Sam G. Winsbury

We Create Thought Leaders Through Personal Branding | 150+ Personal Brands Built | Founder & CEO Kurogo

We turn entrepreneurs into credible thought leaders through personal branding so they can scale their businesses, unlock untapped opportunities and outlast their competition.

If you’re anything like our clients, you’re an expert in your field. One of the best.   

But you just don’t seem to have the reputation you deserve.   

You want to be the go-to authority in your industry and become an opportunity magnet.   

That way you could…  

- Generate inbound leads consistently 
- Win clients and customers with ease 
- Attract media features   
- Attract top talent 
- Speak on stage  

The list is endless.   

We help our clients do just that through the power of personal branding, by: 

1. Giving them clarity on their brand and positioning them as industry leaders.
2. Blowing up their social profiles and landing them high-profile media features.
3. Helping them convert their new-found reputation into meaningful opportunities and ROI

And having built 300+ personal brands, we’ve got quite good at it, achieving results like these in the process:  

🚀 Jack generated 2.5M views and 6 figures in revenue in 90 days with us 
🚀 Joe and Olly generated millions of views and saw a record month
🚀 Guy added 5 figures of pipeline value in a matter of months
🚀 Olie added £50K of inbound revenue to his pipeline
🚀 Sue generated over 8.3 million views in 4 months
🚀 Jemma increased her views by 51,347%
🚀 James became an Amazon Best Seller 
🚀 Tom generated 5M views in 3 months 

Your reputation is your biggest asset.   

Take control of it! 

If you want to see how we could help you build your personal brand, shoot me a dm saying ‘Personal Brand’

If you're not quite ready yet, I post daily content on here showing you how to do it yoursel

Founder

On paper, I look self made: 

- Started Kurogo at 20
- Entirely bootstrapped 
- No loan from mum and dad

 But in reality: 

- Parents never questioned me
- Mentors helped when they didn’t have to
- Friends liked my posts before anyone cared
- My first clients took a chance on a kid with no portfolio
- Teammates believed in the vision when it was just an idea

Every “self-made” story has invisible scaffolding: support, belief, opportunity.

Ps. Who's supported you recently?

300+ Personal Brands Built | Sky, Entrepreneur, Insider | Founder & CEO Kurogo | We Create Thought Leaders Through Personal Branding

Career advice to 18 year olds:

- Work for free to build your network
- Work for someone you admire
- Upskill in your spare time
- Do the apprenticeship
- Learn on the job

Just don’t think you need more knowledge to get started.

Ps. I speak to a lot of very rich people and they admire initiative. Show some.

7 ‘unscalable’ things I did to get from 0 → 1M revenue:

(I still do some of these today)

1. Took proposals at 3am 
2. Worked for free for my first clients
3. Wrote for and managed 20+ clients alone
4. Tailored every project to overdeliver for clients
5. Sent 100s of personalised looms to connections 
6. Shadowed an entrepreneur around London for free
7. Travelled to clients offices to deliver free in person trainings

If you’re just getting started:

Don’t worry about ‘systems’, ‘efficiency’ or ‘balance’
Worry about signing clients, delighting them and gathering xp. 

You can do the fancy stuff later. 

My approach:

Do what no one else will until you have the ability to do what no one else can. 

-- 

With me? Hit repost. You might just help a first-time entrepreneur.

PS. You ever done any of these?

2015: you won by being the best.
Today: you win by being the authority

You can have a great product…

But if no one knows you
If no one sees you as an expert
If no one trusts you

You’ll never get the credit you deserve.

(And there’s no nobility in being your industry’s ‘best kept secret’ btw)

So of course, ensure your product is good.
But please, ensure your presence is too.

How?

Leverage your senior team.

1. Pick your key profiles
2. Position them as industry experts
3. Optimise their profiles
4. Publish consistent thought leadership
5. Align content with wider marketing pushes

Within 1 month: momentum

After 3 months: recognition

Get to 6 months: authority, pipeline, leverage

Your senior team are your no. 1 marketing channel.

