EPS 75 - 2024 Is Your Year to Create Scalable Revenue in Your Expertise-Based Businesses  Transcript

Erin Austin: Hello friends, welcome to this month's

Erin Austin: not minimizing your recording. All right. I'm starting over. I need to move this guy so I can read my script. Hold on. Where is it?

Erin Austin: All right, here we go. Hello, welcome to this week's edition of the hourly to exit podcast and to h2e 2024. Hope you had a wonderful holiday and ready to get going in the new year. So in April, I will be celebrating. The third year of the hourly to exit podcast, I'm in a bit of a shock, but I have been doing this since April, 2022.

Erin Austin: And when I started, I thought I had a pretty clear plan. I was working with someone to help me plan out an entire season of topics and guests. And well, you know what they say about the best laid plans. Turns out that there is a lot of ground to cover between hourly and exit. And so it seemed like a really good idea at the time.

Erin Austin: I mean, how else am I going to have a ton of stuff to talk about? I want to have a very broad. Universe of topics. And of course that encourages lots of different guests as well. And I absolutely have loved the amazing women and one man that I've had as guests over the past two years, but I found that I was having a hard time kind of getting a thread like a unified thread running through the podcast.

Erin Austin: And so in 2023, about midway through the year, I started recording solo episodes. I think that's when I went weekly to try to remember. And, uh, and so more solos, I was a little afraid. I don't think I did any solos the first year. I was a little afraid of the solos and, but, uh, talking about. Contracts and copyrights, my two favorite subjects, and I will tell you, I really love it.

Erin Austin: Like my solo episodes are my favorite episodes. And so, but even though I was talking about contracts and copyrights, that's still a pretty, some pretty broad topics. And so I still felt like I needed a little more, uh, structure to what I'll be talking about. And so, you know, I don't need to talk about.

Erin Austin: Yeah. Everything 1, because, you know, I don't know everything I'm trying, but I don't know everything. And 2, you don't need to know everything. You know, there is specifically what you come to me for is because you want to turn your expertise into intellectual property that so you can create scalable revenue streams.

Erin Austin: That's why you're here. And so with that in mind, I have, uh, found a framework. We love our frameworks in order to kind of be really clear about how I can best help you, and that is what I will focus on during the podcast this year. So it is a three step process, uh, to turn IP, uh, to use IP to turn your expertise into scalable revenue streams.

Erin Austin: So the three parts are audit, protect, and scale. So first audit. First step is that you need to audit the assets that you already have in your business. And yes, you do already have assets in your business. So in layman's term, what is an asset? An asset is a useful or valuable thing, person, or quality. And more specifically in business terms, an asset is any resource that a business.

Erin Austin: Owns or controls that can be sold or licensed for money. So what are the assets in your business? What do you sell to your clients? Uh, maybe you're selling your time, which is valuable. Maybe you even charge a lot for it, but it is limited. How else do you provide value to your clients? So it is with your expertise.

Erin Austin: And without being flippant, I mean, we're here because, uh, we have an expertise based business, a professional services business, and we sell our expertise, but a lot of service space. Providers or services providers do not treat their expertise as assets. They're still just selling it as time, but it is an asset if we properly take care of it.

Erin Austin: So first, if we go back to making sure we are auditing our businesses. To identify the assets that we currently have in our business. So, here are a few examples of assets, the assessment tool that you use, even in the proposal stage, this is before you even deliver something. You may have something that you're using internally that helps you, you know, determine your proposals, how you're going to charge for what you're going to charge what the deliverables will be that assessment tool is an asset.

Erin Austin: When you have a deliverable, let's say you deliver strategic plans, that strategic plan, even if you are assigning all rights to your client, the elements that go into it are an asset. Any secondary research that you're using, maybe you have a whole catalog of secondary research that you lean on when you're doing your analysis.

Erin Austin: Not all of it's going to be primary. So it'll be secondary. Those are assets. If you have created an original training program, of course, that is an asset. Those worksheets that you, uh, Acquired during your certification program, those are assets, you may not own them. You're probably given permission, i. e. a license to use them, but things that are in our business that we have access to legally are still assets.

