Founder, In Good Company | Ghostwriter | Social Media Marketing Specialist | Copywriter | Content Strategist | Scriptwriter
In the fall of 2025, Ryan Jones-Symonds sat with about 1,000 followers on LinkedIn and no plan. It was, by her own account, the worst hiring market since the pandemic. She had spent seven years marketing brands and telling other people’s stories. The layoff forced a different question: “What happens when the writer becomes the subject?”
The Newsroom That Taught Her to Stay Out of the Frame
Jones-Symonds did not start out chasing followers. She started out chasing facts. A journalism diploma from St. Clair College put her in a newsroom before she’d finished her studies, and by 2018, still a student, she was Managing Editor at The Converged Citizen, leading a team of more than twenty reporters, chasing beats, fact-checking copy, and holding everyone, including herself, to Canadian Press style. She wrote a book review column on the side. She filed one to two stories a week.
That discipline followed her out of school and into content operations. At Perk.com Canada, she spent three years managing editorial calendars across more than twenty sites, in niches from health to finance to home renovation. She learned how audience intent and keyword research actually move traffic, not in theory, but across dozens of publications at once. At Luminara Creative, she stepped into managing people for the first time, hiring copywriters, running client relationships, and helping a client pull off their first in-person event.
Then came Finka Inc., and the first real signal that her instincts extended beyond editing other people’s words. Over two years, she rebuilt the company’s brand strategy into one clear voice, grew the domain’s search authority from zero to twenty, and built lead sequences where a single opt-in generated 85 leads. She also took the CEO’s personal LinkedIn from roughly a one percent engagement rate to eight, well above the industry standard, while adding more than 2,000 followers. She was, without quite naming it yet, already the guardian of someone else’s brand voice.
She just hadn’t tried it on herself.
The Layoff That Rewrote the Assignment
The layoff in the fall of 2025 changed the assignment. Facing the worst hiring market since the pandemic, Jones-Symonds started posting on LinkedIn by first sharing her layoff story and taking people along on her job application journey. From there, she moved into writing about: brand voice, positioning, and the mechanics of being visible in a market that no longer rewarded quiet competence. Two of her next roles found her, not the other way around. People messaged her directly because they had already seen her work in their feed.
That experience is what drives her work today. As founder of In Good Company, Jones-Symonds helps founders and creators build a voice and social media content that people can’t scroll past. Drawing on seven years of marketing experience and a journalism background, she gives words to a personal brand and helps people sell themselves through story, across LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Substack. Her premise is the one she learned the hard way: a personal brand and a story are a person’s most valuable assets.
That same instinct for authenticity shapes her hardest line in the industry. As AI tools flood the content world, Jones-Symonds has become one of the more vocal advocates among her peers for writers reclaiming their own vocabulary. “I don’t believe AI belongs anywhere in the writing process,” she says. “It blocks people’s ability to think and form intimacy with their own thoughts and words.” The actual sentences, she insists, have to come from the person living the story.
The results bear that out. On her own profile, Jones-Symonds grew from 1,000 to 6,000 followers in nine months, and her most viral post reached 47,000 impressions, with 615 reactions, 147 comments, 27 reposts, and 21 saves. Her past client work shows the same pull: one LinkedIn post earned 2,056 reactions, 81 comments, and 19 reposts, while an Instagram post drew 34,600 views, 2,200 saves, 1,200 shares, and 435 new follows. Through In Good Company, she now brings that approach to founders and creators who want their content to attract the right audience and grow their business.
What She Wanted Back
What happens when the writer becomes the subject? For Ryan Jones-Symonds, the answer turned out to be the whole business model. The same visibility that once felt like exposure became the asset that rebuilt her career, then someone else’s, then a growing roster of them.
She is still, at heart, the reporter who was trained to stay out of the frame. She just learned that some stories only work if you finally let yourself be in them.
Ryan Jones-Symonds is the founder of In Good Company, based in the Greater Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo Metropolitan Area. She helps founders and creators build a voice and social media content that attracts the right audience across LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Substack. To connect with Ryan, visit igcwithryan.com or find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-jones-symonds/
