LinkedIn Profile Optimisation for Founders: A Checklist

The six changes worth doing first

Most founders treat their profile as a career record. Buyers treat it as a sales page visited by exactly one kind of person: someone deciding whether to take your call. Optimise for that reader and most decisions become obvious. Start with these six.

1. Headline states who you help and how. "Founder at Acme" tells the reader nothing. "I help mid-market law firms cut cloud spend by 30% without a replatform" tells them everything. Roughly 220 characters, front-load the promise.
2. Banner image carries the value proposition. A picture of a skyline is a wasted slot. Put the same six-word promise you put in the headline, in plain 24pt type.
3. Profile photo is current and describes you as a person. Suits read corporate. A clean, well-lit non-suit photo performs better because the reader assumes you will be direct in conversation.
4. Featured section carries three proof assets. A relevant case overview, a piece of thought leadership you are proud of, and a direct booking link. No PDFs that require a form.
5. About section is written as a letter to the buyer. First three lines do the heavy lifting because the rest is collapsed. Name the problem, name the reader, offer the fix.
6. URL is a custom one. It is a five-minute change and it makes you look like you manage your own stack.

Do these six and you have captured roughly 80% of the profile's effect on call bookings. The rest is polish.

The six refinements most founders skip

These take an hour in total and they raise the average deal size because they filter out the prospects who were never a fit.

1. Turn on creator mode only if you publish weekly. Otherwise the Follow button feels unearned.
2. Rewrite the top three roles in your experience section in plain English. The reader is not a recruiter; describe what you actually did in outcomes.
3. Skill endorsements are noise for your buyer. Suppress the top-3 endorsed skills block if it highlights generic skills like "Management".
4. Turn on Creator mode for the newsletter field only if you have a newsletter. An empty field is worse than no field.
5. Turn on "Open to" as creator, not job seeking. The "Open to" blue banner is a giveaway if set to "open to work" style flags.
6. Set a custom button. LinkedIn allows one link in the top block. Point it at your booking page, not your company site.

The overall test: a stranger in your ICP should be able to answer three questions in fifteen seconds. Who does this person help? Have they done this before? How do I take the next step? If any of the three is unclear, the profile is not finished.

Reviews: audit your profile as a stranger would

The most reliable way to check is to have someone who does not know you read the top of the profile and report what they think you sell. Founders routinely discover that the reader understood a different service, a different audience or a different price point.

Two specific patterns recur. First, founders describing the technology rather than the outcome ("25 years building enterprise Java systems" instead of "we cut release cycles for mid-market lenders"). Second, founders listing company names and giving the reader no idea what they personally are good at.

Update the headline and about section quarterly, and any time your positioning changes. Profiles that have not been touched in a year give the impression of a founder who has stopped publishing, whether or not that impression is fair.

We rewrite founder profiles as part of every engagement we take on. See what's included at Wes Marketing Solutions or book a 15-minute call.