Dan Murray-Serter 🧠

Co-Founder of Heights I Angel Investor | Over 100 Startups I Follow For Daily Posts on Health, Business & Personal growth from UK’s #1 ranked health creator (apparently)

Serial entrepreneur and Angel investor in 100+ startups with over 10 years experience starting, scaling and failing multiple startups.

Co Founder of Heights - Europe's leading brain and gut health company.

I also started and help run Foundrs - A not for profit community of the best, most ambitious and compassionate founders in UK.

I recently stepped away from Leaders Media - A media company making the top business podcasts in Europe, Secret Leaders - at the top of the charts, to focus on much more important things with my time - being a dad to 2 awesome daughters.

Angel/Advisor

Beam (www.beam.org)
ATAI Life Sciences (https://www.atai.life)
Allplants (www.allplants.com)
Humanity (https://humanity.health)
BYP (www.byp-network.com)
Goss (https://www.goss.media)
Tribe VR (www.tribevr.io)
Thrift (www.wearethrift.com)
THIS (www.this.co)
The Sports Edit (www.thesportsedit.com)
Faction (www.factionskis.com)
Runway East (http://runwayea.st/)
London Union/Dinerama (http://londonunion.com/)
Neardesk (https://www2.neardesk.com/)


Tailored.to (https://tailored.to/)
Motivii (http://motivii.com/)
Earlybird (https://earlybird.fm/)
Upshot (http://www.upshotapp.co/)
Togethera (www.togethera.com)
Repairly (www.repairly.co.uk)
Zaboo (www.zabooapp.com)
Lissom (www.lissom.com)
Bloom (www.hellobloom.io)

Dan Murray

Too many leaders still fear being “outshined” by smarter people on their teams.

That’s backwards.

The best leaders don’t aim to be the smartest person in the room. They aim to build the smartest room possible.

Here’s the reality:

- A team full of people who only know what you know will never surpass you
- Hiring people smarter than you creates leverage, not competition
- Growth comes from surrounding yourself with people who stretch your thinking, challenge your assumptions, and bring ideas you’d never imagine

It takes humility to admit you don’t have all the answers. But humility isn’t weakness-it’s the foundation of strength.

I’ve learned the leaders who fear smarter colleagues usually struggle with ego. The leaders who thrive? They welcome it. Because they know:

- Smarter teammates = faster progress
- Different perspectives = fewer blind spots
- Bigger talent = bigger results

Stop guarding your title. Start curating your circle.

True leadership isn’t about being the brightest mind. It’s about creating the conditions where the brightest minds can do their best work-together.

If you want to grow, stop fearing smarter people. Start hiring them.

Question for you:
Do you intentionally surround yourself with people who outshine you in certain areas-or do you default to comfort?

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One thing I’ve learned after building multiple teams: the most valuable people are rarely the loudest.

They’re the ones who quietly upskill when no one’s watching.

You can’t teach that level of internal drive.
You can’t force someone to care about their growth more than the company requires.

That has to come from within.

And from a neuroscience perspective, people who self-educate build something incredibly powerful:
a plastic brain.

Every new skill, every book, every online course, it all strengthens their neural pathways for adaptability, problem - solving, and creative thinking.

Those traits compound.

They become faster learners.
Better decision-makers.
More resourceful under pressure.
And over time, they outgrow people who rely only on formal training.

When I hire, I look for curiosity.
Not credentials.
Not polished answers.
Curiosity.

Because someone who reads, experiments, builds, tinkers, or studies on their own time will eventually outpace almost everyone else.
They don’t wait to be told what to learn.
They choose it.

And that choice is what makes them dangerous, in the best way possible.

If you’re that person, keep going.
Even if no one notices right now.
Your effort is compounding quietly.
You’ll feel the gap before anyone else sees it.

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Follow me Dan Murray for more on habits and leadership.

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🖐️ P.S Join my newsletter The Science Of Success where I break down stories and studies of success to teach you how to turn it from probability to predictability here: https://lnkd.in/d9TnkzdH

100-year-old productivity hack. Still works. Still simple.

1918. Charles Schwab runs Bethlehem Steel. Hires productivity consultant Ivy Lee. Lee's offer: give me 15 minutes with each executive, pay me what it's worth in 3 months. 3 months later, Schwab writes a cheque for $25,000, equivalent to $400,000 today. The method was that effective.

The Ivy Lee Method. Five steps. At the end of each workday, write down the 6 most important tasks for tomorrow. Not 7, not 10, six. Rank them in order of true importance. Tomorrow morning, start with task 1, work until complete. Move to task 2, then 3, one at a time in order. Unfinished tasks move to tomorrow's list. Repeat daily.

