In this conversational segment, Speaker B advises Speaker A on how to transition from seeing themselves merely as an author to operating a full‑fledged content business. The core argument is that authorship is a narrow subset of a broader value proposition: content must demonstrably change employee behavior and move corporate performance levers, with a clear ROI that can be quantified. B stresses the need for a balanced mix of qualitative storytelling and quantitative data to persuade corporate clients, who care about business outcomes rather than feelings. He then outlines scaling tactics: targeting a handful of high‑value Fortune‑50 accounts, developing assessment tools, moving toward more scalable offerings, and limiting low‑margin speaking engagements. The overall message is to reframe mindset, prove impact with data, and focus on scalable, high‑value revenue streams.
Chapters
I've got some great ideas other than hiring you, which is the best one, right? That's a great idea. Give me some steps that I should be thinking about. Give me some things that I should focus on in '14. How do I scale this idea above and beyond me? Or what are some of the steps, some of the processes to think through?
Sure, so there was a lot of conversation earlier around the book, the book, the book, the book, right? And I think number one is change your mindset. Don't think of yourself as an author. I mean, it's a lovely image of Mark Twain with the pipe or Hemingway wrestling a bear, whatever, but you're not an author, right? An author is a subset of what you do. I would argue that, how many authors are in the room? Right, okay, how many of you authors make your living from the authoring part of your lives? Yeah, OK. That's my point. And how many of you, if you think about the year that you wrote the book, 9 months prior to release and 3 months after, how many of you earned 50% of your revenue from your book? Directly book sales, not— right? Like, none. How many of you spent 60% to 70% of your time on that activity? None. So if I change the word book to, do you want to be in this business, it doesn't make any sense, right? So to your point here, it's— What's the goal? How do I reframe my thinking from I'm not an author, I'm in the content business? And what I believe is if I can show that my content changes behaviors, and if I can prove that those behavior changes move the levers at a business, and the cost of the business implementing my stuff is less than the improvement here, then you have a business, right? That's what you need to do. And Rick did a great job talking about the data and all that. A lot of content is sort of this right-brained, emotional, feel-good stuff, and that's fantastic. You've got to have some quant to it. You've got to have a nice balance of qualitative and quantitative information to be able to share to the corporate customer, because they don't care how you feel. They don't care how their employees feel and the individuals feel. They care about moving the levers. So once you know what the levers are, then we'll go back to answer your question, is everything you're doing aligned to that? So I don't know what market you're trying to play in, so you specifically, where you're trying to go. Sure. But that's how you have to judge. I want to have 5 Fortune 50 accounts that pay me a lot of money. I want to do 100 speaking gigs to these type of people. I want to build an assessment tool this year. I want to get into more scalable solutions, and I'm tired of being on the— it's like you said, everybody that's doing 30 speeches a year wants to do 200, and everybody that's doing 100 is going, my God, it would be nice to sleep in my own bed, right? Careful what you wish for.
