#70: Allison Whalen - This CEO Crushes It On LinkedIn & Is Building Her Founder Brand To Grow Revenue

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Yep. Alison Whelan. I am the co founder and CEO of Parentally. We help employees go on parental leave, and we're focused on the career impacts of that. So we have a career coaching program. We take people three months before they go on leave, through three months back at work, and we're making sure that that time they spend away from work doesn't end up backfiring.

And can you give me some context about the company today? Like, how big is the company? How many employees? Where are you based? Anything you can share?

Yeah. So we're a pretty small company, actually. I ran the business almost like a solopreneur for about two years with a lot of coaches who are contractors. Now, today we have about 10 employees, and we're fully remote. I'm in Minneapolis, and everyone else is all over the place. So first phase of the business was very much, I would say, sort of what you're doing a little bit, but, you know, you're doing it much better than I was doing it for the first two years. And then we sort of transitioned into a little bit of a faster scale mode.

How did you get into this, this challenge? It's an interesting one. I have two children. I've seen a lot of different perspectives about parental leave. It seems like this is a personal cause to you, and I'm not even a cause. I mean, it's part of your life. But a lot of people that are listening will be going through this or have gone through this or have friends or family. So what was the thing that led you? Because you were doing enterprise, you're a VP of Enterprise Sales. You weren't like a tech. You didn't grow up coding and were like, I'm going to go start a tech company or whatever one day. How did you get here? No.

And in fact, the story I told myself was, I never want to be a founder. I want to be a number two. I want to support founders. Then I had a child, so I was Working in sales. I was pregnant, and it was the first time in my entire life that all of a sudden, I became insecure. And I thought, how in the world am I going to continue this trajectory? How am I going to work like this and be successful once I have another human? And I thought, is this normal? Is this what everyone's worried about is they're expecting their first child? And I looked around. I couldn't find any resources, couldn't find mentors, couldn't find examples of transitioning from childless to having a child and what that experience would look like as it impacts your career. I had plenty of health care resources, parenting, mental health, all of that stuff, but no one was talking about the career implications of this. So I went on leave, came back after three months, and I just could not believe how bad the experience was from a career perspective. It was just like, you know, the company was trying to be really supportive. They promoted me, threw me more money. They were very nice about my compensation plan while I was out because we hadn't navigated that before. They were all trying to do the right thing, and yet I walked back in. So many decisions were made without my input. I sort of got unintentionally pushed aside from some of the leadership things that I was involved in. My team was upset, lots of problems thrown at my feet, and it was like, thank goodness you're back. Like, let's get into it. And it was just such a bad experience that I thought, why are we asking where all the women are in leadership when every time they have a child, they take time away? And it's like, research shows this is the moment where their career starts to sort of falter.

Yeah.

So, you know, I could talk about this for hours, but that was really a shocking experience to me. And the last thing I'll say about it is it didn't seem like it was the inevitable. Oh, it just has to be this way. Like, in hindsight, having gone through it, I was like, there are 50 things that I should have done that I wish someone would have told me that my manager could have done. And so that was really how we started this business. And we're like, all right, well, no one's focused on this. We're going to do this very specific thing. We're going to teach managers and employees how to set up parental leave for success and how to return stronger than they were before.

All right, So I want to unpack some of that in a little bit. But it's crazy what you said, because it's not and you didn't even in all that, you said you only talked about the internal company things. Right. Like decisions being made at the company. Like, never mind the fact that your body just went through the biggest trauma that you could possibly have. To even be up and walking and moving after three months is like a heroic feat for most people that give birth. And you're on three hours of the worst sleep. There's just so many different factors. And so like, yeah, your team is asking all these questions. You're like, how am I going to get on a call at 9 o' clock when I've just been up? And you, you know, you gotta do all the other things that, that happen as a new mom. Like that's a whole other factor to this, which I, you know, I didn't see until we had kids.

Of course. Totally. And honestly, I think part of why I don't even talk about that is, I don't know, maybe it's sort of like I don't want to introduce this bias, you know, to companies to think about like, oh, maybe they are hurting a little bit and they're not like ready to come back. Because I want, when I talk to the HR buyers, I want them to focus on how do we create the infrastructure at the organization to support this. And if I'm being honest, all of our clients offer usually four months, if not five or six months. So I am living in this very privileged world with the people who buy our programming that for the most part a lot of the parents do have a lot of those resources and they have more time. But you're totally right, I mean, for the vast majority of the United States. I was in an Uber the other day and the woman said, I have a two month. The Uber driver said, I have a two month old at home and he's a preemie. And I thought, how are you even here?

Right. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, yeah, we're in a very privileged bubble talking about, you know, most tech companies or people are listening to this are at companies that have.

Right.

That A, have leave and B, it's. The minimum is usually three months. But even in this world, three months feels like nothing. But compared to, you know, maybe like a service worker or a gig type worker or more traditional kind of blue collar ish jobs. Yeah, like you're lucky to even have a couple weeks and you're not going to get paid for that.

Yeah, totally. I know. But yeah, I mean, it's a fair point. I think the other thing we see a lot is that parents will come back. I should say specifically, mothers will come back and they'll have this lack of confidence. And I think a lot of that is driven by the exhaustion and the physical. You know, it's like exactly what you're describing of you can barely function.

