Fractional CIO & Strategic Advisor | Helping Non-Technical Leaders Make Technical Decisions | Scaled Orgs from $0 to $3B+

Strategic IT Leadership for Growing Companies

Helping non-technical founders and small business leaders scale without getting slowed down by their own systems

The Problem
Most companies don’t fail because they dream too small.
They fail because their technology trips them up before they ever hit full speed.

Systems that don’t talk to each other

Vendors that overpromise and underdeliver

Teams that pull in different directions

Operational chaos hidden behind "we’ll fix it later"

Growth without fundamentals isn't a shortcut—it's a detour. Real business expansion is about building systems that scale with integrity, not just adding layers of complexity to a shaky core.

The Outcome
I help you build a stronger, smarter, simpler technology foundation — one that scales with your business, not against it.

✅ Faster operations
✅ Smarter use of tools and teams
✅ Fewer expensive mistakes
✅ A clear, flexible roadmap for growth
✅ More time spent leading — less time fighting fires

My Approach
I’m not here to sell you systems you don’t need or waste months writing strategy decks nobody reads.

I’m here to help you:

Fix what’s broken (before it costs you real money)

Align your people, process, and platforms (so they work together, not against each other)

Build momentum you can actually feel (and measure in real-world results)

I bring 30 years of hands-on experience building and scaling IT in organizations that grew from to over $3B — many times as the very first IT hire, often leading global distributed teams.

What you get is simple:
Real strategy. Real execution. Real growth.

No bloat. No buzzwords. No bureaucratic nonsense.

Services
Fractional CIO Leadership
Part-time executive leadership to align your tech and business strategy, manage vendors, and build internal capabilities without hiring a full-time CIO.

Project Rescue and Turnaround
When critical projects stall, I step in to realign teams, simplify the chaos, and deliver results.

Vendor and System Sourcing
Find the right systems and partners that fit your business — not someone else’s template.

Strategic IT Roadmapping
Clear, practical roadmaps that connect today’s actions to tomorrow’s growth.

Who I Work Best With
Founders and business leaders who:

Are serious about scaling

Know tech is crucial but don’t want to live inside it

Value momentum over perfection

Want a partner who talks business, not just tech

Ready to Clear the Bottlenecks and Build What's Next?
Let's start with a simple conversation.
No sales pitch. Just clarity on where you are — and what’s possible next.

Phillip R. Kennedy

The VP forwarded the CEO's angry email to the whole engineering team at 9:47 PM on a Thursday. 

Daniel's manager replied-all at 9:48: "I'll handle this. Everyone log off."

Twelve seconds. Two completely different leaders.

The CEO's email was four sentences. A client's integration broke during a routine deployment. The client called the CEO directly. The fourth sentence: "I need to understand who is responsible."

The VP read it and clicked Forward. Added the entire engineering distribution list. Twenty-three people. Two words at the top: "See below."

No context. No plan. Just a CEO's anger, amplified to two dozen engineers on a Thursday night, most of whom had nothing to do with the deployment.

Daniel was brushing his teeth when his phone buzzed. He'd been at the company four months. He'd worked on a small piece of the integration three weeks earlier. Close enough to wonder. Close enough to lose sleep.

His shoulders went up. He started mentally composing a defense for code he'd written at 2 PM on a random Tuesday.

Then his phone buzzed again. 9:48.

"I'll handle this. Everyone log off."

Seven words. No exclamation point. No performative urgency. Just: this is not your problem tonight. It's mine.

James fixed it by 11:30. Configuration issue. Not a code defect. Nobody on the team caused it.

The next morning, James emailed his team: "Issue resolved. Config problem. Nothing any of you shipped caused this. If last night's email stressed you out, that's worth a conversation. My door's open."

Daniel saved that message. Not because it was eloquent. Because it was the first time a manager acknowledged that an internal communication could cause harm, and took ownership of it.

The VP forwarded blame at the speed of a click. James absorbed it in twelve seconds.

Same crisis. Same night. Two completely different engineering cultures.

Your team already knows which one you are.

♻️ Repost if you've had a manager whose first instinct was to protect the team, not forward the pressure 

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on engineering leadership that absorbs the hit instead of passing it down

I've spent 30 years watching what great technical leaders actually do.

Almost none of it looks like leadership on paper.

18 things I've seen the best ones do:

1. Say "I don't know" out loud so the team learns it's safe to say it too.

2. Kill a meeting to protect four hours of uninterrupted build time.

3. Put a junior engineer on the project everyone said she wasn't ready for. Then quietly clear the path.

4. Sit in the architecture review and ask the quiet person in the back what they think. Then actually wait for the answer.

5. Walk into a budget meeting and make technical debt visible to executives who only see features shipped.

6. Recognize the engineer who prevented the outage. Not just the one who fixed it.

7. Take the call from the angry stakeholder so the team can keep building.

8. Fight for an infrastructure investment that won't show results for six months. Then fight again when someone tries to cut it in Q3.

9. Tell their best engineer "you should interview for that role" before she'd ever considered leaving the team.

10. Share their own worst production mistake in a retro. Watch the room exhale.

11. Push for a promotion before the engineer asks. Then build the case so well it's undeniable.

12. Translate a forty-five minute technical explanation into two sentences a CFO can act on. Without losing what matters.

13. Block the fourth "urgent" request in two weeks. "Urgent" is not a strategy.

14. Pair a twenty-year veteran with a six-month hire. Tell both of them they're going to learn something.

15. Turn "this is broken" into "what would good look like?" Same facts. Completely different energy.

16. Advocate for sustainable pace when everyone above them is performing urgency.

17. Create space for exploration that might not ship anything. Then defend it when someone asks for the ROI.

18. Remember that the job was never to be the smartest person in the room. It was to make the room smarter.

None of this shows up on a dashboard. Most of it never gets recognized in a performance review.

