Roughly a third of the people who apply are told not to proceed. This guide lets you reach that verdict yourself, before spending anything, using the same test we use. It includes the cases where the correct advice is to keep your money.
Opens your assistant with this page's address and a prompt asking whether someone with your background is a realistic candidate for entity and visibility work.
Almost every eligibility conversation opens the same way, with somebody slightly apologetically explaining why they might not deserve this. It is the wrong axis entirely, and the apology is misplaced.
Machines are not assessing your importance. They have no mechanism for that and no opinion about it. They are assessing whether independent sources agree about who you are, which is a question about the state of the public record rather than about the state of your career.
This produces outcomes that feel unjust and are simply mechanical. A quietly brilliant operator who has never spoken publicly is invisible. A moderately competent person who spent three years on conference panels is resolved and gets named in answers. Neither result is a judgment. One left a trail and the other did not.
Which is good news, because a trail can be laid deliberately. It is also the reason the honest test below is about evidence rather than about achievement.
Stop asking whether you are notable. Ask what a stranger could find that somebody else wrote about you. That number, not your CV, is what decides this.
That is roughly the floor. Not a rule with a published source, and an honest generalisation from what has and has not worked. Below three, the work has nothing to build on and no supplier can change that by trying harder.
Each of the three has to satisfy the same test: somebody who is not you, published it, in a place that still resolves, and it names you. All four conditions, not three of them.
The fourth. A surprising amount of coverage describes somebody's role without printing their name, particularly in corporate press and case studies. It feels like coverage, it reads like coverage, and to a machine trying to resolve a person it is completely silent. Check the actual text before counting it.
Tick only what is true today, not what is planned or nearly finished. The scoring is weighted the way the mechanism actually weights things, which is why some obvious achievements score lower than you would expect and some unglamorous ones score higher.
Composites drawn from real diagnoses, with details changed. Two of the six are told no, which is roughly the real ratio.
This is the single biggest variable in any diagnosis and the one people most often withhold. It never disqualifies anybody. It changes the target, the timeline and occasionally the price, and all three of those are better known in week one.
| Who shares your name | What happens | The realistic target |
|---|---|---|
| Nobody findable | The straightforward case. Everything you build accrues to you, and progress is roughly linear. | Your bare name, within the standard timeline. |
| Other professionals, none prominent | Several weak records compete. Slower, and the main risk is your own material being absorbed into somebody else's fragment. | Your bare name, at the longer end, with strict name discipline throughout. |
| One moderately known person | They hold the meaning of the name today. Consistent context beside your name gradually separates the two. | Your bare name is possible and not guaranteed. Name plus field is certain. |
| A genuinely famous person | You will not take the bare name. Effort spent on generic visibility partly feeds their entity instead of yours. | Name plus a permanent qualifier. This is a good outcome and it needs saying up front. |
| Somebody notorious | Different problem. The name carries an association you did not create and cannot remove. | Strong, well-connected identity so a searcher immediately sees two distinct people. Realistic and slower. |
The qualifier decision is permanent and worth making deliberately. If the answer is that you will be findable as your name plus your field, that pairing has to appear beside your name on every surface from that day forward. Choosing it late, after a year of generic building, wastes most of the year.
Declare the namesake at the first conversation. It does not cost you the engagement and concealing it costs you months.
Written down so you can apply them yourself and skip the conversation if one obviously fits.
The diagnosis is free and stays free when the answer is no. Most of the people told no are perfectly accomplished and simply have not left a trail yet, which is a timing problem rather than a merit problem. Several have come back a year later having earned three citable things, and those engagements tend to go unusually well.
This is the part suppliers usually omit, because it is the part where you do not need them. Three citable things is a realistic target for most competent professionals within about six months, working alone.
Every item above is free and none of it requires a supplier. If you do four of the six over six months, you will not need to be talked into eligibility. You will simply be eligible.
Some people clear the evidence bar comfortably and should still wait, and it is worth naming the situations rather than taking the fee.
The single best moment to start is shortly before something citable lands. A book, a major appointment, a conference keynote. The build turns one event into a durable entity instead of a spike that fades, and the difference between doing this three months before a book and three months after is considerable.
The worst moment is during an upheaval. Anything built against a title you are about to abandon has to be rebuilt, and the fragments left behind actively compete with the new identity.
Suppliers rarely raise this and it deserves raising, because for some genuinely eligible people the honest answer is no.
