Do You Know Where Your Body of Work is?

You know I like to say that “IP is everywhere.” I mean this in the legal sense. It’s on your website, in your LinkedIn posts and newsletters, part of client deliverables, and the essence of the work you and your employees do.

For fellow quick starts like me, you know where else it is. In the physical sense—everywhere.

The ideas come fast and furiously. In the middle of the night. While driving and listening to a podcast. After a meet and greet call.

To be clear, ideas are not intellectual property. However, they are part of our “Body of Work.”

According to the dictionary, a “body of work” is the entirety of the creative or academic output produced by a particular individual or unit.

As experts, we all have a Body of Work.

Through our many years of building our expertise, we inevitably have many original [emphasis added] ideas about how to serve our clients better, products or services to offer, articles to write, new interpretations of old ideas.

A few of these ideas get a full expression. Some get just a bit of structure. Many languish in long abandoned notebooks. Still, the totality of our thinking, learning and advising is our Body of Work.

Imagine an inventory of all of these ideas, outlines, and expressions. I bet you would be pleasantly surprised by the depth and richness of your Body of Work.

Now imagine this inventory as a reservoir to draw from to increase the value in your business, the foundation for building scalable and saleable assets. A resource for thought leadership. A resource of information products. A resource of new services.

Building an inventory of my Body of Work will be my top priority for 2023.

So, do you know where your Body of Work is?