How a coach with a decade of happy clients realised her message was no longer working, and how a messaging audit discovered what her audience needed to hear instead.
Pippa’s first message about working together was a lot like a lot of messages I get from people…steeped in frustration that her business didn’t fit traditional marketing “rules”.
She’d been told, by more than one person, that a mastermind needs to promise specific, tangible results. She agreed with that in principle, she said, but also “I’ll be buggered if I can articulate the results.”
A decade of happy clients and no way to say why
Pippa runs The Disobedient Business Co. with Lucy, and the Disobedient Business Mastermind is the main event. It’s for ADHD and autistic business owners who’ve been at it a while. People join and then stay. One member had been there since September 2021, and others for well over two years. Pippa knew it worked, partly because “none of the people that are in the mastermind are dickheads, and they wouldn’t stick around if we weren’t doing something right.”
The trouble was selling it. She wanted to get it back to being “an easy sell”, and she told me straight that it was “def not landing in the current marketplace at all.”
The advice she’d been given was to hang the Mastermind on one thing, so it became a sales mastermind or a launch mastermind. But that was too narrow for what the Mastermind does, and a bit disingenuous. She was stuck.
Which was why she needed me.
Five years of tweaking at the edges
She’d written the messaging a couple of years earlier, and since then she’d tinkered with different sections, sharpening and tweaking, without changing the structure underneath.
She could feel the gap, too. “We’re definitely missing the mark in terms of speaking to people the way that they need to hear things now, as opposed to maybe the way they needed to hear them in 22, 23.” She needed some kind of golden thread that would run through everything – something suited to the new context we found ourselves in in 2025 – a bin fire globally, cost of living crisis nationally, and everyone in the online business world finding selling more difficult.
Send me everything
The Messaging Reset is a week-long messaging audit for businesses whose messaging used to work and has stopped landing. I work out what’s still doing its job and what’s drifted, then map out what to say first (and who to say it to) right now, in a doc you can copy and paste straight from.
It starts with me reading everything, and I mean everything. Pippa took me at my word. She sent the website pages, her welcome email, a filtered view of every email she’d sent since April, her draft framework, onboarding answers from Mastermind members, a testimonials spreadsheet she was embarrassed about, and a brand-new doc she’d pulled together that morning.
Then we talked it through on a kickoff call, and I sorted what her people were dealing with into three groups.
- There’s their brain, and the judgment, self-doubt and shame that come from being told one-size-fits-all and finding it doesn’t fit.
- There are their ethics, and the bro marketing, manipulative tactics and toxic productivity they keep being told they need.
- And there’s the vibe they’re looking for, which is a space where they can be themselves and find people like them.
Her voice was already doing its job for all three, and that part of the Reset map simply says “Do Not Touch!” The humour, the swearing and the generosity of it all stayed exactly where they were.
What needed work was the order things were said in, and who they were said to.
Knackered, and just trying to stay upright
Pippa’s people were the same ADHD and autistic business owners, allergic to blueprints and drawn to her for the same reasons as ever. What had changed was their context.
The old messaging assumed a reader who was angry and ready to burn it all down. Five years ago they wanted to rage against the system. Now they’re knackered, and just trying to stay upright. Most had spent a lot of money on coaches and programmes, and the cost of living had made every decision feel heavier. What they wanted to know was whether this could finally work for them.
Yes, they still wanted the world and unjust systems to change. But this Mastermind couldn’t just give them that – it actually had to make their business work, too. They were in a “put your own oxygen mask on first” situation.
So the Reset moved the lead from rebellion to relief. The core shift went from “This is a space for business rule-breakers” to “This is where your business finally works, because it’s shaped around your brain, not someone else’s formula.”
What you put in place of the rulebook
The ideal Mastermind member needs to believe two things before they’ll jump in:
- “You can help me get the results I want.”
- “I won’t have to leave part of me at the door to get them.”
Everything else in the map hangs off those two lines.
There’s a new value proposition for the Mastermind, the messages to lead with and the order to use them in, a clear signal that this is for people with three or more years in business, and a sales page opener written for someone who’s tired rather than furious. There are before-and-after rewrites of her existing copy, a swipe bank of lines she could lift straight into emails and posts, and five mini case studies built from what her members had already told her.
It all arrived as a Google Doc with a video walk-through, so she could copy and paste from it rather than squint at a shiny PDF.
“Ohhh, yeah that makes sense'”
“It all makes total sense,” she wrote, “and to be honest, both comfortingly and also fucking annoyingly (on me not you), 97% of it is stuff I’ve been circling for aggggges.”
That’s the bit I hear most often after a messaging audit. Most people have been circling the answer for a while, and they need someone outside the business to point at it and say yes, that one.
After years of the industry shouting about launch numbers and revenue, she’d come to believe her clients’ results were “too squishy” to count, even though she knew how much they mattered.
So we used the implementation call for exactly that. We triaged the sales page so the new messaging could go in without a full rewrite, planned content around each part of the messaging shift, and worked through how to show results from the testimonials and feedback she already had, without sounding “bro-ey”.
Seven weeks
The last time Pippa had torn her business down to start again, her website was offline for eighteen months.
This time she rewrote the whole thing, copy and design, in seven weeks. When she got to the two pages she’d been avoiding (the Mastermind page and the homepage), she brought me back in to red-pen the first and write the second. The Mastermind page she’d drafted was already a long way from the old one. It felt like a significant shift towards what the Mastermind offers, and the struggles her audience were dealing with right now, and I didn’t change much.
If you’re feeling nosey you can check out the copy we worked on here.
What Pippa said
A few months later, Pippa joined me on an Instagram live to talk about the Reset. Without being asked, she made the case for it better than I ever have.
“Downwards of a thousand quid, I cannot think of another thing that would be better to invest in at the moment. If you are not saying the right things to the right people in the right way… you can put all the content out in the world that you like and it’s gonna be an absolute load of nonsense.””
Pippa Parfait, The Disobedient Business Co.
Circling the same answer for a while?
If your business works, your clients stay, and you still can’t quite say what you do for them.
Or selling has gotten more difficult, but you’re not sure why.
A Messaging Reset is a messaging audit that keeps what’s working, shows you what’s drifted, and gives you the words to put your messaging back where your people are.
Have a look at The Messaging Reset, or book a call and we’ll talk it through.