Luke Tobin

Founder of Unusualgroup.com | Follow for posts on Business, Marketing, Investing & AI

Commercial and speaking: sponsorship@luketobin.com

3 exits, different industries, each one bigger than the last. Turned a £100 investment, into an eight-figure agency exit in 5 years. 

I help founders turn self-doubt into leverage, and leverage into exits.

My last business started with £100 and a lot of imposter syndrome. No funding. No safety net. Just a laptop, a tiny runway and lots of grit. Five years later, we sold for eight figures. It was one of the fastest growth-to-exit stories in the UK at that level.

That was exit number three. Before that, I built and sold a hospitality business and an e-commerce brand. Different industries, same scale-to-exit playbook. Build lean. Price for profit. Systemise delivery. Think like a buyer long before you ever meet one.

Now I back other founders and work on fixing what is broken in the agency world.

Current work:

Unusual Group (Founder)
We take minority stakes in agencies and plug them into the capital, infrastructure and operator support they need to grow margins and become exit-ready.

Tobin Capital (Owner) 
I invest in more than 25 brands, including SpaceX, Atom Bank, and Honest Mobile. When I invest, you do not just get capital. You get an operator in your corner on pricing, operations, hiring and exits.

A-Frame Venture Studio (Partner)
We build consumer brands from scratch. Our first brand, Mirth Water, is now live in the United States at drinkmirth.com.

The Success Method Newsletter
Every week, more than 100,000 founders get my breakdown of how to turn self-doubt into an advantage in their business. I share how I structure deals and exits, the pricing moves and margin levers that work in practice.

Book (Q2 2026)
My first book, on how founders can turn doubt into an asset rather than a drag on growth, is coming in Q2 2026 from a major publisher.

In total, I have started seven businesses. Two failed. Three exited. Two, I am still building. The failures taught me more than the exits. Self-doubt never went away. I learned how to use it as a filter to make better decisions in hiring, pricing, partners, and exits. That is what I teach and invest around now.

Today, I share what actually works with more than 800,000 founders across my channels. The playbooks, the red flags, the live deals and the parts of the mental game most people never talk about.

If you are an agency owner or founder who wants to raise, exit or fix your margins in the next 12 to 36 months, send me a DM.

Newsletter (100K plus subscribers): www.luketobin.com/newsletter

DM me about: investments, agency exits, speaking

Investor

The next‑generation personalization AI for e‑commerce.

Success that burns through your mental bandwidth isn’t success.

It’s mismanagement disguised as commitment.

Early in my career, I thought being available meant being valuable.
Every ping got a reply.
Every meeting got a “yes.”
Every spare minute became a catch-up slot.

On paper, it looked like momentum.
In reality, it was erosion.

High performance isn’t about being always on.
It’s about knowing when to switch off so your decisions stay sharp.

These are the boundaries that keep my focus intact:

1. Control inputs.
No phone before strategy, no Slack before thinking.

2. Batch reactions.
Email and messages twice a day, everything else waits.

3. Protect transitions.
Five minutes between calls to reset the brain.

4. Create unreachable hours.
Evenings or weekends when nobody gets access.

5. Guard energy like capital.
Spend it where it compounds, not where it’s wasted.

This isn’t self-care.
It’s self-leadership.

Because success that costs your sanity will eventually cost your results.

Which boundary protects your focus the most?

♻️ Repost to help more leaders build sustainable success.
🔔 Follow Luke Tobin for more personal growth insights.

cc Dr. Carolyn Frost (shout out for the image and powerful message)

3x Exited Founder | Follow me for posts on Business, Marketing, M&A & Success Psychology

Most people are chasing the wrong luxuries.

And it’s costing them the ones that matter most.

The truth is… it’s not about how much money you make, or the brand you wear.

The real luxuries are simple.

These aren’t handed to you.
You have to create them. Protect them.

Because in the end,
it won’t be the title,
the money,
or the status that matters.

It’ll be whether you had peace in your heart,
purpose in your work,
and people to share it all with.

That’s the real richness.

That’s the life worth building.
♻️ Repost to help inspire others.
🔔 Follow Luke Tobin for more mindful tips.

cc Scott Caputo (shout out for the image and the powerful reminder)

We are often told to "play it safe".

But, safety doesn't help you grow.

