Great ideas
won't
sell themselves.

A tech founder came to Ellie. He had already raised $3M and was preparing for a $12M round. He was extraordinarily smart, but under pressure he came across as the opposite: so worried about saying the wrong thing that he seemed untrustworthy.

Ellie helped him bring his story to life so investors leaned in. They worked to create a clear and compelling narrative, find vocal dynamism, and — most importantly — project the power that makes people want to write checks.

He raised the $12M. Afterward he told Ellie he couldn't have done it without her — and that he still didn't entirely understand what she does, but he was very glad she does it.

TED requires speakers to memorize their talk word for word. For a Google engineer preparing his talk, that process had backfired. The more he rehearsed, the more robotic he became — and the more his natural confidence, humor, and warmth disappeared.

Ellie worked with him on presence, pacing, and how to let the talk live in his body — not just his head. The goal was what TED calls "Happy Birthday level" memorization: so deeply rehearsed that his conscious mind was freed up to actually be in the room with the audience.

The result was a speaker who could stand in front of an audience and make a carefully rehearsed talk feel completely spontaneous.

The head of sales at Business Insider had a problem: some sellers were dramatically outperforming others, and she needed to close the gap. She brought Ellie in with a specific assignment — figure out what the best sellers were doing, and teach it to everyone else.

Ellie met with the CEO and top performers, having each try to sell her. Then she did the same with the struggling sellers. The best sellers had a far more instinctive command of the brand and how to handle objections. Ellie identified the common factors, distilled them into key narrative points, and built a framework every seller could use — without locking them into a fixed script.

She taught it at the sales conference. In the months that followed, more sellers began hitting their targets.

A private equity firm engaged Ellie to prepare eight executives — including the founder — for their annual investor meeting. The challenge: highly technical language, written by lawyers, that needed to sound natural and authoritative. Several presenters were non-native English speakers. None of them were natural performers.

The engagement began as presentation coaching. Midway through, Ellie was brought in to rescue a series of executive video interviews that weren't working. She helped the team reshoot entirely, then spent an intensive day coaching all presenters the day before the conference.

The transformation surprised even the team. The firm's head of HR was the first to notice how much had shifted. Executives who walked in nervous walked out confident. One presenter summed it up afterward: "This wasn't that bad."

Coming from a room full of private equity executives, that counts as a standing ovation.