3 Steps to Find (and Communicate) Your Value
The more value you generate, the more invaluable you become.
🏴☠️ Arrrr, welcome to this week's 💎 free edition 💎 of Category Pirates. Here, we share the most important frameworks, thoughts, and examples from our mini-books to help you learn and apply category design thinking.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Outcomes are the currency of the business world.
They don’t just show what you’ve accomplished—they reflect your value, impact, and significance.
An outcome is something you have delivered, either personally or as a meaningful contributor, that generated significant value for others.
If you’ve led a cost-saving initiative that improved profit margins for your organization or clients, that’s a financial outcome.
If you’ve mentored a team member to achieve professional growth, that’s an emotional outcome.
If you’ve designed a strategic roadmap that helped your company break into a new market, that’s an aspirational outcome.
If you’ve designed a new process that cut down the time spent on internal administrative work by 15%, that’s an organizational outcome.
Chances are, you’ve already generated outcomes in your career. You just might not realize the magnitude of your impact. (Which means you might not know your Category Superpower!)
But your ticket to career success is your ability to create and deliver value, as measured by outcomes that matter to others.
3 Steps to Find the Outcomes You’re Known For
Here’s how to figure out the outcomes you’re known for achieving.
Step 1: Connect your outcomes to the three metrics that matter most.
There are only three kinds of outcomes really matter to a company:
Outcomes that drive revenue
Outcomes that drive category potential
Outcomes that drive market cap
To connect your outcomes to these metrics, look at your current work function and ask yourself: “How does my job generate revenue, category potential, or market cap?”
Imagine you’re on the HR team, for example.
Does HR generate revenue? Not directly, but you hire great salespeople and marketers who generate revenue. Great! How much revenue do they bring in? You also might hire great executives, and keeping great executives increases the market cap via investor relations. Consider how the market cap has changed since the people you hired came on board.
The goal: Understand your company’s strategic goals and connect those to high-value outcomes you generate for others.
Step 2: Think about your contribution to the outcomes.
With your list of outcomes in mind, ask yourself:
How do I directly or indirectly support these outcomes?
Which outcome do I have the greatest agency and ability to impact?
Which outcome do I enjoy the most?
Ideally, you pick an outcome with direct contribution, the highest agency, and the highest enjoyment.
Once you choose this outcome, describe the impact it had on others.
Who benefited from this outcome?
What positive changes or transformations occurred as a result?
Did it save time, money, or resources for others?
How does it align with my unique strengths or skills?
Step 3: Communicate what you contribute.
Finally, write a clear statement that illustrates your role and value as it relates to your outcome.
You can say something like, “I'm an executive assistant, and by doing what I do, the executive that I support is 25% more effective because she can stay focused on the metrics that matter while I deal with the bozos at the hotel or event or airline. So, my dealings are contributing to the value of our company.”
If you wind up with more than one outcome, we recommend focusing on the most impactful one.
Bonus tip: To create maximum value, join material impact projects.
Material impact projects are critical projects that define a company’s trajectory and significantly impact what truly matters (revenue, category potential, and market cap). The more of these you directly contribute to, the stronger your outcomes. And the more value you provide, the more valuable you become.
You don’t have to be an entrepreneur or C-suite executive to make an impact and have a legendary career.
You simply have to generate impactful outcomes consistently.
By centering your career around outcomes, you’ll understand the value you create for others. You’ll create your own legendary category of one. And you’ll be sought after for the outcomes (and value) you generate.
Check out the full mini-book to learn more about the power of outcomes and how to leverage them to level up your career.
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates
Here’s what else you're missing on the paid Pirate Ship:
How to know the value of your value and build outcome-based wealth
How to reimagine problems and create new, non-obvious solutions
How to solve churn with non-obvious bundles and business models
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