For everybody worried about marketing, or how clients will find you, or just AI et. al, I keep repeating this, so I might as well write it down here for future (self) reference.

If you are worried about people finding you for work, OR you finding work from people - you only need to be worried about two things.

Well, three things, but the first one is so obvious it doesn’t belong on the two things list. That’s “be good.” As in be good at what you do, be a good human, and have some internal sense of standards for what constitutes good that you stay above.

I’m assuming if you’re reading this and hanging out around me that’s already well established so now back to the only two things that you need to worry about:

Easy, right? Not fancy, either!

I mean discoverable like - can people find you? Can they look you up if a friend mentions you? If you google yourself, or whatever AI-enabled version of that, can they find you and poke around a couple of different places to both confirm you are you, and then get a sense of who you are?

And then - are you differentiated? Which, this is the nice way of saying are you a little weird? Are you not quite for everyone, but really IT for some specific people? After the searching, if you’re what turns up, do you stand out with contrast from anybody else who came up in that search net?

So, be good. At a minimum, you must be good. That’s the obvious rule.

But once you’re good, make sure you are discoverable and differentiated, and not only will people find you, they’ll come with work to be done.