There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from doing everything right and getting nowhere. I see it in the founders I work with—intelligent, capable people who show up on podcasts, post consistently on LinkedIn, maybe even dabble in YouTube. They’re visible. They’re present. They’re tired.

And when we dig into what’s actually broken, it’s never what they think it is.

For the last five years, the prevailing wisdom has been simple: growth is a visibility problem. Pour more people into the top of the funnel. Sell a $27 tripwire offer, break even on ad spend, fill the pipeline. Make seven figures. The formula was supposed to work.

It doesn’t anymore.

The Funnel Has Collapsed

The low-ticket lead magnet that built businesses in 2019 is now just noise in an oversaturated market. Buyers have become wary. The economy has shifted. And the expectations of what it means to be a credible leader—in any space, across every industry—have fundamentally changed.

Recent research from Gartner reveals why: B2B buyers now spend less than 5% of their time talking with sales representatives during their purchase journey. The remaining 80%+ is spent doing independent research, connecting with peers, and consuming content—all happening beyond your funnel’s reach.

We’re no longer operating in a funnel economy. We’re operating in what I call a flywheel economy: content creation that compounds, audience engagement that deepens over time, and sales conversations that build momentum rather than pressure.

The shift from funnel to flywheel isn’t just tactical. It’s philosophical. It’s the difference between trying to get somebody to do something and inviting them into something worth joining.

This is what has caused the seismic shift in communication over the last eighteen months. And most founders haven’t caught up yet.

The Three Pillars of Magnetic Communication

Over the next month, I’ll be unpacking what’s changing in how we communicate as leaders—and why the old playbook no longer applies. But today, I want to focus on what you can activate immediately, whether you’ve built a funnel or not.

There are three pillars: clarity, credibility, and consistency.

If your visibility isn’t covered on all three counts, your message is weak. You already know this intuitively. You’ve heard some version of “be clear” and “be consistent” before. But the definitions have changed. And the stakes have changed too: Norwest’s 2024 B2B Benchmark Report found that positioning products clearly and differentiating from competitors are now the top challenges for revenue leaders, with longer sales cycles and increased churn indicating that unclear messaging is costing real money.

What counted as consistency in 2022—same time, same channel, same cadence—is no longer what the market demands.

Clarity: The Sharpening, Not the Dumbing Down

Clarity means your audience fully understands what you do and what you do for them. Not just when they’re in conversation with you, but everywhere they encounter you—your homepage, your LinkedIn bio, your YouTube description, your sales pages.

If someone lands on your website and can’t immediately answer what does this person do and how does it matter to me, your clarity score is low.

Here’s where most people get it wrong: they confuse clarity with simplification. They’ve been told to “explain it like I’m five” or “use five words or less.” For creatives and specialized service providers, this advice isn’t just restrictive—it’s paralyzing.

Clarity is not about reduction. Clarity is about sharpening. It’s about specificity. Sometimes that requires more words, not fewer. When you serve a very specific thing, you need the space to explain it well.

I’ve noticed this particularly with thought leaders who are brilliant at their craft: you can be extraordinarily good at what you do and still be extraordinarily unclear about what you do. The expertise doesn’t translate automatically. It requires work.

Credibility: Depth of Insight Over Proof of Revenue

Credibility is not about bragging. It’s certainly not about what I call “selling your money”—going out and talking about how much you make as if revenue alone confers authority.

It doesn’t.

If you’re a financial advisor or a real estate broker, fine—money is the product. But if you’re a coach or a service provider, you need to examine whether sharing your revenue actually adds to your credibility, or whether it’s a band-aid covering the fact that you can’t articulate your credibility any other way.

What’s shifting for 2026 is this: credibility is no longer just your resume, your client results, your social proof. Those things matter, but they’re table stakes. What matters now is depth of insight—the compounding effect of a clear point of view expressed confidently over time.

If someone scrolls back six weeks or three months on whatever channel they’re engaging with you on, do they see a consistent, deepening body of thought? Or do they see someone who posts sporadically, pivots frequently, and never quite stakes a claim?

The market is rewarding the latter less and less. Credibility now comes from intellectual consistency—from becoming entrenched as the expert on something specific because you’ve committed to saying it, refining it, and saying it again.

Consistency: You Are the Algorithm

This is where it gets interesting—and where I predict the most resistance.

For years, we’ve been told that consistency means showing up every day. Post, post, post. Feed the algorithm. It doesn’t matter what you say, just say something.

That era is over.

The shift happening now is that you are the algorithm. Not the platform. You.

We’re no longer getting up to serve the algorithm. We’re getting up to consistently embody the energy of our leadership. And that looks different day to day.

Sometimes it means staying silent. Sometimes it means engaging deeply in the comments rather than posting new content. Sometimes it means prioritizing internal communication over external visibility. Sometimes it means posting something off-script because you know your audience needs it now, not next Tuesday when it was scheduled.

Consistency has evolved. It’s no longer about the calendar or the cadence. It’s about energetic congruence—meeting your audience with the energy they expect from you as a leader in your field, in the moment they need it.

This is your permission to stop posting when you’re not in the energy for it. If you wake up thinking I don’t want to post this, but I’m being consistent, don’t post it. The inconsistency isn’t the missing post. The inconsistency is the mismatch between what you’re putting out and the energy your audience has come to expect from you.

That’s the new consistency.

The Diagnostic

I’ve built something new: a 90-minute paid diagnostic session where we audit your communication across all channels and score you on the three pillars—clarity, credibility, consistency.

You’ll receive a scorecard showing exactly where you need to tighten, where your strengths lie, and how to push into a more easeful, more magnetic form of communication in 2026. Within a week, you’ll have a roadmap.

I wasn’t planning to release this until next year. But I’ve watched too many smart, capable founders floundering—visible but not seen—and this diagnostic is the fastest way I know to pinpoint why.

I have four spots left for 2025 if you want to hit the ground running in January.

The Question

Which of the three pillars is weakest for you right now?

Not in theory. Not what you think you should be weak at. Actually weak. Where is your visibility cracking?

Clarity? Can you describe what you do in two sentences without hedging?

Credibility? If someone scrolled your content for three months, would they see depth or scattering?

Consistency? Are you showing up with energetic congruence, or are you performing consistency for an algorithm that doesn’t care?

Make diagnosing this a priority. Because I promise you—if your visibility isn’t working, it’s not because you need to post more.

It’s because one of these three pillars is broken. And everything you build on top of it will be, too.

Book your Clarity to Conversion Diagnostic here