How this Career & Leadership Coach got clarity on her offerings through a home page project
“Elena wasn’t just asking me questions to get the information she needed, they were also questions that helped me get information that I needed… Our work together is serving me beyond the website — it's serving how I think about my business.”
- Anna Hess, Career & Leadership Coach
THE CHALLENGE
A year after launching her business, Anna’s services had evolved — but her messaging had stayed the same
Anna Hess is a Career & Leadership Coach who helps her clients move forward in their careers with intention and clarity. She’s been coaching for years, and she’s damn good at it. I know this first-hand because I’ve been a client of hers, twice. (That’s how we met!)
About a year after going full-time in her coaching business, she felt like it was the right time for her to invest in working with a copywriter. “Because by that point, I’d gathered a lot of data about my business and how I wanted to present it. And you can be more intentional when you have data,” says Anna. “So it felt like a good time to pause, reflect, and do more intentional building.”
Not to mention, being a solopreneur has its limits. “Being alone in any endeavor has natural limitations,” says Anna. “So, I want to leverage experts when I can.”
She was proud of the website she initially created, but it hadn’t evolved very much over the previous year — while she and her services had. When she first launched her business, she marketed herself as a Career Coach, but not as a Leadership Coach. Leadership coaching didn’t have much presence on her website for a few reasons.
First, the service wasn’t on her radar when she first launched the site: “I wasn't talking about leadership coaching because it just wasn't a part of my original business plan” Anna explains.
Second, as it usually goes for solopreneurs, she simply had more urgent things to do. “It's hard to keep all of these things top of mind at once. I'm dealing with a client load, I have follow-ups, I have business admin, I have to do my business development — all of which is so creative and generative. So, figuring out how to talk about leadership coaching kind of just fell by the wayside.”
And third, incorporating leadership coaching into her messaging was complicated, because it involved talking to two different audiences at once. “I wanted to speak to both audiences in one breath, at any given time. I wanted everything to apply to everyone, all in one sentence. And that copy was hard for me to craft. Because if you want to speak to everyone, you have to keep it broad. Broadness is not effective. So I felt like I had to choose one or the other.”
But in the end, Anna didn't have to choose. We dove into a collaborative process to figure out what needed to be incorporated into her new messaging, how to talk to two audiences on a page, and — most importantly — why that was worth doing for the business she wants to build.
“It felt like a good time to pause, reflect, and do more intentional building for this business.”
- Anna
THE PROCESS
One great conversation, talking to two audiences on a page, and web copy written with “intentionality”
Every web copy process looks a little different depending on the scope of the project. Anna’s process looked like this:
Anna filled out a Discovery Workbook (a simple questionnaire in a Google Doc), so I could learn more about her story and the purpose behind her business.
I reviewed her customer data (things her clients have said in writing or verbally), to incorporate how Anna’s clients talk about their experiences in their own words.
Anna and I had a great conversation.
I wrote a draft. Anna reviewed it. We made a few edits, and she was good to go.
Anna implemented the copy on her own. You can read it here.
Anna says the part of the project that had the biggest impact was step #3: Our great conversation.
While she knew coming into our collaboration that leadership coaching wasn’t present on her website, neither of us knew how central it would become to our project.
Anna laughs as she summarizes the beginning of our conversation: “I said, ‘I'm a Career Coach and that's what I tell people I do. I'm also a Leadership Coach, but really I don't tell people I do that.’ And Elena said, ‘wait a tick…’”
Anna says that having a collaborator to process with can make all the difference. “I hadn't taken the time to pause, reflect, and realize: This has become a great part of my business — how do I want to make sure it continues to be a great part of my business?” she says.
“Elena was able to really quickly dial into something that I was avoiding. Having a partner who invited me to pause and reflect on that helped me see that I wasn't touching marketing leadership coaching at all — partly because I just haven't had the energy and bandwidth to do it, and partly because I didn't know how to talk about it — and that talking about it would be really powerful for me, because I love this part of my life.”
So, we identified that leadership coaching had to be a part of her messaging — the what. Then we got to the trickier part — the how. When it came to her concerns about how to talk to two audiences at once, the solution was simpler than she’d thought.
“I didn't have experience speaking to multiple audiences at once. I probably would have figured out some kind of solution eventually, but it would have taken me a lot longer to do, and I don't know if I would have felt as confident about the end result,” says Anna. “It was good to have Elena in my corner to see that and say, ‘Oh, that's not rocket science. We can do that.’”
Lots of my clients have more than one audience to talk to at a time. Sometimes that’s because, like Anna, they have more than one line of service, and those different offerings serve different groups of people with different purposes. Other times, the people they serve are in one group, while the people making the buying decisions are in another group (e.g. nonprofit program participants vs. donors; teachers using EdTech software vs. their school principals).
Regardless of who the different audiences are, in the context of a website, the simplest solution is often to put those messages in different places, and make it really clear who we’re talking to in each spot. In Anna’s words: “Elena helped me pause and consider, what if we use two different sentences to talk to those two different people? And it just made it so much simpler.”
Here’s an example of how we segmented different messages for different audiences at the top of Anna’s home page.
