Mindset

Stop Selling Your Product. Start Selling How You Think.

July 22, 2026 · Bradley Jacobs

A detailed account of a conversation with Simon Bowen, founder of The Models Method and creator of the Genius Model.

For nearly thirty years, Simon Bowen has helped founders and consultants do the single hardest thing in business: get out of their own heads. His work spans 30 countries and clients as far apart as defense contractors and one-on-one coaches, and it rests on a belief that should make every fractional executive sit up straight - that thinking is the most undervalued skill in business, and most experts are sitting on more insight than they'll ever know what to do with.

What follows is a detailed account of that conversation. If you sell your expertise for a living - advisory, consulting, fractional leadership - this one is worth reading slowly.

The problem isn't your product. It's that nobody can see how you think.

Bowen's origin story is unglamorous and instructive. He grew up in tiny Western Australian farming towns where directions were drawn with a stick in the dirt. He later designed electronic components, where an idea only became real after it passed through a circuit diagram you could trace, test, and fix. Then came 25 years facilitating billion-dollar projects - stadiums, defense deployments, hospital budgets - rooms full of people who didn't like each other but had to agree on something by lunchtime.

The through-line: every idea lives in the gap between concept and reality, and that gap almost always gets filled with a drawing. "When you draw, you draw people in," he says. His whole career has been about making invisible thinking visible so that other people can rally around it.

For the fractional executive, this reframes a familiar frustration. If the market doesn't understand what you do, that's rarely a quality problem or a value problem. It's a communication problem. You're trying to sell the product when the market is trying to buy your depth of thinking.

Every business does two things: make me safe, help me win.

Bowen argues that beneath every transaction, the customer wants two things - to be made safe, and to be helped to win. Nobody says the second part out loud, but nobody wants an average result either. The deep thinking behind how you deliver those two things is what he calls your company genius. And that genius is the real product.

Here's the trap he wants you to avoid: uniqueness. We live in a sea of "we're unique" claims, and AI is flooding it further. Feed a large language model your business and it hands back something that sounds fresh - but it only sounds fresh because you haven't heard it before, not because it's deep. "That's not depth of thinking, that's laziness of thinking," Bowen says. "You've made the headline your genius." The market doesn't reward uniqueness. It rewards completeness - the sense that you've thought this through more thoroughly than anyone else the buyer has met.

The 80/20 rule you've been getting wrong.

One of the sharpest reframes in the conversation is about imposter syndrome. Most experts secretly worry that 80% of what they do is just what everybody else does - best-in-breed tools, standard methods, borrowed frameworks. So they stay quiet about it.

Bowen flips this. Your genius is three moves: you curate the 80% that already exists, you create the 20% that comes from your own lens of perspective, and then you integrate it all into one solution. The 20% - shaped by whatever you personally wrestled with on the way here - is what changes how you see the other 80%.

He illustrates it with a laundromat. Anyone can buy reliable machines and take coins. But a founder who grew up poor, who learned that clean clothes and a tidy home were a form of dignity, and who noticed that people are stuck there for an hour anyway, builds something different: cheese and crackers, a fridge, a clean bench, a way to pay without hunting for coins, a social event instead of a chore. The machines aren't the secret. The thinking behind them is. And that thinking scales across the whole country.

Believability is the new bottleneck.

We now live, Bowen says, in a believability crisis - an era where you can't tell whether the dog video is real or AI, and skepticism is the default. His answer leans on biology: most of the signals we take in arrive through the eyes, and much of the brain's reflex response is wired straight to the optic nerve. An animal hears a noise and goes on alert, but only runs when it sees the danger.

So when people can literally see your thinking - laid out as an organized visual model showing the curated, the created, and how you integrated both - something shifts. They call you "switched on." No one says that about a laundromat. They say it about the thinking behind one. Seeing your thinking is what makes you believable.

Stack the three together and you have a sale: character makes you trustworthy, consistency makes you reliable, and visible thinking makes you believable. Trust, reliance, belief. That's the complex sale, and Bowen's blunt correction to a decade of "start with why" is this - purpose doesn't make the sale, purpose makes you interesting. People don't buy what you do until they know that they are the reason you do it.

Find the ache.

The most emotionally resonant stretch of the conversation is about depth. Bowen maps three levels of any customer problem. The known problem is what they'll say out loud - "I have acne," or "we need more sales." The hidden problem is the one they know but won't admit, usually wrapped in shame - a bad diet, or a team that's genuinely bad at selling. And beneath both sits the ache: the deeply felt thing they can't even name.

He tells the story of his cousin, Australia's top-voted non-surgical dermal therapist, who charges many times the going rate and never argues about price. She takes the client past the acne, past the habits, down to the ache - I'm judged the moment I walk into a room - and then names the future they actually want: skin they love living in. By the time she explains that it's not her equipment but how she uses it that gets results, the price has become irrelevant. Same tools as everyone else. Different lens. Different outcome.

The ache is the hardest thing to find, Bowen says, and - surprisingly - the founder is often the worst at finding it. Like a magician who can no longer be amazed by magic, you've become so fluent in your own solution that you've forgotten the ache that started it. Recovering it is most of the work.

The takeaway that stings a little.

Bowen's closing warning is aimed straight at anyone tempted by the "I built a business in three hours with AI" dream. AI can't read a dysregulated room, can't sense that the real problem is that everyone hates the CEO, can't give someone a hug, and - crucially - can't be held accountable. The value of what you sell is proportional to the effort and risk behind it and the ongoing quality of thinking that sustains it. Don't shortchange the market with effort-free money.

For the fractional executive competing in a world where anyone can spin up a product overnight, this is the whole game. The product is commoditizing. You are not. Your story, your lens, your ache, your thinking - made visible - is the only thing that can't be copied in an afternoon.

Where to go next

You can find Simon Bowen on LinkedIn or at modelsmethod.com, where there's a full breakdown of the Genius Model plus tools and video content. He's genuinely open to email at simon@modelsmethod.com - mention Founder Unfiltered so he knows where you came from.

And if this hit a nerve - if you know your thinking is your real product but can't get the market to see it - that's exactly the gap Mylance helps fractional executives close on LinkedIn. Book a free positioning session at mylance.co and let's make your thinking visible.

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