You're Very Good At What You Do.
It's Just Your Conversations
Don't Seem To Bring
Clients...

You're a self-employed professional whose work genuinely helps people — but you don't yet have a reliable way of attracting enough of the right clients.

You're not new to your field. You may have spent years developing expertise inside organisations, where the work came through the system and your contribution was understood without needing to be articulated. Now you're working independently. That structure is gone. You have to generate your own work.

You might call yourself as a consultant, coach, trainer, therapist, practitioner, specialist. The label doesn't matter. What you share is that you sell expertise and professional judgement, not products. Attracting clients was never what you were trained for.

Familiar patterns

Explaining doesn't seem to help. You've written your brochures, chosen your words carefully. On paper it looks sound. Yet in practice, people hesitate and conversations drift.

It goes quiet after the good ones. There's interest. They ask you to send something over. Then the days pass, nothing arrives in your inbox, and your follow-ups disappear into silence.

The advice repels you. Most marketing advice feels vague or over-engineered. You've tried directories, social media, blogging. Fragments of progress, but nothing you can trust or repeat.

Part of you has always felt that selling was beneath you — something done by people with targets and commission structures, not professionals with standards. The kind of activity that required a shamelessness you neither had nor wanted.

That belief is easy to maintain when the pipeline is full. But if the work isn't there, something has to give. So you do the things that feel acceptable. You write. You explain. You put yourself out there carefully, on your own terms, in ways that don't feel like selling. And it still doesn't produce what you need.

Who it's for

This is for a particular kind of person. The kind who takes their work seriously and holds themselves to high standards. People who want practical help getting out there and having clearer, more productive conversations — without turning themselves into marketers.

People willing to take responsibility for attracting clients, even if they dislike the idea of marketing. They act, reflect on what happens, and adjust, rather than look for a single trick that removes the need to engage.

Most independent professionals who get in touch already know their work is good. What they want to understand is whether this kind of support will actually change anything.

Not every conversation will lead somewhere. But fewer will drift for reasons you can't identify, or stall in ways that feel vague and discouraging. And you'll find it easier to talk about what you do when it actually matters.

Guiding beliefs

It matters to me that the people I work with know where I stand. Not just what I do, but what I believe to be true.

• Good work deserves to be recognised, not dressed up. The problem is rarely quality. It's clarity.
• Marketing that requires you to perform or inflate yourself is unsustainable. If a way of attracting clients can't be maintained without strain, it will eventually be abandoned.
• Responsibility matters on both sides. This works when you are willing to engage, try things, and pay attention to what actually happens. Confidence grows from experience and reflection, not from memorised scripts.

People come wanting clearer messaging, a stronger website, better conversations, a steadier flow of enquiries. Sometimes that's where we end up. It's rarely where we begin.

The problem you think you have is seldom the one costing you clients. So the work follows a sequence, and the sequence matters.

Understanding the situation

We start with what's actually happening, because the apparent problem is usually a symptom of something else. A proposal that doesn't resonate. A website that explains everything accurately and still leaves people unconvinced. Until we know why things are happening as they are, any change is a guess.

Understanding the people you serve

Then we turn to the people you're trying to help: how they see the problem, what they've misunderstood, what they're hoping will change. These aren't marketing questions. They're questions of perspective — and the answers determine everything that follows.

Describing your work

Finding the right words is rarely a matter of polishing what you already have. It's discovering what needs to be said. Sometimes that means cutting detail, sometimes adding context, sometimes changing a handful of words. The aim isn't to make your work sound more impressive. It's to describe it faithfully enough that people recognise its value for themselves.

Looking at conversations

By now, we've moved beyond websites, proposals, and written material to the conversations themselves. Where does curiosity grow? Where does it disappear? Which questions open things up, and which subtly bring things to a halt? Very small changes often make a disproportionate difference here — not because the conversation becomes more persuasive, but because it becomes clearer for both people in it.