But the engineers remember. And they become leaders who do the same things.

That's how you scale more than systems.

♻️ Repost if you've had a leader who did one of these and it changed your trajectory 

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on technical leadership that builds people, not just products

He texted me eighteen months after leaving the company. 7:32 AM on a Tuesday. "Congrats on the promotion. You earned it."

He had zero organizational reason to care.

James had been my CTO for three years. Left to start his own company. Most former bosses disappear when the org chart changes. Within a month, the relationship becomes a LinkedIn connection you scroll past.

James never did that.

When I got stuck on an architecture decision after he'd gone, I almost didn't reach out. He replied in twenty minutes: "Coffee Thursday?" Asked three questions that reframed the problem. No lecture. No "remember who helped you" energy.

When a product manager kept changing requirements mid-sprint, James said something I still use: "Your job isn't to stop the changes. It's to make the cost visible to the people requesting them."

When I left for a startup, most of leadership went quiet. That silence tells you which relationships were real. James responded in an hour: "Exactly the right move. Need references?"

The promotion text came a year later. His own company, across the country. My career had zero impact on his.

I've had many managers. Most competent and forgettable. James is the only one whose influence outlasted his badge access.

He never managed from the org chart. The authority was incidental to the relationship. When the authority left, the relationship didn't.

Most leaders aren't this way. Not because they're bad people. Because organizations reward transactional leadership. When someone leaves, the incentive to stay connected disappears.

Leaders who stay were always outside that system. They invested in the person, not the role.

The test that matters more than any review: would people who used to work for you still take your call? Not because you can help them. Because it was never about that.

♻️ Repost if you've had a leader whose influence outlasted their title

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on leadership that survives the org chart

She said she was "doing fine" and "learning a lot." Two weeks later she put in her notice.

I'd asked all the right questions. How are you settling in? Anything blocking you?

Surface-level questions get surface-level answers. And surface-level answers hide problems until they become resignation letters.

That exit taught me first 1:1s aren't introductions. They're the moment you earn honest communication or guarantee you'll never get it.

Most leaders fill that meeting with org charts and project updates. Nobody gets uncomfortable. Nobody learns anything.

After thirty years, here's what actually surfaces truth:

"Walk me through the last time you dug into someone else's code." Tells you more about team culture in three minutes than any survey. Listen for colleagues who help vs. territory that's guarded.

"What's the most frustrating part of getting your work done here?" Not "any concerns?" That gets "everything's great." Ask what frustrates them, then sit in the silence. The pause tells you whether honesty feels safe.

"When you disagree with a technical decision, how does that play out?" If the answer is "I don't usually disagree," that's not harmony. That's someone who learned speaking up costs more than staying quiet.

"If a friend asked whether they should join this team, what would you honestly tell them?" People rarely lie when it's framed as advice to someone they care about.

"How do you know when you've done good work here?" If they can't answer, your org hasn't made it clear.

You don't need ten questions. You need three honest ones and the discipline to stop talking after you ask them.

The engineers who answer carefully are often your best performers trying not to get fired for saying what's broken. The ones who say "everything's great" in week one say it again in their exit interview.

♻️ Repost if you've learned more from one honest answer than a dozen safe ones

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on leading teams with better questions

He'd been the fastest developer on the team for nine years. Last quarter, a mid-level with half his experience outshipped him three to one.

She wasn't a better coder. She'd quietly changed what her job was.

Rachel started using AI agents the way a good manager uses a team: delegate predictable work, provide context, review output, redirect when something drifts. Agents handled integrations, test coverage, docs. She focused on architecture and judgment calls between what agents produced and what the system needed.

Still an IC on the org chart. Her daily work looked like management.

David coded line by line. Nine years of it. Genuinely good. He'd see no IDE on her screen and assume she was slacking.

Then sprint reviews told a different story.

Rachel shipped three features in a cycle where David closed four tickets. Not because she was smarter. Because she'd changed the ratio between thinking and typing.

His response is one I hear constantly: "That's not real engineering."

I get it. If you built craft through your hands for a decade, watching someone achieve more by orchestrating feels like a violation. Not just a career concern. An identity one.

But stripped of hype, here's what's happening.

The IC role is shifting from production to orchestration. From writing every line to directing, reviewing, and integrating work AI produces. The skills this demands aren't new. They're management skills. Providing context. Reviewing with judgment. Knowing when to intervene. Maintaining quality when production outpaces review.

Every engineer is becoming a manager. Not of people. Of systems that produce at a pace no human can.

The IC track isn't dying. It's evolving. More judgment. More context. Less typing. More thinking.

For engineers willing to make that shift, it's the best version of the job they've had.

♻️ Repost if your role is quietly shifting from building to orchestrating

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on the real AI shift in technical work

She accepted an offer for 15% more. Her manager started a counteroffer. I told him to stop.

The money wasn't the problem. He just didn't know what the problem was.

Days before notice, her fix prevented a major outage. Week before, her refactoring cut response times in half. Her architecture decisions saved thousands in cloud costs monthly.

Her manager knew none of this. Not because he didn't care. Because he was a non-technical founder at a $12M company and nobody taught him what to look for.

He saw tickets closed. Features shipped. Through that lens, every engineer looked the same.

She didn't feel underpaid. She felt invisible.

This is the pattern I see most in growing companies. The founder is sharp. Competent in their domain. But they evaluate engineering like a restaurant kitchen: if food comes out, everything's fine.

The engineer preventing outages looks identical to one doing unremarkable work. Both close tickets. The difference is invisible unless you know what great engineering looks like.

