May you live long enough to know why you were born.
Welcome
It is a human endeavor, to get better at being yourself.
There is no question about your potential as a leader.
You already have everything in you that you need.
The Work
EXECUTIVE COACHING
I don't believe you need to be fixed...because you aren't broken.
I believe you need seeing.
Most of us spend years becoming exceptionally good at being one version of ourselves. We develop habits that earn us promotions, admiration, influence, and success. We become known for being decisive, dependable, accommodating, analytical, resilient, or driven.
Then one day, the very qualities that carried us forward begin to hold us still. Not because they are wrong, but because they have become our only way. My work is to help you recover your range. Together we'll explore the assumptions you've come to accept as truth, the identities you've worked hard to protect, and the stories that quietly shape how you lead, decide, communicate, and relate to others.
Let's not replace them but let's loosen their grip. When you have awareness, you have choice and then you have freedom. The goal of our work is not to turn you into someone new but for you to discover that you have already have way more than you imagine.
The greatest limitation in our leadership isn't what we don't know, it's the boundaries of who we believe we're allowed to be. We begin to mistake one part of ourselves for our whole identity. Our work is to help you see beyond that edge and find that moment when you realize you have more range than they imagined. That's when everything changes and you begin to have the agency you crave.
LEADERSHIP SPEAKING COACH
You don’t actually struggle with what to say. You struggle with how you show up when it’s time to say it.
Leaders are constantly being asked to speak in front of people, be it on a stage or even just at an important meeting. The clarity and authority you have every day feels just a little harder to access when you have to put yourself out there in front of key decision makers and supporters.
My early background is in theater, and my training is in Gestalt. When I put these together its a powerful approach to you learning how to use yourself (your voice, your energy, your presence) as the thing that actually carries the message.
We’ll look at where you lose yourself. Where you over-rely on polish. Where you rush, tighten, or try to get it “right.” And we’ll start to loosen that, not so you become more casual, but so you become more real, more intentional, and more in choice.
MEETING DESIGN
You don’t need someone else to run a world-class meeting. You need a way of seeing and leading that allows you to create and lead it yourself.
We partner to design meetings and off-sites that actually work. Together, we’ll build your capacity to read the room, structure content and agendas with clarity (without overengineering), and lead in a way that keeps people both accountable and connected.
Through practical tools and tailored strategies, you’ll design and run meetings that are focused, energizing, and effective. This is about more than content—it’s about the nuances, patterns, and dynamics that shape the experience. It’s where strategy comes to life, relationships are strengthened, and real momentum is created.
KEY NOTE SPEAKING
As a speaker I offer storytelling that touches a new edge — the place in leadership where strategy is no longer enough. It is the moment when presence matters. When what you tolerate shapes culture. When who you are becomes inseparable from how you lead.
Not traditional lectures, these are high-engagement leadership experiences that combine insight, storytelling, reflection, and practical application. Keynotes that become the conversation people are still having over dinner that evening — because they touch the human realities of leadership that are rarely discussed out loud.
This is an approach that blends real executive experience with deep awareness work and practical leadership discipline. The result is a room that becomes more honest, more thoughtful, and more willing to engage in the real work of leadership.
About Me.
Where leadership becomes personal — and awareness changes everything
I coach at what I call The Edge of You — the place in your leadership where strategy is no longer enough. It is the moment when presence matters. When what you tolerate shapes culture. When who you are becomes inseparable from how you lead. It is when you decide you are at the edge of what you know and decidedly want to know more.
I try not to be a theorist of leadership but to be a practicing leader. As the owner and CEO of F.H. Perry Builder, a nationally recognized remodeling firm in Boston, I have spent more than two decades leading teams through growth, succession, conflict, and reinvention. I understand the weight of real responsibility and the quiet decisions leaders make every day that ultimately shape what gets easier— or harder.
My coaching draws from that lived experience, from my leadership training and from my work as a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) trained through the Gestalt International Study Center. The result is the rare combination of executive credibility, deep relational intelligence, and the courage to name what leaders often sense but struggle to articulate.
My work invites you to confront what you somehow know but haven’t yet named and to move forward with greater awareness to support the discipline you crave and to hold the integrity you require of yourself.
Because we don’t perform leadership, we practice it. It’s not a position; it’s a behavior grounded in responsibility and awareness. Awareness that is not the soft stuff but a strategic necessity.
I’m most effective with leaders at that very specific moment of when what’s been working is no longer enough and something in how you're leading needs to shift or be explored. For me, it is less about giving you a system or defined framework and more about helping you know you have more range than you realize.
You are a leader willing to look at yourself as part of the equation.
You are at the point where it becomes personal and the work is no longer about what to do but who you are in how you do it.
Education
A graduate of Walnut Hill School for the Arts and a BS from Skidmore College. Allison studied business and leadership extensively, including earning certificates in Skills for Influential Leaders and Leadership in the 21st Century at the Gestalt International Study Center.
