Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:00:05] Bigger and louder doesn’t always mean better. And that’s the case in business and on LinkedIn. Today we hear how to build a strong LinkedIn presence and why a successful profile is more about relationships than constantly posting content. Linkedin trainer Karen Tisdell joins us to share her top tips for creating a profile that inspires confidence. And she talks us through how to avoid common mistakes, including the over AI polish. Next, Brad Giles of Evolution Partners challenges the common belief that bigger is always better in business. Drawing on his new book, Brad explains why growth for growth’s sake can actually hold your business back, and he unpacks the hidden costs of chasing scale, from toxic teams to disloyal customers from Sound Cartel. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist, and this is Business Essentials.
Polishing your LinkedIn presence as a business leader
Our first guest is Karen Tisdell, LinkedIn trainer and Australia’s leading LinkedIn profile writer. She says the key to LinkedIn success isn’t posting more, but building trust. In our interview today, Karen says relationships are crucial to driving real impact on the platform, and she shares a few practical steps for crafting a compelling profile. From writing a human bio to properly connecting your profile to a company page. Karen also highlights common pitfalls and outlines why authenticity and first person storytelling matter more than ever. To begin, Karen tells me just how important having a LinkedIn presence is these days.
Karen Tisdell: [00:01:39] Linkedin presence on LinkedIn is absolutely crucial. I’d argue it’s even more important than it used to be. However, it’s not what most people think it is. So most people think LinkedIn presence means I need to be creating content. I need to be the loudest person in the room. And we’ve all read those newspaper articles online which talks about celebrity CEOs and the like who are creating content. But I’d argue that actually creating content is not as important as having the best relationships. So leaders are often appointed to leadership roles because of the relationships that they can bring. So the clients, the business partners, the investors, the talent. And so it’s actually about having the right network and having a profile that really builds trust with that network. So it’s crucial. But it’s not how people think it is. It’s not all about creating content.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:02:40] I’d love to hear a bit more about that. Where should business leaders get started when building their LinkedIn profile?
Karen Tisdell: [00:02:47] Don’t start with content. Everybody starts with content. They think I need to be the noisiest. I need to be the noisiest. And just like any good business strategy, you need to think, actually, what’s my intention here and what’s going to work for me long term? Where am I going? So I would say LinkedIn has three pillars your profile, the people you know and posting. And I would start with profile. So I’d have a profile that’s built for trust. So we know from the Edelman Trust Barometer, we know from other studies that have come out in the last couple of years, that trust is at an all time low. So you need to have a profile that really talks to who you are. Show that you’re that safe pair of hands. Show that you’ve got the qualities that people are looking for, that you’re curious, that you’re innovative without sounding like a bunch of cliched words. So really making sure that you’re starting with a profile that builds trust and then move to creating those relationships and leave the posting to last.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:03:51] So talking about LinkedIn profiles, I’m wondering what are your sort of top tips to ensure that a business leader’s profile delivers maximum impact? What kind of practical things Would you suggest they do to get started?
Karen Tisdell: [00:04:03] Absolutely. It’s really important to like I see so many leaders who are not connected correctly to the company page. So I would start by having a look at the people that are in your organization and just check the company name that they’ve connected to. So in your experience section next to the company name, you should have a logo there. And a lot of leaders, they’re not experts on LinkedIn. You know, they’re an expert in other areas and they’re not connecting correctly to the company page. So make sure you’ve connected correctly to the company page. Have a profile that is set up not as a resume, but one that’s really talking to the overlap between your values and your organization’s values, your genuine interest in what the business does and the difference that you have delivered and look forward to delivering. Make sure you’ve captured those themes in your about section, and you can easily use AI to help you to write that. Everybody’s got a great writer in their pocket these days. And then in the experience section, make sure you’ve got a description about the company, but also adding to it. Again, what is it that you’re looking forward to doing that you’re able to talk about? You know, you may have joint ventures and things like that, takeovers on the horizon that you’re not able to talk about, but you could talk about those in previous roles. So you’re making sure that you’re capturing all of those good words that make everybody just breathe that sigh of relief. Yes. They’ve got this.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:05:37] Um, you mentioned the About Me section. Is there kind of a magic number or length? Like how short is too short? How long is too long?