Building reliability

Individual improvements start to connect. Instead of relying on chance encounters and inspired moments, you're better placed to attract the right clients, have better conversations with them, and help them reach well-informed decisions.

Most professionals describe their work from their own side of the relationship — talking about what they do, how they do it, and what they offer.

But the person you're trying to reach is thinking about their own situation: the difficulty they're in right now, what it feels like to be there, what they've already tried, and what's at stake if nothing changes.

When you can describe that situation accurately, in language that reflects how your client actually experiences it rather than how you categorise it professionally, they stop evaluating whether your service applies to them and start feeling that you already understand them. That is a different kind of attention, and it changes what happens next.

That sense of being understood is where professional authority begins. Not authority that has to be claimed or performed, but the kind that becomes apparent through what you notice, what you question, and whether you can look beyond the problem as it first appears.

How the programme is shaped

The Wild Thyme programme typically follows the five-stage roadmap outlined earlier — moving from understanding what's really happening, through the people you serve, the language you use, and the conversations you have, towards a more reliable way of attracting the right clients.

But it is not a fixed syllabus.

Our initial conversation establishes where the greatest difficulty lies and how much attention each stage needs. We may discover that the way you describe your work is obscuring its value. We may find you're attracting the wrong enquiries. Or the real difficulty may only become visible when we examine what happens during the conversations themselves.

The roadmap gives the work direction. What we discover together determines the precise route through it.

How the work happens

The work takes place through a series of individual sessions, each lasting around an hour. Sessions normally take place by video call, though meeting face to face can be arranged where practical. The number and spacing of sessions are agreed once we understand what the programme needs to contain.

We may examine conversations you've already had — where interest grew, where something changed, where you found yourself explaining more than you intended. We can also recreate situations and explore different ways of responding.

Where appropriate, we'll work directly on the material surrounding those conversations. That might include how you describe your work, selected website copy, messages or proposals. Sometimes we will develop the language together. Sometimes I will write it for you.

You may also find opportunities to try things out between sessions. What happens can become part of what we explore next time, and brief contact between sessions is included when a question arises or there's something you'd like me to look at.

Why this isn't sales training

Would you begin your own work by recommending an answer before you fully understood the problem?

Probably not. Yet experience brings its own temptation. Someone begins describing their situation and you recognise it. You've encountered it before. You already have a fairly good idea what will help. So you move towards the answer before either of you has discovered whether the apparent problem is the real one.

In your own field, the questions are part of the work. A therapist would not formulate before listening. A coach wouldn't discuss the way forward without understanding the present reality. A financial adviser wouldn't make a recommendation before completing a fact find.

But when someone is deciding whether to work with you, that professional discipline can disappear. You begin demonstrating what you know rather than helping them understand more clearly what is happening.

What would change if you brought the same curiosity, judgement and care to that conversation that you already bring to the work itself?

The purpose is not to make you sound authoritative. It is to allow the authority already present in your work to be experienced in the conversation itself.

What changes

The programme is designed to give you:

• A clear understanding of who your work is for and what their world looks like before they find you.
• Language that explains what you do with the clarity and essential detail it deserves.
• The judgement to lead a more searching conversation, without relying on a script.
• A more dependable way of helping the right people reach a clear, well-informed decision.

There is no performance involved, no pressure applied and no moment where you are asked to be anything other than the professional you already are.

This is for experienced professionals who already do good work but struggle to translate it into client decisions. It is not for anyone wanting a quick fix or a script to memorise. And it is not an open ended engagement.

So, how much do I charge for my services? Well, I use an approach called Pay What You Can. So, there's no fixed fee. You decide how much you pay for the Wild Thyme Programme.

In its simplest form, that means we do the work first. When we’ve finished, you decide what you can afford to pay and what the programme has been worth to you.

And I do mean what you can afford. If money is particularly tight, you can pay very little. If you genuinely can’t afford to pay anything, you don’t pay anything. There isn’t a minimum hiding behind the words Pay What You Can.

