Scott Ritzheimer: Hello. Hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I'm here with a high demand coach, which she's actually an attorney and a strategic consultant. This is the one and the only Erin Austin. She's a graduate of Harvard law school, and she uses her 25 plus years of practicing law to help female founders of expertise based firms to build and protect saleable.

Scott Ritzheimer: Assets so that the business is ready to sell when the founder is ready to exit. And Erin's experience as a lawyer and as an executive at the intersection of business and law informs the elevated legal and strategic business advice that she provides to her clients. Her expertise includes roles as COO and general counsel for, uh, things you MGM Teaching Strategies and M3 USA Corporation.

Scott Ritzheimer: Well, Erin. Uh, this feels like it's been forever and coming, but I'm so excited that you're here with us now on the show. I'd love if you could, you know, before we get into how you're helping particularly female entrepreneurs, I'd love to just hear a little bit of your story. What were you doing before helping, uh, to founders helping founders build saleable and scalable businesses?

Scott Ritzheimer: And why did you ultimately make the leap?

Erin Austin: Yeah, well, I thank you for having me, Scott. So I've spent a career helping big businesses get bigger, frankly. And, uh, and that's probably way a lot of lawyers start. We come out, we go to big firms, we end up in house at big companies. And, uh, and obviously, you know, it's.

Erin Austin: It's a great way to make a living, of course, uh, but there came a time when one, you know, as my career matured and I was looking for something just a little, um, more, uh, uh, that was more, a little bit more aligned with my personal goals, uh, as I have a son who's getting older, I'm about to be an empty nester.

Erin Austin: And, uh, and have a little more time on my hand. And I'm like, well, what can I do that has more impact? I think all of us kind of get there eventually about how we can, uh, use our expertise to have greater impact and, and trying to figure out like how to. Translate my big company experience into working with a different population.

Erin Austin: And it took me a bit to figure it out, frankly. And then I realized, you know, a lot of my big clients, you know, they are in the IP space and I work on, you know, protecting their intellectual property. And a lot of it is with services. And so I'm like, well, wait, there's. Other populations who have service based businesses that they have intellectual property that they need to protect and that I can translate.

Erin Austin: It's not, you know, the same scale, but also use my IP based experience working with service based businesses to help them protect their IP and in particular, with respect to women. I mean, it's no secret. I don't think that wealth, um, Thank you. Has a voice in this country and in order to kind of, uh, spread some of the wealth, spread some of our, um, the influence that comes with it, um, to more people to work with, uh, you know, women in particular, I believe that wealth in the hands of women can change the world.

Erin Austin: And so helping them turn their businesses, not just into income, you know, providers, but also wealth builders. So that's how I got

Scott Ritzheimer: here. I love that. I love that. And, uh, I was telling you before we hit record here that I have no idea how to get all the questions that I have for you down into about a 20 minute block.

Scott Ritzheimer: So we're going to try and do this as best we can. Uh, but, uh, I just want to start off and say. Head over to Erin's site. We'll put the link in the show notes, and we'll talk a little bit about it at the end here, but there's so much good stuff on there, so go check that out, you're not going to regret it, but I'd love for you to just unpack a couple things for me, you make some pretty profound statements on your site, I'm going to read them back to you, and then I want to hear your thoughts on them, so One of them is owning and controlling intellectual property is the prerequisite to scaling your B2B expertise based business.

Scott Ritzheimer: There's not a lot of people saying that right now. So tell us what you mean by that.

Erin Austin: Yeah, that makes me insane. That a lot of the day, if we want to stop selling our time, like as an expert, so to speak, and, and instead sell, sell our expertise, then we have to have an asset there, either we're selling our time or we're selling.

Erin Austin: An asset. And so if we want to build assets, those, when we're experts, you know, it's not something that's patentable, like a, like a, you know, a car or pharmaceutical, it's not something that's like a trade secret, like Coca Cola. Our expertise is saleable in the form of copyrightable intellectual property.

Erin Austin: And so we, if it's a book or a course or the, uh, workshops that you provide, the trainings you provide your clients. All those things are copyrightable assets and we can't copyright something if we don't own it. And so I keep kind of like, you know, people like, well, you know, I get lots of questions about, you know, registering stuff, like, well, do you own it?

