The Skills Audit - What You Actually Know

Before you can translate your expertise into a business, you need to take a clear inventory of what you actually know how to do. Not the job title — the actual skills. The things you could do again tomorrow if someone asked.

Most people can name their job title quickly, but struggle to list the underlying skills that made them good at it. That is what this chapter is about. We are going to strip away the corporate jargon, the org chart labels, and the LinkedIn headline — and get down to the raw material you are working with.

Why Job Titles Are Misleading

Here is something that trips up almost every displaced worker: you have been defining yourself by your title for so long that you have forgotten what you actually do.

"I was a Senior Project Manager." Okay — but what does that mean? If I put you in a room with a whiteboard and a team that needs help, what would you actually do? You would probably scope the project, identify risks, create timelines, facilitate communication between technical and non-technical people, manage stakeholder expectations, and keep the whole thing moving forward without going off the rails.

That is not one skill. That is six or seven skills, each of which has independent value to different types of businesses.

The same is true for almost every corporate role. A "Marketing Director" might actually be skilled at brand positioning, audience research, copywriting, paid media strategy, team leadership, and vendor management. A "Finance Manager" might be skilled at financial modeling, cash flow forecasting, budgeting, audit preparation, and executive reporting.

Your job title was a container. The skills inside that container are what you are going to build your business on.

The Hidden Skills You Are Overlooking

Beyond the obvious skills from your job description, there are skills you have been using every day that you probably do not even think of as skills:

• Translating complexity into simplicity — If you regularly explained technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, that is a valuable skill. Many consultants build entire practices around being the person who can make complex things understandable.
• Managing up — If you were good at getting executive buy-in for your projects, you understand stakeholder management and persuasion. That is useful to any business that needs help with internal alignment.
• Cross-functional coordination — If you regularly worked across departments, you understand how to navigate organizational politics and get people aligned. That skill is in high demand at growing companies.
• Process improvement — If you ever looked at a broken process and fixed it, you have operational consulting skills. Most companies have dozens of broken processes and no one dedicated to fixing them.
• Mentoring and coaching — If people regularly came to you for advice or guidance, that is a coaching skill that translates directly into paid consulting.

Do not dismiss these as "soft skills" that cannot be monetized. Some of the highest-paid consultants in the world are paid precisely for these capabilities.

The Skills-to-Value Framework

For each skill you have, we want to connect it to something concrete: who needs it, what they get from it, and what they would pay for it. Here is the framework:

1. The skill — what you actually know how to do
2. Who benefits from it — what kind of person or organization needs this
3. What outcome they get — what is specifically better for them because of your skill
4. What it is worth — how much value does it create (in dollars saved, revenue gained, time freed, risk avoided)

This framework is the bridge between "I know how to do things" and "I have something people will pay for." Without it, your skills remain abstract. With it, they become business opportunities.

How to Think About Value

Value is not just about money saved or revenue generated. There are four types of value that businesses pay for:

• Revenue value — You help them make more money. This could be through better marketing, new customer acquisition, improved sales processes, or product development.
• Cost value — You help them spend less money. This includes process optimization, vendor negotiation, waste reduction, or automation.
• Time value — You help them move faster. This includes project management, removing bottlenecks, streamlining approvals, or accelerating hiring.
• Risk value — You help them avoid bad outcomes. This includes compliance, legal review, security assessments, quality assurance, or crisis management.

When you are filling in the "what it is worth" column, think about which type of value your skill creates. Risk value is often the most underestimated — companies will pay a premium to avoid regulatory fines, lawsuits, or reputational damage.

Worked Examples Across Industries

Example from a displaced Tech PM:

Skill: Product discovery and user research
- Who benefits: Startup founders trying to build their first product
- What outcome they get: They learn what customers actually want before spending months building the wrong thing
- What it is worth: Avoiding 6 months of wasted development time = easily 00K–00K+ in saved cost

Now that skill has a number attached to it. You can build a pricing conversation around it. You are not selling "user research" — you are selling the avoidance of a 00K mistake.

Example from a displaced HR Director:

Skill: Designing performance management processes
- Who benefits: Fast-growing companies with 50–200 employees that do not yet have formal HR systems
- What outcome they get: Employees get clearer feedback; managers have a process to follow; the company retains talent longer
- What it is worth: Reducing employee turnover by even 10% often saves 0K–00K/year depending on company size

Notice how the value is framed in terms the buyer cares about. They do not care about "performance management processes." They care about keeping their best people from leaving.

