Excavation
Two long interviews and a document review. We are looking for the specific thing you know that very few people know — not your CV. Most positioning fails because it was written from a CV.
Practice area 01
Personal branding for founders and executives
For founders and C-suite operators who have built something significant and are illegible outside their own industry. We construct a public identity precise enough to survive diligence and durable enough to hold page one.
The problem
An empty record is not a neutral record.
When a sovereign fund analyst, a journalist or a prospective co-investor searches your name and finds a LinkedIn profile and four directory scrapes, they do not conclude that you are private. They conclude that there is nothing to find — and then they form a view from whatever else is on the page.
Founders routinely discover this at the worst possible moment: mid-diligence, mid-raise, or the week a journalist decides to write about their sector.
What we build
- A positioning line you can defend in a boardroom — not a tagline
- An owned site at your own name, structured for search and for answer engines
- A rewritten professional profile stating a position, not a job history
- Bylined commentary in titles outside your own industry press
- Speaking and award placements that generate independent coverage
- Consistent structured data so machines describe you the way you describe yourself
- A press kit and approved biography so nobody improvises one for you
Method
How the build runs
Architecture
One narrative, three supporting themes, and the evidence for each. Everything published for the next twelve months maps to this. Consistency is what search rewards and what people remember.
Estate
The owned properties: personal domain, profiles, structured data, media kit. This is the ground you actually control, and the foundation everything else pushes traffic and authority toward.
Earned
Placement of commentary, interviews and analysis in titles your counterparties read. Editors take arguments, not announcements — so we bring arguments.
Compounding
Each earned placement is cited, syndicated and linked back to owned assets. Six months in, page one starts to hold itself without further spend.
Defence
Every asset built here is also a defensive asset. If something breaks later, you already own the top of the page — which is most of the battle.
Timelines
What to expect, honestly
Personal-name search is usually low competition, which is good news. The constraint is not difficulty — it is publication cadence and the time editors take.
Weeks 1–4
Positioning and estate
Interviews, narrative, owned site live, profiles rewritten, structured data in place. Page one usually starts moving here.
Months 2–4
First earned placements
Two to four substantive placements. Video and speaking assets begin claiming their own results.
Months 5–9
Consolidation
Owned and earned assets occupy the majority of page one. Answer engines start reflecting your language rather than a directory's.
Ongoing
Maintenance
Roughly one substantive publication a month keeps it there. Left alone entirely, it decays over about eighteen months.
Common questions
Straight answers
Is this just PR with a different name?
PR sells attention. This sells legibility. A PR firm counts placements; we count what is on page one for your name in twelve months, whether the description of you is accurate in an AI answer, and whether the record holds under adversarial reading. Earned media is one instrument among several.
I would rather stay low profile. Is this for me?
Often, yes — with a different brief. A low-profile principal still needs an accurate, controlled top of page one; they simply do not need volume. We build a small, authoritative footprint rather than a loud one. Deliberate quiet is a position. Absence is not.
Do you write in my voice or yours?
Yours. Everything is drafted from your interviews and your arguments and approved by you before it goes anywhere. Commentary that does not sound like the person named on it gets found out quickly, usually by the one journalist you most wanted to impress.
How does this help with fundraising or diligence?
Diligence teams search founders. What they find shapes the questions they ask and the discount they apply. A clean, substantive record does not close a round on its own, but an alarming or empty one absolutely slows it down.
Related
Thought leadership & media
The earned-media engine that gives the build its authority.
Read moreWikipedia & knowledge panel
How notability and structured data feed the panel and AI answers.
Read moreOnline reputation management
What to do when page one already says something you would rather it did not.
Read morePrivate enquiry
Build the record before you need it.
The cheapest time to construct authority is a year before anyone is looking for a reason to doubt you.