That's not a character flaw. It's a knowledge gap. And it's expensive.

After she left, I told him: you don't need to understand code. You need three sentences.

"I heard your fix Tuesday prevented a customer issue. Tell me about it." Engineers know instantly if recognition is genuine. Specificity is the difference.

"What technical work happened this month I'd never see in a sprint review?" This teaches you what's invisible.

"What should I understand better about what engineering does?" Most leaders won't ask. Feels vulnerable. That's why it works.

The counteroffer would've cost $30K. She'd have stayed six months and left anyway. Her best work looked the same as average to the person signing her check.

Engineers don't leave for better offers. They leave when no one can tell the difference.

♻️ Repost if you've seen an engineer leave because leadership couldn't see it

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for helping non-technical leaders keep great engineers

She stopped getting invited to strategy meetings in month four. By month eighteen, she'd stopped noticing.

That's the scary part.

Not the exclusion. The adaptation. Priya rebuilt their payment system from scratch. Designed architecture that scaled them from 200 to 2,000 concurrent users without adding. When their biggest client threatened to leave over reliability, her monitoring work saved the account.

The CEO texted the CTO about technical feasibility. Never Priya. The CFO questioned velocity at board meetings she wasn't in. Product roadmap happened Tuesdays. She found out Thursdays, after decisions were locked.

She wasn't failing. She was being compressed. Compression doesn't feel dramatic. You don't notice the ceiling dropping. You just start hunching.

By month twelve she'd stopped proposing improvements. By eighteen she was executing what others decided, calling it "being a team player," wondering why she was so tired.

I asked her when she'd last made a decision nobody above her rerouted. Too long before she answered.

Decades of this work. The pattern repeats. The CEO calls engineering "the IT group" at board meetings. Not just a wrong label. Labels shape budgets. Budgets shape headcount. Headcount shapes what Priya gets to build. When systems fail and the first question is "who did this" instead of "what happened," leaders absorb that. Stop taking risks. Stop volunteering hard truths. Shrink to fit.

She left. Smaller company. CEO with an engineering background. Six months later she told me: "I forgot what it felt like to have an idea and be allowed to finish the sentence."

She hadn't gotten smarter. She'd gotten room.

If something in your chest just tightened, pay attention to that. Not every struggle is a skills gap. Sometimes the ceiling is just low.

♻️ Repost if you've felt the difference between being grown and being compressed

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for building environments where technical leaders thrive

They spent eight months building an AI recommendation engine. Beautiful machine learning. Garbage recommendations.

Their product catalog had 847 duplicate entries and descriptions from 2020.

The AI did exactly what it was designed to do. Found patterns and served them confidently. Customers got recommended discontinued products, duplicates of things in their cart, accessories for items no longer sold. Confident wrong answers at machine speed.

This company isn't unusual. They're the norm.

The pattern is becoming too common. The CEO hears AI is table stakes. The board wants a strategy. So leadership announces an initiative while their systems run on spreadsheets, manual uploads, and that one person who reconciles the data every Friday.

Customer records in seventeen tools. Support tickets referencing orders that don't exist in the main database. Three definitions of "active customer" depending on which dashboard you open.

Then they layer AI on top and wonder why it doesn't work.

AI doesn't fix broken systems. It scales them. Wrong answers with perfect grammar. Three versions of truth delivered faster than ever.

The most effective AI deployment I saw last year was boring. Nine months of cleanup before writing a single prompt. Data consolidated. Duplicates resolved. Systems connected. One source of truth.

No press release. When they turned on AI, it just worked. Not because the technology was special. Because it had something sane to work with.

Before you spend another dollar on AI: would a new employee be confused by your current systems? If yes, so will the AI. Just faster and more expensively.

The companies quietly winning aren't the ones with the biggest AI budgets. They're the ones who did the boring work first.

♻️ Repost if you've watched AI get layered on a foundation that couldn't support a spreadsheet

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for technology decisions that actually work

He told the CEO he was 60% sure. The CEO said, "That's 20% more than I had when I started this company. Go."

Daniel had been circling a platform decision for three weeks. Two viable paths. Trade-offs he could model, risks he couldn't. The data said "maybe" in fourteen different ways.

He kept requesting more analysis. Another benchmark. One more comparison. His director finally said, "You're not gathering information. You're avoiding a decision."

She was right.

Daniel could architect systems most people couldn't diagram on a whiteboard. The problem was never capability.

He'd confused certainty with competence.

He believed good leaders decide because they know the answer. So when he didn't know, he assumed he wasn't ready. More data. More time. The team stalled.

The CEO's response broke something open. Every founder who's built something real knows certainty almost never arrives on time.

Daniel made the call Thursday. "Here's what we're doing, here's why, and here's what I'm not sure about. We'll learn the rest by building."

Six months later, two of his assumptions were wrong. The team had adapted. What he'd agonized over mattered less than the momentum of actually moving.

This pattern lives everywhere. The leader who won't commit until every variable is known. The founder polishing the deck instead of making the call. The executive requesting another quarter of data before approving a hire they know they need.

It looks like diligence. Past a certain point, it's avoidance in a professional costume.

Courage doesn't follow confidence. It's the other way around.

Daniel told me a year later: "I used to think my job was to have the answer. Now I think it's to make the call and help the team navigate what we find on the other side."

That's not a technology insight. That's a leadership one.

♻️ Repost if you've made the right call on incomplete data and didn't know it until later 

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on leading through uncertainty

They hit every sprint target for eleven months. Green across every dashboard. The board loved them.

Their production system was rotting from the inside.
I got called after the third senior engineer left in six weeks. The CEO was baffled. "Velocity is up. Deployment frequency is the highest it's been. Why are they leaving?"

