How Getting Fired Led Lyndsay Dowd to Build a Book, Podcast and Authority Brand

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After 23 years at IBM, Lyndsay Dowd left for another corporate job, ready for a new challenge. Six months later, she was fired.

For someone who had spent her entire career being the person companies called when things needed fixing, it was devastating. She was embarrassed, convinced she'd never work again and had no idea what to do next. What she couldn't have known was that getting fired would turn out to be the shove she needed to build a business, write a book, launch a podcast and become a recognized authority on leadership.

Today, Dowd is the founder of Heartbeat for Hire, a leadership coaching and consulting business, the author of Top Down Culture and the host of a podcast that's featured everyone from CEOs to Olympians and Grammy winners. Her work has led to speaking engagements, corporate clients and opportunities she never would have imagined during her IBM days.

We talk about how she built her reputation from scratch, why she considers LinkedIn one of her most important authority-building tools and how her book and podcast work together to keep her visible to potential clients. She also shares why she stopped making polished promotional videos in favor of simply talking to the camera, how she uses her book to turn speaking engagements into future opportunities and why the people who never engage with your content may be the ones most likely to hire you.

And there's a pretty remarkable example of that last point: A former IBM colleague who'd been quietly following Dowd's work reached out to invite her to keynote a virtual event expected to attract 50,000 people.

In this episode:

How getting fired after 23 years at IBM led Dowd to reinvent her careerWhy she started a podcast despite not being a podcast listener herselfHow her book, podcast and LinkedIn presence work together to attract speaking engagements and clientsWhy casual, imperfect videos outperform the polished promotional content she used to postHow she builds book giveaways into her s