One interview and one questionnaire, then roughly an hour a month. This is every question you will be asked, why it is asked, and what happens downstream when the answer is vague. Read it before you apply and you will know whether you have the material.
Opens your assistant with this page's address and a prompt asking what information a visibility engagement requires and how to prepare it.
The intake exists for one reason. Every fact captured here becomes something a machine will eventually be asked to confirm about you, and machines do not hedge. They repeat.
A slightly imprecise job title does not stay slightly imprecise. It gets written into your entity home, then into a conference bio, then into a podcast description, then into a directory that scrapes the podcast description. Six months later it is on nine surfaces and correcting it means correcting nine surfaces. The questionnaire is the last cheap moment.
There is a second reason, less comfortable to say. The intake is also where we discover whether the diagnosis was right. Occasionally somebody answers the evidence section and it becomes clear that the material we assumed existed does not. Better to find that in week two than in month eight, and it is the point at which we would rather refund the first payment than continue.
This is not administration. It is the only point in the whole engagement where being precise costs you nothing, and every later stage inherits whatever level of precision you set here.
If you read one section of this guide, read this one. Name fragmentation is the single most common reason capable people remain invisible, and it is almost always self-inflicted and completely invisible to the person doing it.
Machines resolve identity on exact character sequences. Every variant of your name risks becoming a separate weak record, and a productive career generates variants without anybody noticing.
What we ask for is every form you can remember, honestly, including the ones you are slightly embarrassed by. From that list one canonical form gets chosen, and it becomes the only form used from that day forward, without exception, including on book covers and speaker forms you fill in yourself.
Choosing the canonical form is a genuine decision rather than a formality. Usually it is the form with the most existing material behind it, not the one you prefer aesthetically. Occasionally the right answer is to keep a middle initial you have never liked, because ten years of publications carry it.
The one used by a former employer. People frequently have several years of press, talks and directory entries under a job title and a name format from a previous company, mentally file it under "old life", and never mention it. That material is often the strongest evidence available, and it is sitting there unconnected because nobody asked the question in a way that surfaced it.
Roughly two hours, recorded with your permission, and deliberately unstructured in places. The questionnaire that follows captures the facts. The interview captures the things you would never write down because they do not feel relevant.
Experience says the most useful material almost always arrives sideways. Somebody mentions in passing that they used to teach a module at a university, or that a trade magazine interviewed them years ago, or that they sat on a jury for an award. None of that appears on a CV and all of it is precisely the independent, citable evidence the whole method depends on.
Do not prepare for the interview by writing a polished summary. Come with the messy version. The polished version is what everyone already has and it is not where the useful material hides.
Roughly ninety minutes if the material is to hand. Nine sections, and every one of them exists because of something that went wrong on an earlier engagement.
| Section | What it asks | What goes wrong without it |
|---|---|---|
| Name forms | Every spelling, initial, title and variant, plus which one you want as canonical. | Four weak records instead of one strong one, and no way to tell which is being strengthened by later work. |
| Identity line | Role, organisation, location, in one plain sentence. We draft, you approve. | Every third-party bio says something slightly different, and consistency is the entire signal. |
| Dates | Founding, qualifications, publications, and date of birth where you are comfortable. | A panel with no facts in it, because there were never any citable dates to draw on. |
| Organisations | Everything you founded, lead or hold a named role at, with registration details. | The person and the company never get linked, so neither borrows credibility from the other. |
| Prior coverage | Press, podcasts, panels, awards, teaching, juries. Links where possible, approximate dates otherwise. | Months wasted pursuing new coverage while existing coverage sits unconnected. |
| Published work | Books with identifiers, papers, patents, registered designs. | The strongest available accelerator goes unused, and split-name publishing goes undetected. |
| Profiles | Every account you own, including dormant ones and ones you forgot. | An abandoned profile with a stale title quietly contradicts everything else for years. |
| Namesakes | Anyone well known sharing your name, and any confusion you have already noticed. | Effort feeds their entity instead of yours, invisibly, for months. |
| Boundaries | Anything you do not want published, connected or discussed. | Something gets syndicated that should not have been, and unwinding it is far harder than never publishing it. |
It is optional and a reasonable number of people decline, which is respected without argument. Worth knowing what the trade-off is: it is one of the few hard facts a panel can display, and its absence is a common reason a panel looks sparse next to somebody comparable. Decline it deliberately rather than by default.
This is where intake conversations most often become uncomfortable, because people arrive with a great deal of material that feels substantial and does not function as evidence. The distinction is not about quality or achievement. It is about whether somebody independent said it, in a place a machine can read.
Nothing in the left column is worthless. A strong newsletter and a well-made website are genuinely valuable and they do other jobs well. They simply cannot perform this particular job, because the whole mechanism turns on independence, and material you control is by definition not independent.
The practical consequence at intake is this: when we ask what already exists, we mean the right column. A client who answers with the left column and believes they have answered the question is a client heading for a difficult conversation in month four, so it is worth being blunt about the distinction now.
The question is never "have you published a lot". It is "has anybody else published about you". Two items in the right column beat two hundred in the left.