Here's what does:
1. Taking chances on the dreams that scare you.
2. Betting on yourself when no one else will.
3. Choosing courage over comfort, every single time.
4. Believing in the vision only you can see.
5. Acting on what feels like destiny, even if you're unsure.

The truth is:
Every bold move looks unrealistic until someone makes it real.

Why? 
Because the world has always been shaped by people who were willing to look a little “crazy” in pursuit of something bigger.

The innovators. 
The builders. 
The dreamers.

Fear will tell you to wait.
Doubt will tell you you’re not ready.
But growth only happens when you decide to move anyway.

Reminders when chasing your dreams:
If it feels impossible → it’s probably worth the risk.
If people doubt you → you’re likely onto something powerful.
If it feels like destiny → that’s your sign to leap.

At the end of the day, I've learnt that regret weighs heavier than failure.

And the world needs more people who are brave enough,
to follow the dream that feels like destiny.

♻️Repost to help inspire someone in your network.
🔔Follow Luke Tobin for more personal growth tips.

cc Codie A. Sanchez (shout out for the image and powerful reminder!)

Nothing kills you faster than your own mind.

Don't stress over things that are out of your control.

Most people are losing the game before they even start. 
Why? 
Because they’re obsessed with the "noise." 

Which means that you're wasting your most valuable asset: Your Energy.

If you want to scale, whether it's your business or your life, you need to be ruthless with your focus. 

You have a finite amount of mental capacity every day. 
Stop spending it on things where you have zero leverage.

If you’re ready to stop being a passenger in your own life, start here:

1. Audit Your Inputs: 
- Guard your first 60 minutes of awake-time like your business or life depends on it.

2. The "So What?" Test:
- Next time you’re stressed, ask: "Can I influence this in the next 5 minutes?" If the answer is no, move on. If it’s yes, do it. 

3. Set Non-Negotiable Boundaries: 
- Define when you are "on" and when you are "off." High performance requires high-quality recovery.

4. Master Your Self-Talk: 
- Stop saying things to yourself that you wouldn't let a stranger say to your best friend. 

5. Focus on Output, Not Optics: 
- Stop worrying about how the "brand" looks and start worrying about what the "work" is. 

A gentle reality check: 
Everything out of your control is a distraction designed to keep you average.

High performers don't have "easier" lives. 
They just have a tighter filter. 

They double down on their attitude, their boundaries, and their execution.

♻️Found this helpful? Share it with your network.
🔔Follow Luke Tobin for more on cultivating a growth mindset.

Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a month

and underestimate what they can build in a year.

Progress rarely looks exciting while it’s happening.

It’s not dramatic.
It’s repetition, refined.

The truth is, nothing meaningful scales overnight.
It compounds quietly, in systems, skills, and relationships.

In business and in life, I’ve learned:
Momentum isn’t a spark.
It’s friction mastered.

The days that feel slow, repetitive, or unnoticed are usually the ones where foundations are forming.

When growth stalls, I don’t double the effort, I double the focus.

I look for the one action that will compound over time,
not the ten that just make me feel busy.

Because high performance isn’t about speed.

It’s about stamina.
Anyone can start fast.

Few stay consistent long enough for the results to catch up.

💭 What’s one thing you’re quietly building that will pay off next year?

♻️ Repost to remind someone that slow isn’t failure, it’s formation.
🔔 Follow Luke Tobin for more insights on focus and sustainable growth.

cc Justin Wright (shout out for the image and essential reminder!)

The action you're most scared to take is usually the right one.

Deep down, you know what you need to do.

You've been thinking about it for weeks. 

Trying to convince yourself that you need more time, maybe more information, or just a better moment to make that particular move.

But that moment isn't coming.

Some of the best things I've done in business felt completely wrong at the time. 

And there was always a reason; it was too early or felt too risky.  

That feeling of unease is just part of it.

So whatever you've been putting off, make the move.

♻️ Repost if you needed to hear this today. 
🔔 Follow Luke Tobin for more.

cc Justin Welsh (Shout out for the powerful reminder!)

Most founders start the sale process in the wrong place.

Before you think about valuation, you need to answer three questions. 

1. Can someone quickly understand your business? 
2. Are your clients likely to stick around?
3. And if you stepped back, would it still run without you?

If any of those questions make you feel uncomfortable, it's worth paying more attention to that area.

Succeed helps founders get ready, find the right buyer, and manage the whole process, without getting messed around.

