HOW I HELP
I HELP EXPERTS DISTILL WHAT THEY KNOW INTO THE REASON CLIENTS CHOOSE THEM.
I’m Ryan Rhoten, a brand strategist, author, and founder of The Distilled Brand®. My work explores how experts turn accumulated knowledge into something people can understand, recognize, and choose.
Founder of
The Distilled Brand®
Creator of
The Distilled Brand Method™
Background in operations, lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma
More isn’t always the answer.
Expertise, like complexity, accumulates. And when expertise accumllates so too do offers, explanations, and ways of doing things. Eventually, adding more makes it harder to recognize what's valuable from what's familiar.
That's my work at The Distilled Brand® starts with the decisions experts need to make about what to keep, what to leave behind, and what they want to become known for.
WHAT I’M WORKING ON NOW
UPDATED NOV 5, 2026
New Book: PROOF
My latest book was released on November 2, 2026. It's called PROOF. Distill Your Expertise Into the Reason Clients Choose You.
The book follows the journey of five clients through the distillation process and the decisions they needed to make along the way
The Undiluted Podcast
I’m developing a mix of solo episodes and conversations about the decisions, obstacles, and patterns behind expert-led businesses.
This will be my third podcast. My first two were The Brand New You Show and The Distill Brand podcast.
CPMR Faculty
I'll teach branding and messaging fundamentals built for how manufacturers sales reps win business. Specifically, how a rep firm gets known for something specific, and how to say what you do in a way manufacturers, distributors, and contractors remember. This audience interests me because reps serve multiple customers and they tend to sell on relationships, and a firm whose brand carries the same weight as its relationships is harder to replace and worth more when it comes time to sell.
AI for Experts
I'm investigating how experts can put AI to work without handing over the judgment clients hire them for, and where the line sits between the parts of the work AI should carry and the parts that have to stay theirs.
Underneath that sits a harder question about authority: AI can generate the answer but cannot stand behind it, so the work is figuring out what AI amplifies in an expert's practice, the signal or the noise, before the market gets a diluted version of them.
BOOKS
My books explore how individuals, foundes, and businesses make their expertise recognizable, from building a digital presence and reputation to distilling the knowledge behind a business that gives clients a reason to choose you.
RELEASED NOVEMBER 2026
PROOF
Distill Your Expertise Into the Reason Clients Choose You.
For experienced experts whose value gets lost in everything they know. PROOF helps you recognize what dilutes your expertise and make the decisions that turn it into the reason clients choose you.
Buy PROOF
LinkedIn Made Simple
Fat Strategies in a Thin Book. With Andy Foote.
For professionals and business owners who want LinkedIn to do more than display their résumé. Written with Andy Foote, LinkedIn Made Simple offers more than 100 practical actions to strengthen your profile, build your reputation, and connect with potential clients.
CareerKred
4 Simple Steps to Build Your Digital Brand and Boost Credibility in Your Career.
For career professionals who want their reputation to reach beyond the people they already know. CareerKred walks you through four steps to define your personal brand, build your digital presence, and make your expertise visible to people who can influence your next opportunity.
The Distilled Brand®
The Distilled Brand® is where I put this thinking to work. Through The Distilled Brand Method™, I help expert-led businesses distill their expertise into positioning, messaging, and offers, then carry that work into their market presence.
The Distilled Brand Method
This is my proprietary process to help clients articulate who they are and what they do by distilling expertise into the reason clients choose you.
The process is based on twenty-plus years of operational experience on manufacturing shop floors and in business process environments where lean manufacturing and Six Sigma techniques taught me the methodology of distillation and how to identify what's valuable in a process, from what's familiar.
The Distilled Brand Method runs in three phases, with each one producing a specific output for clients.
01 Distill
Position
We decide what your expertise should be known for. You leave with a Position that everything downstream has to answer to.
02 Develop
Perception
We turn that decision into a message and voice the market can receive. You leave with language that sounds like you on your best day.
03 Deploy
Presence
We install it across the assets your market touches. You leave with a signal that holds in the same shape wherever buyers find you.
The StraightUp Newsletter
A weekly note on expertise, business decisions, and the things that dilute both. Lessons from client work, ideas I’m testing, and something useful to put to work.
Here's a recent newsletter article on:
How to become undiluted.
