Stories from the work

Great in a room, uneasy on camera

One of the agency's most valuable experts was a semi-retired specialist in complex federal retirement and premium-pay law, which was exactly what her audience needed to understand. For decades she had been excellent in front of a live room: reading the audience, connecting, adjusting in real time. But asked to record that same material online, everything felt wrong. She was talking to a blank screen, with no faces to read and no nods to go on. Despite a lifetime of expertise, she honestly wondered whether she could do it. And it mattered that she could, because the people on the other end were public-sector workers making once-in-a-lifetime decisions about a multi-decade career. She had to get it right.

Coaching first, recording second

We didn't rush, and the camera didn't come first. Each session opened with conversation, a check-in, a little icebreaking, a walk through the technology so nothing felt foreign. Then came unlimited retakes and permission to make as many mistakes as she needed, with no pressure. After years of voice work myself, I know how hard it is to sound natural when the mic is live and you are trying to sound a certain way instead of simply being yourself. So we made room for that. Some sessions felt more like therapy than production, and that was what she needed. Session by session, what made her great in person started coming through on screen, on her terms.

She asked for more

She went from anxious to genuinely loving the process, so much so that she asked to keep going beyond the original scope. Two more comprehensive series followed that same year. Knowledge that had only ever existed in a live conference room now lived as a complete, multi-module training library the whole agency could reach on demand.

Two experts, two temperaments

She was not the only voice in this work. Another expert, just as accomplished, approached it from the opposite direction. Where the first held herself to near-perfection and felt every imperfect take, this one was calm and self-assured, knew exactly what she wanted, and knew when a take was good enough to move on. The difference showed in the final product: the one who let go sounded the most natural. I learned something from that. I can shape the pacing and the polish, but the best recordings happen when the expert stops performing and just talks, the way you would to a friend across a table. Two people chatting, with no slides, and the expertise comes through on its own.

Rigor at scale

These two were part of a much larger initiative. Across the whole program: 32 recording sessions across 9 projects, more than 800 hours of work, the equivalent of 20 weeks of full-time effort, and over $83,000 in delivered value at a discounted public-sector rate. The work spanned technical coaching, live session support, post-production editing, transcript generation, and full LMS integration, all delivered under budget, with one project coming in 28% under. Results like that are why the client kept coming back. And that was one series: the contract behind it came back every budget cycle, worth roughly $100,000 a year, and it's the work that clinched my 2024 Client Impact Award.

A new standard for the agency

Staff and learners praised how smooth the final product felt and how much the self-paced format improved engagement and accessibility. The program manager who sponsored the work called the sessions seamless from scheduling through follow-up, and singled out the patience, thoroughness, and on-the-spot guidance during recording. What began as a rescue of at-risk knowledge became a repeatable standard: SCORM templates, branded bookends, captioning, and transcription, ready for the next team to use.

A relationship built one project at a time

Some clients become part of your working life, and this national sports organization was one of them. For more than eight years I was their trusted production partner, the person they called whether the job was a major recurring series or a single event that came together on a Friday afternoon. One to two events a month, year after year, with barely a quiet stretch outside the holidays. It was a high-profile relationship with a lot at stake, and I kept it by delivering, project after project.

The full package, across three departments

There was a lot more to it than pressing record. Across three different departments, the work spanned webinar production and post-production, reporting, scheduling, and event management, course development and instructional design, and hands-on coaching and rehearsals to get subject matter experts camera-ready. Two ongoing programs anchored it all: a recurring professional learning series that kept officials and members sharp, and an internal onboarding and community pathway that welcomed new staff and connected them with senior leaders. They often ran in parallel, which meant staying calm and organized on more than one front at once.

Reliable when it counted most

The work was rarely nine-to-five. It meant last-minute requests, after-hours sessions, and weekends, all while juggling other clients. When their learning system went through an LMS platform migration, I supported them through the entire transition with no loss of service, and kept right on going afterward. Alongside the steady programs came a constant stream of one-off events, including sensitive and closed sessions where the priority was simply to make people feel safe and well held. I was proud to be trusted with those.

