Take Her Name Off It
How I built the positioning, voice, and website for an executive coach who’d spent thirty years making other people visible
Swap the names on most executive-coaching posts and nothing changes. You can’t tell them apart.
On the phone, Yasmeen was the most specific person I’d talked to all year.
On the page, that specificity hadn’t made it through yet.
That's where this one started.
THE SITUATION
Yasmeen Toney spent three decades leading inside complex organizations, most of them at one of the world’s largest investment firms, where she led teams of 300 or more. She left to build an executive coaching practice of her own. Now she holds an ICF credential and coaches senior leaders at large enterprises.
She needed a website that showcased her unique voice.
THE PROBLEM, STATED PLAINLY
She knew her value. It just wasn’t well articulated on a page a prospect could easily find.
Her public presence lived on LinkedIn, a platform she didn’t own, and her audience was described in broad terms. In conversation, she described the leaders she works with in vivid, particular detail. Getting that detail onto a page she controlled was the job.
Her best framework was still unwritten, because she’d never said it out loud. Thirty years of experience had produced a rich set of ideas, more than a dozen named concepts. Finding the through-lines that connected them was the work, so each idea strengthened the others.
WHAT I BUILT
A three-phase process to hone and differentiate her voice, then bring it to life on the page. Each phase was approved in writing before the next began, because a site built on unresolved messaging is an expensive placeholder.
Positioning, built entirely from her own language — including a three-word diagnostic framework she’d developed over years of practice and used in conversation but never put on the page. I played it back to her, and it became the spine.
A voice guide and content prompts — the four moves her voice actually makes, each with its common miss, and prompts built as doorways rather than templates, so her voice leads.
Four pages of copy. Drafted, approved, then re-shaped after further conversations helped her sharpen how she wanted it to sound. I rewrote all four from the ground up rather than editing toward the new register.
Prototypes before pixels. Real copy in a neutral design she could interact with, so the architecture got pressure-tested as a working site.
The build and handoff. A fully functioning website, including a domain she owns independently of whoever hosts it, and a post-launch walkthrough to teach her how to publish her own pages.
WHAT IT PRODUCED
Yasmeen’s site, yasmeentoney.com, launched with her identity written all over it. Her three-word framework, which long predates this engagement, is now the diagnostic spine of her homepage.
A newly launched site has no traffic, leads, or pipeline numbers to report. But Yasmeen and I were aligned that this was a foundation engagement. Positioning shifts will show up in engagement over six to twelve months, not weeks.
WHAT IT DEMONSTRATES
When you ask someone to describe their own voice, you get adjectives. When you put something concrete in front of them — their own words, arranged on a real page — and let them sit with it, you get authenticity. That's what the copy drafts were for: writing specific enough to show her what she actually wanted to say.
Yasmeen read the drafts out loud, stepped away for two days, then came back. She told me every pass made her think harder about how she wanted to say what she says. That process helped her realize something she couldn’t have seen at the start: she wanted language that put her reader in the driver’s seat rather than naming what was being done to them. That was a different posture, so I rewrote all four pages in it.
None of this was a client second-guessing the work. It was the process doing what it was built to do. The clearest example: her video. The first take was a script she’d written and read well. Then I said, “Don’t read it. Just say it.” The second take sounded like her.
On our last call she said that note summed up the whole website.
“His discovery process helped me sharpen my true voice. He made sure the final design showed my genius to clients and prospects.”
If your conversations are sharper than your website, that's the gap I close.
5th House Leo helps founder-led brands write the way they talk.