Why 6 tasks? Forces prioritisation. With unlimited tasks, everything feels important, nothing gets done. Six is manageable, ambitious but achievable.

Why rank them? Most people work on whatever feels urgent or easy. Ranking forces you to confront true importance. Task 1 should be the thing that, if completed alone, makes tomorrow successful.

Why one task at a time? Multitasking is a myth. Task switching reduces productivity by 40%. Takes 23 minutes to regain focus after interruption. Doing one thing until complete equals deep work.

Why plan the night before? Decision fatigue compounds throughout the day. By 4pm, decision-making quality is 40% worse than 9am. Planning tonight means decisions made when not depleted. Wake up, no decision required, just execute task 1.

Six tasks, ranked, one at a time. Decide tonight, execute tomorrow.

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Follow me Dan Murray for more on habits and leadership.

P.S. If you want 2026 to feel different, don’t start with goals.
Start with clarity.

Most people don’t need more discipline.
They need to understand what’s been draining them and what deserves their energy.

I’ve spent years refining a simple process to help you with exactly that.

Download my short PDF guide https://lnkd.in/eniDNptW

I'll see you there.

The Ivy Lee Method 100-Year-Old Productivity Hack 

Opportunities rarely arrive directly.
They move through conversations you’re not in.
Decisions made without you present.
Rooms you never see.

That’s why who you build relationships with matters more than how loudly you promote yourself.

The people who open doors are the ones who trust you enough to bring your name up when it counts. Not because you asked. But because your character, consistency, and competence made it easy for them to do so.

This isn’t about networking harder.
It’s about being reliable.
Doing good work quietly.
Treating people well when there’s nothing to gain.

Reputation travels faster than resumes.
And long before opportunity finds you, it finds your name.

Choose your people carefully.
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Follow me Dan Murray for more on habits and leadership.

P.S. If you want 2026 to feel different, don’t start with goals.
Start with clarity.

Most people don’t need more discipline.
They need to understand what’s been draining them and what deserves their energy.

I’ve spent years refining a simple process to help you with exactly that.

Download my short PDF guide https://lnkd.in/eniDNptW

I'll see you there.

Luke Shalom

CEO @ Grow Solo I help the C-suite turn industry expertise into predictable pipeline

There are two ways agency founders try to turn LinkedIn into a reliable source of clients.



One is by guessing. Posting when there is time. Relying on referrals and hoping the next month is a good one.



The other is by building a system that creates steady conversations, even when client work gets busy.



Our clients choose the second.



→ Joya Dass (Founder, Women’s Leadership Lab)



The problem:



- She spent hours in the DMs to book a few calls.

- Content happened on weekends.

- When delivery picked up, sales stopped.



Some months were strong. Others were quiet.



Even in good months, there was stress about where the next client would come from.



What we did:



We built a simple LinkedIn content system she could run in house. No ghostwriter or agency retainer dependency.



We shifted her content from generic how to posts to insight driven thinking.



That changed the conversations. People in her network showed up aligned and ready to buy.



We added a content led outbound system powered by a setter we hited and trained. The system kept working while she focused on delivery.



Results:



- Revenue grew from $150k to $300k.

- Sales became predictable.

- The pressure eased.



→ Jonathan Crowder (Founder, Founders Ally)



The problem:



- No time for content.

- Unpredictable sales calls.

- Leads with no budget.

- No sales background. A 10 percent close rate.



What we did:



We removed Jonathan as the bottleneck. 



We built a content system using AI supported by his real thinking. It sounded like him, not software.



Trust was built before the call. Outbound went from 10% to 40% response rates.



We focused prospecting on real buying moments, like recent funding to catch buyers at the right time.



We simplified his sales process. Clear outcomes. Clear cost of inaction was communicated to his buyers.



Results:



- Meetings went from 3-5 a month to 10-15 sales qualifed leads a month.

- A visible pipeline. Increase to a 25 percent close rate.

- $300k in pipeline in 60 days.

- $30k in new revenue closed.



→ Brian Dukes (COO, Exit Wise)



The problem



- Ovelry dependent on referrals.

- No LinkedIn playbook.

- No time to write.



What we did



- We clarified positioning.

- Simplified the offer.

- Built a content engine.



Then we added outbound from the founder profile.



Everything was owned and run internally.



Results:



- Consistent posting machine.

- 500 to 6500 ICP followers.

- $740,000 in LinkedIn-driven revenue over two years.



We have helped 100+ founder led agencies replace unpredictable growth with systems they understand and control.