I spent a week with the team before opening a dashboard.

Engineers had learned to game every metric leadership tracked. Points inflated. Deployments split into smaller chunks. Tickets closed at "good enough."

The burndown charts were beautiful. The codebase was held together with workarounds nobody touched.

Nobody had raised it. The one engineer who tried, eight months earlier, got told metrics showed everything was fine. Last time anyone spoke up.

The moment I knew the team was in trouble wasn't in a report. It was in planning. A junior engineer pushed back on a timeline. Got two sentences in. The room went still. Not respect. Warning. She stopped. "Never mind, we can make it work."

On a healthy team, that sentence never gets cut short.

The signs that matter have nothing to do with velocity. When something breaks, does the team ask "what failed" or "who failed?" When someone says a deadline is unrealistic, does the room listen or reroute? Does the team celebrate three weeks of database work nobody outside engineering will notice?

These behaviors don't fit in Jira. They're the difference between a team that ships metrics and one that builds systems you can bet a company on.

His best engineers hadn't left for comp. They left because they'd been saying the system was fragile, leadership pointed at green dashboards, and they decided to let the next team deal with it.

Prevention never shows up on a dashboard. But it's the reason you still have a business.

♻️ Repost if you've seen the gap between what metrics show and what's really happening

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for seeing what dashboards miss in engineering teams

I watched him delete a Slack message. He'd started typing a direct answer to an engineer's architecture question, stopped, and forwarded it to his direct report instead.

He'd been VP for eleven days.

James had been a director for three years. Engineers loved working for him. Answered questions directly. Showed up in code reviews to learn. Knew the last five production incidents by heart.

Eleven days in, something shifted. A quiet recalibration of who he thought he was supposed to be.

Stopped joining sprint demos. Replaced architecture chats with "strategy alignment" meetings. When engineers pinged him, he forwarded the message.

He wasn't arrogant. He was doing what he thought VPs do. Every VP he'd watched kept distance. Details were for directors.

The system was turning a connected leader into an abstraction.

I'd seen it dozens of times. The title lands and the operating system changes. Not because the person changed. Because the calendar fills differently. Information arrives filtered. You stop hearing what engineers think and start hearing what managers think engineers think.

Three months in, his team didn't recognize him. Engineers routed through his chief of staff. The architect who used to argue with him had stopped, because James was no longer in the room where those arguments happened.

I told him: "You used to spot the caching problem before anyone filed a ticket. Now you find out in a weekly summary. That gap is where your judgment lived."

He made a few changes. Kept one architecture session weekly. Not to decide. To listen. Stayed in sprint demos for his most critical product. When engineers pinged him, he answered directly.

Small things. But the team noticed immediately: proximity isn't beneath me.

The title doesn't have to change you. But it will, unless you choose which connections to protect.

♻️ Repost if you've watched a promotion quietly rewire someone

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for leadership that stays connected to the work

The CTO told me he'd spent his weekend studying AI augmented development. His background was finance. His best engineers were leaving. He thought the two problems were connected.

They weren't.

Daniel had been CTO for eighteen months. Smart. Great with numbers, strategy, board communication. Zero engineering experience. He assumed credibility meant closing the gap. So he studied. Tutorials. Whitepapers. Architecture reviews full of detailed implementation questions.

His engineers didn't see a leader learning. They saw a bottleneck forming.

Every decision became a research project. Three-week sprints stretched to six because nothing moved until he felt informed enough to approve. He thought he was being thorough. His team experienced it as distrust.

The senior engineer who left first told me: "I don't need my CTO to understand AI development. I need him to trust that I do and make the call."

That's the gap. Not technical knowledge. Decision-making confidence. Daniel didn't need to understand how to setup OpenClaw. He needed to recognize his senior architect had been right about the last four calls and earned trust to make the fifth without a two-week wait.

The hardest part of leading technical teams without a technical background isn't the knowledge gap. It's saying "I don't fully understand this, I trust your judgment, here's my decision." That terrifies most non-technical leaders. It's also what stops your best people from updating their LinkedIn profiles.

We worked on this together. He stopped studying how to technically implement AI. Started making faster calls based on who recommended them and what they optimized for. Approval cycles shortened. His team stopped leaving.

He told me: "They didn't need a better engineer. They needed faster decisions."

His engineers could have told him that on day one.

♻️ Repost if you've learned that leading technical teams is about decisions, not expertise

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on leading technical teams with confidence, not code

His hands were shaking over the keyboard. He'd deployed the change that took checkout offline. Everyone in the room knew it.

Revenue stopped. Tickets stacking. VP of Sales pinging me for an ETA I didn't have.

The room wanted someone to bark orders. Demand root cause. Point at the deployment log.

I sat down next to him. "How many customers are affected right now?"

Not "what happened." Not "whose change."

He stopped staring at the error logs. Pulled up monitoring. "About 1,200 in checkout. Another 300 getting timeouts on product pages."

"Good. Checkout first. Walk me through the rollback."

His hands stopped shaking by the third sentence.

A leader's emotional state during an incident becomes the team's operating environment. Instantly. Walk in radiating urgency and everyone matches it. They talk over each other, chase parallel theories, make decisions that feel productive and create more problems.

Walk in calm and something shifts. The engineer who caused the outage stops bracing for blame and starts working the problem.

The fix took ninety minutes. He found it himself. A config flag that behaved differently in production than staging. After systems were restored, I told the team to go home. Handled the sales update myself. Scheduled the postmortem for two days later, because running a blameless retro on no sleep is how you get a blame-filled one.

Two days later, he proposed the fix: automated config comparison between staging and production. Nobody asked him. He volunteered because the incident room had been safe enough that owning it didn't feel like a career risk.

