What Deleting LinkedIn Taught Me About 6x Growth
On narrowing the door, dropping services I love, and the math that made it obvious.
I owe you an update.
Some of you have been reading this newsletter since the early days—back when I was writing from a home office in Tahoe with a handful of clients and a thesis that nobody was representing senior leaders the way they deserved to be represented.
A lot has changed.
And the people who’ve been along for the ride deserve to hear what’s happening inside the business, not as a press release, but as a real conversation.
So here’s what’s going on.
The Lenny Effect
A few months ago I appeared on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast.
What happened next was unlike anything I’ve experienced in fifteen years of doing this work.
Demand increased 6x immediately.
In two weeks, the practice closed $450K in new engagements—with active conversations pushing that north of $1M.
I wasn’t expecting it.
Not because the work wasn’t ready—but because I had spent the months leading up to that moment doing the opposite of what every growth playbook tells you to do.
I deleted my LinkedIn profile.
I narrowed my channels. I stopped trying to be everywhere and started investing in fewer surfaces with more depth.
The conventional wisdom says that’s how you shrink.
Instead, demand exploded.
I’m sharing those numbers not to impress you—I’m sharing them because they created a decision I wasn’t expecting to make.
At least not now.
And I know that many of you follow my newsletter and attend my monthly AMA sessions for ideas on how to run your consulting or solopreneur business.
I’ll keep sharing the mistakes and the wins—because the way you build matters as much as what you build.
Most practitioners—most business owners, frankly—would look at that kind of demand and do the obvious thing.
Hire. Scale. Build a team. Productize. Franchise the model. And many talented people have advised me to do just that.
Yet, I’m doing the opposite.
And I want to explain why, because I think the reason matters—especially if you’re building something of your own.
What Fifteen Years Taught Me About the Room
After thousands of negotiations and over a billion dollars in lift outcomes for clients, I’ve found the following to be true.
The most important work of a senior executive’s career happens in maybe four or five rooms across a lifetime.
The package that sets the decade. The exit that funds the next phase. The severance that protects the family. The equity conversation that changes generational math.
You set a precedent that compounds for the rest of your life.
Those rooms don’t need more consultants. They need the right one.
If I were to scale this practice—as many have advised I do—I would hire associates and train them on my frameworks and send them into rooms where the stakes are measured in millions.
But then every client gets a slightly diluted version of the person they actually hired.
The services model dilemma.
I’ve watched it happen across all consulting, wealth management, executive coaching, and now compensation representation. The incentive to scale always degrades the craft, because the craft is unique to the practitioner.
You don’t scale craft. You pay for it, or you don’t get it.
That sentence sounds like confidence—perhaps arrogance.
It’s really a lesson I learned the hard way—by watching other practices expand past the point where the founding partner could be in the room, and then watching the outcomes drop.
I experienced it every day while leading a team of 25 as the CEO of Discover Podium too.
You’ve seen it all around you.
And many of those firms are fighting for their lives in the wave of AI.
They drop in quality enough that the client who needed extraordinary got ordinary with better branding.
I don’t want to build that.
I love working both on and in the business—and the combination of flexibility and agility that my model affords.
What’s Changing
With these lessons nagging at me top-of-mind, I know that ThinkWarwick Global must continue to tighten.
Fewer clients. Higher stakes.
The Calendly offering has been consolidated to a single session type, priced to reflect the altitude of the work. The engagement floor is going up. Every session still credits toward full representation when appropriate—that hasn’t changed.
Since I made that change four weeks ago, I’ve negotiated four $10M–$15M, two $15M–$20M, and two $20M+ compensation packages.
And I’ll be honest—I’ve learned more in the last two months at this altitude than I did in the two years before it. The complexity scales faster than the numbers do.
Board dynamics, multi-entity equity structures, international tax implications, performance-vesting schedules that require their own legal teams, eight-figure buyout provisions on restrictive covenants—this is a different craft than the one I was practicing eighteen months ago.
And it requires the kind of focus that a scaled team model would make impossible.
