Sarra Richmond / The Ghost / The Post Mortem
4 likes. 2 of them from your own team.
You are the person they bring into the room when it matters. 20 years of judgement, and it shows within about 90 seconds of meeting you.
Then you post, and it reads like every other marketer. Not wrong. Not embarrassing. Just indistinguishable.
So the warm referral looks you up at 11pm, reads 3 posts, and finds nothing that could only have come from you. They do not tell you that is what happened. The deal simply goes quiet.
The Post Mortem is a paid diagnostic. 90 minutes of me picking at how you think, plus everything you have written, and at the end of it you get the precise sentence where you stop sounding like yourself, and what is underneath it.
Book the Post Mortem£799 + VAT. 90 minutes, then a pack. No commitment to anything afterwards.
Her ability to capture a brand's voice in compelling and captivating copy is inhuman.Lea Turner · Founder, The HoLT
Where it went
Nobody took your voice. It was notched down.
Not in one go. By a boss in 2009, a brand guide, a compliance team, a colleague who said "can we soften that", and then 20 years of doing it to yourself before anyone had to ask.
The result is a way of writing where "professional" means whoever trained you last. It produces content that sounds like a building society brochure with better line breaks. Nobody is proud of it. Nobody remembers it. Nobody reads it twice. Everybody keeps making it, because it is safe.
That used to be survivable. It is not any more. AI has made acceptable infinite and free, so acceptable is now worth nothing. The only thing with any signal left in it is the sentence a machine could not have produced and a competitor would not have risked.
You do not have a voice problem. You have a self problem. You only know the polished version, because that is the one that got rewarded.
The frame
You have 3 voices. You have only ever been allowed one.
The lock-in voice
The one you hear when you read to yourself, or when you are sitting thinking. Nobody has ever had access to it. It is the rawest thing you own and nobody has ever taught you how to use it.
The taught voice
Built on top, starting young. Don't say that. We don't use that word. Then school teaches you to think and write one particular way regardless of how you actually operate. Then work teaches you to be professional. By your mid-20s the first voice is buried.
The third voice
What comes back when you take the rawness of the first one, work out what your buyers actually need in order to trust somebody, and build the overlap. Not you performing. You, aimed.
Your third voice is not in a document. It is in the sentence you are slightly scared to say out loud. The audit is how we find it.
Somebody who has been through it
She has a name for it too.
How it runs
What actually happens.
90 minutes, no preamble
No brief. No research. No questions sent ahead for you to prepare answers to. I ask you the same 4 questions across 90 minutes in slightly different clothes. Do you notice. Do you answer the same way. Do you get irritated. Where are you consistent and where do you drift. I am reading your language, your reasoning and your reactions at the same time, and there are layers to how you communicate that you have no idea are there.
Then I read everything you have written
Read your posts aloud and the energy drops at a particular sentence. That is nearly always the line where you swapped your own phrasing for the professional version. The hedge is the tell. I mark all of them and show you the pattern, which is usually a good deal older than you think. Send your customer support emails too if you have them, because support teams write more honestly than marketing teams, for the simple reason that nobody ever handed them a voice guide.
You start sending voice notes
Light homework, and deliberately spoken rather than written. The intricacies live in how you actually say a thing, not in how you would type it once you had tidied it up. Most people find this the easiest part and then cannot stop.
You get the pack
Your voice profile, your buyers and how they actually communicate, and enough concrete direction to change what you publish on Monday. Written to be used, not admired. Clients tend to print it.
"In less than an hour, she had me, and my tone, down to a T. The pack she created was so good I printed it out and still refer back to it."Amy Ho · Finance transformation
What you walk away with
The pack.
- Your voice profile: how you actually communicate, in detail
- Your ICP, and how they communicate
- Where the two overlap, which is where your third voice lives
- The specific sentences where you stop sounding like you
- The pattern underneath them, and roughly when it was installed
- How to optimise your LinkedIn profile off the back of it
- How I would write for you, if you ever wanted that
- A couple of sample posts, so you can hear it
Enough to get you going, whether or not you ever speak to me again.
Who books this
3 kinds of person, usually.
The agency founder
You sell marketing and your own feed is a ghost town. It is not lost on you. It is not lost on your prospects either.
The finance or accountancy principal
Best year the firm has had and no way of saying so that does not feel like boasting or a press release. So you say nothing.
The recent spinner-out
20 years of reputation, all of it attached to a letterhead you no longer have. Building a name from zero, in public, at 45.
UK, mostly 35 to 55, firms up to around 200 people. People who get referred rather than retained, and who would quite like that to stop being luck.
What you are actually buying
You are not paying for words.
Nobody has ever got rich buying 4 posts a week. What this buys you is recognition, and recognition behaves differently from content.
You walk into a networking room and a good portion of it already knows who you are, what you do, how you speak and how you think. You have been dripping into their heads for months without meeting them. So the conversation starts 3 steps further along than it used to, and the deals get easier rather than louder.
That is what you are paying for. The posts are just the delivery mechanism.
The price
One number. No stages.
90 minutes of being properly interrogated, everything you have written read properly, and a pack you will actually use. Paid before we start.
There is no upsell built into it and no obligation at the end. If the audit is all you ever buy from me, it was still worth doing, and you will have the pack either way.
If you want more afterwards
2 doors. Both real.
Plenty of people take the pack and run with it themselves. If you would rather not, there are 2 ways forward and I will tell you honestly which one fits.
I hold the pen
Ongoing ghostwriting. You send a voice note between meetings and finished work comes back sounding like you. No reader should be able to tell I was there. That is the entire job.
I build you the machine
A voice system, built on your third voice and handed over with the keys in your hands. For people who want to write it themselves and stop sounding like the brand guide while they do it.
Why me specifically
I built the machine that flattened people.
25 years writing copy. 19 of them inside one company, where they gave me a plaque for what I now call head of beige. I am not fucking proud of it.
My job was to make people sound professional. Brand guides. Compliance sign-off. The careful softening of every interesting edge, notch by notch, by sodding notch. I was extremely good at it, which is the part that took me longest to admit.
Then I walked out, sat at a kitchen table, and started building the opposite. I have ghostwritten for major brands and major influencers, under contracts I will not break for the sake of a LinkedIn anecdote. Across 710 posts on my own feed, the writing that cost me something to publish runs at 5 to 7 times my baseline. The safe, educational stuff sits at 0.87.
I do not tell you that as a brag. I tell you because the data points the same way every time. The person beats the product.