Here’s an inside peek of the Google Doc comment that I left Anna at the top of her first draft.
In retrospect, Anna frames our project around one central question: “What's important for you to understand about your business so that you can communicate it to others? That messaging belongs on a home page.”
Anna says that going through this process helped her realize that her website was capable of more than just establishing credibility. “The thing that I found most exciting about this project was the idea of messaging,” she says. “Before, I had always thought about my website as saying: ‘I'm real. This is valid. Don't worry, real people have worked with me. And here's how to get in touch with me if you want to.’ And all of those things are still really important,” she explains.
“But now, I also see a website as an opportunity to use language with incredible intentionality. And I like to take language very seriously. But I didn't really know how to harness it. Elena helped me harness it.”
About the process overall, Anna says: “I felt extremely supported the whole time. I felt pushed in a productive way. I love that Elena was willing to pause, ask clarifying questions, and reflect back what she heard for confirmation, and that she was able to provide her own additional commentary, rooted in her expertise, to help me understand how someone might receive what I was saying. I don’t have a copy or marketing background, and it was so cool to have a consultant in those fields. As a solopreneur, it’s so helpful to partner with others, and I loved partnering with Elena.”
“Now, I see a website as an opportunity to use language with incredible intentionality. And I like to take language very seriously. But I just didn't really know how to really harness it. Elena helped me harness it.”
- Anna
THE RESULTS
A home page that says what it needs to say, and a new perspective on the business Anna is building
Anna says the most impactful result of the project actually came through the process, not the end product. (As these things usually go!) We figured out what her new messaging needed to incorporate — leadership coaching. We figured out how we were going to do this — simple reader segmentation. But the most important part came earlier: the why.
Leadership coaching is only an important part of Anna’s messaging because it’s an important part of her business.
“It was so clear from our conversation how much I wanted to make sure that leadership coaching continued for me. It was something that I hadn't originally intended to center in my work, but it’s not something that I want to be fleeting. It’s something I want to maintain and continue. We talked about the virtuous cycle of the two lines of service — career helps leadership, leadership helps career. Both are a part of maintaining my business, and a part of satisfying me professionally. The most important learning for me was that each service challenges and nourishes me in different ways,” says Anna.
And while the natures and challenges of career and leadership coaching are different, in both services, Anna gets to do the work that drives her: helping people strengthen their self-awareness and intentionality, so they can make decisions that are aligned with who they are.
“I didn't have the capacity to really examine it on my own. So, just giving it the time and space to be true, I realized how important it was. Now, that virtuous cycle of career and leadership coaching is in my mind almost all the time,” says Anna.
“Elena is really good at asking questions without judgment or agenda. It felt more like we were thinking it through together. I felt very supported the whole time, both in terms of her wanting to do justice by my services through language, and her encouragement when maybe I felt a little daunted,” Anna recalls. “It was so fun, too. Beyond supportive, it felt exciting, hopeful, energized, generative, and impactful. It felt future-thinking in a way that was really cool.”
Even when talking about the end product, Anna emphasizes the process: “The end product was so great because the process was so collaborative. People can check out my website to understand my business because I now have a website that communicates my business. But the process was even more powerful than the end product for me.”
“Elena wasn’t just asking me questions to get the information she needed, they were also questions that helped me get information that I needed… Our work together is serving me beyond the website — it's serving how I think about my business.”
Because we did all this process work before drafting, the home page copy itself was easy to write. We did one round of minimal edits, and Anna was all set to implement her new copy on her own.
“Reading my new home page copy was exhilarating!” says Anna. “I felt like someone was able to distill the most poignant takeaways from my clients and make sense of them for me. My new messaging makes me feel more confident in what I’m presenting to the world.”
To confirm her newfound clarity and confidence even further, when Anna shared her site re-launch on LinkedIn, someone in her network commented: “Brings so much clarity for the client as to whether you’re the right fit for what they need.”
“If you’re considering hiring Elena… Do it!!!!” says Anna. “She will help you understand your business better, improve your confidence, and articulate your offerings in ways that you can’t because you’re so deep in it. I just loved this process. I genuinely looked forward to our meetings. I felt so supported and in good hands. Elena was communicative, collaborative, and receptive.”
The feeling is mutual. When I worked with Anna as her client, I always felt seen and heard. Before we met, I’d never worked with a coach before, and because I’m slightly allergic to people telling me what to do, I was a little skeptical. But nothing about the work Anna does is directive. In sessions, she spends most of her time listening and asking questions; and then, only when she’s gathered enough information, she reflects what you’re saying back at you — usually, something you already knew deep down.
What Anna and I discovered together is that, on a big-picture level, our work follows some similar processes. Because whether you’re writing your website, picking your next career move, or trying to grow as a leader, the same is true: looking at your data and talking things through with a professional who listens without judgment can help you make intentional choices — the kind of choices that help you build what you truly want to build.
“My new messaging makes me feel more confident in what I’m presenting to the world.”
- Anna
“Elena will help you understand your business better, improve your confidence, and articulate your offerings in ways that you can’t because you’re so deep in it.”
Sound good? Let’s talk!