Erin Austin: You know, just because you worked on something doesn't mean you own it just because you created something doesn't mean you own it. Um, so we have to be aware of the whole life cycle of, from creation. Ownership, utilization, registration of our IP assets. And so you don't want to create, you know, a course using, you know, stuff that you got off the internet or materials that you got from a certification program or something that you took from your corporate job.

Erin Austin: Like you can't create courses out of that. So you need to make sure you own your own assets in order to do that.

Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah. Oh, that's so good. Uh, you made another statement here. It's a little bit longer, but again, I want to read it because I think it's fascinating. And that is that the biggest threat to your expertise based business isn't AI.

Scott Ritzheimer: AI might be able to write a cookbook, but it can never be a chef. The bigger threat, uh, is falling as the The bigger threat, sorry, is failing to build a business that can run without you failing to build your business so that you, your income is decoupled from your time and failing to adapt to the changing market forces, such as low cost competitors or micro learning, learning on demand.

Scott Ritzheimer: In other words, you need to build a business with multiple revenue streams that can scale. Uh, so, uh, uh, uh, some people, especially with like how trendy AI is there, there's like a, you know, that's probably pretty drawing for them. So. Again, what do you kind of mean by that? And what can we actually do about it?

Erin Austin: Yeah. I mean, obviously AI is at the top of everyone's, um, mind and I get up, I do get a fair amount of inquiries about it, but the end of the day, you know, AI is just another way of accumulating. Already known information and so, um, you know, it's, it's just a better version of Google, frankly, you know, and so if you have your intellectual property, your expertise, your, you know, publishing it.

Erin Austin: You know, you should be publishing it. So you're developing your thought leadership. Every single human with an Internet has access, whether they use chat, GBT or whatever other AI, they have access to it right now. They can go on Google and get it right now and copy it right now and steal it right now.

Erin Austin: Right. So that's not going to change. Um, you know, and someone can, you know, does it make it easier for them to take your materials and stick it in the AI and change it enough. But at the end of the day, you can't stop copycats because we can't protect ideas. So the way we protect our position in the marketplace is through our expertise by providing the Michelin, you know, level service to your clients, becoming the go to person in your space, becoming the leader, the thought leader.

Erin Austin: And so. That's how you combat, whether it's Google or AI or other bad actors. It's not, you know, by somehow keeping everything secret because it's not going to help you. You can't keep it. If you keep your stuff secret, you're going to stay secret. Right. And, uh, and so if you, but if you want to scale, you know, on the other hand, if all you're doing is kind of, you know, selling your time, doing custom work that you don't own, you're not developing processes, you're not developing your own solutions.

Erin Austin: You're not, you know, um, Creating assets that you can use to put leverage into your business. Like you will obviously top out. That's why you're here. You know, that's going to be the end of, you know, that's it. That's all you want then. But if you want to grow your business, then you have to be creating assets and you can't be obsessing about AI.

Erin Austin: That would be.

Scott Ritzheimer: So your, your, your concepts here, they, they challenged, uh, a little, some of the advice that I'll give, especially to those in the coaching profession. Uh, and so I want to have a fun little conversation around this. Um, I think that, uh, for a lot of coaches, Uh, maybe not as much writing a book, but creating courses or other kind of lower market engagements is oftentimes a distraction.

Scott Ritzheimer: And here, here's, here's why I think one of the things that happens if we're not careful, we do it for the value of leverage, right? Because it doesn't take my time, but it takes a long time to do it. And we do it so clumsily that it actually takes more time for the value that we get back out of it. Right.

Scott Ritzheimer: And so for me, I've always encouraged folks to go after the thing that provides the highest value for time. Don't sell your time, right? I agree with you there, but provide the highest value for your time. And so how do you help folks navigate? Like, are you creating courses just because someone told you to create courses or are they really a strategic step in the right direction?

Erin Austin: Yeah, I'm using courses as a kind of just a cheap example, but it would, it also apply to productized services. Like even, even if it's not packaged as a productized service, if you've systematized your services, so you created, so you can expand, you know, eight by as an agency, you need to have processes in place.

Erin Austin: It just can't be your genius sitting down every day, genius saying, and order to improve your business, there has to be processes in place. So you can either, you know, delegate those. Less expensive pieces so that you can just operate at the genius level. And then you have less expensive resources doing some of the groundwork.

Erin Austin: So it can be either things that you sell literally or assets that use within the business to make your business more efficient and profitable. Yeah.

