I asked a friend to critique my website. She found the thing I couldn't see

I make my living telling businesses to put evidence before opinion. So here, in the interest of fairness, is a story about me failing to do exactly that, and what it cost me until someone kinder and sharper pointed it out.

When I launched this website I was quietly pleased with it. Direct copy, real numbers, no corporate wallpaper. Before shouting about it, I asked a friend whose judgement I trust to give it a proper critique. Not a "looks great!" review; the real kind. I chose her deliberately because she knows nothing about my industry. She's a midwife, and a seriously good one: the person I'd send anyone to on all things women, birth and the female experience, with a career spent listening to people at their most unguarded. My test was simple: does this site make sense to an intelligent person outside the consulting bubble? I was after a readability check. What I got was a wake-up call.

What she saw

Because here's the thing I hadn't clocked: in asking someone outside my industry, I had accidentally consulted one of the foremost experts I know on the very audience my site was quietly excluding. Her feedback, lightly edited: the site reads as very masculine. Fine, she said, if you're not targeting women. But if you are, and given that female-founded companies are one of the fastest-growing and most watched parts of the market, you might want to look at that. She also, for good measure, took a scalpel to one of my favourite phrases, which she found pretentious. She was right about that too, and it's gone.

What I did next, which is the embarrassing part

My first reaction was to reach for a defence. It's not masculine, it's just direct. Directness is the brand. And then I caught myself, because I know that reflex professionally. Defensiveness in response to feedback is nearly always a tell: it means the observation landed somewhere true. When a client's leadership team bristles at a finding, that finding usually turns out to be the important one. Apparently the rule applies to me as well. Inconvenient, that.

And this matters more the more senior you get, because somewhere in most careers, honest feedback quietly stops arriving. People soften things for you. Meetings agree with you slightly more than they should. You don't notice the silence, because silence sounds like approval. Founders and owners get the worst dose: nearly everyone around them is either paid by them or fond of them. If nobody has told you anything uncomfortable in six months, it is not because there's nothing to say.

What I found when I actually looked

So I did what I'd tell a client to do, and audited the evidence. The imagery: altitude, engine rooms, boardrooms, being parachuted in. The case studies: estate agency, precision manufacturing, IT services. The only human pictured: me, a middle-aged man, above the Manhattan skyline at night. The metaphors: spines, walls, arithmetic. Here's the thing that makes it a lesson rather than a confession: not one of those choices was biased. Each one, individually, was true and defensible. The bias lived in the sum. Fifty small defaults, each pointing the same direction, adding up to a shop window that quietly told half my potential clients this probably isn't for you.

Twenty years of experience wasn't protection here; it was the mechanism. Expertise is, in large part, a collection of defaults that once worked, and fluency makes them invisible. The better you get at your craft, the more convincingly you can defend precisely the things you ought to be questioning. That's why the review had to come from outside. Nobody inside the fluency can see it.

Why this is a business problem, not just a virtue problem

It would be easy to file this under politeness and move on. That would miss the point. Female founders are starting companies at a rate the market has finally noticed, they typically have fewer trusted senior advisers around them rather than more, and they hit exactly the walls I spend my days helping people through. In other words, I had built a website that discouraged one of my fastest-growing markets from calling me. That's not a values failure first; it's a commercial one. And every business has a version of it: the job advert written in the language of the people you already employ, the product designed around the customer you already have, the testimonials that all look like each other. Your defaults are always sized to your own reflection.

And consider the economics of feedback for a moment. The market almost never sends any. The founder who lands on your website, feels vaguely that it isn't for her, and closes the tab does not write to explain her reasoning. She just doesn't call. Silence is the most expensive feedback there is, because it arrives disguised as nothing happening. A friend prepared to make you wince is the only affordable source of that data, and most of us never ask.

What a midwife knows that my industry forgets

Sitting with her notes, something else occurred to me. Her profession is built on the exact discipline mine claims and routinely skips. Midwifery is expertise exercised through listening: to people at their most unguarded, in moments where getting it wrong matters absolutely, where the person in front of you is the leading authority on their own experience and your job is to hear them accurately before you act. Consulting, as an industry, tends to the opposite failure. We arrive fluent, we talk, and we mistake the confidence of our patterns for the truth of the situation in front of us. The best engagements I've ever run started with me shutting up, and I evidently still needed the reminder from someone whose entire career is the masterclass.

What changed, and what didn't

The fix was not a pastel rebrand or a page about values, which would have been its own kind of insult. It was small and structural: the founders in my case studies now have pronouns, so women are visibly among the clients; the copy now says I listen before I prescribe, because I do, and it's odd that the site didn't; and the pretentious phrase is dead. The directness stayed. Directness was never the problem. The problem was that I'd proofread my own bias, and you can't. Nobody can. The only reliable fix is other eyes, deliberately chosen to be unlike yours, invited to be honest before the work ships rather than after it fails.

She wasn't finished, either. Reviewing the rewritten copy, she flagged three more words: "if I'm honest". Her point, backed by the psychology of hedging language, is that readers process that phrase as a tell for its opposite. You are directing them to believe you, which quietly plants the question of why you felt the need. Strip the hedge and the sentence stands on its own conviction; keep it and you've traded a little credibility for a little rhythm. It's gone from the site now, along with the reflex that put it there. Three separate reviews, three things I could not see, each one obvious the moment she said it. That's not an accident. That's what a good outside eye does: it keeps working after you thought the work was finished.

The awkward bit about writing this down

There is something faintly self-serving about publishing your own humility; done badly, it's just showing off in a quieter voice. I've weighed that, and I'm publishing anyway, because the mechanism is too useful to keep quiet about, and because the irony deserves recording: I sell outside eyes for a living, and I very nearly forgot to buy a pair for myself. I asked for a proofread and received an entirely different lens on my own business, a thorough and slightly humbling list of things to think about, and a better website, for the price of a favour. That exchange rate is absurd, and it was nearly zero because my first instinct was to explain to an expert why she was wrong.

So: find your version of my friend. Not someone adjacent to your work; someone properly outside it, expert in something you aren't, ideally expert in the people you serve. Ask before you ship, not after. Treat the wince as data. And since this piece is about inviting the uncomfortable question, I'll end on one rather than a moral: who in your life is both unlike you and unafraid of you, and when did you last actually ask them?

A note on the reviewer

Since this entire piece rests on her judgement, it's only right to tell you what she's building, because it's rather wonderful. She's soon to launch an online community built around a career spent in some of the busiest maternity hospitals in England: experiences shared, not lessons handed down. Home birth, breastfeeding, the unvarnished realities of women's health, and what it means to be genuinely present with another human being at the biggest moments of their life. It's for pregnant women and new mothers themselves, for the next generation of midwives, for medical professionals who want the view from the bedside rather than the textbook, and for anyone else drawn to the conversation. Because what she carries doesn't fit inside a job title: it's about womanhood, and beneath that it's about humanity itself, the accumulated, generous kind of knowing that only comes from thousands of hours spent with people at their most human. Which is, when I think about it, exactly what this post has been arguing for: wisdom that lives in a person, shared so the rest of us can borrow it.

If that sounds like your world, or you'd like to swap ideas with her, contribute to what she's creating, or simply be an early ally of something good, email me and I'll gladly put you in touch. No forms, no funnels, nothing in it for me. Just an introduction to someone worth knowing.