Building Trust at Scale: Troy Fine’s LinkedIn Strategy Revealed

Troy Fine turned a wake-up call into a launchpad. After years of entrepreneurial ambition, it was a moment of personal loss that propelled him to trade hesitation for action. Now, as the founder of a cybersecurity compliance firm, he empowers businesses to win enterprise deals with confidence. In this edition of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight, Troy shares how embracing imperfection, prioritizing aligned clients, and mastering social selling on LinkedIn transformed both his mindset and business. His journey is a testament to grit, clarity, and the power of starting before you're ready.

Hi, Troy Fine! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

We conduct cybersecurity compliance audits that validate a company's security posture, allowing our customers to close lucrative enterprise deals with confidence.

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

I had an entrepreneurial mindset early on, but the moment I became an entrepreneur was when I realized my value wasn't tied to my job description. In my first role, I started spending all my free time trying to figure out how to bring in the next dollar of revenue, even though it wasn't my assigned task. I realized I was driven by the success of the business itself, not just my career path.

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

My entrepreneurial catalyst was a moment of profound clarity following the death of my father in early 2025. He was 78, and at 38, I looked at my own life and realized I could be halfway done. This was a wake-up call about mortality and wasted time. While I had spent years wanting to take the leap, the excuses always won. In that moment, the math became non-negotiable: The fear of failure was completely overshadowed by the far greater fear of regretting the business I never started. That day, the excuses stopped, and the business started.

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

My single greatest game-changer has been LinkedIn, but not as a networking site—as a platform for Social Selling and building a brand of trust.

It contributes to my success in two core ways:

High-Conversion Social Selling: LinkedIn allows us to bypass traditional gatekeepers and target key decision-makers directly. By prioritizing insightful, high-value content over generic sales pitches, we use the platform to warm up prospects, nurture relationships, and generate high-quality leads.

Instant Authority and Trust: Our business relies on credibility. By consistently sharing expertise and engaging in industry conversations, my profile becomes a digital proof-of-work. This established authority shortens the sales cycle dramatically, allowing us to build the necessary brand trust required to secure lucrative enterprise deals.

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

I learned the hard way that perfection is the enemy of progress. I spent too much time over-engineering our processes, confusing complexity with quality. My course correction was a commitment to ruthless simplification. We now focus only on the essential to deliver timely client value, allowing us to successfully scale by validating our small steps before making large leaps

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

The game-changing strategy for us was deliberately choosing to be highly selective with our client intake. Our competitors prioritize volume, but we realized that saying "no" to misaligned work was actually the key to scaling. By cutting out 80% of potential prospects, we ensured our team was always working on projects where we could deliver the maximum impact. This minimized client churn, dramatically increased team efficiency, and allowed us to maintain an unusually high standard of quality without burning ourselves out.

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

The one thing I desperately wish I knew was the true nature of the "long middle." Everyone talks about the initial excitement and the eventual success, but no one prepares you for the patience required to endure the valley of development. The advice is to brace for the fact that for a long time, perhaps a year or mor, you will be grinding in isolation, generating very little revenue, and receiving almost no external validation. You must be prepared to be your own cheerleader and find your resilience not in hope, but in the non-negotiable commitment to simply make it to the next day.

Want to dive deeper into Troy's work? Check out the links below!

• Visit Fine Assurance's website: fineassurance.com
• Connect with Troy Fine on LinkedIn: Troy Fine
• Listen to the GRC Unsensored Podcast.