The Tuesday meeting
You walk out of another alignment call having spent more energy managing the politics than doing the work you're actually good at. You're not tired from the job. You're tired from the system around the job.
CAREER ADVISOR & COACH · DIRECTORS OF MARKETING AND SALES
You're a strategic builder, stuck managing the status quo.
I help Directors of Marketing and Sales get back to work that fits the builder in them: by reshaping the role, moving internally, moving out, or building alongside what they already have. Clarity first, then we walk it together.
A free 45-minute Career-Fit Conversation. You leave with a clear read on where you stand, either way.
Looks good on paper. Feels wrong in your bones.
You're a high performer who can't perform where you need to be. The title is senior. The company is one people recognize. From the outside it reads like a career working exactly as planned.
Inside, the building got taken out of the work. You used to make things. Now you maintain them. You route information between markets and the business unit and call it a role.
The part of you that builds has gone quiet. And the strange thing is, the external work isn't even the hard part. It's the internal battles that drain you, the friction with the culture, the process, the people who can't enable what you can see.
You've thought about leaving. You've thought about staying. You've thought about the side project you keep not starting. Every option feels like a coin toss, because what you don't have is a clear picture of what the choice is even between.
Clarity, not confidence.
Most career advice gets one thing wrong about you. It assumes you've lost your nerve. You haven't. You've kept performing the whole time.
What you've lost is the merged-layer picture, the one that shows you what's really going on and what you can do about it. That's not a confidence problem. It's a clarity problem. And clarity is something we can build.
You might know this from the inside.
The role that hollowed out
You took this role because it looked like a step up. Somewhere in the reorg, the building part quietly disappeared, and now you maintain a machine you didn't design and can't change.
The 11 PM tab
You've got a half-written business idea, a job listing you didn't apply to, and a coaching email you never replied to, all open at once. None of them feels like the obvious move, so you close the laptop and do nothing.
The advice that doesn't fit
Everyone tells you to "go all in" or "trust the process." You have a mortgage, a family, and twenty years of craft you're not willing to set on fire. The leap everyone's selling isn't built for someone with something to protect.
The folder that doesn't open
You have a half-built business idea, a brand idea, a product idea, something you've been carrying for two years that uses every part of you the day job doesn't. You haven't built it because you can't see how it fits alongside everything else you have to protect. So it sits, and the part of you that wants to build it gets quieter.
A method, not a vibe.
The Aligned Career Method is a one-to-one advisory engagement with three ways in. A free Career-Fit Conversation to name the pattern. A four-week Career-Fit Plan that ends with a Four-Path Map and a written decision to one path. A six-month Career-Fit Move that turns that decision into a market-ready package: positioning, a rebuilt CV and LinkedIn, outreach in motion, interview reps.
The four paths are simple to name and harder to choose between: job-craft inside the role you have, move internally to a better-fit role, move out to a different employer, or build something alongside the day job.
Four phases. Three layers. Peer-reviewed research underneath. No leaping.
Built for one specific person.
Director of Marketing or Sales. Forty to fifty-five. Inside a multinational.
A natural builder with a track record of building, now in a role that only asks you to maintain. You want clarity, not a pep talk, and you're not willing to lose who you are to get it.
If that's not you, I'll say so on the first call. The work is sharper because it's narrow.
"I stayed in the same company, but the job I do now is nothing like the one I had. Kate helped me map what I actually want to do against what the business actually needs. Six months later I moved into a new role I basically designed myself. Same employer, completely different life."
"I spent eighteen months talking myself out of applying anywhere because I thought my experience was too narrow. Kate showed me how to tell the story differently. Three months after we started I had two offers, and I took the one that actually uses the builder in me."
"I had a side project I'd been sitting on for three years because I couldn't see where the hours would come from. We built it into the week properly, not as a hobby but as a real thing with real hours. It made money in month four, and I didn't have to quit my job to do it."
About Kate
I spent twenty years inside the most brand-driven environments the consumer world has. Adidas, New Balance, BBDO, Leo Burnett, Groupe SEB, PepsiCo. I built brands, scaled teams, ran a P&L.
Three times, across two countries and three decades, I lived the same pattern: the move from a brand-driven employer into one where the building had been quietly removed.
I'm ten years further along that curve than most of the people I work with. This isn't a framework I learned. It's a pattern I lived, then built a method out of.
You don't have to choose between money and meaning.
Start with the free Career-Fit Conversation. Forty-five minutes. You leave with the pattern named and a one-page summary. From there, the four-week Career-Fit Plan or the six-month Career-Fit Move, only if it's the right fit.