An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Open communication is not complicated. It’s just very hard. We try to avoid hardship, and end up complicating everything in the process. Business owners tell me all the time: “You don’t understand. This situation is so complicated.” Once we dig deeper, it’s clear that it’s actually very simple — you need to tell the employee this or that. Ah, but that’s hard.
As part of our series of interviews about “How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Freund.
After quickly climbing the corporate ladder into management positions, Joel was hired as CEO at a telecom company, where he used LinkedIn organically to bring the product to market. After leaving that role, Joel founded Fluex Media (https://fluexmedia.com), which currently manages some of the largest personal brands on LinkedIn. His team uses Fluex Media’s unique, trailblazing process to build a consistent, authentic, and lucrative LinkedIn presence for executives at B2Bs. When he’s not working, you’ll find him playing music, listening to audiobooks (favorite topic: company culture), and donating kidneys.
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joefreund/.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
When I was hired as CEO of a national telecom company, my task was to bring the product to market. I wasn’t told one thing: the company’s entire budget had been spent on product development. The budget for marketing was a total of… $0. I turned to LinkedIn as a free marketing tool. 3 months in: nothing doing. 6 months: starting to gain some traction. 9 months: this is working! Companies I hadn’t managed to open a conversation with, people I couldn’t talk to — they were seeking me out at trade shows all over the country, taking my calls, trusting me, and giving me serious consideration. My LinkedIn presence put the telecom company on the map as a legitimate player, and I was the face of it. All this was done organically, without a cent in ad spend: just posting, engaging, and connecting consistently and strategically.
Friends with their own businesses followed my journey and asked, “What’s the secret?” I freely provided tips and advice. When I left my role, one company asked me to help them with LinkedIn in an official capacity. Then another asked the same.
I realized that while countless companies are offering LinkedIn services such as lead gen, automation, ghostwriting, or paid ads, nobody was offering an authentic, organic, all-inclusive service run by real people. As I built out my services and process, I started charging. Soon after, I hired an assistant, and then a copywriter. My little side gig was starting to look like a real business!
I could never have foreseen this journey, and never expected to have grown into the company Fluex Media is today. I was thinking small until one very interesting drive from New Jersey to Virginia…
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?
There was a prospect I was convinced could become a leader on LinkedIn, but his whole company was very against the whole idea of social media and personal branding. I had many conversations with the business owner but he wasn’t open to it. We ended up working on a different project together and needed to do some real brainstorming, so decided to go away for a day or two. We set out on the 7–8 hour drive to Virginia Beach.
During the drive, I was busy with my couple of clients. Back then I was still writing up all the posts myself. He listened in to the conversations and started asking: How does it work? Why did you write this instead of that? What is this person’s goal? This guy said something much longer — why are you writing it this way?
He said he wants to do LinkedIn. Right now.
I asked him a couple of questions and created some posts. We put up a profile picture and put out the first post. It got a lot of engagement. He was so excited. His account had 7 followers then.
On the way back, I had a call with a great writer I was considering hiring full-time. She suggested a partnership, with her running the creative side and me doing the business aspect. I said, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Next to me, this business owner is gesturing wildly at me. When I hung up, he asked if I was crazy. I couldn’t see the problem.
Him: How many clients can 1 writer handle?
Me: 10 accounts, max.
Him: Okay, so what happens when you get your 11th client? 20th? Every time you need another writer you give them a partnership?
Me: I don’t know. I never thought of having more than 10 clients.
Him: You’re crazy! This is a real business. Do you know how many business owners like me have no idea what LinkedIn is all about? If they would understand the power of it, you’ll have hundreds of clients!
Me: You’re thinking like a visionary. I’m not a visionary. I don’t need a writer as a partner; I can hire writers. I need a visionary partner. I would make stupid decisions like this every day if I don’t have a visionary.
Him: You know what I need? An integrator. I have all those great ideas, but to make it happen — I don’t know how to do that.
By the end of that drive, we shook hands on a partnership that turned out to be the foundation of what later became Fluex Media. I’ve never looked back.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One of the biggest mistakes I made was thinking small. Even funnier was that a die-hard social media skeptic was the person who believed in my little business even more than I did — he became my partner and the visionary at Fluex Media!
