Thot: How To Build Your Influence
What if building influence isn’t about better pitching, but better follow-through?
I’m reading the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, a cautionary tale of influence gone bad, which got me thinking about the links between action, influence and credibility.
Most founders obsess over perfecting their pitch while neglecting something more powerful: the story their actions tell over time. Your actions act like liquidity for your business, flowing through networks, accelerating or stalling your momentum based on how "what you do" aligns with "what you say". Venture investor and Substack author Earnest Sweat calls this "narrative liquidity".
Think of narrative liquidity as cash flow for influence. When your story and actions sync up, relationships become resources, conversations transform into capital, and credibility becomes your competitive advantage. When they drift apart, everything slows down.
Over the years, I’ve observed three distinct states:
When your actions consistently fall short of your story, your credibility bleeds, and your trust level drops until there’s nothing left to draw on. Hype has caused too many promising ventures to stall, not from bad ideas, but from broken promises.
When actions merely match your story, you maintain your position. But with markets demanding constant evolution, just delivering is not enough. When the gap between what you promise and what you deliver lacks tension, you will simply fade away.
When the impact of your actions consistently outpaces your story, trust compounds. You build a reservoir of influence that becomes your buffer against uncertainty and your accelerator towards opportunity.
A venture in my portfolio developed a tool to help clients improve billing accuracy and accelerate transactions in an industry suffering multimillion-dollar losses from hard-to-find calculation errors. They compete directly against large multinationals with huge brand equity that have dominated the market for decades, despite leaving customers dissatisfied.
Although this self-funded startup launched during the dark days of the pandemic, they have been steadily growing by overdelivering to increasingly larger and influential clients. Now the biggest customers in their market actively invite them to submit proposals, which they consistently win, leaving the incumbents wondering what happened.
No expensive digital marketing, splashy branding or spammy growth hacking. Just doing what they say they will do, overdelivering with stellar quality, remarkable results and consistent follow-up, making their clients and all their stakeholders look good. They’re transforming their narrative liquidity surplus into becoming the go-to expert in their market, yielding a consistent 40% CAGR and a healthy positive cash flow.
Ask yourself: Are your daily actions adding to or draining your reservoir of influence? What story are your actions telling today?
Davender’s passion is to guide innovative entrepreneurs in developing the clarity, commitment, confidence and courage to enter, engage and lead their markets in an unpredictable world by thinking strategically and acting tactically. Find out more at https://www.davender.com and https://linkedin.com/in/coachdavender .