James Farnfield

Founder

LinkedIn is not the channel to be sleeping on in 2025 as a 7+ figure B2B CEO. You know it. I know it. 
(but I get it)

I am a multiple time founder and time is precious. 

IS THIS YOU ↓

“I KNOW I need to utilise LinkedIn”

and....

- “I am sitting on lots of underused media”
- “I’ve been sitting on a podcast idea for years”
- “I want to be a thought leader in my space”
- “I want to build brand exposure & inbound leads”

BUT MOST OF ALL ↓

“I do not have the time to post everyday”

So maybe it’s time to Shake it Up.

Building a process and powerful content engine is the answer.

HERE IS HOW SHAKE CAN HELP (you to the 1% of your industry) ↓

1. Craft content pillars, roadmap and LinkedIn strategy
2. Produces podcasts, thought leadership videos and webinar
3. Creates stunning copy posts for you to approve every day

Whilst taking up less than 2 hours of your time each and every month. 

If you are interested in seeing how we can get your started in the next 2 weeks then drop me a message today. 👋🏽

---------------

😆 About Me 😆

I have been on the entrepreneurial journey since I was 16 and have delved into multiple industries from events to web development. I founded Airbyte in 2020, growing the business to 7 figure revenues

Before realising I was sleeping on my LinkedIn. 

The conversations and revenue started flowing.

I knew I had to go back to my marketing routes. 

Shake Content was born in Q4 2023.

https://shakecontent.com/

🎙️ The Everyday Founder  🎙️

1% of professionals are founders, the 0.1% are the stories we glamorise. I talk with the everyday founders on how they are growing their businesses

Founder & CEO

In Q4 last year, we partnered with shipshape.vc to support their CEO, Daniel, with his LinkedIn strategy. Our collaboration headlined a 30% increase in signups for the platform.

The summarised results over the first four months:
• 60% increase in impressions
• 44% increase in engagements
• 13% follower growth
• 30% uplift in platform signups vs the 62-day period prior

Who is shipshape.vc? Well I will tell you because they are really cool. I like really cool clients. Who doesn't !!!

shipshape.vc isn’t another investor database. Over 4,000 companies have raised £1bn+ using the platform. They aggregate 25,000+ global funds and layer in private growth signals directly from management teams, which means founders can see where capital is actually moving rather than where it moved 18 months ago.

So what did we do with Dan to get these results:

Dan already had a strong LinkedIn presence. He wasn’t starting from zero. He had an audience, credibility, and a genuinely differentiated product. What he didn’t have was the time or headspace to consistently translate complex data into clear, compelling content that founders and institutions could instantly understand.

That’s where we came in  🎉

Instead of doubling down on feature releases, we stripped everything back to founder-led storytelling. We focused on why private growth signals matter in fundraising, how attribution and precision targeting translate into ROI, and how to make something technically powerful feel obvious and usable.

The content had to do two jobs at once. It needed to educate founders at the top of the funnel while also acting as a sales asset mid-cycle, giving Dan something concrete to anchor conversations with public sector bodies, banks and ecosystem partners.

Some great big number metrics, purely vanity though (not always a bad thing), however, the metric that matters: 30% uplift in platform signups vs the 62-day period prior to working with Shake.

A 30% increase in users is not a vanity metric. It’s behaviour change. It’s adoption. It’s proof that content, when done properly, drives commercial outcomes rather than just blah noise.

As Dan put it:
“We’ve seen a 30% uplift in users, and increased inbound from working with Shake. We’ve got relevant insights to share, but finding the time was always challenging. Working with Shake Content has made content easy and we’re now producing studio-grade video and tapping into new channels like YouTube.”

When shipshape.vc came to us, they didn’t need louder marketing. They needed sharper storytelling. They needed clarity, consistency and a narrative that did justice to the product they’d built.

I am proud of what we’ve built with Dan and excited about where shipshape.vc heads next.

If you’re a founder sitting on genuinely differentiated insight but struggling to articulate it consistently, we are a message, DM or email away.

CEO @ Shake Content | I turn CEOs, leaders, and elite performers into consistent, credible voices — with more high-quality content than anyone else globally.

Do you want to join the #1 LinkedIn Marketing agency?

At Shake Content, we are hiring for a couple roles across our London and Cairo hubs. In the UK and more specifically London area, we are searching for our founding account manager to sit within Harry's industry leading team. 

This person will not only have great exposure to both commercial and operational aspects of a growing agency, they will also have the opportunity to truly be a driving force in owning their space in the accounts team from day 1. 