A year later he led our incident response. Calm. Methodical. Sat next to the person panicking instead of standing over them.

He learned that from a Tuesday afternoon when his hands were shaking and nobody blamed him for it.

♻️ Repost if you've seen calm leadership change the outcome of a crisis

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on leading technical teams through hard moments

We've all made the "perfect résumé" hire. Strong credentials. Nailed the technical interview. Three months in, you realize they can solve any problem except the ones that actually matter.

I've hired hundreds of people over thirty years. The pattern that predicts success has almost nothing to do with algorithms or credentials.

It's curiosity. How someone behaves when they hit a problem they don't know how to solve.

One of my best hires had two years of experience and a community college degree. Struggled in the technical round. But when conversation shifted to a real problem we were facing, he asked diagnostic questions that showed he'd operated systems under real pressure. Not textbook answers. Thinking from the weeds.

A year later, three teams called him first when something broke. Not the fastest coder. The one people trusted to think before acting.

What I've learned about what actually predicts success:

Give candidates a real problem, not a puzzle. Walk them through a challenge your team faces. Twenty minutes of real conversation beats an hour of whiteboard performance.

Watch what happens when they don't know. The best say "I haven't seen this, but here's how I'd start." People who bluff in interviews bluff on your team.

Listen to what they ask about. The system, the users, the team? Or just the stack, the title, the comp?

Look for ownership instinct. Ask about a project that went sideways. People worth hiring talk about what they learned. Not who was at fault.

Create unstructured time. Thirty open minutes surface what no template will.

You can teach your tech stack in months. You can't teach someone to care about the problem behind the ticket.

The résumé says where someone's been. The conversation tells you who they are. Most hiring processes only measure the first.

♻️ Repost if your best hire looked nothing like you expected on paper

➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on building teams that scale on trust

Career advice nobody's giving: Quit. Stack Mac Minis. Subscribe to every AI model and claw bot. Emerge in 90 days as something the market doesn't have a job title for yet.

Connor Gillivan

Scaling my 4 B2B companies w/ SEO. Daily posts about the process. 7x Founder (Exit in 2019).

Hey hey! Thanks for stopping by my profile. Here's a quick tl;dr: 

I've been an entrepreneur since 2009. I've scaled multiple businesses to 6, 7, & 8 figures in ARR and I exited one, FreeUp, in 2019. Today, I run a portfolio of companies, teach SEO, and scale B2B and SaaS businesses with SEO.

A little bit more about me:

Over the last decade, I've built 5 businesses to 6, 7, & 8 figures in yearly revenue. 

In 2019, I exited one of them, FreeUp, to The HOTH after 4 years of growth to 40+ team members and $12M+ in ARR.

Today, I'm building a portfolio of 10+ B2B companies. 

→ TrioSEO: SEO growth services for B2B and SaaS businesses. 
→ Outsource School: Teaching business owners how to build affordable teams in the Philippines.
→ EcomBalance: Monthly bookkeeping for eCommerce companies.
→ AccountsBalance: Bookkeeping for agencies, SAAS, and service providers. 
→ ConnorGillivan.com: Teaching SEO & marketing strategies, processes, & know-how. 
→ HG Media: Social media growth agency for LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Youtube, and more.

My business partner is Nathan Hirsch. We met in college and have been working together ever since.

Our mission is to build businesses in areas where we struggled while growing our first companies and we wished there had been better solutions...hiring, outsourcing, bookkeeping, accounting, billing, legal, SEO, growth, etc. 

If you need help growing your business, I'd love to help. Here's how...

TRIOSEO

I'll work with you on keyword research, building an SEO content plan, writing SEO content, and publishing it on your website to drive more organic traffic, leads, and revenue. 

→ Get an SEO Audit here: https://trioseo.com/audit

THE SEO SYSTEM

In this 4 hour video course, I'll teach you the 4 Pillars of SEO and give you my exact SOPs that I've used to scale multiple companies to millions in ARR with SEO. Packed with value and loved by hundreds. 

→ Purchase Access: https://connorgillivan.com/seo

BOOKKEEPING & OUTSOURCING

Need help with your bookkeeping? Or hiring a virtual assistant? I've got you covered. Get a Pricing Quote for our monthly bookkeeping services. And check out the exact Hiring System we've used to build remote teams for our companies.  

→ Go here: https://ecombalance.com and here: https://outsourceschool.com

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. 

I'm committed every day to making SEO & marketing simpler for millions. 

See you out there!

Best,
Connor

Email: Connor@ConnorGillivan.com

Founder and Owner

ConnorGillivan.com is the home to my personal brand where I make SEO simpler for millions. It hosts my weekly newsletter, The Savvy SEO, and my SEO course, The SEO System. Come learn SEO from my 10+ years of experience scaling my own companies to 6, 7, and 8 figures with an exit in 2019.

My ChatGPT Cheat Sheet for SEO Backlinks:

(How I use ChatGPT to help in building backlinks.) 

I've found that ChatGPT is best for ideation. 

When you're stuck, it helps you through. 

- Ideas for better HARO answers
- Processes to analyze competition
- Backlink strategies I didn't know
- Email templates for outreach
- Local backlink ideas to build
- Digital PR story inspiration

Building backlinks isn't easy. 

ChatGPT doesn't do it for you. 

But man is it a great sparring partner. 

Don't underestimate it. 

& find ways to incorporate it. 

It'll feel weird at first, but then you'll love it. 

---

You agree with me? 

Repost ♻️ if you think it will help others.

P.S. I drop a weekly newsletter every Sunday. Tomorrow, I'm sharing insights on building an SEO strategy. Grab a copy: https://lnkd.in/gs3iPKMA

Connor  Gillivan

I scale companies w/ SEO & content. Book a call & let's talk SEO. 7x Founder (Exit in 2019).

