High Point University
Writing for someone elsewithout sounding like someone else.
Executive ghostwriting is a strange job.
When it works, nobody should notice you were there.
Category
Executive Voice / Ghostwriting / Higher Education / Email
Campaign platform
Writing for someone elsewithout sounding like someone else.
The work
Strategic idea
I write executive thought leadership, parent communications, enrollment campaigns and brand storytelling for High Point University and its president, Dr. Nido R. Qubein.
The assignment is rarely “write this.” It is: understand how this person sees the world, understand what the audience needs to hear, then make the two sound like they were always meant to meet.
Creative device
Borrow the voice.Leave no fingerprints.
His voice
- Optimistic.
- Reflective.
- Direct.
- Story-driven.
- Entrepreneurial.
My job
- Disappear.
Executive voice
Executive ghostwriting
Write like them. Disappear completely.
“The best ghostwriting disappears.”
I develop executive thought leadership for senior university leadership, including work published in Fortune.
Role
- Ghostwriting
- Executive thought leadership
- Voice development
The job
Find the argument the executive is actually making, then write it so completely in their voice that the writer disappears.
→View executive writing samples
Featured piece 01 — Executive thought leadership
AI doesn’t replace life skills. It exposes them.
“The panic, it turns out, is louder than the reality.”
A thought-leadership argument built around a counterintuitive insight: while AI dominates workplace headlines, the people doing the hiring continue to place extraordinary value on deeply human abilities.
90% of executives and 93% of HR professionals said life skills remain essential in the AI era.
Featured piece 02 — Executive storytelling
The laugh that built a company
“A laugh can become motivation.”
In 2000, Netflix offered itself to Blockbuster. Blockbuster said no. Worse, they laughed.
The piece turns that famous rejection into a reflection on persistence, innovation and what happens when someone refuses to let another person’s certainty become their own.
Email that had a job to do
For parents and prospective students, email was often one of the first places the HPU experience became personal.
Not a newsletter. A voice arriving in the middle of somebody’s ordinary Tuesday — and earning the next thirty seconds.
Email 01
The Koi Fish Formula
The job
Turn a simple story about environment into a parent-facing argument about challenge, growth and student potential.
Excerpt
What if your child’s potential wasn’t limited by their talent or ambition, but by the size of their “fishbowl”?
Email 02
The Most Dangerous Word
The job
Use one provocative idea to earn the second line, then the third, then the click.
Original copy available on request.
Email 03
Success Coach / Parent Series
The job
Make a university support system feel personal, specific and real before a student ever arrives on campus.
Original copy available on request.
Interactive enrollment
Interactive enrollment
Sometimes the email isn’t the experience.It’s the door into it.
Enrollment marketing also meant giving prospective students something to do, not just something to read.
The writing
Question phrasing
Every question has to sound like a person asking, not a form collecting.
Answer choices
Options that feel true enough that choosing one says something about you.
Microcopy
The small words between screens keep momentum from leaking.
Pacing
Short enough to finish. Long enough to feel like it was about you.
Conversion path
The outcome screen has to earn the next enrollment step, not just applaud you.
The job
Turn passive interest into participation, then use that engagement to move the student toward the next enrollment action.
Results
Up to 70%
improvement in click-through performance on selected HPU campaigns.
Gold 2025
DotCOMM Gold Award for Copywriting.