Get the exec personal brand blueprint here: https://lnkd.in/e_uXTgUK

Ps. Prediction: SLT will become the most effective marketing channel in 2026

2015: Few channels, trusting consumers, little competition

2025: Many channels, sceptical consumers, lots of competition

The same tired company campaigns that worked in 2015 don’t cut it now.

Consumers see through it.

Instead, they want to consume content from your people instead.

So turn your senior leaders into brand advocates:

1. Build personal positioning strategies that complement company messaging
2. Update their profiles (no more CV profiles!)
3. Publish content weekly (trends, opinions, predictions, stories)

3 steps and you’re ahead of 90% of your competitors.

Each one will reach, engage and build trust with 100,000s of people per month.

(Or you can stick to the 15 likes you’re getting on the company page)

Want to turn your senior team into brand advocates?

Here’s how: https://lnkd.in/e_uXTgUK

Ps. Hubspot nailing it. Anyone else you’ve seen doing this well?

I keep having to remind myself: 

- This is where I dreamt of being 5 years ago
- This is where I should enjoy the journey most 

But that’s tough to balance with ambition. 

So I’m reading this note daily.

(maybe) controversial advice to grads: 

Take the lower salary if the job will teach you more. 

A job that pays £2,000 less now but teaches you 10x more is worth an extra £200,000 over the next 10 years.

I help scaling agency owners reclaim time + double client capacity with operational systems & automated workflows | Automated workflows | Notion Creator | DM ‘Scale’ to get my 2-Minute Scale-Breaker Finder |

In 2022, I started as a content creator and copywriter. 

Back then, I had no idea what a “system” really meant.

I worked in fast-paced agencies where I saw backend chaos first-hand - operations lived in DMs, scattered docs, and 10+ tools.

At the same time, I was creating content, managing clients, handling sales… and tracking deliverables in messy folders. 

It was exhausting. 

And it burned me out.

So, I quit everything.

That’s when I discovered Notion. 

I started building small internal templates, refining them, and testing them in real workflows. 

Soon, I realized what most agency founders overlook:

Backend clarity isn’t a luxury; it’s a lever for real business growth.

Today, I help agency founders double their client capacity and scale smoothly using the Calm Agency Scaling System™, where we:

- Map what’s working
- Fix what’s messy
- Automate what’s repetitive

We respect your current workflows, no “full reset.” 

Just enough automation and targeted fixing of the bottlenecks to help you come out of the backend overwhelm and focus on sales and growth.

Here’s what changes when we work together:

✅ Clients onboard automatically, even while you sleep.

✅ You’re no longer the founder bottleneck.

✅ You get 7+ hours back every week to double your client capacity.

✅ You move from client overwhelm to full visibility.

Because here’s the truth: what carried you through 10 clients won’t carry you through 20. 

Every growth stage demands a backend realignment.

If your operations feel scattered and manual, you’ve likely outgrown your current way of working.

Ready to simplify, systemize, and scale? 

DM me “scale” and let’s map your backend ops together.

Sumanpreet Kaur

I smiled on the call but it paused me inside when I heard they were judging me for “years of experience.”

2 years ago, when I was turning off ghostwriting projects, one client said casually in the flow:

“And you don't have 10 years of experience in marketing.”

That one line stayed with me for days.

Because working with someone who doesn’t believe in you becomes a leak, draining your confidence, your energy, and your momentum.

That’s when I decided I wanted my services and solutions to become unquestionable to my age or my “years of experience.”

So I strengthened a habit of working with precision. It reflects in:

- How structured calls I keep.

- The depth of homework I do before discovery and client meetings.

- The experience clients get at every touchpoint - from problem audits to delivering systems.

Years don't define someone's preparation, depth of concepts, understanding, and the value they bring to the table.

Even without 10 years:

- I figured out how to build ops systems and automation that support scaling agencies (Because I lived the pain of chaos inside them).

- And back then, my clients’ content went viral on LinkedIn, got them leads, and enhanced their influence.

To make a strong impact, we don’t need more years of experience.

