Sam G. Winsbury

We Create Thought Leaders Through Personal Branding | 150+ Personal Brands Built | Founder & CEO Kurogo

-- DM for Speaking Enquiries --

We turn entrepreneurs into credible thought leaders through personal branding so they can scale their businesses, unlock untapped opportunities and outlast their competition.

If you’re anything like our clients, you’re an expert in your field. One of the best.

But you just don’t seem to have the reputation you deserve.

You want to be the go-to authority in your industry and become an opportunity magnet.

That way you could…

- Generate inbound leads consistently
- Win clients and customers with ease
- Attract media features
- Attract top talent
- Speak on stage

The list is endless.

We help our clients do just that through the power of personal branding, by:

1. Giving them clarity on their brand and positioning them as industry leaders.
2. Blowing up their social profiles and landing them high-profile media features.
3. Helping them convert their new-found reputation into meaningful opportunities and ROI

And having built 300+ personal brands, we’ve got quite good at it, achieving results like these in the process:

🚀 Jack generated 2.5M views and 6 figures in revenue in 90 days with us 
🚀 Joe and Olly generated millions of views and saw a record month
🚀 Guy added 5 figures of pipeline value in a matter of months
🚀 Shan Grew 24,000 followers and landed $200,000 in sales
🚀 Olie added £50K of inbound revenue to his pipeline
🚀 Sue generated over 8.3 million views in 4 months
🚀 Jemma increased her views by 51,347%
🚀 James became an Amazon Best Seller 
🚀 Tom generated 5M views in 3 months 
🚀 Anna doubled her followers in 1 year
🚀 Debbie generated 11M Views

Your reputation is your biggest asset. Take control of it! 

If you want to see how we could help you build your personal brand, shoot me a dm saying ‘Personal Brand’

If you're not quite ready yet, I post daily content on here showing you how to do it yourself.

Founder

Pret A Manger CEO Pano Christou's journey is incredible.

2000: Assistant Manager
2019: Became CEO

In a world that pushes you to start a new job every 6 months or build a 6 figure business in 3, it’s nice to see there's still a case for working your way up in one place.

Personal Brand Advisor To Leading Entrepreneurs & Execs | 350+ Brands Built | Speaker | Sky, Entrepreneur, Insider | Founder & CEO Kurogo

2020

- Struggling freelancer
- Constantly ignored
- Insecure

2021

- Started taking LinkedIn seriously
- Began building my personal brand
- Started signing more clients

2022

- Hired team members
- Signed loads of clients
- Was the ‘kid with potential’

2024

- Grew rather fast
- Got rather stressed
- Increased my prices

2026

- Run quite a good personal brand agency
- Helped 350+ people build their brands
- Happiest I’ve ever been

What changed? 

1. 6 years of trial and error 
2. Huge focus on authority over everything
3. Realising everything you want is the other side of reach and reputation

More people trusting you as an expert will never not be useful.

So start sharing your ideas/opinions/expertise online.

For 15 years, the growth playbook was “send & spend”.

Run ads → generate leads → sales grinds → numbers game → maths works.

And to be fair… it did work when buying was simple and linear.

2005 buying: see ad → click → buy.

But 2026 buying is not linear.

2026 buying: see you → ignore you → see you again → ask a friend → google you → check your LinkedIn → read comments → watch a video → forget → come back 3 weeks later → then enquire.

It’s not a funnel anymore. It’s a squiggly line.

Inside the chaos, only one thing matters:

Trust.

Because when buyers have unlimited choice and unlimited information, they don’t pick the “best” option on paper.

They pick the option that feels safest.
The one they trust most.

Here’s the truth:

If you still rely on “cheap leads + pushy sales” to do the heavy lifting,
you’re betting against how modern buyers behave.

They do the work before they ever speak to you:

- searching your name
- checking your LinkedIn
- looking for social proof
- scanning for authority
- testing if you’re credible

So if your marketing is only designed for volume

but not designed to create trust…
you’re just paying to enter the messy middle 
(where you’re judged, compared, and forgotten)

That’s why trust-based marketing is winning.

