Marcus Straub
A coaching philosophy that needed room to breathe, published as a full feature rather than a profile blurb.
Read the published articleBackground
Marcus works with leaders on the harder half of personal change: the part after someone has understood their own patterns and still has to do something about them. It is a genuinely distinctive position in a field crowded with people selling insight as though insight were the finish line.
The brief
The problem with a position like that is it does not compress. A one-line bio cannot carry it, and a short news item would have flattened it into the same language every other coach uses. The piece needed enough space to lay out an actual argument, and it needed to sound like him rather than like marketing copy written about him.
How we approached it
We built the feature around the idea itself, that self-awareness is a starting point rather than a destination, and let the rest follow from there. Marcus set the pace on timing rather than working to our schedule, and reviewed the draft before anything went live.
What it does now
The feature is live on NY Weekly and is a permanent, indexed article. It surfaces when someone searches his name, and it gives him something substantive to point to that explains how he actually works, rather than asking a prospective client to take his word for it.
In their own words
“From beginning to end communication was great! My wants and needs were met, my preferences were not disregarded, they were flexible with my timing and the article turned out very well. I would work with SAM and the Publisive team again.”
What a feature does, and what it does not
A published article is not a lead generation channel and we will not pretend otherwise. What it does is change what exists when someone looks you up: a real, dated, indexed piece on a publication, written about your work, that keeps surfacing long after it ran.
That matters at the moment someone is deciding whether to take you seriously. It does not replace having something worth writing about.
Your story, properly told
Tell us what you do and what you want to be known for. You approve every word before anything goes live.