Erin Austin: So the web design of your website. That's an asset. And so these are all assets in your business. And the only difference among those bullets is who owns it. Some of those you clearly own the original training materials that you created, um, the uh, web design that you had someone make for you subject to something we're going to talk about a minute.

Erin Austin: Um, and some of those you don't own, but you control such as things that you have a license to use. So, what's important is. Figuring out this is what your audit process is 1 what the assets in your business are and 2 who owns it and or controls it because this is the foundation of creating scalable. IP based revenue ownership or control of assets.

Erin Austin: So we're going to make sure that you understand the assets that are flowing through your business that make sure that you can create revenue generating assets that you understand the depth and the breadth of your assets. So you don't miss leverage opportunities. And that you can take advantage of any third party assets that you have without fear of copyright infringement.

Erin Austin: Think back to those worksheets that you got in your certification program. You have the legal right to use those in your business. Do you have a right to create other revenue generating assets with it? That's what we want to find out as well during our audit process. So let's imagine a clothing store and that it has just a jumble of garments in the back room.

Erin Austin: They've never done an inventory of it. Like, how would they know what they have? How would they know if they're the sales associates are walking out the door with it? How would they know what is required to make a profit? How long have they been holding it in their inventory without selling it? Same thing with the assets in your business, unless you are inventorying it and auditing it, then you won't know what you have, what's valuable, what's not valuable, what's being wasted, what's Walking out the door with subcontractors.

Erin Austin: This is all part of the audit process. Uh, when you are an expertise based business, you know, the other thing is, if you don't know what you have, and you're using it in a way that is in breach of perhaps a client agreement, maybe you have a deliverable that you thought you could reuse with another client.

Erin Austin: But you gave all those rights to client A, you can't use it again with client B. Let's make sure that you own what you think you own. And if you don't, then let's clean it up. The second step is protect. So there are two forms of protection of our assets, copyright registration and contracts. Why copyright registration instead of trademark registration?

Erin Austin: Well, remember that list of assets I said, I mentioned above it was. Assessment, strategic plans, research, training programs, worksheets, websites, all those things. Are copyrightable materials. So unlike physical assets like the clothes, anyone can access your intangible assets like anyone who has access to them can copy them and take them over.

Erin Austin: So the way that we protect people from just taking our materials is we register them with the copyright office. So the way we really protect our, our most valuable assets, the things that our clients remember assets are the things that people you sell and to people and say, we don't sell our trademarks to people.

Erin Austin: We sell the copyrighted materials or the fruits of our expertise in the form of copyrighted materials to our clients. That is what our clients are paying us for. Here is a brief example to illustrate that point. So you have a consultancy, an HR consultancy, the name of it is Diversity Talent Solutions, and you have a registered trademark on that name, and it provides DEI training to its corporate clients.

Erin Austin: So you have two types of intellectual property in this business. You have your trademark on diversity. Talent solutions, and you have your copyright protections on your training materials, which could be videos, slides, workbooks, other types of guides, and any workbook, book, uh, work product that you provide to your clients.

Erin Austin: And so which are, what does your client pay for? Which of those two buckets provides value to your client? It is the copyrighted material, right? That's why it is so important to make sure we are registering our money making copyrighted revenue generating materials. There'll be lots of materials in our business, like, um, um, You know, LinkedIn posts and social media, things like that.

Erin Austin: Maybe our newsletters that aren't directly revenue generating, but the things that people are actually paying us money for. We want to make sure those things are copyright. Uh, registered with the copyright office. The 2nd, part of protection is contracts. You know, people generally don't have people ripping.

Erin Austin: Off your cop, you know, with ill intent, ripping off your copyrights. It happens. We all have heard the stories of people just taking over someone's website and all their content and selling it as their own. But that really is the exception and not the rule. The number 1 way we lose control of our most valuable assets are our contracts.

Erin Austin: Or I should say our failure to use contracts or our failure to understand what we are signing when the client presents their contract to us. So, uh, when we think about intellectual property, generally. And if we kind of take a common sense approach to who owns something, unfortunately, the intellectual property laws generally don't, um, match up with what your common sense, um, understanding of what property, um, means.