But it’s the fire inside that makes us more valuable in solving the market's problems.

Depth isn’t measured in years.

It’s measured in intention.

—
📌 P.S. Most founders don’t realize what’s really stealing their time.

In 2 minutes, you’ll see exactly what’s breaking down on the backend.

DM “Scale” and I’ll send you the free 2-Minute Scale Breaker Audit.

5 things I did this week I’m proud of (They’re not really big, but they build the real momentum):

1. Didn’t touch my phone till 10:30 am.

This single step changed the tone of mornings in terms of more focus and less noise.

And I’m calling it my new morning momentum.

2. Finished building a free source for founders.

It took more than 2 weeks to create this source for founders who want to be free from manual client onboarding.

Launching it next week.

3. Built an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) system.

This system helps me create the first draft under 5 minutes, rooted in my clients.

And it never lets me run out of content ideas.

So many scattered efforts replaced by one simple system.

4. Had an amazing conversation with a founder.

I got to know more about their pain points and the solutions they are building.

The real conversations like these on LinkedIn keep shaping what I build next in systems and operations.

5. Journaling more, every day.

I’ve been keeping a diary beside me and writing down every thought, worry, idea, insight, next thing to do.

It’s wild how much clarity comes once everything is on paper.

A few months ago, days operated me. Now, the gear is in my hand.
None of these are shiny wins, but they are creating smoother, faster flow.

The best part? They have become my support system while designing days that energize instead of drain.

What’s one small win you’re proud of this week, even if no one saw it?

I stopped automating everything and finally started saving time.

A few months ago, I built one of my biggest and most ambitious automations yet for an agency:

- Dozens of steps.
- Multiple apps.
- All tools connected perfectly.

Technically, it worked really well.

But something still felt… off.

Workflows themselves were too complicated:

3 apps were getting used to review, approve, and send client deliverables.

That’s when I learned:

Don’t automate a mess. Simplify first.

Because if your system is messy, automation won’t fix it,
It’ll just make the mess look beautifully organized.

So I flipped my approach.

Here’s what I do now:

1️⃣ Simplify.

Strip everything down to the essentials.

- What steps actually matter?
- What tools can I remove?
- What process can I make better?

2️⃣ Optimize.

Reduce tool chaos.
Cut unnecessary steps.
Make it easier for a human before you make it easy for a bot.

3️⃣ Automate.

Automate only the leftover manual bits.

Simplify → Optimize → Automate.

That’s how you buy back 10+ hours/week without overcomplicating your setup.

Nothing fancy or multi-step automation.
Just simplified workflows that help you grow beyond your current client capacity.

—
📌P.S. Most founders don’t realize what’s really stealing their time.

In just 2 minutes, you’ll see exactly what’s breaking down on the backend.
Grab the free "2-Minute Scale Breaker Audit" to quickly audit your client and team ops.

DM ‘Scale’ and I’ll send it straight to your inbox.

People often ask how I manage it all - full-time work, client projects, and still show up here.

Truth is: I don’t “manage it all.”
I just built systems that do.

All of it comes down to one rule I live by:

Make repeated actions repeatable, without repeating yourself.

It’s the same rule I help agency founders apply.

Because as your business grows, it brings more moving parts and less headspace.

More team members = more clients = more chaos.

Here’s how that rule looks in action (and how I help founders do the same):

1️⃣ Daily planning under 2 minutes

I stopped spending 20 minutes planning my day.

Now, one click in Notion pulls up my core categories - content, marketing, product, client work.

I just add actions, and it’s done. Even the decision fatigue has gone down too.

2️⃣ Stop explaining the same thing twice

Reflect on what you are repeating twice - that’s your sign to systemize.

For example:

- Explaining things to the new VA you hire.
- Giving content briefs to every new content writer.
- Repeating tiny process steps that should already live in a doc.

My rule for such repetition is:

Document once. Rotate it wherever needed.

I guide founders to document in a way that makes their team self-sufficient, no more “quick questions” in DMs.

3️⃣ Client feedback in one place.

Client feedback scattered across DMs, emails, and calls?

