Peter Winick outlines three ways thought leaders can boost income: fill your current capacity with better sales and marketing, move upstream to higher-level clients, and digitize your content into scalable products like assessments and e-learning courses.
Hi, this is Peter Winick, founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I want to talk to you about 3 things every thought leader must do to maximize their income. While authors, speakers, and thought leaders tend to be more different than alike in many ways, from a revenue generation perspective, things just aren't that complicated. You can have a wide range of speaking styles from motivational to improvisational, comedic, Socratic, and so on. Writing styles can vary as well: dry and academic, anecdotal, autobiographical, analytical. But when it comes to generating revenue, there are only 3 things that all thought leaders, speakers, and authors can do. Number 1: Do more of what you're doing. For many, they are not at capacity or near capacity. They speak a little bit, consult a touch, and do some workshops as well as advisory work. However, they are not generating either sufficient revenue or the revenue that they can easily handle. For these folks, the focus usually needs to be on sales and marketing and making sure they have systems and processes in place to handle inbound queries effectively. If you aren't at capacity, however you define capacity, that's where you need to focus. Number 2, do higher-value work. For many, they are at capacity from a time or bandwidth perspective, so doing more isn't a solution. They have to figure out how to generate more for the equivalent inputs. In some instances, that means moving upstream. For example, move your content from a training solution to a business solution. Focus on leaders instead of managers, or managers instead of the frontline. It's amazing how solid content can and does extract more value for the thought leader in direct proportion to to the value the client can benefit from it. It's about positioning and packaging your work in ways that maximize value creation. It's also okay to move away from markets that may have served you well in the past, but which you may have outgrown as you've evolved and developed your skills and content. Number 3, digitize. The ultimate way to scale and leverage your content is to digitize it. The limiting constraint is you. You can only be in one place at one time, and at the enterprise level, the client is far more interested in a consistent and scalable solution than they are in a personality-based offering. There are multiple formats and modalities that content can be ported into. There are assessments, diagnostic tools, train-the-trainer solutions, video-enabled e-learning. The list is almost endless. Ideally, you create something that is of high quality and that has been validated from a learning efficacy perspective, and you sell it in multiple ways to multiple markets. You can reach more people, have a far greater impact, and increase your income exponentially. If you'd like to learn more, please email me directly at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com.
