Eric Moore – Meet the Mentor

Why did you decide to become a mentor?

Most of the people I've learned from just answered my weird questions at odd hours and told me when I was being foolish. I wanted to pay that forward. But there's a selfish reason too: mentoring forces me to articulate things I know instinctively but have never had to explain. When someone asks "why does communication feel off?" I can't just say "it doesn't sound like you." I have to reverse-engineer what 'you' actually means. That makes me better at my own work. What's surprising is I signed up thinking I'd help people write better. Instead, most conversations are about permission to sound like themselves, permission to be direct, permission to fix the real problem instead of polishing a turd. Turns out the technical skills are easy. The courage to use them is hard.

How did you get your career start?

I started as a software trainer, and I was good at it. Really good. The problem wasn't the work, it was the treadmill. Every six months, the software would change. New interface, new features, new workflows. Which meant new curriculum, new demos, new troubleshooting scripts. I'd finally get people comfortable with one version, then have to tell them everything was different again. The burnout wasn't from the work volume. It was from the futility. You can't build expertise when the ground keeps shifting. So I made what looked like a completely irrational pivot: I went to film school. On paper, I was learning to make movies and run TV shows. In practice, I was learning something more fundamental—how to manage projects with actual constraints. In software training, if something went wrong, you could usually patch it or push the deadline. In film production, if you don't get the shot today, the location's gone tomorrow and the actor's on another project. You learn to plan obsessively and execute ruthlessly. That's where the real education happened: learning to run a P&L when every line item matters, leading crews where everyone has to trust your decisions in real-time, mentoring people who need to level up fast because there's no time for slow growth. Film production is a terrible business model but an incredible MBA. The through-line between software training and film wasn't obvious at the time. But both taught me the same thing: people don't fail because they lack information. They fail because the information is organized wrong or delivered at the wrong moment. That insight eventually led me to messaging work, where the stakes are lower than a film shoot but the principles are identical: clarity under constraints, ruthless prioritization, and understanding that how you frame something matters more than what you're framing.

What do mentees usually come to you for?

Here's the pattern I see: people come in thinking they have a writing problem. What they actually have is a thinking problem that shows up in their writing. I recently work with a sports videographer. Smart guy, incredible at his work. He'd say things like "I'm struggling with my messaging" or "I need help with my pitch." But when we dug in, the real issue was that he was charging $500 for work that should cost $3,000. He had a pricing problem disguised as a messaging problem. This happens constantly. Someone will say "help me rewrite my homepage" when what they really need is permission to fire their worst clients. Or they'll ask for "positioning help" when the actual issue is they're trying to be everything to everyone because they're terrified of turning down work. The actual messaging work is straightforward once you know what problem you're solving. We start with an audit of whatever they're using: homepage, pitch deck, email templates. Then we find the one thing breaking the whole system. Usually it's not the words. It's that they're answering the wrong question or talking to the wrong audience. But the harder part, the part that takes real work, is helping people see that their business model doesn't support the message they want to send. You can't position yourself as premium while accepting every $200 project that comes your way. The math doesn't work. The message won't stick. So we end up having uncomfortable conversations about which clients to keep, which to fire, and what they're actually worth charging. The other thing people come for: courage. They know what they should say but can't bring themselves to say it. "Won't clients think I'm too expensive?" "Shouldn't I sound more professional?" "What if I offend someone?" This is where we look at the cost of playing it safe. Boring messages don't offend anyone. They also don't convince anyone. The goal isn't provocation for its own sake, it's being clear enough that the right people recognize themselves and the wrong people self-select out. Mentees usually come to me for better words. What they get is a clearer understanding of what they're actually selling, who they're selling it to, and what they need to stop doing to make the whole thing work.

What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?

I worked with someone who ran a boutique data analytics firm in Spain. Super likable and knowledgeable. Absolutely terrible at explaining what he did. His pitch was something like "We provide actionable insights through advanced statistical modeling and data visualization frameworks." When I asked him to show me an example, he pulled up a project where he'd helped a retail chain figure out why their best-selling product was actually losing them money. Turns out the product attracted customers who never bought anything else, and the margin was so thin it wasn't worth the shelf space. So, I asked: "Why didn't you lead with that story?" He said: "Because every project is different. I can't promise I'll find that specific thing for every client." Yeah but nobody hires you for the specific thing. They hire you for the kind of thinking that finds hidden problems. We rewrote his entire pitch around that story. New version: "I find the expensive things you don't know you're doing wrong." Then the story as proof. Three months later he told me he'd closed two deals in a single week, his previous record was two deals in a quarter. The work hadn't changed. The explanation had. He went from trying to sound credible by listing services to demonstrating credibility through a specific example of the impact he creates. That's the mentorship win I love most: when someone realizes their best marketing asset isn't a framework, it's a true story about the last time they did something unreasonably useful for someone.

What are you getting out of being a mentor?

It keeps me from calcifying. When you do the same kind of work for fifteen years, you develop patterns. Some of those patterns are hard-won wisdom. Some are just habits you've stopped questioning. Mentoring forces me to defend my assumptions to smart people who haven't absorbed them yet. Things like: "Why does this need to be three sentences instead of one?" "Why can't I just list my features?" These aren't dumb questions. They're fundamental questions I stopped asking myself five years ago. The other thing: watching someone implement advice and actually get results is intoxicating in a way client work sometimes isn't. With clients, I'm often implementing the changes myself. With mentees, I'm watching them do it, which means I get to see what parts of my process actually transfer and what parts only work because I have specific context they don't have. That feedback loop makes me better at my job. But the deepest benefit is mentoring reminds me, as cheesy as it sounds, that the work matters. It's easy to get cynical about messaging when you're wrist-deep in edits at 11pm. Then someone tells you that your advice helped them finally explain what they do to their own mother, and suddenly you remember: clarity isn't a commodity. It's the thing that unlocks every other thing. When people can explain what they do, they can build the thing they're supposed to be building instead of fighting with a website that doesn't work. That's worth staying up for.