S10:E46 | 12-13-2021 Why is LinkedIn Essential for Business with Debbie Wemyss?

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In our Hot Topic this week we have Debbie Wemyss, Founder DW Consulting Solutions, LLC on the program to help people with their LinkedIn profiles. I think this is such an important topic because more and more investors, employers are going to LinkedIn looking for your background, and your experience. And I think it’s so important how you tell your story. To be honest with you folks, if you look at most of the LinkedIn profiles out there, this is not being told well!

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Why is LinkedIn Essential for Business with Debbie Wemyss?

As you guys know, I got hit with COVID, but we’re back and I’m back. I’ve never felt so good to be back on the show, but it is so good. You value health, especially when you don’t have it there for a while. Anyway, we’re here Monday, December 13th, 2021. This show is created by mortgage professionals for mortgage professionals. We’re so grateful to have you as our readers. Our commitment is to bring you timely information that you can read anytime, anywhere.

We’ve got in the Hot Topic segment. Debbie Wemyss is the Founder of DW Consulting. It’s a great story. There’s a lot of movement going on in the mortgage industry. It’s so timely that we have Debbie come on and talk about your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn profile is becoming the way in which we communicate and talk about ourselves and put ourselves out there as professionals. She’s going to give us some great tips and there’s so much she can go into.

More importantly, I love that Debbie reinvented herself and her career. You’re going to hear all about it in the Hot Topic segment. Stay tuned into the Hot Topic segment. I recommend that you share this with many of your coworkers. Many owners, senior executives, and managers tune in to this show. Share this with your people because a lot of how you put yourself out there will determine your own success and your business’ success. Here’s the other thing. Investors are starting to look at these LinkedIn profiles. They’ve been doing it for some period of time.

Who runs secondary? Who runs underwriting? Who runs quality control? Having a strong profile that communicates your professional background and does it in a way that represents you and your company well benefits you. Pay attention to the Hot Topic segment. We’re looking forward to that. We’re pleased to be a part of the Industry Syndicate. Check out all the podcasts at IndustrySyndicate.com.

Also, we’re thrilled to have our sponsors, the Mortgage Bankers Association of America as well as Finastra, the Fusion Mortgagebot Solution. We’ve been doing some webinars with them. I encourage you to check out those. You could go onto their website. Go back and listen to those. Lenders One, as well as the Mortgage Collaborative, both these co-ops do a great job of getting lenders, vendors, and your peers to gather to talk about what’s going on in the industry and be able to compare notes.

Pure data, being able to talk to lenders of your like size. Some of the issues you’re facing can make such a difference. These organizations are solid. As well as Community Mortgage Lenders of America as well as Insellerate. Knowledge Coop does a great job. Ken Perry and his team do a great job in keeping you trained and helping you have a learning management system that’s a part of your company. That is customized, and then also can provide so much content.

Also, Mobility MMI, the Mortgage Market Intelligence, does a great job of helping you recruit LOs. Ben Teerlink is going to be our guest in the next episode. Modex does a great job of helping recruit. Modex and Mobility MMI complement each other. I encourage you to check out both of these companies. We have an increasing number of our clients that are using both companies and they see the advantages of both. The interview with Dale Larson that we had on November 22nd, 2021 with Dale and Dale was really good.

Also, Snapdocs, digitizing your mortgage closing to offer better experience for your closing teams. You got to pay attention when you’re working with settlement partners and borrowers. Snapdocs provides an elegant solution. I encourage you to check it out. We did an interview with Vishal Rana on September 13th, 2021.

Talking about telling your story, being able to do it, and doing it well, there’s an old proverb that says, “Let another man’s mouth praise you, not that of your own.” I want you guys to get to know SuccessKit because what they can do to help you create a testimonial that improves your credibility and helps get your message out. I encourage you check out SuccessKit.io. Joining us now as a new sponsor is our good friend, Brent Emler. We had them on November 29th, 2022. Check out LenderToolkit.com.

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I’m excited to introduce to you Debbie Wemyss. She is the Founder of DW Consulting Solutions, LLC. She’s located in Florida. I met both Debbie and her COO, Chief Operating Officer, Dayve at the MBA Conference at San Diego. They had a booth set up where they were helping people with their LinkedIn profiles.