Karen Tisdell: [00:05:44] I see so many about sections that are just far too short. Linkedin gives us 2600 characters, which everybody considers to be far too long. But actually I’d argue it’s not. If you structure it well, so you need to have entire paragraph breaks. So don’t just do a little enter. You need to have some white space there. You need to start with something that talks to what your audience cares about, the people that you wish to influence. What are their interests? What’s their pain? What’s their longing and talk to that? You need to then talk about what it is you do, the values of the organization, how they align with your own, what you’ve done in the past, and then have a call to action. So that is typically a full page of words, and it’s just about breaking it up so that it’s not all a wall of text. You know, you’ve got some white space in there. And very sparing use of emojis can look okay. And people think, oh, emojis. They’re winky faces, but they’re not necessarily they could just be bullet points. A couple of bullet points in your profile. You know, my core values are da da da, you know, and something that just visually makes it look nice because it’s my 16 year olds are always telling me people eat with their eyes and we need a profile that doesn’t just have a lot of information about you, so that when people are thinking, do I really want to invest in him or her? Is are they somebody I can trust? You’ve built that trust. You’ve given a lot of information, which is very helpful for people, but it also looks attractive on a page.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:07:21] Now, you talked a little bit before, Karen, about the actual LinkedIn your businesses page. So as opposed to sort of you’ve got your personal profile. Am I correct in thinking that every sort of small to medium sized enterprise does really need a LinkedIn presence of some sort?
Karen Tisdell: [00:07:35] It does need to set up a company page. It’s really important for every individual. Even if you are a consultant and you’re a solopreneur, you know you’re like me and you don’t have lots of employees. It’s still absolutely crucial to have a company page, because otherwise you don’t have a logo there, and people can easily think it’s not a real business. It’s not, you know, this is just a stop gap. So if you have a company, even if it’s a very tiny company, you still need a company page. But I would argue that unless you’ve got employees and a sizable number of employees, you really do want to just be pushing out content from your individual pages, not your company page. That becomes different. And I would be creating content from your company page and trying to grow followers of your company page. If you plan on selling the business in the future, that’s important because then having lots of followers for your company page actually forms part of the asset base. So it’s something that you can show people who are looking at buying a business, never planning on selling, not really your thing. Then instead, lift your visibility and the visibility of the senior leaders and experts in your company.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:08:49] Okay, so if you’re talking again about LinkedIn company pages and say you’re not looking to sell it, so you know, you don’t need to so much build your follower base, how much detail do you need at a minimum? Like you said, at minimum you need a logo. So it looks like a real thing. Is there any kind of bare basics that you want to make sure you have on that LinkedIn company page?
Karen Tisdell: [00:09:06] It’s very easy to fill out. It’s just really a colour by numbers. And LinkedIn will ask you for a lot of information, like you can upload a banner, you can upload a whole about section. It forces you to choose a tagline. But actually none of those things matter. People don’t see your tagline. Very few people ever click on your company page. So I would simply look at your website. If you’ve got a website, copy a paragraph from that, dump it in and just set yourself a reminder note to look at it every year. So I didn’t look at mine for a while and then looked somebody quoted a fee at me and said, oh, but these are your fees. And I’m like, my fees for like three years. And I realised I hadn’t set myself a reminder note to update my company page. But hardly anybody ever looks. So I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I’d just have a paragraph there and just change it every year or so.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:09:54] Well, my last question is, I wonder what are some of the perhaps a couple of key mistakes to avoid when building a LinkedIn presence as a as a business leader.
