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The referral brief

The whole thing written out, so you can read it slowly instead of watching it go past.

What Unstealth is

We rebuild how an experienced coach or consultant is found and taken seriously on LinkedIn. The profile they land on, the writing that carries their thinking, and the referral relationships that already drive most of their work.

One person does the work and decides every line of it. That is a limit on how many people we can take. It is also the reason the work is worth putting your name next to.

The five signals

Every one of these is checkable from a profile in under a minute. You do not need to know their business, their pricing, or whether they are looking for anything.

  1. Credentialed, and long past proving it

    PCC or MCC, or the equivalent seniority in consulting. Usually a book, a named framework, or a method that is theirs.

  2. This is a second act

    They came to coaching from another career. The practice was built on the back of something they did first.

  3. Organisations, or senior individuals

    Not a part-time practice fitted around something else. The work is the job.

  4. Their clients arrive by referral

    Ask them where the last three came from. They will answer without stopping to think, and it will be a person, not a channel.

  5. And then they went quiet

    A profile that stopped. A feed of other people's articles. Something in them will not do the marketing that was recommended, and they would rather be invisible than be that.

Who this is not for

This matters as much as the five. A name that lands here costs us a conversation, and it costs you something with the person you sent.

What happens to a name

Nothing happens to them without their say. We write once, and we say who suggested it. If they are not interested, that is the end of it and we do not write again.

If they are interested, there are two things they can buy and no others.

The Read

A written diagnosis of where their authority actually stands with the people who could hire or refer them, and who is already in their network who could refer them and never has.

Some Reads conclude they do not need us. That conclusion gets written down and delivered as the deliverable. It is why the first step is a diagnosis and not a proposal.

The Run

Only if the Read says it is worth doing. The profile rebuilt as something people land on and take seriously, writing in their own voice at a cadence they can sustain, and the slow warming of the practitioners who could send them work and currently do not.

Three months minimum, because nothing here shows up faster than that.

What gets reported

No promised number of calls, leads, followers or clients. Not in a pitch, not in a report, not ever. What gets reported weekly is movement along one ladder, which describes what a reader is doing rather than counting anything.

  1. Names the pain in a public comment
  2. Engages the work privately
  3. Does the work and brings it back
  4. Invites you in

What we will never do with it

And only now, the money

15% of what a referred client actually pays, on the Run, for their first twelve months. Paid monthly, in arrears, only on money we have received. No cap on how many.

TermValue
Rate15% of amounts received
Applies toThe Run only. The one off diagnosis is too small to track as a line
DurationThe first twelve months of that client's payments
TriggerThe client pays. Not on introduction, not on a booked call, not on signature
CapNone
WhoAnyone. Past clients, current clients, people who have never bought a thing from us

You are free to tell them you are paid, and we will say so ourselves if they ask. That is not manners, it is the rule. The people we work with have been burned by this industry, and an undisclosed referral fee found out later is the exact shape of the thing that burned them. It would also cost you the only asset that makes your introduction worth anything.

This sits at the bottom on purpose. The ask is for a name. If the money changed whether you would send one, please do not send one.

What is not true yet

Nobody has ever been offered this and nobody has ever earned it. The 15% is reasoned from a real contract and from what a two person margin can carry, not from any referrer who has tested it. The twelve month limit is a convention rather than a measurement.

We are not going to show you results. We have delivered this work and we do not have written permission to describe it, so we are not going to describe it anyway with the names filed off. If that makes this harder to refer, that is the correct cost, and we would rather pay it here than have you find out later.

What you can check instead is the work. Read what Unstealth publishes and decide whether the thinking is the kind you would put your name beside. That is a fairer test than a number we could have invented.


One line is plenty

Send us their name and where they turned up for you. If you would rather introduce us directly, that is better. If you would rather we never mention you, that is fine too, and we will not.

And if nobody came to mind, that is a genuinely useful answer. We would rather have it than a name you had to go looking for.

Send us a name

Unstealth  /  Dev Prasadh