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FEATURED ARTICLE
Being Excellent and Being Known Are Two Different Jobs
PERSONAL BRANDING
September 21, 2026 at 8:16:18 AM
Thank you so much for joining us today to share your perspective with our community. If one of our readers happened to meet you for the first time over coffee and asked what you do and what your business is all about, how would you introduce yourself and your work?
If we were sitting over coffee and you asked me what I do, I'd probably say I make experts visible, mostly on LinkedIn, so the right people come to them instead of the other way around. Then you'd ask what that actually means, and here's the longer version.
I'm Jaimie Skultety, founder of Upscale Your Business. I work with coaches, consultants, speakers and fractional executives who are genuinely good at what they do and are not being found for it. That gap is the whole business. I've never met an expert who started a business because they love marketing themselves, and yet marketing is what decides who gets the client. So I take that part off their plate.
Only two things decide whether LinkedIn produces clients for you. What the right person finds when they land on your profile, and whether anyone lands there at all. Most people are missing both, and they usually think they're missing neither. I work on both halves. First, positioning: I read your profile the way a stranger would, then build the language that helps the right person recognize themselves in it. Then the traffic, where I invite the right people to your profile, in your voice, and you don't run any of it.
I've been doing this since 2009. My own LinkedIn network has passed 30,000 connections organically, with no paid ads, which is a nice way of saying I've tested this on myself first for a very long time.
Looking back at the early days, was there a particular moment, experience, or realization that made you say, "This needs to exist"? We'd love to hear the story behind how it all began.
Was there a moment that made me say, "This needs to exist"? Honestly, it wasn't one moment. It crept up on me over years, and then one day I couldn't unsee it.
I started in 2009 on the operations side, working behind the scenes with coaches and consultants, and that seat gave me an unusual view. I got to see who was thriving and who was struggling, and I got to see the actual quality of their work up close. Most people never have those two pieces of information at the same time.
What I noticed was uncomfortable. The people growing were not reliably the best practitioners. Sometimes they were very good. Sometimes they were fine. The thing they had in common was that people could find them and could tell, quickly, what they were for. Meanwhile I watched people who were superb at the actual work stay quiet and stay small. They weren't lazy and they weren't careless. They had just never been taught that being excellent and being known are two separate jobs.
That's when it became a business, not a service. Nobody was going to fix that for them, because everyone in the marketing world was offering tactics, and the problem wasn't tactics. They were invisible to the exact people who needed them. I'm writing a book about it now, called Quietly Excellent, which tells you how long that idea has been sitting with me.
If your best customers were sitting with us right now, what do you think they would say makes your business, product, or service stand out from the crowd?
If my best clients were sitting here with us, I think they'd say two things, and neither would be about LinkedIn.
The first is that I don't hand them a strategy and leave. Most of the industry shares a plan with you and then leaves you to write the words yourself, which is the hardest part and the part you were stuck on in the first place. My clients get the actual language, delivered as their Authority Playbookâ˘: who you're for, what you actually do, and the words that make the right person recognize themselves in it. Headline, About section, outreach, and the content that carries it, written for them, in their voice, ready to use.
Second, I solve both halves of the problem. Plenty of people will polish your profile. Plenty of others will send traffic anywhere you point them. Doing one without the other is how people spend a year on LinkedIn and get nothing. A beautiful profile nobody visits produces the same result as no profile. Traffic sent to a page that reads like a resume burns the introduction. Order matters, and I own the whole thing so the order stays right.
And I'd hope they'd say it still sounds like them. That's the part I'm most careful about. If their clients read something I wrote and it doesn't sound like them, I've failed at the job even if the numbers look fine.
Customers often come into relationships with assumptions that may or may not be accurate. What's one of the biggest misconceptions you regularly encounter, and how do you help educate people about the reality?
The misconception I run into most, and I run into it almost weekly, is that low client flow is a volume problem. People arrive convinced they need more of everything: more connections, more posts, more leads, more activity. So they go buy leads.
Here's how I help people see it differently. Buying leads isn't the wrong instinct. It's the wrong order. If you send a well-qualified stranger to a profile that reads like a resume and doesn't make it obvious what you're for, you haven't gained a prospect; you've spent an introduction. You only get one. I've spoken with plenty of people who bought leads, got nothing, and concluded the lead company was the problem. Usually the lead company wasn't the problem. The positioning was.
The related misconception is about signals, and this one costs people more than they realize. Most people judge their LinkedIn presence by reactions and comments, and that is a genuinely misleading scoreboard. The person who most needs what you do often won't like your post about the problem they have, because that's a public admission they have it. They read it, they say nothing, and they decide privately. I've watched people get eight reactions on the post that produced their best conversation of the year, and ninety on a post that produced nothing. If you optimize for the applause, you slowly walk away from your buyer, and the numbers will feel like they're going up the whole time.
