This week on Random Access Memories, I'm reflecting on my conversation with Ayoub Fandi, better known as The GRC Engineer, and someone I'm fortunate enough to call a close friend.

Ayoub has spent around eight years working in GRC, including time at Salesforce and GitLab, and recently joined Lovable. But what makes his story interesting isn't really his CV. It's how he went from being a relatively unknown GRC practitioner to someone with a huge professional network, relationships with some of the biggest names in technology and career opportunities most people would love to have.

And he did it largely by writing about GRC on LinkedIn.

I've had plenty of people ask me how to build a personal brand, grow their network or create a career where opportunities come to them rather than constantly having to chase the next job. Ayoub is probably one of the best examples I know of someone who's managed to do exactly that.

But what surprised me about our conversation was how little he actually cares about the followers.

We talked about consistency, why most people give up too early, finding your niche, building genuine relationships, the difference between influence and popularity, and why he doesn't believe you need to discover your passion before getting started.

We also established that a Frenchman recommending London restaurants might be the biggest endorsement of British food I've ever heard.

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Ayoub started writing about GRC years before anyone really knew who he was. For a long time, he'd post for a few weeks, get distracted by work or life and then disappear for months.

Around mid-2023, he decided to try something different. He challenged himself to write every day for 30 days and see whether he could build a habit. Nearly three years later, he estimates he's published around 1,200 posts.

What I found interesting was that he wasn't initially writing to become an influencer. He was writing because it forced him to organise his own thinking. If he couldn't explain something clearly, perhaps he didn't understand it as well as he thought.

The first person who should benefit from your content is you. Everyone else is a bonus.

This was probably my favourite part of the conversation.

Ayoub explained that LinkedIn content is essentially how people discover him, but the real value comes afterwards. He's built close relationships with more than 100 people, many of whom barely interact with his content anymore.

Those relationships have become a source of learning, feedback and opportunities. He can test ideas against people running GRC programmes in completely different industries and understand what actually works rather than relying on his own experience.

He's effectively built a network that helps him become better at his job, which then makes his content better.

10,000 followers who recognise your name aren't necessarily worth as much as 10 people who'll pick up the phone.

Ayoub didn't start by trying to become the world's leading authority on cybersecurity.

He focused on GRC Engineering, a relatively narrow subject that very few people were discussing seriously at the time. He wrote about it repeatedly, developed expertise and became someone people associated with that particular problem.

Only later did people start asking him broader questions about GRC strategy, security programmes and organisational change.

His advice was to start with something specific enough that you can genuinely become useful to a particular audience, then expand as your knowledge and credibility grow.

You don't need everyone to know who you are. You need the right people to know why they should come to you.

Ayoub referenced Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You and challenged something we hear constantly in career advice.

The idea that everyone should find their passion and then build a career around it.

He doesn't buy it.

When he started working in GRC, he regularly thought about changing careers. He wasn't particularly good at the job, didn't necessarily love it and wondered whether he'd be better suited to something else.

But as he became more competent, he became more interested. As he became more interested, he invested more time. Eventually, something he initially considered leaving became the foundation of his entire professional identity.

Maybe you don't need to find something you love. Maybe you need to get good enough at something to discover why you love it.

Towards the end, I asked Ayoub what actually motivates him.

His answer wasn't followers, money, recognition or access to CEOs.

He talked about the messages he receives from people who've used his content to get promoted, negotiate better salaries, find new jobs or convince their companies to create GRC Engineering positions.

That's what matters to him.

He also made an important point about access to influential people. Just because someone important gives you their time doesn't mean they're doing you a favour. They probably believe they're getting something valuable from the relationship too.

Understanding that helps you recognise your own value.

The best measure of your influence might be what changes for other people because you were there.

Something Ayoub said during our conversation made me think about how completely backwards we've got the idea of personal branding.

We obsess over followers, impressions, engagement rates and how many people recognise us at conferences. I've certainly been guilty of it myself. There's something strangely addictive about watching a LinkedIn post take off or seeing your follower count increase. It feels like progress, even when you're not entirely sure what you're progressing towards.

But Ayoub described his content as essentially the top of a funnel. People discover him through something he's written, perhaps reach out to discuss it, and occasionally that turns into a genuine relationship. Some of those people haven't read his content in over a year, but they're now close friends who regularly exchange ideas, challenge each other's thinking and help one another professionally.

That's a very different way of measuring success.

What I found particularly interesting was how those relationships have actually made Ayoub better at his job. When he's considering a new approach to GRC, he can speak to people running programmes across dozens of different companies and industries. He can find out whether something that works at a technology startup would be completely impractical in financial services. He's essentially crowdsourcing knowledge from people who trust him enough to share their experiences.

And that knowledge then makes his content better, which introduces him to more people, which creates more opportunities to learn. It's a pretty incredible cycle when you think about it.

It also reminded me of something I've increasingly realised through my own career. The best opportunities I've had rarely came from applying for a job or having the perfect CV. They've come from conversations, introductions and relationships built over years, often with absolutely no expectation that anything would come from them.

The mistake is treating networking as a transaction. Connecting with someone because you want a job, an introduction or something else from them. People can generally tell when that's your motivation.

Ayoub's approach is different because he's genuinely interested in people. He enjoys the conversations, wants to understand their experiences and is happy spending hours talking about GRC even when there's absolutely nothing obvious in it for him.

Perhaps the real purpose of building a personal brand isn't to make thousands of people know who you are. It's to create opportunities to really get to know a few of them.

And if those relationships make you better at what you do, the followers become considerably less important.

Right at the beginning of the conversation, I asked Ayoub the question I ask every guest. Who's your hero?

He chose his mum.

Ayoub's family is originally from Morocco, and he talked about how his mother moved to France with very little and managed to build a career while raising a family and dealing with the additional challenges that come with being an immigrant, particularly as a woman.

What he admired wasn't necessarily a particular achievement. It was her ability to keep going despite the difficulties, building something for herself and her family when the opportunities weren't necessarily obvious or easily available.

Later in the conversation, when I asked Ayoub what motivates him to keep doing everything he does, his answer was equally simple. His family.

I thought there was something quite nice about how those two answers connected.

His mum worked to create opportunities for her family, and now Ayoub is doing something similar, although in a completely different way. He's building a career and relationships that create opportunities for himself and the people he cares about. And through his work, he's also helping other people improve their careers and lives.

It made me think about Ollie and Izzy and what I actually want them to take from watching me work.

I spend an enormous amount of time working, travelling, speaking at conferences and trying to build things. Sometimes probably too much. And while I'd love them to be proud of what I achieve, I don't particularly want them to remember how many followers I had, which companies I worked for or how much money I earned.

I'd rather they remember why I did those things and what I tried to do with the opportunities I had.

I want them to see that working hard can create opportunities, but also that those opportunities mean more when you use them to help other people. That success isn't necessarily about being the most important person in the room, but sometimes about helping someone else get into a room they otherwise wouldn't have reached.

Ayoub talked about how much it means when someone tells him his work helped them get promoted, find a better job or earn more money for their family. I think that's a pretty good definition of success.

Maybe the greatest thing we can pass on to our children isn't what we've achieved, but the opportunities and confidence we give them to achieve something of their own.

And perhaps, if we're lucky, they'll look back one day and understand why we worked so hard in the first place.