I’ve spent years building and leading hospitality teams that have generated millions in revenue, and now, I help professionals like you tell your unique story on paper.

As an executive resume writer with hands-on experience in operations, I partner with leaders who have well-deserved accolades but struggle to position themselves for the next significant step. 

I've sat on the other side of the table as a hiring manager, so I know what stands out. I excel at transforming your complex, behind-the-scenes accomplishments into clear, compelling narratives that grab attention.

Whether your background is in hospitality, operations, or broader business leadership, my goal is simple: 
To position you as the clear choice for high-profile roles, promotions, and opportunities that truly align with your skills and aspirations.

Specialties include crafting executive and professional resumes, optimizing LinkedIn profiles, and guiding career transitions in the hospitality and operations fields. 

I take pride in working with a select number of clients each month, ensuring a personalized and high-quality experience for each one. If you’re ready to take your career to the next level, let’s connect!

Luke Duggan

People learn how to value your work by how you describe it.
If you minimize, they discount it.
If you generalize, they assume replaceability.
If you’re precise, they see you as credible.

It’s not about sounding impressive or grandiose (see what I did there😊).

It’s about being specific enough that your contribution can’t be mistaken.

📍 What does your language (and body language) teach people about your value?

Luke Duggan 

Executive Resume Writer | Led Multimillion $ Teams, Now I Help You Land High-Visibility Roles

Most senior resumes don’t fail because they lack results.
They fail because they hide judgment.

When you get to a certain rung on the career ladder, hiring leaders already assume competence.

What they’re scanning for is how you decide.

What you prioritize.
What you protect under pressure.
The tradeoffs you’re willing to make.

If your resume only lists outcomes, you look capable. (But at your level, aren't you capable?)

If it shows decisions, you look promotable.

📍 Where could you replace “what happened” with “how you chose”?

There’s a quiet difference between being trusted and being relied on.

Trusted leaders are respected.
Leaders who are “relied on” are leaned on.

They catch what others miss.
They stabilize moments before they escalate.
They absorb complexity so others can function.

But, 

Reliance doesn’t always translate to recognition.

I continue to see leaders who are essential day to day yet invisible on paper. 

Their resumes describe tasks, not gravity.

Careers don’t stall from a lack of contribution; they stall when the contribution isn’t articulated clearly.

📍 Where are you relied on but not fully recognized?

Building a solo business is not a clean upward line.
Some weeks, you do solid work, and nothing moves.
Some weeks, you have good conversations that go nowhere.
Some weeks, you question whether any of this is translating.

What keeps me going is not motivation.

It’s paying attention to what actually creates momentum, even when it’s small.

Which conversations led to follow-ups?
Which posts led to profile views?
Which work did people ask questions about?

Progress shows up quietly before it shows up financially.

📍 If you’re building something on your own, what’s the smallest signal you’ve noticed that tells you you’re not wasting your time?

When asked during an interview, “Tell me about a challenge you handled.”
Some provide a detailed answer that details the effort.
Others reveal leadership.

When you talk about what you did, you sound busy. We are all busy, right?

When you explain why you chose the solution when you had a split second to decide, you sound credible.

Authority shows up in decisions:
•	what you didn’t escalate
•	what you corrected early
•	what you chose to carry yourself

📍 What decision do you avoid naming directly when you tell your story?

Most leadership growth isn’t dramatic.
It’s directional.

What you reinforce.
What you let slide.
What you finally name instead of carrying quietly.

Either way, those choices compound.

Over time, they tell people exactly who you are to work for.

📍 If someone watched your last 30 days, what direction would they see? Firm, fair, and consistent or wishy washy when it matters most?

High performers often believe one thing will take care of everything else:
“If I keep delivering, the right people will notice.”

Sometimes they do.
Often times, they don’t.

However, consistency builds trust. Trust that you can handle the task at hand.

But trust alone doesn’t create opportunity.