Erin Austin: So, when we want to make sure that we're owning and controlling the copyrights that flow through our business, we have to start with our contracts. So we need contracts with our clients so that we are 1 reserving the rights in our pre existing materials. So we're not giving rights to them to use to own it.

Erin Austin: And when we. Uh, give them permission to use our preexisting materials. We want to make sure we limit that license so they can't do all the things that we can do as copyright owner. I frequently see license provisions like, yep, we reserve the rights in the preexisting material, but then we go on to grant a license to the client.

Erin Austin: That is so broad that they can literally literally will state. All the copyrights in there that I licensed you the right to make copies and make derivatives and sub license it and transfer to do all these things. The same rights that we have as a copyright owner. And so we don't want to do that. So that is a major, um, uh, threat if we aren't understanding our contracts and essentially it'll permits our client to continue legally.

Erin Austin: Without breaching our rights, infringing our rights to legally continue to use our materials without paying us forward or without our permission. And the other thing, you know, I love to harp about non competes on a non compete hater because non competitors, a group of competitors is a niche. Right? And so we want to make sure we were able to work with competing companies.

Erin Austin: And that is, uh. Provides even more value to them, frankly, as your expertise grows in that niche. And then we also need to have contracts with our contractors back to that kind of common sense understanding of how property should work in intellectual property. The default is that the human being who created it.

Erin Austin: Owns it unless there's something in writing signed by the creator that would give it to you as the client. So when you're the client, you also want to make sure that you're using agreements that are signed. If the intent is for you to own the deliverable, if you don't have it, something signed, you don't own the deliverable.

Erin Austin: You have a right to use it, but you do not own it. And so. If you have any, this is the kind of thing also that we would find out during the audit stage as well. Like, do you have deliverables that you thought you own, but you don't because you didn't have your contractor sign agreements. The final, uh, leg of our, uh, IP to scalable and, uh, revenue generating assets is leverage.

Erin Austin: And so leverage means increasing profitability. It's not just about increasing revenue, but increasing the profitability. So we have leverage in our business when we can increase revenue and do that without increasing costs, or we can decrease costs without also decreasing our revenue, preferably both.

Erin Austin: We can increase revenue while decreasing costs. is the ultimate leverage, right? So we can have leveraged services. People think it has to be products. We'll talk about that in a minute, but we can have leveraged services. So even one on one services, even high tech services, if we have systematized them and or productized them.

Erin Austin: We can increase the efficiency in delivery, and when we become more efficient in delivery, we decrease the cost, even though we are charging the same, maybe even more because the more dependable are deliverable deliverables are, uh, the more. The happier clients we have and the more we could charge for them.

Erin Austin: Remember that you are the most expensive resource in your business. So anything that you can do to decrease your time spent in delivery, whether it's through systems or technology or, um, less expensive humans, then, uh, then you are. Increasing profitability, and you've added leverage to your business and then also increasing revenue per sale would be another example without, uh, increasing the cost of the sale.

Erin Austin: So, let's say you bundle 2 offers together, then, you know, you get the benefit of the. Increased revenue from that 2nd offer, but the still the same resources expended to get to the sale. So that has become more profitable, more revenue without increasing the, uh, the, the cost of the sale and then. There is just the complete decoupling of income from your time.

Erin Austin: We do this through one to several offers or one to many offers. And you know, what is the basis of every single, and I'm not being extreme here, literally the basis of every single one to several or one too many offer. Is copyrighted materials and so that's why I am banging the drums on copyrights. So examples.

Erin Austin: Your products, courses, books, anything that you are providing a subscription to such as software or a database, all copyrighted materials and then services that are, you know, one to several or one to many like trainings or, um, memberships, the foundation of those is all copyrighted materials. So before you can legally.

Erin Austin: Offer a one to several or a one too many service or product, you must own and control the underlying intellectual property. That is vitally important. So, back to that audit stage and our contracts. So, that's what you can look forward to in 2024. And beyond, I would love to have you come back every week to find out more easy to digest content will be content will be trainings and some products that are created specifically for experts with corporate clients that fit into these three areas.

Erin Austin: pillars of creating a scalable expertise based business. Remember they are audit, protect and leverage. And I look forward to the next year. Thanks friends.