Why the founder with the most experience is rarely the one getting the calls, and what a strategist who has been invisible herself does about it.
Early on, one platform was carrying the whole business. It was working, so everything went into it. Then the posting stopped for six months, and because that one channel had been holding up all of her visibility, the moment it went quiet, so did she. There was no LinkedIn presence to fall back on, no email list nurturing anyone in the background, nothing else keeping her in view. That was early 2024. As she puts it on her profile, she lost $24k in two weeks.
Abigail Mills is the one who went quiet. She’s the founder of Rose & Thistle Social and a social media strategist for founder-led brands, now based in Dubai, and what she rebuilt afterwards is what the business helps clients with today. In plain terms: she takes a female founder who’s posting occasionally and builds her a personal brand on social media, so that the founder’s own story and expertise do the work of turning followers into buyers.
The founder she writes for, in her own description, is “posting when they have a spare minute because there’s no real plan behind it. She’s established, good at what she does, tired of watching less-skilled people get the visibility she should have.” Abigail hears the second half of that constantly: someone with a fraction of the experience is being called “the” person in the space. Her answer is short. “Expertise was never the thing that made someone visible,” she has written. “Visibility is.”
Leader in Spotlight: Read Adam Dowd Feature in Executives Diary
The Bins Post
The part of visibility she cares about most is the part founders leave out. “Most people find sharing their story and elements of their life doesn’t feel like content,” she says. “What most people forget, though, is that this is the only part that is truly unique to them.” The small, human, unrelated-seeming pieces of a founder’s story get cut “because it feels too personal or too far from their ‘expertise’ to count, when in fact this is the part that builds the most trust with people and leads to the best sales and insights.”
The consumer research points the same way. Sprout Social’s 2025 Index, drawn from more than 4,000 consumers, found authenticity and relatability to be the two traits people value most in a brand, with about half saying original content is what makes their favourite brands stand out. Edelman’s 2025 report on brand trust found that trust now weighs as heavily as quality and price when people decide what to buy.
“Most experts’ knowledge can be replicated, qualifications can be earned by anyone willing to put in the time, but no one can take your lived experience.”
Abigail Mills, Founder/Social Media Strategist for Founder-Led Brands, Rose & Thistle Social
Her proof is a bin. One of her clients is an ADHD coach who has ADHD herself. Before they worked together, Abigail says, the client was posting “tips about how to manage overwhelm, executive function hacks, the usual content that any ADHD coach can put out.” Then, on a call, the client mentioned in passing that her week had been so overwhelming she’d forgotten to put the bins out, a task she never forgets. She laughed it off as a silly aside. Abigail told her to post it. “That post about her bins is still her best performing post to date,” she has written, “and it started conversations with more people than any hack or tip she’d ever shared, because so many people had lived exactly the same moment.” It brought enquiries and real conversations, and it did something the tips couldn’t. “This was her proof that she understands how her clients think and live because she has similar moments,” Abigail says.
The bins post worked because it closed a gap Abigail tends to find with founders.
Expert Mode
“She can articulate what she does in a room, in a discovery call, in a DM,” she says of the founders she meets, “but none of that language has made it into her content. She’s always in expert mode and has lost the thing that would actually move her audience from following to buying, which is the personal, trust-building mode.”
The other thing she finds is the loop. In one post she listed what runs through a founder’s head before a single word is written: what to post today, reel or carousel or story, which hook, whether to show her face more or less, whether last week’s win sounds braggy. “That’s roughly twenty micro-decisions,” she wrote. Then second guessing, paralysis, no post, guilt, a scramble to batch a few in one sitting, burnout, and silence again. Her point is that the decisions belong to the strategy. “When your positioning, your pillars, and your point of view are actually locked in, every piece of content already has a job before you sit down to create it.”
Positioning, she has written, is simpler than the jargon makes it sound. She asks founders two questions. What do you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room? When someone mentions a problem you solve, does your name come up first? The hesitation she usually gets back is, in her words, “exactly where a working positioning strategy starts.”
Those two questions are where her framework begins.
Five Phases
“My SHIFT Framework is my way of building my clients to become a category of one in their industry,” she says. It’s a five phase system, and it starts a step before the question most founders bring her, which is “I don’t know what to post.” That question, she says, leads to overwhelm and usually to not posting at all, or to posting for the sake of getting something out and wondering why nothing’s landing. The step before is story and positioning, “the strategic foundation everything else sits upon.”
So the first phase is to stop the client talking about content and get them talking about what they stand for and who they want to attract. Once that’s in place, the second is to build “a bank of thoughts, opinions, proof and lessons that your audience needs to know about.” The third is channels: which ones suit this founder, and where her time and energy should go. The fourth is what Abigail calls fuelling visibility, when the foundational work becomes “a content machine that drives to your business goals.” The fifth is tracking, going through the data and making decisions on what’s going well and what needs to be dialled back. Then, she says, “the SHIFT then moves into a repeatable cycle that is tweaked towards your business and marketing goals.”
