I asked an AI to polish my LinkedIn. It staged an
intervention.

It was right. I'd been quietly getting people seen for years without naming it. Now I do it on purpose: I make founder-led businesses impossible for AI to overlook. Hi, I'm Sally.

Book a free call → The short version ↓

● ClaudeThe intervention

"We're not doing this again. You keep changing the words. From everything you've told me, this is what you actually do."

The rewrite that renamed the business

● A quick hello

The short version

Twenty years of helping people get seen.
Took me a while to spot the pattern.

I didn't arrive here in a straight line. I came up through the parts of business nobody romanticises. Debt collection and skip tracing, which is mostly finding people who really don't want to be found. Bookkeeping, which is making the true numbers visible (receipts, before it was a buzzword). A good stretch as a makeup artist, helping people walk into a room looking like the version of themselves they wanted others to see. Then operations. Then running an agency.

Different rooms, same job every time: make sure the real thing gets seen properly. Funny thing about a pattern. I couldn't see my own until it was all sitting outside my head, laid out in the machine. Then it was obvious.

01 Collections finding the unfindable
02 Bookkeeping the true numbers, visible
03 Makeup chair people, at their best
04 Ops leadership systems that hold
05 Agency GM the engine room
06 AI visibility seen by the machines

The Studio1 chapter

He was ready to sell the business. Then he hired me.

Greg Merrilees spent more than a decade building Studio1 Design into a multi-seven-figure web agency. By the time the Melbourne lockdowns hit, he was done. Burnt out. Brokers in the US were already pricing the sale.

His coach said hire a COO. He put a call out on LinkedIn, asked applicants for a five-minute video, and hired me off my answers and my personality. I started at 25 hours a week.

Eighteen months later I was running the place as General Manager. (I announced my own promotion at the Christmas party. Greg still thinks it's hilarious.) I mapped every decision that was draining him and built systems so those decisions stopped landing on his desk, across 50 to 100 live client projects at a time.

He went from wanting out to wanting to stay. From exhausted to a 20-hour week, with the RescueTime logs to prove it. He tells the whole story himself on Josh Hall's Web Design Business Podcast, episode 330. Don't take my word for it. That's sort of the whole point.

What Greg says

"Sally was my General Manager at Studio1 Design for five years, and during that time she made a tremendous impact on the business, allowing me to focus on growing the business while working less. Her work ethic, strategic mindset, and systems thinking lifted every part of our operations. She brings clarity to complexity with a calm confidence and can-do attitude."

Greg Merrilees Founder & CEO, Studio1 Design

The bit where a robot knew me better than I did

I tried to rewrite my LinkedIn.
Instead, I changed my business.

Then last year we blew up our lives. Moved the whole family from Melbourne to Brisbane, which was every bit as chaotic as it sounds. Somewhere in the middle of the upheaval I left the GM role and went out on my own. New city, clean slate, no boss, and a decision to make about what I was actually going to be.

For a while I did what I knew best. Operations, with AI bolted on to clear the busywork. But the work that kept pulling at me was a different thing entirely: getting businesses found and cited when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity or Google's AI "who's actually good at this?" Hardly anyone has figured that out yet, and it's exactly the kind of problem my brain refuses to leave alone.

I still kept introducing myself as an ops person, though. Old habits.

Then I sat down to sort out my own LinkedIn (plenty of viewers, no followers, the usual) and asked Claude for help. Three rewrites in, it pushed back. We weren't polishing anymore, it told me. We were quietly rebuilding my whole positioning, and I kept widening it with every message. The sharpest thing in everything I'd described, the one almost nobody else owns, was this: getting found in an AI-first world. Stop hedging, it said, and plant the flag there.

It named the thing before I could. Slightly humbling, getting out-strategised by the tool I work with all day. But it was right. So I stopped arguing and committed.

Why AI search, why now

Getting cited by AI isn't a marketing trick.
It's an operations problem.

Here's what I worked out. When a client asks an AI who's good, you're either in the answer or you may as well not exist. Getting into that answer isn't about being loud or gaming anything. It's the same discipline I ran inside Studio1, just pointed outward.

So I'm running the method on myself, in public, starting from zero with this very website. Score and all. No before-and-after I quietly polished first. You get to watch it happen in real time, because I'd rather show you the working than ask you to trust me.

The receipt: my own site currently scores 12 of 24 on the citeability audit, and climbing. Live, dated, no hiding the number.

If you want to see your own number, there's a ladder. Start with the free does-AI-recommend-you check. Want the detail, take the $197 Snapshot. Ready for the full build, that's the Citeability Engine.

Still hear the ops thread humming under all this? You're not wrong. That work lives over in operations.

01Position, so the AI knows exactly what you're the answer to
02Reference, so the rest of the web backs the claim up
03Optimise, so machines and humans can both read the proof
04Validate, so you see yourself named, not just hope you are
05Evolve, so the weakest signal gets fixed before it costs you

And where this is heading, since you're already here: search is quietly splitting in two. People still Google. But more and more, they just ask an AI and take the answer at face value. The businesses that get named in that answer win the decade. Most don't realise the race has started. That's the gap I'm here for.

Outside the work

Brisbane. Two kids, one dog, strong opinions about coffee.

We moved up from Melbourne last year and I have no complaints about the decision. I miss my people and the coffee culture - everything else I can live without. Most mornings start with a walk and a coffee strong enough to be a controlled substance, not always in that order.

I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. The funny thing is, life didn't look that different before the diagnosis - because I'd already built the systems. Structured calendars, checklists, a gazillion alarms, post-its everywhere (most of them digital now). I just didn't know why I'd built them. The diagnosis didn't change the systems. It finally explained them.

Weekends I shoot archery. One hour where it's just me, my bow, and a target, and everything else can wait. I am quietly, fiercely competitive about it.

A few things I believe, on the clock and off it: clarity is kindness, being a genuinely good person is not a competitive disadvantage, and nobody should need a personal brand the size of a stadium to get found for work they're brilliant at.

Sally

Base: Brisbane, via Melbourne
Path: Call centres to bookkeeping to the makeup chair to ops to agency GM to AI visibility
Switch-off by: Archery, dog walks, strong coffee
Allergic to: Cats, hype, bullshit, and people-pleasing
This year: Radical integrity. Doing the thing even when I don't want to, working with people who respect my scope and my boundaries, knowing in my gut that what I do is real and people need it.

Say hello

Let's find out if working together makes sense.

30 minutes. No pitch, no prep required. We'll talk through where you are, where the AI engines currently think you are (usually a gap, and a revealing one), and whether I'm the right fit. You'll leave with at least one clear next step either way.

Book a free call →

Not ready? Run a Snapshot first →

Twenty years of helping people get seen.Took me a while to spot the pattern.