Founder of Conan & Co Content | Content Marketer | Blogger | Marketing Strategist | SEO Expert | Marketing Consultant | Copywriter | Personal Brand Manager
Witte Girard names the diagnosis most executives get wrong, why visibility isn’t built through volume, and what has to change before anything is published.
“Executives and their teams mistake expertise as a point of view.” That substitution, in Lauren Witte Girard’s account, is what leaves a year of disciplined publishing with nothing to show for. Senior leaders are often told to share what they know and trust that consistency will compound. “A point of view requires you to make a choice,” she says. “This is what I’ve seen, this is what I believe because of my experience, and this is what I’m willing to stand behind.”
Lauren Witte Girard is the founder and lead content strategist of Conan & Co Content where she helps organizations and leaders turn expertise into impact.
A Point of View is a Choice, Not a Credential
Expertise is the raw material. A point of view comes from deciding which conclusions you’re willing to stand behind publicly. “Too many times have I seen content be just a deliverable instead of a means to an outcome,” Witte Girard says. The failure state is quiet: the cadence holds, the calendar fills, and nothing arrives. “You’re spending time and resources creating and publishing, but you’re not building authority, relationships, or opportunity.”
One client engagement involved the CEO of a marketing agency serving consumer goods brands. His industry knowledge was well established with the people who knew him. The reputation existed, but online, and on LinkedIn in particular, there wasn’t much evidence.
Witte Girard developed his executive persona, identified the ideas and experiences that could carry a recognizable position, built the editorial strategy and recurring themes, ghostwrote the content, and ran the LinkedIn programme. “A big part of my role was pushing the content away from broad marketing commentary and toward specific opinions, examples, and language.”
Monthly profile views rose 50 percent over the first three months. “We started seeing the kinds of outcomes we actually cared about: more relevant conversations happening on LinkedIn and new leads and partnership opportunities originating directly from the platform.”
“Polish isn’t always better,” Witte Girard says. Some of the strongest posts kept the blunt, faintly unfinished vibe of a conversation. Smoothing them would have removed the authenticity.
An Executive’s Best Idea is the One They Stopped Noticing
When Witte Girard hears something generic, she digs in deeper. She keeps asking questions until she uncovers what they’ve watched happen repeatedly over their career. The ideas that surface are sharper and more valuable.
“What we end up publishing isn’t new information. We feature concepts executives understand so deeply from experience, they’ve become second nature.”
The publishable material is already in the room and has been for years. Executives know their subject so well, they’ve lost perspective on which parts are interesting to other people. “A big part of my job is identifying what’s worth posting.”
Finding the Idea Only You Can Express
The process starts before anything is written. Finding a strong point of view requires enough curiosity to move past the first answer, enough distance to recognize the distinction, and enough discipline not to polish out the personality.
First, start with evidence. “I’m listening for specificity and authenticity,” Witte Girard says of that opening conversation. “What have you seen firsthand? What do you believe because of what you’ve experienced? Where do you disagree with conventional wisdom, and why?” The goal isn’t to be contrarian, but to get specific enough that the post could only have been written from that person’s point of view.
Second, pressure-test the idea. “Is it supported by their experience? Is there something distinctive here?” A distinctive claim with no experience behind it is something anyone could have written.
Third, pay attention to what gets a reaction. “I ask more questions, listen for patterns, challenge vague answers, and pay attention to the moments when they light up with passion.”
Fourth, cut toward the specific, then stop cutting. Move away from vague commentary towards what makes the leader recognizable. “I’ve become much more willing to leave some edges in,” Witte Girard says. Her standard for a finished draft is that it “doesn’t lose the way they naturally think or speak.” That’s not a stylistic preference. “When you’re willing to be specific, people have a reason to come back to you.”
Why Executives Stall Before the First Sentence
The bottleneck is almost never the writing. “Most people get stuck before the writing ever starts. Their knowledge has become second nature, so it’s harder to recognize what’s valuable to someone else.” Starting with a conversation instead of a content calendar helps pull the treasured knowledge out.
The value of a LinkedIn presence has raised the stakes on getting content right. Data published by Profound in February 2026 places LinkedIn among the five most cited domains across large language model tools.
What about the leader who feels they’ve done everything right and has a year of posts to show for it, but not much else? “If you’ve been showing up consistently for a year and it hasn’t created recognition, relationships, or opportunities, you don’t have a consistency problem, you have an inauthenticity problem.”
Who is Lauren Witte Girard?
Lauren Witte Girard is the founder and lead content strategist of Conan & Co Content, an executive content practice in Phoenix, Arizona, working with founders, executives, and their teams on thought leadership content, LinkedIn strategy, and personal branding. She has spent fifteen years turning what leaders and organizations know into material other people can act on.
After running communications for the Arizona Technology Council from 2016 to 2018, Witte Girard spent four years at GitKraken where her work centered around content marketing for Git tools used by software developers. “Working with highly-technical audiences taught me quickly that you can’t hide weak ideas behind polished language.”
She founded Conan & Co Content in January 2023, and it’s been her full-time work since. “I started Conan & Co because I wanted more ownership over my work (and my life): Who I worked with, the problems I took on, and what I believe good content could actually accomplish.”
“My job isn’t to manufacture a personal brand around someone, it’s to uncover the story that’s already there.” Your material’s there. The work is deciding which part of it to stand behind.
Lauren Witte Girard is the founder and lead content strategist of Conan & Co Content, an executive content practice in Phoenix, Arizona, working with founders, executives, and their teams on thought leadership content, LinkedIn strategy, and personal branding. To connect with Lauren or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile or https://conanandco.com/
