How to License Your Expertise Without Creating a Licensing Program

Thinking about turning your expertise into a licensing program, but concerned that it isn’t a fit for your highly customized, non-recurring professional services? If so, you are correct. The type of licensing program I’ve been writing and speaking about isn’t the right fit for your business.

That said, there is a way to use licensing to scale your business without compromising the bespoke professional services that you are known for and that your clients demand by changing how you sell what you do instead of changing what you do.

Ownership vs. Access

Let’s consider today’s “access economy”, where we increasingly prefer access over ownership.

· Instead of owning servers, everyone is in the cloud.

· Even the largest companies are using SaaS solutions.

· Why buy the dress when you can Rent the Runway?

I know--these aren’t examples of bespoke custom services. So let’s consider this mind-blowing fact as retold in the book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt:

When the largest computer company in the world comes knocking at your door in 1980, asking if you can provide an operating system for a new personal computer, say, “Yes, we can!” And be sure to insist, as Bill Gates did in 1980, that, after they pay you for the software, the contract still permits you to sell it to third parties. You might just become the richest person in the world.

In other words, instead of following the typical services engagement where the client owns all of the deliverables created for the client, Microsoft licensed to IBM the rights in the PC-DOS system that it created for IBM.

Microsoft shrewdly included a clause in the agreement that allowed them to sell the operating system to other companies under the name MS-DOS. It was this clause that changed the course of technology history, opening the door for Microsoft to become the dominant technology company of the PC era.

Read more about this amazing story here and here

40 years ago, Microsoft knew the power of retaining rights in custom commissioned deliverables.🤩

Licensing rights to custom commissioned work

Your clients want a solution, not a deliverable. But look at your contracts--are you still selling deliverables? Instead, sell access to (aka a license)--not ownership of--the commissioned solution. When presented with options and restrictions that everyone clearly understands in the form of a carefully drafted agreement, licensing rights to commissioned work has upside for you and your client:

✔️ The client pays only for the rights in the solution it needs.

✔️You build a valuable, scalable library of IP assets that you own and can leverage.

Let’s talk if licensing custom solutions might be a fit for your services.