And the best way to collapse the timeline for trust? 

Personal brand.

- 89.4% are more likely to trust a company if a senior leader is seen as an expert
- 98.2% say leadership expertise affects purchasing decisions
- 85.9% would pay at least 2x more to work with a leader in their space

The top 1% in every industry are exploiting this.

Over the last few years, I’ve even used it to:

- help 350+ execs build their brands
- generate 100M+ views
- drive £10M+ in pipeline

And I’ve seen the same patterns again and again.

There are 5 trends the top 1% of industry leaders are using to dominate 2026.

I’m breaking all of them down in a new live training:

“The 2026 Personal Brand Playbook: How To Build A $1M Personal Brand.”

If you want your reputation to do more of the heavy lifting…

Join the live training here: https://lnkd.in/e6ZKYnmB

Ps. Everyone who attends will get our FULL LinkedIn Profile Optimisation Blueprint for free (usually £79)

For years, 'having a great product' was enough.

Your work would do the talking... That world is closing. Fast.

Here is what the data says:

→ 90% of executives think people trust them
→ 30% of customers actually do

Pwc call it 'The Trust Gap'.

That gap is where deals are won and lost.

Best way to close it? Personal branding.

When I look at the 350+ brands we have built, the ones who win treat personal branding as a tool, not an ego trip.

They follow a simple flow:

1️⃣ Position

You become “THE person for X”, not “Another option”.

→ Clear proof
→ Clear promise
→ Clear point of view

2️⃣ Amplify

You show up where your buyers already spend time.

→ Content that speaks to their pain
→ Opinion, frameworks, predictions
→ It acts like a 24/7 salesperson

3️⃣ Convert

You turn attention into pipeline.

→ Clear, low friction next steps
→ Nurturing focus, not chasing
→ Ecosystems, not funnels

We are in the reputation economy.

So today I'm breaking down the 5 trends that will separate the top 1% of leaders from everyone else in 2026:

→ The rise of the executive personal brand
→ The shift from posting to positioning
→ Fame vs authority
→ Ecosystem-driven growth
→ How AI will make or break your reputation

If you want your face to be the one people trust in 2026, now is the time to build it.

Join us for our workshop later where I have nothing to pitch to you:

https://lnkd.in/e6ZKYnmB

View company: Kurogo - Personal Branding Agency

In this session, Sam Winsbury (Founder of Kurogo) will walk through the 5 Trends That Will Separate the Top 1% of Thought Leaders From Everyone Else in 2026:

✅ The rise of the executive personal brand (and why people trust individuals far more than companies

✅ Why positioning beats posting (and how authority compounds)

✅ Why fame ≠ authority (and how ‘smaller’ brands are winning higher-value deals)

✅ The “ecosystem” strategy replacing funnels (how modern consumers really ‘buy before they pay’)

✅ How to use AI without damaging your reputation

Plus everyone who attends will get 3 exclusive bonuses:

🎁 Bonus 1: Our Complete Guide To Building A Personal Brand in 2026
🎁 Bonus 2: Our Profile Optimisation Checklist For Free (Worth £79)
🎁 Bonus 3: A Free 30 Day Trial To The Thought Leader’s Academy (Worth £97)

This session is designed for:

- Founders, CEOs, and marketing teams
- Consultants, coaches, and professional services
- Anyone whose business depends on trust, credibility, and reputation

If you feel like:

- opportunities are harder to come by
- sales cycles are getting longer
- competition feels louder but not better
- or you’re being overlooked despite having a great offer

This session will give you the roadmap to dominating your industry in 2026. 

🗓️ 5th February 2026
⏰ 18.00 GMT / 12.00 CST

View event: How To Build A $1M Personal Brand In 2026: 5 Trends You Must Know

How To Build A $1M Personal Brand In 2026: 5 Trends You Must Know

Andrew Osborne

Yesterday was my birthday. I celebrated by doing something I had absolutely no business doing.

