Alex McInnes is a digital marketing consultant with years of client work under his belt. Good at his job, busy with clients, and chronically undervalued for it. When we worked together he was turning 40, recovering from major surgery, and done with waiting for things to shift on their own.
“Lydia’s not really just a business coach.
I mean, she is, but that’s not really what she is. She has such a human-centered approach that the business part becomes a side effect. She’s able to drill down and ask questions about the real drivers, about why people make decisions.
I have this analogy about what makes a good sports coach. Is it someone who improves your technique, or someone who instills belief in you so deeply that you’d run through a brick wall? I lean toward the second.”
Alex McInnes
Good at the work. Undercharging for it.
Alex came to me with a full roster and no real sense of what his work was actually worth.
He was profitable. He had clients. From the outside, things looked fine. But the reality was a business that kept him in execution mode, doing the work himself, keeping prices low, and wondering why it all felt so precarious.
Take me back to when you first reached out. What was going on?
“I was juggling far too much. I had a full client roster but wasn’t earning nearly what I felt I should be earning. There was no real idea of the value I could provide, and a lot of it had to do with self-validation, with what I believed I was actually good at.
I also knew that if I continued doing what I was doing, I’d probably face burnout at some stage. I didn’t want that. I’d had major surgery that year, I was turning 40, and I just wanted to provide a better life for my kids, but also for myself. To be proud of myself.”
What were you most worried about?
“Not having the kind of agency I wanted. I didn’t want my business to just be a service to everyone who came along. That stressed me out. I didn’t want to be beholden to feast-and-famine cycles, constantly worrying about where the next project was coming from or how much it would pay.”
He almost didn’t reach out.
He’d been circling my work for a while before reaching out. The ethos, the shared experience of building a life and business in Southeast Asia, the way I talked about work that actually fits the life you want. But the decision took time.
You’d been aware of my work for a while before reaching out. What finally made you decide?
“I circled around for quite a while. Lydia’s lifestyle and ethos really appealed to me, and I felt like she’d clearly been through something similar to what I was going through. But that decision process took quite a while to get to.
At the end, sometimes you just have to pull the trigger. I could have kept looking forever, but I kept coming back.”
The business stuff was never really the problem.
Alex expected business coaching. What surfaced pretty quickly was something that had to be worked through before any of the tactical stuff could land.
He’d spent years operating as the skilled executor, genuinely good at it, but selling himself at that level for so long it had become a ceiling.
A lot of our work was about closing the gap between who he actually was and how he was showing up in his business.
What was the most surprising thing that came up during the work?
“That Lydia’s not really just a business coach. I mean, she is, but that’s not really what she is. She has such a human-centered approach that the business part becomes a side effect. She’s able to drill down and ask questions about the real drivers, about why people make decisions.
I have this analogy about what makes a good sports coach. Is it someone who improves your technique, or someone who instills belief in you so deeply that you’d run through a brick wall? I lean toward the second.
That was probably the most surprising thing. And it was uncomfortable at first, having someone see me that clearly in such a short space of time. But refreshing too.”
From executor to strategist.
Alex is still working hard. He’d be the first to tell you that undoing deeply ingrained patterns takes time. But the quality of what he’s working on has fundamentally changed. He recently closed a deal where the client told him directly that after their last conversation, they looked at each other and said they needed someone who could think the way he thinks.
A year ago, he would have been the one doing the implementation for that same client.
What does a week look like now compared to when you started working with Lydia?
“I still work pretty hard, I won’t lie. But the processes, the documentation, the mindset around how I run things, that’s fundamentally different. I question why I’m doing things far more often now. I’ve built systems I never would have thought to build before. I take my business more seriously than just ‘I do work, I make money.’ It’s got to be more than that, and recognizing that has been pretty significant.”
There was a big identity piece underneath all of this too. How does that feel looking back?
“I always thought I could work at a high level and think differently than someone who just executes tasks. But I was still operating as the executor. Now I’m not. I’ve taken away a lot of those low-level tasks. I explain how they’re done and why, and have clients or their teams do them. The surprising thing was that that’s okay. And once you rise to that occasion, people realize that’s what they’re actually hiring you for.”
If you hadn’t made these changes, where would you be?
“Very much exactly where we were when we met. Just doing tasks for people for not nearly what the work deserved.
Every single day now it feels like I’m the one who decides where things go next. Before, even though I technically had agency, I didn’t believe I deserved it. It’s amazing what one human being can do for another to say, you can.”
Who this is really for.
I asked Alex who he’d describe as the right person for this kind of work with me.
Who would you say this work is really for?
“You better have a real drive to want to make meaningful change, because Lydia is going to force that on you in the best possible way. She’s going to make you think differently, push you to question things you believed were true.
And if they’re willing to do the hard work, willing to put in place a system that actually serves them, they’re going to get so much out of it. They’ll make a friend in the process. And they’ll have a damn good time doing it.”
If any of this resonated, let’s talk.
“Lydia is the real deal.
I’m more than certain, I’d be doing the same shit, fucking up in the same way without her gently (but firmly) pushing me in a direction that feels uniquely ME. You want value for money in a business coach? You get it right here.”
