Twenty years of expertise doesn’t transfer automatically. Not when you step out of somebody else’s organisation and put your own name above the door.
The Access Embassy exists to help healthcare and life sciences businesses get new treatments through to the patients who need them — cutting a path through policy, funding decisions, and the different groups of people who all have to agree before anything changes. Christel Jansen built that expertise over two decades, inside other people’s organisations. Then she left to do it on her own.
Credibility isn’t a nice-to-have in this business. It’s the entire offer.
The Challenge
Twenty years of credibility doesn’t travel with you automatically. It stays behind, in the organisation where you built it, until you find a way to carry it into something new.
Christel Jansen had built exactly that credibility — close to twenty years of it, doing market access work inside other people’s organisations, in the rooms where decisions about patient access to new treatments actually got made. Leaving to build The Access Embassy under her own name meant starting again, visibly, in a sector where people take their time deciding who to trust.
I’d worked with Christel before, while she was still doing this work inside somebody else’s organisation. When she decided to go it alone, the brief was clear: give her clarity, thinking and direction — including working out exactly who she needed to speak to and what mattered to each of them, because a business built on relationships can’t afford a vague answer to “who’s this for.”
The Collaboration
Because we already knew each other, this didn’t start with a discovery call and a proposal. It started with the work.
Strategy came first, not logos. Workshops to map out who The Access Embassy actually needed to reach — pharmaceutical teams, industry bodies, NGOs, the people shaping health policy — and what each of them was afraid of, wanted, and needed solving. Skip that step and the brand ends up speaking to nobody in particular.
Positioning came out of the same process — deep instead of broad. Not everything to everyone. A methodical, deliberate practice, built around Christel staying close to the work herself rather than delegating the relationships away.
From there: a purpose — getting new treatments through to the patients who need them. A vision — becoming the partner people trust to bring the right people into the same conversation. And five values that meant something once we tested them against real decisions: meaning, competence, clarity, authenticity, curiosity. The voice had to hold two things at once. Bold enough to challenge. Never preachy. Strategic. Never cold.
Identity followed strategy, the way it should. The core colour is a near-black teal — heavy, grounded, the kind of colour that says this isn’t a business selling on personality alone. Sitting next to it, natural tones — sage, soft taupe — because this is still relationship work, still human. And then a genuinely vibrant mint and a sharp coral, dropped in deliberately, because Christel isn’t just measured and methodical. She’s got real energy. A brand that hid that wouldn’t be telling the whole story.
The Website
One page. Built deliberately simple, because the business was one person at launch and didn’t need six sections pretending otherwise. But built to grow — structured so it can expand as the business does, without a rebuild every time something changes. Same instinct as the rest of the project: solve the problem in front of you, not the one you’re imagining might exist in three years.
What We Made
A brand and a website built to carry two decades of real expertise into a name nobody had heard yet — grounded enough to be trusted on sight, and still unmistakably her.
The relationship didn’t stop at launch. We’re currently working on a PowerPoint template, an image library and social media assets for her — the kind of work a client only commissions once the first project has actually held up. That’s a better signal than anything I could put in a testimonial.
“I highly recommend Bob to founders and leadership teams looking for end-to-end support across strategy, branding, design, and website development.”
— Christel Jansen, The Access Embassy
If you’ve spent years building real expertise inside somebody else’s organisation, and you’re now stepping out under your own name, none of that credibility follows you automatically. It has to be built again — deliberately, visibly, before the first client conversation happens. That’s the work. Give people clarity and a clear direction, and they can move into their independent career with confidence instead of just hope.
