What Is Executive Profiling? And Why Most Senior Leaders Need It More Than They Think
Closing the gap between who you are in person, and how you show up online, is easier than you think.
By Liam Fitzpatrick, Founder, Commswork | 8 min read
The CEO arrived early. Over the course of 20-30 minutes of a keynote, I watched her confidently outline the state of her sector, without pause. She hit every cue, moving from what the industry is doing well, challenges that remain, through to what government needs to focus on, finishing by educating the audience about regulatory changes that may impact many related businesses. She was articulate, relatable, and hesitation free. The kind of person a journalist would seek out first, for reaction to industry news or emerging trends.
Before our next meeting, I searched her name.
The results were thin. A LinkedIn profile, last updated two years ago. A company website bio that read like it had been written by her HR team. One mention in a trade publication from 2019. That was it. The entire public record for a senior leader who, twenty minutes into any conversation could command a room with her infectious passion.
The gap between who she was in person and who she appeared to be everywhere else was not a small one.
This is the executive profiling problem. And it is far more common than most senior leaders, and their team, would care to admit.
Liam Fitzpatrick hosting a panel for Networx Brisbane looking at Super Bowl marketing
What executive profiling actually is
Executive profiling is the process of building a consistent, credible, authoritative and recognisable public presence for a senior leader — one that reflects how they actually think and speak in meetings, rather than how they’ve been coached or briefed to sound.
It covers the channels through which a leader communicates beyond internally at their organisation: thought leadership writing (op-eds, LinkedIn articles, contributed columns), owned media videos, earned media appearances, speaking opportunities, award submissions, industry awards judging and the profile copy that represents them when they're not in the room. Done well, it means that when a journalist, a board member, a potential client, or a future employee searches your name, what they find matches the person they'd meet.
That last part matters more than most executives appreciate or their organisation is willing to admit.
I’ve seen over the past two decades how profile opportunities snowball, for senior leaders willing to comment publicly. I’ve seen one executive provide commentary from a digital perspective for Bloomberg on earnings calls from FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), which led to thought leadership chances with Forbes, resulting in judging at Cannes Lions and even a new job offer with one of those organisations.
Why it's not the same thing as personal branding
Personal branding is a marketing concept that migrated upward from consumer culture. It carries with it an assumption of self-promotion, of managing optics, of being your own product. For a lot of senior leaders, particularly those from technical or operational backgrounds, the term alone is enough to make them cringe or pull back.
Executive profiling starts from a different place.
It begins with what you already know: the knowledge gained over years of experience in your sector, a perspective you've built by making mistakes, and the view of the industry you could articulate to anyone willing to listen. Our work is focusing on translating that into profile opportunities, not hyping you into something you’re not. The goal is a more visible version of you.
The distinction is worth holding onto, because the motivation behind the work changes the outcome. Executives who approach their public profile as a performance tend to produce content that feels exactly like that. Executives who approach it as an honest attempt to share what they genuinely think tend to produce something that connects with the people they care about reaching. Content people want to read, and are more likely to remember.
Why it matters now
The Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked, for several years running, that senior executives remain among the most trusted sources of information about their industries. Not anonymous analysts. Or media commentators. Nor influencers with a podcast. The people actually running organisations, speaking specifically about what they know from the inside.
That trust is an asset executives can lean into.
There's also a more practical consideration. The media landscape has fragmented. Trade publications, national business mastheads, and broadcast programs are actively searching for credible voices to fill the gap left by shrinking newsrooms. The executives who have developed a public presence, with a track record of clear, on-the-record sector commentary, are the ones who get the call when a story breaks. Those willing to stick their head above the parapet.
Digital news sources are ranked very highly as signals for AI search rankings. Earned media, along with a strong LinkedIn presence offers executives the chance to tell their story on their terms. And benefit across SEO/AEO/AIO/GEO.
It’s riskier now for senior executives to remain invisible and follow the status quo, than to take a stance, have a clear voice and share it with your industry.
In Australia, this dynamic is sharper than most executives expect. The corporate landscape here is concentrated enough that a handful of well-profiled leaders tend to dominate the conversation in any given sector. The gap between them and everyone else is rarely about expertise. It's almost always about visibility.
The translation problem
In conversations with senior leaders over the past decade, I've noticed a consistent pattern. Most of them can articulate exactly what makes them different, what their genuine point of view is, why their approach to their sector is worth listening to. They can do it in a meeting, on a panel, over a working lunch. The moment you ask them to write it down, or to sit in front of a camera, or to put their name on something for publication, the specificity drains out and corporate language moves in.
