Hello Networkers! I’m finally back from my extended visit to the U.S., happy to be home in Barcelona. I’m lucky to have a semi-nomadic life! Next stop: Bangkok. Please reach out if you’re in Bangkok as I’d love to meet up with you between September 7-26.

This week’s Networkist interviewee is the brilliant, but contrarian, Jacob Warwick. Jacob is a coach and consultant for C-level executives and has a lot to say about marketing to senior executives—a must-read for anyone selling to the C-suite, and plenty to learn for all creators.

What’s new related to LinkedIn? Here’s what caught my eye this week.

• New gold medalist Justin Best changed his LinkedIn moments after winning Olympic Gold. Clever. (NDTV)

• LinkedIn adds verification for Company Pages. (Social Media Today)

• Surprised? LinkedIn reports higher revenue and record levels of engagement for their fiscal Q4. (Social Media Today)

• LinkedIn’s chief product officer discusses whether AI is good for job seekers. (Associated Press)

Welcome, Jacob. Please tell us about yourself.

I’m an executive career coach and consultant in the high tech industry. I lean towards go-to-market professionals: sales, marketing, customer success—anything on the revenue side of the business. That’s anywhere from early-stage C and series A companies all the way to the Facebooks and Googles and larger side of the tech sphere. My typical client is anywhere from VP to C-suite, including a lot of CEOs.

Technically I’m industry agnostic. Beyond tech, I do a lot of clients in healthcare, in Hollywood, and also those doing things that aren’t tech-related in any way.

What does LinkedIn do for you?

I've been on LinkedIn since the very early days, probably 2008. I built my career on LinkedIn. It helped me grow from the kid that didn't go to college, the AV nerd, to a vice president of marketing by the time I was 25 or 26. I built a pretty massive network with it.

LinkedIn is the one channel that I've chosen to go all in on versus every other channel out there. I realized that most of the ROI was in this one place, and it’s better to go all in with one platform than spread myself too thin with many.

What are your main goals for using LinkedIn?

To use the platform to attract folks to an environment that I control! This is more important than building on someone else's platform. Right now my goal is to move LinkedIn followers to email subscribers.

I've never really attached a revenue goal to LinkedIn. That just sort of happens when you focus on providing for the audience, everything else comes in check.

Jacob’s content strategy

Who’s your target audience on LinkedIn?

My ideal client is a C-suite executive that is, at a minimum, $1.5 million in annual compensation on W2. And that number skews pretty widely upward depending on the background that someone has. That pool is relatively small.

Beyond that, I have two subsets of clients. One group are execs that are actively looking to transform their career. I concentrate on meeting them where they are today, looking for opportunities within their current ecosystem, while also putting the pieces and habits together to make sure that they’re moving their career forward into something that'll be more transformational for them. I try to teach them how to fish so they can be active in their career trajectory.

In the second bucket, there is a client who is actively searching for work, who's looking for a certain compensation range, typically a minimum of $300k-$400k base salary, plus strong bonus performance incentives and a bunch of triggers like that.

How do you decide what content to create and share on LinkedIn?

I look at what everyone else is doing and I do the exact opposite.

Basically, I ask ChatGPT or Anthropic what to say, then challenge everything that's in it with a new perspective. That's how you know how to create the right content, because most of the content that is perpetuated publicly is designed for mid-level managers. Most executive career coaches don't understand the nuances of what it takes once you're a multi-seven figure earner.

Content is not going to work at that level unless you put additional thought into it, oftentimes challenging the status quo. I've had thousands and thousands of conversations with executives, and I can really think about what these folks are going through. I think I’ve found the throughput of what they actually care about, and I think the best content is when you talk about the elephant in the room.

Most creators on LinkedIn either haven't put in the work to have the conversations, are copying and pasting other influencers, or relying on AI to tell them what everyone else already knows. I think everyone should challenge what AI is telling them and do something different.

How do you differentiate your content from others on LinkedIn?

As I said, I try to take the contrarian view, an unvarnished view, and tell it like it is. That’s the goal, anyway.

It's very difficult to find the line there because if you miss a corner case scenario, you'll get shredded in the comments for being an a**h0le or something. So you need to be mindful of how to best position your views. I like to say: it's strong opinions loosely held. If someone can show me the data in their situation that's different, then I think that's learning that we can all gain from.

What makes your content successful with your audience?

As soon as I focused on leaning into my strengths, things started going better, even though it wasn't popular with the trends.

An example of this is everyone says: you need to be doing short video content, this needs to be more digestible, you need to write this at a fourth grade reading level.

But my audience isn't the average. My audience are the extraordinary. They're type A personalities that don't just say they'll do the work. They do the work excessively.

There's a lot of folks that can market to the average person, but what works for me is marketing to the people who will gladly read and absorb a 3,000 or 4,000 word guide. So I’ll create content for them.

What are the processes you use to create content? 

• Schedule in advance ✅

• Batch create content ❌

• Optimize for SEO/keywords ❌

• Follow an editorial calendar ❌

• Have specific content pillars/themes ❌

• Repurpose content to/from LinkedIn or reuse on LinkedIn ❌

• Use AI in any part of the content writing process ✅

• Have team/human support for any part of your LI process ❌

• Keep a list of potential topics somewhere (Notes, Notion, etc.) ❌

• Design or source visuals including infographics and carousels and video ❌

What types of content do you post to LinkedIn?

