Your weekly edge for turning expertise into income
Quick Hits
📌 This week: The four foundational challenges you need to address before chasing your first client: emotional compass, skills gap, identity translation, and visibility strategy.
💡 The insight: Your expertise didn't disappear when you left corporate life, the support system that made your relevance visible vanished overnight.
⚡ Your move: Look for the four-part framework below to identify which foundation is holding you back most right now.
🎧 Listen online: The Four Foundations
Still Building 🔨
I spent last week creating all four Field Notes guides, plus bonus audio, video, and slide decks for each one. Then learning Kajabi's digital product delivery - offers, downloads, CTAs that don't sound like a used car salesman.
It took longer than I planned. After mapping out the customer journey, I kept seeing the same pattern: professionals trying to monetize expertise while still struggling with emotional foundation, skills gaps, identity translation, and visibility strategy. All four guides needed to exist together.
Am I getting rich selling $10 guides? Probably not. But I'm learning the mechanics while building something that actually helps.
This week? 100% focused on YouTube. Shorts and long-form. I've been hesitant as videos make me uncomfortable in ways that writing doesn't. Next week I climb over that wall and simply start creating, posting, and incrementally improving. The discomfort teaches you more than the comfort zone ever does.
This week's topic is different. While I'm wrestling with video creation anxiety, several of you asked about the bigger picture: what actually needs to be in place before you chase clients?
You left corporate life with 30 years of expertise everyone valued. Then you discovered something unsettling: outside the organizational scaffold, nobody knows you exist.
The problem isn't that you lost relevance. It's that the system that made your relevance visible vanished overnight.
Most professionals jump straight to tactics: building websites, creating offerings, chasing clients. But there are four foundational challenges you need to address first, or everything you build sits on unstable ground.
The Emotional Foundation
When performance reviews stop and your boss's validation disappears, you need to rebuild the internal compass that corporate structures provided. For decades, you had external feedback loops telling you when you were on the right track.
Strip all that away, and you're left wondering if you're making the right decisions.
You need your own feedback system before you start building. Self-coaching frameworks answer the questions that used to get answered in quarterly reviews: Am I on track? Is this working? Should I pivot?
If your emotional foundation is working, you no longer ask "Is this right?" every single morning.
Once you stop outsourcing validation, another reality hits fast: the skills you relied on for decades aren't the ones your new business actually runs on.
The Skills Gap
You have domain expertise. You don't have modern technical fluency: AI tools, digital platforms, content systems, course hosting, video editing.
The gap isn't about intelligence. It's about practical familiarity with tools that didn't exist during your corporate career. You can run a $50M P&L but you've never built a Kajabi course. You've led 200-person teams but you've never edited a YouTube video.
The solution isn't going back to school. It's focused 30-day skill sprints: daily 30-minute practice at the edge of your capability, active recall instead of tutorial consumption, systematic documentation that builds your portfolio while you learn.
I learned Kajabi, NotebookLM, Descript, and numerous other content systems at 63 while finishing my Master's degree. Same systematic approach I used managing complex projects for 40 years.
If your skills gap is closing, you're shipping imperfect work weekly, not researching endlessly.
But even with confidence and capability, you still face the visibility problem: how do you communicate expertise without the corporate validators that did half the credibility work?
The Identity Translation
Your professional identity was built on external validators: title, company, organizational position. When you introduced yourself at conferences, your business card did half the work.
Now you need to communicate the same expertise without that scaffold.
This isn't reinvention. It's translation. The Three-Part Brand Framework shows you how: specific expertise you've proven, specific audience who needs it, specific delivery model that fits your lifestyle.
You're not starting over. You're repositioning what you already possess. The 30 years of problem-solving didn't disappear. The presentation system did.
With your identity translated, the final piece clicks into place: ensuring the right people can actually find you.
The Visibility Strategy
Consulting, coaching, and courses all require people finding you and trusting you can help. But visibility isn't volume. It's pattern recognition.
Strategic content leverages your unfair advantage: 30 years of solving the same problems repeatedly. The questions people asked you throughout your career? Those are your content roadmap. You're not guessing at pain points. You're documenting solutions you've already proven work.
The Monday Assembly Line system makes this sustainable: 4-6 hours weekly creating one core piece that becomes seven distribution points through AI multiplication. Not daily social media scrambling. One focused morning per week.
If your visibility strategy is working, people book discovery calls and say, "I've been following your content. I think you can help me with..."
Why I Built Field Notes
Over the past year building Retirepreneur while finishing my Master's at 63, I kept encountering these four challenges. Not just in my own journey, but in conversations with dozens of professionals navigating the same transition.
Everyone asks about business tactics. But the real obstacles are deeper. So I documented what I learned in four comprehensive guides:
→ Guide #1: Self-Coaching for Career Transition – Build the internal guidance system you need when corporate feedback structures disappear.
→ Guide #2: Strategic Learning for Experienced Professionals – Master modern skills in 30 days through focused practice and adult learning science.
→ Guide #3: Personal Brand Evolution – Translate 30 years of proven competence into independent positioning. Your expertise didn't disappear. Your presentation system did.
→ Guide #4: Content Strategy for Professionals – Build authority through strategic content leveraging pattern recognition, not influencer tactics.
Each guide includes comprehensive PDF, audio discussion, video summary, and professional slide deck.
If you're standing between "I know I can do this" and "why isn't this working yet," the Field Notes are built for that exact moment.
Your expertise didn't disappear when you left. The support system did. These four foundations rebuild it on your terms.
Next Steps
🎯 Your Focused Action This Week
→ Review the four foundations honestly and identify which one is holding you back most right now. Not all four equally, pick the single foundation creating your biggest bottleneck, whether that's emotional validation, modern skills, identity positioning, or visibility strategy. That's where you start this week.
Want to go deeper?
📖 Complete Field Notes Series: Four comprehensive guides with audio, video, and slide formats → Explore Field Notes
🔓 FREE Retirepreneur Hub: Access business templates, pricing guides, and startup checklists designed for 55+ entrepreneurs—completely free, no credit card required → Join Free
🏠 Keep building,
—Curt
Know someone who needs this? Forward this →