This is such an important topic because more investors, employers, and people are going to LinkedIn to be looking for your background and your experience. It’s so important on how you tell your story well. To be honest with you, if you look at most of the LinkedIn profiles out there, the story’s not being told well. Debbie, I’m excited to have you join me on the show.

I’m excited to be here. Thank you very much.

I love what you’re doing because you’re helping people tell their story and tell it well. I think that’s where many of us fail. We can tell someone else’s story, we can tell various aspects of what someone else does, but we oftentimes have trouble talking and representing ourselves well, especially on something like LinkedIn.

Debbie, that’s what we’re going to be talking about and sharing with our readers in how they can tighten up their LinkedIn profile. I hope it leads to a conversation with you and your team. Let’s get started. Before we go there, tell us a little bit about your background that our audience get to know you just a little bit. What’s your background? Where did you come from? How did you get into this?

Thank you, David. I appreciate that opportunity. I’m a New Englander from way back. I have been in Florida now for over 40 years. I still follow all the New England teams and a few of the South Florida teams as well. I am a diehard fan of a lot about New England. I miss this 2022 with the fall foliage. It’s a great time to visit. I did not get up there in 2022 because we went to California for that conference instead. It’s all good.

You live in West Palm Beach, Florida, so not a bad place to go. A lot of Northeasterners get down there to eventually find their way down there. It was beautiful. I had my wife and daughters did a fall leaf tour up in your old stomping grounds and it’s beautiful. It’s magnificent. Career-wise, let’s talk a little bit about your career path. How did you get to where you’re at?

I had to start with a little company called Raytheon up in Waltham, Massachusetts when I was out of college. I was an admin assistant, secretarial-type work. Eventually, that led me into the hospitality business up in Maine with restaurants and bars. I’m a networker from day one. Eventually, the winter of ’78 drove me South. I don’t know how many people can remember that. It was a blizzard.

That’s when I came down to Fort Lauderdale. I’ve been in Florida ever since. I do get back to New England at least once a year, but I spent many years in the hospitality business in Fort Lauderdale area. I came up to Palm Beach County to West Palm Beach, and several years here in the nonprofit industry. I’ve always done marketing media PR. The last seven years of that career was fundraising.

I lost my job at 57 for the first time ever. All of a sudden, I was like, “What am I going to do next?” It was the crash in 2008. I didn’t know what I was going to do because no one was hiring in the non-profits. I was fully qualified, but it was a bad time to be unemployed. I stayed in that mode for almost a year and a half. I went through lots of changes. I found LinkedIn as a job seeker at 57 and it went on from there.

I created my business to show other older, unemployed adult professionals how to use LinkedIn for job seeking. Honestly, a couple of those people I was meeting with at Starbucks with our laptops came back to me at our next gathering and said, “I got two interviews because of what you showed me on LinkedIn.” It was like poof. That was my epiphany moment.

You’ve helped so many others and so much feedback. I went through it. I’ve got a good profile. As Dayve said, your LinkedIn profile is well done, but here are some tips. The tips you guys came up with were over the top even for those of us who have been very intentional on developing a good LinkedIn profile. A lot of people look at LinkedIn and it’s for finding a new job.

There’s so much more we’re finding that LinkedIn is involved with. One of the of the things that I’m finding is that an investor who is looking to put money into company invests in equity. I have other companies that are looking to buy loans from a particular company, and they’re looking at the bios and backgrounds of what is posted on LinkedIn. Sometimes they check Facebook.

LinkedIn is such a good professional site to go to get data points on someone’s background. With that in mind, I want to talk a little bit and have you open up by sharing what you’ve seen this do to enable business owners and employees, the full gamut. It will help you find a good job. You just talked about that. What are some other examples of what you’ve seen this has done for people?

It is the number one HR site as far as people needing to transition. We do work with professionals all the time that are in that mode. Business owners can leverage LinkedIn to their advantage with all sorts of features that have been introduced. We just celebrated several years of doing this work. Even over the years before these wonderful new options came out, you’re able to differentiate yourself because of those profiles and the content that you can build into them.

