Building a Business and Career on Who You Actually Are
Most of us have been handed a deficit model at some point in our lives, perhaps repeatedly. It's a list of what we can’t do. What we struggle with. What needs to be fixed or managed. Educational assessments, performance reviews, feedback sessions all tend to start from the same place:
"Here is what’s wrong with you, now go fix it."
I recently shared a webinar that goes in the opposite direction – we need to focus on our strengths. (Members can see that webinar here.
We can start with what we are genuinely excellent at, map those strengths to the businesses or career we’re building, and give ourselves precise language to design work that actually fits who we are. What follows is that conversation, expanded into an article, using an assessment instrument I’ve relied on since 2018: BestWork DATA.
Why Strengths First Isn’t Just a Feel-Good Idea
I want to be clear about something up front: This isn’t a motivational exercise. Leading with strengths is a business strategy, and it rests on a few principles that hold up whether you’re Autistic or not — though I think they matter especially for those of us who are Autistic.
The first principle is that people perform best within their strengths. When we’re doing something we’re genuinely good at, it comes easily. It’s enjoyable. You can relax into it. Research consistently shows that sustained high performance comes from operating primarily within our strengths, not from endlessly grinding away at our weaknesses.
Here’s an analogy I like to use: Imagine a basketball player who is 5’2” trying to become a great rebounder. She can practice all she wants and pick up marginal improvement, but if someone 7 feet tall steps onto the court, that person will out-rebound her every time without much effort.
Meanwhile, that towering player may not be able to dribble and control the ball at speed the way a smaller, quicker player can. Neither player is deficient — they’re built for different roles, and both roles matter.
When we try to force ourselves to perform well in areas that are genuinely not our strengths, it costs an enormous amount of energy. The smart move isn’t to keep compensating — it’s to figure out where our real strengths lie, invest our time there, and find other ways to handle the rest: delegation, partnership, a different business model, outsourcing.
This is especially essential for those of us who are Autistic. Many of us have spent years in workplaces and in society generally trying to adapt, trying to become what we were told we needed to be. But when we’re building our own business or designing our own career, we finally have the opportunity to design it around how we actually function — not around what we’ve been told we’re supposed to do.
There’s a third benefit that doesn’t get talked about enough: Knowing our strengths gives us language. Objective strengths data gives us words to describe the value we bring, grounded in evidence rather than self-promotion. I’ve been asked plenty of times over the years to take on highly detailed work. I am not a detail-oriented person — I’m wired for strategy and the big picture. Now, instead of forcing my way through work that drains me, I can say plainly: this isn’t my strength, but I know someone who’s great at it, and I’m happy to connect you.
What BestWork DATA Actually Measures
BestWork DATA is a 25-minute online instrument. It looks at your hard-wired traits and abilities — not skills you’ve learned to compensate with over time, but the underlying wiring itself. It measures two things: personality traits and cognitive processing style.
The personality side is built on the Big Five model, which is the most validated personality framework used across behavioral science. These traits are stable over time and across situations. They don’t shift with your mood on a given day — they’re linked directly to who you are. Each trait is mapped as a spectrum between two poles, and neither pole is right or wrong. Both ends of every spectrum come with genuine strengths.
The cognitive processing section is a bit more unusual: 60 questions in 15 minutes, timed and intentionally challenging. That works out to four questions a minute, which doesn’t leave much room for painstaking, get-every-detail-right processing. If you need to answer everything correctly, you likely won’t finish all 60 — and that’s by design.
This is not a measure of intelligence It’s not an IQ test, though I’ve had people ask, frustrated, what their “score” was, assuming a lower processing speed meant lower intelligence. It doesn’t. Someone who processes information more slowly isn’t less capable — they simply have a different processing style, with different strengths attached to it.
Faster processing — which is how I’m wired — is excellent for rapid decision-making, high-volume environments, and quick adaptation. It can also mean moving faster than the people around you are ready to follow. Slower processing is often associated with thoroughness, depth of analysis, and getting things right the first time. It indicates careful, deliberate thinking.
