Wes creates “Intellectual headshots” for his clients, but needed to rely on a 3rd party designer to deliver the quality his clients expect. This was fine when the design element was only a small part of a big service, but once this took off and became 90% of his revenue, he knew it was time to change.
This is another interview where we get two different switches – first to PJ Milani’s course, and then later to Janis’ Explain Ideas Visually course. I include both analyses below, but I’m not 100% sure this is two different stories until we complete the final analysis.
Check out the video below and see what you think:
Watch the full interview below:
The Four-forces debrief
This is another that I have debriefed twice, although Wes’ story feels more like a continuation of the same motivations than Frederic’s did. We will only know for sure when the analysis is concluded – so it’s better to capture the subtle differences and be able to analyse them later if they turn out to be important.
Wes - Four Forces Analysis
Wes is an independent consultant who helps other independent consultants find their niche, then turn their expertise into "Intellectual headshots" that are visual documents to use in Marketing and Sales collateral to help these consultants find and win more business.
He started 3 years ago, and originally had a much larger service offering - however after presenting his Intellectual headshots idea on stage in Feb 2025, he got a "flood" of inbound requests for this and took on some clients in a Pilot Sprint in April 2025.
* To begin with, he relied on retaining the services of a graphic designer to help clients - and was bothered by the loss in profit margin for doing this - but it was a small part of a bigger service
* One the whole service became "Intellectual Headshots" and design, this made him more interested in learning to get enough skill to do this for paying customers with confidence
Wes has a background as a consultant, so he knows about visually designing slides and says it's "in his blood to sketch ideas". However he is not an artist and lacks the confidence to promise that his visual ideas could be used as material for other consultants to publish professionally - at least when he started out.
By mid-July, there was a let up in his workload, which coincided with a PJ Milani course cohort and a Maven $100 discount. He had been following PJ for 4-5 months (roughly since the talk)
- I have a client where I've created 5 ideas for, 2 of which I'm happy with (A+) and three are a C and I have impostor syndrome
He took Janis' course at a later date, which is covered in another debrief.
- he got the $100 Maven discount for their top 100 courses - taking it from $499->$399 - which was "not a lot of money" - the business paid anyway and felt it was a reinvestment
- he wanted to "see what Maven was like" and that this would be a fun thing to upskill and learn
- he could fit this into his workday because it was summer, and PJ teaches during the day time - otherwise it might have been a struggle
- the figma tutorials were really useful, as he was reliant on Miro which wasn't the best way to produce visuals
- he was pleased and thought this was worth the fee - publishing more of his work on LinkedIn and having the confidence to take the "you need to get a proper designer to turn these ideas into assets" language from his onboarding process with new clients
And here is the analysis for the switch to Janis’ course:
Wes - story 2 - Four Forces Analysis
This is story 2 about Wes:
Wes is an independent consultant who helps other independent consultants find their niche, then turn their expertise into "Intellectual headshots" that are visual documents to use in Marketing and Sales collateral to help these consultants find and win more business.
He started 3 years ago, and originally had a much larger service offering - however after presenting his Intellectual headshots idea on stage in Feb 2025, he got a "flood" of inbound requests for this and took on some clients in a Pilot Sprint in April 2025.
* To begin with, he relied on retaining the services of a graphic designer to help clients - and was bothered by the loss in profit margin for doing this - but it was a small part of a bigger service
* One the whole service became "Intellectual Headshots" and design, this made him more interested in learning to get enough skill to do this for paying customers with confidence
Wes has a background as a consultant, so he knows about visually designing slides and says it's "in his blood to sketch ideas". However he is not an artist and lacks the confidence to promise that his visual ideas could be used as material for other consultants to publish professionally - at least when he started out.
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As part of the PJ Mialni course, he learns about Janis, and gets to see him in action:
He learned about Janis through PJ's course:
- he liked the laid back, relaxed vibe that Janis gives off when teaching
- he realised Janis' sweet spot is creating visuals for others - which is what he wants to do
- he loved watching the real-time image generation videos and seeing how "effortlessly" Janis could do this - and wanted the ability to do that himself
- a peer had asked him why he didn't do more live demos himself to help people understand his concept a few months back
- he wanted access to the templates, the community and found the "behind the scenes" of how it works fascinating to someone just starting out
- he paid $179 for this course - also with a discount, to get in before it expired - and thought it would be good to pay once and have perpetual access
- he felt like he was buying a community and not a course - which made it worth the money
- he struggles to come up with questions for a 1-on-1 call, so decided not to spend the extra money on the more expensive engagement; he already gets 2 min loom videos from PJ and can get the loom reviews from Janis - and feels he would not be able to fill up a whole hour
Another one that won't pay for the one-on-one coaching from Janis because he doesn't know how he will use it, what he will ask, and how it will be better or more useful than simply getting the standard community feedback from Janis.
We now have three more interviews remaining before this moves on to the analysis phase. One of these did not want her full story to be published, so that will just be the four-forces analysis.
Are you beginning to see patterns in this process, yet?