The scarcity isn’t manufactured—though I know the discerning reader says, “Right, the guy who espouses Cialdini like gospel pulling the oldest trick in the book—you sly dog you.”
No.
Rather it’s been a relatively painful decision to make. As painful as dropping resume and LinkedIn writing from my service offerings years ago—services that were generating over $1M a year at Discover Podium.
Looking back, I’m glad I did.
I’m also dropping job search consulting from the practice entirely.
In its place: annual senior leadership representation—ongoing advisory for the clients I already represent, not one-off search engagements.
This one was hard. I love supporting job search work.
Helping executives think through positioning, target companies, build a search strategy from scratch—it’s deeply satisfying and I’m good at it. But the math doesn’t lie.
Job search consulting, no matter how well I do it, keeps my effective rate in the low hundreds.
The interview and negotiation work—where the stakes compress into a handful of critical conversations—regularly yields multi-five-figure effective hourly rates on the value created.
It’s why I built a free course around the job search process—so the methodology is still available to anyone who needs it.
The clients I have in active job search right now will be my last.
Once they land, the practice narrows to what it does best—the critical conversations.
Board presentations. Interviews. Keynotes. Negotiations.
The moments where executive presence, rhetoric, and influence determine the outcome. That's the work.
Again, this is uncomfortable for me.
But I want to keep growing and challenging myself at the highest levels of this work—you can’t do that by continuing to do more of the same. It’s passion and obsession in equal measure. If it wasn’t fun, I’m not sure my ADHD mind would let me stick with it this long.
I’ve just done the math—and the combination of value based pricing and the strength of outcome doesn’t lie. It’s the math of what quality representation at this level requires.
I can only serve a finite number of clients at the level I insist on, and demand now exceeds that number.
I had a moment a few months ago—an engagement where my effective hourly rate on the value we created together crossed $50,000. Not because I charged that. Because the outcome we produced in a few hours moved the needle multiple millions per year.
That’s the kind of room I want to be in. And I can’t be in that room meaningfully if I manage a team of twelve.
The pricing hasn't been the friction I expected.
I've structured my contracts around a 10:1 ROI on outcomes. When the math is that clear, the conversation isn't about cost. It's about value. For those running your own business—keep that lesson close.
What This Means for You
If you’re reading this and wondering whether you’re being priced out—the honest answer depends on what you’re navigating.
If you’re in a seven-figure comp conversation, a board-level equity negotiation, or a critical conversation where the next twelve months determine the next decade—the math works in your favor.
The practice is built for those moments—and the ROI reflects it.
If you’re not at that altitude yet—the content isn’t going anywhere.
The newsletter is free. The frameworks are public. More podcast appearances and workshops are coming. The book is coming. And the media work I’m doing over the next year is specifically designed to put the ideas into the world at scale, even as the practice stays tight.
That’s the distinction I want to be clear about.
The practice stays small with ThinkWarwick Global. The ideas go wide with Predetermined.
The principles that change a $15M negotiation are the same ones that change a $30K one—and the same ones that change how you show up at home.
The altitude is different. The architecture is the same. I’m driven to bring that to everyone.
The book, the podcast appearances, the frameworks I publish here—that’s how the work scales. Not by putting more people in rooms, but by putting the thinking into more hands.
Why I’m Telling You This
Many of you follow this newsletter because you’re building something too—a practice, a career, a business—and you’ve told me that watching how I build mine is part of why you’re here.
So I’m going to keep showing the work.
The pricing change. The reasoning behind it. The deals I’m learning from. The moments where I got it wrong. The tension between wanting to serve more people and knowing that the work is better when I serve fewer.
I don’t have all of this figured out. I’m fifteen years in and still recalibrating in real time.
But I know one thing for sure—the practitioners who last in this business aren’t the ones who figured out how to be everywhere.
They’re the ones who figure out where they belong and stay there.
I belong in the room. And I’m staying.
Thank you for following along.
Work with me directly. Every session credits toward representation.
Stay fearless, friends.