10 months of hard work.
One placement that changed everything.

The situation before

Jo Hermon spent two decades in consumer telecoms. Senior roles. P&L ownership at Virgin Media. Large-scale teams. A career that covered the full customer lifecycle - acquisition, engagement, retention - at a level most people in that market never reach.

She left employment to go independent. By her own admission, she is risk-averse. Stepping out of a safe corporate career was the biggest risk she had ever taken. And for the first ten months, it felt like it.

She had the knowledge. She had the CV. What she did not have was a system. She had been attending webinars, watching content, trying to piece things together on her own. She could feel what was missing but could not see how to fix it. She described the experience herself: one day feeling like she was getting somewhere, the next day spinning again. The pattern repeated.

“I feel like I’m, I feel like one day I’m there and the next I’m spinning again. I’ve stepped out of the safe game and tried to do something. I genuinely want this to work. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into it. I’m just not quite getting there.”

When she got on a qualifying call with Dan, she did not have the cash to join the programme upfront. She asked for a deferred payment arrangement - paying from client revenue once it came in. Dan said yes. That decision mattered more than either of them knew at the time.

The work

Jo joined in March 2025. The programme started, as it always does, with ICP. For Jo this was harder than most. Twenty years of expertise across an entire customer lifecycle, across multiple company types and stages, meant she had multiple plausible ICPs and could not easily choose between them. The risk of being too broad was real. So was the risk of niching so narrowly she cut herself off from the conversations she was already having.

Dan worked with her on the framing: her edge was not a single segment. It was the rare ability to see the whole lifecycle in one view - something most specialists could not offer. The niche was not an industry. It was a problem. Companies that were not acquiring enough customers, or not keeping the ones they had long enough to monetise properly. That language shift - from her expertise to their pain - changed how she talked about what she did.

The profile work followed: banner, headline, about section. Dan reviewed her LinkedIn directly on the qualifying call and gave her the honest version. The banner was not working. The headline had too much in it. The social proof buried in the about section was invisible. She had never once received a message through LinkedIn from a prospective client. That was the number that told the real story.

Alongside the ICP and profile, there were limiting beliefs to work through. Not unusual for someone who had spent two decades succeeding inside a corporate structure and was now trying to create demand from nothing. Dan named them directly in the qualifying call. Jo did not disagree.

She kept showing up. Through the sessions on profile, network, outreach, content, and sales confidence. Through the moments of feeling behind. Through the weeks where nothing seemed to be moving. She kept doing the work.

The placement

In June 2025, four months after joining the programme, Jo secured her first fractional placement. A six-month UK engagement, delivered through a boutique consulting firm, as an interim MD-level hire for a European company expanding their UK operation.

The role was genuine seniority. She was responsible for P&L management, people leadership, and building the commercial pipeline. She was not a contractor filling a seat. She was the operator running the function while the company worked out its permanent structure.

By September - midway through the engagement - she was already grooming the Sales Director to step into the MD role permanently. She described it herself: doing exactly what she said she would do, in the time she said she would do it. That was the brief. She delivered it.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to have this opportunity. I will continue to work with Dan to build onto the foundations that have been laid to ensure the success started continues. Massive thanks Dan.”

What came after

Jo finished the engagement in December 2025 with glowing reviews. By January 2026 she had two significant opportunities in pipeline: a transformation project for a UAE-based company - her first engagement outside telecoms and outside the UK - and a second via an associate model with a boutique consultancy, a telco transformation in Malaysia.

She was using AI tooling confidently across her client work, recording discovery interviews, managing project context across multiple threads, building the infrastructure of a properly run consulting practice. She was thinking about case studies, testimonials, what the next phase of growth looked like.

None of that was where she started. At the start she could not afford the programme. She was spinning. She had never had a single client message her through LinkedIn. She was risk-averse and knew it.

The change was not sudden. It was accumulated. Four months of structure and consistency after ten months of trying to do it alone. That is the honest version of the story.

Who this is for

Jo’s story is for everyone who sees themselves in the spinning. The people who have been at this for months, who know what they are capable of, who have watched enough content and attended enough webinars to understand what should be happening, but who cannot seem to get it to click into place.

It is also for the people who are being honest with themselves about their limiting beliefs - about whether they are really cut out for this, whether the risk was the right call, whether they have what it takes to create demand rather than wait for a job offer.

The answer, in Jo’s case, was yes. But the answer only became visible when the spinning stopped and the structure started. That is what the programme does. It does not make the work easier. It makes the right work visible.

“I didn’t just feel more confident about fractional work - I now have a clear mental model for how to position myself, scope engagements, price my value, and lead conversations with authority. The structure removed ambiguity, and that clarity translated directly into confidence when speaking to prospects and peers.”