I’ve seen impressive leaders stall not because they lacked results, but because they never articulated what those results actually required:

The judgment calls.
The tradeoffs.
The moments they stepped in when things could’ve gone sideways.

When you don’t name that work, others fill in the blanks, and they usually fill them in smaller than reality.

This isn’t about self-promotion.
It’s about accuracy.

If your work carries weight, it deserves to be described with the same care you put into doing it.

📍 What part of your contribution have you been assuming others “just know”?

Most professionals don’t undersell themselves on purpose.
They do it to stay comfortable.

They describe outcomes without decisions.
They mention results without pressure.
They talk about teams but not the weight they carried.
It sounds humble.
And yet it reads unclear.

Hiring decisions aren’t made on effort.
They’re made on trust.

And trust is built when someone can say:
•	Here’s what I saw
•	Here’s the call I made
•	Here’s what changed because of it

If you don’t give your work its proper shape, others will shrink it to something safer, and smaller.

📍 Where are you choosing comfort over clarity in how you talk about your work?

I don’t measure progress by how much I produce anymore.
I pay attention to resistance.

When decisions need less explaining.
When conversations don’t require backtracking.
When the work moves forward without constant justification.

Misaligned work creates drag, even when it looks productive.
Aligned work feels quieter, but it moves with purpose.

Lately, I’ve been noticing what no longer needs force.
That’s how I know I’m heading in the right direction.

📍 Where has your work started to feel clearer instead of heavier?

Most LinkedIn profiles are clean.
Polished.
Technically correct.
And completely interchangeable.

If someone finishes reading your profile and can’t clearly say:
• who you help
• how you think
• what problem you solve

you’re not positioned for the role you want, so you end up blending in.

Professionalism gets you seen.
But being specific gets you remembered.

📍 What do you want a decision-maker to know about you after 30 seconds?

Most people stall because their story stops evolving.
Their scope expands.
Their judgment deepens.
The risk they carry increases.

But they keep describing themselves the same way they did years ago.

That needs to change.
Hiring decisions are made on what is seen.

If your story hasn’t kept pace with your responsibility, your value gets misread.

Growth doesn’t require exaggeration.
It requires translation.

📍 Where has your responsibility increased without your narrative catching up?

Anyone can describe effort.
Leaders describe decisions.
What they chose.
What they ruled out.
What they took responsibility for when there wasn’t a clear answer.

Effort shows involvement.

Judgment shows readiness.

📍 What decision do you soften when it should be owned directly?

I used to say yes based on capacity.
If I could do the work, I would take the work.

What I pay attention to now is different.

I notice whether the work requires:
•	constant clarification
•	urgency without direction
•	emotional smoothing to keep things moving

That kind of work looks productive on the surface.
In reality, it drains judgment and hides impact.

The work that moves me forward doesn’t need performance.
It needs thinking, ownership, and decisions that hold.

📍 What kind of work keeps you busy but makes your contribution harder to see?

Most senior resumes don’t move forward because they don’t help the reader assess risk.
Hiring decisions at this level are about trust in the face of uncertainty.

On this sheet of paper, can this person show me they can:
make judgment calls without a playbook?
protect standards under pressure?
absorb complexity without creating noise?

Yes, most resumes demonstrate- “Here’s what I was responsible for.”

Effective resumes show: “I can be trusted to make the right decisions when it mattered.”

That sight difference can move someone from the “qualified” to the “shortlist” pile.

📍 Does your resume describe your role, or your reliability?

You’re reliable.
You deliver.
People trust you when things go wrong.
And slowly, that becomes your ceiling, and you’ve plateaued.
Because you’ve become operationally indispensable yet professionally invisible.

I see this when clients are:
•	people doing director-level thinking
•	carrying director-level consequences
•	while presenting themselves as “support” on paper

At this level, careers don’t stall from a lack of impact.

They stall because impact isn’t framed clearly enough to be valued.

