The situation
Someone recommends you, and then they look you up and decide whether they can put their own name behind you.
Most of your work arrives by introduction, which is exactly why the site matters more than it appears to. The referral gets your name into the room. What happens next is a quiet search, by someone who will have to justify the choice to whoever else is involved, a client, a committee, or the person paying. You are not there for it.
Where it fails
This is not where they find you. It is where they check you.
The introduction has already happened. Someone credible has said your name in a meeting, and the person who has to act on it is looking you up before they reply. They find one page saying you help organisations navigate change, a photo from a 2019 conference, and no way to tell whether you work with forty people or four thousand. The recommendation was warm. The page isn’t.
And the loss isn’t only the engagement that never starts. It’s the one that starts at the wrong number. A buyer who can’t tell whether they’re hiring extra capacity or real judgement will assume the cheaper option, and the conversation opens there. You spend the first meeting correcting a position your own site handed them for free.
And you know it’s thin. People hire you for judgement, and judgement doesn’t photograph. What you can show is the finished thing, which carries the client’s name rather than yours, never the argument that got it approved or the twenty worse versions you talked them out of. So you send the profile instead, or a deck, or nothing, and hope the referral is strong enough to carry itself.
Everything that would prove it is filed under someone else’s name.
How it works
Every stage ends with something in your hands, and a decision that is yours.
Four stages, in that order. You can stop after any one of them and keep what it produced. That includes the language for the work you cannot name, which is worth having whoever ends up building the site.
- 01
The first conversation
You write, through the contact page or straight to my inbox, and it helps to send whatever you currently send in place of the site, whether that is a profile, a deck or nothing at all. I read it myself, and nothing drops into an address nobody owns. If what you need is not what I do, I say so and point you somewhere better.
You keepA reply from me, not from an autoresponder.
- 02
Who actually has to be convinced
We start by understanding how the work really arrives: who introduces you, what they say when they do, and who that person then has to persuade. Then we work out what can be said about the engagements you can’t name, because a confidentiality clause covers the client, not the shape of the problem or what changed by the end.
You keepA written brief, and language for the work you cannot name.
- 03
Design and build
Strategy, design and build stay in one pair of hands. The site is built for how yours is actually used, which is forwarded: someone passes on the link, and the person opening it has three minutes and no context. What you take on, what you’ve changed before and the level you work at are clear at that moment, without anyone having to write to you first.
You keepA staging link that holds up when it reaches someone who has never heard of you.
- 04
Launch, and what you keep
It goes live in your accounts: domain, hosting and the words. There is upkeep, though. The most persuasive engagement is always the most recent one, and a site describing what you were doing two years ago quietly argues that you have been quiet. Keeping it current is either you, once I have shown you how, or me on a monthly basis.
You keepEvery account in your name, and nothing in it only I can open.
You are never asked to commit to a stage before you have seen the one before it.