Yeah. Like, what day is it? I have no. Am I supposed to give a pipeline update in 20 minutes? Like, I have no idea.

Yeah. And it does take a long time. I'm almost seven months postpartum right now with my third and absolute final child. We will not be doing this again. And if I'm being totally honest, I did not really feel. I didn't feel okay until about six months, even though I came back much earlier than that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot. It can be different. Right. There's just so many things happening, and I'm sure every child has been different, and so it's a different experience every single time. All right, so let's talk about starting the company, because one of the reasons that we want to have you on the podcast is you've done a great job of telling your story and making the story center of what you do, and you subscribe to the founder brand theory of telling your story, and you kind of transitioned from somebody who has more of a sales background into now you're the face and the. The chief marketer of your own company. I'd love to try to dive into, like, how you started to bring marketing into your company and what you did.

Yeah. I love your book. First of all, we started. I should say I started with some of the concepts before I read your book, and then once I read your book, we've actually spent a lot of time sort of systematizing things. So when we first started, it was my co founder and I. We were both working full time in other jobs. This was sort of like a side project. And then I went all in. And I come from traditional sales, so that's how I started. And that's all I did for, like, six months. And then I actually met with my former boss who is now at Refine Labs. She's their coo. And she was the first person that just said, you are never going to make it unless you get on LinkedIn. You've got to be on LinkedIn. You've got to be posting. And I was like, oh, like, my first career was in finance, where your biggest nightmare is having any publicity whatsoever. And so that was sort of ingrained in me from a really young age of, like, I want to be public. I did not like social media. The idea just made me terrified.

What's her name?

Megan Bowen.

Okay, cool. I've heard of that. And so why did she say LinkedIn not, oh, you need to start a newsletter, you need to start a podcast, you need to go on YouTube. Like, why did she say LinkedIn now?

I don't know. And I feel like I read too much of what you say, that I'm just going to regurgitate what you said and I'm going to get you and her.

But I'm trying to lead. This is it. I'm trying to lead the way. There's places where I try to lead the witness. So it's okay.

Well, she was like, look, the future of B2B sales is LinkedIn selling. It's not what you know, it's not what you've been doing. And she pointed to their success and how they've driven basically all of their business through posting on LinkedIn. And she broke it down really tactically for me. She said, you've got to be connecting with X number of people per week. You've got to be posting at least. She said, start once a week, then up it to twice, then up to three times. You've got to get comfortable, find your voice. And at the time, I was postpartum immediately. It was like my second child was a month old, so I was doing nothing. So I literally would just sit on my phone and connect with people while I'm nursing my baby. And she warned me, she said, it takes time. And, you know, again, coming from sales, you're like, what are the metrics and how is it going to translate? And said, no, this is going to take a lot, a lot of time and you have to be consistent. Fast forward. I mean, I do now I post three times a week, if not four or five. And I don't know exactly when the tipping point was, but when I read your book and then I did hire a head of marketing, I brought in a few other folks on the growth side and we started to talk about how we do need to lean into the founder brand. We need to have me telling my story. Because especially when we're talking about something that is different and it's like a newer category, there aren't other companies that do what we do. You can't just go out even and sort of preach the problem all the time. It has to be about me and it has to get people, but it's not really about me. It's about what I represent. So how do I go out and tell my stories that people can resonate with that and realize, oh, wow, that's exactly how I felt, and I can lead them to draw those connection points. And it's just, you know, it's been a long time coming of me getting comfortable doing that, because I think, especially people who come from sales, it's like, really, I'm going to spend all this time and I don't see the leads coming in. You know, I don't know.

I would say that, like, it depends on who you're talking to, because I know many salespeople who. LinkedIn is, like, the only thing. It's the only thing worth focusing on. I think what you're doing is just different. You're taking it from a content standpoint as opposed to, like, Connect and, you know, Sales Navigator. Send.

Well, that's true.

Send a message or something.

Right? Exactly. And now I think what's fun about this is it's. For me, when I realized this is working is when I had a meeting with one of the largest companies in the world. And the guy shows up at the meeting and he starts talking about what I had been posting on LinkedIn.

It's amazing.

Blew my mind. And he goes, so excited to meet you.

And I'm like, and did you know you were connected? Did you know, like, you two were connected? Like, did you connect with him?

I didn't realize it, but I had, because this is our system.