LinkedIn is the number one HR site as far as people needing to transition. Click To Tweet

Here’s where a lot of LinkedIn members are a little bit lacking. They don’t realize the importance of the About section. That’s the summary. That’s where you get to tell your story. You started off with how difficult that can be for people. I’m a prime example. This has happened since we saw you in San Diego. I hired a professional writer to do my story for my website even though I’ve personally written over 500 summaries for LinkedIn profiles.

I think I do a pretty good job for other people, but it is difficult sometimes for people to write about themselves. We take advantage of every opportunity to use things like the cover story. That’s a new ten-second video. If you’re using this feature, when they land on your profile, they’ll see a ten-second video. It’s like a teaser. When they click on the headshot, they’ll see the whole video.

It’s whatever you wanted to say. We are changing ours frequently. That’s one way to stand out because a lot of people get a little bit shy about holding a phone in front of themselves and recording. LinkedIn pages are like mini websites. Every business owner should have one. Right now, there are over 5 million LinkedIn pages.

We work with people to help build out their company page, and then there are video opportunities. They just enabled video on messaging. You can set up a video chat. They’re rolling this out. Everyone doesn’t have it yet. I have a lot of counterparts in the UK and Australia and we all keep each other apprised of how that rollout’s going. It’s coming if you don’t have it yet.

You can voice message people through the inbox on LinkedIn and that makes you stand out. There are a lot of different opportunities to make yourself climb above the competition. We think that’s what we’re best at. We like our clients to show up on page one of those searches when people are looking for what they provide.

Talk about getting to page one. Is that the objective on these search results or is it just when they find you? We’re using LinkedIn on our new website. Rather than doing an about each of us individually, we connect it to LinkedIn. I think that’s the most effective tool to do that. What should be the objective that everyone has when developing a good LinkedIn? Is it to be found in the search?

We feel that every LinkedIn member should have two goals. Number one, have a complete professional keyword-optimized profile. That is the key. Keywords are your friend. There are over 800 million members. Trust me, there are a lot of mortgage bankers in there. In order to get them to come up to the top of searches, it’s all about keyword optimization.

LinkedIn for Business: Have a complete professional keyword optimized profile. Keywords are your friend.

You have to know what your keywords are. It’s not rocket science. These are the skills and expertise that are offered by you and your company. We do help people get those together. Generally, nowadays people have a pretty good feel for what their prominent keywords are. We make sure that those words and phrases are in all of the five basic fields on a profile for the search engine. I’m talking about inside LinkedIn.

After doing this for many years, we know about 14 more places in your profile where you want to have what we call “intentional repetition” of those keywords. That’s how we get our clients on page one. Every research result has ten people on a page. You don’t want to wind up coming up in a search on page 3 or 4. No one’s going to find you there. We feel you should look good and be found on LinkedIn.

Look good is one of those things. Let’s start with the profile picture. You do a lot of advising on profile pictures. You see some of the craziest profile pictures out there. You go like, “What were you thinking?” There are others that look really stiff and they look so professional. What are the tips?

First of all, have one. That sounds obvious, but I have worked with CEOs that did not have a headshot. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen too often anymore. When I first started many years ago, absolutely. They didn’t understand who was finding them and who they’re exposing themselves to. It’s the world. A professional headshot is the best you can have.

As far as the dynamics, here are some tips that a lot of people don’t realize. They call it a headshot for a reason and we’ve seen it all. Some people have a full-body shot in that field that’s supposed to be a headshot. When you come up in a search, whatever image you use in that field it’s reduced by 50% on a search result page.

If you’ve got even from the waist up shot in that field, your face is going to disappear. People are not going to click on you. They’re going to click on someone that they can see clearly. Basics, face the camera. Dress the way you would for work. A lot of people are working from home. It doesn’t necessarily call for a suit and tie. It all depends on what your customers are typically going to see when they meet with you, whether it’s on Zoom or in person. Thankfully, in-person things are coming back.

You want to face the camera. You want to have a pleasant smile. Basically, no hats, no sunglasses, and no one else in the picture. We still see a lot of that. Typically, a lot of times husbands and wives will have a team for doing real estate. I get it. They work together. They’re a couple, but they each need to have their own profile and their own headshot.

What else? I love outdoor pictures. If they’re going to do professional photography, a lot of photographers will take you outside into nature or anything green behind you. We’re on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean here, so you can do a lot with nature. The idea is to have a professional headshot that looks good, that presents you well, and that doesn’t make you look like you’re in jail. We’ve seen those, too.

