The market often notices your expertise before you do
When colleagues keep asking to "pick your brain", that's rarely a coincidence. It's often the first sign of a business you haven't named yet.
It usually starts with a coffee. A former colleague, or a friend of a friend who has just moved to Copenhagen, asks if they can pick your brain about something you’ve done a dozen times. You say yes, of course. You enjoy it, they leave with three pages of notes, and you go back to your inbox without thinking much more about it.
Then it happens again a few weeks later, with someone else and roughly the same question.
I hear versions of this story in almost every first conversation I have with a new client. Someone with fifteen years in operations, or brand strategy, or people leadership, tells me they’re not sure they have a business idea yet. Ten minutes later they’ve described four people who came to them for exactly the same kind of help in the last year.
What I find interesting is how invisible this is from the inside. When you’ve been doing something for a decade, it stops feeling like expertise and starts feeling like common sense. The thing that makes people seek you out is the thing you’d never think to put on a sales page, because surely everyone knows that.
They don’t, and the people asking are telling you so.
Living abroad tends to make this even harder to see. You’ve reinvented yourself a few times already, in different languages and different work cultures, and the skills you carried across borders can feel too ordinary to sell. Yet that adaptability is often a big part of why people trust your judgement in the first place.
So when someone asks to pick your brain, it’s worth paying attention to what they’re actually asking. Which problem did they bring? What had they already tried? What did they say was the most useful part of your conversation? Write it down. After five or six of those, you’ll usually see a pattern that looks a lot like an offer.
The business rarely starts when you register the company. More often it started a while ago, over coffee, while you were busy being helpful.
If people have started asking you for help but you’re not sure whether there’s actually a business there, I’d love to hear your story.
Written by Val
ICF ACC certified business coach for expats and international professionals. Originally from Italy, building a life and a business in Copenhagen for over a decade.
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