Own Your Mark

Own Your Mark Helping small to medium business owners to scale up or start up the businesses they are passionate a

“I don’t want to be one of those LinkedIn people.”Half the accountants I talk to have already decided what posting on Li...
10/09/2026

“I don’t want to be one of those LinkedIn people.”

Half the accountants I talk to have already decided what posting on LinkedIn would make them look like: arms folded in a suit, delivering three business lessons that an Uber driver taught them about resilience on the way to their child’s baptism.

You’ve seen that version, you’ve cringed at it, and you’ve decided staying off the platform is the better option.

I think the instinct is fair.

That style of posting is genuinely embarrassing. People photographing a hotel gym at 5am and calling it . Someone is “humbled and honoured” for the fourth time this quarter. It reads like drivel because there’s nothing underneath it.

The absence of substance is the whole problem, and that part is fixable.

An accountant who’s spent nineteen years watching family businesses split down the seams over succession has plenty to say.

Not lessons... A blow-for-blow explanation of what goes wrong, and when it starts, which is usually about four years before anyone thinks to call their accountant.

Written plainly, that post doesn’t read as performance. It reads as someone who knows their job, describing their job.

Nobody looks at it and thinks “he’s doing LinkedIn.” They think “I should ask him about Mum and Dad’s business.”

Most people worried about sounding like a LinkedIn guy haven’t yet worked out what they want to be known for. That’s the TRUE gap. Once it’s settled, the writing sounds like them, because it’s just them explaining something they understand better than the reader does.

The tone problem sorts itself out after that.

Have you been sitting on this for a while? If so, it’s worth asking what you’d want a stranger to say about you after reading three of your posts. If the answer comes easily, you’ve got more content to work with than you think.

If you’re ready to create a social media presence that won’t make you cringe, and that actually represents you as you, let’s talk.

Someone asked me what I do last week and I gave a rubbish answer.I said “content strategy for professional services” and...
21/08/2026

Someone asked me what I do last week and I gave a rubbish answer.

I said “content strategy for professional services” and watched them nod politely and change the subject.

So here’s the actual version.

I sit down with a broker or coach or an accountant and ask them questions about their job. Not marketing questions. Things like: what does a client always get wrong before they call you? What are you explaining for the fiftieth time this month? What’s the deal that still annoys you two years later?

They usually talk for forty minutes without stopping.

That’s the material. It was already there. It’s just that nobody had asked for it in a way that made it usable.

From there it gets structured into a small set of themes they can keep coming back to, so people start associating them with something specific instead of a job title that fifteen thousand other people share.

Then we write it. LinkedIn posts, video prompts, sometimes a website that says something worth reading.

But the reason any of it matters is simpler than the process.

Someone gets referred to you. Before they call, they look you up online, because everyone does that now.
They find a profile you last touched in 2019 and a photo of the team at a Christmas lunch.

Nothing there says “this is the person who was described to me.”

So they don’t call. And you never find out. They ghost you.

The work we do together is about closing that gap. Making sure what people find matches what they were told.

Leads come out of it eventually. But the first thing that changes is that the referrals you already get stop falling over at the search step. No more ghosting…

If someone described your work to a stranger tomorrow, and that stranger went looking at your profile, what would they find?

01/08/2026

The couple next to me opened the bidding at $2.2 million.

By $2.3 they were gasping out loud.

I was at an auction yesterday filming some content for a client. Big crowd, plenty of registered bidders, real competition in the yard. That couple put their hand up first, then sat there watching the number climb past everything they'd braced for. It sold for $2.7 million.

The bidders still going at the top looked completely unbothered. No flinching, no glancing at each other to check. They'd been in that spot before and knew exactly how it plays out.

That gap followed me out the door to a nearby park where I filmed this vid.

It's the same gap that shows up in every professional services business I work with. You've been through a process hundreds of times. Your client is going through it once, maybe twice in their life, with a big chunk of their money (or health or sanity) sitting on the table.

The things you skip because they feel too obvious to say out loud are usually the exact things they're guessing at.

Share the 101s. The bit you'd almost be embarrassed to post because surely everyone knows it. That's the thing someone screenshots and sends to their partner before they ring you.

