Can a 90-Minute Conversation Really Change How Your Business Is Understood?
I can understand why someone might be skeptical.
When Deb Coviello became a client a few years ago, my approach wasn’t nearly as well known. She took a leap of faith. Could the answers really emerge from our conversations? Sure, the experience might be therapeutic. But could the insights actually change how she built her business?
As it turned out, they could inform virtually every part of it.
Dr. Kirsten Viola Harrison faced a different challenge. Her accomplishments told one story, but it was no longer the story she wanted to tell. Could we find the thread connecting her experience to the audiences she wanted to reach?
We did. And the resulting work extended into her voice, audiences and opportunities for monetization.
Then there’s Jordan Brady, whose work with me has spanned more than a decade, multiple companies and new chapters in his career.
Because the work doesn’t stand still. Businesses mature. Ambitions change. What made sense five years ago may no longer describe what you’re becoming.
That’s when stewardship of the signal matters.
And through all those changes, the work still begins the same way.
Not with prompts. With conversations.
How about your story? You’ve built something that matters to you. Along the way, you’ve grown, your ambitions have changed, and the work has taken on dimensions you couldn’t have anticipated when you started.
You know how it all fits together.
But does anybody else?
That’s where I come in. We take a fresh look at what you’ve built, what it’s become, and what people are actually seeing.
And I tell you we can make considerable progress in a 90-minute conversation.
Really, Hersh?
You bet your ass.
Not because I have a magic question. It’s because sometimes what takes years to build takes an outside perspective to recognize.
Ninety minutes won’t build your next business, rewrite your website, create your speaking platform, or make the market suddenly understand you.
But it can be enough time to identify something that has been missing from all those efforts: a strategic center that allows the different parts of your work to make sense together.
Consider a few situations I’ve encountered.
A psychologist with 35 years of experience and a new chapter ahead
Consider Dr. Harrison, who had spent more than three decades working in trauma psychology.
She was moving toward a different professional life as an author and speaker, with a book built around an unexpected relationship with one individual.
There was plenty to talk about. Her clinical expertise. The book. Her experience. Her ambitions.
We could have started developing speaking topics, polishing her biography, or deciding which audiences she should pursue.
But the work revealed something larger within the story.
The relationship at the center of her book opened onto a broader conversation about community, healing, reintegration and resilience.
Suddenly, the pieces belonged together.
Her years as a psychologist weren’t simply credentials supporting a new career. They gave substance to the ideas she wanted to bring into the world.
And the book wasn’t simply a book she hoped to promote. It was one expression of a much larger body of thinking.
From that strategic center, we developed the positioning and architecture for speaking, organizational audiences, messaging and her public platforms.
The conversation established the direction. The subsequent work gave that direction a way to travel.
An AI pioneer with more credentials than most people know what to do with
Another client was already an accomplished inventor, entrepreneur, futurist and keynote speaker.
Credibility wasn’t in short supply.
But an audience encountering his work could easily see a collection of impressive credentials without understanding the larger idea connecting them.
We looked at what his expertise actually represented.
AI and innovation were central, of course. But so were adaptability, creativity, leadership, resilience and the ability of human beings to remain effective amid rapid change.
That led us to a larger territory: Human Effectiveness in the Age of AI.
AI was the subject people associated with him. Human effectiveness was the larger conversation he could lead.
Notice what happened there.
We didn’t take AI away from an AI pioneer.
We established what his authority in AI made him uniquely qualified to talk about.
That distinction gave us a way to organize his speaking, media presence, website, LinkedIn and thought leadership.
Instead of asking every platform to present another list of accomplishments, we could give those accomplishments a common purpose.
Again, the initial strategic decisions informed a much larger body of work.
When the founder and the company have different jobs to do
Here’s a situation that comes up in different forms.
A founder spends years building a company. Along the way, they develop expertise, relationships, ideas and ambitions that extend well beyond the business they originally started.
Meanwhile, the company has grown. It has customers, a team, its own reputation and opportunities that don’t necessarily depend on the founder being in every room.
So now what?
Should the founder’s public identity revolve around the company? Should the company be the primary expression of the founder’s thinking? Or have they reached a point where each needs a distinct identity?
And how do you make those identities reinforce each other rather than compete for attention?
There’s no universal answer.
But there is a decision to be made.
Until it’s made, you can have a perfectly good website, a compelling founder bio, an active LinkedIn presence and plenty of marketing activity, with no clear understanding of how the pieces fit together.
That’s the kind of question we can get to the heart of in an Alignment conversation.
Not by deciding which logo goes where, but by establishing what the founder should represent, what the company should represent, and how each contributes to the larger picture.
The architecture that follows gives those decisions a practical expression.
So what actually happens in those 90 minutes?
We examine what’s been built, what’s changing, how the different pieces relate, and what the people you’re trying to reach need to understand.
I ask questions. I challenge assumptions. Sometimes I notice a connection that’s been hiding in plain sight.
We work toward decisions about the larger idea, the intended audience understanding, and what must remain true as the business evolves.
The conversation is the beginning, not the entire deliverable. I take what we’ve uncovered and develop it into a strategic brief that identifies the decisions, direction and implications for what comes next.
Depending on the engagement, we may go further, developing the messaging, architecture and practical guidance needed to carry those decisions across websites, speaking, media, content, products and other parts of the business.
The point is that the work has a center.
Without one, you can spend an extraordinary amount of money improving individual pieces that still don’t add up to the understanding you want people to have.
And with one, the next decision becomes easier to make.
You can look at a proposed campaign, partnership, speaking opportunity or website revision and ask whether it strengthens the understanding you’re trying to establish.
That’s a useful thing to have.
The question behind the question
When someone asks whether 90 minutes can really make a difference, I think there’s another question underneath:
I’ve been working on this for years. What could you possibly see that I haven’t?
Plenty, potentially.
Not because I know your business better than you do. Because I don’t.
But I’m not carrying all the history that makes everything seem connected to you. I can encounter your work more like your audience does.
And that difference in perspective can be revealing.
Want to see for yourself?
Ask three people who know your work, but aren’t involved in building it, to describe what you do, who it’s for, and why someone would choose you.
Don’t explain. Don’t correct them. Just listen.
Where do their answers differ from what you intended?
That’s where the interesting work begins.
The conversation creates the unlock. The work that follows puts it to work.
That’s the distinction between Authority Alignment and the Architecture we build from it.
Curious what people are actually understanding about your work?
If what you’ve built and how people perceive it aren’t quite lining up, let’s take a look.