Working harder won’t fix it.
Naming the work you’re already doing will.

📍 Where might your reliability be hiding in your leadership?

There’s a moment in interviews where the tone shifts.

It’s not when someone lists achievements.
It’s when they explain a decision.

Why did they choose one path over another?
Did they make a decision that was best for the business?

That’s when interviewers stop evaluating competence
and start evaluating judgment.

And judgment is what senior hiring is really about.

📍 What decision would immediately change how someone perceives your leadership if you owned it clearly?

How you describe the importance of your work (the task at hand) trains people to value it.

Generalize it, and it sounds too common.
Minimizing it discounts its impact.
Stay precise, and they feel the weight of what you want to accomplish.

Don’t make your own leadership voice invisible.

📍 Where could sharper language change how your work is taken seriously?

This year, I’ve stopped trying to measure progress by how motivated I feel.

Instead, I keep a simple weekly log:
What did I actually ship?
Who did I help make a decision?
What moved forward because I was involved?

No dashboards. No goals wallpaper.
Just a notebook and a pen at the end of each week.

It’s less inspiring, but it’s nice to measure (and see) the momentum.

📍 What would show up in your notebook if you tracked outcomes instead of effort?

Consistency helped me build trust early in my career.
It stopped helping when expectations changed.

At a certain level, showing up is assumed.

What people look for next is how you think.

If your value isn’t clearly articulated,
others decide for you, and they’ll get it wrong. Promise.

📍 Where might people misunderstand your contribution right now?

Most professionals don’t hit a wall because they lack skill.
They hit it because their story is outdated.

Their expertise has grown.
Their judgment is sharper.
The decisions they make carry more weight.
But they’re still describing themselves the same way they did years ago.

That disconnect comes across: 
In interviews.
When promotions become available.
In how seriously they’re taken.

📍 Where is your experience ahead of the way you currently explain it?

Exited founder turned CEO-coach | Helping founders discover who they are as leaders and build high-performance, low-drama companies

Over 15 years I founded and served as CEO to three VC backed companies (one big exit and two learning experiences), all while presenting only the most polished, hyper-competent version of myself and my company, at all times. And then, in 2020 I left it all behind.When I signed the papers, officially removing myself as CEO of the company I’d started a decade prior, it felt like I’d been punched in the gut.Without my persona as the “CEO of VNN,” I realized that I had no idea who I was anymore, or what to do with my life.It was the opportunity of a lifetime.I spent the next 2 years searching, meditating, hanging out with monks, diving into psychedelics, and trying on new identities that never felt right.I was stuck.And then, I finally opened up.I started being honest about my struggles, despite the voice in my head telling me to play a role. I let go of my compulsion to be “Ryan the CEO,” or “Ryan the entrepreneur,” or even “Ryan the guy who’s raised a ton of money and scaled a media company.”I was just, Ryan.And the most surprising things happened.1. The more I opened up, the more everyone else did around me. My network grew and developed into one of deep relationships spanning life and business.2. The more I let go, the more the universe seemed to place exactly what I needed on my doorstep. Things began to happen organically, in ways much better than I could have planned.3. The quieter my mind got, the more I was able to access an innate wellspring of creativity and inspiration that, frankly, made work feel easy and joyful.Me, the guy who’d worked so hard his whole life to be perfect, when I learned to let go and be me, great, meaningful work flowed out of me.And from that foundation, I started Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique executive coaching firm that helps founders transform their companies into their masterpieces and step fully into their lives.Today, in my work as a coach I see the tendency to present that veneer of polished competence in nearly every founder I meet. And while I recognize the need for presentation in some cases (fundraising, recruiting), I also see how that need to look good actually gets in the way of our learning and growth.If you're tired of doing your own impression of the "perfect leader," you're not alone.Shoot me a DM. There's another way. And it's fucking incredible.

Ryan H. Vaughn

Big news! I'm so excited to welcome Derek Haswell to the team as a Partner and Founder Coach! 

