Mikaela Hardiman

LinkedIn post — published format

We lost a deal because our onboarding took 11 days.

Competitor's took 3.

Same product. Similar price. Completely different first impression.

We'd spent months building features we were convinced buyers wanted. Turns out what they actually wanted — before any of that — was to see value before they had to justify the purchase to their CFO.

Reasonable, in hindsight.

So we stripped onboarding back. One clear outcome in the first session instead of a grand tour of everything we'd built. Time-to-value dropped to 4 days. First-90-day churn dropped 30%.

The lesson wasn't really about onboarding.

It was about remembering that "good" looks completely different from your customer's seat than it does from yours. And that the gap between those two perspectives is usually where you're losing deals you thought you'd won.

Opens with a loss, not a win — which is what earns the read. The numbers are specific enough to feel true. "Reasonable, in hindsight" does tonal work — it's self-aware without being self-flagellating. Written to generate comments from founders who've had the same experience.

LinkedIn post — published format

The most expensive thing in most professional services firms isn't bad work.

It's exceptional work that no one outside the building knows about.

You can be genuinely outstanding at what you do and still lose to someone who's merely competent — but significantly better at showing up in the right conversations at the right time.

Content isn't about broadcasting into the void and hoping someone relevant happens to be listening. It's about being findable — and credible — at the exact moment a buyer is ready to make a decision.

Here's the part most firms miss: high-ticket buyers don't move quickly. They watch. They read. They quietly form opinions over months before they reach out to anyone.

The question isn't whether your work is good enough.

It's whether the right people can see it clearly enough to choose you before they've even spoken to you.

Written to resonate with senior practitioners who know they're good at the work but haven't cracked how to make that visible. "Exceptional work that no one outside the building knows about" names a problem the audience has but hasn't articulated. Ends on a question rather than a CTA so it reads as insight, not sales.

Subject · Preview

Your security stack has blind spots. Here's where.

It's not the tools. It's how they talk to each other.

Email body

Most security tools are doing their job.

The problem is they're not doing it together.

That gap — between tools that work individually and tools that work as a system — is exactly where threats slip through undetected. Not because of weak coverage. Because of weak connective tissue.

In 45 minutes, we'll show you where mid-sized organisations are most exposed, how to cut alert fatigue without cutting corners on visibility, and what stronger endpoint protection actually looks like in practice.

No theory. No sales pitch dressed as a webinar. Just the stuff your team can actually use.

→ Save your seat

Subject line does two jobs: identifies the problem (blind spots) and promises a specific answer (here's where). The "connective tissue" framing in the body is sticky — it's a fresh metaphor for a problem IT managers know exists but usually hear described in jargon. Registers are earned, not assumed.

Headline · Subhead

Stop reconciling. Start strategising.

Automate your month-end close and reclaim 20+ hours every cycle.

Body + CTA

Month-end close shouldn't feel like trench warfare.

If your finance team is still buried in manual reconciliation, chasing down errors, and producing reports that are outdated by the time anyone reads them — that's not a people problem. That's a systems problem.

Our platform automates the repetitive work so your team can focus on the decisions that actually require a human brain. What that looks like in practice: 40% fewer manual errors, faster reporting cycles that leadership actually trusts, audit readiness without the last-minute scramble, and room to scale without adding headcount.

Your team didn't get into finance to spend their days reconciling spreadsheets.

Let's give them their time back.

→ Book a demo

"Trench warfare" is specific enough to be funny and accurate enough to be true — which is the combination that earns a scroll. The closing line reframes the CTA as a gift to the team rather than a vendor commitment. Objection handling (scale without headcount) built into the benefit list rather than called out separately.

Instagram caption — Medellín

Medellín was supposed to be a two-week stop. That was four months ago.

I've tried to explain it to people back home and I genuinely can't. It's not the weather (though it's 24 degrees every day and I will never recover from that). It's not the food, or the coffee, or the city that just casually climbs a mountain. It's the way it makes you feel like you're exactly where you're supposed to be, which is a very annoying thing to feel when you have a flight booked.

Full breakdown in bio — where to stay, what to eat, what nobody tells you before you go. Save this if you're planning a trip. You'll need it.

Opens with a feeling, earns the practical plug through the story first. "A very annoying thing to feel when you have a flight booked" is the line that gets screenshotted. The CTA is integrated, not tacked on — saves the post, follows the account, clicks the link. One caption, three outcomes.

Blog intro — "What nobody tells you about Colombia"

Every travel guide will tell you about the weather (perfect), the coffee (life-changing), and the safety situation (more nuanced than the headlines suggest). None of them will tell you that you'll spend the first three days mildly overwhelmed and the next three weeks mildly devastated that you have to leave.

This is the guide I wish I'd had before I went. The honest version, not the itinerary-optimised one. The one that tells you why two weeks isn't enough, what the food actually tastes like beyond "amazing," and the single decision I made on day four that completely changed the trip.

Hooks on the gap between what travel content promises and what the experience actually is. Specific enough to feel credible, curious enough to keep reading. Written to rank for long-tail travel intent keywords while being genuinely worth reading — SEO and editorial don't have to fight.

Case study snapshot

A mid-sized healthcare provider came to us with a problem that sounded operational but was really strategic: their billing systems were fragmented, their data was inconsistent, and by the time reporting reached leadership, the decisions it needed to inform had already been made.

After implementing the platform, reconciliation time dropped by 35%. Reporting accuracy improved within the first quarter. And leadership got something they hadn't had in years — visibility into what was actually happening, in time to do something about it.

Complex problem. Clean solution. Numbers that speak for themselves.

The problem description does emotional work before the solution appears. "The decisions it needed to inform had already been made" is the line that makes a finance director or operations lead say "yes, that's us." The closing line is a positioning statement disguised as a summary.

Brand voice guide extract

Voice pillars: Direct (clarity over complication), Practical (every message has a purpose), Human (we talk to people, not at them), Commercial (benefits before features, always).

Not: "Our solution leverages advanced integrations to streamline complex workflows across your organisation's existing infrastructure."

Instead: "Your tools finally work together — so your team can too."

The before/after is the most instructive part of any voice guide. "Leverages advanced integrations" is the exact sentence this company was writing before we got involved. Naming the specific failure mode is more useful than describing the aspiration.