If this feels familiar send me a DM with "Grow", we should talk.

Founder

We help executives to build and monetize their brand on linkedin by scaling your content and turning it into leads, authority and thought leadership.

How?

Engagement + DM flows = Qualified meetings. 

Done with you. Done for you.

Stop wasting hours on cold outreach that never converts. ↓
Here's the secret "Go To Network" strategy we used to generate 47 leads and a 44% reply rate in 2 weeks for an enterprise SaaS company.
 
Every week I see B2B founders scraping lead lists in spreadsheets trying to figure out who's worth talking to.
 
Meanwhile, we are running a fully targeted outbound campaign in a few days flat.
 
(241 people contacted. 53.4% connection rate. 44% reply rate. Built with this exact workflow.)
 
With senior leaders from Nvidia, Adobe and Capgemini.
 
3 tools.

Zero cold outreach needed.
 
But 95% of founders don't know how to use them together to target the right prospects and the right time with actual INTENT.
 
So I documented the whole thing:
 
→ Why your ICP lead lists and personalisation before personalization's sake is murdering your response rates and burning your ICP.
 
→ How this custom Clay flow identifies and scores ICP, internal referrals, and partner opportunities from your ICP posts
 
→ The exact messaging framework we used in Valley to get replies in days, not weeks with leads actually looking for your service
 
Grab the strategy to scale your event pipeline here: https://lnkd.in/e97kQUJy
 
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Founder at Atticus | Predictable LinkedIn pipeline using a founder-led sales system I 100+ clients scaled | Be the next 👉 atticusagency.com

I'm making a public bet with myself.  I will earn $1M from my agency by December using only LinkedIn. Here's the 10-part plan (steal it):

1. Get GTM fundamentals dialed in before adding complexity

Everyone's over-engineering AI and wondering why they're bleeding on tech stack costs with nothing to show for it.

Three questions before anything gets added: 

Do I know who I'm going after? 
Is my message right? 
Am I running a real qualification process?

Nothing else gets added until those are dialled in.

2. Commit to human-in-the-loop AI for service delivery and demand gen

I got burned assuming AI could handle more than it can.

Just because you can hand everything to an AI SDR doesn't mean you should. A machine won't know your client's real objection or when to pull back.

Human-in-the-loop is where the real leverage is.

3. Use buyer triggers in our marketing

Most B2B content is purely logical. That's why it doesn't convert.

Frame your offer around your buyers' exact frustrations, fears, wants and apirations. That feeling closes deals. Not your feature list.

4. Go all in on middle of funnel trust

Fewer leads than last year. But the ones that do show up are more qualified.

Buyers need more airtime before they buy. YouTube's my play.

5. Keep LinkedIn as the spine of everything

If it doesn't link to the LinkedIn funnel, I'm not doing it.

Meta ads only if they benefit LinkedIn. Conferences only if I'm capturing video. 

Email only if I'm scraping LinkedIn first.

Everything else feeds it or gets cut.

6. Double and triple down on fulfillment

Retention is the key to growth. I ignored that lesson for too long.

Clients getting results are staying. Some are booking meetings in days.

7. Never get on a call without it being qualified

I need 30-40 qualified calls a month. Willing and able to buy.

Tight ICP targeting. A GTM manager is qualifying every call. 
No coffee chats. No random bookings.

8. Fix the leaks in the LinkedIn funnel

January leads dropped 50%. Close rate stayed the same. I'm not squeezing enough out of the demand that does come in.

Now we track every conversation. Likes, comments, views, lead magnets, all assigned to setters.

When someone books, pre-call flow triggers. They see proof before they show up. By the time they're on the call, they're 90% sold.

9. Know my numbers better than my phone number

For two years I didn't know my actual numbers. Inbound vs outbound. Show rate. Close rate. Which posts drive pipeline.

Growth only gets predictable when you know where it comes from.

10. Pick a niche (eventually)

I know, I know. Riches in niches.

We're good across many client types. We also start from scratch every time we enter a new space.

Goal: three to five case studies, same niche, measurable results. Then go all in. Before the halfway point of this year.

Ten clients, same niche, same result. That's not luck. That's a trend a prospect can actually believe in.

Want to follow along? Follow Luke Shalom

Tired of being the only reason deals come in? We handle the outbound... LinkedIn, email, full GTM so your pipeline doesn’t stop when you do | 100+ clients scaled I Be the the next one 👉 atticusagency.com

I gained 25,000 followers in the last 12 months and realised it’s been a while since I introduced myself.
So here goes nothing.

My name’s Luke Shalom. 31, from Norfolk in the UK. Been living in Medellin, Colombia for the last 2 years. Learning Spanish. Slowly.