I met Derek early in my coaching journey, and have wanted to conspire together in some way for years. He's amazing. And now I'm eager to see what we get up to together at IO. 

In 2013, Derek accidentally co-founded a meditation company. He helped build an award-winning product, scaled to 8-figure ARR, and worked with some of the best meditation teachers in the world, including the Dalai Lama.

Today, Derek blends outer work (strategy, goals, accountability) with inner work (self-awareness, resilience, what's actually driving the stuckness).

In his own words:

“I've lived that trade-off as a founder and it sucked... for everyone. Then I discovered they could be part of the same path, and it changed everything. Now I help founders make the same shift.”

I’ve known Derek for years, as a coach, a builder, and a wonderful human being, and I’m so excited to co-create Inside-Out with him, and support our founders in scaling consciously.

Check out Derek's full story in the comments. It's worth the read.

Exited founder turned CEO-coach | Helped early/mid stage startup founders raise over $500m, and create equity value over $12bn (and counting...)

I have big news. But first, a story. 

I talk with founders every day who are in the middle of real inflection points.

Co-founder splits. Post-exit identity crises. Scaling without burning out. The weight of figuring out who they are as a leader.

But I only coach 15 people at a time, which means I can't work with most of the founders I speak with.

That's always bothered me, so we're doing something about it.

Introducing: Inside-Out Virtual Workshops.

Small (around 8 people). Led by me and the Inside-Out team using the same frameworks and modalities we use with our 1-1 clients, finally accessible to a broader group of founders.

The first workshop is Getting Unstuck. It's for the founder or exec who knows how to do hard things, but keeps hitting the same wall in one specific area.

Most approaches to this work outside-in: Better habits, tighter systems, more accountability. And if that's worked for you, great. But if you've tried all that and you're still stuck, the problem probably isn't discipline.

This workshop works from the inside-out, using IFS (Internal Family Systems), an evidence-based framework that has become one of the most powerful tools in serious executive coaching.

Give me 90 minutes. You'll leave with a new way of seeing the stuckness and a concrete experiment to take into your life.

WHEN: March 23rd. Noon to 1:30pm ET.
COST: Free

Space is very limited. Click the link in the comments if you'd like to apply.

A client told me: “The single most important thing for my company right now is the fundraise.”

Then he paused. “And it’s the thing I avoid every morning.”

I see founders in inner conflicts like this every day. This type of dynamic can take years to unwind, and kill companies and relationships along the way. 

After nearly a decade of coaching founders, I've found one reliable method for resolving inner conflicts like these: 

Internal Family Systems, or IFS. 

IFS is a leading toolset at the bleeding edge of exec coaching, and is built on the only scientifically proven method to change emotional learnings, Memory Reconsolidation.

It's a core tool in our practice at Inside-Out, and we're teaching founders how to use it themselves live on March 23. 

When we looked inside at this particular issue, we found two competing parts.

One part wanted the company to grow. The other part said, “If this fails, you’ll look like an idiot in front of your investors.” So we work on the problematic part. Once you do that, the system stops conflicting.

This doesn't take weeks of months. The best coaches help clients get unstuck in an hour or less. 

Want to learn how it works? Apply for our first intimate workshop on March 23. Application in comments.

"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it."
–J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

I've played basketball my entire life, and here’s what I’ve noticed. If I step on the court
believing I'm the best player there, I hoop. If I'm uncertain, I play poorly.
Leadership works the same way. If you believe you'll win, you'll win. If you believe you'll lose, you'l lose.
Confidence is king.

But real confidence isn't peacocking. It's not pretending you have all the answers. It's not even earned through success. You can build a great company and still be one bad outcome away from doubting yourself.

Real confidence comes from alignment between who you are inside and how you show up in the world.
The ball’s in your court.

For most of my career, creativity came from pressure. From big problems I had to solve. From outcomes I needed to hit. 