And here’s the note I most want Autistic readers to sit with: Many Autistic people process information differently than neurotypical norms, and I think that’s a genuinely good thing. The assessment measures your actual pattern — not whether it matches some neurotypical standard.
Report One: The Entrepreneurial Role Chart
The first of three sample reports I want to walk through is the Entrepreneurial Role Chart. It’s a fast, visual way to see how your wiring maps to eight key roles in a business, arranged as four spectrums:
Sales vs. Non-Sales — Are you wired for sales, or does your business model need to work around that, whether through a strong digital presence or delegating the sales function entirely?
Management vs. Non-Management — Are you built to lead and manage others, or for individual expert work? This connects to what I’ve called the “management tax” in other ABN sessions: if you’re not wired to engage with people constantly, you may need to structure your business so you aren’t managing a team at all. When I left my corporate career, I built my own practice as a solopreneur specifically so I could put my “people energy” into clients rather than employees.
Strategic Vision vs. Immediate Focus — Are you a long-range thinker, or a day-to-day operator? Every business needs both, and most of us need to do a bit of each — but knowing which side you lean toward tells you where to focus your own time and where to bring in support.
Creative vs. Non-Creative — Are you an idea generator or an implementer? Creative thinkers often need execution partners to turn ideas into finished products.
There are four more dimensions that follow the same logic: Consistent vs. Exception-Making (do you follow proven procedures, or evaluate each situation individually?), Detail-Oriented vs. Big-Picture, Negotiating vs. Non-Negotiating (is the confrontational dynamic of negotiation energizing or draining?), and People
Facing vs. Non-People-Facing — On my own report, the dot lands toward sales, management, strategic vision, slightly creative, slightly toward exception-making, away from detail-oriented work, toward negotiating, and toward non-people-facing work. The farther the dot sits toward one end, the more strongly that trait is expressed. My alignment with strategic vision is very high, while my creative lean is closer to the middle — a modest strength rather than a defining one.
This report gives insight, not prescription. It shows you where your wiring sits; it doesn’t tell you what to do about it. I score well on management traits — assertiveness, decision-making, processing and delivering information — and yet because managing people costs me real energy, I still had to design my business around minimizing how much of that I do day to day. The data informs the decision. It doesn’t make the decision for you.
Report Two: The Business Owner’s Strengths Study
(excerpt)
This is the most comprehensive of the three reports, and it’s written in narrative form rather than a chart. It covers your strategic focus, your sales adaptability and closing ability, how you interact with a team, your consistency in customer service, your energy and clarity in marketing, your attention to financial procedures and deadlines, your planning horizon, and your openness to coaching.
The report doesn’t just list traits — it tells you what they mean in practice. Mine says I learn very quickly and can project business strategy well into the future, sometimes with more clarity on long-range plans than short-term ones. That’s a genuine strength. But it also notes I may have difficulty communicating that same clarity to people more focused on tactical or immediate concerns. That’s not a flaw to fix — it’s a design consideration.
The report frames its findings in two categories: genuine strengths and design opportunities. I want to be precise about that second phrase, because it matters. These are not weaknesses. They’re areas where a different kind of design response is called for.
On the strengths side, mine highlighted my ability to project long-range strategy, my willingness to ask for the sale (a vital trait for sales success), my adaptability in recognizing different customers’ needs, and my openness and coachability — being comfortable enough with who I am to admit where I am not as strong.
On the design-opportunity side, my report flagged my preference for minimal interaction with others, noting that this can be perceived by employees as indifference or unfriendliness. This is the double empathy problem in action — we don’t automatically know what someone else is thinking, and they don’t automatically know what we’re thinking either. The design response isn’t to force myself into more small talk. It’s to build in regular, intentional check-ins and actively invite feedback rather than waiting for it to surface.
The report was similarly direct about my financial procedures. I don’t manage the day-to-day details of money well — I’ll often let bookkeeping pile up until year-end. Its advice wasn’t vague encouragement to “Do better.” It told me plainly: Invest time in getting this right, or outsource it to someone genuinely strong in that area.