I am especially proud of the 8 incredible team members we have that have led to the tremendous growth of our business over the past years. We will soon be 10 and on-track to another 2x year and further progress into seven-figure revenues. 

If you or someone you know would be a perfect fit for our LinkedIn marketing agency, then click apply and lets see what we can build together. 

Come shake it up with us. 🚀

What Just Happened Podcast Bloopers.

Out Now....

Who will be shouted out on the What Just Happened podcast in Episode 2?

Find out in under 2 weeks.

But first… check out this clip from Episode 1.

In it, we talked about why entertainment content is quietly becoming one of the most powerful plays on LinkedIn right now, and why the founders who understand “long tail” content are building unfair distribution advantages without even realising it.

And no, despite Dani’s love for memes, this is not about low-effort viral bait.
We’re talking about entertainment with depth. With structure. With follow up. With a commercial brain behind it.

If you’ve been on LinkedIn recently, you’ll have seen, and if you haven’t you really need to, the Batman/Joker scene. Unreal.

Huge credit to Henry and Ian for committing to it properly. The makeup. The production. The timing. And yes, Henry is absolutely killing it right now, even if he is a massive Joker.

But the person who really caught Harry’s and our attention?

Jack Welham.

The videographer behind it all.

While the front-facing content racked up the impressions, Jack started posting something else entirely:
- Behind the scenes.
- How they filmed it.
- The colour grading decisions.
- The edit structure.
- The thinking.

This creates long tail authority with entertainment at the top of funnel, education in the middle and commercial credibility underneath it all.

At Shake Content, we are seeing this every single week with B2B founders. LinkedIn does not have to be the most serious place on earth. It does need a professional anchor, yes. But if you can be funny inside your industry, if you can poke it a little, if you can show you understand the nuances well enough to play with them, that signals mastery.It is not easy to be funny.

But if you can do it and still teach, you win twice.

We unpacked all of this in Episode 1 of What Just Happened.
And in Episode 2, we’re shouting out more creators who are getting it right.

If you’re a B2B founder, leader, marketeer or anyone trying to work out whether you should lean into personality, production, or pure education on LinkedIn… this series is for you.

Who do you think we should shout out next?

How do you show up on LinkedIn in a world full of AI slop?

Honestly, I think this is where a lot of founders are stuck right now.

You scroll for five minutes and everything sounds the same. Same structures. Same hooks. Same “5 lessons I learned building a 7-figure business” written by someone who didn’t. It’s all polished. All optimised. All empty af.

And you’re sat there thinking…

I don’t want to add to that.

But at the same time, you know if you don’t post, you’re slowly disappearing from the narrative around your own company.

A while ago I published a post called “How to avoid LinkedIn-xiety.” It’s a real thing. I’ve had the fortune of being around some of the most impressive, successful founders in Europe and the US, and they feel it too.

That internal tension of:

“I don’t want to look cringe.”
“I don’t want to look try-hard.”
“I don’t want to add to the AI slop noise.”

But let’s zoom out for a second. Businesses need to be honest about what modern day marketing actually is:

1. Modern day PR is done on LinkedIn.
2. Modern day marketing is done on LinkedIn.
3. No one is reading your annual strategy report.
4. No one is waiting for your perfectly crafted press release.

What are they doing?

They’re forming opinions about you, your business and your leadership based on what shows up in their feed while they’re in an Uber, waiting for a coffee or between meetings.

Can we stop pretending we’re not all scrolling? (Probably more than we should).

So how do you cure LinkedIn-xiety, own the narrative in your industry and actually show up properly?

1. You need to post more than once per month.
2. You do not need to post 5 times per week.
3. Quality over quantity has never been truer.

Try twice per week. 
One thoughtful written post. One video.

AI can mimic tone and it can structure ideas, but it can’t feel the pressure, it can’t replicate lived experience.

I would prioritise video as video accelerates trust faster than any other format, it shows who you are, it makes you recognisable offline.

We work across 10+ verticals in 4 regions globally, and I can tell you with confidence, videos are what get mentioned offline (e.g. at events). Not the perfectly formatted text post with clear AI input.

Now I do believe that if you can then scale your content, you will hit your targets faster, appear in LLMs more often and have more opportunity to solve your audiences pain points. 

So, once the quality is locked in, once the narrative feels clear and you’re starting to create real noise in your category, scale up, fast!

The biggest mistake I see right now is CEOs and senior leaders thinking the answer to AI slop is silence.

It’s not.

Silence just allows someone else to speak to your audience.