• Text only ✅

• Polls ✅

• Audio ❌

• Video ❌

• Carousels ❌

• Photos of yourself (selfies) ✅

• Photos of other people or things ✅

• AI generated images ❌

• Infographics (single image) ✅

• Other people’s graphics ❌

• Links to your company content ❌

• Links to other content ❌

• Reposts of others’ content (repost only) ✅

• Reposts of others’ content (with your thoughts) ✅

• Community articles ✅

How much time does it take?

How much time do you spend each weekday on LinkedIn on comments or Direct Messages (DMs), outside of content creation?

About two hours a day, on average.

Are you active on LinkedIn on the weekends, either posting or commenting or both?

Yes, probably still around two hours a day.

LinkedIn is ingrained as part of my life, which I don't like, to be honest. But it's better than being on LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook.

I made the decision to go all in on one platform and ignore everything else, even if there's audience there.

How do you use DMs (direct messages) in the service of your goals?

I'll make connections through DM if I don't have someone’s phone number, but my order of contact is text message intro first, LinkedIn introduction second, and email introduction as a last resort.

Occasionally I'll use DMs as a discovery conversation where I'm just asking questions. I'm very rarely selling, but people will ask via DM how they can work with me.

Jacob’s biggest growth levers

What has contributed most to your growth?

Discipline, consistency, putting in the work.

I've given away thousands of hours of my time for free, to be able to now demand thousands of dollars an hour with the expertise that I picked up along the way.

How do you track what’s working and know what to change?

Live feedback from my audience and what my clients are saying.

One of the things that I do is that I write for a specific person. When I'm working with a client and there’s something I need to really help them with, I find that writing is my best form of thinking. That’s why I rarely outsource content to AI. And if one person has that problem, I know many people likely have had that problem before.

So I write for that one person, and then text them and maybe 25-30 other people that post and ask for their feedback on it. Then I write a follow-up post based on their feedback. I actively solicit feedback all the time.

How Jacob makes money

How do you generate revenue in your business?

I have a lot of ways I get paid:

• Hourly

• Retainers

• Group coaching

• Affiliate sales

• Sponsorship sales

• Public speaking

• Contingency

• Licensing and royalties

How do you quantify your success on LinkedIn?

I've probably brought in a little over $10 million in personal revenue on LinkedIn. And right now I’m doing a little over $100,000 a month.

All of my deals originate through or are closed through LinkedIn. It's the only platform I have. Even when people are like, hey, you should meet Jacob, the first thing they do is go to my LinkedIn. They don't go to my website, they go to my LinkedIn first. And there's 90 recommendations on there for a reason.

I have obsessed over LinkedIn for 15 years and it’s worked for me. But now I’m working to move people from LinkedIn to my email list.

Jacob’s top tips

What challenges have you faced on LinkedIn? What’s made you almost—or actually—quit? What got you back on track?

I always want to quit. But when you're a solopreneur, you live and die by it.

Unfortunately, if I were to quit LinkedIn, I would take a significant revenue hit.

What would you do if LinkedIn ceased to exist tomorrow?

I would probably work 20 hours a week and make $300k a year instead of 40 hours a week and $1 million a year.

When you work with clients and they're at the end of their career, or even at the end of their life, they look back and they say, look, all that stuff, garbage, not important. The real meaningful stuff in my life was when my kids were young and I missed that. Or, I wish I didn't screw up my first marriage. Or, it's not about the money that I had, it's about these experiences.

Everything that our elders teach us is everything the opposite of what LinkedIn promotes. But here we are. My contrarian view is that LinkedIn is a dumpster fire, but we can make money on dumpster fire stuff, you know?

What advice would you give other Networkers who want to build and leverage their LinkedIn presence?

• Tell the unvarnished truth.

• Say things other people are afraid to say.

• Dig down to what your customers really need.

• You can’t boil the ocean—don’t try to do everything all at once.

Is there anything else you want to tell other Networkers?

I recently came across a concept that transformed my approach to business: the 10X mindset. Instead of aiming to double or triple your efforts, think about what it would take to increase your results by 10X.

For instance, if you have 25 clients, consider what would be required to get 250. This approach forces you to think more strategically, requiring better infrastructure, advertising, partnerships, and organization. Thinking at this larger scale makes your path forward clearer, helping you map out exactly what’s necessary for significant growth.

This one little mindset shift has provided me with so much clarity: how to optimize my time, investments, and overall strategy.

How to network with Jacob

• Follow Jacob Warwick on LinkedIn

• Read Jacob’s newsletter, Execs and the City

• Visit Jacob’s company, Think Warwick 

Richard Moore is one of my favorite LinkedIn creators and a genuinely nice guy, I got to meet him in person here in Barcelona last year. Today’s tip from Richard is about doing the scary thing: outreach via DM.

Read this post on LinkedIn

I’m always on the lookout for something that changes the way I use LinkedIn. It could be an idea, a tool, a process, or something strategic.

Have a tip I should consider? Hit reply to this email and let me know!

That’s all for now—I look forward to seeing you again next week for another Networker interview.