She’d been going to the same industry events for nearly twenty years.
Same rooms. Same faces. Same conversations over the same mediocre coffee. She’d fly home with a handful of business cards and maybe a couple of follow-up emails. That was networking. That was the routine.
Then she flew to a workshop in Chicago.
And before she was home, the connection requests started landing. More than a dozen, all from people she’d just met in that room. People who wanted to stay connected, collaborate, bring in her expertise.
Twenty years of the same events. That had never happened before.
Never.
What changed between the last twenty years and this one workshop?
Only one thing: her LinkedIn profile. That’s it.
We’d finished rebuilding it the day before she left. She still wasn’t convinced it would make a difference, but she hated her profile before and told me that she really didn’t “get” LinkedIn until we finished her profile.
But she got it once those connection requests started pouring in. All enthusiastic about staying connected and more. A few even complimented her on her profile, too.
But here’s the part that matters: the people who sent those connection requests looked her up after the fact, found a profile that made sense, and acted on it.
She didn’t follow up with them. They followed up with her.
What did her LinkedIn profile look like before the rebuild?
I’ll be honest with you. Before we rebuilt it, her profile was genuinely terrible. One of the worst I’d ever seen.
Third person throughout. About section and Experience entries copy-pasted straight from her websites, but not formatted. No relevant skills. No narrative. No Red Thread connecting where she’d been to where she was going.
THIRD PERSON. shudders
(And clearly, nobody else was impressed either. Fourteen years on the platform. Fewer than 400 connections.)
No reason for anyone to look twice. So nobody did.
Why does a rebuilt LinkedIn profile change what happens at conferences?
Because your profile is doing work in three moments you’re not thinking about.
🔹 Before the event. People look you up to decide whether you’re worth seeking out. Organizers check speakers and panelists. Attendees scan the registration list. If your profile doesn’t make sense in a few seconds, you don’t make the shortlist of people they want to meet.
🔹 During the event. They check you mid-conversation, quietly, on their phone. “What exactly does she do?” If your profile answers that clearly, the conversation deepens. If it doesn’t, they move on to someone whose profile does.
🔹 After the event. Badges off, back at their desks, deciding who earned the follow-up. They go to LinkedIn. And they decide fast. A profile that’s confusing, generic, or written in third person or has no details doesn’t get a second look.
In every one of those moments, your profile is in the room whether you are or not.
The “local crowd” objection doesn’t hold up
Here’s why the Chicago detail matters. This wasn’t a networking event down the street where attendees already knew her by reputation. She flew to another city. These were people she’d never met, in a room where nobody owed her a follow-up.
The only thing they had to go on, after the handshake, was what they found when they looked her up.
Twenty years of events, and the follow-ups never came. One rebuilt profile, and more than a dozen requests landed before her plane did.
That’s not coincidence. That’s positioning.
The gap between “technically complete” and actually working
Her profile before the rebuild wasn’t completely empty. The most common sections had something in them.
But filling in the blanks isn’t the same as building something that works. Copy-pasting from your website isn’t a LinkedIn strategy. Writing in third person isn’t a style choice. It’s a signal that you don’t understand how the platform works.
The rebuild wasn’t about adding more. It was about building an argument. Evidence first, narrative second. Impress TF out of the audience that doesn’t yet know her. A profile that made strangers in a Chicago workshop think, “I need to connect with her before I forget.”
She’d been on LinkedIn for fourteen years. She wasn’t completely ignoring the platform, but she wasn’t nurturing it, either. For someone who has local businesses and networks best in person, that seemed like a reasonable play.
Like she told me, she just “didn’t get it.”
Chicago proved to her that a well-done LinkedIn profile works on supporting her existing businesses by simply existing. Answering questions people didn’t know they had. Closing the deals half way (or for some, all the way).
If your LinkedIn profile isn’t working in the room
Your profile is already at every event you attend, every meeting you take, every cold outreach you send. The question is whether it’s helping or hurting.
If you’ve been going to the same events for years and the follow-ups never come, it might not be your networking. It might be what people find when they look you up afterward.
And it’s not just entrepreneurs. I know people who’ve lost jobs they thought they had because the last step was checking out their LinkedIn profile. (Absolutely true story.)
So let’s fix that.
That’s what the Optimize Lab is built for. Six weeks of live group sessions where we rebuild your profile the way it should have been built from the start. Same methodology I used with her. Same section-by-section excavation. Except you’re not doing it alone.
Founding cohort starts October 8. Twelve seats. $1,997 founding price that won’t repeat.
The waitlist is open. If you want in before the cart opens to everyone on September 25, now’s the time.