That’s relatable. I look at some of these pictures and they have the classic hand on the chin. They’re professional but they just don’t connect. It seems cold on those. That’s one thing I’ve also noticed. Let’s talk about the importance of a banner. Should it tell your story? Should it be your logo? What are some guidelines that you recommend to make a banner effective?

First of all, again, have a banner. A lot of people don’t realize the importance. The default banner is quite bland. It’s a tricolor, gray and not very interesting. I will key in on yours. This is a great one. I’m sure Dayve already gave you this tip but here’s a thing. You are now able to include a call to action on this field. Microsoft bought LinkedIn four and a half years ago and they’ve done some great changes.

One of the best things they did in 2020 was open up and start to allow people to add to the banner website, phone number, email tagline, whatever you’d like. Be careful that you don’t crowd the image too much. The only thing I would advise you on here is get right across the bottom under the word past. You can have a website or an email or your phone number. That becomes what we call a standing ad for business owners so that they don’t have to go searching for the best way to reach out to you.

It’s a great point. By the way, readers, if you want to go to my LinkedIn profile, put in David Lykken. That’s how you search for me, which is another place I want to go. A lot of people, you see their name but you see numbers behind it. They don’t realize they can go in and uniquely identify their name. I think it’s so important. Mine is LinkedIn.com/In/DavidLykken/. When you look at that, there are a lot of people that have numbers behind that.

Yes, it’s called optimizing your LinkedIn URL. You did it perfectly. Those numbers and letters get jammed up at the end of your name the minute you create an account on LinkedIn. LinkedIn assigns you that number until and unless you optimize it, which means getting rid of all that stuff after your last name. We feel that the URL should end with first name, last name. No spaces. No caps. Just one continuous David Lykken. That’s it. If you wanted to include MBA or PhD, that’s fine. The search engine is going to have a much easier time finding you above your competition or other people. I’d be curious, I haven’t looked up how many David Lykkens there are on LinkedIn.

When you eliminate that stuff at the end of your name, it’s called optimizing your URL and everybody can do it. You tap on that contact info link underneath the headline. That’ll take you into an edit mode where you can do whatever you want with that URL. Some people do put their business name instead of their name. Honestly, your name is your number one keyword on the internet. The minute you’re born and you get a driver’s license, your name is all over the internet. That’s what we go with.

Your name is your number one keyword on the internet. Click To Tweet

When you’re talking about some of the other tips that you had, tell us a few things that most people don’t know about LinkedIn. The one that you already mentioned is now they’ve added a number of new features. I love some of the new features they’ve added. Dayve did a great job of bringing this to my attention. I’ve got to go back in and change my photo, number one.

I showed her several pictures. She goes, “I would use this one. It’s a much better one.” I haven’t changed it yet. I love the video that you can put a brief video introduction. I love what you did on yours, by the way. Yours is a great example of how you took advantage of this. Talk about some of the things that people don’t know about LinkedIn. It seems like there are an increasing number of them.

One of the interesting things is that LinkedIn started in 2003, almost the same month as what’s now called Meta or Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg. Reid Hoffman’s a Cofounder of LinkedIn, and they knew each other back then. They had very different ideas of what they were trying to do. It’s been fascinating to watch the past several years of growth between the 2 sites.

Facebook is the kingpin for members. However, that said, LinkedIn is the leader for professionals. It is now the largest professional network online with over 800 million members. That’s something we like to tell everybody. Out of the 800 million members, people get wide-eyed. To bring you back to earth, about 32 million are active on LinkedIn. That means they’re on LinkedIn about 3 to 4 times a week, but that’s still a pretty good network to get into for business. The other stats that’s fun is that even after many years, they are still adding more than two new members per second around the world. That’s why we love what we do.

The pool from which you can be consulted to is just ever expanding. Two members per second. It’s a pretty rapid expansion and a pretty strong trajectory. When you talked about some of the other new features, any insights of some of the things we can anticipate? This show now can be featured on LinkedIn. I’ve heard someone say that. Is that accurate?

