The Six Voices Running Your Business (with Theresa Rose)

Short and Sweet

Every thought leader has a boardroom in their head. Six voices around a table, all trying to run the business. Most of us only listen to the loudest two or three, and the ones we ignore are the ones that bite us later.

Theresa Rose has spent her career helping experts get clear on their brand and the business behind it. In this episode she starts with cocktail napkin clarity, her way of boiling your brilliance down to something you can draw on a napkin. Then she walks through the six seats of the Boardroom Within, why AI makes a lousy board member, and the two simple systems she uses to make sure every seat gets heard each week.

Full Show Notes

Ask most speakers who runs their business and they'll say "me." Theresa Rose would ask which part of you.

Theresa is a Certified Speaking Professional and a strategic advisor to thought leaders, and her work comes down to two things: clarify the brand, then clarify the business that supports it. The brand side starts on a cocktail napkin. If you can draw it, you can sell it, and a napkin is the one piece of marketing tech that's always within reach. The business side is the Boardroom Within: an inner chairperson and six leaders, each with a name, a question, and a job.

It's a system for making decisions, and it's honest about the seats most of us would rather skip.

What we get into:

• Why a cocktail napkin beats a pitch deck, and why the napkin implies a conversation, not just a clever drawing
• Theresa's rules for a framework people remember: three to nine words, labels instead of sentences, and no acronyms
• Doodling live on sales calls and dropping the drawing straight into the CRM record
• The six seats: Victor (CEO, where are we going?), Rich (CFO, does the math work?), Sharon (CMO, does this connect?), Hunter (CRO, are we moving forward?), Link (CIO, is there an easier way?), and Flow (COO, can we keep this going?)
• What happens when the first four seats all say yes and your systems aren't ready for the business that shows up
• Why AI makes a poor board member, and what she means by "mechanistic sycophants"
• The big client she nearly lost by skipping her COO seat for a week
• Her two systems for keeping every seat heard: a weekly recurring task to sit in each seat for an hour, and a calendar color coded by seat

Find Theresa at theresarose.com or on LinkedIn, and grab her free download, What's Missing in My Thinking?, on her homepage.