Yeah, I love that. So this is such a smart move. And this is why, like, the way that you should use LinkedIn has changed. This is like, I would make a list of a hundred target accounts or 500 target accounts, or, like, you don't even have to have. You can have a system and. And have an actual spreadsheet and have your. But like. Or, like, if you just use your brain and you're saying, and you had, like, one tenth of a brain because you're sitting on the couch, like, while nursing your child, like, scrolling on LinkedIn, right? And you can just kind of really quickly see as you're scrolling, like, oh, that person looks interesting. Like, they might be in my market. Connect, connect, connect. And it's not LinkedIn of five, 10 years ago now, where you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Allison Whalen. Who the heck is this? I'm not going to accept it. Like, I see Alison Whalen, co founder and CEO at Parentally. She went to Northwestern, she went to Wharton. This woman seems to know her except. Right. And so, like, you're going this Is why especially it's powerful from the founder CEO. If I see somebody's title that's like sales outreach or SDR or bdr, like I know that I'm not. If I accept that request, I'm probably going to get a sales pitch. But now what that person has done is they've opted in to see your content. And so the reason this guy saw your stuff was you didn't cold message him. Like at some point you connected. Now all of a sudden, guess what shows up in your feed. And so like, we used to do this when I was at a company drift a couple years ago, we used to do this every day. We'd be on LinkedIn proactively connecting with people that we want to reach out to. No ask, just can you connect? And I found that like 8, 8 out of 10 people are going to accept the connection because we kind of just blindly do it if it's someone that looks like they're interesting. And all of a sudden now those people are seeing my stuff.

Yep. And the old me would have sent a connection request and asked for a meeting because that's, you know, what I had been trained in. And so you're totally right now. And the other thing that works in our favor is now I'm connected to so many HR leaders that every time I ask for a connection, they see that we've got 89 mutual connections. They always accept, oh, this must be a person. And now, of course, I do know these people, but in the earlier days I didn't. But I'm also not bugging them. And what's been really cool to see is it's becoming more of a flywheel now. So now, because I do actually think, and this is a little egotistical, I think the content that we're posting is good, is very helpful, is stuff that are the people I want to read are getting value out of. Now there are other people posting about me and saying everyone in HR who's interested about X should go follow her. And so I can see how I'm doing the same things that I did a year ago, but it's way more powerful, you know, and the more time you get, the more. So I don't know. And it has felt very unnatural to me. It took me a long time to figure out my voice. And there was also a period of, I would say, like six months where I would obsess over everything before I post it. Because the topic of parental leave is also controversial. Even the language you use is this gendered or not Right. Are we being inclusive to adoptive parents? And so I've struggled to figure out that comfort level.

Yeah, it's right. You're right. At intersection of, like, all the things that you can say and offend almost everybody.

Yeah.

In some way or another.

Yeah. And I think, like, you know, we'll post things, and sometimes it's slightly controversial, and that's intentional because people are doing this the wrong way. And so we're trying to do that. But then I'll get real upset if people understand, you know? And so it's taken me a while to figure out, when you put yourself out there publicly saying somewhat intentionally controversial things, how do you navigate that?

Here's a good one. Good morning to everyone except the companies that claim they offer paid parental leave, but actually just require you to use up all your PTO and then take the rest of your leave unpaid. That is not parental leave. My sister just went through this. I know this well.

And sometimes I post about things that I know our clients are doing wrong.

This is an amazing comment, by the way. Somebody wrote, yes. And it's not a vacation. Especially when someone had their body cut open. C section. And they're waking up every one and a half hours to feed a baby. Like, yeah, no kidding. That's a great way to put it.

I know. Yeah. And so sometimes I'll post things where I'm like, I know that our clients are doing this. And so if they read this, I don't know. It's. It's tough. And so I'm.

So you gotta be. Honestly, I think this is great. You gotta stay in this lane. You don't always have to do it, but controversy. And I don't mean you have to be a clickbait troll. You don't have to be extremists on one side of the political spectrum or the other. But definitive perspectives are what is going to get engagement. And ultimately, yes, this is somewhat of a game. You are trying to get engaged. You don't. Nobody wants to admit this, but this is a game. This is a video game. You are trying to get comments and engagement to bring more attention to the company that you're building and the cause that you're supporting. And so I think you got to have. And you can see it if I go through your posts, like some of the stuff, like, you know, when you just kind of post something regular, like, it gets low engagement. That happens to me all the time. I did it intentionally the other day. I took a. I was just in a good mood and I was on a webinar that we did for exit five and we had 900 people registered and I was really proud of it. I just took a screenshot and I posted on LinkedIn and I have 155,000 followers and the post had like 12 likes and three comments. And it was like, it's because nobody cares about that, right? Nobody's interested in that. But then if I go through your stuff, right, like every job offer should explicitly include the company's paid paternal leave policy. Do not make the applicant ask for this information. Would you ever give out a job offer without talking about health insurance? No. And like you go on and like the way that you write, it's very clear that you know your stuff and you have an opinion on that stuff. And I think that's tie this back to like the founder brand concept from the beginning. So often the found a company founder starts a company for the reason you started it, right? You, you were an executive, you didn't like the parental leave policy. You felt like it was like a career limiting move for you to have a child. You thought that that was bullshit and so you went and go start your own company about it. So often the founder story is rooted with something like that. And that is why, like the founder story is the perfect ingredient for marketing. And it's, it's cool to see how you've, you've embraced this. By the way, you're going on CNBC in an hour and a half today. This is good. We'll get you warmed up. We'll get you warmed up.

That's how we got that.

How'd you get it? LinkedIn.

