What to Say When Someone Asks What You Do (Without Watching Their Eyes Glaze Over)

Someone asks what you do.

You explain it. You hit the main points. You cover what you help people with and who you work with and roughly how it works. It's accurate. It's complete. And somewhere in the middle of it you watch something in their expression go slightly blank.

They nod. They say "oh, interesting." The conversation moves on. And nobody follows up, nobody refers anyone to you, and nothing comes of it.

This is one of the most common and least-diagnosed problems in service businesses. The work is good. The clients who find you are happy. But the description of what you do doesn't travel — and a description that doesn't travel means your best marketing channel, word of mouth, is quietly not working.

Why Accurate Descriptions Don't Work

The instinct when explaining your business is to be accurate and complete. Cover what you do, who it's for, how it works. Make sure they understand the scope. Don't oversimplify something nuanced.

The problem is that accurate and complete descriptions are designed to inform the listener. But that's not actually the job of a business description in a casual conversation. The job is to create a connection in the listener's mind — between what you do and a problem they recognize, either in themselves or in someone they know.

An accurate description of your methodology doesn't create that connection. A description of the problem you solve and who you solve it for does.

"I'm a business design strategist who helps entrepreneurs build sustainable offers and systems" is accurate. It tells someone what you do. But it doesn't give them anywhere to file it in relation to their own life or the lives of people they know.

"I help entrepreneurs figure out why their business feels hard even when they're doing everything right" does something different. It describes an experience. And if the person you're talking to has had that experience — or knows someone who has — something clicks.

The Referral Test

Here's a useful way to evaluate any description of your work: could someone repeat it accurately to a friend?

Not a perfect description. Not your full positioning statement. Just the core of it — enough that if their friend has the problem you solve, they'd think of you.

Most business descriptions fail this test. They're either too vague to be memorable ("I help people grow their businesses") or too specific to be repeatable ("I provide fractional CMO services with a focus on demand generation and pipeline optimization for B2B SaaS companies at the Series A stage").

The sweet spot is specific enough to be meaningful and simple enough to be repeated. That combination is harder to find than it sounds, and most people never deliberately work toward it.

What Makes a Description Stick

A business description that travels has a few qualities worth building toward.

It names a problem, not a service. People remember problems more readily than services. "She helps entrepreneurs whose business is consuming their life" sticks in a way that "she provides business consulting" doesn't. The problem creates a mental hook — the next time someone encounters that problem, the description has somewhere to attach.

It's specific enough to be recognizable. Generic problems don't create the hook. "She helps people with their businesses" is too broad to be memorable. "She helps entrepreneurs who've built something real but can't figure out why it still feels so hard" is specific enough that either someone immediately recognizes it or they don't — and both responses are useful. The recognition is what you're after.

It uses the language your clients use, not your professional vocabulary. "Business design" means something specific to you. To most people it means nothing, or something vague. "Figuring out what's actually broken" means something to anyone who's ever had a business problem they couldn't diagnose. Use the words for the experience, not the words for your methodology.

It's short enough to say in one breath. If explaining what you do takes more than two sentences, it won't get repeated. The person who wants to refer you to a friend will simplify it in their head anyway — the question is whether what they simplify it to is accurate and useful, or whether it loses everything important in the compression.

How to Find Your Description

The fastest path to a description that works is to start from your clients' words rather than your own.

Think about the clients who got the most out of working with you. What did they say when they described what was wrong before they found you? What words did they use? What did they say had changed when they talked about results?

Those words — their words, not yours — are usually closer to a working description than anything you'd generate from inside your own expertise. Because they describe the problem from the outside, which is exactly where the people you want to reach are standing.

If you don't have client language to draw from yet, the next best source is the conversations you have when you're most energized — when someone asks a question and you find yourself explaining something you genuinely care about. The language that comes out in those moments is usually closer to your real positioning than the language on your website.

Testing and Iterating

A business description isn't something you design once and finalize. It's something you test in real conversations and refine based on what actually lands.

Pay attention to the moments when someone's expression changes from polite attention to genuine interest. Notice what you said in the thirty seconds before that happened. That's the part that's working.

Pay attention to the moments when you get "oh, interesting" and nothing else. Notice what you said before that happened. That's the part to cut or rework.

Over time, through actual conversations rather than theoretical positioning exercises, you'll find the version that creates the connection. It will be shorter than you expect and more specific than feels comfortable — but it will travel.

And when it does, your best marketing channel starts working the way it's supposed to.