But there's a different kind of creativity that lives underneath all of that. It comes from joy. From play. From love. I call this place presence. And it's where the most interesting work happens.

I see this all the time working with post-exit founders. During the scale-up, every identity shift serves the company. But after the exit? When that crutch is gone and you're staring at a blank page, wondering what's next?

That's when the real work begins.

Because now you're not choosing who to be based on what needs to get built. 
It's terrifying. And it's also the most creative place I've ever been.

There’s a hidden force behind many “productivity problems.”

It’s not laziness. It’s not discipline. It’s not even time management.
It’s fear.

When pressure, uncertainty, or self-doubt creep in, the brain doesn’t lean into bold work.

It looks for safety. Suddenly emails feel urgent. Slack feels necessary. Small,
controllable tasks replace the ambiguous, high-stakes ones that move things forward.
From the outside, it looks like busyness.
From the inside, it’s avoidance, rooted in fear.
And the insane part? It feels rational.

Understanding how fear quietly reshapes attention, decision-making, and execution is
one of the biggest unlocks for founders and high performers.

Because you’re not always fighting a workload problem.

Sometimes you’re fighting a fear problem.

The most defining part of leadership isn’t certainty. It’s the unknown.
Especially now, when AI and systems increasingly handle the predictable, repeatable, “figured-out” work, what remains for founders and CEOs is ambiguity.

Leadership becomes a cycle:
Enter the unfamiliar.
Navigate the discomfort.
Create clarity.
Hand it off.
Repeat.

The lesson is simple, and I’m trying to follow it myself.
Stop treating discomfort as a warning sign.
It’s usually evidence you’re exactly where you need to be.
Learn to recognize it.

Normalize it.
Build the internal capacity to move forward anyway.

Most people have picked a side on AI.
Either it's the greatest tool ever built, or it's an existential threat we're sleepwalking into.

The binary is comfortable. But the leaders I work with who are navigating this most
effectively have learned to hold something harder: Both.

The fear is real. It lives in the gut. It wakes you up at 3am thinking about the world your kids will inherit. The excitement is equally real. As it should be.

The mistake isn't feeling one or the other. The mistake is collapsing into one becausethe other is too uncomfortable to carry. 

The most important things in life are paradoxical. They resist resolution. And AI may be the defining paradox of our time.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

Angry seagulls are going to make you a better leader. Stick with me and I’ll
explain.

You"re in a board meeting. An investor cuts you off. "I don't think you know what you're doing. Your strategy is completely wrong."
Do you fight back or shut down?
When this happened to me once, I made two mistakes.

First, I said "okay" while quietly resenting the investor. That didn't work.
Then I pushed back and defended myself. Also a mistake. It took me years to find the third option. Get curious.

Not the kind of curious where you ask questions to trap them. The kind where you stay grounded in yourself while opening up to what you might be missing.

You're going to run into "angry seagull" investors. It's not if, it's when.
You can fight back. You might win the moment, but you won't grow.

You can blindly agree. You'll lead your company somewhere you don't believe in. Or you can ask questions. Really listen. Stay confident while staying open.

How you react when you're uncomfortable dictates the trajectory of your company and
career.

So…

What angry seagulls are in your life right now?
The investor who keeps pushing back?
The co-founder who questions every decision?

The board member who never seems satisfied?

What would it look like to stop resisting them—or blindly accepting them—and start
getting curious about what they're here to teach you?

https://lnkd.in/gHUzHVcZ

The most comforting and terrifying thing I’ve learned in business is the same truth. Here's the story.

My real education happened inside a startup accelerator. 12 intense weeks, surrounded
by founders, mentors, and Thursday night “fireside chats.”

One moment stuck.
A wildly successful executive paused when asked for his single biggest lesson for entrepreneurs. “Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing,” he said.

“The difference between successful companies and unsuccessful companies is that, with the successful ones, you can’t tell.”
That perspective has followed me through every stage of my career.