I ran 27K for my 27th birthday.

I saw a TikTok of someone doing similar and thought "why not"... that was mistake number one

The most I'd ever run before was 13K...

So naturally I thought doubling it for my birthday made total sense 🙂

And not to mention, running in South London is hill after hill after hill... that was mistake number two

Around 19K my thighs completely cramped up.

I stopped. Stretched. Somehow ended up in a shop and spotted fizzy watermelons, the exact ones I used to eat back in secondary school.

And somehow I pushed through and got it done.

I don't know what it is in me but I just can't help pushing the boundary.

Whether that's in work or in life, I always seem to find myself doing more than I probably should.

But I wouldn't have it any other way.

27 feels exciting.

I'm so grateful to God for everything. My career, the people around me, my friends who make all of this so much more meaningful.

Can't wait to see where this year goes.

Here's to 27! 🎂

I've just been hired as a GTME at Notion. Here's the exact flow I'm creating in my first 30 days to drive immediate impact. Let's dive in.

Most PLG-led B2B SaaS companies are ignoring 60-70% of their customers.

SDRs are chasing Tier A accounts, the big enterprise deals, six-figure ACVs.

Makes total sense.

But what about everyone else?

The Tier C accounts. The SMBs paying $500-$5k a year. The ones actively using your product, collaborating with their teams, building workflows.

Nobody's talking to them.

And that's thousands of accounts just sitting there, with minimal engagement

Here's the thing.

You already have the data to engage these accounts at scale.

PostHog is tracking everything.

For a company like Notion, you can see:
• Are they building project management workspaces?
• Using documentation templates consistently?
• Collaborating with 5+ team members?
• Adopting databases?

This isn't just "user logged in." This is context about what they care about.

So here's the motion I'd build:

1. 𝗣𝘂𝗹𝗹 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝘂𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 Segment Tier C accounts by what they're actually doing in the product using PostHog.

2. 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗲𝘀 Documentation template usage? They care about knowledge management. Database usage? They're trying to organize data, maybe replacing spreadsheets.

3. 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 Use ClaudeCode (Anthropic) & Clay to analyze patterns across similar users, then go deep into Reddit threads and community forums.

What are people in that role complaining about? What challenges are they facing?

4. 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗵𝘆𝗽𝗲𝗿-𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 Not "Hey, want a demo?" But "Noticed you're managing projects in Notion—most teams your size hit a wall with task dependencies. Here's how to solve that."

5. 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 Push this into Instantly.ai for email and HeyReach.io for LinkedIn.

The result?

You're engaging 60-70% of your customer base that was getting zero attention.

In 2023, ignoring Tier C made sense.

But today? With such tools at your disposal, you can build insanely personalised and valuable messaging at scale.

There's no excuse to not be doing this anymore.

I recorded a 5-minute walkthrough of this entire system below 👇

Claude Code + Instantly MCP is making me stupidly productive. Here's my exact workflow.

Traditionally, email sequencing tools and client context sat in their own two worlds.

You're constantly jumping from tab to tab. Moving your mouse around more times than you can count.

Copying and pasting from here to there just to get AI outputs you feel comfortable with.

It's clunky, slow and often, it's frustrating.

Here's how I've set things up in my Claude Code project:

1. Client context

Everything from intake forms, sales calls, and conversations lives in the project.
Claude has full visibility into what matters to each prospect.

2. Claude skills

I've got skills built out that contain how I personally like to write copy.

Things as simple as "no em-dashes."

Things as complex as specific quirks I use to make messaging more persuasive.

Loss aversion frameworks. Tone adjustments based on audience.

3. Human-in-the-loop

I don't just let Claude do what it wants.

I'm constantly there going back and forth using Wispr Flow to perfect things exactly how I want them.

4. Right into Instantly.ai

What you're looking at in the terminal below is a snippet of the conversation where Instantly has taken my completed Markdown files and pushed everything directly into a new campaign.