Karen Tisdell: [00:10:03] A few mistakes to make is to talk about yourself like you’re not yourself. I saw that a lot years ago where people would say, you know, Mary Smith is da da da is a senior leader with 25 years experience in. And people would talk about themselves like they weren’t themselves, like as if their executive assistant or their personal assistant was managing their LinkedIn profile for them. And instead we need to use first person perspectives. So I and you, we’re seeing a huge rise in people using that third person perspective. And I believe it’s because people are getting AI to write their LinkedIn profile. So we’re getting a lot of ubiquitous statements and profiles that look very samey. So instead, I’d make sure that you do talk in that first person perspective. You do talk about I as uncomfortable as it is. And you do make sure that you reflect on what your values are and you know, what are your hobbies? What are your interests? Where’s that overlap between what you do? Can you create a story around that? So think about what AI doesn’t know about you and put that in your LinkedIn profile. Because this is a social media platform and it is social. We are social animals. We need to connect human to human. So bring your humanity to your profile.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:11:25] That was LinkedIn trainer Karen Tisdell.
Why bigger isn’t always better in business
Now is bigger really always better? Brad Giles says it’s not. Brad is founder of Evolution Partners, a strategic planning consultancy across Australia and New Zealand. He says growth for growth’s sake can quietly sabotage culture, customers offerings and profit. Drawing from his new book, Bigger Isn’t Better, Better Is Better, Brad explains how rapid scaling can lead to mediocrity and how to focus instead on intentional, disciplined improvement. He also shares how to spot when you’re scaling for the wrong reasons. To get started, Brad tells me what a better business actually looks like.
Brad Giles: [00:12:12] A better business has a better team, a better customers, better offering, better financials that enables an owner to build a life by design. Now, there’s a lot to unpack there, as you’d imagine, but many companies can fall into the trap of chasing a bigger business, which might not be what they actually want. And they can fall into that trap and then fall out of love with their business over time. And so a better business, it gets them to focus on compounding those four areas, rather than just putting another zero onto their revenue, which may come at a pretty large cost.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:12:56] Now, you talked about people chasing this idea of a bigger business. What do you think the allure of bigger is. And why is it so deeply embedded in business culture?
Brad Giles: [00:13:05] Yeah, it’s an interesting point. I think that it comes down to three areas. The first is psychology. The second is DNA and the third is the outside world. So to dig into those a little bit, first of all psychology. Imagine that you were nine years old and one of your parents or school teachers said something like, well, you could never do that. It might seem quite innocuous, but sometimes these little things that happen can frame our psychology over time. And there’s a test called the Thematic Apperception Test. And that test tells us where do our needs come from. And they come from three areas the need for affiliation, the need for power, or the need for achievement. And so the need for affiliation, I need to have very close friendships and Chips and relationships. Need for power. I need to accumulate power. And then the last need means that we end up more in a competitive state. That’s the how psychology plays out. And then second DNA. So there’s a propensity from DNA for people to have a higher likelihood of risk. They tend to chase risk more than other people. And then thirdly, the outside world. So the world is fascinated by bigger the fast 100, the the list of the richest people, the biggest building in the world. All we are, it is everywhere. And so all of those three things come together in a bit of a recipe that really makes us chase bigger, or the endless pursuit of more, rather than a better compounding business.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:14:46] Now, you alluded before to the fact there can be a downside to kind of chasing bigger business just for the sake of it. So what are actually the hidden costs of scaling too fast or without discipline?
Brad Giles: [00:14:56] Every business does what I call drift. So this happens across four areas. So first of all, teams drift toward toxicity. Customers drift towards indifference. Offerings drift toward mediocrity, and financials drift toward unprofitability. So across that drift, every business experience is there. And that’s why we must work on the business rather than in the business to counter the drift, so that, you know, we’re going to work on culture so the team doesn’t drift towards toxicity, etc.. But when you’re enamored with growth, when you want growth for growth’s sake, when you’re chasing another zero, the endless pursuit of more for no real meaningful reason, you supercharge that drift so much quicker. Teams. They don’t just drift, but they race towards toxicity and customers race towards mediocrity. So you kind of supercharging these problems that naturally occur in a business. And so it’s not that we shouldn’t grow by any means, it’s that we should be intentional and understand what happens when we grow fast.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:16:03] I want to dig down a little bit into customer loyalty. Um, how can customer loyalty be affected if business owners become too distracted by chasing this thrill of growing a bigger business?