Document that too in one doc.

So, you improve client experience and keep insights alive even when roles change.

4️⃣ Weekly planning & reflection

Weekly planning used to feel heavy.

But now, I have a very simple system for it as well:

- Predefined categories to review.
- Specific actions to analyse.
- Defined areas to plan next week.

So every Sunday feels structured and easy with the focused reflection and planning.

The idea is simple:

Stop building from scratch for anything you repeat.

Make it repeatable without repeating yourself.

This rule helped me:

- Maintain quality across multiple roles.
- Replace hustle with systems.
- Free time to focus on what actually matters.

And it helps agency founders get 5+ hours back each week - to lead, think, and grow better.

Where would you apply this rule in your work?

—
📌P.S. Most founders don’t realize what’s really stealing their time.

In 2 minutes, you’ll see exactly what’s breaking down on the backend.

DM “Scale” and I’ll send you the free 2-Minute Scale Breaker Audit.

She works a 9–5.

She’s building her business online.

A multi-role woman I recently worked with told me this:

“Managing my work, business, and life has become another full-time role.”

Because all her tasks, notes, and tracking lived in 5 different spreadsheets.

Most people respond by trying to “be more disciplined.”
(I tried that too, it never works.)

Because discipline can’t fix a scattered system.

So here’s what we built together:

🔹 Financial Tracker

→ Tracks monthly income, expenses, investments, and net worth.
→ And it auto-updates totals.
→ It works every new year without any resets.

🔹 Weekly Planner

→ One clean page to plan her weekly focus, goals, tasks, and weekend flow
→ New week? Duplicate the page. Done.

🔹 Health System

→ A personal dashboard to log sleep, hydration, meals, workouts, mood, and energy.

(She stopped relying on memory - in her words.)

A few weeks later, she told me:

“This has become my 10X system.”

Because clarity is the new momentum.

Systems that help you lead with clarity determine whether you grow without burning out.

If you want systems customized for your business and life, DM me and we’ll explore what’s possible.

Anyone can go viral once. Few can stay consistent for years.

And the difference comes to one thing:

The systems they use on the backend.

You know that feeling when you’re…

- Starting from scratch every week.
- Waiting for a “shiny” idea to get more reach.
- Creating content while juggling five other roles

I have lived this loop too.

So I hit pause and spent 30 days rebuilding my content systems, step by step.

And no, not for another viral spike, but for long-term foundations.

So I slowed down to create content that aligns with me, make it more useful for people, and make it feel like a game.

During this process, my traction dropped.
Some posts felt repetitive.

But that’s what happens when you stop chasing trends and start building foundations.

It’s the dip before the lift.

And now:

✅ My new system helps me plan every post draft with clarity rooted in my audience.

✅ It’s easier to create consistently… even while managing my job and client work.

✅ Every metric, small or big, is now just a mirror. A reflection that helps me create better next time.

Because for me, content creation isn’t about the next viral post.

It is about building a sustainable system for the upcoming years to create impact, help people, and generate revenue.

When your mindset shifts from content to system, creation becomes an easy, repeatable process.

When your focus shifts from reach to impact, your content stops being posts and starts turning into a business.

Next Wednesday, I’m breaking down how I rebuilt my content system to avoid starting from the scratch in my newsletter. Join here: https://lnkd.in/gptvAfu3

I’d rather play with our dog than spend my day doing $5-worth tasks.

Because being busy doesn’t mean moving forward.

And it definitely doesn’t mean the revenue is growing.

Here’s the math:

If your one hour is worth $300...
And you spend 7 hours a week in manual check-ins, updates, and follow-ups…
That’s $2100 lost every week.
And $14,700 every month.

And these hours don’t disappear because of “big problems.”

They disappear in tiny leaks like:

➨ Asking people in DMs about file links and “latest versions.”

➨ Sending client deliverables manually. The same copy-paste links on repeat every week.

➨ Onboarding clients manually while repeating the same Drive + project setups.

➨Team check-in calls just to understand what’s moving and what’s stuck.

➨ Asking team members what the status is.