Yes. That goes along with the ability to publish newsletters on LinkedIn. I don’t have those two new things. LinkedIn Live is what you’re talking about. That enables you to do live shows. I don’t have it yet and I don’t have the ability to publish newsletters. In the past weeks, I’m sure a lot of your readers have run into this on LinkedIn. You’re getting lots of invitations to sign up for people’s newsletters.

That feature is being rolled out in the US right now. Again, I don’t have it yet so I expect it any day, but it’s a little bit annoying how they’re rolling it out because there’s an avalanche of invitations. “Sign up for this newsletter. Sign up for that newsletter.” There are only so many hours of the day. I’m very selective, but it’s another great opportunity for another avenue of marketing.

If you’re a borrower looking for a loan program, you may subscribe to a loan officer’s newsletter for a period of time because it is relevant to something you’re entering into like real estate transaction or buying a new home. You’re wanting all the articles and everything. Once you close on the deal, it could possibly go away and go from there. For those that may not be aware, there’s a free membership within LinkedIn. There are various levels. Talk about the advantage of different levels.

When everyone signs up initially with LinkedIn, they’re on the free basic membership. We do encourage members to stick with that level until they’ve exhausted every possible option. LinkedIn is notorious for what we call burying valuable options. We make sure that our clients are fully aware of everything they can get for free.

Next step up is called premium. The biggest two advantages of upgrading to premium, which if I’m not mistaken, it’s around $45 a month. You get unlimited searches. On the free profile, you get a limited number and they will not tell you how many searches you get in a month. Eventually, if you’re a prolific searcher like most salespeople are, you’re going to get stopped on the free membership.

LinkedIn will say, “Debbie, it looks like you might be recruiting. Why don’t you advance to our recruiter membership?” when I’m just prospecting. That’s what every salesperson does. They’re going to do it prolifically when they find out all the filters that you can use on that free membership. We recommend exploring everything you can do on basic first, the free membership.

We do advise people all the time. Premium gives you unlimited searches, which is great for sales and it also gives you 90 days’ worth of who’s viewed your profile. That’s important to see who you’re attracting to your profile. You want to make sure it’s your target audience. All of that is done with that keyword optimization we spoke of.

That is the first thing we do with every client we work with no matter who they are, what level, and what industry. It’s all about coming up in the top of those searches. There are 4 or 5 now paid levels of membership all the way up to a recruiter. Almost all of the large companies now will buy into the recruiter membership for their HR departments because it is very robust.

No matter who they are, what level, what industry, it's all about coming up in the top of those searches. Click To Tweet

You can also get into Sales Navigator which is a terrific level if you’re going to use all the features. It’s been an interesting journey because we will work with a lot of people that are on premium. First of all, most of them don’t know what they’re paying for. They just felt that a paid membership was a better membership to have. It is as long as you’re using those options that you’re paying for.

We make sure that people are using what they’re paying for on the various level that they’re on. Honestly, all of our coaching is based on basic membership or premium. I know enough about Sales Navigator to be dangerous, but we have several very trusted associates, particularly 1 in Canada and 1 in New York that are specialists on Sales Navigator.

If somebody’s on that level and they want help, I will freely refer them out to those couple of people that we have. We know people overseas as well. It comes down to this. What are you doing on LinkedIn? What is your goal? Who are you trying to get in front of? What is your business? What services do you offer? These are all things that we cover initially with every client so that we can have a feel for the best way to guide them.

LinkedIn has a code of conduct in how you present yourself. Can you could give us some ideas about how they’re enforcing it? Are there some boundaries that we should be aware of that we could trip over accidentally?

Thank you for asking me that. This is my favorite subject. We’re all about professional behavior on LinkedIn. There has been a bit of an increase. For instance, spammy invitations. People that are trying to sell to you right out of the gate. We feel that that’s probably the most inappropriate behavior on LinkedIn. I understand why it’s happening.

When people find out how targeted the searching is and how you can get right in front of who you need to sell to, it gets rather exciting. I can’t blame the younger salespeople for doing this anymore because there are a lot of other people as well of all ages. They’re too anxious to sell. They know they’ve got a great target. This is where my gray hair comes in. We’re always going back to Sales 101.