Brad Giles: [00:16:14] Well, do we want more customers or do we want more loyal customers? It’s an interesting concept and it depends on the industry. I’m in real estate. I want more customers, for example, or the business can take care of the existing customers. It is different ways to think about it, but what can happen is that we can develop transactional relationships with customers rather than loyal relationships with customers. So if we develop transactional relationships, I do the thing you pay the money. We’re all good. And that can really amplify that drift toward mediocrity. And and then double down on indifference through offerings and customers. So it becomes very problematic. And when we have a transactional relationship with customers, it’s very easy for them to leave. It’s very easy for them to go somewhere else and do something else with another customer. So there is no loyalty. And then that means that suddenly we think we’re out there chasing new customers. But the transactional relationship that we build with those customers means that we then need to backfill the customers that are leaving because of that transactional nature. So much faster. And the customer acquisition cost goes through the roof.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:17:30] So if a founder or a CEO is perhaps feeling the pressure to grow, for all of those three reasons you laid out before, how can they know if they’re chasing scale for the wrong reasons?
Brad Giles: [00:17:40] Well, there’s an easy way and a hard way. So the hard way is to learn from your own mistakes. That means I have to go through everything. I have to see the pain, feel the pain, and then really get to later in my entrepreneurial journey to only realize, what have I done? Is this the right thing? The easier way is to learn from other people’s mistakes. And that’s somewhat what the book’s about. It’s this is what the mindset of a better business and a better life looks like. So how do you know if you’re chasing scale for the wrong reasons? Well, maybe it’s your ego. Maybe it’s a really good, hard look in the mirror. Is this delivering what I really want from life? Many people will say to themselves, the reason that I do this is for the family and then neglect the family, for example. And that plays out across many different parts of one’s life. The reason that I do this is to get freedom and then they end up feeling trapped. So you don’t need to look too hard in the mirror to think that you are going down the wrong path. Maybe you’re falling out of love with your business. A nice and simple question is, what’s the lie that I’m telling myself that can perhaps prompt that self-reflection?
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:19:01] All right, my last question, and you did touch on this before, but you may want to expand what is actually the first step towards shifting from a bigger mindset to a better one, apart from obviously buying your book?
Brad Giles: [00:19:12] What do you want out of life? What’s the purpose of your life? They’re very big questions. People have pondered those philosophers and every person throughout all of history. But I think that most people start a business for freedom. And whatever that definition of freedom is, it could be financial freedom. It could be time, freedom. I don’t know, everyone’s got their own story and that’s totally fine. But go back to that. What freedom are you looking for? And do you feel trapped in your business? And so if you’re not pursuing the freedom that you are looking for in the business, if you feel like you might be either trapped or leading towards being trapped, well, what does better look like for you? What is a better business look like? It does not mean that you need to get smaller by any means. The book isn’t called bigger isn’t better. Smaller is better. It’s called better is better because a better business will deliver that freedom where you actually enjoy going to work on a Monday morning, rather than not so much so that some people would do. And you’re building a better life over time.
Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: [00:20:19] That was Brad Giles, founder of Evolution Partners. Thanks for joining us on this week’s episode. Follow Business Essentials Podcast across social media and head to www.BusinessEssentialsPodcast.au for more. Business Essentials is a SoundCartel podcast. Producers are Nick Schildberger, Nicole Goodman and myself. Technical production is by Pete Letts. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist thanks for listening. We’ll bring you more business essentials next week.
