Ep 195 - How Molly Stovold Built a £611K Business in 7 Months Using LinkedIn

# How Molly Stovold Built a £611K Business in 7 Months Using LinkedIn What if your personal brand could become your most powerful client acquisition channel — without paid ads, cold outreach or constantly launching? In this episode of **Dawn of a New Era: The Billionaire Brain Podcast**, Dawn sits down with **Molly Stovold**, founder of **Setting Pretty**, to unpack how she built a **£611K business in just seven months**, driven by inbound marketing and LinkedIn. Molly’s journey hasn’t been straightforward. After building her first LinkedIn account to almost 10,000 followers, she was hacked and lost everything. Instead of walking away, she started again — rebuilding her audience from zero to more than 80,000 followers and proving that a powerful personal brand can be rebuilt. When motherhood changed the way Molly wanted to work, she spotted a new opportunity. Her existing students were getting results from LinkedIn but struggling with the sheer amount of time required to manage it. That demand became the foundation for her agency, which quickly scaled through inbound leads rather than advertising or outbound sales. ### In this episode, we talk about: - How Molly built a **£611K agency in seven months** - Why **LinkedIn is the vessel, not the strategy** - How a strong personal brand creates inbound demand - The difference between **content that gets attention and content that gets clients** - Why founders get stuck creating only TOF, MOF or BOF content - Molly’s recommended content mix when building your first 10K relevant followers - How to create bottom-of-funnel content through **case studies, pain points and storytelling** - Why LinkedIn creators should increasingly optimise for **saves AND sends** - The rise of contrarian, reframe and “educational maxing” content - Why your stories may be far more commercially valuable than another infographic - The danger of allowing AI to remove your personality from your content - Why Molly starts with the founder’s **story first and trends second** - How she is removing herself as the bottleneck as her agency approaches **£1M ARR** - Building a business around motherhood, freedom, travel and the life you actually want - Working with your partner without allowing work to consume your relationship ### Molly’s LinkedIn Content Funnel One of Molly’s biggest lessons for founders is that successful content needs to perform different jobs. **Top of Funnel:** Attract the right new followers. **Middle of Funnel:** Build familiarity, credibility and trust. **Bottom of Funnel:** Convert that trust into clients. For founders with fewer than 10,000 genuinely relevant followers, Molly suggests weighting content towards discovery. If you're publishing seven times a week, she recommends roughly **four top-of-funnel posts**, with the remaining content divided between middle and bottom of funnel. The mistake? Creating content entirely for reach — or entirely for sales. A huge following means very little if the people following you are never going to buy. ### The LinkedIn Strategy Molly Thinks More Founders Need **Tell more stories.** Instead of trying to manufacture a lesson, viral hook or perfectly polished AI-generated post, Molly recommends going back through the funny, difficult, embarrassing and unexpected moments in your life and business — and simply telling the story. Those stories make you sound human again. And being unmistakably human is becoming one of the strongest ways to differentiate a personal brand. ### From Hustle to Lifestyle Molly also shares what the success of the business has made possible. After beginning her career charging **£100 an hour**, she now describes consistently generating six figures a month while living in Portugal, raising her daughter, travelling with her family and building a business designed around **luxury, adventure and comfort**. But her advice to founders is important: busyness doesn't magically disappear as the company grows. You have to deliberately create the practices that reconnect you with yourself. For Molly, that's her sauna, journaling without screens and working out every day. ### Molly’s One Piece of LinkedIn Advice **“If you can't do it properly, hire help.”** Because content carries a huge cognitive load — and as the founder, your job isn't necessarily to personally execute every part of your personal brand. It's to protect the ideas, stories and perspective that make that brand yours. ### And finally… Molly reveals one of the best embarrassing-founder stories we've had on the podcast yet: accidentally uploading a Loom recording to her course that continued for an entire hour while she emailed her dad, did her hair and shared all the gossip from her life with her grandma. About ten students saw it before she managed to take it down. A very good reminder: **Always check where your Loom recording actually ended.** Listen now to discover how Molly turned LinkedIn, storytelling and personal brand into a rapidly scaling agency — and why the future of founder-led marketing may have far less to do with creating *more* content and much more to do with becoming impossible to copy. ### Connect with Molly Stovold Find Lauren by searching **Molly Stovold** on LinkedIn ## Support the Podcast Enjoyed this conversation? Subscribe to *Dawn of a New Era*, share the episode with an ambitious founder and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Your support helps more women discover the conversations, strategies and stories that can change the way they build their businesses and their lives. **CHECK OUT THE PODCAST & APPLY TO BECOME A GUEST** https://dawnmcgruer.com/podcast **FOLLOW Dawn McGruer** Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dawnmcgruer/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawnmcgruer This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podkite - https://podkite.com/privacy