My Proven SEO Keyword Research Cheat Sheet:

(7 steps to DOMINATE keyword research in 2026)

1/ Brainstorm like your ICP
2/ Analyze KD & Volume
3/ Look at "Suggested" Keywords 
4/ Steal from your competitors
5/ Shortlist 100+ Keywords
6/ Label Intent & Prioritize
7/ Repeat Quarterly

---

Keyword research is the backbone of your SEO. 

It will make or break whether you rank top of Google. 

AND whether you'll rank in ChatGPT and LLMs.

Don't overlook it bc you don't know how. 

Follow my proven SOP & start dominating.

---

Find this helpful? 

♻️ REPOST so others can learn too. 

P.S. My company, TrioSEO, will take keyword research off your plate. And form an unbreakable SEO strategy. Download my SEO eBook to learn more: https://lnkd.in/gJ8pJ7dz

My Technical SEO Checklist to Rank on Google & LLMs (no tech skills needed):  

Technical SEO is just “making it easy for bots to crawl, understand, and trust your site.”

If you can click around in WordPress, Wix, Webflow, or Shopify, you can do 80% of it.

1/ Make sure Google can index you

- Google “site:yourdomain.com” and see pages show up
- In Google Search Console, check Indexing → Pages for errors
- If pages aren’t showing, they may be “noindexed” accidentally

2/ Submit your sitemap

- In your SEO plugin, find your sitemap URL (usually /sitemap.xml)
- Add it in Search Console → Sitemaps
- This helps Google find new pages faster

3/ Fix broken pages and redirects

- Install a broken link checker plugin or use a free crawler tool
- Redirect old URLs to the closest matching new page
- Don’t leave 404s for money pages or top traffic posts

4/ Get your titles + meta descriptions under control

- Every important page needs a unique title tag
- Include the main keyword, keep it readable
- Write a meta description that matches search intent

5/ Make your site fast enough

- Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage + a blog post
- Compress images (biggest easy win)
- Use caching and remove bloated plugins/apps

6/ Make your site mobile-friendly

- Check your pages on your phone
- Fix text that’s too small and buttons too close
- Make sure menus and forms work cleanly

7/ Clean up your URL structure

- Use short, clear URLs: /service-name/ not /p=123/
- Avoid dates unless news-based content
- Keep one “canonical” version (no duplicates)

8/ Add internal links like a librarian

- Link from related posts → your main money pages
- Add 3–5 internal links on every new post
- Use descriptive anchor text, not “click here”

9/ Add basic schema (no coding)

- Turn on FAQ schema for FAQs (only if visible on page)
- Use Organization/Website schema via your SEO plugin
- This helps search engines + LLMs understand entities

10/ Make your pages easy for LLMs to extract

- Use clear headings (H2s that match questions people ask)
- Add a quick TL;DR and definitions near the top
- Use bullet lists, steps, and short sections

---

Most people overthink technical SEO.

You don’t need perfection, you need clean basics.

Speed, indexability, and clarity beat fancy tricks.

Do this once, then maintain monthly.

Technical SEO is reputation insurance for your site.

---

Whatcha think?

Repost ♻️ to help others learn too.

P.S. Do you want more LEADS from your SEO? I have the solution. Read the entire SOP here: https://lnkd.in/gJ8pJ7dz

Top 21 SEO Creators Helping You Rank on ChatGPT & LLMs:

1. Aleyda Solís
2. Jake Ward 
3. Anna York 
4. Louis Smith 
5. Lily Ray 
6. Sarvesh Shrivastava 
7. Artur Perrella Glukhovskyy
8. Steven Schneider 
9. Connor  Gillivan 
10. Ume Laila 
11. Britney Muller
12. Tom Winter 
13. Amanpreet Singh 
14. Liam Quirk 
15. Nick Zviadadze 
16. Jairo Guerrero 
17. Fery Kaszoni 
18. Nick Eubanks 
19. Brodie Clark
20. Neil Patel
21. Rob Hoffman 

---

You learning from this squad yet?

♻️ REPOST if you're interested in what GEO is becoming. 

P.S. GEO is rapidly evolving. SEO is becoming more about LEADS than traffic. Read my "SEO Lead Magnet Project" ebook here: https://lnkd.in/gJ8pJ7dz

P.P.S. Want to chat about your GEO w/ me? Book a call: https://lnkd.in/gYccSVY8

SEO teams don’t have a data problem.

They have a decision-speed problem.

Most teams sit on incredible data.

They just can’t access it fast enough when it matters.

Board asks:
“Why did traffic drop?”

CMO asks:
“Where are competitors gaining ground?”

Content team asks:
“What should we build next?”

And someone has to go:
“Give me 30 minutes.”

That’s the old workflow.

Semrush MCP inside Semrush One quietly changes this.

Instead of navigating dashboards,
you prompt the question directly.

Here’s how I think about it.

1. Stop navigating and start asking
→ “Show me keywords competitors rank for that we don’t”
→ “Find pages that lost positions in the last 30 days”

2. MCP pulls structured Semrush data
→ Live keyword datasets
→ Position changes
→ Competitive domain gaps

3. Get analysis-ready outputs
→ Tables, rankings, clear comparisons
→ Turn answers into action immediately
→ Adjust content briefs, update internal pages

The shift is subtle but important.

SEO used to be:
Pull data → Analyze → Decide.

Now it’s:
Ask → Decide.

That compression matters at scale.

Especially for agencies.
Especially for in-house teams reporting up.
Especially when time-to-decision is a competitive advantage.

Semrush didn’t just add another feature.

They reduced friction between question and insight.
And in SEO, speed compounds.