The part that did not feel like work

Honestly, this one was fun. Every stakeholder, from directors to staff who would send a kind word from the sidelines, was patient, generous, and openly grateful. They were spread across the country and beyond, and to a person they were a pleasure to work with. I watched people grow over those years, some moving up into leadership while I was there. There were stretches where I had to remind myself this was a job. On the rare day a flicker of stress crept in, it took almost nothing to recenter, because I was thankful to be working with people who valued what I brought.

One client, every craft

For close to twelve years my business held a contract with a company that builds and runs LMS and HCM solutions for corporate and public-sector clients. It started at the bottom, on live chat and email support, resetting passwords for people learning to use their platforms. By the end I was managing service delivery. In between, the contract covered almost every job this kind of work contains. First the systems administration team, supporting the platforms clients ran their training on. Then virtual event management, producing live and online events, where a program manager and I built the team into the company's media and production department. Then managing service delivery for that department for several years, with a small team of my own. For the final stretch I went back to the craft itself: content development, instructional design, voiceover, and course narration. That last chapter was the most rewarding work of the whole contract. Over those years the company grew from fewer than twenty people to nearly two hundred, and the work added up to more than 25,000 hours for 60+ organizations.

The standard was federal, and it never moved

I juggled multiple federal and corporate clients at the same time, every one of them held to strict accessibility compliance, every deliverable expected to be right the first time. After enough years of that, it's just how you work, and I still work that way.

The work behind the work

For more than a decade, I also produced and ran the company's best-practices webinar series: two, sometimes three sessions a month for various platform providers, plus user groups, hybrid conferences, and large vendor events. On top of that came the internal machinery most people never see. Town halls for the whole company. Team meetings, feature sessions, lunch-and-learns. And underneath all of it, the reporting: attendance, registration, interaction logs, quiz and chat data, post-production debriefs, summary reports to stakeholders. None of it was billable, and all of it mattered. Organizations tend to underestimate this part. The deliverable you see is only a slice of the job. The coordination, the tracking, and the work with the content, systems, and live support teams are what keep a production operation running.

Why this matters to organizations

Everything Your Expert Voice offers, I have already done at organizational scale, for years, for a client that was itself serving demanding federal and corporate clients. Holistic business development, instructional design, multimedia production, specialized projects: at an organization's size, those come together as one resource that flexes to whatever you need, on retainer, on salary, or one project at a time. If you run a company like that one, you already know how rare it is to find someone who can move between system administration, event production, instructional design, and the voice work itself without dropping the standard. I learned to do that for a company like yours. A colleague I trained eventually took over producing the best-practices series and still runs it today. Years later, he put it this way:

How word of mouth works in government

A federal agency is really many clients. A single department sits under a bureau, the bureau under a larger body, and the teams all talk to each other. They share contacts, they share recommendations, and they talk about you in the same meetings. That is how this work grew. I started with one learning and development team, did right by them, and the referrals followed from there.

The foundation you are handed is rarely clean

In agency work, you often inherit a situation that is held together loosely: scope that shifts, approvals that take months, coordination that moves at government speed. You don't get to choose the foundation, so you build on what's there. My job was to absorb that friction so the people in front of the camera never felt it, and to deliver something polished out the other end no matter how rough the inputs were. Over those years I built a track record of trusted delivery, whatever the conditions.

Three services, usually all at once

For this agency the work landed in one of three buckets, and often all three at the same time. Virtual event management and multimedia production: running the live and recorded sessions, the editing, the audio fixes, the packaging. And content development: the instructional design and course work that turns raw expertise into something learners can actually use. Because I work across the whole chain, I usually ended up with all of it, and that's the point of hiring me: one person who has done every part of the chain.

Section 508, non-negotiable

When you produce for a federal agency, accessibility is the law. Section 508 compliance had to be perfect: transcripts, captions, font sizing, color contrast, the whole specification, every time. Failing an audit is a serious problem for the client. That is the standard I worked to for years, and it is why accessibility compliance auditing, against Section 508 and the WCAG 2.1 standard used internationally, is part of what I offer today. I learned it on real deadlines.

