About the practice, the coach, and what's deliberately not on offer.

What I don't do.

I don't do executive presence. The phrase has a coaching-niche meaning that I find unhelpful, and the work it covers is not what I'm best at. I don't do leadership development. I don't run group cohorts, I don't sell a programme with a brand name, and I don't take corporate retainers. If you're an HR director looking for a panel of vetted external coaches, I'm not on those panels.

I don't write CVs from scratch for clients. I review and edit ones you bring in. I don't promise specific outcomes. I'd be uncomfortable making the claim, and the harsh realities of the job market mean any coach who promises an outcome is, in my view, mis-selling. I don't do CV writing as a one-shot service either; see the FAQ on the home page for why.

What I do is the bits of a job search that don't reward an elite-track CV: interview rehearsal, CV editing, online profile copy, salary conversations. Most of my clients came up the long way round, and so did I.

How this practice came about.

The first story is about a working week in 2012 that did not end. I was a specialist in publishing production management. I had come in via an apprenticeship route in 2006, after evening study while working a different job, no graduate scheme, no Russell Group degree behind me. I was good at the work. The problem was not competence; the problem was that I was on track to spend the next twenty years inside weeks that did not end, and the senior people who had done that for the previous twenty looked tired in a specific way I did not want to inherit. I left the next month with the savings I had and an idea I was not sure about yet.

The second story is about being coached, badly, the year before I started this practice. Six sessions, generic advice, lots of language about transformation and self-discovery that I found embarrassing on the page and worse out loud. I came out of it more sceptical of the profession than I'd been going in. What I noticed, looking back, was that the parts of the work I'd actually liked were the bits where the coach made me describe the job I was applying for in plainer terms than I'd been using. Those bits were specific, useful, and not generic. The other bits were the generic ones I was sceptical of. I trained 13 years ago, properly, on an ICF-accredited route, with the question "can I do this without the bits I disliked?" sitting in front of me. Mostly I think I have.

The third story is shorter. I was talking to a former colleague who's also ex-publishing production management, also self-taught up to managerial level, and who'd been told by a recruiter that she was "presenting too operationally" for a role I knew she could do. I spent forty minutes on the phone with her about how to answer one specific question differently. She got the role. She didn't get it because of me; she got it because she answered the question better. But the difference between the answer she'd been giving and the answer she gave at the panel was twenty minutes of work, and somebody helping her see what the panel was actually asking. That kind of work, narrow and specific and occasionally useful, is what I do now.

The clients I work with now are mostly in sectors I did not come up in. That distance, in my experience, is part of what makes the work useful: I can read what is in the way of an interview answer or a CV line without being pulled into the sector mechanics that the client knows far better than I do. The work is about how the case gets made, not about whether I have done the same job.

I work with people in the middle of their working lives, mostly in their forties and fifties, mostly across creative industries, public sector, and technology. I'm based in London; sessions are online or in person. I'm credentialled as Professional Certified Coach; the credential dates from 2018, the practice from 2013, and the 7 years before that were in publishing production management.

Credentials and the practice in numbers.

• CredentialProfessional Certified Coach
• Awarded2018
• Coaching since2013
• Prior careerpublishing production management, 2006–2012
• Sectorscreative industries, public sector, technology
• Client count750+ people in the middle of their working lives worked with
• Formatonline or in person in London
• Engagement length8 weeks, six sessions standard

Where I work.

Sessions are held online by video call, or in person in London. The split is roughly half and half. Online clients tend to come from across the country; in-person clients are mostly from the London commuter belt, with a handful who come down for two-session intensive days when their schedule won't fit a fortnightly cadence. There is no office per se: in-person sessions happen in a quiet back-room of a working café in London that the proprietor lets me hire by the hour. It's not a posh setting. The clients who care about that are not, on the whole, the clients I'm best for.