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.

Transform Your Business with Cutting-Edge Computer Vision and Edge AI Solutions | AI Specialist & Innovator

For years, I've seen one problem consistently block growth: content chaos. It derails pipelines, overwhelms teams, and creates inconsistency. That's why I built Ryza Content an AI-powered platform designed to fix that. Ryza brings a codified voice, governed inputs, and consistent outputs without the guesswork.If you're serious about creating consistent, on-brand content at scale, sign up for Ryza and start transforming your content operations today.Sign up here → https://ryzacontent.com/loginWith 9+ years of expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, I’ve built impactful products that solve real business problems. My focus is on leveraging AI and ML to develop cutting-edge solutions, integrating C#, Python, and other languages to meet diverse business needs.► Driving Results: I collaborate with C-level leaders to align AI with strategic business goals, delivering measurable ROI. From vision to execution, I ensure AI initiatives generate real value.► Thought Leadership: As an expert in the field, I share actionable insights through blogs, webinars, and public speaking. Recently, I led a global webinar with over 150 attendees, showcasing the transformative power of AI across industries.► Technical Excellence: My technical skills span Azure, TensorFlow, Nvidia Jetson, and multimodal AI systems. I specialize in edge AI and automation, creating solutions that integrate image, video, and sensor data for real-world applications.Whether leading teams, advising executives, or developing AI-driven products, my passion for technology drives my commitment to excellence. Join Ryza today and take the first step toward streamlined, efficient, and scalable content creation.

Timothy Goebel

Are your prompts quietly killing your results?

Most AI fails from vague prompts, not weak models.  
Turn your ask into a system: clear role, format, and limits.  
Stack rules, not adjectives. Test, refine, repeat.  

If your prompt was a policy, would you sign it?

#promptengineering, #AIsystems, #digitalstrategy, #contentworkflow, #RefreshWithRyza

Founder & CEO, Ryza Content | AI Solutions Architect | Driving Consistent, Scalable Content with AI

Are your Super Bowl conversations building a real pipeline?

This weekend, everyone talked about the game.  
The smart ones turned it into a system for future deals.

Not by pitching.  
By treating every interaction like a long-game asset for their brand.

Here is the tension:  
Most leaders invest heavily into digital content and ignore the in-person “network content” they create at events like the Super Bowl.  
Same effort, different capture rate. Very different business impact.

Four practical levers to turn casual chats into compounding value:

1) Design one memorable narrative, not a sales script  
Have a single clear “about” line that anchors your brand.  
One sentence that explains who you serve, the risk you remove, and the outcome you create.  
If people cannot repeat it on Monday, your narrative failed the test.

2) Tag every new connection into a simple follow-up system  
Post-event, segment contacts into 3 buckets: partner, buyer, amplifier.  
Treat each bucket differently: co-create content with partners, share case stories with buyers, and send bite-size insights to amplifiers.  
This keeps energy high without feeling transactional.

3) Convert moments into content within 24 hours  
That question you answered three times in the suite?  
That is your next LinkedIn post, webinar topic, or sales enablement asset.  
If it showed up in live conversations, your wider audience is probably wrestling with it too.

4) Reduce risk for new relationships  
Instead of “Let’s hop on a call,” offer a low-friction next step: a short teardown, a quick benchmark, or a tailored resource.  
Make it safer and easier for busy executives to say yes.

The scoreboard is forgotten fast.  
The relationships you systematize this week can power your next year.

#B2BMarketing, #NetworkingStrategy, #RelationshipMarketing, #RefreshWithRyza, #SuperBowl2026

Are your “bold” decisions actually just loud?

Every conference has the same battle cry:
“Be bold.”
“Best will win.”

But bold is not about decibels.
It is about decisions that carry risk, friction, and responsibility.

The real tension:
Most brands want the upside of bold moves  
without leaving the comfort system of “what everyone else is doing.”

So you see noise:
New taglines.
Big stages.
Zero change in how the business actually works.

Here is a different lens.
Bold means operational commitments, not marketing adjectives.

Three concrete angles to check inside your own brand:

1) Bold in where you say “no”  
If everything is a priority, nothing is a bet.  
Choose one uncomfortable focus: a segment, a problem, a channel.  
Resource it properly. Starve the rest. That is where strategic risk lives.

2) Bold in how you measure “best”  
“Best will win” sounds clean, but best by whose scoreboard?  
Redefine “best” around one or two customer outcomes you can own.  
Build your content, sales motions, and product decisions around that single definition.

3) Bold in what you’re willing to unlearn 
If your current playbook feels safe, it is probably stale.  
Audit one core ritual: reporting, campaign planning, or approvals.  
Ask: “What would this look like if we optimised for speed into market, not internal comfort?”  
Then change one rule and live with the discomfort.

The companies that truly step out of others’ comfort zones  
are not the loudest on stage.  
They are the ones whose risk is visible in their calendar, budget, and roadmap.