Of course we posted something. They saw it and it had nothing to do with my company, nothing to do with me. Actually. It was about, I was again back to storytelling, telling a story about women who are getting laid off while pregnant in this environment. And what does that mean in a country where they now cannot get another job and get paid leave? You know, so it was, it was actually a very special specific posts that had nothing to do with us. They saw it, they came to us and they wanted to do a story. And then they said, well, what is it that you do? And I didn't even really pitch them because I'm thinking, no.

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Oh, they want to do this other story. And so I kind of gave them an overview and they were like, ooh, that's really interesting. So again it's all back to LinkedIn. And you're right, I think the expertise and if anything, and actually I had a question for you when you were talking about this and you said you posted this thing and you didn't get a lot of engagement, Are you at the stage where you know whether it will be good or not in terms of engagement? Because we cannot figure it out. Really?

Yes. Yes and no. Yes, in that the sense of, like, I have a feeling like, if I'm writing something, I can do it in a way where I know it's gonna get a response. Like, okay, for example. Well, there's also, like a kind of, like, an intersection of, like, there's things that are in, like, the bucket of topics. And so, like, for example, if you told me, hey, I want to write a post about how it's bullshit that companies claim they offer paid parental leave, but it's really just using your pto, that's going to be a post that gets lots of engagement unless you write terrible copy. You wrote, like, that one, that post that you wrote. I'm looking at it. It's like four lines, right? And it looks like, you know, you didn't need your degree from Northwestern to.

Be able to write.

To write that, like, it's just very simple language, right. Because that's a good topic. And so I think a lot of times, like, the topic and point of view matters more than, like, the execution of the writing. And I would say most often, yes, I could figure it out. Or, like, if I want. If, like, if you and me on this call for an exercise, if I was like, oh, I'm gonna write. Let's write a viral post. Like, I can't guarantee that it's gonna go viral, but I could, like, think through some topics that we could pick that would, like, probably be controversial or get people fired up or bring in a lot of comments and. But there are still. I would say, still, there's some times where I'm like, man, that was like, I actually thoughtfully wrote a lot of that. Like, I usually just kind of fire stuff off the cuff. But, like, sometimes I'm like, I'm going to sit down and write this and then post it, and it does nothing. Yeah, there's a little bit of that. And I think sometimes it's just what else is going on in the newsfeed and what else is there? So it's not always perfect, but I do think, like, from a topic standpoint, I can often. I often have a feeling of which posts are going to get more engagement than others.

Yeah, I think we've gotten a little bit better, but we've been surprised. Like, we went back and looked over my posts and the top performing posts. One of them, I was shocked. I think it still might be our top performing post in terms of impressions and maybe even comments. It was like the three things every manager should do to support parental leave, which to me is kind of boring. This is the world I live in. It's so obvious.

But that's like right in the crosshairs of like what's good on like LinkedIn. Things that work really well on LinkedIn are about like careers, leadership, management. You have a list, you have three things. It's about a topic that's widely applicable to a lot of people and can be controversial, which is parental leave. You're saying that the way that it's usually done is wrong. Like the ingredients are right for there. And again this is where you being the founder, like this is in your head. This feels obvious, this feels easy. This is like a no brainer. Those are oftentimes the best things to write to your question about like which things don't get a response. Sometimes when you go like too deep and you're like, oh, I have this great thought it might be too like abstract or like too deep for people to get. But that thing you wrote is, is perfect. Yeah, you content gets a lot of engagement though. I think this is to be A lot of people ask like hey, who's a good CEO to go follow. I think we'll put your LinkedIn in the show notes and everything. But I think yeah, you're like great.

This is all pants.

But I think like, you know, your average post is like 17 Comments 10 Comments 28 Comments 12 this is real engagement and you're posting real stuff. I think the mistake that I see a lot of founders or people just make in general with LinkedIn is they kind of only do the like, hey, we have this webinar tomorrow thing. And you know, I feel this firsthand, which is like I do have stuff that I need to promote on my LinkedIn sometimes, whether it's for a sponsor, whether it's for an Exit 5 thing. And if I like what do what you've done, which is like write some original, like if 8 out of 10 things are like original thought, original content for me. And then like the ninth thing is like, hey, sign up for our thing next week. That always performs way better than if I only do promotion, promotion, promotion. And so like you have a good balance of like not promoting the company, but like clearly this is your company. These all things that are going to increase the brand affinity and reputation of parentally as you go.

Yeah. So how we do this is because LinkedIn has been so helpful to us. I write in like a writing block where I'll write like 15 different posts. Now I'm taking notes all the time, as, you know, kind of like what you said off the cuff. If I see something, I'll take notes for myself. I sit down, I write, and then I try to bucket them so that when I'm posting on LinkedIn, it is more intentional. And it's like, am I educating about the problem? Am I sharing a story from new mother that's interesting? Am I giving a tip or trick? Or am I talking about parentally? And so we're trying to make sure that it's not overwhelmingly one style because, you know, you want to keep it interesting and varied. But I don't know if that's the best practice to be that, you know, scientific when really, like, I kind of know when I'm going to post something that's going to get engaged in it, but not really.

