Why I Stopped Talking About What I Do And Shared 10 Things About Me Instead.

Working on my presentation for the Member of the Month slot at We Mean Biz isn’t about "what have I done to deserve this?" because everyone gets a turn, but something more useful: what does the way I work say about who I am, and where am I taking it next?

The MoM slot gives you more time than the usual sixty seconds. The format is yours to choose, and I decided to do something different. Rather than run through a list of services, and photos of my dogs and family I put together "Tim in 10 Things." Ten personal touchpoints that say more about how I think than a simpler pitch would. Books and a love of ancient history. M.E., and everything that managing a chronic condition teaches you about pacing and prioritisation (And we’ll come back to that another day). Dogs, and my years of fearing them. Music, CDs. Where my work has taken me; collaborators and friends I’ve made in business. And one unexpected surprise involving becoming part of the team working on a major documentary film.

The detail of each one mattered less than the pattern they made. What I was really trying to show was the thinking behind the work, because it connects directly to where Selling Service is heading next.

The way my ten things add up

Everything in that list points to the same few things.

Curiosity. Books, ancient history, shortwave radio listening: these are all ways of paying attention to how people communicate and why. That curiosity is not a hobby which sits alongside the work. It is the work. Understanding what a business is really saying, and what it is failing to say, requires real interest in people, in ideas, and in the gap between the two.

Patience. I spent years absorbing music knowledge before I found a use for it. I have lived with M.E. for thirty years, which teaches you very quickly that sustainable output is not the same as maximum output. Good writing does not come from rushing. Neither does a good client relationship. The businesses I work with best are the ones that understand this too.

Consistency. Working with a chronic condition means knowing how you operate and planning around it honestly rather than pretending otherwise. That same principle applies to how I work with clients: no vanishing acts, no overpromising, no chasing the next brief at the expense of the current one. The people I have worked with longest are the ones who knew from the start that I would show up and do what I said I would.

And underneath all of it: a sense that quality and proper customer service are not negotiable. That one came from my dad's TV shop and working with him in his Vintage Sounds business straight out of school. It is a simple standard, but it is the one I come back to most often.

The circle, and what comes next

The last thing I talked about, the one I called "circle," is the most relevant here.

If you are on a business or life journey, you must be open to the possibility that you will end up back where you started. Not as a failure, but as a completion. Twelve years of working across content strategy, copywriting, and sales support has given me a clear picture of what I am good at, what I genuinely enjoy, and where those two things overlap most usefully for clients.

The re-evaluation of what Selling Service looks like in its next phase has been running quietly alongside everything else for a while. Preparing "Tim in 10 Things" was a public voicing of things I had been thinking through privately, and that kind of clarity has a way of shifting the energy around how I’m progressing in life and business.

The direction is at least partly back towards where I began: helping businesses put themselves into words in a way that reflects who they are and then helping them create the processes and strategy that converts prospects into clients. The “what” has always mattered. But the “why”, and the “how”, the things that make one business different from another are where the real work happens. More on that in the coming months.

In the meantime, if you are not already part of We Mean Biz, it is is worth investigating. People who are interested in each other beyond the sixty-second pitch. Which, it turns out, is exactly the kind of place where a presentation about how you think lands better than one about what you do.