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You've had a front-row seat to changes happening within your industry, and we'd love to hear your perspective. What trends, technologies, or shifts are you paying closest attention to right now, and where do you believe things are heading over the next few years?
You're right that I've had a front-row seat, and the shift I'm watching most closely is the obvious one: AI, though not for the reason it usually comes up.
For years the hard part of LinkedIn was showing up at all. Having a profile that was actually written instead of a job title, posting regularly, and being findable when someone searched. That took real time; most people didn't do it, and so doing it put you ahead. Visibility was scarce, and scarce things are worth something.
AI took the cost of that to almost nothing. Anyone can produce a clean profile and a steady stream of perfectly competent posts in an afternoon. So the number of visible, polished, present experts exploded, and the moment something becomes abundant it stops being worth much. Search for a coach or a fractional executive today and you'll get thousands of results that all sound equally reasonable. Being findable no longer sets you apart, because everyone is findable.
What did not get easier is getting one specific person to read two lines and think, that's me, that's my exact situation. That takes knowing precisely who you're for and what's actually going on in their week, and no tool can guess that for you. It stayed hard, which is exactly why it's now the valuable part.
That's the difference between visibility and recognition, and it's where I think the next few years go. Visibility is about you: can I be found? Recognition happens inside the reader: do I see myself here? You can write flawless sentences about helping leaders unlock their potential and never earn recognition, because nobody specific is in it. Polish doesn't get you there. Specificity does.
The related shift is that buyers are getting quieter. They research privately, they decide privately, and they show up ready or they don't show up at all. So by the time someone is looking at you, most of the decision is already made. What you did in the months before that, and whether your profile does its job the one time they check, is the whole game.
The work moves from producing more to being unmistakable to fewer.
Is there a belief you hold strongly about your industry that may differ from conventional wisdom or the way many others approach the market today?
If we're talking about where I break with conventional wisdom in my industry, this is it. The standard advice is to grow your audience, and the clients will follow. I don't believe that, and I have 30,000 connections that prove it.
A connection is not a relationship. It's an unexercised permission. It grants you three things: you can message them, your posts may reach them, and you can see who they actually are. Almost nobody uses the third one. I've sat with people who have 4,000 or 5,000 connections and have never once gone through the list to find out that seventy or eighty of them are exactly who they most want to work with, sitting right there, already connected, never spoken to.
So the number going up feels like progress and often isn't. Worse, the number going up is profitable for a lot of people who are not you.
I believe you don't need thousands of clients. You need a few of the right ones, and they are very likely already on the platform, possibly already connected to you. That changes what you do on a Tuesday morning. Collection is not selection. Growing the list is the easy half and it's the half everyone is offering. Deciding who on that list matters, and then saying something worth answering, is the half that produces clients.
What professional advice, "pro tip," or piece of wisdom do you find yourself sharing over and over again with colleagues, clients, or people entering your industry?
The one piece of wisdom I repeat most to clients on calls, probably in my sleep, is that consistency beats intensity, and it isn't close.
People come to LinkedIn in bursts. They have a big Saturday, rewrite everything, send forty messages, post three times, and then real work resumes and nothing happens for five weeks. Then they conclude LinkedIn doesn't work. What actually happened is that this work pays out on a lag. Everything you do lands somewhere between a month and a year later, so when you stop, nothing happens immediately. The silence arrives six weeks on, long after you've forgotten what caused it.
Ninety minutes a day, most days, will beat a nine-hour Saturday every time. Not because the hours are different but because the lag needs something arriving continuously.
If somebody takes only one thing from me, I'd make it smaller than that. Go fix the first two lines of your About section and change nothing else. Those two lines are all that show before someone has to click, and most people use them for a job title. Make them the moment when the right person recognizes their own situation. It takes twenty minutes, and unlike everything else on the list, that door keeps working while you're not looking.
Well, we could talk all day. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today and contribute to the Biz Amplified community. Before we let you go, we'd love for you to share where readers can connect with you on social media, visit your website, or follow along on your journey moving forward.
Thank you, this has been a pleasure. As for where people can find me, the best place is LinkedIn, which would be embarrassing if it weren't.
You can find me at linkedin.com/in/jaimieskultety, and my profile is the long version of everything I've said here. If you'd rather see the approach than read about it, that's where to look.
My site is upscaleyourbusiness.com. I also write a newsletter for coaches and consultants called The Impactful Coach, at upscaleyourbusiness.com/theimpactfulcoach, where I share what I'm seeing in the market and what's actually working right now.
And I'm writing a book called Quietly Excellent, about the people this whole conversation has been about: the ones who are genuinely good at the work and can't understand why the phone isn't ringing. If that describes someone you know, tell them the two things are separate. Being excellent and being known are different jobs, and nobody is coming to hand them the second one.
If you'd like to talk about your own visibility, upscaleyourbusiness.com/chat gets you on my calendar.
© 2026 Joseph Haecker, LLC dba AmpLever | All rights reserved.
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