The value depends almost entirely on whether people search your name before deciding something. If your work arrives through investors, journalists, procurement, hiring committees or inbound buyers, being a resolved entity is worth considerably more than it costs, and the cost of being invisible compounds quietly. If your work arrives entirely through personal referral, and always has, the honest answer is that this is a nice-to-have.
A reasonable test: think of the last five significant opportunities you got. For how many did somebody who had never met you search your name first? If the answer is four or five, this matters. If it is zero, spend the money on something closer to how you actually get work, and we would rather say that than take it.
Eligibility and worth are separate questions. Plenty of people qualify comfortably and should still spend the money elsewhere, and knowing which you are is worth two minutes of thought.
Each of these leads somebody either to buy when they should not, or to disqualify themselves when they should not. Both are expensive in different ways.
| The belief | Why it is wrong | What is true instead |
|---|---|---|
| "I need to be famous" | Fame is not measured and not required. Plenty of resolved entities belong to people almost nobody has heard of, including academics and specialists. | You need independent sources describing you consistently. That is a much lower and more achievable bar. |
| "I have a big following, so I qualify" | Audience size is not an input. A large following on a platform you rent produces no independent record of who you are. | Followings help by getting you invited onto other people's platforms. That invitation, not the following, is what counts. |
| "My company is well known, so I am covered" | The company may be a resolved entity while you are not. Machines routinely know an organisation and have no idea who runs it. | The link between person and organisation has to be stated explicitly, in both directions, or neither borrows from the other. |
| "I write constantly, that must count" | Self-published volume corroborates nothing, because you control it. Ten years of posts and no third-party mention is a common and weak position. | One trade publication quoting you outweighs a year of your own output for this specific purpose. |
| "My coverage is too old" | Age is not decay. A conference page from years ago that still loads is a durable dated record. | Permanence beats recency. An old page that resolves outperforms a recent post that will be buried in a week. |
| "It is all in another language" | Non-English sources count and are routinely discounted by the person they are about. | List them. They carry real weight and are frequently the strongest material somebody has. |
| "I share a name with someone famous, so it is hopeless" | It is a complication, not a disqualification. It changes what the realistic target is. | Your name plus a permanent qualifier is achievable and is a genuinely good outcome. |
| "I can pay to skip the slow part" | The slow part is other people publishing on their own schedule. No fee changes a conference programme. | What shortens it is material you already have, plus warm introductions you can make yourself. |
The two most expensive beliefs on this list sit at opposite ends. "I am not famous enough" stops eligible people applying. "I publish constantly" convinces ineligible people they qualify.
Suppliers in this field tend to describe the cost of invisibility in apocalyptic terms. The truthful version is narrower and, for the people it applies to, more serious.
Invisibility costs you nothing at all in situations where nobody searches you. It costs you specifically and repeatedly in four situations, and if none of them describe your working life then the honest advice is to spend the money elsewhere.
Of your last five significant opportunities, how many involved somebody who had never met you searching your name before deciding? Four or five means this matters and the cost is already being paid. Zero means your work arrives another way, and you should back that route instead. Nobody selling this will normally tell you the second answer exists.
Worth describing precisely, because "we sometimes say no" is the kind of claim every supplier makes and almost none can evidence. Here is the actual sequence.
The commercial logic, stated plainly, because you should not have to take goodwill on faith. An engagement sold to somebody who cannot win runs twelve months, consumes real hours, and ends in a full refund. It is worse than never having taken it. The refund promise is what makes declining people the rational choice rather than the noble one, and a rational incentive is more reliable than a stated value.
Ask any supplier what percentage of applicants they turn away and what happens to those people. The answer, and whether they have one at all, tells you most of what you need to know.
This page will cost us work, and publishing it is still the right commercial decision. An engagement sold to somebody who cannot win ends in a refund twelve months later, having consumed a year of their attention and ours. Preventing that is worth more than the fee.
What this guide gives you is the test. What it does not give you is the method: which sources are worth pursuing in a given field, in what order, how the approach is framed so it lands, and the structural work that turns scattered facts into one resolvable identity. That remains the thing being paid for.
The line is deliberate. Everything you need in order not to be taken advantage of is published, including the parts that lose us business. Everything that is purely operational advantage is not. Any supplier who reverses that arrangement is worth a second look.
It arrives in writing within three working days and tells you what machines currently hold on your name, whether a namesake is in the way, and whether this is worth your money. If it is not, that is what it will say.
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