If you want to pay something but can’t manage it all at once, you can spread it over a few payments. What you can afford today and what you would like to contribute overall aren’t necessarily the same thing.

The idea itself isn’t particularly new or strange. Think of a street performer. You don’t agree a price before they start playing. You stop, you listen, and afterwards you decide what to put in the hat. If you have very little, you might put in very little. If you have more and want to give more, you can. The decision belongs to you.

There are a couple of reasons why I think that makes sense for the Wild Thyme Programme.

The first is straightforward. I work with independent professionals at very different stages and in very different circumstances. The same fee can be perfectly manageable for one person and simply unaffordable for another. I could try to anticipate all of those circumstances and construct different prices for different people. I’d rather not.

But affordability isn’t the only reason.

Before we start, you can read this website. You can talk to me. You can decide whether what I’m saying makes sense and whether I seem like somebody you could work with. What you can’t know is what will happen when we actually sit down together and look closely at what is happening in your efforts to attract clients.

You may arrive with one idea about where things are getting stuck and discover something quite different. Something that has been bothering you for months may turn out to need a surprisingly small change. Something that looked simple may need more unpicking.

That uncertainty is part of the reason for doing the work in the first place. It also means I’d rather not ask you to decide what the work is worth before you’ve experienced it.

There is, of course, another person in this arrangement. Me.

This is part of how I make my living. Pay What You Can doesn’t mean that my time has no value, or that it makes no difference to me whether people pay. It means I’m choosing not to turn that value into a fixed price that determines who can and cannot work with me.

And giving you that freedom means accepting where it might lead. Some people will be able to pay more than others. Some may decide that the programme was worth more to them than I might ever have thought to charge for it, and pay accordingly. Others may be able to pay very little. Occasionally, somebody may not be able to pay anything at all.

I’m comfortable leaving all of those possibilities open. What I don’t want is for Pay What You Can to become a peculiar sort of test in which I say the decision is yours while giving you clues about the answer I’m hoping for.

So when the time comes, I won’t tell you what other people have paid or make you justify what you can afford. Nor will there be an awkward conversation in which I try to steer you towards a particular figure.

I’ll trust you to decide.

Experience the programme first. Then decide what to pay.

You want evidence that this works. And like most people, your first instinct is to look for it in the case studies. That's reasonable. But ask yourself what a case study can actually tell you — and what it can never tell you.

It can tell you that someone else was satisfied. What it can't tell you is how complete that picture is, how representative that experience was, or whether the circumstances bear much resemblance to yours.

It can tell you that someone worked with a well-known company, or show you the logos of clients who said yes. But you are not that company, and you are not that person. Their experience, however impressive it sounds, says nothing about whether this work is right for you, at this point, in your circumstances.

I've never been convinced by case studies as a persuasion tool. To me, the only thing that tells you whether someone understands your situation well enough to help is a conversation with them.

Here's what I think I know about you. You're not struggling because your work is weak. You're struggling because the people who would benefit most from it can't yet see that. And you've started to wonder whether the problem is you. Your confidence. Your manner. Your ability to explain yourself when the moment arrives.

It's probably not. But that doubt has started to cost you — in hesitation, in over-explanation, in exchanges where you give too much away trying to prove something that shouldn't need proving.

The conversation itself is the evidence.

If you recognised yourself in what you've read, you know more than any case study would have told you. What's left is a simpler question: whether the person writing this is someone you could trust to help you think more clearly about your own situation.

You may already know whether working together makes sense to you. The remaining question is whether I'm someone you trust to help you work out why your sales conversations aren't converting, and what to do differently.

I work with experienced professionals who are good at what they do but find client attraction strangely uncomfortable. Selling was never meant to be the job. Over the years, I've seen the same pattern repeat across professionals who trade in judgement rather than products.