One of my takeaways from this experience was that as much as we tend to think we need to have everything planned out — goals, prospects, partnerships, investors — in reality, despite our efforts, often you just need to work on building relationships, and good things happen from there. It’s not always clear which action will lead to which outcome, so get out of the box and be open to unexpected results.
My second lesson was about making smart partnership decisions. I was about to take the wrong business partner, and for all the wrong reasons. Many business partnerships happen for the wrong reasons: out of fear, or because of a specific pain point you’re dealing with right now.
Let’s say you start a business and need money. Along comes somebody offering you $200,000 for a 50% partnership. As soon as the company starts making money, you start wondering: why am I doing all the work and forever after giving away 50%? It doesn’t make any sense.
You need money? You need a business loan, not a partner.
Or you need help managing the business. Along comes somebody offering to share the workload, for a percentage of the business. Soon the business grows and you need to hire more help — but that person is still getting a huge share of your profits.
Need help running the business? You need an assistant or COO, not a partner.
Don’t go into a partnership for short-term fixes. It creates the biggest problems in business. Go into partnerships because of self-awareness. Know your strengths, identify the gap in your skills, and find the right person to fill them. When you’re both on the same page about what each of you brings to the business, that value never goes away and it’s always a fair deal.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader?
The life of a business owner is a series of decision-making — and a lot of the time, those are hard decisions. When you have two good options, making the decision is easy. It’s when you have two bad options that it gets tough. That’s when business owners stall, and it stops the business from moving forward. Leaders need to be able to make decisions quickly, even without enough information.
A hard decision I had to make: a prospect at a larger company than our typical target market reached out. They were going public shortly and investing in their PR. Would we be able to help them with LinkedIn? We met the CEO and he seemed to be an excellent fit: articulate, outgoing, and with a great story. They gave us a sizeable deposit and we were ready to go. As soon as the first batch of content was ready, lots of other people at their company started getting involved: the publicist, the marketing team, and the investors. At that time, we were still working primarily with smaller companies where there weren’t so many people involved, so this became complicated. We tried in many ways to make this work, but it came to a point where everybody picked at the content until there was either nothing left, it didn’t reflect the CEO’s authentic voice, or it was very technical and unengaging.
I had two options: keep on taking their money (which we desperately needed at the time as a startup) to produce underperforming content that they were happy with but would not bring results; or I could say, “This was a mistake. We’re not on the same page about the best way to help you achieve your goals. We’ll refund you and we wish you all the best.”
Both options were unappealing. Keeping going and fighting every step of the way was bad for team morale, and knowing their money was not being well spent felt wrong — yet giving up that money and admitting this wasn’t working wasn’t easy to swallow either. Clearly, we had presented enough of a professional image to get this company to reach out and sign on in the first place; now we would be taking a step back.
Ultimately, after a few days, I made the call to go with option two. The main reason was that this account was dragging our team down — they knew the content wouldn’t perform, communication was challenging, and the overall feeling was confrontational and frustrating. The best interests of your team always have to come first.
We let the client go and took full responsibility for being unprepared to work with their team. The CEO was grateful for our open and honest approach. We refunded the entire amount and moved on. It’s hard to choose the lesser of the two evils, but it’s important to make that decision and keep moving forward.
Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?
There is no ‘most effective’ platform. Every business has different goals and target markets, and you need to choose where to invest accordingly. That being said, you need a bit of diversity — don’t invest everything in one place. The trap is trying to be everywhere at once. It takes time to build a strong presence on any social media platform, so focus on one to start with, and then slowly add more once that first one is well established.
For us, as a B2B, LinkedIn is where we invest the most time and effort, and it’s the same for our clients, who are also all in the B2B space. LinkedIn has proven to increase business revenues for B2B when used consistently and strategically. One of our clients actually had to leave LinkedIn for a while to hire more staff and increase his capacity to handle the influx of new business directly from organic LinkedIn! His LinkedIn presence built brand awareness, trust, and authority, and made him likable and memorable — plus it attracted two best-fit salespeople to reach out to him, get hired, and drastically grow his business. Full case study here: https://fluexmedia.com/case-studies/power-7-group/.
Let’s talk about LinkedIn specifically, now. Can you share 5 ways to leverage LinkedIn to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.
