consultant-profile

# Consultant Profile

Create consultant profiles that sell a clear professional thesis instead of merely listing a career in reverse chronological order.

The profile's job is to help a buyer, recruiter, partner, or staffing lead quickly understand:

- what this consultant is unusually good at
- which kinds of organizations trust them
- which industries and operating contexts they know
- what level of complexity, responsibility, and impact they have handled
- what they should be hired for next

## First Read

Read these references before making substantive changes:

- [Profile principles](references/profile-principles.md) - research synthesis, project-prominence model, regional/channel strategy, writing formulas, and audit checklist
- [Language and persuasion](references/language-and-persuasion.md) - tone calibration, positive-but-earned framing, plain-language editing, human voice, and ethical marketing psychology
- [Narrative arc](references/narrative-arc.md) - professional storyline, recurring themes, project connections, and "no loose pile of projects" structure
- [Interview and completion](references/interview-and-completion.md) - source inventory, gap analysis, interview questions, project completeness, and reference/testimonial mining
- [Personality and boundaries](references/personality-and-boundaries.md) - professional personality, opinionated positioning, limits, working style, design background, and self-learner signals

## Core Workflow

1. Identify the target reader and buying situation.
   - Distinguish between project staffing, direct client acquisition, recruiter screening, partnership, and public website profile.
   - Identify the channel: PDF/CV, website, LinkedIn, XING, marketplace profile, proposal bio, or internal supplier profile.
   - Identify the region and language: DACH/German, EU/international English, US/global English, or bilingual.
   - Read accepted ADRs and brand or editorial guidance for audience
     relationship, form of address, voice, tone, terminology, and channel
     exceptions. Use `decision-records` when this work establishes or changes a
     durable cross-channel communication direction.
   - If the target is unclear, infer the most likely one from the prompt and state the assumption briefly.

2. Extract the consultant's positioning thesis.
   - Reduce the profile to one sharp sentence: "[Role/specialty] who helps [type of organization] achieve [business/technical outcome] in [contexts]."
   - Base this on evidence from projects, clients, industries, scope, and recurring strengths.

3. Build an evidence map before rewriting.
   - List projects, clients, roles, industries, scale, technologies, seniority, outcomes, and notable constraints.
   - Mark each item with evidence types: brand signal, business impact, technical depth, leadership/stakeholder complexity, industry relevance, recency, and uniqueness.

4. Run completeness and interview mode when data is missing or uncertain.
   - Inventory sources such as the current website, old website, LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn recommendations, CVs, project notes, proposals, and testimonials.
   - Separate known facts, plausible inferences, and unknowns.
   - Ask small, prioritized batches of questions instead of trying to solve all gaps at once.
   - Extract project facts and reference signals before rewriting.

5. Find the professional arc.
   - Identify recurring themes across projects: industries returned to, capabilities that deepen, scale that increases, and lessons reused from one context in another.
   - Connect projects where later work clearly builds on earlier experience.
   - Use the arc to explain why the consultant's profile is more than a loose collection of engagements.
   - Keep it concise: create context and momentum, not a biography or a sports-documentary script.

6. Choose project prominence by relevance, not chronology alone.
   - Feature 3-5 "signature projects" or "selected highlights" near the top.
   - Promote older but high-signal work when it proves the desired positioning.
   - Keep a secondary "additional selected projects" list for breadth, not for important work that merely happens to be older.
   - Treat recognizable enterprise names as signal when they support the profile. Examples in this user's context include Heidelberg Materials, Otto Group/Witt, Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Telekom, and 1&1.

7. Rewrite projects as proof points.
   - Prefer Outcome -> Action -> Scope when impact is known.
   - Prefer Challenge -> Role -> Deliverable when outcomes are confidential or unavailable.
   - Name the industry, organization type, scale, and responsibility level where possible.
   - Avoid vague responsibility lists and generic technology stacks without business context.

8. Make the profile scannable.
   - Put the strongest positioning and proof in the first screen/page.
   - Use front-loaded headings, short bullets, and grouped evidence.
   - Avoid walls of text and burying high-signal clients in long chronological lists.

