Ep. 0114 - Peter Winick - Become a Thought Leader by Writing a Book - The Published Author Podcast

Welcome to the Published Author Podcast, where we help entrepreneurs learn how to write a book and leverage it to grow their business and make an impact. I'm your host, Josh Steinley. Today, my guest is Peter Winick. Peter is the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. For the past two decades, he's helped individuals and organizations build and grow revenue streams through designing and growing their thought leadership platforms. As well as acting as a guide and advisor for increasing business-to-business sales of thought leadership products. His clients include New York Times bestselling business book authors, members of the Speaker's Hall of Fame, recipients of the Thinkers50 Award, CEOs of public and privately held companies, and academics at prestigious institutions such as Yale, Wharton, Dartmouth, and the London School of Business. Peter, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me, Josh. Appreciate it.

We're excited to have Peter on today because funny thing, Peter's not an author. You might actually be the first non-author we're having on the show. We may have had one or two others. We're over 100 episodes at this point, but you might be the first one. But your expertise in the area of thought leadership is exactly what we focus on with this podcast because we've got entrepreneurs who are listening to this show trying to figure out how they can become authors and build a thought leadership system. And so I thought this would be a perfect fit for helping our audience out, especially because you have a lot of experience working with other authors. But before we dive into that, Peter, give us a little bit more background on yourself. Who are you? Where'd you come from? How'd you get to where you are today?

Yeah. So really sort of two different pieces of the story that merged together to get me where I am, which is sort of like I see life as a Venn diagram sometimes. So, you know, one is entrepreneurial,. So from an early age, starting businesses, growing businesses, selling businesses, et cetera, love the challenge of the entrepreneur doing things that hadn't been done before, all that sort of fun stuff. And then the flip side of that coin, which I thought was a totally unrelated whatever, was we didn't even have a term thought leader, we just called it nerd, right? Like just always consuming a ton of content, articles, magazines, books, whatever. Part of it was, I'm curious, part of it was being a lifelong learner, Part of it was being, like every entrepreneur, underfunded and looking for answers to questions and not having abundant resources to hire experts to do those sorts of things. Eventually, those two things came together. I'll give you the short version of the story, but I was brought in to do a turnaround in a communications consulting organization. What I learned there was that basically it was a business that was $40, $50 million global business that was based on a book someone had written 40 years earlier. I'm like, "What?" Jeez, of all the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books I've bought over my life and being entrepreneurial, I never asked myself the question, "How does that person make a living?" And that's when the two things came together where I'm basically a specialist in helping authors, thought leaders, speakers, and organizations develop, deploy, curate thought leadership in a lot of entrepreneurial ways.

So how long have you been running Thought Leadership Leverage, this organization?

Yeah, so I started Thought Leadership Leverage about 14 years ago as a consultancy.

And now what does that look like? What does your day-to-day look like? What does the organization look like?

Yeah, so we're small. I've got 10 folks on staff. And I'll give you sort of a little bit of a history lesson because it speaks to your question. So when I started it, the focus was working with individual authors, speakers, academics, consultants, thought leaders, your audience, quite frankly. And helping those folks figure out their strategies, figure out their brand, figure out their platform, figure out how to productize the ideas that start in their head that typically, although not exclusively, landed in a book, and then ultimately supporting them in things like sales, marketing, product development, business development, et cetera. The reason I started the firm is I saw that if you were a thought leader, whatever, however you define that, we can get into that as well, there's a lot of people that care a little bit about you for a short period of time. Because they're bad people, but if you have a book agent, they care about you for a millisecond. If you have a speaking agent, they care about you for this, but nobody was looking at this holistically. I said, wow, it's hard enough to have the gravitas to put out a great book, but how would you possibly know what to do in social media or email? There's hundreds and hundreds of other things, and every one was an opportunity, quite frankly, to screw up. I was like, okay, I need to take a more holistic perspective. A more strategic perspective. So that's sort of where we started the business. It's still a big part of the business, but then right at the end of 2019, remember pre-COVID, remember when we actually left our house? Yeah, way back in those days, we launched a new practice area in the business that we call the organizational thought leader. And what we're doing there is applying our same models and methods and frameworks and processes against large organizations. And those organizations aren't in the business of selling or monetizing their thought leadership, but they do need to, put thought leadership out to the communities that matter to them. So if you think about high-tech, financial services, professional services, those are the type of global organizations that we work with on their thought leadership as well.

Got it. So what's your ideal client look like? Who— can you give us some examples, some case studies of people you've worked with that were kind of the perfect client for you?