Sure. One thing to bear in mind though is the timeframe for these benefits. You will immediately see increased engagement and profile views, but the real results — the lucrative connections and conversations — are earned with consistency and patience. At Fluex Media, we advise clients to expect it to take 9–12 months, depending on their industry, personality, and LinkedIn starting point. but the results are well worth waiting for:
- Legitimacy: The first thing anyone does when they hear about you — you cold call them, send them an email pitch, or they get referred to you — is search your name online. The first result will be your website; the second is your LinkedIn profile. If that profile is well-developed and you’re maintaining an active presence (so it’s clearly not a dummy account), you’ve proved your legitimacy and the connection is ready to move forward. When I was CEO of the telecom company, very few prospects had heard of us. I’d spend time on LinkedIn finding qualified people to call — it was interesting to see how many times — as I was on the call — I’d get a LinkedIn notification that the person was viewing my profile!
Even if you have an excellent website, your LinkedIn profile is very different. The website gives a more technical overview of the company, while your LinkedIn profile is where prospects get to see the way you think and work, what you’ve been up to recently, and helps them get to know, like, and trust you.
To dramatically improve your business: Set up a fully optimized LinkedIn profile and keep it updated. - Authority: When you post industry news, commentary, and insights; and display your expertise and willingness to help, your audience slowly starts to view you as an industry authority. That makes your whole sales and marketing process and strategy so much easier, as building authority is one of the most important aspects of any campaign. I’ve landed several PR opportunities — interviews, features, podcasts — because my LinkedIn activity positions me as an authority on LinkedIn marketing and leadership, and my large following enhances that image. Those opportunities further build my authority, which leads to more followers and then more PR opportunities… and the cycle continues.
To dramatically improve your business: Focus on a niche, provide real value, consistently engage with your target business community, and build relationships with other experts in your niche. - Nurturing relationships: It’s becoming increasingly harder to reach decision-makers using the phone or email. LinkedIn is a powerful tool to be in front of the right people in a way that’s not salesy, pushy, or aggressive. Over time, your audience is getting to know, like, and trust you — especially if you engage insightfully with their content at the same time. Prospects may reach out o their terms when they’re ready, or even if they don’t — if you message them after a few weeks of interaction, they will likely be open to listening, as you’re not coming out of the blue and have already built a level of trust. It’s a longer — but more effective — sales process built on education, value, and familiarity.
Trade shows, networking events, cold calling — clients tell us all the time how their results have improved with a strong LinkedIn presence. Every conversation becomes a warm conversation; even if you’ve never interacted directly on LinkedIn, it feels like you’re continuing the conversation from there.
To dramatically improve your business: Using clearly defined search terms for your target market, build a ‘nurture list’ of people and companies you want to get noticed by. Send them a connection request with a custom note. Consistently engage with their content, or if they don’t post, add your thoughts to posts they’ve engaged with. After a few weeks, open a conversation in the messages. - Recruitment: LinkedIn was originally created for this purpose, and it’s still one of the best places to find talent, though the method has changed. It’s no longer about reading resumes — now, it’s about showcasing your company culture, mindset, growth, opportunities, and core values so that you attract the right people. several of our clients have businesses with an agent structure — such as mortgages or insurance — and their primary purpose for being on LinkedIn is to attract best-fit candidates, which is a far more big-thinking way of growing their business compared to aiming to land one more client and then one more. At Fluex Media, we’ve also been fortunate to hire an amazing team — several already had their own successful businesses! — largely because the culture, mission, and growth we exhibited in our posts appealed to them. And this was during Covid when everybody was complaining about hard it was to hire!
Equally importantly, a strong, consistent LinkedIn presence deters the wrong people and thereby avoids a lot of hiring problems. For example, for us, being open and honest is a very important factor. Not everyone likes that kind of environment. If someone like would end up at our company, it would create a lot of problems. By demonstrating your core values all the time, you have a lot less of a chance to fall in with people who are not a good fit.