You have to get to have a relationship. You need to take the time to build the know, like, and trust with a prospect before you start trying to sell to them. When they invite me and say, “Debbie, I notice you’re a coach. Did you know you can prospect on LinkedIn? We can show you how to do that.” I’m like, “I don’t think they even looked at my profile,” which leads me to another important point.

The user agreement is very specific about not incorporating scraping software programs and third-party apps into LinkedIn’s data. That’s a big reason how a lot of these automated invitations are coming in. I got an invitation from a young guy. He was in the States. He said, “Debbie, would you like to generate 100 invitations a day on LinkedIn like we’re doing with this one?” He said that in his invitation.

I took a screenshot. I sent it to the help center and I said, “You need to check this guy out.” I don’t hesitate to do it because it’s against the user agreement. Those are the people that are spoiling it for a lot of us. The first step on that was, all of a sudden, if you started to invite somebody to connect. You might be greeted with a little phrase that says, “This member demands that you know their email.”

There’s a privacy control. People can choose to cut down on the spam. That was 2020. LinkedIn instituted a new rule. You cannot invite more than 100 a week on LinkedIn no matter what level you’re on. If you’re paying for Sales Navigator where you used to be able to do lots of invitations with LinkedIn’s blessing because it’s a very specific setup and it’s very professional, now, it’s 100 a week for everybody. That’s unfortunate, but it’s one of their ways of curbing spam.

I just brought up my connections page. I have 24,384 connections at this moment and I have 5 pending. They’re from all over the world. Some of these are definitely spammy. Go to this point. You’re starting to make a point. I want to tell people that are reading and say, “I got to get home and read to this again and go to the page they were at.” We went to the connections page.

To get there on the navigation bar across the top of the screen, you click on My Network and that’s where LinkedIn will show you any outstanding invitations that you need to act on. I like to click on “2See all 5” or “See all 10” to the right of the word “Invitations.” It lays them out in a different format that shows you when they invited you. It also expands on any that are personalized, so you can read the whole message.

Here’s the point. Almost anything and everything that’s posted on LinkedIn, either by an invitation or a post have three little dots in the upper right corner. You can see that on this invitation from a fellow named Steven. If you tap on the three little dots in the invitation, it gives you an opportunity to right away anonymously report the person’s invitation as inappropriate.

I love that feature. LinkedIn does pay attention. Here’s the real kicker and I don’t think people understand it. When you start throwing out spam like that, it only takes five members to click that inappropriate report and you get restricted. That’s when you’ll go to log into your LinkedIn account and you’ll see this big five-word red phrase that says, “This account has been restricted.” That’s it. They don’t tell you why. You can’t get in. You have no access to your account. That’s when people call us to get out of what we call LinkedIn jail.

Can you get out? I did this one time. I hired someone to expand my network. “I need these.” Probably they gave the profiles and went in. They tripped over all the things and I got suspended for a little while. I got put in LinkedIn jail. I go, “What did I do?” I called and they said, “Did you hire someone?” I said, “Yes.” “Who did you hire? We’re putting that person on notice.”

The point of it is that once you see the power of LinkedIn, you go, “I need to connect with everybody.” You start going at it aggressively. I did that and I got in trouble. This was a number of years ago back at the 500 connections. Now, I’m up over 24,000. There are some things that people can do to get out of jail, or is it a timeframe? You just need to be on the best behavior for a period of time.

No. They have a very orchestrated step-by-step process to, first of all, prove your identity and it is done by showing the front and back of your driver’s license in the US or a passport. I do have people that email me and they’re a little freaked out. “I can’t believe they’re asking me for my passport or driver’s license.” I’m like, “Listen, there are 800 million members. They want to make sure that you’re not somebody that’s trying to shut down somebody else or get into somebody else’s account.” That is another whole issue. Being hacked does happen. It happened to me many years ago and I teach people how to use the site.

My account was hacked because I did not enable privacy control because I thought it was a pain in the neck. “It’s two more clicks to get into my account. I’m not going to bother with that.” It’s ID theft. It changed my password and took me off of LinkedIn. My profile was gone for six days. That was not good as a new business owner. People thought I was out of business. It was a horror show. We try to coach people appropriately.

On that one, how can they fix that?