What's the basic thing in your world you've stopped bothering to explain?

Nothing on a forest floor is wasted.Walk into old-growth bush and the ground gives a bit underfoot. That softness is not...
28/07/2026

Nothing on a forest floor is wasted.

Walk into old-growth bush and the ground gives a bit underfoot. That softness is not soil in the way Flower Power or Bunnings means soil. It is centuries of leaf litter, fallen limbs, dead insects and older trees that came down long before anyone was there to notice.

Every tree standing in that forest is growing out of the decomposed bodies of the ones that stood there first.

A plantation does not have this. Plantation soil is thin and engineered and topped up from a bag. The trees grow fast and straight and they are perfectly fine, right up until the season that tests them.

I have been thinking about which one I am.

Because most of what I consider to be mine is not. The way I run a meeting came from a supervisor who never once raised his voice. My propensity to work tirelessly without complaint came from my parents, who I have never once seen take a ‘sickie’. Half my sense of humour is on loan from people who are no longer around to be credited.

Your standards have a genealogy. You did not set your own bar. Somebody put it in front of you, most likely without announcing they were doing it, and you have been carrying it ever since as though it were an original thought.

Which leaves two jobs.

The first is naming them. Not a gratitude exercise. Just the accurate and slightly humbling work of tracing a habit back to its source.

The second is harder. And more important. You are also becoming somebody’s soil. How you handle a bad week, the standard you hold when you think nobody is checking, the rubbish you leave in the park after a picnic, the thing you say to a junior person in a corridor: some of it will outlive your memory of saying it, and you do not get to choose which bits.

Legacy is not a monument. It is sediment.

———-

We Are All Trees. Whether we realise it or not. My forthcoming book digs deeper into these concepts… and how they shape us both professionally and as humans.

You’ve gotta keep it fun! You can tell when a professional is writing content out of obligation.The posts read like home...
21/07/2026

You’ve gotta keep it fun!
You can tell when a professional is writing content out of obligation.

The posts read like homework. Technically correct, completely forgettable.

I see this a lot with accountants and brokers. They know their stuff cold. But every post sounds like it was written at 9pm on a Sunday because well, they feel they HAVE to do it…

Here’s the thing. If you’re bored writing it, people are bored reading it.

B-O-R-e—-d—zzzzz

The professionals whose content actually builds authority are the ones having fun with it. They enjoy the argument. They like poking at bad advice floating around their industry. They write about the client conversation that made them shake their head that week.

They bring ENERGY.

And that energy carries. Readers feel it before they finish the first line.

So if content feels like a chore, look past the discipline question. Chances are you haven’t found the angle you genuinely care about yet.

What part of your work could you talk about for an hour without notes? Start there.

And just like the way your clients need you for tax work or mortgage applications, you might just need someone to help you create the content consistently.

Don’t beat yourself up. Just get in touch.

Most coaches are sitting on better content than they’ll ever post.Not the frameworks. The stuff around the frameworks.Th...
06/07/2026

Most coaches are sitting on better content than they’ll ever post.

Not the frameworks. The stuff around the frameworks.

That call last Tuesday where a client finally admitted the real reason they keep stalling. The pattern you’ve watched wreck three founders in a row before they’d listen.

That’s the material. It’s specific, it’s yours, and nobody else can post it because they weren’t in the room.

Instead, most of it never makes it out. What gets published is the tidy version. A quote about discipline. A carousel on the five stages of growth. Content that’s perfectly true and completely forgettable.

The knowledge has never been your missing piece. Getting it out of your head and into something publishable is the hard part, because the good stuff lives in the messy client moments you’ve stopped noticing you know.

Here’s a small test. Think back to your last three coaching calls. What did you say that you’ve never once put in a post?

Start there. That’s where your authority actually lives.

(And if you want help extracting it from your brain and turning it into content, that’s what I do).

25/06/2026

An accountant told me he had nothing worth posting. Forty minutes into a normal chat about his work, we had a month of material.

Nothing about him had changed in those forty minutes. He'd just been asked the right questions in the right order.