Oh, I mean, there's several. I mean, I'm trying to think. I don't want to I mean, there's tons of testimonials and all that sort of stuff on the site, but there's a couple of profiles. So it could be a world-renowned academic at a place like a Wharton or a London School of Business or such, where they've got amazing work, amazing thought leadership, really, really deep thought leadership, but are probably lacking in the sales, marketing, business development, productization. So that's one piece to help. We do a lot of work with very senior-level executives, think CEOs, think C-level, think founders that have achieved a level of success in other domains of their life that's unimaginable to many, but there's something else driving at them. It could be the way that they've run the business from a leadership philosophy perspective to a growth perspective or whatever. And they really are in a phase of their life where they're jumping into thought leadership to be more legacy evangelical. It's not as much about the money, although we we keep score with money. That's not really the piece. We have others that have been just at it a long time and are struggling, right? So maybe they're, they're doing some coaching, doing some consulting, they're doing okay, but it never really clicked from a marketing side, right? It never really took off. They're working really, really hard. They have a practice, not a business where if they're not in the room or in the Zoom, ideas don't get exchanged and dollars don't get exchanged. So how do they take those ideas and productize them and scale them? So those are the type of things that we, we, uh, we work on. And, you know, everything is global right now. I mean, it was pre-COVID, but, uh, COVID has accelerated the global nature of the business.

Let's talk about that word thought leadership for a bit, because that means different things to different people. How do you define it, and what are some of the misconceptions around the term thought leader?

Yeah, so, uh, yeah, this is a bit of a pet peeve. So When I started the business 14 years ago, the word that made me cringe was guru. Guru to me, and what do I know, should be some dude with a really long beard sitting cross-legged teaching you yoga or where your chakra is out of whack or something like that. But that was what people were using. Thought leadership, I put it out there for a reason. How I define thought leadership is really two elements. There's the thought piece, So what does thought mean? It means that you've actually put in the reps, you're putting in the work. It could be based on research, it could be based on your client work, it could be based on you synthesizing ideas that come from different domains into a different way, but there's something thoughtful. It's not just sharing a best practice. It's not just regurgitating to something that's already sort of well-known with a little bit of a kitsch or a shtick to it. I mean, there's really, really got to be thoughtfulness to it. And people are smart. People understand the difference between a lazy thought leader and someone that's, wow, Josh has put a lot of thought and work into what goes on into the mind of an author or someone that's a professional or an entrepreneur that wants to get a book out. There's a reason I want to go to him. And then the leadership piece of this to me is, do they have the courage to put out there the ideas that might not be the norm, that might be a little bit different, that might be adding to the conversation in the discipline? And it's not being contrarian for the sake of getting attention and lighting your hair on fire, but you're taking a discipline or subject matter and elevating it and moving it. So that's how I define it. I think that word gets thrown around a lot now. One general rule that I think everyone should follow is do not ever call yourself a thought leader. It is a term of respect that others should bestow upon you. It's almost like being knighted, if you will. But don't jump, run out there and say, oh, I'm a thought leader. It's like, really? According to what standard? I couldn't get up there and say I'm a— dentist or a CPA or something without having the credentials. And I think it's— that's really important, that, that it's up to others, other peers, other folks that you respect in the industry to bestow that, that, uh, title that has— comes with some respect onto you.

Cool. And I agree fully. Nobody should call themselves thought leader, guru, or visionary, or a bunch of other terms that get thrown around there and put on people's LinkedIn profiles. So Let's tie this into books then. When you're working with people, where do books generally fit in? I mean, you work with authors, but you also work with speakers, work with other people, people putting out other forms of thought leadership content. What do you see as the role of the book in that mix?

Yeah. So at the risk of sounding like a consultant, it depends, right? So I would say that, I don't know, 70, 75, 80% of our clients have or are in the process of writing a book. I will also say that I've talked more more people out of writing a book than anyone else I know and have been told that by many, many people. It's not that I say, Josh, you're a dodo bird. You should never write a book. You have nothing to say. I would never say that. I might, probably not. But what I would say to folks is, okay, that potentially has the making of a book, might even have the makings of a good book, but so what? What does success really look like? Because then I have to go through an educational process with the client saying, you know what? The average business book only sells 1,200 units. The average person only reads 18 pages of— Here's the deal, you're not going to make money on a book. I got to burst the bubble and say, no, this concept of a publisher doing everything in rainbows and unicorns doesn't happen. I have to— the things that you know, explain to them and say, okay, how does the book fit into your overall thought leadership strategy? How does it fit into your business? Where does it warrant the investment of time, energy, effort, and money? What are the outcomes looking for? In some instances, at some points in time, it's absolutely essential for someone to get a book out. It is table stakes. To do certain things. That has changed a lot. So it used to be only 8, 10 years ago, to really kill it on the speaking circuit, you needed to have the book. That was the prereq. Now, a book— I love books. I read 2 to 3 books a week, but that's not normal when you look at the data. For many people, you can effectively put out short-form thought leadership, assuming it's real thought leadership, in the form of video, in the form of LinkedIn posts, and lots of other forms to make the point that you're trying to make. And maybe the book is a compilation of that 2 years later. So I think, you know, most people don't realize what it takes, how much energy, effort goes into not just writing, but making it successful, making it something that you're proud of.

