The X is the point

Every portfolio professional knows the pause.

Someone asks what you do, and you watch yourself decide which version to give them.

You have three or four answers ready. The short one that is not really true, the long one that makes their eyes go, and the safe one that describes about a fifth of your working life.

Whichever you pick, you come away feeling you have misrepresented yourself, and the advice you get afterwards is always the same. Niche down. Pick a lane. People need to know what you are.

I went portfolio in 2001, at thirty-nine, and I took that advice seriously for longer than I should have. It kept not working. It took me a while to understand why.

The advice is right for a product and wrong for a person

Niching is excellent counsel if you are selling a repeatable thing to a defined market. It is terrible counsel if the thing you are selling is judgement, because judgement is not made of one lane. It is made of having sat in several and knowing how they connect.

When I advise a founder now, the useful part is rarely the founder experience alone. It is that I have also been the investor deciding whether to back someone like them, and the non-executive asking the awkward question, and the operator who had to actually deliver it afterwards. The value is in the crossing points. Niche me down to one and you have bought a narrower, less useful person.

This is why my business partner Mike Richardson and I built PXO Exchange around a single idea: PXO, where the X is the point. The undefinable multitude of what a portfolio professional does is not the awkward part of the story. It is the asset.

But an uncurated X really is just chaos

I want to be straight about this, because the encouraging version of this article would stop at the paragraph above and it would be doing you no favours.

Breadth is only an asset when it is curated. I have met plenty of portfolio professionals whose X is genuinely incoherent: six unrelated engagements taken because each one was available, no throughline, no compounding, exhausting to run and impossible to describe because there is honestly nothing there to describe. That person does not have a portfolio. They have a collection of jobs and no strategy; telling them their breadth is beautiful is unkind.

The difference between the two is not the number of things. It is whether the things feed each other.

Three tests for whether your X is curated

Does each piece make another piece better? The forum work should sharpen the advisory work. The advisory work should furnish the speaking. The speaking should fill the forums. If an engagement sits entirely on its own and touches nothing else, it is not part of a portfolio, it is a side job. It may still be worth keeping. Just be honest that it is being paid for in time rather than earning its place.

Could you lose one and stay standing? Genuine portfolios are resilient, and that resilience is a large part of why we do this. If one client leaving would take out half your income, you have not built a portfolio, you have built a job with extra admin and no employment rights.

Is it aligned to your version of success, or someone else’s? This is the one that decides whether the portfolio life is any good to be in. Most people arrive here having escaped a definition of success they did not choose, and then quietly rebuild the same definition out of new materials: more clients, bigger names, a fuller diary. If your portfolio is optimised for a scoreboard you do not actually care about, curating it will not help, because you are curating towards the wrong thing.

What to say at the party

You still need an answer. Mine is not a job title, it is a sentence about the crossing points:

“I have sat in every seat around the table, and I help people who are in one of them get where they are going.”

It is short, it is true, and it invites the next question rather than closing it down.

The trick is that it does not defend the breadth or apologise for it. It just treats the breadth as normal, because among people who live this way, it is.

The X is not the bit you have to explain away before you get to the point. It is the point.

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