A word from
Andrea Elliott: Founding Partner
At Well Heard, it's our mission to help you define and amplify your voice.
It's awesome to have expertise and a passion for sharing it... but combine that with your content being easy to follow, your style being engaging to watch and people knowing where to find you??
Now that's Well Heard.
Hi. I'm Andrea Elliott.
In the beginning...
Most people know me as a corporate speaker, coach and instructional designer. I’ve spent the past two decades as a consultant in corporate America, mainly working with Fortune 500 clients, domestically and internationally.
I started my career by facilitating in-person classes to groups of 4-200 people, often in a new city and with a new group each week. My sessions typically contained mindset shifts and tactical techniques to help a person uplevel their mental game and/or personal interactions, boosting their overall productivity.
Expanding into Instructional Design...
Around 2011, I accidentally discovered I had a talent for instructional design, which is a fancy way of saying “building classes that address skill gaps and reach organizational goals”. The neuroscience behind learning is especially fascinating to me, and I enjoy discovering what goes on in our brains as we learn and transform new actions into habits. My corporate L&D projects gave me an extensive look into adult learning preferences, for learners of all backgrounds and education levels. I was constantly tasked with "make it simpler! but respect their intelligence!". Not an easy combo!
Virtually speaking...
Along this journey, I have found it exciting to watch what unfolds as the potential of virtual learning grows. In a world where learners want more on-demand content, and also are more comfortable with self-directed courses, a whole new style of presentation is possible. Because of this increase in demand, in 2020, I co-founded The Virtual Superhero, aimed to help virtual instructors incorporate the neuroscience principles of visual stimulation into their virtual sessions, in both live and recorded formats.
This passion project continues to teach me many things- it challenges me to... be a better virtual presenter as I test different virtual presentation styles... teach myself modern-day filming, editing and virtual delivery platforms...
Spreading corporate methods to a more inclusive audience...
... And along the way, it introduced me to the consumer market. Up until this point, I worked in the B-B space (businesses selling services to other businesses). This collaboration marked a shift to the B-C format (businesses selling services directly to the end consumer), which is similar... yet oh-so-different.
Now I was thrust into this world of "do I need to post on Facebook three times a day to be successful" (spoiler alert: you don't) or "how much do I charge for something I think is common sense" (another spoiler alert: your common sense is likely crafted from oodles of trial and error and NOT common sense) or "where do I even start??" (yet another spoiler: every consultant has a different opinion and MANY options are right). While I might not hold every "right answer"... we've certainly tried a lot of ideas and found pros and cons with many approaches.
Embracing the digital...
Somewhere between designing a great framework and watching a learner actually use it days later, I kept running into the same gap: incredible content, forgotten by Monday. That gap is what led me to Guided Application Tools — but building the idea was the easy part. Making it real meant learning to build the thing itself.
So I taught myself the back-end logic behind how these AI-powered tools actually think — how to take a framework I'd normally deliver in a workshop and turn it into something a learner could open mid-crisis and get real help from. Not a chatbot. Not a quiz. Something built on my frameworks, in my voice.
And because a tool needs somewhere to live, I ended up building that too — the actual web space each GAT calls home. I didn't set out to become a developer. But it turns out "make it simpler, but respect their intelligence" applies just as much to code as it does to curriculum.
And therein lies our invitation- you're reading this for a reason, right?
What is your Next First Step? And how can we help you take it?
One of our most frequent of the FAQ's...
Does working with Well Heard mean I'll be working directly with Andrea?
The short answer:
Yes. No. Maybe...
The more complete answer:
Andrea is very hands-on and will likely work directly on your project in some capacity.
However, we have a team of trusted designers, speakers and business builders that are highly qualified to help you reach your goals. We believe that some content is more naturally suited to some designers or presenters than others, so it's our mission to match-make you perfectly.
This will never be done for you, always with you. You've likely spent hours... days... years... what feels like lifetimes!... accumulating your content. It's like your baby. We understand and respect the importance of you feeling comfort and resonance with those you invite to meet your baby.
