Paul Wagstaff: From LinkedIn lurker to a personal brand with 350k impressions a year

The brief

Paul Wagstaff has been at Houghton Hams for 27 years. 

His family own the company and it’s been producing artisan meats in Northampton since 1983. The business now employs 100+ people and produces 60+ million slices of ham a year.

Social with Ryan has managed the Houghton Hams LinkedIn company page since late 2023. If you want the detail on that work, the Houghton Hams case study covers it in full.

This case study is about Paul and how we used his experience to grow his online presence, in turn driving attention, traffic and enquiries to Houghton Hams.

The starting point

Paul was a lurker. He had a profile, he read what came past, but nothing went the other way – he didn’t post. He sent a few connection requests here and there, and he’d get the occasional message, but nothing that turned into anything.

Which may seem like an odd position for someone to be in when they’re as well-known as Paul. 20-odd years in a family business, a respected name in British food manufacturing, but a LinkedIn profile doing no work at all. It’s a familiar story for many founders and directors, though.

Why we moved the focus onto personal profiles

Two years ago a strong company page could still carry a LinkedIn management strategy on its own. Then company pages got busier, reach got harder, and personal profiles became drastically favoured by the LinkedIn feed’s algorithm.

We could also see it in the Houghton Hams data. The posts that consistently outperformed everything else were the stories about people, by people.

So the strategy changed. Take the stories that were already working, and let the people they belong to tell them.

↳ The result: A LinkedIn strategy that moved with the platform instead of behind it.

Building around a director who didn’t want to get it wrong

Paul is not a natural poster. He runs a busy operation and he is very analytical, which is a fair position to hold. LinkedIn is full of stories of people who got personal branding wrong – the LinkedIn hustle bros or the business preachers, for instance – and nobody wants to be one of them.

That objection comes up in almost every personal branding conversation we have. The answer is not to talk somebody out of it, but instead to build a process that removes the risk.

So Ryan holds Paul to account, pushes for time in his diary, and gets as much out of that time as possible. Every post is written from his words and reviewed by him before it goes anywhere.

Paul’s a dream to work with. He’s honest about what he wants to share, what is off-limits and what he thinks will work. 

But, occasionally, we have to tell him he’s wrong.

In June 2026 we wrote a post about the first day Houghton Hams produced Deli Style Ham for Aldi. Paul stood on the line from 4am to 4pm, without eating, drinking or even nipping off to the loo.

Paul thought it needed editing. “Do we have to include that specific detail?!”, he asked. We pushed back, discussed the importance of the detail, and we ran with it – with his eventual approval.

It did 68,000 impressions and became his best performing post to date. That’s the power of having an expert on your side who instinctively knows what works – and it’s why business leaders partner with personal branding agencies like Social with Ryan.

↳ The result: A director who trusts the process, because the process keeps being right.

What Paul actually talks about on LinkedIn

Paul owns the operation – the process, the people on the floor, and the detail of how something gets made.

Take the made without nitrites range, for example. Paul’s post wasn’t a simple launch announcement. It was about the years of work behind it, why the project kept sliding down the list, and how conversations across the industry eventually pushed it back up.

That’s the key to strong personal brand content. Considered, genuine and grounded in something only you could say.

His second and third best posts of the most recent quarter follow the same pattern. One on the Aldi forecast being 25,000 packets a week and the line now running over 70,000, and one on shutting the factory down for 10 days, the longest planned closure since 1983.

None of them are about ham – they’re about what it takes to make it; the story, the challenges, the learnings, the people. 

↳ The result: A profile that reads like a director thinking out loud, rather than a business talking about itself.

Making content inside a working food factory

Food manufacturing is one of the harder places to film. There are hygiene rules, accreditation to protect, and a reasonable reluctance to show competitors how the job gets done.

Before any filming, the factory spends about an hour and a half getting itself camera-ready.

And it’s a working site producing 350,000+ packs a week, so the window is narrow and the shot list has to be right first time.

Two and a half years in, Ryan knows what he can take, what Paul is comfortable with, and what will land. That knowledge took time to build and it is the reason the content exists at all.

↳ The result: A behind-the-scenes content library from a site most producers would never open up.

Two LinkedIn profiles, one business

Paul is not the only personal brand at Houghton Hams. Joe Nicholson, National Sales Manager, runs alongside him, and the split between them is deliberate.

If it’s in the factory, it’s Paul. Out on the road? It’s Joe. One is operations, one is sales.

On that same made without nitrites launch, Joe’s post covered the relationships and the buyer conversations that got it onto shelves. Paul covered the process that got it made. The company page did the news, plus a video of someone going to buy it in Booths.

Three accounts, three angles, and little overlap in who they reach.

The one thing running through all of them is family. Houghton Hams is a family business, so family is fair game everywhere, and it ties the three accounts together without making them repeat each other.

↳ The result: Three LinkedIn presences covering the same business, none of them saying the same thing twice.

The results

In the 12 months to July 2026, Paul’s profile generated 349,487 impressions – a 659% increase on the year before.

He reached 112,125 people, and 78% of them were outside his own network.

The compounding is the part worth looking at. 192,527 of those impressions came in the final 90 days, which is 55% of the entire year. Out-of-network reach in that window rose to 88%.

Engagement over the year came to 5,812 social engagements, including 415 comments.

All of it off one post a week.

What that visibility opens up

A dashboard full of green numbers is a nice thing to look at, but what a personal brand changes is who knows who you are before you walk into a room.

Paul was recently invited onto a podcast by a recruiter he works with. We didn’t source it and won’t claim we did, but Paul was nervous about it, so Ryan sat down with him for an hour beforehand and worked through the questions that had been put to him.

Some of those questions came from things Paul had written on LinkedIn. He posts regularly about the pinch points a growing business hits before its next step up, and that is what the interviewer wanted to talk about.

That’s what consistent visibility does. It gives you an ownable topic, that gives people a reason to come to you and something specific to ask you about when they do.

↳ The result: An operations director whose thinking is known well enough that other people build conversations around it.

The lesson

Paul was already respected in his industry before any of this. What he didn’t have was a way for people outside his immediate circle to hear from him.

He gave us his time, roughly an hour a month, and eventually his trust, then we did the rest.

If you have somebody in your business who is worth listening to, your job is to get what they already know in front of the people who want to hear it.