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What's Your Secret Sauce?

What's Your Secret Sauce?

Lauren Wambold Patel
October 21, 2025

Welcome back to The 2x2 - the ultimate newsletter for executive consultants!

Greetings from Austin, Texas where barbecue is king.

No one cares about the meat, but all the best spots have their signature sauce.

I’ve been thinking about it, and consultants are also the same. You need to have a specialty and it has to be better than everybody else’s.

And if you’re not sure what it is yet, Wes Wheless can help you refine and bottle it.

Read on…

⏰ Today in 5 minutes or less:

Consultants carry decades of expertise, but clients don’t have time for every detail of it.
Intellectual headshots are the quickest way to orient someone about your way of seeing a problem.
The best headshots are simple visual frameworks.

Bottling Your Secret Sauce With Wes Wheless

Your expertise alone won’t land you clients.

Not when you simply rattle off big-name clients, tell long stories about projects or, list the high-ranking positions you held.

Instead, Wes Wheless suggests using intellectual headshots – frameworks or visuals that package your expertise in a way that clients easily understand.

Wes is the founder of Develop My IP, a brand that helps indie consultants find their niche and build assets that highlight their expertise. Some of his part collaborations include execs and experts from Uber, Amazon, Microsoft and other big-name brands.

In this interview, he talks about how consultants can sell more by “bottling their sauce” and using an IP-first approach.

I live in Austin, so I think about this like the great BBQ battles. All the great pitmasters are known for something.

Aaron Franklin? The brisket.

La Barbeque? Sausage.

Micklethwait? Sides.

Stiles Switch? Less than 20 min line.

You want to be known for something too. Wes helps you find it.

Let’s dig in.

Even people who are great at synthesis struggle to define what they do in a simple way. Why is it so hard to do this for consultants like us?

Wes: Even if you’re great at synthesis, it’s rare that you have to do it for yourself. And that’s the hard part – you’ve spent 10, 20, maybe 30 years building domain expertise. Where do you even start? And maybe even more importantly, what do you leave out?

That’s why I think having someone else reflect it back is so powerful. When I work with consultants, I’ll sketch a simple diagram that captures the essence of their expertise.

My clients often want to add all the edge cases and extra details, but I have to remind them: the point is to get someone quickly oriented to your way of seeing a problem.

You’ll always have time to expand in conversation. But for that first moment – getting a client onboarded into your worldview – you need simplicity.

And honestly, it helps that I’m not as experienced in their specific domain as they are. I can only represent it back in a way that’s simple enough for me to understand. That forces the distillation.

You talk about intellectual headshots. Why is visualization of these nuggets so important compared to just having a talk track or writing it down?

Wes: Consultants talk a lot – probably too much. Even our talking points can overwhelm a client.

Remember that when someone comes to you, they’re in distress. They’re dealing with a problem they haven’t been able to solve internally. They’ve probably tried other solutions, and now they’re about to spend serious money on you. That’s a stressful place for them to be.

If you just start rattling off insights, it doesn’t help calm that urgency. But a visual – something distilled and digestible – can do it instantly. In seconds, you’re showing them: “Here’s what you’re going through. Here’s a way to make sense of it.”

That visual becomes a frame of reference, a shared language. It makes the problem approachable.

Starting with something simple opens up a much deeper conversation. Instead of leading with “Look at all the things I know,” you’re saying, “Here’s a picture of what you’re going through. Let’s talk about it.”

That’s why visuals are so powerful. They shift the energy in the room.

What does the process look like? How do you come up with intellectual headshots for your clients?

Wes: My process is pretty straightforward. We start with a worksheet that looks simple, but gets deep quickly:

Who are you helping?
What problems are they coming to you with?
Where have you led clients to an “aha” moment?
What did you see that they didn’t see?

Those moments of clarity are often ripe for visualization.

From there, I build what I call a visual narrative, which has four columns: pain, problem, solution, and service.

We look for the most resonant pain point. Then we ask: what’s the underlying problem? What metaphor can make that problem really stick?

Same for the solution. Sometimes we’ll even build a visual around how you deliver your service.

What makes a great intellectual headshot for a consultant?

Wes: The best headshots either look like simple frameworks – two-by-twos, process diagrams, timelines – or like visual metaphors. And the visual metaphors are where the emotional punch comes in.

For example, I worked with a fractional general counsel. He told me: “My buyers are CEOs, and they hate lawyers. They think legal comes in and kills deals.” So I designed a metaphor – a ski jump that ends with a brick wall. That was enough to show: momentum builds, and then legal kills it.

He pushed it further and said: “Let’s make it the Grim Reaper at the end of the ski jump.” That’s the version he uses.

And it works because the buyer instantly thinks: “He gets me.” Other consultants talk and talk, but this one visual shows empathy, humor, and deep understanding.

That’s the magic of a headshot. It’s not about cramming everything you know into one page. It’s one clear, memorable visual that grabs attention, sticks in the buyer’s mind, and reframes the problem in a way that only you can.

What We Can Learn from Wes Wheless:

Share a picture of what you do. Consultants carry decades of expertise, but clients don’t have time for 30 years of context. Intellectual headshots (like frameworks and visuals) make everything simple enough for clients to understand. If you can’t explain your superpower, you’ll lose the room.
Niche first, IP second. Trying to build intellectual property as a generalist leads to generic fluff. Before building your IP, it’s crucial to define your niche. Nail down the exact problem you solve and for whom. Only then can your IP resonate and attract the right clients.
Turn old work into reusable assets. Don’t let your best ideas live and die in old decks. Every time you solve a problem, create a framework or visual out of it that you can use again. It will save you time, show credibility, and become part of your marketable IP.