There are two ways. They go to Settings and Privacy. They then go down to Two-step verification. It’s on the left rail as they call it, under Sign in and Security right at the bottom. Make sure you turn it on. It means giving LinkedIn your cell phone. They will simply text you a code every time you go into LinkedIn and you either have the code or you don’t. Most people have their cell phones glued to their bodies so it’s pretty easy to grab the code and off you go. I always thought that was a bit of a cumbersome way to get into your account and I avoided it. Not anymore. After that one time, that’s all it took was one hack.

I’m enabling that now. I did not have that enabled because I have staff that help me manage this. How does that work?

That is the caveat. You’re going to get a text with a code. I also have admin help. When that comes through, I know that she’s trying to access my account to do what she has to do to it. If you’re willing to be able to pass that code on to whoever’s helping you out with your account, it works. If that becomes problematic because you have more than one person helping you or something like that, you’re probably not going to be able to enable this. You might be in the middle of a recording. If somebody’s trying to help you out with your account, you can’t exactly act. That code is only good for two minutes.

LinkedIn for Business: If you’re willing to be able to pass that code on to whoever’s helping you out with your account, it works.

I’ll leave that part there. Pay attention to this. This is such a powerful tool. You need to protect it and also protect your identity. This is an important one. You’ve already touched on a number of new features that we can expect in 2022. Some of which are being rolled out. Let’s review those real quickly here. The newsletter is one of them.

First is the ability to publish newsletters right from LinkedIn. Also, the other feature still being rolled out is LinkedIn Live. That enables live podcasts that are right off of your profile. People just have to come to your profile, start watching, and automatically a replay is enabled as well. That’s pretty cool. I’m still waiting for that.

I love the services. I love your passion. I love also how you reinvented yourself and how you’ve done it so successfully. That’s as much a part of the story as anything else. I think a lot of people get to 57 is what your story is. I had 50 when we sold our interest in our last company. “What am I going to do?” When you get older, people are not interested. That’s shifting, too. There are all these opportunities to reinvent ourselves and LinkedIn into such a powerful tool. I’m so delighted to have you here and I can’t wait for all our audience to get ahold of you. I know many will. How is the best way to do that?

I have one of those strange Scottish names. Finding me on LinkedIn, they need to know how to spell my last name, which is Wemyss. They can go right to our website, DWConsultingSolutions.com. Right on the homepage, they can access a link to schedule at their convenience a complimentary 15-minute profile review. There are three of us that do this day in and day out. There are no strings. It’s how we get people pointed in the right direction with a few immediate edits to their profile right over the phone.

Kathie Thomas, who works with me in the consulting business, and myself went through this at the MBA. We are blown away with the value and what came out of that 15 minutes. It was so powerful. Readers, I encourage you to get ahold of Debbie and her staff. Look at your LinkedIn profile. We want feedback on this particular show.

We’d love to hear that you’ve done this. Please get a hold of us. Debbie, thank you so much for being here and sharing some quick tips. Every time I talk to you, I just want to dive in. I go, “I got to do more.” It’s such a powerful tool. I applaud you for reinventing yourself because it’s to all of our advantages. Thank you, Debbie. I appreciate you.

Thank you so much, David. I appreciate the opportunity.

Say hi to Dayve and the rest of your team.

Will do. Thanks.

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I hope you enjoyed that interview. There’s so much information in there. Again, warehouse lenders, investors, and more companies are going to your LinkedIn profile to find out about you. How are you being represented? Get ahold of Debbie and her team and I encourage you to do so soon as possible. We’ll become partners together and I’m grateful for the relationship.

It’s so good to have you be a part of the show. Sorry, I ran a little extra long today. It was worth it because of the information we had to put out. I want to say a special thank you to our sponsors. Finastra, CMLA, Lenders One, Insellerate, Mobility MMI, Modex, MBA, The Knowledge Coop, Mortgage Collaborative, Snapdocs, SuccessKit, and now Lender Toolkit. Great toolkits out there, and we’re thrilled.

Next week we got Ben Teerlink of Mobility MMI and also Mobility RE. Again, they have two focuses. The real estate side and on the recruiting side. Look forward to having you back here and reading our blog with Ben Teerlink. It’s so good to have you with us, everybody. Have a great week. Look forward to having you back here next week.

12-13-2021 Why is LinkedIn Essential for Business?

Why is LinkedIn Essential for Business with Debbie Wemyss?

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