Thought leadership that gets you hired vs. the kind that gets you liked

Two kinds of content, two kinds of response

Scroll through the LinkedIn feed of almost any professional services firm in Atlantic Canada and you will see the same post, over and over, in slightly different clothes. Leadership is about listening. Proud of our team at the fundraiser. Three lessons from twenty years in practice. Each one earns a respectable number of likes, mostly from other professionals and the firm’s own staff.

None of it produces a phone call.

That is not because the content is bad. It is because it is agreeable. It takes no position anyone could disagree with, and it addresses no decision anyone is currently making. The audience nods and moves on. The nod is the like.

The content that gets a firm hired behaves differently. It is narrower, slightly uncomfortable, and timed to something the reader is actually dealing with. It gets fewer likes, often, and more direct messages. It gets forwarded to a business partner with “this is what I was talking about.” It gets mentioned on the intake call.

If your firm is measuring content by the first kind of response, you are optimising for being liked by people who will never hire you.

What a buyer is deciding right now

A business owner does not wake up wanting a lawyer, an accountant or a consultant. They wake up with a decision. Whether to restructure before year end. Whether a contractor is really a contractor. Whether the new provincial rule applies to them. Whether to sell to the kid or to the competitor.

Content that gets you hired meets the reader inside that decision. It is about a specific regulatory change (what it means for owners of this kind of business in this province), a specific risk (the thing that goes wrong, how it goes wrong, what it costs when it does) or a specific cost (what a given kind of engagement typically involves and why, without needing to publish a price list).

The test for any topic is simple: could a reader act on this, or disagree with it, this week? If the answer is no, it is a like post. It may still be worth publishing occasionally, for warmth. It is not thought leadership.

Pick topics from the intake calls

Firms agonise over what to write about and then choose by what the partner finds interesting. The better source is sitting in the intake notes.

Every initial conversation with a prospect contains the question they called about, phrased the way they phrase it, plus the misunderstanding that usually accompanies it. Those are the topics. They are, by definition, what buyers in your market are deciding right now, in their own words.

A practical method:

• Once a month, the partner or a senior associate spends twenty minutes listing the questions new prospects actually asked in the last thirty days. Not the matter type. The question.
• Mark the ones that came up more than once, and the ones where the prospect had it wrong in a way that cost them.
• Each of those is one piece of content: the question, the common misunderstanding, the position the firm takes, and what to do about it.

Topics chosen this way have an unfair advantage. They are timely because the calls are timely. They are specific because the callers were specific. And they are the questions the next prospect will type into a search engine or an AI assistant before they call, which means the content works twice.

Memo, not manifesto

The format matters as much as the topic. Partners, when asked to write, tend to produce one of two things: a cautious summary that says nothing, or a long piece of thinking that tries to say everything. Neither gets read by a business owner on a phone between meetings.

The format that works is the memo. Think of the note you would send to a good client who asked the question over email.

1. The situation, in one or two sentences. What changed, or what the question is.
2. The position. What you think a business in this situation should do, stated plainly. This is the part that gets you hired, because it is the part most firms leave out.
3. Why. The reasoning, briefly. Enough that a smart owner can follow it and a competitor could disagree with it.
4. What it depends on. The two or three facts about the reader’s situation that would change the answer. This is honesty, and it is also the invitation to call.
5. The first step. One concrete thing to do.

Five hundred to eight hundred words. A real byline. A note that it is general information and that the reader should confirm their own situation with the appropriate professional. No preamble about how the business landscape is evolving.

A manifesto tells the reader who you are. A memo tells the reader what to do. Buyers hire the second one.

A cadence a partner can sustain

The most common failure is not quality. It is the third month. The firm launches with enthusiasm, publishes weekly for six weeks, and then a trial or a tax season arrives and the feed goes silent until someone remembers.

Set a cadence that survives the busiest month of the year, not the quietest. For most partners that is one memo a month, written in a single sitting, or dictated to a senior person who drafts it. Twelve pieces a year, every one of them specific and positioned, will outperform fifty pieces of agreeable filler, and it will still be running in year three.

Protect it like a client commitment. Put it in the calendar. If a partner genuinely cannot sustain one piece a month, that partner should not be the firm’s voice; pick someone who can.

One piece, three places

A memo written once should do work in at least three channels, in this order.

LinkedIn first. The memo, or a tightened version of it, published from the partner’s own profile rather than the firm page. The position in the first two lines. If the firm runs promoted posts to a regional audience, this is the post to promote.

Email second. A short note to the firm’s client and contact list, a week later, with the memo and one sentence of context. Existing clients are the best source of referrals, and this reminds them what you think and that you are still thinking.

A webinar or small session quarterly. Every three months, take the three memos that generated the most direct response and run a forty-minute session, online or in a boardroom in Halifax or Fredericton, where the partner walks through them and takes questions. The questions become next quarter’s memos. The attendees become conversations.

None of this requires a content team. It requires one partner, one memo a month, and someone to handle formatting and sending.

Measure by enquiries that mention the content

Likes, impressions and follower counts are what the platforms give you for free, and they measure the wrong thing. What matters is how many enquiries mention the content.

So ask. At intake, alongside “how did you hear about us,” add “did you read or see anything of ours before calling?” Record the answer. Over a year, a firm doing this well will see a steady and growing share of new enquiries that reference a specific memo, a specific session or simply “the partner’s posts.”

Track three things in a simple spreadsheet: direct messages and replies that are from potential clients rather than peers, enquiries that mention content, and engagements that began as one of those enquiries. Compare quarter to quarter. The trend, not the absolute number, tells you whether the programme is working, and it ties the whole effort back to the value of an engagement.

What to do first

Pull the last thirty days of intake notes and list the actual questions prospects asked. Choose the one that came up most. Have the partner write the memo this week, in the five-part format, with a real position in it.

Publish it from the partner’s profile, send it to the client list a week later, and add the intake question so that when someone calls because of it, you will know. One memo, measured honestly, will tell you more about whether this works for your firm than another year of being liked.