Hi Reader, One of my favorite moments in client work is when we realize we've been trying to solve the wrong problem. That happened recently with a client who owns a college admissions consulting business. She came to me because she wanted to create a thought leadership brand alongside her business—something that would speak more directly to parents and support them through the college application process. It seemed straightforward enough. The longer we talked, the more I realized we weren't...

Hi Reader, One of my favorite expressions is this: You can't read the label when you live inside the bottle. It's why writing your own website is so difficult. It's also why AI can only take you so far. Neither one can solve the biggest challenge: proximity. When you've spent years building a business, it's hard to tell the difference between what everybody knows and what only you know. The assumptions become invisible. The language feels obvious. The stories you've told a hundred times no...

Hi Reader, Most people who reach out to me think they have a writing problem. Their website doesn't sound like them anymore. Their LinkedIn profile feels dated. They keep rewriting the same paragraph, convinced the next version will finally be the one that clicks. Sometimes they're right. More often, the website is the symptom. It's revealing that the business has changed, and the language hasn't caught up yet. That's why I almost never start by talking about copy. I'm much more interested in...