From one nervous expert to a real run of work

One of the best parts of this chapter started when a director recommended me to a colleague in the agency's media and entertainment side. She had always wanted to run her own webinar series. She was naturally bubbly, deeply knowledgeable, well connected in her field, and, like most people, nervous in front of the lens at first. We got her on track. What followed was several separate engagements over time, a handful of short series each, every one of them a success. She and I would commiserate about the bureaucracy and the red tape, and then we would go make something good in spite of it.

How far this kind of work reaches

It is hard to say how far this work travelled. Every session trained people who went on to train others, who went on to do the work it prepared them for. At a minimum it reached tens of thousands of learners, and the real number is probably a lot higher. Her words say it better than mine:

Holding attention

This was one of the bigger engagements of my early career, and it ran for years. The company brought in new staff constantly, many of them straight out of high school or college, a lot of them earning entry-level wages. Dry training doesn't work on an audience like that. They have no reason to pay attention unless you give them one, so we kept it loose and funny. We ran the sessions with the energy of a morning radio show, and the learning rode along inside the fun. People remember what they enjoy.

The same work fits other industries

The specifics here were one company, but the same kind of work shows up everywhere. Onboarding, compliance, ongoing skills training, the modernization of dated course material into something current and watchable. I have done this for cell carriers, and the same work fits a construction firm training crews on electrical safety, a manufacturer keeping certifications current, or any company where the HR team is quietly expected to carry the learning-and-development load on top of everything else. If your people need to learn something and remember it, I can help with that.

Plan for the failure before it happens

Most producers learn this too late: recovering from a live failure is a skill, but preventing one is a better one. On every session I kept a second producer on hand, sometimes just watching as an attendee, ready to be pulled in as a co-organizer the instant anything went sideways. My own connection was not always perfect, so I planned for the moment it might drop. No session ever fell apart, because the backup was already in the room.

The relationships outlasted the contract

The best thing this work left behind was the people. This was a down-to-earth group, easy to be around, no airs about them, and I stayed in touch with several of them long after the engagement ended. One of them matters more than I can say. A colleague I worked alongside here became my program manager for years afterward, first here, then through a long run at the company that came next. On paper I produced and, later, she managed. Unofficially, we were just two people teaching each other how to do the work, and if I am honest, the lessons ran mostly in her direction. Somewhere along the way she became something closer to family. She has mentored me, championed me, and put up with me across two companies and more than a decade. If she is reading this, and she will be: thank you, work mom. I love you. None of the good in my career happens without you. (You know the rest. The inside jokes stay inside.)

Public information that anyone can follow

Voting should not require a decoder ring. The brief was to take the mail-in ballot process, which carries real deadlines and real rules, and make it easy to understand. We produced a series of custom explainer videos, designed and animated in Camtasia, covering the whole process: the different ways to vote, the timelines and cut-off dates, how to actually fill out a ballot, who can accompany or assist a voter, and the accessibility options available. Step by step, plain and clear, the way public information is supposed to be.

Built for accessibility, because it had to be

This was public-facing government content, so accessibility was required. Captions, contrast, legible type, clear narration. Everyone has the right to understand how to cast their vote, and the videos were built to that standard from the start.

Where it got complicated

Public-sector projects rarely run in a straight line, and this one did not. The source information kept changing, because it had to clear internal review, and people inside the organization would catch things that were out of date or needed correcting. Some videos went through three or four versions before the facts settled. Requests drifted past the original scope, the way they tend to. And then, through an oversight on their end, the series didn't get posted where it was meant to go. I found out later it had gone up in a much less visible spot, where it stayed in use until the next election. Common stuff at the state and local level, where budgets are thin and approvals are slow. We still delivered every piece of the first project, and kept it accurate and accessible through every round of changes.

The bigger relationship

The video series was the single project, but it was not the whole of the work. Before it, I had also done course development and instructional design for the board's own people, the election officials and the judges who staff the polls and keep an election running. The video series was one tightly-scoped deliverable inside a broader relationship, which is what Specialized Projects are for: one defined piece of work, done well, with no obligation to commit to anything bigger.

Who Alain is

Al D'Aoust has been helping families, schools, and communities design ecological gardens since 2012. He founded the Regen Learning Hub to make that knowledge accessible and actionable. He is the curriculum architect and the one on the live calls every week. My job across both of these was to help him get what is in his head out into the world in a form people could actually use.