No, I think you're doing it right. I think it doesn't have to be that scientific. I think just roughly, directionally, you look at the stuff you're posting and you're like, yeah, this is not like, of the last 10 posts, I've really only like, directly promoted the company once or twice. Yeah, it's great. It's all going to be promoting the company because you're talking about parental leave, you're talking about your opinions about work and management and parental leave. And so I think you get those. And then like, yeah, you know, you posted this CNBC thing today and like, that's not going to have 100 comments because you're posting like, hey, look, I'm going on CNBC. But I do think that LinkedIn to me is like a mini PR machine. And I think sometimes you have to do some things for like, signaling and Right. The goal of posting that you're going to be on CNBC today and this is not you saying, this is me. Why I would do it is not to dry. Like, are you going to drive like seven new viewers to CNBC segment? Like, they don't need your help. It's to be like, hey, look, I'm legit. I'm going on cnbc. And same way that like a CMO mentor friend of mine told me, he's like, awards don't really matter, but, like, I'll win every award that you want to nominate my company for because, like, they're all like, little PR Hits and I think every now and then it's like the same reason. Why did I take a screenshot during the webinar? Because, like, strategically I wanted to signal to some people that, hey, that thing Dave's building with Exit 5 is like, it's pretty damn legit. And like, I got no comments on that post. But that's okay. I'm still going to do that anyway. But if you did that every time, you wouldn't have an audience. Yeah, I want to go back to the feeling of, you know, I hear from a lot of marketers or other people and this is great because we're doing this podcast. Like every marketing person is going to send this to their CEO or founder and be like, you need to listen to this. You need to step your LinkedIn game up. As someone who comes from. You have a business school background, you have a sales and kind of finance world background, it can be easy to be like, I got to get to. We're going to get to 15,000 followers and this many people are going to visit our website. And when did you know this was working and how did you know? And what advice would you give for others? Like, what was the moment that you kind of felt this? Or it doesn't even have to be a specific moment, but like, it's a combination of like, all of a sudden you're getting conviction.

How do we gain conviction that this is work? Because it's an investment of time for sure.

Which, by the way, just to hear you say that out loud, like, you're damn right it is like huge. It's one of my top founders say that to me. Like, it's like. And I'm like, okay, but you don't say that about recruiting or finance or HR like it is. But you're now seeing pretty significant benefits from this as a channel.

Yeah.

And you're not having to spend on it other than your time.

I think when I realized this isn't like a specific moment in time, but I realized that almost every sales meeting I had, people would mention something that I had posted which was mind blowing to me. And maybe it wasn't the first meeting, but I, you know, connect with them afterwards and then in a follow up meeting they're mentioning it. And I think also this is like a really silly answer. My friends started commenting on it and they were, it's like, even friends that are never on LinkedIn. I have a friend who's a teacher, she never comments. She doesn't know how to use LinkedIn, no offense, you know, who you are. But she started commenting on it and she said, I love it. I love reading what you put there. It's so interesting. And I thought, you're not even my target market. There were enough of those situations where I thought, okay, people are listening. And then we started to talk at our company about the lurkers. People who never comment. They never like the posts. And then you'll meet with them. Maybe it's a friend, maybe it's a prospect, maybe it's a client. And you post something for an event and they're the first one to sign up and you're like, what? You've been watching this the whole time? You know, I just think that we saw enough of that. We have gone completely all in on LinkedIn. That is, we think, and we think we can do even better. We're just in the early stages now, but I'm really excited about it. And the last thing I'll say is I really enjoy it. I love talking about this topic and I like to write, so it's fun and it makes it.

Yeah, I think you could pretty. I don't want to say easy. Easy is the wrong word, but I think given all of the ingredients of your story and your company and the niche that you're in and where you're focused on and what content does well or not does well on LinkedIn, I think you could pretty, pretty, a year from now, have a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn. No problem.

Well, I'll put that goal on our head of marketing and say, here's. No, just kidding. Yeah, sorry.

Sorry for everyone who's listening.

No, I think the topic lends itself very, very nicely and our position on it is differentiated. And so, I mean, I've never run out of things to say in the, what, two plus years that I've been actively posting on LinkedIn every week. I just haven't run out of things to say.

Let's talk about your writing process. So you mentioned you block off time to write. Tell me more about that.

I block off about two hours on a Friday, probably like every other Friday. And I'll just try to go through as many posts as I can. So I'll go on my phone, I'll find my notes, and I'll flesh out all of those posts at that point in time.

And are you writing in like a Google? Like, do you open a Google Doc and you're writing.

We have a master Google Doc. I write them. Then I invite our marketing person, our head of marketing. She comes in and she edits them for me and then I move them out and we save them so someday I can write a book about whatever we were saving. All the posts in a different Google Doc after I post them. And we use that for onboarding new employees. You want to learn about the company brand? You want to become an expert on parental leave? Go read all of the posts that I've ever made on LinkedIn. It's the best way to get up to see speed as an expert in this space, which is means that I'm doing a good job posting if we use it as training for new hires. We debated a lot and actually a lot of founders ask me, should they get a ghost writer. I'd be curious. I mean, I, I can guess what you'll say about this, but I feel so strongly that I need to write these myself. Love the editing support, very helpful. But I'm always the one coming up with all of the posts.

