I coach people who have run out of road with being well prepared.
Fifteen years in front of rooms that did not want to be there — boards, newsrooms, operating theatres, a few genuinely hostile town halls. What I teach is what survived contact with those rooms.
The short version
I started as a speechwriter, which is a job that teaches you very quickly that the best sentence on the page is often the worst sentence in the room. I moved into coaching because the interesting problem was never the words — it was the person deciding, in real time, whether to risk saying them.
Since 2016 I have worked with about three hundred and forty people: founders, clinicians, researchers, a surprising number of engineers who had been promoted into talking for a living.
I take a small number of private clients and run four courses a year. That is deliberate. Coaching at volume stops being coaching.
How I work
Cut before you add
Nearly every talk, email and pitch improves by removal first. We start there because it is free.
Practise under load
Calm rehearsal teaches you to perform while calm. We rehearse with interruption, doubt and time pressure.
Honest, not brutal
You will hear exactly what is not working. Delivered as something you can act on, not something to survive.
Rooms I have worked in
- Series A to C founders preparing investor and all-hands talks
- Clinical leads delivering unwelcome findings to hospital boards
- Research teams translating technical work for funders
- Newly promoted managers running their first difficult reviews
- Conference speakers with one keynote and one chance
If that sounds like the help you want, say so.
A first call costs nothing and often ends with me telling people they do not need coaching. That is a good outcome too.