The course: fourteen self-paced steps

The first build was the 14-Day Permaculture Designer, a self-paced course that walks a complete beginner from a blank yard to a finished regenerative design in fourteen daily steps. It lives on his Regen Learning Hub platform, built on GoHighLevel, with weekly live design labs and a private community around it. It started life as the Backyard Garden Design Course, and he later rebranded it to the sharper name. Honestly, this one was a grind. Getting a full asynchronous course across the line is a real production job, and it took persistence to see it through. But we did, and it is out there earning its keep.

The workshop: weeks of material, two and a half hours, free

The second build is my favorite. We took Al's twelve-hour certification content and condensed it into a single 2.5-hour live online workshop for educators: teachers, administrators, parent volunteers, community organizers, anyone trying to start a school garden. I produced it end to end and moderated it live, which is the part most people underestimate. Al brought the expertise. I kept the energy up, fielded the questions, drew out the takeaways, and made sure two and a half hours never turned into one person talking into a void.

I'm proud of this next part. We had priced it at twenty-five dollars. At the last minute we decided it belonged in as many classrooms as possible, so we made it free, refunded everyone who had already paid, and absorbed the full cost ourselves. It wasn't a business decision, and I'd make the same call again tomorrow.

Why this is both Multimedia Production and Holistic Business Development

On paper you could file this under production. I shot, edited, produced, and moderated. But there was more to it. I was also helping Al build the thing underneath the content: the offer, the delivery, the way his teaching reaches people and holds together as a business. That is Holistic Business Development. With an expert who is great at their craft but stretched thin around it, the production and the foundation end up being the same job.

Watch it

The workshop is public. Watch the full session on YouTube, and see the live event page.

A barter that became a calling

It began as a straightforward trade: I could attend their spiritual events, in person and online, in exchange for handling the technical side. IT support, webinar recording and management, a bit of editing, and a recurring fix I was glad to provide, backing up their event recordings when their cloud storage filled and giving people permanent links so the recordings never expired. Over time it grew past the barter. I have done manual labor on the land, helped run their online events, and even led workshops at their gatherings. I've learned a great deal from their teachings, and I care deeply about what they do.

The technical backbone, so the ceremony can happen

At any gathering, sacred or not, someone has to keep the technology out of the way so people can focus on the experience. That has often been my role here. When recordings needed saving, when links needed sharing, when a webcam or a computer was not cooperating, I was the call. Years on, I still am. It is the same production and event-management skill I bring to paid work, pointed at a community I love.

Why this one is in the book

Most of what fills this logbook is paid work. This isn't, and that's why it belongs here. Everyone should have something they give to freely, and for me this is it. It is my quiet bit of philanthropic work, my way of supporting good people doing good things on beautiful protected land. I'm mentioning it because you can't really understand how I work from the invoices alone. Some of the most meaningful work I have done has never had a price on it.

It started over coffee

This one is personal. The whole Holistic Business Development approach, the idea of sitting down with someone and building their business with them rather than just handing them a website, came out of coffee talks with my partner, Angélique. We would sit together and work through her vision: what the business was, who it was for, how it should look and feel. Slowly, conversation by conversation, it took shape. Somewhere in there I realized this was the work I should be doing for people.

From a loose idea to a real brand

Her site took a lot of rounds to get right. We moved from rough concept and loose visual sketches through iteration after iteration until we landed on a fully developed, branded website with a clear identity, the kind of foundation that can carry a business in any number of directions. I love showing people that evolution, because it's what I help clients do.

The same thing I now build for clients

If this story sounds familiar, it should. It is the same work, and very nearly the same kind of website, that I am building right now for my featured client and her holistic practice. The featured study at the top of this book and this one at the bottom are two ends of the same thread: the place the idea was born, and the place it has grown into a real client engagement. I lived Holistic Business Development first, with the person closest to me, and believed in it enough to offer it to others.

Close to home, in every sense

Building this with my partner was about more than work. It gave her confidence, and it has helped us as a family. That's a big part of why I work the way I do. When you help someone build their own foundation, what you give them holds up a lot more than a business. I learned that here, first, with someone I love. You can see Core & Rhythm at coreandrhythm.com.