Yeah, I would agree with you. I think maybe ghostwriter is not the word. I think, like, I could help you make these much better. And I don't mean that they're bad. I just mean, like, I can't channel your voice. I could. Same way you might give them to your marketing person. Like, I think it's like a trainer or a coach. It's like you're going to do the work, but like I'm going to help you make it 10 times better. But yeah, I think 101 million, 100%. As my daughter would say, a gazillion billion infinity percentage. It's got to come from you. And I can see it. I know which founders have ghostwriters on LinkedIn. And I know because it's very generic, it's very vanilla, or the founder on the other end has just like kind of given up. And it's like, it's because you have a fire and because you're writing it every week. If you had that doc and you gave it to me, I could ghostwrite for you and we could make it great. It's because you have the thoughts. And this goes back to founder, brand. Right? Which is like, because you have your finger on the pulse of the industry, what your customers are telling you, what your friends are telling you, what's interesting in all these meetings, what's interesting with policy. And you've been through it. No ghostwriter is going to ever be able to replace that. They can help you channel it. But I think it's working so well because you are doing it. More questions on the writing process. So you write in a Google Doc, you have notes on your phone. So tell me about, like, how you're using that. Are you always filling it up with ideas? If you have them and you know you're saving them? Like, that's what I do. Like, I, oh, I have an idea on this call and I'll write it down and I'll put in my notes. And then, like, when I go to write content for LinkedIn, I'll go and be like, oh, yeah, that was a great idea. Because sometimes you want to just go post it right now, but you can't. So how does the notes fit in your writing process?

That's exactly how I do it. I used to say, oh, I've got a post today. Look at my note. Try and write something. It doesn't work. Writer's block, you know it. And then I'm pulling the marketing person away and all the switching costs. It's just, it doesn't work. If you want to do this for real as, like, a real business strategy, I think. But sometimes I will come up with an idea and I'll be like, I need to flesh it out more. And so I'll, like, type it into my notes app. But a lot of my ideas come from sales meetings. It's almost always someone says something that infuriates me or inspires me and I'll just take a note about it. But I don't usually flesh it out in a real. Because there's like, one aspect, which is how do I keep the note to myself of what I thought was interesting or controversial? But, like, as you know, you have to change the style. Like, it takes a decent amount of time to put it in a style that will perform well on LinkedIn and that people will understand. And so that I don't do real time, that I save for my writing block.

And do you do that or your marketing person does that?

I do it. I would say I do 80% and she does 20%. So I do take it pretty far. Fleshing it out.

Who wrote this one?

I'm scared.

Ah, it says, ah, fmla, making it illegal. Like, did you write that? Making it illegal so. Cause, like, you have a tone. This is why, like a ghostwriter. Not. This is your voice. I can hear it now that I'm talking to you on the podcast. Like, you had to have written that.

Yeah, that post, I think. What do I say after that? It was something real.

Making it illegal for you to fire someone 12 weeks after they have a child, but it's only illegal to fire them if they have worked for you for 12 plus months, and only if you're a big company. And even then, only if you're in a city where you have a lot of employees, and only if they have worked full time during the past year. Otherwise, by all means, fire them if you wish. Totally legal. But regardless, you don't have to pay them anything at all. Happy 30th anniversary. To the most basic, tiniest fraction of, again, unpaid support we could possibly manage to provide in the USA to just a small group of caregivers. You're good at this. This is really good. I just like that one.

So that's our Jenna. Our head of marketing says if she could just get me angry every time I sit down. Right. Because this I wrote in one sitting. I can't remember what happened, but I was so mad and I just wrote this. And then I sent it to Jenna because I don't post anything without her approval. And I said, oh, is this too. And she was like, I love it. Bring Sassy Allison back. So sometimes I will go 100%, but most of the time she does come in and she's really good at helping things that sound so basic, but, like, the spacing and splitting up into, you know, making it more readable. And she's really great at making it digestible.

That's a huge thing that people underrate is the how much formatting and readability.

Yeah.

Matters. I even make the mistake sometimes, too. I'm just like, I'm in a mood and I just rant about something. If I just. So I, like, reformatted that, it would have done way better.

Exactly. And I think that's for. Because so many founders ask me this too, of, like, how do I do what you're doing? And they tend to want to figure out how do I minimize the amount of time that I spend on this? Because it's so much work. And to your point, like, yeah, it is. And what I always tell them is having someone to make it sound better, make it more readable. Digestible is helpful, but, like, yeah, the ideas have to come from your experience.

Yeah. I think I'm going to write a really clickbaity title for this episode. Like, as I'm writing this founder's crushing it on LinkedIn. Here's why something like that.

Awesome. I'm gonna. Yeah, I would love that.

All right.

In your notes, you all have great prep for this, which is awesome. You wanted to talk about podcasts, and I'm down if you want to ask me some questions. I'm happy to give you the mic on that if you want.

Okay, great. So we've followed your framework. I don't know if framework is the right word from found a brand or if it's more concepts, but we've done almost everything that you've described in your book. Trying to get better at some things, but we've at least attacked them. The one thing we haven't done is we have not started a podcast. And I was very anti for a while because I thought we have such a specific niche, parental leave, which, as your book says, like, having that specificity and the vulnerability actually makes the storytelling better and whatnot. And so fully subscribe to that. The one thing I wonder is how do you translate that into. Okay, let me ask another question, which I'm sure I know the answer. Do you really think that everyone should then start a podcast or are there certain niches where it's, like, not worth your time?