The number one question I get: “Shalom… are you Jewish?”

I’ve got the gloriously funky name because my dad is half Indian, from a family of Jews who owned tea farms in India. 

Since it was my grandpa’s side, I missed being part of the tribe.

For the best part of my career, my CV was a car crash.

7 jobs in 5 years. Fired or left every single one.

Ten years in sales, every form imaginable:

- Selling duck eggs on farms as a kid
- Running raves out of basements in Newcastle
- Touring as a club DJ for 5 years across Europe
- Tech recruitment
- SaaS sales, AI adtech
- Head of sales at a 7-figure agency selling - c*nnabis SEO

At 22, it all fell apart.

Too much partying. I ended up in hospital for 2 months.

Came out with nothing. 
I rebuilt my life from scratch.
I kept hitting the ceiling at every job after that and getting restless. 

Classic ADHD. 

Then a boss told me “sales isn’t for you”. 
I thought about quitting but didn’t.

Over that time is spent far too much time reason self help literature. 

I read the 4 Hour Work Week. Which made me want to live abroad and work for myself. 

And once a relationship ended. 

I bought a one-way ticket to Colombia on a whim.


That was 2 years ago. 

I met my partner Paula out here. 
Rescued a French bulldog called Hugo. 
Made a whole new friend group from scratch. 

Still here.

And to spite that boss, I started a business.

For the last 3 years I’ve been locked in dark rooms solving one problem: how do you get clients from LinkedIn.

That obsession turned into:

- 75,000 followers
- 100+ clients served
- $ 6,000,000 in client revenue from LinkedIn
- Features in Amazon best seller books by Justin Michael and Jonny Staker for my approach to demand gen

Took me from an ADHD kid making $40K a year, getting fired from jobs he hated, to making $250K working remotely from South America.

I’m 31 but feel 40. 

Old soul. I’ve lived a few lives already (and lost more than a few brain cells).

The one thing I keep coming back to: success is just about getting really good at taking pain and having the grit to see it through. That’s it. 

Everything else is details.

I don’t drink. I go to the gym. I work.

Right now I’m building Atticus to $1M+ take home this year and sharing every lesson along the way.

If you’re a founder who wants to get your FREE custom LinkedIn 90-day action plan to sign your next b2b client grab yours today here (takes 30 seconds!) 👉 https://lnkd.in/ehK6Mn5v

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I close 50% of my discovery calls with 5-figure clients. Here's the exact founder profile funnel that does it:
 
Most agency founders are stuck in "random acts of growth".
 
They post and hear crickets.
They buy expensive tools.
They hire an agency and blow there marketing budget.

Nothing works.
 
So pipeline stays unpredictable.

Referrals dry up.
 
And LinkedIn gets written off as something that "doesn't work for our industry."
 
It's not the channel. It's the absence of a system.
 
The founders winning right now have stopped chasing tactics and built a Founder-Led Demand System.
 
One engine where content, trust, and outbound compound together.
 
Here's exactly how mine works.
 
TOP OF FUNNEL
 
Tools: LinkedIn, Perplexity, Claude
 
My founder brand on LinkedIn is the engine.
 
Every month it pulls the right people in. Follows, likes, connections, profile views from founders who match my ICP exactly.

By the time they reach out, they already know me. They already trust me.
 
That means every call I take is with someone already in consideration. I'm not selling to strangers.
 
But that only happens when your positioning is locked in and your content is engineered to take someone from skeptical to ready to buy.
 
Most founders post randomly and wonder why nothing converts.
 
MIDDLE OF FUNNEL
 
Tools: YouTube
 
LinkedIn gets them in the door. YouTube closes the trust gap.
 
I've never gone viral. My videos are lucky to get 500 views.
 
But every single client I've signed in the last 6 months said YouTube was one of the main reasons they hired me.
 
Why? Facetime. There's nothing that builds trust faster than watching someone think out loud on camera for 20 minutes.
 
Every video is built around a buying objection I hear on calls. I post once a week and drive LinkedIn traffic to it. Our setter uses videos in the DMs before calls, between discovery and close, and when leads go cold.
 
It's the best sales tool for trust building I have.
 
BOTTOM OF FUNNEL
 
Tools: Valley AI
 
This is where most agencies leave money on the table. They generate interest and have no system to convert it.
 
We run warm outbound to every ICP founder who engages with content. Likes, comments, profile views, lead magnet requests. All of it.
 
A human is in the loop at every stage. We qualify hard before anything hits the calendar.

That's why close rate is 50%.
 