To dramatically improve your business: Define your core values and give potential candidates a peek inside your business: the people, the culture, the growth, and the opportunities. Think of it as a business journal. - Branding: People have many different interpretations of ‘branding’ and don’t know exactly what it is. Is it a logo? A color? A font? A tagline? The word originates from when we used horses to get around. Their owners would use a hot iron to brand a symbol onto the horse’s flesh to mark it as theirs. It would stay there for life. Branding in business means imprinting a certain image and association in the minds of your audience. LinkedIn is an exceptionally effective tool for branding in the B2B space. With clear goals, a defined target market, and a good content strategy, you can put out information that cultivates a specific, carefully curated image of your company. Before social media, you had to compete with the big brands and their huge budgets to achieve this. Today, it’s so much easier. You build your niche audience and then consistently feed them information. It’s an unbelievable opportunity. Clients tell us all the time that after being with us for a year or two, people are recognizing them and excited to meet them — at networking events, the airport, anywhere.
I went to a conference a couple of months ago. I didn’t know a single person there, but the weirdest thing happened. From all over the room, people were calling out, “Joel!” and coming over to meet me. They ‘knew’ me from LinkedIn. One of the sessions at the conference was about social media. There were four presenters on the stage and I was in the audience. In the middle of the panel, one of the presenters threw a question at me: “Hey, Joel at Fluex Media — what do you think? Is that the same on LinkedIn?” I’d never interacted with this person before. That’s branding. In their minds, they know me, and they know me as the LinkedIn expert. In their brain, they think they know me, they feel like they know me, because they see my content. True, it’s not widespread — most of your readers probably haven’t heard of me. That’s fine; I don’t need that. I have a niche audience, and those are the people I speak to and want to be known by. Social media allows you to do that, and because so few executives are exploiting this opportunity (according to FTI, only 26% of FTSE 100 CEOs are posting regularly on at least one of LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram), consistent content creators have an excellent chance of standing out and building a following.
To dramatically improve your business: Define your target market. Consistently connect and engage with them, and feed them information that makes you memorable and authoritative.
Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I have a dream in which every workplace operates in a truly open and honest way. Open communication avoids all problems and conflicts in business and our personal lives. We need to get used to saying it the way it is. Too often, we hold back, and then resentment builds and eventually erupts. We see this in partnerships, marriages, between managers and teams, between siblings, in politics — it’s everywhere.
Open communication is not complicated. It’s just very hard. We try to avoid hardship, and end up complicating everything in the process. Business owners tell me all the time: “You don’t understand. This situation is so complicated.” Once we dig deeper, it’s clear that it’s actually very simple — you need to tell the employee this or that. Ah, but that’s hard.
I’ve rarely fired anyone. That’s because by the time it would reach that point, it was already so clear to the employee that they weren’t cut out for the role. I didn’t string them along with false assurances and excuses, and then have no choice but to spring the bad news on them when I’d tried everything else. I was open and honest from the start if things weren’t working well. I want people to be the same with me — don’t ‘be nice’ and tell me I’m doing well if I’m not.
I was very musical when I was young. I played several instruments (just placed my hands on the piano keys and started to play!) and sang really well. I expected to be a singer or musician when I grew up. Then, at 15 or 16, my passion dissipated completely. What happened? I used to sing at school events and received great feedback — and then a new student joined. He said he could sing and promised to compete with me. at the next event, he took the microphone… and made a real fool of himself. Everyone was snickering — but afterward, when he got off the stage, there was back-slapping, cheering, and enthusiastic compliments. Of course, he took the opportunity to sing again and again, believing he was doing a fantastic job.
I started doubting myself. Maybe it was the same with me. maybe I was also a joke.
Years later, I met this classmate at an event. Guess what? He took the microphone. His singing had not improved. In 40 years, nobody had told him the truth, and he was still making a fool of himself.
We’re not doing anyone a favor by not being upfront with them. If they’re not really good at something, don’t tell them they are. We all know people who think they’re good at something and they’re just not. How does it happen? Because people like to make other people feel good — and we hurt them in the process.
Be open and honest. Communication is the most important thing. Don’t say things that are not aligned, deep down, with what you really think.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
I’d love to meet Chris Gardner, who overcame extreme hardships one after the next and eventually founded Gardner Rich, an investment firm, and became a multi-millionaire. His perseverance, endurance, and tenacity are unbelievable. His story is an inspiration. My main question to him would be, “How did you keep going? How did you not despair and give up?” Meeting him would be an honor and a privilege.
Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!
Joel Freund of Fluex Media On How to Use LinkedIn To Dramatically Improve Your Business was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.