9. Calibrate personality, values, and boundaries.
   - Identify what makes the consultant memorable: working style, professional values, taste, judgment, collaboration style, and recurring stances.
   - Treat personality as a buyer-fit layer, not a decorative sidebar. The reader should understand what kind of person they may hire, what gives them energy, how they think, and what they want to create or improve.
   - Translate raw personality markers into buyer-safe language. For example, "Nein-Sager" may become "constructive dissent", "clear product judgment", "says no when it protects focus, quality, or users", or "brings clear boundaries to ambiguous product work".
   - State relevant boundaries when they clarify fit: what the consultant does well, what they do not pretend to do, which roles they avoid, and where they need complementary specialists.
   - Use background signals when they explain strengths. A design/webdesign origin, visual judgment, layout/color sensitivity, designer collaboration, and autodidactic engineering path can support a bridge positioning between product, design, and software delivery.
   - Include personal motivation and professional ambition when they make the profile more human and commercially relevant. Avoid private biography that does not help the reader decide fit.
   - Keep personality grounded in proof. Do not make the profile quirky for its own sake; show how the stance improves outcomes, collaboration, quality, or focus.

10. Localize the profile instead of translating it literally.
   - For DACH/German profiles, favor precise, credible, evidence-heavy language and avoid exaggerated sales claims.
   - For US/global English profiles, make the value proposition more explicit and outcome-led.
   - For LinkedIn, combine searchable keywords with a human first-person summary, visible proof, recommendations, media, and posts.
   - Keep bilingual variants aligned in facts but adapted in tone, section order, and terminology.

11. Run a language and persuasion pass.
   - Make claims clear, concise, active, and specific.
   - Add positive framing where the evidence supports it; do not leave strong work sounding neutral or accidental.
   - Treat Dan Berlin's coaching heuristic as a useful default: self-presentation is often discounted by readers, so credible strengths may need to be stated more warmly and explicitly than feels natural to the writer.
   - Remove empty hype, generic AI-ish phrasing, and unsupported superlatives.

12. Preserve truthfulness.
   - Do not invent metrics, client claims, leadership scope, or outcomes.
   - If metrics are missing, use bounded qualitative evidence: "enterprise-scale", "regulated banking environment", "multi-brand retail group", "telecommunications customer platform", or similar factual context.
   - Flag claims that need confirmation before publishing.

## Recommended Output

For an audit, return:

1. **Profile Thesis** - one proposed positioning sentence.
2. **Prominence Map** - which projects should be signature, supporting, or archive-level, with rationale.
3. **Source and Gap Inventory** - what is known, missing, inferred, duplicated, or needs permission.
4. **Interview Questions** - prioritized questions that resolve the most important uncertainties.
5. **Narrative Arc** - the through-line that connects projects, capabilities, industries, and recurring strengths.
6. **Personality, Boundaries, and Buyer Fit Strategy** - which values, motivations, stances, strengths, limits, and background signals should be visible, and how to word them professionally.
7. **Channel and Region Strategy** - how the profile should differ for PDF/CV, website, LinkedIn/XING, and German vs English audiences.
8. **Structure** - proposed profile sections in order.
9. **Voice Strategy** - recommended tone for DACH/German, English/international, LinkedIn, and any "more positive" variant.
10. **Rewrite Samples** - improved headline, intro, LinkedIn/About version if relevant, and 3-5 project entries.
11. **Gaps** - missing metrics, facts, client permissions, or platform/API constraints to verify.

For a full rewrite, return a complete profile with:

- headline
- 3-5 line executive summary
- short professional arc / through-line
- optional personal motivation, working-principles, or role-fit block
- capability pillars
- selected highlights or signature projects
- industry/client context
- additional selected projects
- LinkedIn/About and headline variants when a social profile is in scope
- tone variants when useful: restrained DACH, warmer DACH, international English, LinkedIn
- skills/tooling only where it reinforces the thesis

## Quality Bar

Prefer concrete, commercially legible language over career-history narration. A strong output should make the reader think, within 30 seconds: "I understand what this person does, where they have done it, and why they are credible for this kind of work."

## Related Skills

- Use [linkedin-social-selling](../linkedin-social-selling/SKILL.md) when the
  profile is part of a client-acquisition, network, conversation, or content
  strategy.