Instead of opting out, raise the bar. In a feed full of generic insight, the edge goes to the founder who sounds like a human being thinking out loud.

At Growth Hub, we build embedded operational capability for financial services firms.

We remove the operational drag that sits around deals and internal workflows, so operators can focus on high value work.

That includes:

Deal Operations
CRM hygiene, pipeline maintenance, targeting, and deal tracking. Owned, predictable, and run properly.

Research & Intelligence
Structured, factual research that supports decisions without interpretation or noise.

Business Operations Support
Internal operational workflows. Admin, registers, HR and TA operations, vendor data, policy tracking.

Everything is designed upfront, documented through SOPs, QA’d, and rolled out on a clear 30 / 60 / 90 day plan. This behaves like an internal function, not an outsourced task list.

What we do not do is deliberate.
No advice. No insight. No lead generation. No ad hoc support.

We run defined workflows end to end, and we do them well.

Build leverage. Reduce operational drag.

Dan Vanrenen

A lot of firms think CRM hygiene means doing a clean-up before a partner meeting.

It doesn’t.

CRM hygiene is the recurring discipline that keeps the system usable week after week.

Deduplication.
Stage accuracy.
Next steps.
Ownership.
Field completion.

When that discipline slips, the CRM stops being an operating system and becomes a storage unit.

That is usually the point where side spreadsheets start appearing.

Founder & CEO of Growth Hub | Embedded operational capability for financial services firms

Most growth conversations focus on targets.

Very few focus on decision quality.

Are you qualifying deals properly?
Are you exiting weak opportunities early?
Are you deploying senior time where probability is highest?

Revenue is an outcome of decisions.
If decisions are inconsistent, growth will be too.

There’s a difference between feeling in control and being in control.

Feeling in control looks like:
- Regular meetings.
- Thick reporting packs.
- Constant check-ins.

Being in control looks like:
- Clear ownership.
- Clean data.
- Defined workflows.

One creates activity.
The other creates predictability.

A lot of firms mistake oversight for control.
They aren’t the same thing.

Poor handoffs are expensive.

When research isn’t structured properly, origination recreates it.
When origination doesn’t log context, deal leads chase it.
When history isn’t clear, senior people step in to “fill the gaps.”

That duplication is invisible in the P&L.
But it shows up in slower deals and higher internal cost per close.

Clean handoffs aren’t an operational 'nice to have'.
They protect margin.

One of the most useful questions in origination is:

Why now?

Why would this company consider a transaction now?
Why would leadership engage now?
Why would capital move now?

If research can’t answer that, the outreach will feel random.

Good intelligence doesn’t just describe companies.
It explains timing.

Some of the most expensive problems never show up in the P&L.

They show up as:
- senior time being pulled into execution details
- revenue forecasts that are constantly revised
- deals slowing down for reasons no one can quite explain
- decisions being revisited because the data isn’t trusted
- teams building workarounds instead of fixing the system

None of that looks like a cost line.
But it’s all cost.

It’s called operational debt.

Standardisation gets mistaken for bureaucracy. It isn’t.

It’s simply agreeing that certain things matter enough to be done the same way every time.

Without it, every deal becomes slightly different.
Every report gets interpreted differently.
Every forecast becomes a discussion instead of a number.

That might feel flexible.
But it isn’t scalable.

Consistency isn’t about control.
It’s about making performance repeatable.

Early growth is often powered by effort.

People stay late.
They chase updates manually.
They fix issues in real time.
They compensate for weak process.

For a while, it works.
Then volume increases.

And the same effort that once created momentum starts creating friction.

More deals.
More noise.
More rework.

At that point, working harder doesn’t increase output.
It just increases strain.

Effort gets you off the ground.
Design is what lets you scale.

If revenue is flat but headcount keeps increasing, your cost per head is rising.

That’s not a growth strategy.
That’s margin erosion.

When output per person doesn’t improve, adding more people just spreads the inefficiency.

More salaries.
Same underlying bottlenecks.

Before hiring again, ask a harder question:
Is the issue capacity, or how deals are actually moving through the system?

When we step into a firm’s CRM for the first time, we usually see the same thing.

Open deals that haven’t been touched in months.
Stages that don’t mean what they say.
Notes living in inboxes instead of the system.

No one intended for it to drift.
But without someone owning it daily, it always does.

Pipeline hygiene isn’t a quarterly clean-up exercise.
It’s an operating discipline.

In most firms, research lives in documents.

PDFs.
PowerPoints.
Shared drives.

But deal teams don’t need more files.
They need research that can be used inside live origination.

