Four hours writing.Two hours editing.One hour crying in the Waitrose car park because Hootsuite just ate your scheduled post.All for three likes and a "great post!" from your mum.(Yes, I see you. I was you. I spent six months posting daily, carousels, reels, "value bombs" that felt about as explosive as a wet tea bag and booked precisely zero discovery calls. Turns out I wasn't building authority. I was building a second job that paid in dopamine and Tesco Clubcard points.)

Here's the unspoken truth about the consulting and coaching commoditisation crisis: It isn't that your market is saturated. It's that your voice has been neutralised.

Myth: Post consistently, and the algorithm rewards you with qualified leads.Truth: Consistency without conversion is just performance art with a Canva subscription.Proof: Marcus (strategy consultant, £400/day, ex-Big Four) posted five times weekly for three months. Quote posts. Carousel tips. "Here's what I learned from rowing across the Atlantic" analogies.

Total impressions: 2,400 per post.

Discovery calls booked: Zero.

Revenue attributed: £0.

Time invested: 120 hours.

Hourly rate for that content work: £0.00, give or take a Percy Pig from the petrol station.Meanwhile, his competitor, Sarah (same credentials, same ICP, worse website), posts twice weekly. Short paragraphs. Aggressive opinions about why McKinsey decks are intellectual graveyards.

Last month she closed £40K from three LinkedIn posts that took her 45 minutes total to write.The difference isn't work ethic. It's voice clarity.

You've been conditioned by the content-industrial complex to believe that "professional" means beige. That expertise requires the emotional range of an M&S vanilla sponge. That if you sound too much like yourself, you'll scare away the procurement team.So you write like ChatGPT wearing a blazer."Excited to share five frameworks for optimising your morning routine."

"Thrilled to announce I'm passionate about helping leaders leverage synergy."

"Delighted to unpack the paradigm shift in agile methodologies."Fuck that. (And fuck the "leverage" while we're at it.)Your clients aren't scrolling LinkedIn at 6 am, hoping for another sanitised tip they could find in a Forbes article from 2019.

They're looking for someone who sounds like they actually know where the bodies are buried in their industry.

Someone who speaks with the kind of specific, irreverent intelligence that signals:

I am not interchangeable.

I am not a commodity.

I am not available on Upwork for £50 an hour.

Here's your one tactical insight for today—the thing that will either validate your positioning or expose why you're working for free:Take your last five LinkedIn posts. Remove your name and photo. Hand them to a stranger alongside five posts from your closest competitor.Can they tell the difference?If the answer is no, you've got a voice problem, not a content problem. You're operating in what I call the Greggs Vegan Sausage Roll Zone: technically functional, morally beige, entirely forgettable.

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Most consultants write like this:"In today's rapidly changing business environment, it's crucial for leaders to stay ahead of the curve by implementing strategic frameworks that drive alignment and leverage core competencies."What works instead:"Your strategy deck is a tombstone. It killed three trees and four ambitions to say absolutely nothing. Here's why your 'transformation roadmap' is just a PowerPoint prison..."The difference? Voice authority.The first signals: I am safe. I am corporate. I will not challenge you.The second signals: I see the matrix. I know why your actual problem isn't what you think it is. And I'm brave enough to say it.One gets engagement. The other gets enterprise contracts.

You think you're struggling because "everyone says the same things" in your category. But that's not quite right.Everyone uses the same words. The same frameworks. The same "I help [X] achieve [Y] without [Z]" Mad Libs bios.But nobody has your specific scar tissue. Your particular rage about how your industry breaks things. Your unfiltered 2 am opinion about why most coaching is just expensive validation with better lighting.That specificity is your moat. Not your methodology. Your messiness. Your willingness to say what the McKinsey report won't.

Let's talk about the maths you're not doing because you're too busy batch-creating Reels.If you spend 10 hours weekly on content that sounds like everyone else, you're not marketing. You're manufacturing digital noise at a cost of £X,000 per month in billable hours (if you converted those hours to client work instead).The consultants winning right now? They're spending 2 hours weekly on content that sounds like them. The rest of the time they're delivering. Or sleeping. Or doing literally anything else that doesn't involve crying in a Sainsbury's car park because the LinkedIn algorithm changed again.

One thing. That's all you get today. Do this or stay beige:Take your next post—the one you've got scheduled for Tuesday morning, and run it through the Corporate Deprogramming Filter:1. Circle every word that could appear in a Deloitte annual report. ("Synergy," "alignment," "optimise," "leverage," "unpack," "deep dive.")2. Delete them.3. Replace with the word you'd use at the pub after three glasses of wine when your mate asks what you actually think about your client's problem.4. Post that.If it makes you slightly uncomfortable, you're close.If it sounds like something your old boss would write in a "circle back" email, delete it and start again.

You think the risk is being too much. Too opinionated. Too "unprofessional."The actual risk is being invisible. Interchangeable. One of twelve identical beige boxes in the client's "maybe" folder.Your market isn't saturated. It's starving for someone who sounds like they have a pulse.Stop marketing.Start positioning.Struggling? - This is my day to day, we can talk it through.

SubText Written by Sarra, the Ghost, professional ghostwriter, strategist, and marketer hiding in plain sight behind the voices you read every day.

Find me here → linkedin.com/in/meetsarra