Start with Semrush MCP with Semrush One here: https://bit.ly/4kr4jlM

♻️ Repost if you think SEO tools should help you think faster, not click more.

P.S. I'm Connor Gillivan. Follow me for daily SEO tips & SOPs.

(Thanks to Semrush for teaming up w/ me on this post)

How to win the modern SEO game

My ChatGPT Cheat Sheet for Digital Marketing (40 Free Prompts):

Prompts to apply TODAY for your marketing:

1/ Content Marketing Strategy
2/ Social Media Marketing
3/ SEO & Web Traffic
4/ Email Marketing
5/ PPC Advertising
6/ Analytics & Reporting
7/ Marketing Automation
8/ Content Personalization

---

Digital marketing isn’t a guessing game...it’s a system.

Smart marketers don’t work harder, they work smarter.

This cheat sheet is your shortcut to great results.

Master these prompts, dominate your strategy.

Start marketing like it's 2026. 

---

What would you add? 

Repost ♻️ to help others work smarter too. 

P.S. I am Connor Gillivan. Follow me for SEO, Marketing, & AI advice.

The Anatomy of a Winning SEO Campaign: 

No, it's not just "blogging". 

In 2026, it's comprehensive. 

1/ Technical SEO

First, you set a foundation for success.

- Optimize speed
- Robots.txt
- Mobile optimized
- Modern UX + design
- URL structure
- Use of CDN
- HTTPS set up
- Schema markup
- Redirect rules

2/ Link Building

Second, you build trust w/ Google. 

- Partnerships
- Custom outreach
- HARO + Featured
- Podcasts
- Guest articles
- Digital PR
- 30+ DR
- 1,000+ traffic
- 10+ backlinks/mo
- Linkable assets
- Directories
- Expert Quotes
- Anchor text

3/ SEO Content

Third, you write content to attract your ICP. 

- Keyword research
- BoFu vs MoFu vs ToFu
- 90 Day Content Plans
- Specialized Writers
- SERP Research
- Competitor Analysis
- In-depth Outlines
- Editing + Optimization
- Internal linking
- CTAs in content
- Images + Videos
- Infographics
- Monthly analytics
- Keyword tracking
- Content upgrades
- Measuring RoT
- Calculators + Tools
- Easy to read + nav

---

Are you winning in SEO? 

♻️ REPOST if this made you think.

👋  Speak with me about your SEO: https://lnkd.in/gYccSVY8

Your competitors are ranking on ChatGPT.

You're not and you don't even know why.

Most founders have zero clue who's winning in AI search results.

No visibility into which prompts matter. 

No idea what content is getting cited.

Semrush One is built for this shift.

It unifies traditional SEO + AI search visibility in one place.

And the AI Visibility Toolkit shows where AI platforms mention your competitors, but not you.

Here’s my competitor gap workflow for AI search:

1/ Start in Competitor Research
→ Benchmark visibility vs your actual AI competitors
→ Filter by platform (ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode)

2/ Find topic gaps first
→ Use the Topics & Prompts section
→ Apply the Missing filter to see where competitors appear and you don’t

3/ Drop to prompt-level gaps
→ Switch to Prompt view
→ Pull the exact questions users ask where you’re absent

4/ Identify citation gaps
→ Open the Sources tab
→ Use Missing to find domains cited for competitors but not you

5/ Track the fixes
→ Add the highest-value prompts to Prompt Tracking
→ Watch daily movement after updates

This is the shift.

Not “rank higher.”

Get mentioned where AI is answering.

The brands winning in AI search aren't doing anything magical. 

They have structured content, clear answers, and authority. 

The brands losing don't even know what prompts to track.

I use Semrush One to run this process. 

It tracks AI visibility, prompt mentions, competitor gaps, and sentiment across LLMs. 

All in one dashboard alongside traditional SEO. 

It's become essential for how I do competitive analysis in 2026.

Try Semrush one for Free here: https://bit.ly/473eyr0

---

What you think? 

♻️ Repost if you think this can help someone stay ahead of AI search.

P.S. I talk about AI's impact on SEO & marketing every week. Follow me for more.  

#Semrushpartner

What is EEAT? Is it still important for SEO in 2026? 

Yes, more important than ever. Let me explain: 

E = Expertise
• Google wants subject-matter experts, not surface-level summaries.
• LLMs reference creators with deep topical footprints.
• If you can’t prove expertise, search engines will sniff it out.

E = Experience
• First-hand stories, real examples, behind-the-scenes details.
• AI can’t fake lived experience (yet). Humans still win.
• Google and ChatGPT both trust content tied to real operators.

A = Authoritativeness
• Backlinks, mentions, citations, and recognition in your niche.
• The more others reference you, the more LLMs surface you.
• Authority compounds. It's a MUST in today's search.

T = Trustworthiness
• Clean design, transparent authorship, sources, accuracy.
• Google penalizes low-trust pages. It's just a fact.
• LLMs reduce hallucinations by leaning on trusted publishers.

Why It Matters More in 2026:
• AI writing flooded the internet with low-quality noise.
• Google shifts ranking weight to real expertise signals.
• ChatGPT & other LLMs cite brands & creators they trust most.
• Your E-E-A-T becomes your competitive moat.

---

AI didn’t kill SEO...it raised the bar.

Real operators stand out more than ever.

E-E-A-T is your brand identity online.

Invest in it now. It's KEY to search success.

---

Agree or disagree?