Clients are consistently surprised by how much attention this gets. The reason is that images in a panel are drawn from places a search engine believes are about you, and the strongest signal that several accounts describe one person is that they show the same face.
Five different photographs across five profiles is a reasonable thing for a person to do and a genuinely unhelpful thing for a machine to encounter. Each one is a slightly different piece of visual evidence, none reinforcing the others.
Worth stating both halves precisely, because the second half is the one that protects you and it is the one most suppliers leave vague.
Ask what happens if you refuse all access and simply apply changes yourself from a list. The honest answer is that it is slower and entirely workable. A supplier who says the work cannot proceed without full control of your accounts is telling you something about how they operate, and it is worth hearing.
After the intake, your involvement collapses to roughly an hour a month. It is a small commitment and it is the one everything else depends on, which is an uncomfortable combination.
The introductions line is worth dwelling on. A warm introduction to somebody who runs a relevant podcast converts at a rate a cold pitch cannot approach, and it costs you a two-line message. Clients who send three of those over a year materially shorten their own timeline, and clients who send none are relying entirely on cold outreach working.
The failure mode here is not refusal, it is drift. Nobody declines the monthly hour. They simply have a difficult quarter, and two invitations sit unanswered, and by the time anyone notices the corroboration stage has lost three months. Which is why a missed month gets flagged in writing rather than absorbed politely.
Stated here rather than buried in a contract, because a client discovering these at month six has been sold something different from what they bought.
Every item on this list exists because doing the opposite works briefly and then fails publicly, attached to your name rather than to ours.
None of this is required before applying, and doing it makes the intake faster and the diagnosis considerably more accurate. It also tells you something useful for free: if this exercise turns up almost nothing, that is itself the answer.
That is genuinely useful information and it is free. It means the honest first move is not hiring anybody. It is earning two or three independent, citable things: one podcast appearance, one industry article, one association listing. Come back afterwards. We would rather tell you that now than take a fee and tell you in month eight.
These come up at almost every intake. Better to answer them here than to have the conversation twice.
Every item on this list is a reasonable objection. Five of the six have answers that cost you nothing, and the sixth costs one conversation.
The intake is the busiest part of the engagement for you and it is followed immediately by the quietest. Worth knowing the shape so the silence does not read as inactivity.
The reference document. It is tempting to skim a summary of facts you already know, and it is the single place where an error becomes permanent. A wrong founding year, corrected in week two, costs nothing. The same error corrected in month eight means correcting it on your site, three profiles, two conference bios and a podcast description, several of which you no longer control.
Intakes vary enormously by background, and knowing which pattern you fit tells you where your own gaps probably are before you start filling anything in.
| Type | Usually strong on | Usually missing |
|---|---|---|
| Founder of a known company | Organisation records, registry filings, some trade press, a company page that names them. | Anything about the person as distinct from the business. The evidence describes a company with a person attached rather than a person who runs a company. |
| Academic or researcher | Publications with identifiers, an institutional page, conference records, co-author networks. Genuinely the strongest starting position of any group. | A canonical name form. Academic publishing generates name variants relentlessly, and initials-only bylines are common and fragmenting. |
| Author or speaker | Books with identifiers, event pages, podcast appearances. Excellent third-party material. | A connection between the work and a role. The books resolve, the person does not, because nothing states what they do when not writing. |
| Senior corporate executive | A clear title, a large recognisable employer, occasional quotes in trade press. | Anything durable that survives leaving. Almost all evidence sits on an employer's domain and vanishes on departure. |
| Independent consultant | A clear specialism, a personal site, often a strong network and real client outcomes. | Independent corroboration of any kind. This group has the most self-published material and the least third-party material, which is exactly the wrong ratio. |
The pattern worth noticing is that the group with the best marketing is frequently the group with the weakest evidence. Independent consultants often arrive with an excellent website, a substantial newsletter and years of content, and almost nothing anybody else published. Meanwhile a researcher who has never thought about visibility at all arrives with fifteen citable records and no idea they matter.
Neither position is better in principle. They simply need opposite first moves, which is why the intake asks what exists rather than what you have built.
Find your row above and look at the third column. That is almost certainly where your intake will be thin, and it is worth gathering that material before the interview rather than during it.
This guide is complete on the intake, deliberately, because a client who arrives prepared gets a better diagnosis and a faster build, and there is no advantage to anybody in keeping a questionnaire mysterious.
What is not described is what happens to the answers. How a set of scattered facts gets sequenced into an identity a machine will accept, which sources in a given field are worth approaching and in what order, how a pitch is framed so it lands, and the structural work that turns several fragments into one person. That is the part being paid for.
The test of whether a supplier is being straight with you is simple: they should tell you everything you need in order not to be taken advantage of, and keep only what is pure operational advantage. If they invert that, and hide the process while publishing the method, ask what you are actually buying.
Preparation is only worth doing if the underlying answer is yes. The companion guide covers eligibility honestly, including the cases where the correct advice is to keep your money.
Start with the free diagnosis →