Interested in building this out for your Agency? DM me "grow" and I'll show you the gaps stopping you from turning LinkedIn into  7 figure channel.

Predictable LinkedIn pipeline using a founder-led demand system I Get your FREE custom Li 90 day action plan to sign your next b2b client 👉 atticuslinkedinblueprint.lovable.app

"I'm really not seeing why I should go with you guys… there's a team overseas that does this for half the price"

That's one has come up a few more times than you'd like recently. 

That sh*t stings like an insult to:

- The years you built your business
- The expertise you got through blood sweat (and a couple tears)
- The confidence you built from delivering your clients amazing results.
- To get compared to a cheaper alternative. Really?!

Just like that the deal is lost. Or worse you get the "not the right time, we'll check back in with you next quarter."

(Code words for… we did not see the value in what you do.)

A couple more quarters of this will leave you with a slow burning frustration.

"What the f*ck was the point in building all those years of experience to get passed by others less experienced players in the market?"

The good news is… there's nothing wrong with you.

Your buyers are just having a hard time seeing HOW you are different.

And all that comes down to your positioning.

How I structure positioning so your buyers come on calls already understanding why you're different:

1/ Define what makes you different

It comes from understanding your differences across who you service, what you deliver, and how you help them get there.

Some companies niche down. Others lean on personal experience. A couple years back I worked with a guy who built Gong to 8 figures. We differentiated through his experience.

It's not a checkbox exercise. If your buyers can't tell the difference. You're toast.

2/ Build your own category

I see fish markets here in Colombia all the time. 

Everyone flogging fish next to each other. The only differentiator becomes… price.

That's what 99% of agency owners do on LinkedIn.

Own the language around your problem. When your prospects think of their problem they think of you:

LinkedIn lead gen = founder-led demand system
Agencies can't scale on LinkedIn = random acts of growth
AI trash lead gen = the magic lead machine

3/ Define your category POV

Big buyers don't buy for information. They buy because they see why you are different and they dig why you do it that way.

Run a POV creation exercise:

- What's broken about your industry
- Why it's broken
- The new way this problem should be solved
- How is your solution the new way

Comment "POV" and I'll send you my 5 minute 7-figure POV creator worksheet that gives you instant clarity on what will make your content strategy truely different.

Last week I signed a CEO who has a consulting company in the manufacturing space. He told me something that slapped me across the face:

Him: "my entire financial year is tied up in 3-4 deals...

and I have no idea when they will come..."

Me: "So what happens then if they don't come in?" 

Him: "well it's stressful... I have no idea where my next big client is coming from".

Me: "and how long has it been this way?" Him: "well I've been running the business 10 years". 

Me: "10 YEARS!"

Me: "but given it's been a problem for 10 years what's held you back from investing to solve this?"

Him: "I just could never get outbound to work for myself and delivery always got in the way.

Isn't that wild.

Imagine placing your entire financial year on a small handful of deals that may or may not show up.

What's even wilder is that this isn't an edge case either.

It's the reality for 100s of agency owners I speak to either.

I call it the "referral trap".

Everything is amazing. Until it isn't.

There is an insane amount of fragility in building a business based of referrals.

And it's part of an old dying model of building a service business.

"Hey if I do good work people will refer me".

That was great a couple of years ago but now your customers who would have been referrals have more options:

- They could work with you
- Find an overseas alternative
- Plug into claude code and do it on the cheap

Those same buyers you rested your entire financial year on getting are fewer and far between.

That mixed in with changing consumer behavior of buyers needing more information and creating a vetted list of faves before they reach out to you means less sales calls anyhow

What does that mean…

Those handful of referrals are a liability. 

It's running your agency on hope and good will. 

It's hoping you don't lose that key client $50k a month client that might be "bringing in house" knowing you have no way to get another just like them.

It does not have to be that way.

Be like this smart business owner.

We showed him the gap… he was missing out on $100,000 of net closed deals a month from linkedin 

He was missing a system where he knew that his pipeline was getting filled with net new conversations from the right people every month. 

He wanted the certainty of knowing his entire financial year didn't rest on a couple of deals.

3 months from now he will  be able to relax over summer with his kids playing in the garden… instead of worrying whether those 4 deals show.

And that's priceless.

Want to know exactly how we'd fix this for your agency? I'll map out a plan to get you off referrals and adding $100k a month from LinkedIn. Free. Grab your strategy here: https://lnkd.in/eHVyck32

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The Battle

Dan Murray

Luke Shalom

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Performance ScoreDan Murray's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Dan Murray

Luke Shalom

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dan Murray's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreLuke Shalom's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreDan Murray's LinkedIn Performance