The Day AI Found Me a Client (While I Was Buying a Clockwork Boat)

I was knee deep in old junk at a flea market, grinning like an idiot because I'd spotted a clockwork boat exactly like the one I had as a little boy, when something was happening that I had no idea about.

Thousands of miles away, a pharma VP was sitting at her laptop asking an AI tool to find her an executive coach. And somewhere in that search, my name came up.

I found out about all this a few days later, once we'd had our first call. I want to walk through what happened, because it's stayed with me since, and I think it says something worth sharing about where executive coaching, and search in general, is heading.

How she found me

We arranged a call after she reached out, and we got on well almost immediately. The kind of conversation that has an easy rhythm to it from the first few minutes.

Out of simple curiosity, I asked how she'd come across me.

She told me she'd used AI to help with the search. She'd described what she was looking for, and the tool had suggested three possible coaches worth approaching. I was one of them.

What she'd asked for, specifically, was an established executive coach with experience in the pharma industry and with executive transitions. Not "a coach." Not "someone good." A coach who understood her world and the particular kind of change she was navigating.

That's wild to me, if I'm honest. It's the first time anything like this has happened, and I had to sit with it for a minute to properly take it in.

Found, rather than finding

Most of the ways I've built this business involve some version of me putting myself out there. A LinkedIn post. A conversation at an event. A warm introduction from someone who knows my work. I'm used to being the one doing the finding, in a manner of speaking, showing up consistently enough that the right person eventually notices.

This was the opposite. I didn't do anything to initiate our conversation. I was merrily browsing a shelf of relics, completely unaware that a decision about my business was being made somewhere else entirely, by a process I had no part in and no visibility of.

There's something a bit odd about being chosen by a system rather than a person. It sat a bit strangely at first. But the stranger it felt, the more I kept coming back to the same thought: an AI tool didn't invent a reason to recommend me. It surfaced something that was already true, because I'd been specific and consistent about it for ages.

Which is really the point of this whole post.

Why specificity found me before she did

About 60% of my work is in the pharma and life sciences industry. I spent 25 years in and around that world before I became a coach, and I've written and talked about it consistently since. Not as a throwaway line in a bio, but as a focus: the matrix structures, the reorganisations that are never quite finished, the particular pressure of leading through a transition when your whole career has trained you to look steady on the outside, through a pharma and life sciences lens more often than not.

An AI tool doing a recommendation search isn't working from vibes. It's working from pattern and relevance, pulled from whatever is written down and findable. If your positioning is vague, there's nothing for it to latch onto. If it's specific, consistent, and backed up by tons of content across your website and your posts, there's something real for a search like hers to find.

In other words, this wasn't luck. It was the long, unglamorous result of years of saying the same things about who I help and what I know, often to an audience of what felt like nobody.

What this means if you're searching for a coach

If you're reading this because you're the one doing the searching rather than the one hoping to be found, here's the practical bit.

Whether you ask an AI tool, a colleague, or a search engine, the same questions apply. Do they have real experience in your specific world, not just coaching in general? Have they actually worked with people navigating the kind of transition you're facing, whether that's a new executive role, a restructure, or a step up that's bigger than anything you've done before? Perhaps your and HR leader searching for a coach for a very specific situation you have. Can you find consistent evidence of that experience, not just a claim on a homepage?

An AI tool can shortlist three names for you in seconds. It can't tell you whether the chemistry is right, whether you feel trust and connection with the person, or whether their coaching approach will land for you. That part still has to happen the old-fashioned way: on a call, in a conversation, deciding whether this is someone you want in your corner for the next six months.

Which is exactly what happened next in this story.

What happens now

We start a six month engagement together in November, and I'm really looking forward to it. She's stepping into a significant transition, and that combination of pharma background and executive change is precisely the work I love doing most.

I still don't entirely know what to make of being found this way rather than doing the finding. It feels like a slightly odd, slightly good watershed moment. Proof that specificity still has value in a world outside my immediate control, even when I'm nowhere near the keyboard.

Crazy times we're living through. Or maybe I'm just starting to sound like one of the relics in that flea market myself.

Has an AI tool found you a coach, a consultant, or a service recently? I'd be curious to hear how that went for you, and whether it changed how you think about being findable in your own work.

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💬 If you're navigating an executive transition or you're an HRD looking for an industry experienced coach in pharma or life sciences, and you'd like to talk, my details are on this site.