Experience
Allison joined her family business in 2000 and in 2008 Allison purchased F.H. Perry Builder and has proudly carried on the tradition of building well and doing the right thing- the philosophy taught to her by her father and F.H. Perry’s founder, Finley Perry. Allison is very proud of her team that delivers the best in craft and quality with a focus on creating partnerships with clients, trades and designers.
Allison served as a Mentor for the Eastern Mass National Association of the Remolding Industry (EMNARI) and is currently a national Remodeling Thought Leader. Allison also currently sits on the Board of Directors at the Hopkinton Center for the Arts serving as the chair of the Governance Committee and serves as a mentor and facilitator of the monthly Women in Residential Remodeling meetings hosted by the Professional Remodeling Organization of New England (PRONE). Allison also chairs the Board of Directors of Allen Construction in Santa Barbara, CA.
Allison has been recognized as a Banker and Tradesman New Leader and a Professional Remodeler magazine Rock Star. F.H. Perry Builder is a Remodeling Magazine Big 50 winner and was named to the Commonwealth Institute’s list of Top 100 Women Led Businesses three years in a row. Allison was named a Distinguished Mentor by Design New England Magazine and F.H. Perry Builder was named Best of Boston and was inducted into the Design New England Hall of Fame. Most recently, Allison was recognized as the Women in Residential and Commercial Construction Conference Woman of the Year.
Allison has been a speaker, panelist, podcast guest, and facilitator at countless local and national industry events. Notably, Allison delivered keynotes at the Women in Residential and Commercial Construction conferences, most recently in Phoenix in the fall of 2024.
Allison is a GISC-trained coach and is certified by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) at the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) level.
Allison also serves as faculty for the GISC Competency Development Program for Coach Certification as well as the GISC Leadership Series and is a Coach with Boston Executive Coaches.
Reflections
Coaching is Long Enough
“How many sessions will it take?” they ask, with just enough hope that there might be a formula.
One.
It might take one session to see something new about yourself. One aha that’s strong enough to bring you back for another.
And yet change is cumulative.
It is the gathering of ahas. The small adjustments made with awareness and intention. The willingness to notice impact and choose differently next time. Until one day, before your own eyes, you realize you have grown into someone steadier. Wiser. More self-trusting.
What We Already Carry
Because I don’t think we can master our humanity by starting with what we don’t have, for in so doing we miss what we do have.
If we want strength, we miss our commitment to tenderness. If we want time for ourselves, we miss the loyalty we pledge to others. If we do only what we love, we miss our devotion to curiosity.
Tenderness, loyalty, curiosity…imagine giving these up! Or any of the other traits we so assiduously nurture and cultivate with active allegiance to our survival as a good-enough-human.
These ways of being so precious to us as they should be-- they have been useful all these many years. So useful in fact, we might not even notice how freely we employ them…until we ask ourselves to do their opposite.
Building Your Range
The trouble is that any polarity has a downside. When you become a manager, for example, your rigidity doesn’t work quite as well. You are told you are too controlling, and it is impossible to make you happy. People start to quit, and it doesn’t make any sense to you. Why can’t people just do what you tell them to do already?
In our coaching work, we build range. Not by manhandling ourselves into the other polarity but rather by appreciating the familiarity and the value we hold for the one we’re already in. Why do you like it so much? How has it served you? What are you afraid will happen if you stop?
Questions You Might Have
At what level in a person's career have you found people tend to find your coaching the most helpful?
I tend to work with people who are already performing at a high level and find themselves at an inflection point, when something is shifting, or needs to. Often, their current way of operating is beginning to show its limits. Other times, there’s an opportunity to step into something more or different.
It often shows up as tension in how they lead others, or more importantly, how they lead themselves. I work at that edge of when they know the cost of staying the same starts to outweigh the risk of changing.
What size organization do your clients tend to be in?
It varies. Size is less relevant than their relationship to their role and their willingness to look at themselves within the system they’re part of. A senior leader in a 20-person company and one in a much larger organization are navigating different complexities, but the core work is similar.
Change begins with awareness of patterns, choices, and impact. The clients who benefit most are those who bring curiosity to that process, whether they are operating in a small, tightly held environment or a large, distributed one.
Voices of the Work
"Thanks for creating a space where I have been able to find myself."
- MD and Medical Director
"I want to let you know how much our relationship and work together has meant to me these past few years. There is zero doubt in my mind that working with you has made me better at my job and happier with my life."
- Executive Vice President
What is your average engagement timeline?
Most engagements run 6–12 months. That’s typically enough time to build meaningful awareness and begin translating that into real change in how someone leads and operates day to day. It allows us to move beyond surface-level insight and into sustained shifts in behavior, decision-making, and impact.
For many, that’s just the start. Once the shift is underway, they often choose to continue into a second phase—using the work to deepen what’s changed, expand their range, and ensure those changes hold under pressure over time.
"There’s a feeling when Allison speaks — a kind of zing. It’s the architecture of her ideas. She frames a view and invites you to look beyond your own self-imposed limitations.”
- National Conference Chair
