Allison Akhnoukh
Positioning a psychedelic-informed coach for leaders and change makers
“I know this is powerful, I just don’t know how to talk about it.”
When Allison first came to me, she was already doing incredible work. Her clients from Portugal to the Bay Area and beyond were experiencing change. She had executive coaching experience, a psychedelic-informed practice, and a steady stream of word-of-mouth referrals. But she was struggling to put words around what she did. Attempts either sounded too vague to be taken seriously or too risky for the calibre of leaders she wanted to reach. The work was profound. The brand and business structure to hold it weren’t yet on the page.
When we first spoke, Allison was holding several tensions at once. She wanted to integrate her psychedelic work with her executive coaching background, without sounding like a corporate coach in disguise or a retreat facilitator with no depth. Her audience was blurry: locals in Portugal, global executives, HBS- and Bay Area-adjacent networks, and a broader “change-maker” bucket all sat in the same column. Her offers and pricing were more intuitive than intentional; she felt the work warranted premium pricing and also cared deeply about accessibility. She wasn’t sure how to hold both without undercharging. And her website and LinkedIn didn’t match the depth of her practice.
She also had a deadline on the horizon: a Harvard-related event where she wanted to “have her act together” — a clear message, a strong site, and confidence in what she was inviting people into.
“I know the work is powerful. I just don’t know how to package, price, and present it in a way that feels true and lands with the right people.”
That was the gap.
Present a clear, credible, psychedelic-informed practice
We agreed on a focused arc of eight weeks, broken into four phases — anchoring the language, naming the practice, structuring the offers, and bringing the public-facing assets into alignment.
1 Anchor the work in real client language
Before any positioning work started, we went looking for the words Allison’s clients were already using. She brought deep insight from her practice. We ran it through a simple framework: What are her clients really trying to change? What external problems are they naming out loud? What internal conflicts are quietly running the show?
Three pain clusters emerged. Feeling stuck in systems — corporate, societal, relational — that they no longer believed in. Trapped or stagnant energy: the felt sense that something needs to move and not knowing how. And a subtle kind of lostness — the aimlessness that arrives despite all the markers of success being in place.
We translated those pains into corresponding gains: seeing new possibilities for how to live and lead; freeing up trapped energy to actually act; becoming clear, emotionally honest, and capable of taking aligned action again. The pain/gain mapping became the foundation of everything that came next — homepage copy, offer descriptions, the pricing guide.
2 Name the practice without softening or hiding it
With the language anchored, we tackled the question Allison had been circling for months: what is she actually calling this?
We tested several frames — “psychedelic coaching for leaders and change-makers,” “psychedelic-assisted coaching,” variations that bridged both worlds. We were thoughtful about legal and reputational optics, so we drew a clean line: what lives on the public site, what lives in the downloadable guides, and what gets discussed in private conversation. She could stand in the truth of her work without softening or hiding it.
3 Build an offer ladder that reflects the work’s value
From there we got concrete. We built a simple but durable offer architecture: a structured premium deep-dive session as the front door; deeper multi-session containers with clear boundaries and outcomes for clients ready to go further; and sliding-scale and sponsorship language placed in the right spots so generosity was built in without eroding the perceived value of the core work.
To answer the inevitable “how much is this?” without turning her homepage into a price list, we created a downloadable pricing and offerings guide — a lead magnet that pre-qualified prospects and gave Allison room to talk openly about investment levels and structures in conversation. We then layered in a more educational lead magnet: a microdosing and psychedelics guide, written in precise language with the right disclaimers, and designed to match the visual brand.
4 Bring the website and LinkedIn into alignment
With strategy and architecture in place, we turned to the surfaces. On the website, we rebuilt the navigation, removing an “Offerings” page in favor of a focused path through the site and a clear “Programs & Pricing” entry point. We rewrote the About to be more story-led, embedding her credentials in narrative rather than stacking them as a list. Header and supporting images got curated to feel like her practice — grounded, warm, and serious about the work.
On LinkedIn, we shifted her into a first-person, results-oriented profile drawing directly from the pain/gain map and the new positioning, then aligned her title and summary with the website. She wasn’t going to be one person on LinkedIn and another on her homepage.
A clearly positioned, premium-yet-accessible practice
By the time we wrapped the initial arc, Allison had a coherent positioning, a structured offer ladder, two working lead magnets, and a website and LinkedIn that told the same story. She walked into her Harvard-adjacent event with a clear message, a public site that presented the work for her, and confidence in what she was inviting people into.