GPS Coaching · Concept
The skyline hero
Your idea from the last call: a city skyline behind each page title, carrying the global theme, because the work already spans four continents. Here it is built, next to what the site does now, so the two can be compared rather than described.
Same page, same words, two directions.
The Executive Coaching hero, unchanged except for the photograph behind it. Everything else on the page stays as it is.
Now · Maryam in the room
Executive Coaching
Good at what you do. Probably great.
The reader meets a person. It is warm, close, and specific to her, and no other coach can run this photograph.
Proposed · Miami at golden hour
Executive Coaching
Good at what you do. Probably great.
Bigger, cooler, more corporate. It signals reach and altitude, and it says nothing about who is doing the coaching.
One city per page.
Applied across the four service pages. Miami and New York are real photographs; London and Toronto show the treatment only, until they are shot at the same hour and grade. The cities are a placeholder set and yours to choose: this one covers the US, the EU and Canada but not Australia, which is part of the global claim.
Executive Coaching
Miami.
Miami · in the library
EQ Coaching
New York.
New York · in the library
Transitions & Change
London skyline
No asset. Treatment shown, photograph to source.
London · to source
Corporate Workshops
Toronto skyline
No asset. Treatment shown, photograph to source.
Toronto · to source
What it buys, and what it costs.
What it buys
- Scale. A skyline reads as a practice that operates across cities, which is true and which the site currently only states in words.
- Variety. Four different heroes solve the problem that the portrait set is thin and repetitive, without needing a new photoshoot.
- It is the register the buyers with budget already recognize, which matters if the practice moves toward organizations.
What it costs
- Distinctiveness. A city skyline is the most-used image in executive coaching and consulting. Every competitor can buy the same frame; none of them can buy a photograph of Maryam.
- Distance. The whole thesis is that leadership begins with knowing yourself. Glass towers at altitude argue the opposite of intimacy.
- It weakens the strongest asset. The reason the current heroes work is that a stranger meets her face before they read a word.
Where this lands
Use the skylines, but not on the pages that have to sell her.
Keep Maryam on Home, About and the service pages, where a stranger is deciding whether to trust a person. Give the skylines the pages where the subject genuinely is reach rather than intimacy: Speaking, Corporate Workshops, and the section of Contact that says where she works. That keeps the global signal she wants, spends it where it is true, and does not trade away the one image no competitor can copy.
The Miami frame stays either way. It is the strongest landscape in the library and it is where she now lives, which makes it hers rather than stock.
What it would take.
- Two more skylines, at the same hour and grade as the Miami and New York frames. Mixed light across four heroes reads as stock, which is the failure mode to avoid.
- Maryam picks the cities. The set here is a placeholder, and the honest version covers where she actually works rather than the famous four.
- A decision on whether any city appears that she has not worked in. If the skyline implies a presence she does not have, it is decoration making a claim.