It feels safe. Risk free. Except staying within your jargon-heavy rhetoric makes you sound generic, boring and forgettable.
This is the translation problem. And it's the core of what executive profiling is designed to solve.
It's not a content problem. Most executives have more genuine insight than they'll ever have the time or mechanism to share. It's a structural problem. The bridge between what they know and what appears in public under their name either doesn't exist, or it runs through so many layers of legal review and sign-off that the original thought is unrecognisable by the time it arrives anywhere.
Fixing that mechanism is our job.
What the process actually involves
Executive profiling is an infrastructure, built across several channels and maintained over time.
The starting point is almost always a positioning conversation: what is the leader's genuine area of authority, what do they have a right to speak about, and what is the one perspective they hold that most of their peers do not? This matters because the most common mistake executives make is trying to be credible about everything. The ones who build real public profiles do so by being specific. They become the person journalists call about a particular type of problem, not a general spokesperson for their industry.
From there, the work spans several areas.
Written thought leadership is the foundation. Op-eds placed in relevant trade publications, LinkedIn articles, contributed columns in sector media. These create a searchable, citable record of how you think. They're also the assets that AI search tools draw on: when Perplexity or ChatGPT answers a question about your sector, it cites the people who have written about it clearly and consistently. An executive with no written record is, for practical purposes, invisible to these platforms.
Media engagement sits alongside this. Knowing how to handle a journalist's call, how to stay on message without sounding robotic, how to turn a reactive media moment into a visibility opportunity rather than a reputational risk. These are skills. And they can be developed. The executives who decline media requests because they don't feel ready are the ones who never get ready. I include myself in that observation. My own first national TV interview came about because a client wasn't available and I stepped in at nine weeks into running Commswork. Not ideal preparation. But waiting for better conditions would have meant waiting for something that doesn't exist.
Speaking opportunities, award submissions, and panel appearances complete the picture. Each adds a dimension to the public record and provides content that can be repurposed across other channels. A well-handled conference panel generates clips, quotes, and LinkedIn content. An industry award submission, whether you win or not, forces a level of articulation about your work that most executives find useful well beyond the submission itself.
None of this happens overnight. A credible and authoritative executive profile, one that’s remembered by customers and media, typically takes six to twelve months to build with any consistency. And it requires exactly that: consistency. Raising your visibility cannot be achieved over a single campaign. There is no launch date.
The cost of staying invisible
I’ve heard executives rationalise that the focus should be on the company. Why would raising my profile help? Another executive mentioned they didn’t feel ready. They want to wait until the company hits its next milestone, until the timing is better, until they have something more substantial to say.
Then something happens. A competitor gets quoted in a piece they should have been in.
A board opportunity goes to someone with a more visible profile.
A journalist writes a story about their sector without the organisation mentioned - they only find out after a colleague send them the link.
The cost of invisibility isn't always tangible. That's what makes it easy to defer.
But it is always felt. Sooner or later.
Executives who build a public presence, consistently, always-on during the busier and quieter periods, are the ones who have credibility to draw on when the spotlight comes their way. And it always starts eventually. A regulatory shift, a market disruption, a reputational challenge. Leaders who have been communicating consistently already have a relationship with the media, with their industry, and with the broader public conversation. The ones who haven't are starting from nothing at exactly the wrong moment.
The effect of Executive Profiling compounds. This is the snowball effect. Because every talk, every panel, every repurposed piece of content with their name on it that’s shared, becomes part of the canon of work.
Where to start
If you're a senior leader who has been putting this off, the place to start is simpler than most people assume.
Pick one topic you have a genuinely distinctive view on. Something specific rather than a broad industry trend. Something where your experience gives you a perspective most people in your field can’t have. Write about that, in plain language, in the way you'd explain it to a smart colleague who isn't from your industry. Or write it how you’d explain it to your mum, that’s often a good start point to focus on reducing complexity and jargon.
That's the first piece. It doesn’t require a full content strategy. Or a brand audit. One piece, on one topic, published somewhere your clients and peers actually read.
Most executives are surprised by what follows. The reach is rarely what they imagined. The impact from feedback they receive is typically instant.
The leaders who cut through in their sectors don’t require large comms teams behind them. Just a specific and unique point of you, which is expressed clearly in public.
That's executive profiling. And the gap between how you’re received by those who know you and who you appear to be everywhere else is, in my experience, almost always closable.
The only question is when you decide to close it.
Liam Fitzpatrick is the Founder of Commswork, a communications consultancy working with founders and senior executives on executive profiling, media training, and crisis communications. Based in the Northern Rivers. Get in touch atcommswork.com.au.