Scott Ritzheimer: And that I could not agree more with. One of the biggest things that I've found in, in doing this podcast and in an interviewing near about a thousand coaches now is the number one thing that separates what I would call like a high demand coach from kind of your average coach that not, neither of them is a bad person, but some of them have figured it out.

Scott Ritzheimer: They've unlocked something and some haven't yet. the thing to unlock that something is what I call a structured offering. And I think this is where you and I are on exactly the same page that if you're just making it up as you go, I would go so far as to say, it's not just that you haven't built a scalable saleable business.

Scott Ritzheimer: I would actually say you're, you're doing a disservice to your clients, right? Because it's, it's completely dependent on how you show up that day. Yes. And you're going to have good days. You're going to have bad days, right? And so what I, what I did love about the way that you laid this out and, and the idea of creating these processes one, so people can help, but I think a bigger part of it and, and what's really helpful for a lot of coaches, because.

Scott Ritzheimer: They want to know that what they do matters and is helpful is the biggest thing that I've seen to generate higher ROI for your clients is to actually do what you're talking about here. The really cool thing that you bring to the table is that it's not just for the ROI for your clients, but that it actually can end up being an asset for you for the long run.

Erin Austin: Absolutely. And what you mentioned, it reminds me, frankly, of the legal industry, you know, where we typically build by the hour. And so we are disincentivized from finding really efficient ways to deliver services. But as a consequence, you know, a lot of times we are kind of just starting from the beginning with.

Erin Austin: Each engagement, every time I pick up a services agreement to review it, I, um, have, and I will confess, you know, just kind of read through it by my lines. I do have to read the whole thing. I can't skip through it, but I have put in place, like. You know, checklists and sample language and things like that.

Erin Austin: So that every time I go through it, like another, you know, a hundred page services agreement that I don't miss anything because these things can happen. And so you take some of the risk out for you and your client when you

Scott Ritzheimer: have these things. And I think there's something again, this really cool that happens.

Scott Ritzheimer: And, uh, the amazing thing about doing this, uh, really approaching it this way is one. If you just want to do your own thing and you just want to increase the, the, uh, what you can build per hour, right? By increasing your value and, and optimizing your time, this is the best thing to do. Uh, the biggest thing that I've seen it accomplish is the amount of time you spend between sessions, right?

Scott Ritzheimer: So for coaches, you don't typically build by the hour you build by the session and where a lot of coaches get really stuck. And a lot of service providers, just in general, I just happen to work with a lot of coaches, but, uh, is. They're not billing for the two thirds of their time that's not in the session room.

Scott Ritzheimer: And you can dramatically reduce that with, you know, things like checklists and processes and following the same thing the whole way through. The other really, really cool thing about it is that it's, it's a very incremental step to moving towards certification. and allowing other people to step into that.

Scott Ritzheimer: So tell us a little bit about, uh, how, how does this idea of certification plan one? What are the IP considerations just quickly that we might want to consider? And then two, how does that play into this idea of, of, uh, moving from your hourly to exit?

Erin Austin: Yeah, so just quickly on the IP side, it goes back to owning the elements that you're using.

Erin Austin: You know, when we are providing one on one services to our clients, we may have 3rd party materials that we're using there and it's fine. We have the right to use it. Say we got it from a. Another certification program or continuing education or something. We can use it with our one on one clients. Well, we can't license that on to a 3rd party certification is a license.

Erin Austin: So that would be a sub license. So we had to make sure that anything that we're proposing to certify, we own it 100%. Um, and then it helps us move to the exit because it helps us. We take our expertise instead of, you know, you can grow either internally by What Adding experts internally, or you can grow externally by licensing other experts to use your expertise.

Erin Austin: And so that's what certification would be. You know, it can be, uh, without kind of the certification part, it could just be a license, but the certification part usually comes with some kind of training element and some kind of proof of competency. So depending on the nature of, of what your expertise is, you may want to go the certification route.

Erin Austin: But that also helps kind of extend your own, um, brand because people like, Hey, I was trained by, you know, Scott and that's why I do what I do. So yeah.

Scott Ritzheimer: That's awesome. We, I had a guest on a few episodes back, his name was Mitch Russo, and he talked about this idea of certification as well. But I would imagine when you're working with, it probably blows them away what they're sitting on and they don't even know they have it.

