STOP Being Your Industry's Best Kept SECRET

Hello, hello, hello, hello. This is Katheline Jean-Pierre, the founder of The Top 5% Method. And today I wanna talk about stop being your industry's best kept secret. What am I talking about? Okay, real talk. I worked at LinkedIn for 3 years, but it's only after I left that I grew 10 times faster, which is crazy. When I started LinkedIn, I had 3,300 followers. And then now I'm getting close to 37,000 followers. But the beauty of it all, it's in the past 8 months I started posting consistently, and that's when I 4 to 5x my growth. And it's not even about the numbers of likes or comments. No, it's about the brand deals. It's about the collaborations. It's about the opportunity of traveling the world, being paid to speak in Europe, in Canada, where I'm from, in the US, and also I went to Africa, which was an incredible experience. So I went— I 10x my follower count, that's number one. Secondly, I became a top 1% global creator per— for Vicon. And then what nobody talks about is that the real breakthrough was not all of these metrics or vanity metrics. It was finally for me to become unleashed and owning my voice. Because could you imagine that I was the corporate perfectionist. I spent most of my career, I mean, spent 10 years at Google, but nobody knows that before Google in Canada, I was in the media, I was in movies, I was everywhere. I hosted my own happy hours. I moved to the US, started working, uh, in corporate in Silicon Valley at Google, and then I was heads down managing portfolios of $40 million, then $80 million, then close to a billion dollars. I was known inside Google. People called me, oh, Kath, what are million-dollar shoes? And I would get into the office and people would hear my heels and say, oh, Kath is in the office. She's a legend. She's fearless. But outside of Google, people in the US did not know me. And that was terrifying. That's why when I started working at LinkedIn in 2022, and I had to coach the CMOs on how to become thought leaders and own their voice, I realized first they asked me, do you do it for yourself? And I'm like, yes. But I was not really doing it and I started trial and errors and I wish I knew how to do it in a way that was not as daunting. So that's number one. Number two, well, I realized that I wanted to go back to what I used to do, which is owning my voice, being on stage, doing speaking engagements, which is also part of what I'm good at. So I was the best kept secret at Google, crushing my numbers, but outside of Google and the people who knew me, the world didn't know it. And that's why 8 months ago, so that's very recent, I decided to take the bull by the horn and start being consistent, owning my voice. And that was the biggest transformation ever. So for me, what I love about this is I was able to close brand deals with companies that I love and I try out and I'm like, what is this? What? What? Closing customer deals of 5 figures, which is important. Also getting paid to speak in Europe, Canada, and the US, and then doing my first trip to Africa, all paid for. And that's the plot twist, because honestly, growing on LinkedIn in 2025, like, that was probably the worst time for me to start because the algorithm had changed. A lot of things were happening, and it was like, I used to sneeze and get 100 likes. But it's not even about the likes. It's not about the comments. The people who hired me to speak never liked, never commented. They went, they never reposted. They went straight into my DMs and asked me, hey, do you have the time to talk? Do you give, uh, speak, do speaking engagements? And then we jumped on the phone and then we got booked and then we, we made it happen. So I think there's a lot of things to, to understand that there's all these vanity metrics, but think about you being the best kept secret, especially as we're entering the next 3 years, the age of AI literacy, that's gonna be very important. The world of work is gonna change. So if you don't have a brand, if you don't have, uh, a different revenue stream that you're slowly but surely building. I'm not saying, oh my God, you're going to make 5, 6, 7 figures right away. No, it's going to compound. It's going to take time. But if you start now and you start small, then you're not going to be taken by surprise. So that's— now I want to extend an invitation because what am I talking about this? It's because what I see is that in your small circle, you're very known, you're solving problems and you're the go-to, but outside you're not. So how do I help you build your brand authority? So I'm hosting a masterclass. Class on January 29th, which is pretty soon. And I'm the host and the owner of the Top 5% Method. And we added the brand authority component because everybody's like, well, are you going to talk about growing on LinkedIn and building your influence and closing deals? Well, okay, I can do that. So people have been asking me for it. So I built it. It's a clear playbook to build brand authority without burning out, but also you're going to learn how to become more visible and also how do you create visibility inside and outside your organization, but also figure out your own style because everybody's very different in terms of how you want to be writing, what is your voice, and then that's going to slowly but surely open doors to speaking consulting offers and fractional work. And this is only for high-performing professionals. So people who already have a craft who want to be recognized. So now wait no more. January 29th at 11 AM PDT or 2 PM East. When you register, you're going to get a copy of the webinar. You go on top5percentmethod.com/webinar. Www.theresearch.com/career-webinar, or just click the link in the comment. And the webinar is $27. Click in the comment, register, and I want to see you there. I'm so excited to see you there. Okay, let's do it. Welcome to Driving Impact.