All the variants load automatically. The variable names match my Clay table perfectly 👌🏾

No manual copy-pasting,  missing variables or formatting issues.

I'm generating campaigns faster and of higher quality than I ever have done in the past.

I'd highly encourage you test this out if you haven't already

and if you already have, let me know your workflow!

Shoutout to Aaron. Reid, Hans Dekker and the rest of the folks at Instantly.ai for this great product!

P.S I'm still getting there with my Claude code project structure and haven't yet found the perfect setup, i'm focusing more on getting work done and iterating as I go

I'm sure Jacob Dietle, Mitchell Keller & Joe Rhew have a thing or two to show me 😭

For someone who was told all their life that they're easily distractible, I'd like to say that nowadays I'm a pretty focused person.

Let me explain how I've done this.

I've come to the realisation that systems are way more reliable than willpower.

I try to structure my day to make it as easy as possible for me, someone who can easily get distracted, to actually focus and get stuff done.

I work as early as I can.

Even though these days my work is towards a US time zone, I start my first block early morning UK hours because that's when my brain is primed for work.

No meetings. No comms. Just straight into the hardest tasks.

For me, that's building new campaigns, Clay list building, or writing copy.

I eat the frog first thing. It puts me in a good mood for the rest of the day.

I use a tool called Freedom, which blocks any app that might distract me from 6am to 2pm.

It's great, especially for my laptop

my phone however is never near me when I'm working, it's often in a cupboard somewhere and I can never find it

like right now... I have no idea where exactly it is 🤣

All of this actually starts from the end of the previous workday.

Before I log off, I make sure I know exactly what I'm going to do the next morning and that I'm not blocked on anything.

The last thing I want is to wake up and not know what I need to do, or worse, be waiting on someone else to give me information.

Deep Work by Cal Newport is a great read if you'd like to get more into this!

Interested to know how your work routine differs from mine, let me know! 👇

Competitor ad research just fundamentally changed. If you missed it, you're already behind.

Doing ad research at scale used to be a nightmare.

First, you'd need to find companies to research.
Then you'd have to pull up each company's ad library on LinkedIn, Meta, or Google.

Then manually go through each ad to understand what they're running and how they're positioning it.

Time-consuming doesn't even cover it.

Now extrapolate that across wanting to do research on an entire segment.

Where do you even start?

That's where DiscoLike and Adyntel work amazingly together.

DiscoLike is the superhero that lets you enter a company domain and find organisations incredibly similar.

You can even layer in things like tech stack data to get even more granular.

So if you're targeting Series A companies using Salesforce and running LinkedIn ads, you can filter for exactly that.

Once you've got a really strong similarity list, you throw them all through Adyntel.

Adyntel shows you what ads they're running on LinkedIn and Google, but more importantly, how they're running them.

Are they top-of-funnel focused? Middle? Bottom?

Are they pushing thought leadership content or are they doing a lot of PDF downloads???

Are they running video testimonials or product demos? 🤔

All of this can be analysed for you now at scale, accurately, in a fraction of the time it used to take!

The video below shows you exactly how 👇

Shoutout to George Rekouts at DiscoLike and Emils Veveris at Adyntel for making this so easy to setup!

What's the point of accumulating knowledge if you keep it to yourself? The people who helped me get here didn't gatekeep. I refuse to either.

Ali Yildirim🌲 suggested I take a call with our paid media team on Friday to walk them through how I've been using Claude Code.

And honestly? It was one of the most fulfilling things I've done in a while.

I spend most of my time deep in the GTM engineering side. Building campaigns, researching prospects, writing copy. A completely different world to paid media.

But the workflows I've built, the skills, the research systems, they translate.

And watching the team pick it up and start thinking about how they could apply it to their own work was genuinely exciting.

I think there's something powerful about being the person who bridges gaps in a team.

Not because it's in your job description. But because you see an opportunity to make the people around you better.