This is the part people get wrong about content. They assume the problem is discipline, or that they were never any good at writing.

The ACTUAL gap is getting what you already know out of your head and into a shape you can use. You explain this stuff to clients every day without breaking a sweat. Put the same idea on a blank page and it seizes up.

That blank page beats most people most weeks. If you've sat down to write something, managed one sentence, and walked away, that's the bit worth sorting out.

Tell me where you get stuck. I'll show you what I mean.

A broker I spoke to last week had posted every fortnight for a year. Rate updates, the odd market take.Then I asked him ...
16/06/2026

A broker I spoke to last week had posted every fortnight for a year. Rate updates, the odd market take.

Then I asked him to name one client who came from any of it.

Long pause.
.. Most people in professional services post answers to questions nobody in the feed was actually asking... so you pick up a couple of likes from colleagues, a comment from a recruiter you've never met, and then the post goes cold.

Posting more often won't change that. More of the same thing lands the same way.

Here's where it actually goes wrong. Your sharpest thinking is still stuck in client meetings. The line you delivered on Tuesday that made someone sit up and reach for a pen... it died the moment they walked out of the room.

That line was the post.

"If you're selling an investment property before June 30, the order you do these two things in changes your tax bill." Someone sitting in exactly that situation stops scrolling, because it speaks to where they are this week.

One test before you publish: could you say the sentence out loud to a client across a desk? If it reads like a brochure, it won't travel.

That's the whole job. Take the things you already say in meetings and put them where more of the right people can hear them.

Swipe through. And if a post of yours went cold last quarter, I'd like to know what it was about, so we can workshop why. Message me...

This is me 9 years ago. A handful of months into my first year of business, holding our firstborn on a jetty in Thailand...
14/06/2026

This is me 9 years ago. A handful of months into my first year of business, holding our firstborn on a jetty in Thailand.

I underestimated myself then. You’re probably doing the same thing right now.

Almost 20 years into my career, there were things I’d been doing so long they stopped feeling remarkable.

I was a Chartered Accountant who’d also spent years in the trenches of marketing, sales, and operations. I could write. I understood numbers and commercial reality. I knew how to talk to clients, not at them.

Nobody had told me that combination was rare. Or they had, but I didn’t hear them.

Then people started saying it out loud. They wanted that skillset in their corner. That led to mentoring, then to ghostwriting content for professionals in a way that only someone with their same lived experience could do.

Here’s what I’ve learnt from that, and from working with professionals since:
- You say things every day that your clients remember for years.
- ⁠You solve problems in a way no one taught you.
- ⁠You have a way of explaining something that makes it click for people.

You just don’t think any of that is worth posting about.

It is.

Your connections don’t want polished. They want perspective. And yours, built over years of real work, is more valuable than you’re giving it credit for.

Want to extract that perspective and finally share it? I’m here to get you started.

Leverage. I spent 20 years looking at it as a number on a balance sheet…. how much debt can I use in place of equity to ...
13/06/2026

Leverage. I spent 20 years looking at it as a number on a balance sheet…. how much debt can I use in place of equity to produce returns?

Once I moved my mind outside of accounting I saw the wider definition: leverage is anything that lets one piece of effort keep working for you after you’ve stopped.

A broker I work with answered the same question four times, for four different clients, in one week: “how can my parents act as guarantor to get our mortgage over the line?”

…So she wrote her answer once, properly, and we posted it and repurposed that content in various ways over time. Her effort happened once. 8 months later, the enquiries (the returns) keep arriving.

Professionals carry more leverage than they realise. The onboarding process you’ve refined over a decade. The way you explain a complex structure so a client finally gets it. The 200 matters you’ve settled that taught you exactly where deals fall over.

The problem is most of it stays i-n-v-i-s-i-b-l-e.

It sits in your head, your inbox, your file notes. Your clients benefit from it. The people who haven’t hired you yet have no idea it exists.

That’s leverage running at half power.

So here’s my question for you to wrestle with: what’s the one piece of leverage you’re sitting on that your audience has never seen?

Address

Sydney, NSW

Telephone

+61450770366

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Own Your Mark posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Own Your Mark:

Shortcuts

Share

Category