The short version is her Power Hour, sixty minutes with one founder. It starts before the call: the client takes Abigail’s free personal brand audit quiz first, because, as she wrote, most founders already know something isn’t working and can’t pinpoint what.
The result she says she’d stand behind is a single one. A client went from occasional, no-plan posting to three social posts that generated £50k of qualified leads inside 48 hours. Not a slow build: three specific posts, positioned correctly, doing what a year of consistent content hadn’t.
She learned the cost of the other approach on herself.
One Channel
The business grew out of Marketing in Scotland, an Instagram blog Abigail started to learn about marketing, which became a full-time business working with service-based companies. Instagram was the only place she showed up. “It was working,” she wrote, “so I put everything into it and funnelled my entire business into one platform.” Then came the six months of silence, and the two weeks after it. “My marketing didn’t just dip. My entire personal brand disappeared.”
What she took from it is the thing she says a strategist who has never gone quiet can’t offer. “People have this perception that when things get busy, the first thing that takes a hit is their visibility and marketing,” she says, “which is fine until something like this happens and you’ve got nothing to help move the needle in your business anymore.” She has the evidence, she says, and can show that it’s possible to get back out there and build again from scratch.
“A strategist who’s never gone quiet can’t tell you the impact of it from real life experience, which in turn can impact the trust in that person when they’re advising on this side of the conversation.”
Abigail, Founder/Social Media Strategist for Founder-Led Brands, Rose & Thistle Social
Someone who has felt the drop, she says, knows that the infrastructure behind visibility is “the thing holding the pipeline up while you’re busy doing the work that pays the bills today.” It’s why she no longer bets on one channel. What works, in her experience, is being as visible as possible every week across several channels, online and off: email, in-person events, conversations and content working together. “Visibility compounds when it’s happening in more than one place at once.”
The place she does that from changed in June 2026.
Dubai
Abigail moved from the UK to Dubai in June 2026. She has written that the move changed how she thinks about building a business and showing up online, and she is specific about what shifted. Confidence first, “because being somewhere new forces you to introduce yourself without the safety net of everyone already knowing your story.” Speed, because “everyone around you is already building,” which kills the “I’ll get to my personal brand eventually” mindset almost instantly. Networking, because in-person connection is everything there and it taught her how to translate that energy into what she posts. And positioning: “You cannot blend in here and expect to be remembered, and neither can your business.”
She has also been applying her own advice to herself. “I avoided gym floors for 29 years for the same reason most founders avoid showing up online,” she wrote in September. Two months in, it isn’t effortless but it’s familiar. “Showing up isn’t something you’re naturally good or bad at,” she wrote. “It’s a muscle.” The founders who build strong personal brands, in her telling, are the ones who kept showing up long enough for it to stop feeling like a decision every single time.
Where Abigail Is Now
This year has brought two confirmed speaking engagements, one at an online summit in America at the end of September and one in Dubai in October, with more conversations already in motion. They came, she wrote, not from one viral post or one lucky DM but from consistent visibility across every channel she shows up on. Her Power Hours came back this summer, and the results, she says, made it obvious she should never have stopped them.
Outside work, she’s always socialising: her Women’s Sunday Club meet-up, dancing, reformer. “I’m always out doing something,” she says. Her advice to other founders on that front is to have something to do outside of work, so there’s time and space to grow, because it will bring the biggest return mentally. And there’s a line from one of her first-ever clients that she keeps. “Always be prospecting, because you never know what might happen.” The dip in early 2024, when she lost a large chunk of income in two weeks, was the sign that he was right.
What’s next, in her words: “I’m planning my 2027 to be the best year in business yet and to really build up my network and name here in Dubai as a go to for female founders who want to build their founder-led brand into an asset that brings them dream clients and visionboard opportunities into their businesses!”
Five Lines from Abigail’s Diary
“Your lived experience isn’t separate from your expertise. It’s what makes your version of that expertise impossible to copy.”
“Expertise was never the thing that made someone visible. Visibility is.”
“People don’t build trust with a service or business; they build trust with a person.”
“Visibility compounds when it’s happening in more than one place at once.”
“Nobody walks onto the gym floor or starts building their personal brand feeling completely ready.”
From the Diary of Abigail Mills
Abigail Mills is a Dubai-based social media strategist for founder-led brands and the Founder of Rose & Thistle Social.
| Role | Founder/Social Media Strategist for Founder-Led Brands, Rose & Thistle Social |
| Based in | Dubai, United Arab Emirates |
| Also with | Marketing in Scotland, the Instagram blog the business grew from |
“Your lived experience isn’t separate from your expertise. It’s what makes your version of that expertise impossible to copy.”
Editor’s note
Executives Diary features Abigail Mills because the case she makes for the founder-led brand is one she can prove on herself. She is the founder who went quiet, and the figure it cost her is on her profile for anyone to read. What convinces the editors is the bins post: a client’s forgotten chore doing more than a year of tips, and a strategist who told her to publish it. The framework she names has five phases she describes in plain words, and the result she stands behind is counted in pounds and hours.
Executives Diary, Editorial