Scott Ritzheimer: Would you agree with that? I would say, would you say, let me say this way, would you say that most, especially female entrepreneurs are sitting on more value than, than they, that they, than they even know they have? Yeah.

Erin Austin: I mean, what is it that your clients come to you for? Like, I mean, there's something you're doing something that's providing value to your clients.

Erin Austin: They're choosing you instead of choosing somebody else. And so if they're willing to pay you for that, uh, outcome, then, you know, there's only so many people that you can service that there are other clients that you couldn't service that could have benefit from. Whatever the transformation is that you provide and you can, you know, uh, extend that reach either, you know, through other experts or through some, some products.

Erin Austin: Um, and so there's more than one way to get, you know, to, to, to leverage your, your

Scott Ritzheimer: expertise. Yeah. Oh, that's so good. Uh, so good. So, uh, there's a question I like to ask all my guests. It's this, what is the biggest secret that you just wish wasn't a secret at all? What's that one thing you're sitting there and you just wish everyone listening, you're watching today, new

Erin Austin: Yeah, well, I, you know, it's going to be about IP.

Erin Austin: So I like to say IP is everywhere. It's literally all day, every day when every time we sit down as experts sit down at our desks, we're creating intellectual property. We're using our intellect. We're creating intellectual property. We're talking here. We're posting on LinkedIn. We're, you know, creating deliverables for our clients.

Erin Austin: We're training people online. All that that's intellectual property, people think IP is just software and books, you know, like the external things, but it's all the things that we create that are the way we express our intellectual property, the way we use. I mean, I'm sorry, our expertise, the way we use our expertise, all that stuff is intellectual property and issue isn't.

Erin Austin: Do you have any. The issue is, are you owning and controlling it.

Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah. Wow. Well, uh, yeah, that's a great point. So, uh, another question here. Uh, we've talked a lot about, you know, kind of how you help your clients, but I want to turn things around a little bit, take off your kind of attorney consultant hat for a moment, put on your, your, uh, CEO hat, kind of jumped down into the ring with the rest of us.

Scott Ritzheimer: What's the next stage of growth look like for you and your business and what challenge will you have to overcome to get there? Oh, boy, well,

Erin Austin: this has been a tough one for me, you know, because as a lawyer, you know, I do have like confidentiality issues. So group programs are tough. And, you know, if I do products, well, can I disclaim, you know, liability for our products?

Erin Austin: And so I am, but nonetheless, I am working on some group programs regarding copyright registration, because people have a lot of questions about it. And so to be able to do that in a group context, and then I am, you know, like, Uh, you know, not just templates, but, um, developing some negotiation guides, you know, when you, it's one thing if you're, you know, an online business, so to speak, but when you have corporate clients, like templates don't really help you because your corporate clients send you their agreements.

Erin Austin: And so you need to know what to do when your clients send you their agreements. So that's what I'm going to help people do. So, well,

Scott Ritzheimer: Wow. Fantastic. Well, uh, again, I love, love, love the way that you approach this. Uh, and it's, it's very rare for those listening. It's very rare to have an attorney who's able to enter into the business world like this.

Scott Ritzheimer: It's one of the things that's so profound about you, Erin. And so. For folks who want, who need that legal advice, who, who maybe sitting there thinking, Hey, I probably have more IP than, than I thought. Uh, and they want to know what the next steps are. They want to know how you can help. Where can they find more out about what you do and connect with you?

Erin Austin: Yeah. Well, you can find me at my website, thinkbeyondip. com. And there I do have a free assessment. That's. Called is your expertise, copyrightable, and you can take that and it can give you an initial analysis of, you know, kind of what the requirements are to have copyrightable, um, material. And from there, you know, look at the other ways that you can work with me online and then you can always find me at LinkedIn as well.

Erin Austin: I've been on there. Forever. So I am the only Erin, well, the original Erin Austin. I imagine there are others that came after me, but, uh, just my name, Erin Austin.

Scott Ritzheimer: The OG Erin Austin. That's right. Oh, that's so good. So again, uh, Erin's, uh, website is fantastic. Think beyond ip. com. It's in the notes. We'll put her LinkedIn profile there as well.

Scott Ritzheimer: So you can click right to it and Erin, thank you so much for being here. Uh, and it was just an honor having you. And for those who are watching or listening today, you know, your time and attention. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time.

Scott Ritzheimer: Take care. Thank you.