How I helped an ex-Microsoft director build real authority outside her company β and land a book deal with ATD.
Visible expertise, invisible authority. Here's how we closed the gap β and what came back through the door.
When she came to me she'd just left Microsoft. Years there as a director. The kind of track record most people spend a whole career trying to build.
And she was starting again. Her own company this time, in leadership and team development, in a market where publicly almost nobody knew her yet.
Her LinkedIn was fine. Good profile, strong connections. But all of it pointed back at the company she was leaving, not the one she was building. Inside Microsoft, everyone knew what she was worth. Outside it, as a founder, she was starting from zero.
That's the gap nobody warns you about. You spend years becoming the person one building trusts completely. Then you walk out the door, and the market has no idea who you are.
The first thing we did wasn't content. It was positioning.
Positioning
"Ex-Microsoft director who coaches leaders" describes a few hundred people. So we got specific about who she's actually for: the senior HR or people leader quietly carrying a whole company's culture on their back. No real support from the top. Watching leadership get harder as teams went remote and hybrid β and their middle managers struggle the most. She'd lived that exact problem inside Microsoft, as a director, at scale. That became the spine of everything.
The channel
Then the harder question: how does someone who hates being on camera build visibility? Most advice says push through it β film the videos anyway, be consistent. That's how you sound like everyone else and quietly quit in six weeks. So we didn't. Alone in front of a lens, she's stiff. In a real conversation, she's magnetic. So we built around that: a podcast with other coaches and leaders, LinkedIn as home base, and a steady run of writing on leadership, in her voice, aimed squarely at the people who needed to find her.
They came to her.
ATD β the Association for Talent Development, the professional body for exactly her field β read her writing and reached out.
An ex-Microsoft director, barely a year out of the building, brand new as a founder β and the leading body in her field came to her about a book.
It didn't stop there. She's been invited to speak at ATD events β invited, not a paid slot she bought her way into β and her articles now run in ATD's newsletter. The leading body in her field doesn't just know her; it puts her in front of its own audience. She stopped competing for attention and started getting chosen.
And the channel we were nervous about β built around a woman who told me flat out she hated being on camera β turned into the engine. In her words, she "did not mean to start a podcast." Six months in: hundreds of downloads, real relationships with coaches she'd never have met, and β the line that matters β people reaching out saying they needed help, and becoming clients.
When Kate and I started this, we were solving for one problem: I hated talking to myself on camera. Then people started reaching out saying they needed help β and became clients. All in six months.
What she lacked was a way for the market to see it without becoming someone she's not. That's the gap I build across β positioning, the right channel for the actual person, and a system that runs after I step out. If you've built something real and the market still doesn't know it, that's the conversation worth having.
Start the conversation β