Take our free exit assessment:
https://lnkd.in/ey8-zd9G

♻️Repost and save to help other founders in your network.
🔔Follow Luke Tobin for more on agency growth and exit planning.

Ryan Hall

Founder & Managing Director

Founder, Friday Solved | Building scalable, predicable and sustainable sales engines inside your business

I'm the founder of Friday Solved, a consulting company that helps businesses solve their sales problems with sustainable and scalable solutions. 

I've founded and been through two exits, through which my focus has always been about sales growth.

Over the last 20+ years of experience in positioning, proposition design, and sales strategy, I have helped leading global brands such as Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Sky, M&S, first direct, Trainline, Vodafone, The Independent, UBS, Bank of America and The Times buy market-leading solutions. 

My passion is to share my expertise and insights with other, founders, CEOs and business leaders who want to create a market position that stands out in a B2B market. 

I offer pragmatic frameworks, build sustainable sales engines inside your business, and coaching formats that create focus, drive accountability and scale sales results and my book guides readers through the growth process. Whether it is sales culture, sales engine, or go-to-market strategyI can help you find clarity, relevance, and value.

Coach & Mentor

As lead Coach and Mentor at Friday Solved, I work personally with you to create focus and accountability to help you unlock the challenges ahead of you.

My approach is highly pragmatic and based on a sleeves-rolled-up approach to getting the right solution for you. 

I pride myself on the way I work with those I'm coaching. Using a mix of structure and on-demand discussion, we get the focus and results you need.

After 23+ years building creative agencies and two successful exits along the way. Including one to Accenture, I've never seen a market this tough.

This space is moving so fast, and it's getting harder and harder to figure out what's worth your time and what's not when it comes to sales.

To share this knowledge, we started with my Amazon bestseller, Don't Sell.

And now we've created a private learning platform for Founders and Business Leaders to access exclusive content, created by me.

A safe place to learn, share questions, insights, and winning moves from the community.

All of which is aimed at answering that burning question.

How do we solve sales? 🤯

Because sales has changed, and marketing needs to be done differently.

🤷 Outsourcing the problem to underperforming "pay-per-meeting" agencies doesn't work.

🤮 Relying on "hustle-bro" guru advice is often just vapourware.

🫠 Advice from supposed experts and advisors with no lived experience won't help.

🗳️ Expecting random acts of marketing to work, but they don't cut it.

🥱 Using tired old strategies based on outdated thinking fails.

This is simply a place for everything you need to get sales working predictably.

Inside, you'll get ...

✅ Step-by-step guides and exclusive content on building your sales engine.

✅ Access to a community of people just like you.

✅ Weekly sales accountability and coaching from me and my team of experts.

🧠 PLUS, live weekly broadcasts straight from the frontlines about what's working right now.

Sound interesting?

👉 Apply for your FREE place before our membership fee starts.

Spaces are limited.

Link in the comments below.

Founder, Friday Solved | Sales systems that are scalable, predictable and sustainable.

No alternative text description for this image

International Women's Day is a great way to celebrate the brilliant women around you. 

But it's not just about one day for the Friday Solved team or me. 

Celebrating our brilliant women is not a one-day-a-year thing.

Thats not our culture. 

But it's a great chance to shout out some of the amazing things our talented women have achieved recently. 

Our Head of Creative Strategy Jasmeen, was promoted to her current role and now leads our creative thinking. She's enabled us to develop entirely new ways of thinking around leveraging marketing tactics inside our sales engine frameworks, blown our minds with her way around AI tools and has been pivotal in our biggest pitch ever at Friday Solved. 🤯 

Our Delivery Manager, Emily, was promoted to her current role and has created such a rigorous underlying operating model that not only keeps our business on track but is the catalyst for our ability to scale. And the things she's done with Notion, which has become the interface to our Business Operating System, is simply incredible. 🤓 

Our Demand Generation Consultant, Jeyda, has been at the forefront of us adopting, learning and operationalising the way we run CRM in our own business and that of the implementations we do for our clients. But she's also just become a mum, which is one of the most important jobs going. 🥳 

And last but not least, our Growth Executive, Natassia, has been an incredible backbone for our own sales engine, keeping the wheels turning, events organised, and multiple channels corralled and controlled. Not to mention keeping me in check! 💪

So a huge thank you. 