Example from a displaced Operations Manager:

Skill: Designing and implementing operational workflows
- Who benefits: Small businesses that have grown fast and are now disorganized
- What outcome they get: Faster onboarding, fewer mistakes, more consistent customer experience
- What it is worth: 20%–30% increase in team efficiency, which can be hundreds of hours per year

Example from a displaced Financial Analyst:

Skill: Building financial models and forecasting cash flow
- Who benefits: Startups and small businesses preparing for fundraising or trying to manage runway
- What outcome they get: Clear visibility into when they will run out of money, what levers they can pull, and what story to tell investors
- What it is worth: The difference between raising a round and running out of cash — potentially millions of dollars in company value

Example from a displaced Marketing Manager:

Skill: Running paid advertising campaigns across Google and Facebook
- Who benefits: E-commerce companies doing 00K–M in annual revenue who are not yet sophisticated in their ad spend
- What outcome they get: Better return on ad spend, lower cost per acquisition, and more predictable revenue
- What it is worth: A 20% improvement in ROAS on a 0K/month ad budget = 0K/month in additional revenue

Example from a displaced IT Director:

Skill: Cloud migration and infrastructure optimization
- Who benefits: Mid-size companies still running on-premise servers who are spending too much on infrastructure
- What outcome they get: Lower hosting costs, better uptime, and the ability to scale without buying more hardware
- What it is worth: 30–50% reduction in infrastructure costs, plus avoiding 00K+ in capital expenditure on new servers

The Skill Stacking Advantage

Here is something most people miss: your most valuable offering might not be a single skill. It might be a combination of skills that, together, solve a problem nobody else can solve in quite the same way.

This is called skill stacking, and it is one of the biggest advantages displaced workers have. You have spent years (maybe decades) developing a unique combination of skills that came from your specific career path.

For example:
- A person who knows both financial modeling and SaaS metrics can help software companies with a level of specificity that a generalist financial consultant cannot.
- A person who knows both supply chain management and data analytics can help manufacturing companies optimize in ways that someone with only one of those skills cannot.
- A person who knows both sales process design and CRM administration can help companies implement systems that actually get used by the sales team — because they understand both the human and technical sides.

Think about your unique combinations. What two or three skills do you have that, combined, create something more valuable than any single one?

Your Exercise: The Skills Inventory

Set a timer for 45 minutes. This is not something to rush through. Get a piece of paper or open a spreadsheet, and create five columns: Skill, Who Benefits, Outcome, Value, and Skill Combos.

Step 1: List at least 10 skills. Go through every job you have had in the last 10–15 years. For each role, ask yourself:
- What did I actually do day to day?
- What was I known for being good at?
- What did people ask me for help with?
- What would fall apart if I was not there?
- What did I do that my replacement would struggle with?

Step 2: Fill in the Who Benefits column. For each skill, write down the type of business or person who would pay for this. Be specific. "Small businesses" is too vague. "E-commerce companies doing M–0M in revenue who are expanding into wholesale" is useful.

Step 3: Fill in the Outcome column. What specific thing improves for them because of your skill? Frame it as a result, not an activity. Not "I would audit their processes" but "their order fulfillment errors drop by 50%."

Step 4: Fill in the Value column. Put a dollar amount or time savings on it. Even rough estimates are fine. The point is to start thinking in terms of value, not hours.

Step 5: Look for Skill Combos. Review your list and identify which skills work together. Draw lines between them. Circle the combinations that feel most powerful.

What to Do If You Get Stuck

If you are struggling to list 10 skills, try these prompts:
- Look at your last three performance reviews. What was praised?
- Ask a former colleague: "What was I really good at?" Their answer might surprise you.
- Think about the problems you solved that nobody asked you to solve. Those are often your strongest skills.
- Consider what you do in your personal life that is actually a professional skill. Organizing events, managing budgets, teaching others, building systems — these all count.

What Your Completed Inventory Tells You

By the time you finish this exercise, you will have a list of 10 or more potential business ideas — each rooted in something you already know how to do. That is a much stronger starting point than trying to invent an idea from scratch.

You will also start to see patterns. Maybe most of your skills cluster around a specific industry or a specific type of problem. That is useful information — it points you toward your natural niche.

Some of your skills will have high value estimates and clear customer profiles. Others will be harder to monetize. That is normal. The goal is not to turn every skill into a business — it is to find the one or two that have the best combination of value, demand, and personal interest.

In the next chapter, we will take these skills and test whether the market actually wants what you are offering. Because having a valuable skill is step one. Confirming that people will pay for it is step two.

Key Takeaways:

• Skills are different from job titles — list the actual capabilities, not the position names
• The Skills-to-Value Framework connects each skill to who benefits, what outcome they get, and what it is worth in dollars
• Putting dollar values on your skills transforms abstract expertise into concrete business opportunities
• Skill stacking — combining two or three skills — often creates your most valuable and differentiated offering
• 10 skills = 10 potential business ideas, each grounded in something you already know how to do
• Look for patterns in your inventory: clusters point you toward your natural niche