Repost ♻️+ Follow me for daily takes on SEO & GEO

P.S. I drive SEO traffic and leads for fast-growing brands. Steal my SOP on how I do it: https://lnkd.in/gJ8pJ7dz

AI won't replace SEO. But you MUST learn how to use it. Here's 5 AI + SEO examples: 

1/ AI for Keyword Research

- Use AI to expand seed keywords into 100+ variations.
- Identify high, medium, and low intent faster.
- Validate with tools like Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner.
- Resource: https://lnkd.in/gJGyj_2g

2/ AI for Content Outlines

- Analyze top ranking pages in seconds.
- Generate H1s, H2s, FAQs, and “People Also Ask” ideas.
- Build drafts that align with search intent.
- Resource: https://lnkd.in/gKdQx2Bc

3/ AI for Keyword Clustering

- Group related keywords into topic clusters fast.
- Identify pillar pages and supporting blog content.
- Build stronger internal linking structures.
- Resource: https://lnkd.in/guYp-aDT

4/ AI for Optimization

- Refresh posts ranking 5–20.
- Add missing entities, FAQs, and internal links.
- Improve CTR with better titles and meta descriptions.
- Resource: https://lnkd.in/gkFJKdzb

5/ AI for Repurposing

- Turn blogs into LinkedIn posts, threads, emails.
- Extract snippets for short form content.
- Multiply distribution without rewriting from scratch.
- Resource: https://lnkd.in/gyT5-ui6

---

I still don't recommend using AI to write your content. 

But I absolutely encourage you to use it for other areas of SEO. 

AI tooling is becoming too smart to ignore. 

If you're not using AI somewhere in SEO, you're showing your age. 

Adjust to the times and level up with AI. 

---

Find this useful?

Repost ♻️ to help others learn too.

P.S. Want my guide on using AI to create SEO Lead Magnets? Download it here: https://lnkd.in/gJ8pJ7dz

My SEO Internal Linking Strategy:

Most websites treat internal linking like an afterthought.

That's not the way to gain likeness w/ Google & ChatGPT. 

1/ Map Your Topical Hubs
• Create 3–5 core hubs around your main offers.
• Each hub gets 10–20 supporting articles.
• Google sees topical authority. ChatGPT sees depth.

2/ Use 1 Clear Primary Link Per Post
• Every article should push authority to ONE key page.
• No guessing. No clutter. Decide and link.
• Helps Google and LLMs understand hierarchy.

3/ Add 3–5 Contextual Links Naturally
• Place them inside the content, not just at the bottom.
• Anchor text should match search intent, not exact-match spam.
• LLMs use these connections to learn how concepts relate.

4/ Link “Up, Down, and Across”
• Up = link to your hub page.
• Down = link to deep, niche articles.
• Across = link between related articles.
• Google crawls deeper. ChatGPT builds a knowledge graph.

5/ Refresh Links Every 6 Months
• Update old posts with new internal links to fresh content.
• Keeps your whole site “alive” in Google’s eyes.
• LLMs benefit from a fully connected content ecosystem.

6/ Prioritize High-Intent Pages
• Link aggressively to service pages, comparison posts, and category pages.
• Drives conversions and strengthens the pages you actually want ranking.
• ChatGPT tends to surface pages that have clear depth and strong relationships.

---

Internal links are your quietest SEO power move.

Few people do them consistently.

They compound over years, not weeks.

The more connected your site is, the harder it is to beat.

---

What did I miss?

Repost ♻️ to help others master internal linking as well. 

P.S. Want to turn more SEO traffic into real leads? Download my SEO Lead Magnet SOP ebook: https://lnkd.in/gJ8pJ7dz

Which is best? SEO vs Ads vs Email:

Let's break each down...

SEO:

- Cost effective long term
- Drives organic traffic
- Depends on Google
- Higher conversions
- Long term investment
- Helps rank on ChatGPT
- In a phase of transformation

Ads:

- Costs for every click
- Paid traffic in search 
- Paid traffic from social
- Pay until you stop
- High CRO potential
- Targeting is unique
- Works then doesn't

Email Marketing:

- Low cost, high ROI
- Turns traffic to leads
- Turns leads to revenue
- Full control over it
- Fast acting (if done right)
- Takes time to build list
- Fighting w/ lots of noise

---

I'd rank them:

1) SEO
2) Ads
3) Email

SEO still takes the crown. 

When done right, it drives leads for years. 

I used to be an ads "hater", but that's changed. 

I now get 100s of leads from it every month. 

It's a great complement to SEO for instant leads. 

Then email nurtures & warms leads up. 

It's very much a symbiotic relationship..

....when you execute it properly. 

---

What's your favorite? Post it below. 

♻️ REPOST to encourage this conversation. 

P.S. Follow me + slap my 🔔 for daily Marketing tips & advice.

This cold email is satisfying on multiple levels.

Not because of the copy.

Because of the proof.

Here is the context:

Warmy sent me this email.

It landed in my primary inbox.

Not promotions. Not spam. Primary.

That is their entire product in action.

Think about that for a second.

The email itself is the case study.

No PDF needed. No testimonial screenshot.

Just open your inbox and see it working.

Here is what makes this smart:
1/ The value prop is proven before you read it.
2/ The messaging is simple and direct.
3/ It reframes what cold email can be.

Cold email has a bad reputation for a reason.

Most of it is noise that never gets seen.

Warmy makes sure yours actually arrives.

This is one of the smartest product demos I have seen. No call needed.

♻️ Repost if this made you rethink your cold email setup.

P.S. Check out Warmy
here: https://lnkd.in/gheuYKEc

taplio

The Battle

Phillip R. Kennedy

Connor Gillivan

Followers

Posts

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Likes

Performance ScorePhillip R. Kennedy's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreConnor Gillivan's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Phillip R. Kennedy

Connor Gillivan

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);}Phillip R. Kennedy's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreConnor Gillivan's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScorePhillip R. Kennedy's LinkedIn Performance