Clarify what you stand for. Turn your stories and skills into an offer people believe in. Then build the content, email, advertising, and team engines that keep growing while you go live.
You wanted freedom.
More control over your time. More creative work. More adventure. More space for the people and experiences that matter.
But somewhere along the way, the business became another machine that needs to be fed every day.
Fieldwork helps you build a different kind of business.
One with a clear story, a believable offer, and simple engines that continue creating attention, trust, and customers without requiring your constant presence.
Because the point of building online is to live more fully offline.
You are intelligent, curious, and good at what you do.
You may have built a real business, developed an unusual collection of skills, or spent years mastering a craft.
But communicating it all feels harder than it should.
You do not want to become a guru.
You do not want to manufacture a personality.
You want to build meaningful work, communicate it honestly, and create enough leverage to spend more time living.
That is what Fieldwork is for.
Most business programs begin with an offer, funnel, or growth target.
Fieldwork begins with a more important question:
What are you actually building all of this for?
The result is not simply a better personal brand.
It is a business and body of work that point in the same direction as your life.
Systems that continue producing results with low founder involvement.
Your engines should create momentum while you are working, sleeping, surfing, traveling, or spending time with the people you love.
Useful resources you activate when a specific job needs to be done.
Tools help you move faster without turning every part of your business into another complicated automation.
Human capabilities that stay with you wherever you go.
Skills make you adaptable long after a tactic, platform, or algorithm changes.
Build the engines. Craft the tools. Develop the skills. Then go live.
Three moves: extraction, installation, return loop. This is the same map I draw on a napkin when founders ask what we actually do all day.
Deep-dive interviews pull the story you're too close to see — origin, turning points, the promise underneath it all.
The same Story Bank threads into emails, ads, landing pages, social — consistent signal everywhere a stranger meets you.
Your audience sends new stories back (replies, sales, encounters). Those become your next week of publishing. Life → Story → Publish → Revenue → Repeat.
Five phases. We design the life, find the throughline, craft the offer, build the engines, then hand you back a business that keeps moving while you live.
Define what a rich offline life means to you.
Map your ideal lifestyle, time, income, relationships, environment, adventures, and impact.
Then calculate the economics required to support it.
Extract the experiences, stories, beliefs, skills, and interests that make you valuable.
Then connect them into a clear mission, audience, and personal position.
You do not need to reduce yourself to one shallow niche. You need a throughline people can understand.
Turn your experience and expertise into something people can understand, believe in, and buy.
Build the offer around both customer value and the life you want to live.
Create the connected systems that turn your work and ideas into attention, trust, customers, and revenue.
You stop relying on random bursts of motivation. The engines begin doing the repetitive work.
Create workflows that allow you to step away without disappearing.
Capture ideas while walking, traveling, surfing, building, or talking with interesting people.
Let real life feed your content rather than interrupting it.
Most founders think they need more ideas.
They usually do not.
The problem is that expertise feels ordinary from the inside.
Fieldwork helps you identify what matters, shape it into a clear message, and install it across the places people discover and trust you.
Your content no longer begins with a blank page.
It begins with a life already being lived.
Honest conversations with founders building meaningful businesses and unconventional lives. We discuss the real stories behind the work, including the decisions, doubts, failures, identities, and experiences that rarely appear in polished business content.
Practical lessons from business, storytelling, marketing, personal growth, and the field. These are the ideas, frameworks, and observations Christian has gathered from scaling brands, interviewing founders, building systems, and creating an unconventional career.
Small, useful resources designed to help you complete a specific job. Story prompts. Calculators. Copywriting frameworks. Hiring tools. Content systems. Offer builders. No enormous resource library you feel guilty for ignoring. Just the right tool when you need it.
A community of curious, capable founders who want to build meaningful businesses without surrendering their entire lives to them. No manufactured titles. No performative networking. Just people building, learning, sharing, and helping each other move forward.
I was born in Montana, raised on the west coast of Ireland, and studied mechanical engineering.
Then photography took over my life. I spent years documenting surfers, expeditions, ocean adventures, and creative people around the world. I thought photography was my one true calling.
Then, after a four-and-a-half-month expedition from California to Alaska, my van was broken into. My cameras, hard drives, and months of work disappeared. The identity I had built my life around disappeared with them.
I started emailing brands, offering to help however I could, and getting paid only if the work produced results. That is how I learned marketing.
Photography led to storytelling. Storytelling led to content. Content led to growth. Growth led to funnels, email, advertising, AI, hiring, and business systems.
Since then, I have worked across more than 120 brands, 50 industries, and 23 countries, contributing to more than $220 million in client revenue.
But the most important discovery was not a marketing tactic. It was realizing that I was never supposed to be only one thing.
Engineering was not wasted. Photography was not wasted. Adventure was not wasted. Marketing did not replace creativity.
Every chapter became part of the same skill stack.
A slice of it. 120 brands · 50 niches · 23 countries · $220M in tracked revenue · $700K+ in documented student wins — and counting.