#Leadership, #B2BMarketing, #BrandStrategy, #DecisionMaking, #RefreshWithRyza

Is your OCR failing before it even starts?

Most teams think OCR is the hard part.  
It is not.  

The real work happens before the model ever sees your PDF.  
Especially with complex tables.  

If you push raw scans, skewed pages, merged cells and noisy headers into OCR, you do not get data.  
You get arguments.  
Ops vs data vs finance about “why the numbers don’t match.”

Here is the quiet truth:  
OCR accuracy is a direct function of preprocessing discipline.

Four levers to treat preprocessing as a system, not an afterthought:

1) Structure the chaos before recognition  
Separate text pages from table-heavy ones.  
Normalize orientation, margins and page size.  
You want consistent layouts, so the OCR engine is solving vision, not layout guesswork.

2) Teach your pipeline what a table looks like  
Use basic vision rules to detect table regions: lines, cell borders, whitespace grids.  
Mask everything else.  
That single step reduces false matches and “hallucinated” columns.

3) Clean at the pixel level, not in Excel  
De-skew, de-noise, improve contrast and remove stamps and watermarks.  
Better pixels mean better tokens.  
You fix errors upstream instead of hiring people to fix them downstream.

4) Standardize headers into a business dictionary  
Map messy column labels into a controlled vocabulary *before* storage.  
“Total,” “Total amount,” and “Grand total” should resolve into one concept your business trusts.

The payoff is simple:  
Less reconciliation, faster cycles, and fewer “we do not trust this report” moments.

P.S.: If you want a concrete preprocessing checklist for your PDFs and tables, reply “checklist” and I will send you a structured framework you can adapt with your team.

#DocumentProcessing, #DataQuality, #OCR, #DigitalOperations, #RefreshWithRyza

Is messy OCR quietly burning your agent ROI?

Your agents are not “acting weird.”  
They are acting on what they see.  

If your OCR scrapes the page like a blunt tool, small misreads slip into core systems. At scale, that turns smart agents into fast, confident interns who move money and update records on shaky ground. The cost is not just rework. It is brand, trust, and operational drag.  

Three levers to pull now:  

1) Treat OCR as a core system, not plumbing.  
Evaluate it like you would a CRM. Match engines to your real document mix, layout complexity, languages, and tolerance for mistakes. Search-grade text is rarely safe for action-grade workflows.  

2) Wire confidence scores into your logic.  
Modern OCR knows how sure it is per field. Use that. Auto execute only on high confidence. Send mid confidence to lightweight checks. Route low confidence into human review or safer paths. Speed where you can, brakes where you must.  

3) Structure content before decisions.  
Do not feed agents raw text blobs. Normalize into clear fields like “supplier,” “amount,” “due date,” and classify document types before any decision. Agents then operate inside a system, not a pile of notes.  

If you looked at your current agent stack today, would you still blame the model, or finally inspect what your agents are actually seeing?

#AI, #IntelligentAutomation, #DocumentProcessing, #RefreshWithRyza, #RiskManagement

Can your AI agents truly read operations?

Most leaders say their AI is “reading” documents.  
In reality, it is just skimming pixels.

Here is the tension.  
Your operations live in messy content. PDFs. Scans. Handwritten notes. System exports.  
Your AI agents only act on what they can see clearly.  
OCR is the bridge between “nice demo” and “real workflow change”.

Four practical levers to focus on:

1) Treat OCR as an operations layer, not a tool  
OCR is not a plugin. It is an input system.  
Design from the workflow backward:  
What decisions must agents make?  
What fields, tables, stamps, and signatures do they need to see?  
Then shape OCR around that, not the other way around.

2) Standardize structure, not just formats  
You will never control every file format.  
You can control the target structure.  
Define a canonical schema: entities, fields, confidence scores, exceptions.  
Feed that clean structure into your agents, not raw text blobs.

3) Make confidence a business rule, not a metric  
Stop treating confidence scores as technical trivia.  
Tie thresholds to risk.  
High value payment? Require higher OCR confidence and a human check.  
Low risk ticket? Let the agent auto process with lower thresholds.  
This keeps speed without gambling with compliance.

4) Close the loop with human feedback  
Every correction is training data.  
Build a simple review step: humans fix, system learns.  
Over time, your agents stop asking the same questions.  
That compounds into faster cycle times and fewer escalations.

Core takeaway:  
AI agents cannot “read” operations until OCR is designed as part of the business process, not an afterthought.

P.S.: If you want to need help with your current documents into an agent ready OCR flow, reach out.

#AIagents, #OCR, #DigitalOperations, #RefreshWithRyza, #BusinessTransformation

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The Battle

Luke Tobin

Timothy Goebel

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Performance ScoreLuke Tobin's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreTimothy Goebel's LinkedIn Performance

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The Battle

Luke Tobin

Timothy Goebel

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);}Luke Tobin's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreLuke Tobin's LinkedIn Performance