On planning, the report offered a line I still think about: “The ability to shoot rattlesnakes is not nearly as prized as the ability to avoid rattlesnakes.” I don’t love the metaphor, but the point lands — better to design around risk in advance than manage it once it becomes a crisis. It suggested building an informal advisory board to bounce ideas off, which I’ve done, just not formally.
Report Three: Persuasive Sales
(excerpt)
I spent a year in a sales role in the 1980s, long before I’d heard of BestWork, and was told almost daily that I wasn’t cutting it. Years later I learned I had actually performed slightly above average for a new salesperson. Sales wasn’t a natural strength, and the missing piece was networking — the report made that immediately clear once I finally took it.
This report divides sales behaviors into two categories: critical job behaviors, without which success is unlikely, and important job behaviors, which shape performance but can’t compensate for missing critical ones. My critical behaviors were strong: moving prospects toward a decision and closing, handling both product and complex solution sales, and controlling the structure of a sales conversation.
Where I’m weaker is the important-but-not-critical category. My presentations are more factual than enthusiastic — I lay out the information and let it speak for itself. My prospecting leans toward research rather than networking events. And I talk faster than average, so I have to consciously slow down so I’m not communicating past the point where people can follow.
Here, too, the report separated genuine strengths from design opportunities. Closing and solution selling are real strengths — directness in asking for the sale, and diagnosing a client’s actual needs and matching them to what I offer. Prospecting and presentation style are the design opportunities. Rather than forcing myself into networking events I find draining, the response is to lean into channels that fit how I actually connect: research-based outreach, a strong online presence, and communities like ABN itself, which function as prospecting channels built around how many Autistic entrepreneurs naturally connect. For presentations, the fix is structural — visual aids, clear written formats, and leave-behind materials that do some of the persuasive work I’m not going to do through enthusiasm alone.
Putting It Together: Authentic Business Design
Once you understand your strengths, there are three moves worth making.
First, build your value proposition around your genuine strengths. The most sustainable, differentiated value propositions come from what you’re actually excellent at, not a generic list of services. My own strengths center on insight, strategy, and quickly grasping a situation. Early on, people often asked me to build websites, manage advertising, or track analytics. I could do those things, but they weren’t my greatest strengths, so over time I moved fully into coaching and consulting — the work where my strengths actually live.
Second, design your business model to minimize your energy drains. Anything you’re doing outside your strengths costs more energy than it should. Design around that — through partnership, delegation, outsourcing, or restructuring how the work gets done — and you free up capacity for the work that actually energizes you, which is where your best results come from.
Third, use your strengths language in how you talk about yourself professionally. I tell new clients directly: I’m good at processing information quickly, making decisions, and developing insights that move a business forward. That’s not self-promotion — it’s an objective description backed by data, and there’s something reassuring about that. It isn’t my opinion or anyone else’s opinion; it’s what the assessment shows.
This connects directly to other work we’ve done at ABN. When we talked about self, roles, and expectations, strengths were part of that picture. When we talked about values as navigation points, strengths and values were linked there too. And when we spent six weeks on growth mindset, the point was never to ignore our challenges — it’s to start from an accurate picture of what’s actually there, rather than a deficit model, so we can build on what’s real rather than fixate on what’s missing.
An Open Offer to ABN Members
You have always had these strengths. The assessment doesn’t create them — it names them, and naming them precisely is the first step toward building something that actually fits, because they are the raw material of work that is genuinely yours.
I believe in this instrument enough that I want every ABN member to have access to it. If you’d like to complete the full 25-minute BestWork DATA assessment, I’ll make sure you receive your Job Strengths report automatically, and I’ll personally send you your Entrepreneurial Role Chart and Business Owner’s Strengths Study. I’m also happy to sit down and walk through your results with you.
To get started, reach out through the contact form on our website or email hello@autisticbusinessnetwork.com, and I’ll send you a link to set up your own BestWork account, along with everything you need to complete it.