The week LinkedIn nearly killed my business, and what I built in the ashes.

I sat down with Steve Kidd for his US radio show at the end of 2024. He asked me how I show up in the world. I ended up telling him a story I had not told in public before, about the week my business almost ended.

This is the longer version of that story.

Search and connect

For about a decade, my business ran on a simple service. I called it search and connect.

A client would come to me. They would say, "Eny, I want to reach accountants in a specific area of London. They are the people who buy what I sell." So I would go onto LinkedIn, find those people, connect with them, open the conversation, and hand the warm connection back to my client. It worked. I did it for dozens of industries. It built my company.

Then, around the pandemic, LinkedIn decided they did not like it.

LinkedIn wants you to connect only with people you have met in real life. That is not what search-and-connect does. And what I had been doing for a decade, which had been tolerated for a decade, was suddenly treated like spam.

I got the warnings. I got the restrictions. The service stopped working almost overnight.

The week I was walking off the platform

I want to say this honestly. For about a week, I was done with LinkedIn. I had built a business on top of their platform, and their platform had changed the rules underneath me. I was looking at other things. I was thinking about how to rebuild in a different place.

It is a particular kind of exhaustion that only entrepreneurs understand. The ground you have been standing on for ten years tilts, and your instinct is to leave the ground rather than learn to stand on a tilted floor.

I am glad I did not leave that week. Because as I was literally walking out the door, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. LinkedIn was quietly testing a new feature. They were calling it LinkedIn Audio.

The thing that changed everything

Most people, when LinkedIn rolled out audio rooms, ignored it. It looked like a Clubhouse imitation. It looked like a feature that would be killed in six months. I understood both of those reactions. I had them too.

But I had one advantage the people ignoring it did not have. I had just watched LinkedIn kill the way I made my living. I had nothing left to lose by trying the new thing. And the new thing turned out to solve the exact problem that search-and-connect had been solving, but legally, and at scale, and in a way that my clients' future customers would actually thank them for.

Instead of sending one-to-one cold connections that got 99% of people to hate you for what they call "pitch slapping", you could gather your client's audience in a live audio room. Twenty, fifty, two hundred people who chose to be there. Your client talks. Your client co-hosts. Your client answers questions in real time. Relationships form in forty-five minutes that would have taken forty-five outreach messages to build.

The thing that had been impossible became easy. The thing that LinkedIn had punished became the thing LinkedIn rewarded.

What I do every day now

I told Steve that I did two audio rooms the day of the interview. The day before, I had done five. I sometimes stand for eight hours because I do not have a desk where I am staying. The rooms are about miscarriage and baby loss one hour and skincare the next. The topics swing wildly. The method does not.

This is what I do now. I bring my clients' audiences together. I help them plan the room, set up the room, sometimes co-host the room. When the room is over, relationships exist that did not exist ninety minutes before. Inquiries arrive days later from people who were in the audience, watching quietly, deciding.

It looks nothing like the search-and-connect business I ran for ten years. It is ten times better for the clients. And I almost missed it by walking off the platform the week before it launched.

The lesson I carry

The lesson for me was not "always watch for features". The lesson was that when the ground under your business tilts, the instinct to leave is usually wrong. The platform that just changed its rules is also, in the same moment, rewarding whoever adapts fastest. The people who leave too early hand that reward to whoever stays.

If the ground under your business is tilting right now, I am not telling you to stay forever. I am telling you to stay the extra week.

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Watch the full Steve Kidd radio interview below. For the practical version of how to use LinkedIn to build book sales, see How to promote your book on LinkedIn on Global.Media.