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She spent 15 years behind the scenes. Now she’s fully owning her expertise.
AMANDA EDGAR · PAGE & PODUIM PRESS
Amanda Edgar, PhD
Page & Podium
A PhD, a former tenure-track professor, and a 15-year ghostwriter who had built an entire career while making herself invisible.
Amanda Edgar grew up working class, in a world where entrepreneurship wasn’t on the menu. She took the high-achiever’s path: master’s program, PhD, and a tenure-track academic position – only to discover that the parts of academia she loved (writing, coaching, helping people find their voice) were exactly what she was doing on the side for clients she was quietly ghostwriting books for. So she freelanced her way out of academia. And then realized she had no idea how to run the business she’d built.
She found Racheal the way Amanda’s own clients find her – through a book. She bought Fired Up and Focused before she ever made contact. Recognized the strategic, step-by-step methodology immediately, and knew: this is the room I need to be in.
Break free from a third-party platform that was capping her income, controlling her client relationships, and preventing her from building the team her business needed to grow. Get her own clients. Get visible. Build something that could run without her carrying every piece of it.
Expert at the work.
Trapped by the business model behind it.
Amanda had clients, a craft she’d honed for 15 years, and a genuine gift for helping people write the books they needed to write. What she didn’t have: control over her clients, proof she could show them, or a path to building anything bigger than herself.
01
Held Hostage by Third Party Platform
Amanda was sourcing clients through a third-party marketplace that took 20% of everything she earned – infuriating on projects where ghostwriters can charge $150K or more. But it was worse than the cut. The platform monitored every conversation, blocked her from sharing website links, and prohibited team members from logging in to respond to leads. Every “scolding email” from the platform dysregulated her. She was growing in spite of the system she was trapped in.
02
Invisible by Design: No Testimonials or Visibility
Ghostwriters don’t promote themselves – that’s the professional default. Her platform clients required NDAs. She had almost no testimonials she could use, no public proof of her work, and no one outside her personal network even knew she existed. She was terrified of putting herself forward in an industry built on staying behind the curtain. Starting a YouTube channel felt like the most presumptuous thing she could imagine doing.
03
Comparisonitis Keeping Her Small
The academic world is built on competition – who’s more published, more credentialed, more recognized. Amanda brought that conditioning with her. She was fixated on competitors who had more testimonials, more visibility, more apparent authority. Never mind that she had a PhD and fifteen years of books written. The imposter syndrome was louder than the evidence. She stayed hidden because stepping forward felt like asking who she thought she was.
“It is the supportive framework around all the learning that helps you actually implement it in a way that’s healthy — rather than put my head down and do every single thing on this checklist in two days. Y’all are so good about saying: this is actually 20 goals, not one goal. Break it down.”
AMANDA EDGAR · PAGE & PODIUM PRESS
What the system actually built for Amanda.
Amanda came in knowing her craft inside out and her business model not at all. The 90-Day CEO OS gave her something she’d never had: a structure for moving from freelancer to founder – including the visibility strategy, the team infrastructure, and the systems that would hold the business when life demanded she step back.
Phase 01
Visibility as Essential Infrustructure
The CEO Collective helped Amanda see that visibility wasn’t vanity – it was the engine her business needed. She launched a YouTube channel, showed up on reels and lives, and started telling stories she’d been holding back. That visibility immediately unlocked something the 3rd party platform never could: testimonials. Named clients. Real social proof. People who found her through her content came already knowing her voice and wanting to work with her specifically.
Phase 02
Hiring for Leadership Not Comfort
Amanda’s early hires were people who didn’t intimidate her. She can see that now. Once the CEO Collective helped her build genuine confidence in her own expertise, she started hiring for what her business actually needed – people stronger than her in the roles she needed filled. Emily, her full-time writer with an MFA in fiction, now leads group calls, handles client relationships, and contributes ideas Amanda never would have thought of. That happened because Amanda finally got out of her own way.
Phase 03
Systems That Hold When Life Doesn’t
A major personal crisis hit Amanda mid-stride. She could only work 10-15 hours a week. And here’s what she discovered: the business kept running. Emily handled client work. Laura watched the inbox. The SOPs, the delegation, the systems she’d built – they held. What she had thought of as nice-to-have infrastructure turned out to be the thing that let her sleep, grieve, and come back. The business didn’t just survive. It showed her it was real.
What it looks like when a PhD finally claims what she already knows.
When I came to Racheal, I was pulling clients from a third-party platform that monitored my every move, took 20% of my fees, and sent me scolding emails when I tried to grow my team. I had been writing books for 15 years. I had a PhD. And I was letting a platform make me feel like I was doing something wrong.
The imposter syndrome was loud. I was so focused on my competitors – who had more testimonials, more visibility, more everything – that I couldn’t see what I actually had. I remember one mastermind day where it was just me and Racheal and we cried for most of it. Getting it out. And her just saying, over and over: you have done so much. You are doing so much.
"It is the hardest work I have ever done. And it is the most satisfying and rewarding work I have done. Both of those things are true at the same time."
When I started showing up on YouTube, talking about the things I say to my clients every single day, something happened. People started finding me. They wanted to use their testimonials. They referred clients. The growth was exponential in a way I hadn’t imagined possible. Visibility wasn’t the scary thing I had convinced myself it was. It was the missing piece.
And then life happened. A major personal crisis. I could barely work. And I found out something I needed to know: the business ran. Emily held it. Laura held it. The systems held it. I slept. I dealt with what I needed to deal with. And when I came back, the business was still there – because I had built it to hold me, not the other way around.
The CEO Collective gave me the structure for the business side – the things I didn’t know I didn’t know. And it gave me a community of people who were building alongside me. When you’re the only one in your firm, that room is not a luxury. It’s the infrastructure that keeps you standing when the rollercoaster drops.
WHAT’S DIFFERENT NOW
Amanda’s biggest wins.
Result 01
Zero Clients from 3rd Party Platforms
Result 02
A Team That Runs Without Her
Result 03
Business Survived Her Hardest Season
Result 04
Launched The Memoir Method – Her Own Framework at Scale
Featured Episode · Promote Yourself to CEO®
From Invisible Ghostwriter to Visible CEO
Amanda joins Racheal to talk about freelancing her way out of academia, the third-party platform that was capping her income and controlling her growth, what it actually took to claim her expertise publicly, and how building real business systems let her business hold her through her hardest season – not the other way around.
MORE MEMBER STORIES
CEOs Building Unshakeable Businesses.
You can’t read the label from inside the bottle.
You probably already have everything you need. The expertise, the experience, the framework that emerged from years of doing the work. What you need is someone outside of it to help you see it clearly – and a room full of people to help you build the business that deserves it.