Grateful to Alex Fine🌲 and Ali Yildirim🌲 for creating the space for this kind of cross-team sharing. And grateful to the paid team for being so open to it!

Impact over everything, always

"Claude built this." "Claude built that."
But your reply rates haven't moved an inch.

I need to address something I've been seeing constantly the past few weeks.

People are rushing to show off AI automations that, honestly; aren't doing much.

The other day I saw someone post about using OpenClaw to tell them what meetings they had every morning.

My friend... You could have just opened your Google Calendar tab.

Cool demos. Zero impact.

Here's the thing.

In go-to-market, automation doesn't cut it. The space is too competitive for that.

What actually moves numbers is augmentation.

Using AI to do things you genuinely couldn't do before, or couldn't do at the depth required.

Here's what I mean.

I've been building deep research agents that crunch intake forms, kickoff calls, and strategy sessions to run proper research.

They build distinct value prop angles. They mine situations, real observable signals that indicate a prospect has a need right now.

That's not automation. That's augmentation.

Automation replaces a task. Augmentation makes you better at the task.

If you're using AI tools and your results haven't changed, it's worth asking which one you're actually doing 🧏🏾‍♂️

Clay's latest feature has just taken our allbound strategy to a whole new level.
We've been lucky to beta test it. Here's exactly what we're seeing.

We've been testing Clay's Ads Beta integration, and the match rates are at least 2x what we were getting before.

Now, I work on the GTM and outbound side at Understory, so this really caught my attention from an allbound perspective.

The ability to build super targeted lists in Clay and then push them directly into paid channels with crazy match rates changes everything.

Here's what's different.

Instead of uploading just email addresses to LinkedIn and Meta, Clay pushes every relevant field to maximise matches.

First name, last name, company, job title, location, phone, work email, personal email.

More data points. Higher match rates.

We're now consistently hitting 90% on LinkedIn and 50-60% on Meta.

What this means for allbound is massive.

You're building incredibly targeted lists based on your actual ICP.

Tech stack, company size, revenue, job titles, all of it.

Then you're enriching those lists with multiple data sources to fill gaps.

And now, instead of just using those lists for outbound, you can push them directly into your ad accounts and actually reach the same people through paid channels.

The workflow is simple:
1. Build your ICP in Clay
2. Enrich with multiple data sources
3. Push directly to ad accounts
4. Clay syncs updates automatically

No more manual CSV exports. No more stale audience lists.

The audiences stay current because Clay refreshes them as new data comes in.

We're testing this across clients now.

Early signals show lower CPLs and better conversion rates because we're actually reaching the people we built the list for, instead of losing 60% of them to poor match rates.

Exciting times ahead! 🧏🏾‍♂️

My biggest mistake with cold email had nothing to do with the copy I wrote or how I built my list.                                               

 It was deliverability.

You can spend hours perfecting your messaging.

You can build the most targeted list on the planet. You can personalise down to the tiniest detail.

But if your emails don't land in the inbox, none of it matters.

Because let's be honest here... no one's reading their spam folder.

Most teams focus on getting emails. They don't focus on verifying them properly.

So they end up with 5-8% bounce rates. Sometimes higher.

And every bounce damages your sender reputation. Which means fewer emails land. Which means less pipeline.

It's a death spiral. Ouch..

Now here's what we do at Understory.We waterfall email enrichment using multiple providers in Clay.

But there's a reason Icypeas is usually first in that waterfall.

Two reasons, actually:
→ Cost. Sometimes 2x cheaper than other providers.
→ Accuracy. Bounce rates consistently stay under 2%. Sometimes even lower.

That 1-2% difference might not sound like much.

But when you're sending at scale, it's the difference between maintaining a healthy domain and getting blacklisted.

Your sender reputation is everything in cold email.

Protect it! 🛡️

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The Battle

Sam G. Winsbury

Andrew Osborne

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The Battle

Sam G. Winsbury

Andrew Osborne

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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);}Sam G. Winsbury's LinkedIn Performance

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