➨ Answering another message, “Where is the file?”

They never seemed harmful to me when I worked at any agency.

But together, they silently cap your capacity to scale and onboard more clients.

When you free up your time, you get back the focus to:

→ Onboard more clients
→ Make strategic decisions
→ And actually grow your business instead of maintaining it.

And ultimately, saved time is the revenue earned.
(It took me time and some mistakes to learn this.)

So if you want to spot what’s creating friction in your backend,

here’s something simple for you:

The 2-Minute Scale Breaker Audit to find the ops bottlenecks slowing your growth: https://lnkd.in/gwZnNcW6

“Everything depends on me. If I take a day off, things fall apart.”

This is what I hear most founders saying, and I can feel the exhaustion behind it.

Because I’ve seen this same chaos inside agencies again and again:

Slack for questions.

Drive for files.

Sheets for tasks.

Nothing visible in one place.

So every small check-in turns into another meeting

And the founder becomes the “system” everyone depends on (the actual bottleneck across operations).

The fix?

Visibility.

I built a Notion-based hub that gives you full visibility across projects and team updates.

→ Each teammate see their tasks on their own page.

→ The hub shows all progress to the founder across tasks and projects in one 
glance.

→ Any update syncs both ways — hub ↔ teammate.

The result?

- Your team doesn’t wait for updates, they move fast.

- You can see progress at a glance, without another check-in or message.

The actual way to removing founder bottlenecks is by building systems that work without you, without adding more hours or efforts.

So the next time you hear that voice saying, “If I take a day off, things fall apart,” remember:

It’s never because of you, it’s because of a lack of visibility.

Build systems that show everything, so you replace check-ins with clarity.

—
📌P.S. Most founders don’t realize what’s really stealing their time.

In 2 minutes, you’ll see exactly what’s breaking down on the backend.

DM “Scale” and I’ll send you the free 2-Minute Scale Breaker Audit.

How I helped one agency stop sending the same deliverables manually, every week.

In fast-growing agencies, small manual tasks look harmless until they start draining hours (and everyone’s mental bandwidth).

That’s exactly what was happening:

- Deliverables got delayed because approved work still had to be copied, pasted, and shared.

- Sending links became another “job” no one wanted.

And every founder says it in one way or another:

“I just want things to run without me micromanaging every detail.”

In the workflow audit, we found every manual handoff and weekly repetition that were time leaks.

Once the patterns were clear, I built a light automation in Zapier:

→ As soon as the work is approved internally, it’s automatically added to the client project with all links attached and deadlines set.

→ The best part? It was a scalable automation. Every new client setup runs on it without any extra effort.

𝐁𝐞𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞: Friday nights meant Slack reminders and copy-paste chaos.

𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫: Deliverables ship automatically, every time.

- The team saved 10 minutes per client every week. It looked small on paper, but across 12 clients, that’s 2 hours reclaimed every week.

- The founder got back hours (and peace of mind).

When I saw the numbers, I realized how many ‘quick’ tasks silently compound to become time drains.

That’s why, manual activities are a time tax. Automation pays you back.

—
📌P.S. Most founders don’t realize what’s really stealing their time.

In 2 minutes, you’ll see exactly what’s breaking down on the backend.

DM “Scale” and I’ll send you the free 2-Minute Scale Breaker Audit.

Most agencies don’t realise they lose 5+ hours every week to this one activity (and it’s completely removable today. )

Here’s how it shows up:

A new client comes in.
You send them a questionnaire.
They fill in the answers.

Then someone on your team manually moves those answers into a sheet (over and over again).

It adds zero business value, just drains focus and hours.

If that’s you, here are 3 simple options to fix it. Pick the one that fits you:

1. Use Notion Forms (fastest)

Notion forms automatically give a table attached to the questionnaire link.

Type “/form,” add your questions, and share the link.

Every submission → lands directly inside your Notion table.

No extra setup or manual shifting required.

2. Set up a light Zapier automation (for Google Sheets)

- Trigger: New form entry
- Action: Add row in Google Sheet
- Set up your Zap

From now on, every response auto-syncs into your sheet.

