Exciting Offerings Are Coming
As an expertise-based service provider, I am right beside my clients in the process of building and scaling my business with an eye to an eventual sale. It’s no surprise that I get inspired by my Hourly to Exit podcast guests, and the many people I hear from on LinkedIn and other public forms. This has led me to rethink my business, and I am excited to share a new approach to getting more wealth into the hands of more women.
Converting My IP Into a Scalable Asset
There is no profession more wedded to the hourly model than lawyers. I am guilty as charged.
When I went out on my own in the early 2000s, after being general counsel at a big company, I started the same way that many of you did: billing hourly. I sold my time. I quickly changed to a flat fee model, but not because of strategy. I just hated tracking my hours.
That worked well for me and provided a comfortable income and a comfortable lifestyle for me and my family for many years.
Then came the dramatic political events that drove me to want to do more meaningful work. For me, that meant helping to create a more equitable economy. My sweet spot is professional services and I pivoted to working with experts. In the process, I took my own medicine. 😅 The truth is that, prior to this year, unscalable one-on-one services are have been the sole source of revenue in my business. The truth is that unscalable one-on-one services have been the sole source of revenue in my business.
Last year, I started to ask, “how can I turn my expertise into scalable and saleable intellectual property?”
Immediately, the recommendations to sell legal agreement templates rolled in. Creating another agreement templates site was a hard no for me. Yes, I want to increase my income. Yes, I want to decouple my income from my time. But equally important is increasing my impact. Selling legal templates alone would not further my mission of creating a more equitable economy.
So I continued my one-on-one work while having many wonderful conversations, both publicly and privately, with exceptional entrepreneurs who have founded expertise based businesses. I didn’t recognize these conversations as such as the time, but they were actually fantastic market research! With every conversation, the right direction for me became increasingly clear—more education.
Increasing my Impact
My mission is to get more wealth in the hands of women. It will be difficult for me to achieve this with one-on-one services only. I can serve only a limited number of clients on a one-on-one basis. And there are many women who cannot afford or are not ready for my one-on-one offerings.
That is where education comes in. To increase my impact, I need to reach more of you. My goal for 2023 and beyond is to make sure that all of you have access to the knowledge and resources needed to create the foundation for building wealth. Wealth requires assets. And assets in the expertise based business means intellectual property.
In future episodes of the podcast and across the platforms where I communicate with you, you can look forward to hearing more information that focuses on creating that firm foundation that will transform your business from an income producer to a wealth builder. Look for more solo episodes focusing on the four essential steps building a scalable and saleable intellectual property: creation, ownership, protection, and monetization.
The Hourly to Exit Journey
As always, the expert guests on the podcast will continue to share their wisdom on different aspects of the hourly to exit journey.
However, my offerings will change to focus more specifically on the first step away from hourly and toward exit —turning your expertise into intellectual property assets so you can stop selling time.
All of the experts I’ve had the pleasure to speak with in the last 18 months have built successful businesses. Using their expertise to generate a comfortable income and build their reputations is a wonderful accomplishment. But like me, they are starting the ask “what’s next?”
Maybe they are getting a little burned out from one-on-one work and looking to step back.
Or they’ve hit a revenue ceiling and want to grow without working more hours.
Perhaps they are eager to get out of implementation and focus on strategy and thought leadership.
All of these experts are savvy enough to know that they need to create assets to grow their businesses to the next level. During my many conversations, here is the question that I heard over and over: “Am I ready to create intellectual property?”
This was a very frustrating question for me to hear. I suspect it comes from other experts in the authority space who say that you need to reach a certain level of thought leadership before you are ready to create IP. That’s simply not true.
Not only are you ready to create IP--you already are. As an expert, you are creating intellectual property every day. Intellectual property is created every time you use our intellect or pay someone to use theirs.
Now, for the answer to the question “what’s next?”
What’s next is making sure that you own and control the intellectual property that you create with your expertise so you can use it to create a scalable and saleable business. That is the first and essential step on the hourly to exit journey.
Expect to see offers that focus this initial step. In particular, for the B2B professional services provider, we will dig deep on the effective use and negotiation of services agreements with your clients. This is where most service providers lose control of their IP if they don’t understand what they are signing.
Service providers lose control of their IP if they don’t understand what they are signing.
IP-Based Revenue Stream
Once we start owning and controlling the IP created with our expertise, we will be ready to add a new IP-based revenue stream to our businesses.
For most of us, myself included, IP-based revenue will be additive to your current one-on-one services revenue. In other words, it provides revenue diversification. Additional benefits of adding this new revenue stream include:
Decouples income from time
Business can operate independently from the founder
Business moves from expert (aka time) based to expertise (aka IP) based
Enhances revenue visibility
Decreases client concentration
Increases reach and impact
Reduces performance risk
Reduces collection risk
Increases profitability
Simplifies sales process
And, my favorite, transforms the business from income producing to wealth building
I believe in the value that each of you brings to your clients. I am here to support you in your journey to build a business that thrives.
I’m so excited to be on this parallel adventure with you. By creating and releasing educational materials, which will be the IP that propels me along my hourly to exit journey, you will receive the knowledge and resources you need advance your own hourly to exit journey.
I would love to hear from you about questions you might have about turning your expertise into scalable and saleable intellectual property.