I think there's probably certain niches where it's not worth your time, but I think you could change the word podcast to any other channel. And like, the reason that I mention in the book and, or just if I were to, like, look at your business or like, your marketing and let's say, like, the majority of what you're doing right now is LinkedIn, right? Like, to me, going through your LinkedIn for 30 minutes on this podcast today, like, there's something here. Check the box of like, you have content market fit on this topic. And so, like, in the book, I talk about a podcast because I. And I don't know hearing you speak, I think you're a great speaker. You're fired up about this topic. I think you have a lot of potential as somebody to be a voice of this thing. Like, if I was the marketer, like, I'm thinking about the ingredients. Like, well, she's already got the reaction on this topic. Like, if you were posting all this stuff on LinkedIn and it's going nowhere, then I'm not thinking about podcasts. But between that and your voice and your clear point of view, like, I love the idea because I think at least what I've seen with social media is, like, once you kind of prove it out on like Twitter or LinkedIn, it does translate. It's a great indicator to then go and do more another channel. And so I think as you continue to build your business, I would just be thinking about, like, how can I own this audience, right? And so, like, LinkedIn is great, but I want to, like, now step two is like, and I Could have rewritten the book in this way. It's like, now, how do you transfer the audience? And so maybe it's a newsletter, maybe it's a community. Maybe it's, you know, for HR pros or something like that. Maybe it is a podcast. And so I don't think it has to be a podcast. That's the first part of it. But I would also say that it does kind of sound like on paper, that you have the right ingredients for a podcast.

Yeah. As so for you, you have kids, what would make you listen to my podcast? Or would you not? Because you're not my target audience. So it doesn't matter.

Probably in today's form, I just wouldn't, you know, there's nothing in my life that I have to think or worry about a parental leave policy anymore.

Yeah. The reason I ask that is we debate a lot. Who is our audience? Is it the B2B HR buyer, or is it working parents more broadly, who can then advocate for us, bring us into these companies, et cetera, et cetera. And so when we think about a podcast, like, who should we be thinking of?

So that's a sick idea. Like, I think there's two. I think there's different ideas. There's like, the narrow approach, which is like, you could do the podcast for people who work in HR and talk only about parental leave policy, but you also have a very relatable and widely applicable story. And so in that way, it's like they're going to listen to your podcast, they're going to know who you are when it comes time to look at their benefits. They're going to buy parentally. Right. And use it at their company. Simple Playbook. Right. That's easy. Interesting. You kind of have that mass appeal angle, too, which is like, what if you didn't maybe don't create the parental leave policy podcast? And I don't know enough about this space. But that's, you know, as one example, create the Working Parents podcast. Right? And you interview, you know, you tell interesting stories of people who had kids or having kids and, like, still grew their careers and were successful at work. And that show happens to be put on biparentally. And maybe you don't even have to be involved in the show. Maybe somebody else on the team produces it. And it's like part of this umbrella. And the way that you amplify, you know, the way that you're involved in the show is you help amplify it. And your LinkedIn is what helps figure out, like, how you get good guests and how you promote each episode and how you grow the audience. Like it's a different. You see where I'm going with it's like it's a different playbook than the other one where like, it's almost like there could be a YouTube series where it's a 10 episode show where you're just interviewing all successful women or parents or whoever who have had children and grown their careers. Has nothing to do about the product that you sell. But it does because you're talking to them about, about how they grew their career. And now you've created this like, magnet, this resource for people like, oh, I'm interested in like, how do I have kids and continue to grow my career? And so I'm going to listen to this podcast. Oh, it happens to be created by this company that does parental leave. Oh, cool. Oh, and I like the CEO. She's got good stuff to say on LinkedIn and I start following her. That's how I would think about, like how they're different.

Yeah, I think that's really smart. And that's where I lean towards is originally I think I was too siloed thinking we are a parental leave company and you know, that's all we do and that's what I post about. But who's going to want to actually listen to a podcast? And I think there has been this natural progression of now having so many parents follow us that are just allies, they're done having kids, but they really care about the career success of all parents, not just mothers. And you know, so I do think it is a natural extension. And I love that you're pulling me out of like being the critical person there because I think that's one of the dangers of this strategy. And one thing that we've actually done pretty successfully is Jenna, who's our head of marketing. She didn't really post on LinkedIn until I had my third child. I went out in September and I we said to her, you've got to take over because I'm. And it was kind of a scary moment for her because she's like, she was sort of posting, but not really. She's amazing. Now she posts stuff routinely that gets 3,000, 4,000 likes. I mean, it's really amazing to see. And she has sort of channeled a similar voice. And so a lot of what we're thinking of is how do you take that founder brand but not have maybe the bottleneck for every single thing?

