How Dom Hawes turns insider experience into LinkedIn posts that land

Dom Hawes has looked at 250+ agencies through a buyer's lens over eight years. That number shows up in his posts, and it's the reason people stop scrolling. When someone says they've examined 76 agencies in three months alone, you read the next sentence.

His LinkedIn sits at the intersection of agency M&A, founder psychology, and business model reality. He posts 4.5 times a week, mostly stories and transformation narratives, and his best day is Friday. His top post, a career transition announcement, pulled 478 engagements. A year-in-review opener hit 230. A one-liner about AI-written posts got 129.

What ties them together is a voice that sounds like someone thinking out loud after years of watching the same mistakes repeat. He's not teaching from a textbook. He's reporting from the field.

Dom's tone is conversational in a way that takes real discipline to pull off. He drops phrases like 'funny old year' and 'You'll smash it. I know you will.' in posts that also cite deal structures and acquisition timelines, and somehow neither register as out of place. The casual register earns the credibility, rather than undermining it. His signature line, 'Over the past 8-10 years, I've had the privilege of building and acquiring agencies, working closely with founders, investors and leadership teams across the creative market,' does a lot of work in one sentence: it establishes tenure, names the specific world he operates in, and signals that what follows comes from observation, not opinion. He also uses humor as a scalpel. His post calling out 'antithetical sentence structures so beloved by LLMs' is a good example: the critique is sharp, but the phrasing is dry enough that it doesn't read as a lecture. That balance, skeptical but warm, is the through-line across his content.

Dom's content clusters around four distinct areas. Each one draws on the same source material: years of watching agency founders make the same calls under pressure.

Dom uses four hook patterns, and they all share one quality: they establish a specific vantage point before making any claim. His personal announcement hooks work because they signal a real transition, not a thought experiment. His data hooks, like 'Last three months? 76 creative agencies examined in detail,' work because the number is too specific to be made up. His casual contrarian openers, 'It's been a funny old year. Funny peculiar, not funny haha,' disarm the reader before the pivot. And his bold critiques, like 'Most LinkedIn posts that start with the word most are written by AI,' land because they're stated as fact, not hypothesis. The common thread is that each hook earns its authority before asking the reader to trust the insight that follows.

Formula: Major life/career decision stated plainly in first sentence, followed by context and reflection. Example: "After several years as co-Founder and Group CEO of Selbey Anderson, I will be stepping away from the role as the business enters its next phase." Why: Readers stop because they want to know why someone is leaving a role they built; it signals vulnerability and insider knowledge.

Formula: Quantified sample size (e.g., '76 agencies examined,' '250+ agencies looked at') followed by a counterintuitive finding about what those agencies got wrong. Example: "Last three months? 76 creative agencies examined in detail. Previous eight years? over 250 agencies looked at through a buyer's microscopic lens." Why: The numbers establish authority; the promise of a pattern insight makes readers want to learn what they missed.

Formula: A light, relatable observation that flips into a critique of common practice or thinking. Example: "It's been a funny old year. Funny peculiar, not funny haha." Why: The humor disarms; the pivot to critique feels earned because it's grounded in lived experience, not preaching.

Formula: A provocative claim about what most people do wrong, stated as fact, then explained with specificity. Example: "Most LinkedIn posts that start with the word 'most' are written by AI." Why: It's funny, self-aware, and immediately credible because he then proves the point with technical detail about LLM patterns.

Here are the five hooks that drove the most engagement on Dom's profile, pulled directly from his top-performing posts.

Three patterns show up consistently in Dom's highest-performing content. His career transition post at 478 engagements is the clearest signal: personal announcements that signal vulnerability and insider access pull more than any tactical post. His data-backed pattern posts, averaging 126 engagements when they cite concrete sample sizes, work because the numbers do the authority-building before the insight lands. And his rhetorical reframes, 'What if growth isn't an activity you can just throw more effort at?', drive comments because they invite the reader to think rather than just absorb.

Four moves from Dom's playbook are worth copying directly. Each one is specific enough to apply to your next post without translation.

The meta-lesson from studying Dom Hawes is that authority on LinkedIn comes from specificity of experience, not volume of content. He doesn't post more than most. He posts from a narrower, more documented vantage point. '250+ agencies looked at through a buyer's microscopic lens' is a credential that takes years to build and one sentence to deploy. If you want to write like Dom, start by asking what you've seen 250 times that most people have only seen twice. The full analysis breaks down every post format, engagement pattern, and hook structure in detail.