That means:
- Decision-makers logged in the CRM, not buried in a slide.
- Ownership structures mapped and updated, not saved as a one-off report.
- Trigger events tracked consistently, not picked up randomly.

If research can’t be searched, filtered, and acted on quickly, it won’t influence revenue.

Deal Operations vs RevOps

These two get confused more often than they should.

RevOps was built for sales organisations.

High-volume funnels.
Marketing integration.
Automation.
Conversion optimisation.

Deal Operations exists for a different environment.

Lower volume.
Longer cycles.
Relationship-driven pipelines.

The problems are different.

RevOps tries to optimise the funnel.
Deal Operations tries to stop the pipeline from drifting.

That means:
- CRM hygiene
- Stage discipline
- Next-step ownership
- Reliable reporting

If your pipeline is inaccurate, your stages are subjective, and partners don’t trust the numbers…

You don’t have a RevOps problem.
You have a Deal Operations problem.

Most firms don’t hit a growth ceiling because demand disappears.

They hit it because execution stops being consistent.

One team qualifies properly.
Another doesn’t.
One partner updates the system.
Another works offline.
One deal runs clean.
Another drifts.

Individually, it looks manageable.
Collectively, it caps scale.

You can’t scale on variability.
You can only scale on consistency.

Most firms think deal flow is a revenue question.

Often, it’s an operations question.

If your pipeline isn’t clean, your forecast isn’t reliable.
If stages aren’t enforced, conversion rates are guesswork.
If follow-ups depend on memory, opportunities slip.

That doesn’t just create friction.

It affects valuation.
It affects hiring decisions.
It affects how confidently you can deploy capital.

Deal operations isn’t admin.
It’s revenue control.

More deal volume does not automatically mean more revenue.

In a weak system, more volume just creates more leakage.

Deals sit in the wrong stage.
Follow-ups slip.
Information is incomplete.
Forecasts get padded to compensate.

If volume is rising but conversion isn’t, do three things:

1. Review every live deal above a meaningful value.
Ask: does it genuinely meet the criteria for its current stage? 
If not, move it back or remove it.

2. Define clear entry and exit criteria for each stage.
If those criteria aren’t met, the deal doesn’t progress.

3. Track conversion by owner.
You’ll quickly see where discipline is strong and where it isn’t.

This isn’t about working harder.
It’s about cleaning the pipeline so the numbers mean something.

One of the strongest signals that operations are working?

Senior people use the same system as everyone else.

No shadow spreadsheets.
No personal trackers.
No offline notes.

When partners trust the CRM, it becomes the single source of truth.

That’s when:
Forecasts stabilise.
Conversations shorten.
Debates reduce.

Trust in the system isn’t cultural.
It’s earned through discipline.

If you’re running a revenue business, you should know your true conversion rate.

Not instinctively.
Not “roughly.”
Not based on last quarter’s big win.

Exactly.

What percentage of qualified opportunities actually close?
And where, precisely, do the rest fall out?

If you can’t answer that clearly, you’re not in control of growth.

You’re spending money on hiring, marketing, and expansion without knowing how efficiently deals convert.

That’s not strategy.
That’s guesswork with payroll attached.

Most firms underestimate how much margin is lost inside the deal process.

Not through failed deals.
But through slow ones.

When deals drag:
- Senior people get pulled back in.
- More calls are needed to recover momentum.
- Pricing pressure increases.
- Forecast accuracy drops.

The deal may still close.

But slow deals absorb more senior time, and often at weaker economics.

If you’re not measuring deal cycle time alongside conversion and value, you’re missing a major driver of margin.

Most firms treat research as preparation.

The best firms treat it as infrastructure.

Preparation is:
- Pulling a company profile before a meeting.
- Scanning news before a call.

Infrastructure is:
- Tracking target accounts continuously.
- Logging trigger events.
- Updating ownership structures.
- Knowing when capital moves.

One supports conversations. The other supports timing.

In financial services, timing is often the difference between access and irrelevance.

Research isn’t about being informed.
It’s about being early.

There are two ways most firms handle pipeline management.

Option 1:
Everyone updates their own deals when they remember.

Option 2:
Someone actually owns pipeline maintenance.

The first creates:
Stage drift
Missing next steps
Reporting debates
Forecast guesswork

The second creates:
Clarity.

Pipeline discipline is not a cultural value.
It’s an ownership decision.

taplio

The Battle

James Farnfield

Dan Vanrenen

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The Battle

James Farnfield

Dan Vanrenen

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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);}James Farnfield's LinkedIn Performance

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