Fieldwork exists to help other multidimensional founders do the same. Turn what you have lived, learned, and built into meaningful work, then build the systems that give you more freedom to live.
Christian McLeod· Founder, Fieldwork
Same person. Same method. Different business names along the way. Here's the short version of how I ended up here.
The wildfire-and-wildflower version of America.
Grew up in weather. Learned early that every place worth caring about has a story you have to earn.
Which is a long way of saying I spent my 20s learning how things come apart and go back together.
Followed my friends around the world — California, Iceland, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Africa. Sponsored by O'Neill, Narbox, Leatherman. Quiet fact most people miss: I was writing the stories the whole time, not just shooting them. I'd sell one piece to seven magazines in six languages. That's where storytelling stopped being a hobby.
Finished a four-and-a-half-month expedition from California to Alaska. Went on a quick hike. Came back to a broken-into van. Hard drives, cameras, four months of work — gone. Ended up broke, couch-surfing in Anchorage.
Emailed every brand I'd ever worked with. Offered to work for free and get paid if I was any good. Built Simply Adventure into a newsletter list and content engine that mattered — then sold it.
Merged Simply Adventure into Roam. Grew Roam from 100K to 1.6M followers across channels in a year. Outside Magazine acquired it.
A growth agency for e-commerce brands. Scaled 120 brands across 50 niches and 23 countries — $220M in tracked revenue. (This is why a lot of testimonials on this page say Ansel.)
Productized the growth playbook — ads, email, site, offer — into a repeatable framework. Same core idea that later became the Narrative Engine.
Solo consulting — focused heavily on AI, with one north star: turn companies into lean, mean growing machines. Story Engineering is a part of that practice — the piece that handles the narrative layer while the AI handles the scale.
An automated growth system for local service businesses — plumbers, contractors, electricians. Same underlying method, different vertical. Why some testimonials reference HIVIZ.
Every brand I'd ever scaled had one thing underneath the tactics: a real story, engineered honestly. So I built the Narrative Engine — the AI-integrated system that extracts that story and installs it everywhere a stranger meets you. What this page is selling.
Different names on the receipt. One founder. One thesis — story compounds, AI alone doesn't.
Three founders. Three different niches. Three videos of them telling you exactly what changed.
“Hit 7 figures, then added recurring revenue on top — no extra ad spend, just story-first systems.”
“Implemented a fraction of the site and ad systems and hit 5× ROAS with my existing content.”
“Went from yearly revenue to monthly revenue in weeks — same product, rewired story and systems.”
Nine real brands. Nine real outcomes. Same methodology — find the story, install it into their emails, ads, and site, then watch it compound.
Some had big followings but no income. Some had a hundred followers and a skill. Here's what happened next.
Everything you need to design the life, find the throughline, craft the offer, and build the engines.
Guided interviews that help uncover the experiences, beliefs, and turning points you are too close to recognize on your own.
A structured path through life design, story, positioning, offers, content, email, advertising, hiring, systems, and offline integration.
Practical teaching, implementation sessions, founder hot seats, and direct problem-solving. Show up live or watch the replay.
48 sessions per year.
Custom GPTs, calculators, templates, prompts, processes, checklists, and decision tools for every stage of the journey.
Step-by-step support for building your content, email, funnel, advertising, sales, and crew engines.
Founder interviews, guest sessions, and honest conversations with interesting people building unconventional lives.
A private community for feedback, accountability, collaboration, and connection.
Bring your offer, landing page, content, email, funnel, hiring question, or current obstacle directly to Christian. Average response time: 36 hours.
One email a day for two weeks. The exact mental models, prompts, and extractions I use with paying clients. Free, because most founders won't do the work — and the ones who do should know my process by heart.
“Mason said this was the first program he actually finished — the Extraction clicked on day 4.”
Full access to the 12-week Narrative Engine installation — weekly live calls, 1:1 Ask Christian window, the full vault, the community, and every skill I've built. Cancel anytime. 90-day money-back guarantee.
The honest breakdown. No fake urgency. No fake ROI.
Join Fieldwork. Show up to the calls, do the Extraction, install your story everywhere we tell you to. If you do the work and don't make at least $2,000 in your first 90 days, I refund every dollar you've paid. No forms, no clawbacks, no questions.
Why $2,000? Because that's the minimum I expect you to make if you follow the playbook. The system is templated end-to-end; the only variable is whether you actually show up. If you implement everything and still don't hit it, either I failed to teach you well or the fit wasn't right. Either way, you shouldn't be paying for it.
Ecommerce, outdoor, wellness, fashion, photography — same method everywhere.
Fieldwork helps you decide where you are going, build something valuable enough to take you there, and create the engines that keep moving when you step away.
You do not need to become another internet personality.
You do not need a more complicated system.
You need a clear direction, a believable offer, and a business designed to support your life.
Build Online. Live Offline.
Limited to 15 founders in the founding cohort.
$200/mo · cancel anytime · 90-day money-back guarantee · 1:1 consulting available separately
