Peter Winick argues that thought leaders spend most of their time perfecting content but neglect designing business models to distribute it and generate revenue. He recommends deliberately mapping modalities, channels, and scalable frameworks alongside content work.
Hey, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I wanted to share with you a thought I had as a result of some conversations I've had over the last week or two with a pretty interesting group of authors and thought leaders and speakers and such. And the issue really is around how much time you spend as an author, a thought leader, a speaker, an expert, an advisor on the thought leadership, the content, the what you do versus how much time you spend thoughtfully thinking about strategizing, refining your tactics, etc., on the underlying business models. And what I've concluded based on my— I wouldn't call it research, but conversations— is that far too many folks are spending time constantly, constantly, constantly, constantly refining, modifying, tweaking the thought leadership that is really market ready. It's good stuff. You know it works. You know that it resonates when you're in front of a group, when you're working with your clients, when you're getting accolades from your books, etc. But we're not spending enough time putting the thinking, the heavy lifting, into thinking about the underlying business models. How do I port my ideas into various modalities to increase the impact that it can have, to increase the revenue that I generate from it, to get it out to the right group of people to get the right outcomes that I know it is capable of. And I would argue that if you reallocated your time just a bit, I'm not advocating, you know, not putting out great thought leadership, that's table stakes. But I would suggest that you take some time and invest it into the business models, invest it into thinking about how can I get this out there in a way that is consistent, that's fairly easy, that's predictable, that gets it to the people that I want to, to have the outcomes that I'd like to. Anyway, we'd love to hear your thoughts and comments. Thank you so much.