One-time setup → lifetime payoff.

3. Use a native tool integration.

If you’re already using Typeform/Tally:
Just integrate it with Notion.

Connect your form → build a table→ done.

Every submission auto-create entries in your table.

Personally, I use Notion Forms because it builds both the form and the table together without any extra effort.

Recently, I talked to 2 founders who were still doing this activity manually even while scaling.

And it reminded me how often founder attribute the ‘heaviness’ to more clients.

When in reality, that weight comes from the manual load that never got fixed.

Manual work is a time tax.
Automation pays you back.

And the real freedom you get is not just hours saved, but the headspace you get back:

- Space for growth.
- Space for strategy.
- Space for the work that moves the agency forward.

—

📌P.S. Most founders don’t realize what’s really stealing their time.

In 2 minutes, you’ll see exactly what’s breaking down on the backend.

DM “Scale” and I’ll send you the free 2-Minute Scale Breaker Audit.

You wake up to Slack pings, another Drive link request, and someone asking for the “latest version” of your video.

Before your first coffee, your day already feels full.

But while building systems for agencies, I observed that the real problem isn’t just the workload.

It’s the weight of running your content operations without a centralized system.

Right now, your team is doing their best but they’re operating in silos.

And you end up in the middle, bridging every gap manually.

Here’s what that looks like:

⭕ No clear view of which stage each content asset is in — idea → filming → edit → publish.
⭕ 10 extra minutes just to find the “latest” version.
⭕ Paying assistants just to keep information flowing.
⭕ Asking for file access in DMs again.
⭕ Approvals and handoffs that slow down the entire content cycle.

Slowly, the mental clutter builds up.

That’s why a centralized content backend system becomes a game changer to give you full visibility.

And this is exactly what I build for agencies - dashboards that become your one source of truth without disrupting your existing workflow:

🟢 All ideas, edits, approvals, and published assets organized a single, visible system.
🟢 Instant visibility into the stage of every piece of content.
🟢 No check-ins or no “where’s that file?” loop.
🟢 Clear status tracking from ideation to filming and publishing.

Just one clean hub that replaces the scattered tools you’re juggling today.

Because structure is the ultimate self-care for founders

It gives you:

- Mental clarity
- Faster execution
- Systems that protect your time instead of consuming it.

And when your content teams relies on your system, not on you:

You get leaner operations, faster approvals, and a backend that runs without demanding your time.


—

📌P.S. Most founders don’t realize what’s really stealing their time.

In 2 minutes, you’ll see exactly what’s breaking down on the backend.

DM “Scale” and I’ll send you the free 2-Minute Scale Breaker Audit.

What if your CRM starts reminding you of today’s follow-ups?

What if your CRM starts telling you who’s qualified?

What if your CRM starts reminding you of the next actions for every deal?

That’s not a dream.
That’s exactly how I updated the CRM system for founders recently.

It’s a single, centralized CRM that:

- Tracks every follow-ups ➔ Total follow-ups sent, what those follow-ups were, next date, due days, and reminders.

- Gives Lead Qualification Sore ➔ Automatically gives you the lead qualification score based on the client’s timeline, pain, need, urgency, and budget fit.

- Stores every piece of information ➔ Contact details, discovery call notes, and required tasks.

Just one page keeps the full record of your leads so nothing stays in your mind or gets lost on paper.

This is the 3rd updated version of the CRM with simplicity as its core foundation.

Once follow-ups and scores give you auto updates, your sales processes finally start running on systems instead of relying on your memory.

So if clarity and speed in your backend systems is your priority this year,

I break down setups like this inside my weekly newsletter.

You can subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/gptvAfu3

taplio

The Battle

Sam G. Winsbury

Sumanpreet Kaur

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreSam G. Winsbury's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreSumanpreet Kaur's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Sam G. Winsbury

Sumanpreet Kaur

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);}Sam G. Winsbury's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreSumanpreet Kaur's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreSam G. Winsbury's LinkedIn Performance