Yeah, it's awesome because now you've built Another voice inside of the company. So now you have both of you. Geez. The more that I talk about this idea out loud, I think you should do it. It just depends on, like, what your goals are. Like, are. It seems to me that, like, if you were like, we want to have 10 new sales meetings this month, which channel should we do? I wouldn't say do that, but this is why I think, like, the LinkedIn stuff is so great. Because just directionally, like, the response to Jenna's stuff, the response to your stuff, People are really passionate about this topic. And there's something interesting there. I would go and look is like, is anybody doing a podcast about how to grow your career after having kids? Or like, there's some topic in there that is applicable to like, and it's like, it's the career podcast for parents or something. And it's like, you talk about all of the things, parental leave, how do you work hours, pickup, drop off, nannies, daycare sickness, all this stuff. You could talk about all that stuff and never talk about your company. And based on the response that you're getting on LinkedIn and your stuff, it's like, I would feel pretty good about going and testing that idea. And that can become like this massive top of the funnel for you.

Yeah. Part of why I like it too. And I don't know if this is good or bad, but a lot of what I do is just like, what sounds fun. That sounds fun. It was a problem for me. I didn't have any role models other than you hear about, you know, the Sheryl Sandbergs. And that's like the only story you hear. You don't hear about the sort of regular ambitious people that have real jobs.

And so she just leaned in and then everything else was fine, right?

Yeah, exactly. And so it's like being able to put more of those sort of stories out.

It feels very between you and Jenna. Like, you could go to Linked. Like, this is why I love testing ideas before I do them. And especially now that you have an audience on social media. You could do this. You could go to LinkedIn tomorrow and you could say, hey, we're thinking about starting a show and we want to interview people who have had children and have managed successfully congr growing your careers. Leave a comment if you'd be willing to be a guest on this show. I almost guarantee you'd have hundreds of comments if you did that.

Yeah. Who's a good example of this? And people are tagging, tagging each other now.

You're like, okay, we haven't done this yet. We're thinking about doing it, but now we got hundreds of people who said, like, oh, I, I'm gonna do this, like, or like, I'm gonna hire someone to work with me on Exit 5. And I've kind of been like half committed to it. I wrote this job description I posted on LinkedIn. I had 600 applicants. So just me doing that has now, like, full bore. Like, I've gotten like, I've had so many amazing people reach out that I didn't even know were interested in looking. And it's like, that has been like a forcing. I could still decide not to do it. Right. But that's been a thing that's forced me to. Like, I've kind of tested this and so I know that I could get somebody great if I wanted to and if I wanted to pay them X and they wanted to do these things. That's another huge benefit of like you having an audience now. It's. You can test that idea without having to go do it.

And we haven't even talked about what you just said, which is like, the recruiting potential from all of the founder brand stuff that we're doing. Every person that we have hired has been through LinkedIn. They've followed us, they're super fans. It's just, it's like the amount of.

Money we save because your, your content, you have a personality and you have a voice in the content. And so, yeah, if I'm following you on LinkedIn, I'm gonna be like, I think I really like this woman. I've never met her in my life, but like, she, she talks real shit and like, she has specific stuff and like, I might want to work with her. Like, I think that is a very, very real benefit of founder brand and just being on LinkedIn beyond. So back to your initial, like, you know, obviously you're over the hurdle now, but the initial objective is like, oh, this takes so much time. Well, here we are an hour into this conversation and we've kind of laid out like four or five different benefits that you get from doing this beyond like likes and comments.

Right? Yeah. And the other thing that we haven't even talked about this is in. Another reason why this is helpful is we use a lot of our business is content. So we are training managers and so sometimes will create LinkedIn posts and we'll realize, oh, we need to integrate that into our manager training, you know, so it's all like, we're constantly trying to figure out how do we make this Authentic and efficient. So if we're going to post something, how do we use it in five different places?

I love this. We could talk for three hours and you just have re fired re energized me about founder, brand and LinkedIn and founders being there. So this is great. I could have, we could have done.

You could hear. I tell people to read your book all the time because there are so many founders in this early stage, you know, pre Seed seed, that they're trying to figure this out. They've been told LinkedIn is the place to be, but they really need to figure out how to execute on it because there are a lot of people that don't post well and it is then a waste of time.

Also I think like the topic and company fit is really matters. If you were, and I don't mean this as a knock, but if you were like another founder doing cloud database software, we could probably make that work. We could find an angle for you to Write about on LinkedIn. But you're just at the crosshairs of such a good content strategy. So I think that also really matters. And I think if I had to pick 10 founders on a list of which business is going to be have a better chance of being successful on LinkedIn, this is a perfect example. Okay, we gotta go. You gotta go. You gotta make sure that you go get some water, some Gatorade, some stretches in. You have CNBC coming up first. Just let CNBC know that this was preempted by the world famous Exit 5 podcast. So Alison Waylon, thank you for doing this. I'll put Allison's LinkedIn. Enjoy all the LinkedIn messages and connections that you'll get from this is my favorite part of doing the show. Check her out. She's the co founder and CEO at Parentally. A lot of people ask who's a great person that I should follow on LinkedIn to show my CEO and founder and you just listen to her talk for an hour. So that's who you should go follow. Thanks for doing this, Alison. I'll see you later.

Great, thank you.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community, a community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 more marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies, companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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