My name is David Feller. My background is not in tactics, funnels, or “growth hacks”. It comes from years of working alongside people whose work genuinely helps others, and watching what happens when that work has to be explained, justified, or compressed into something it's not. I'm interested in where conversations stall, where confidence drains away, and where capable people start performing instead of engaging.

What I bring to the work is perspective, not a formula. I've been around long enough to recognise when advice is technically correct but practically useless. When something sounds impressive but does not survive contact with real people. My role is to notice those moments, name them plainly, and help you move past them without making you feel foolish for missing them.

Much of the work is about restoring proportion. Helping people stop apologising for their fees. Stop chasing the next bright tactic. Stop trying to sound like something they are not. And start having fewer, better conversations with people who are actually deciding whether to proceed.

One practitioner described a shift they hadn’t expected: “Someone contacted me and said they’d read the entire site. They told me, ‘Normally I skim a few bullet points and decide. But I kept reading.’ When we spoke, it felt like half the conversation had already happened.”

Another client noticed a different change: “Before, every discussion seemed to slide towards price. Now the conversations that continue are different. People say, ‘I’m not sure if I should do this at all. But if I do, it would only be with you.’ That surprised me.”

A newly established practitioner put it this way: “People don’t ring to ask whether they should work with me anymore. They ring to ask when. They already know what I’m about, and they use the same language I do.”

Those moments are not accidental. They happen when persuasion gives way to recognition — when language is organised around the client's problem rather than the practitioner's label. It's about helping you respond to opportunities in a way that reflects the quality of what you already do.

Wild Thyme is taken from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — a play full of confusion and crossed signals, of people losing their bearings, of feelings that never quite find their right expression. Oberon describes a grassy bank "where the wild thyme blows"; a still, sheltered place in the middle of all that disorder. It's where he chooses to act. Where he applies the potion. Where the transformation begins. Things fall back into place. The name is not accidental.

People have said to me that they often wish they had found this work earlier— usually after realising how much time and money they spent chasing things that looked like progress but changed very little. That regret is important, but it is not the point. The point is that once things click, the work becomes simpler, calmer, and easier to sustain.

If this website feels less brash than most marketing sites, that's deliberate. I am not trying to appeal to everyone. I am interested in working with people who recognise their own situation here, and who want to move forward without pretending, performing, or inflating themselves.

If you've read this far and feel a sense of relief rather than excitement, we should probably be talking.

At this stage, your questions are more likely to be about timing, fit, and whether it's worth being in touch.

Those are exactly the kinds of things that become clearer once we've spoken. Getting in touch does not commit you to anything.

The purpose of first contact is to understand your situation a little better and decide, together, whether this is the right work to do at this point. There is no pressure, no pitch, and no obligation to proceed.

People reach out in different ways, depending on where they are. Some prefer a short message to test the water. Others want to set things out more carefully in writing. There is no right way to begin, and no expectation that you already know what you want to do.

However you make contact, the starting point is the same. We talk through what’s happening in your practice and what's actually going on underneath it. I won’t be reaching for answers the moment you start talking. I’ll ask questions that follow what you’ve just said, rather than jumping ahead. And I’ll check back to make sure I've understood accurately. We’ll stay with it long enough for a clearer picture to form, rather than settling too quickly on an explanation. If it looks like this work can help, we talk about what that would involve. If it doesn't, we say so plainly.

It's exploratory and at no cost. You won’t be put on the spot, sold to, or treated as though you should already have answers you’re still working towards.

You can contact me in whichever way feels easiest. A brief WhatsApp message is fine. A more considered note via the form below is equally fine. Email or phone works too.

If you’ve been hesitating because you feel too small, underprepared, or unsure how to explain things, that’s normal. Most people I've worked with felt exactly that way before we first spoke. You don’t need to arrive confident or clear. That’s part of what this work is for.

If this feels like the right next step, I’ll be glad to hear from you. And if it doesn’t, you'll leave here with more clarity than when you arrived.

Whatever you decide, thanks for reading.

• Follow