Do they teach that in school? I wouldn’t know.

https://lnkd.in/g_P32hAy

One late night, I got a call from a board member.

It was around 11pm my time, which means it was probably 3am his time.

What he said stuck with me forever.

Most leaders don’t have a strategy problem.
They have a validation problem.

The most dangerous addiction in business isn’t money or power.
It’s being liked.

Applause feels like progress.
Agreement feels like safety.

Slowly, decisions stop being about what’s right and start being about what won’t upset anyone.

That’s not leadership.
That’s people-pleasing with a title.

Control is the most expensive illusion in your company.

My Zen teacher used to tell me, “Sit down, hold everything still, and watch what moves.”
What moves is everything you don't control. Your thoughts arrive uninvited. Your
emotions surface without permission. The narrative you've built about agency begins to
quietly unravel.

AI is doing something similar at civilizational scale. It moves too fast, builds too
suddenly, disrupts too completely to let you maintain the fiction. But I've come to believe that confrontation is a gift.

The founders who thrive aren't the ones who reassert control in the face of uncertainty.

They're the ones who find a different relationship to power, one that doesn't require control as its foundation.

That's not passivity. It’s a more sophisticated form of strength.

"You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." — Marcus Aurelius

This video has been making its way around the Internet. You should stop and watch before you keep reading.

Most people think reading 900 words per minute is impossible. Until they do it.
What changed?

Not their brain. Not their intelligence.
Their belief about what was possible.

We’ve seen this before.

Same with running the four-minute mile.
And having smart machines.

Entrepreneurs do this constantly.

We build invisible ceilings and convince ourselves they’re real.
Then a crisis hits. Or something else forces your hand.
And you discover the ceiling was never real.

When people read 900 words per minute for the first time, there’s genuine shock. Like they discovered some supernatural ability.
But they always had it. They just never gave themselves permission to use it.

Most limitations are just untested assumptions.

Question the ceilings. Test the assumptions.
You’ll probably discover you’ve had the ability all along.

An interesting question to sit with:
What limitation are you currently living with that is, in fact, just a belief?

Scaling a company means giving away the work you used to take pride in.

Watch and listen to why that moment is harder than most founders expect.

I once heard a story that stayed with me.

A little girl walks through a garden for the first time. It was overwhelmingly beautiful, and
she runs inside to tell her mother.

Her mother smiles. “Those are pretty flowers, aren’t they?”
The next day, the girl returns to the garden… and sees “pretty flowers.”

The label stripped the magic. It flattens wonder into familiarity.

I catch myself doing this in business.
A group of complex, brilliant, unpredictable humans becomes “the sales team.”
Or “engineering.”

And without realizing it, I narrow how I see them.

Abstraction isn’t wrong. It’s essential.
But every so often, a moment of awe — in nature, in conversation, in work — reminds
me:

Reality is always richer than the words we use to contain it.

I’m doing my best to remember that.

https://lnkd.in/gxyzemuH

There's a simple exercise I give clients that is deceptively powerful.

Take a walk. Hit record on your phone. Picture one person in your company. And just
talk.

Everything you haven't said. Everything you're holding. Everything unaddressed.
Most leaders think their biggest organizational problems are structural.

Rarely.

They're almost always relational. And almost always, they began with something that
went unsaid.

Have had the pleasure and privilege of getting to know Ryan, and +1 to all this

Founder/CEO at HealthBar | Healthcare Delivery & Payor Model Innovator/Entrepreneur/RN

If you don't know Ryan Cummins, you absolutely need to make it a priority!


Having Ryan close our 'Health'care 2026 conference with a keynote address is going to be engaging and empowering

The work he's doing is absolutely incredible 

His curiosity to learn is unmatched

And his focus on future generations is inspiring.....


Don't miss an opportunity to hear from, and meet Ryan at 'Health'care 2026!

healthcare2026.com

#health #healthcare #business #ceo #entrepreneurship #events

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