get the font-size or brand colors wrong’ deck building. We had a few templates and PowerPoint plug-ins, but this was still hours and hours of very manual apprentice-level work to get things client-ready. And even then, we still sent...

3 days ago • 1 min read

📸 Something to talk about

You've built a mountain of insights. They want to see the map. 💡 -Wes

7 days ago • 1 min read

💡[Teardown] 'The expertise paradox'

You see a lot of visuals on LinkedIn. Most are forgettable. Some are cheap scroll-stoppers. And a rare few are actually great. On Thursdays, I examine a visual, or “Intellectual Headshot” as I call them, that caught my eye, and break down why it works. Today, it’s from “scale whisperer” Judson Rollins. Let’s dig in. When creating visuals, there’s a natural temptation to to want to cram in as much information as possible. But just as our eyes glaze over at presentation slides with blocks of...

8 days ago • 1 min read

💡 When mass awareness is the only goal

Pretty big day in Seattle today! In about an hour, the Seahawks Super Bowl victory parade will kick off from Lumen Field to the Space Needle, straight through the core of downtown. 750,000 people are expected to attend (which is actually roughly the population of Seattle itself). Authorities had one main message to fans coming in for the parade: DO NOT DRIVE. And how did they get this message out about avoiding the parking hassle on the city’s busiest day in a decade? Visually, of course. And...

9 days ago • 1 min read

💡 Scouting the location

There’s a scene in One Battle After Another that takes place in a stretch of desert highway near the California/Arizona border. **Mild spoiler: the movie is essentially a 2.5 hour chase, and the climax happens in this very distinct location — a “river of hills” in the desert of southern California. The roving hills are so unique and integral to the conclusion of the film that they’re likely the iconic image that will stick in your mind weeks/months after you see it. So it was a surprise to...

10 days ago • 2 min read

💡 Super Bowl ad review: Leading with pain

If you’ve been through one of my Headshots sprints, you know we work closely together to articulate your positioning in 5 crisp visual assets. And the first visual is always a depiction of: your buyer’s pain. Not “What problem do they have?” But rather, the step before that: “What pain are they experiencing?” Those are two different things A problem could be declining sales... But the pain for your client, your actual human buyer, could be: Embarrassment that their numbers aren’t healthy...

11 days ago • 1 min read

📸 House of cards

Your clients are feeling the squeeze. Does your expertise draw admiration? Or relief? 💡 -Wes

14 days ago • 1 min read

💡 Teardown: "The Double Squeeze"

You see a lot of visuals on LinkedIn. Most are forgettable. Some are cheap scroll-stoppers. And a rare few are actually great. On Thursdays, I share a visual, or “Intellectual Headshot” as I call them, that caught my eye in the wild, and break down why it works. Let’s dig in. View full post on LinkedIn Luk Smeyers is an advisor to consulting firms -- not a client of mine, never met him -- and this is his visual depiction of “The AI Double Squeeze”. As we all know, the rapid acceleration of AI...

15 days ago • 1 min read

A daily email about monetizing and visualizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.