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My Biggest Mistake
I don't mean to be overly dramatic.
The biggest mistake I made since starting my own company?
Not promoting myself right way.
I spent over a year doing word-of-mouth referrals.
And yeah don't get me wrong it worked well enough, but eventually that network runs out.
You need some way of promoting yourself so people know you exist.
If you've seen any of my content before, you know I prefer LinkedIn.
And let me back up by saying, I'm not a "social media person" at all. I deleted Facebook a long time ago, barely use Instagram, don't have any idea what TikTok is.
LinkedIn is different, and I'd say it's fairly obvious why.
First off, it's designed around being professional, which means the mindset of the standard user is that of improving their professional skills.
They can also be seen by everyone they've ever worked with, so everyone is on their best behavior. As a result, you get fewer trolls and controversy for it's own sake.
A few other stats that are good to know:
- Over 50% of adults who have a bachelor’s or advanced degree in the US are LinkedIn users
- 44% of LinkedIn users take home more than $75,000 per year, which is above the national median in the US
- 11 million of the 87 million millennials on the platform are in decision-making positions
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My whole point? If you're trying to build a business, then LinkedIn is the place to be.
My Path
I went from ~500 to ~30,000 followers in one year by pretty much doing two things:
- Posting content every weekday (and occasionally weekends)
- Commenting on larger accounts (i.e., people that already had a large following)
There's no secret sauce other than that.
More importantly what it's done is continually bring inbound leads for my Consulting and Online Course business.
And that's the whole point.
None of that would have happened had I not started focusing on self-promotion.
And I am constantly kicking myself for not starting sooner.
Action Items for You
It's one thing to read an email, nod your head and say, "hm, yeah, interesting."
But nothing will happen in your life without taking action.
So here's what I'd suggest as a next step:
- Take stock of your best skills as a finance professional -- what do you do really well that you've helped others with?
- Think about what you can talk about, unrehearsed, for 30-60 minutes
- Then, start posting about that on LinkedIn for 30 days
See if you can get any traction (likes, comments, etc.).
What you're doing is testing the market to see if there's a demand for your skills.
Just so you have a frame of reference, below is an image of my first 18 posts when I only had 500 followers (starting from the bottom). You can see that I'm just experimenting.
The posts that got the most views were related to Financial Modeling and Excel, so I continued to focus on that type of content to help find my "voice."
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As you can see, the feedback is all over the place and several posts flopped, so you just have to experiment.
If you get some traction, great! You're onto something. Double-down.
If not, try a little longer, or re-asses and try again.
No matter how skilled you are, without proper marketing in place you will eventually run out of leads (or it will become very lumpy and unpredictable).
Work on starting now, you can always refine the process down the road.
That's it for today. See you next time.
—Chris
How I Can Help Further...
As finance professionals there's one thing we all have in common -- our financial modeling skills need to be dialed.
If you need to refresh or sharpen your modeling skills, you can learn to build the exact models I use with FP&A and Private Equity firms around the world -- check it out here.