I started in social media management. Back when companies thought Facebook pages were the future of B2B. I figured out pretty quickly that the platform didn’t matter. What mattered was whether people trusted you enough to listen.

Over the years, I moved from managing channels to training the people behind them. That shift changed everything. The real leverage wasn’t in algorithms or content calendars. It was in people.

Today I run Just Connecting with Richard van der Blom. Between us, we’ve trained over 300,000 professionals in more than 1,000 companies. Siemens. Capgemini. Mercedes-Benz. Nestlé. PwC. Deloitte. The names are big. But the work is always the same: helping smart people become visible.

Along the way, I developed frameworks for three things that keep showing up in every engagement. How experts build authority. How companies create cultures where people actually want to show up. And how sales teams earn trust instead of burning it.

I didn’t plan for those three areas to connect. They just did. Every time I worked on one, it pointed back to the other two. Authority without culture creates lone wolves. Culture without revenue loses funding. Revenue without authority is a race to the bottom.