The person on the other end of every LinkedIn invitation
On 23 April 1991, Gerald Ratner stood up in the Royal Albert Hall in London to speak to the Institute of Directors. He ran Ratners, the family jewelry business he’d joined in 1966. By The Telegraph’s account, it was making £120 million a year in profit and held about a third of its market.
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He wanted to be funny. Explaining how Ratners could sell a cut-glass sherry decanter, with 6 glasses and a tray, for £4.95, he told the room it was “because it’s total crap.”
Then he said some of his earrings were cheaper than a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich, and probably wouldn’t last as long.
Within a few days, about £500 million had come off the value of the company. Ratner was out of his job about 18 months later, and in 1993 the group changed its name to Signet.
That September, Warren Buffett sat in front of a committee of the US House of Representatives. He’d just taken charge of Salomon Brothers after some of its people broke the rules in US Treasury auctions.
He repeated what he’d told the firm’s staff. If they lost money for the firm, he’d be understanding. If they lost “a shred of reputation for the firm,” he’d be ruthless.
He gave them a test to go with it. Before acting, they should ask whether they’d be happy to see it on the next day’s front page of their local paper, read by their families and friends.
Two businessmen, the same year. One spent a reputation in a sentence, and the other drew a line around his and made clear that money was the cheaper thing to lose.
A reputation isn’t something you own. Other people hold it for you, and they decide what it’s worth.
Nobody hears it all at once
Ratner’s mistake was loud. Everyone heard it in the same week, which is why people still tell the story 35 years later.
A founder’s reputation usually goes a quieter way. It’s spent one message at a time, in front of one person at a time, and those people rarely compare notes.
Picture the person on the other end. She runs a 20-person software company and opens LinkedIn between calls. There’s an invitation from a founder she’s never heard of, with a note that could have gone to anyone.
It praises her “impressive background” and asks for 15 minutes to “explore how we can help.” She ignores it and forgets it in about 4 seconds.
Except she doesn’t quite forget. The next time that founder’s name turns up, on a post in her feed or a speaker list, it comes with a faint label: the one who sent that note. She’d never say it out loud, and she doesn’t need to.
That’s the cost volume outreach never shows you. A dashboard counts the people who replied, but it has no column for what the others now think of you.
The arithmetic adds up faster than it feels. Send 1,000 generic invitations a month and, within a year, 12,000 people have met you through a note written for nobody.
Most of them won’t think about you again. Some will, and you won’t know which ones.
Your name is the sender
For a founder who still sells, this matters more than it does for a big company. A big company’s messages go out under a brand. A founder’s go out under their own face and name, to a small circle of people who might buy, invest, join or send a friend their way.
Ratners could change its name to Signet. You can’t change yours.
That name is also why founder outreach works at all. People will take a call from the person who built the thing when they’d never take one from a stranger with a quota. The same trust that opens the door is the thing each careless note wears down.
In a market of a few thousand buyers, the same names come round again. The person you annoyed in March may be a buyer in October, and she might also be the investor you pitch next year.
Buffett’s rule works here with one change of currency. A missed meeting is money, and money can be made back next quarter. A person who has quietly filed you under “generic” is a verdict you can’t see and can’t appeal.
LinkedIn keeps its own score as well. It lists invitations that are ignored or marked as spam among the reasons it restricts an account’s invitations. The platform and the reader point the same way.
It works in both directions
None of this means founders shouldn’t write to strangers. Most good customers were strangers once.
The same invitation that costs a little when it’s generic can earn a little when it’s right. A note that shows you actually read her post, and asks one fair question about it, tells her something about you even if she never buys. She may not answer this month, but your name now comes with a better label.
So every invitation is a small bet with your name. It can go either way, and the mistake is sending 1,000 of them without looking at what’s on the table.
That mistake is easy to make for a good reason. A founder’s time is short, and a tool that promises 1,000 invitations a month sounds like hours bought back. What it doesn’t say is that it saves your hours by spending your name.
Buffett’s front-page test works here if you shrink the audience to one reader. Would the reason behind an invitation hold up if you read it aloud to the person it’s about?
“You posted last week that your first sales hire quit” holds up. “You matched my filter” doesn’t.
How we spend someone else’s name
At GTME the invitations usually go out from the client’s own profile, so the reputation on the line isn’t ours. That’s why we keep rules about how it’s spent.
Your operator, a GTM engineer on our team, writes every message for one person, about that person’s problem rather than the product. A person writes it on every plan, the cheapest one included.
The fuller argument, with the reason, the note and the reply in order, is in our guide to LinkedIn outreach for founders.
From our Signal plan up, your operator also watches for buying signals: public, recent signs that a person has the problem. That’s the front-page test in practice, a reason you could read aloud to the person it’s about.
People who say no aren’t contacted again. Leaving the right people alone is part of looking after a name.
If someone asks who wrote the message, your operator says a member of the founder’s team drafted it and that the founder takes every meeting. A reputation shouldn’t rest on pretending.
A cloud-based sending tool with daily limits does the clicking, and it only sends what your operator wrote. LinkedIn’s User Agreement doesn’t allow tools like that, and we tell founders so before they sign, on how we run your account. It’s a risk we’d rather name than hide.
To see a note built for one person next to a generic one, read LinkedIn cold message examples, and how an operator rewrites them.
Ratner spent his name in one sentence that everyone heard. Most founders spend theirs in 1,000 small sentences that nobody else hears.
The bill comes either way.
Sources
All checked on 28 September 2026.
- 01Damian Reece, on Gerald Ratner’s 1991 speech, The Telegraph, 25 April 2025.
- 02Wikipedia, Gerald Ratner.
- 03C-SPAN, Securities Trading Investigation, 4 September 1991.
- 04Myles Udland, The moment America met Warren Buffett, Yahoo Finance, 30 April 2019.
- 05LinkedIn Help, Types of restrictions for sending invitations.
- 06LinkedIn, User Agreement, section 8.2.