Not just because it's IWD. But Friday Solved wouldn't be the same without you.

Super excited to be talking for Bristol Creative Industries in a few weeks.

On what topic you say?

Well, sales of course!

My favourite topic! 

But for this talk, I’m specifically covering ‘Luck isn’t a strategy’.

So it has a big focus on systemisation, process design and how to create scalability.

That doesn’t mean we won’t be talking about the creativity and strategy behind sales.

But we will be talking about how to scale it.

Fancy joining?

It’s on Tuesday 17th March at 12:30.

See you there!

Systemising sales isn’t just about technology.

The foundation of systemisation starts with understanding your business, identifying what can and should be systemised. And building up from there.

Technology can then help accelerate that systemisation.

So it goes without saying, without the right foundations AI won’t fix your sales engine either.

If anything, it will simply expose issues if not approached right.

And because every day is a school day, I’ve been reading Shift. A book for agencies, about AI.

Written by the talented Jules Love from the brilliant Spark AI team, led by Emma Wharton Love. 

And reading this book, one thing keeps coming back to me.

This isn’t a tool shift.

It’s an operating model shift.

And sales is where that gets uncomfortable.

Because a lot of sales engines are too dependant on the Founder being used in the wrong way.

The process is too instinct-driven, relationship-heavy and too loosely structured.

It works. For a time. 

Until you try to scale it. And it breaks.

Now layer AI on top of that.

What happens?

You don’t get leverage.

You get faster chaos.

Becusse if you don’t have those foundational processes and understanding of how to build the right sales engine, AI and any technology adoption will likely break you.

Without the foundations, AI has nothing solid to sit on.

It can “do things”, but what are you asking it to do?

Random tasks with no cohesion. 

And here’s the bit I find interesting.

Most teams think they’re “using AI in sales.”

But what they’re really doing is random acts of AI.

Real leverage comes when AI supports a defined system, analyses patterns across deals.

AI can flags risk early and inform targeting.

It can speed up processes and ensure the engine operates at the scale needed to drive Revenue.

But that only happens when sales engine is already structured.

The businesses that win in this next phase won’t be the ones who shout loudest about AI.

They’ll be the ones who quietly did the hard work first.

And they’re also the ones that have read this book.

SOPs don't sound sexy or interesting.  

There's no viral TikTok of someone building a follow-up sequence. 

And that's exactly the problem.

But systemisation is pretty cool when it delivers compound growth and consistency. 

So while the sales world obsesses over closing techniques, objection handling frameworks, and the latest AI tool that promises to do your prospecting for you, the businesses that are actually scaling are doing something far less exciting. 

They're the ones systemising.

They're quietly, consistently and profitably building scalable results. 

And when it comes to building a prediction revenue engine, the same patterns play out over and over again. 

It's systemisation that sells. 

Systems enable your talent to do more and be better. 

Getting to a place of systemisation is about taking a practical approach. 

Layering change and processes to build a sales engine that doesn't depend on luck, doesn't rely on unicorns, and doesn't collapse the moment someone leaves the team.

It's not glamorous. But it is the difference between businesses that grow and businesses that just exist.

The thing that no one is telling you about sales is that it’s the unsexy side of things that creates scale. So let’s get that out of the way early. Sy

Open article: Systems that sell by Ryan Hall • 8 min read

The unicorn salesperson doesn't exist.

And if your growth depends on finding one, you've already lost.

The businesses winning in sales right now aren't relying on raw talent.

They're relying on systems.

Strategy. Process. Rhythm. Methodology. Momentum.

That's the formula for deal flow that compounds over time.

Drop a comment or share if this hits home 👇

Heading to MadFest in Manchester this week?

Well, why not drop by the independent agencies section and come chat with the Friday Solved team and me.

We're here to give advice, guidance and insights on how to solve sales.

Oh, and of course, we're happy to tell you all about the Don't Sell Skool.

Friday the 13th! 

If you're superstitious, you'll not doubt have the scaries today! 

But sales don't need to be scary. 

If you're looking at your sales and marketing engine and thinking, "yeah, I need to move this forward", but don't know how?

We have a stack of resources we can share with you, from learning materials, tutorials, our online learning platform and of course our book. 

So if you want to get to Friday and have sales Solved. Drop me a DM, and I'll see what we can share to help you unpick your problem!

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