How to find your competitive edge

A generalist's guide to standing out from the crowd.

Photo: Pelle Cass for New York Magazine

I’ve always been the type of person who struggled to stay in one lane. In the early years of my career, fuelled by an intense desire to learn, I’d harass my bosses for extra work that sat outside my role. They ultimately relented (I think they wanted to shut me up) and consequently, I was exposed to every facet of business from the get-go. One day I’d be on a photoshoot, the next deep in a spreadsheet, and the next on a plane to New York to suss out the competition.

I embodied a quiet confidence about being an all-rounder, which only grew as I stepped onto the founder rollercoaster and overnight, became the self-proclaimed Head of Sales, Head of Marketing, Head of Content, Head of Finance, Head of Product, Head of Operations, and the CEO of being thrown in the deep end and hoping I’d remember how to swim.

However things changed in 2023 when I started doing ‘a bit of this and a bit of that’ (the non-technical term for a portfolio career). For some reason my quiet confidence became deafening self doubt. Freshly untethered from the brand I’d become known for, I didn’t know how to articulate my broad skills in a way that helped me stand out in crowded market.

“I can do anything!” I’d say to potential clients, seeing their skepticism as they, ever so slightly, rolled their eyes. The fact was I could do most things, but this mattered less than my ability to speak about a specific competitive edge with confidence.

I momentarily floundered, but over time as I played with my messaging and fully leaned into my newfound portfolio career identity, I got clear on my edge and the value I bring to the table. I fell back in love with being a generalist. These days I’m loud and proud.

The competitive edge

Your competitive edge is the unique advantage you have over others. It’s usually based off your set of skills, experience and knowledge, and conviction around your edge can help you:

• Build a unique personal brand

• Direct your sales or job search efforts

• Create a series of unique offers

• Effectively communicate your value

While a specialist’s edge relates to their area of expertise and is therefore relatively straightforward to identify, for generalists things are a little more tricky. It can feel impossible trying to find our edge when we don’t fit neatly in a box.

While it might appear that your seemingly circular generalist skillset is one big mish-mash with no defining characteristics, if you zoom in you’ll see that it’s made up of a series of slices. Each one represents your previous roles, businesses, experiences, projects, learnings, knowledge and results.

The generalist skillset, zoomed in

Each slice represents a potential competitive edge. In fact, within your skillset pie you might find many.

What are your slices?

The first step in finding your competitive edge is to understand which slices make up your generalist pie. To do this, you must mine your past. I suggest turning on do not disturb, grabbing a cuppa and writing your career story from first gig to present day. Answer the following questions:

• Where did you work?

• What industries have you been in?

• What did you do?

• What were your responsibilities?

• What results did you deliver?

• What did you learn?

• What did people say you were good at?

Within your stream-of-consciousness ramblings, try to identify your specific capabilities, experiences, projects and areas of expertise. Hot tip: feed your career story into ChatGPT, ask it to identify your slices and see what comes back.

I do this exercise a lot with my mentoring clients and recently did it myself, and came up with the following list of core skills and experiences:

• Prestige beauty with specific expertise in retail (Sephora, Mecca)

• Scaling a tech marketplace from $0-$1M ARR in 18 months

• Launching global brands into new markets

• Portfolio careers

• Storytelling and the written word

• Growing a podcast community to hundreds of thousands of people

• Landing six figure consulting deals

• Growing a Substack audience from 0-6k in just over a year

• Applying the startup methodology to a one person business

My generalist skillset

Slice and dice

Once you’ve identified your slices you can then search for the competitive edges within. Here’s how I think about it:

1. Each slice can represent an edge

2. Multiple slices can be stacked to represent an edge

3. Your entire skillset can be an edge

A Single Slice

Look at each of your slices. How might these represent a competitive edge and how could you leverage this edge to grow your portfolio career or business?

My deepest experience is in prestige beauty and I could leverage this slice by:

• Developing an advisory offer for DTC beauty founders who have ambitions to expand into prestige retail

• Identifying high potential beauty brands and putting the founders on my sales hit list

• Talking about my beauty industry experience on LinkedIn

Multiple Slices

Now consider how you could group two or more slices together. What unique combinations can you come up with? How can you use these combos to define an even more compelling edge?

For example, I have beauty experience and I’ve grown a podcast to hundreds of thousands of listeners. I could leverage this skill combo by:

• Identifying beauty founders who don’t have a podcast and putting them on my networking hit list

• Developing a pitch deck for podcast advisory services specifically tailored for fast growth beauty brands

• Writing a case study of a beauty brand who’s created a highly successful podcast (eg. Beauty IQ from Adore Beauty)

Another potential combo from my pie: portfolio careers and writing. I could use this skill combo to:

• Run a storytelling workshop for portfolio careerists to help them refine their personal brand narrative

• Publish a newsletter about how I’ve used writing to funnel leads to every single area of my portfolio career and business

The Whole Pie

Your competitive edge can also be the whole pie. Here’s how I’ve monetised my whole skillset to create products, services and content people love:

• I created the Portfolio Career Operating System which combines my founder, startup, sales, writing, personal brand and operations experience to help other portfolio careerists build financially healthy businesses without getting burnt out

• I’ve landed fractional work with startups acting as a Founder’s 2IC, working on whatever needs to be done to keep the business moving forward

• I’ve combined my creative storytelling and practical startup know-how to write a newsletter that is (hopefully!) equal parts inspirational and practical

The generalist advantage

As a generalist there are countless ways to slice up your skillset, just as there are many ways to add value and multiple competitive edges you could strategically deploy at different times, in different places and with different people.

This is the generalist advantage.

Don’t let society fool you into thinking that because you’re broad, you’re not deep. Don’t let other people make you believe that you don’t have something important to contribute.

Because we, the generalists, are not surface level.

We, the generalists, are not scattered.

We, the generalists, are not just breadth.

We’re not ‘jack of all trades, master of none’.

We’re ‘jack of many trades, master of some’.

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“Run, don’t walk!!! I’ve already started using this and it is jam packed with value. It literally covers every major process you need as a portfolio careerist and the best part is you get courtside seats to how Anna Mackenzie’s brain works and her success tools. It’s also efficient - like Anna - not overwhelming and just what you need. PHENOMENAL.”

~ Jill Kravetz, Strategic Advisor to Founders and the C-Suite

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🎙️ Some more thoughts about finding your competitive edge as a generalist, and how to use your unique skill stack to pitch and land work:

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