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Yeah, so, um, there's lots of variation. There are a lot of variations on that theme, right? So one, we might say, okay, let's write the book, but we're not going to stop everything else. Okay, so we decided to write a book today. That book's not going to be on the shelves for what— pick a number, 9 months, 18 months, whatever it is. Books are like house renovations, they never come in on time, and they never take less time or less money or less energy than you thought. So we said, great, we're going to do the book. What else needs to be done in parallel with that? So for example, if it's a self-published piece, they could be pushing out short-form pieces of that book along the way, some dropping some crumbs along the way to stimulate the market, to build the brand. They could be using the book or any form of thought leadership in a way that drives the business. You can conflate content development with business development because there's two calls I can make to you, Josh. Hey, it's Peter. I got a book coming out next year and would love to talk to people like you that have amazing podcasts and are charming and whatever, great. You'd say, hey, that's interesting. I'd love to talk to you about that. Or I can say, hey, it's Peter Winick, I'm a consultant trying to sell you some consulting services. Which call is more likely to get scheduled? So I think being deliberate and thoughtful. There are other times when we might say to a client, we've had other clients say, you know what? Wow, that book's a heavy lift. That's going to take 2 years and requires all this research, whatever. Let's touch base in 6 months. But more often than not, we would be working in parallel Because the book is just the beginning of another chapter of the business. It's not like opening day at a store, a retail store. We say, "Okay, great. Cut the ribbon. Lines of customers, whatever." Yeah, exactly.

So how does this differ from somebody coming to you who already has a book that's out there? Maybe it's been out there for years. It's already doing well. How do you work with that type of author or that type of thought leader and say, "Okay, here's how we take things to the next level"?

DAVID_SHERMAN] Yeah, that's a lot of what we do. So one is most authors are not getting— extracting the maximum value from their assets, most thought leaders, I would say. So what do I mean by that? If we were in the real estate business, Josh, you and I said, let's go form a real estate partnership. Great. What are we going to do? We're going to put up great apartment buildings. Oh, that's great. Let's go design that, whatever. But neither of us are really good at sales or renting, we would be bankrupt fairly quickly because we don't have an infinite amount of capital You say, "How many apartment buildings can we build?" "I don't know. I'm out of money." "You out of money? Great. I guess we're out of business." Thought leaders constantly put stuff out in the marketplace that don't deliver the dividends that they are capable of. So for example, a pub date is a fictitious, silly, ridiculous date that means nothing to the marketplace. It means something to a publisher, it means something to an author, but if a book is good— and what I say to my clients is always think of a book as an investment. With a 5- to 7-year depreciation or amortization schedule. And publishers tend to think of book as a seasonal item, like, oh, it's a spring release, a fall release, whatever. I would argue if you pick the bestseller off your shelf, a classic, nobody remembers that, oh, that came out and when? Oh yeah, let me smell the bouquet of that. That's a spring of 2017 or whatever. So I think you have to make sure you're extracting maximum value out of a book. Now, if a book is dated based on the subject matter or whatever, I get it. I'm probably not going to buy Windows 11 for Dummies, probably not a big demand for that today. But most books and most thought leadership has a longer shelf life than we give it credit.

Peter Winick: Yeah. I mean, look at some of the great books that we still read today. I mean, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, that's over 100 years old, I think, at this point, perhaps.

Well, Tom Peters even, in Search of Excellence, I think is over 40 years old. I still send probably 10 copies of that a year to people I know. Yeah.

Or 7 Habits by Covey.

Right. I think that just broke 30, 35 years, right?

Yeah. And so, yeah, there are these evergreen books that are out there. Now, of course, that's not to say there's anything wrong with writing a book that's going to be outdated in 2 years, like Windows for Dummies or whatever. It has its place. It just has a much different shelf life. But we do sometimes get that impression like, oh, my book's going to be outdated so quick and everything. Well, who knows? It might be around in 80 years and people might still be reading it.

Well, and some of it is the confusion, which is easy to understand, that an author has with— is it that the book is stale or you're so bored with it, right? Because if the book's been out for 4 years, it's been in your head for 2 or 3 years before that, then you've got it out, you've talked about it ad nauseam for on and on and on. Is it your bored, or is it the market has given you an indication that it's no longer topical, relevant, valuable? I think those are two very different behaviors, two different signals.

Right, which brings up that there are some books that do sell themselves. There are some books that, for whatever reason, they take hold and they just sell themselves, and they'll keep selling themselves for decades. There are other books that can't sell themselves and can't be sold by the author either because nobody wants to read it. Yeah, but most of the books fall into the middle where they'll keep selling if the author keeps pushing, if the author keeps doing something to get the word out there. What are some of the recommendations you give to people in that realm to say, yeah, you're gonna have to keep on pushing this and here's how you do it?

Yeah, I think that's a great question because Some books take off like a runaway freight train, and you're like, wow, get out of the way, this thing's taken off. And others don't, and it might be because they're just not that good, or their timing was awful, or whatever the case was. But that middle ground is probably, I don't know, 80%, 90% of them. So the question is, how do you continue to do that? And I think that there is a lot of frustration that I see in the marketplace, or dissatisfaction with traditional PR as it relates to books. So tactics like AM radio, tactics like, I don't know, book signings, these sort of things. So I look at it and say, wait a minute, if you're really clear about who you want to buy your book, because I think that matters for most people. It's not like, listen, are you going to be the next Good to Great? Statistically, probably not by a long shot. I always think like, okay, if there's 100 people, 200 people, 500 people that you can get the book in their hands that could potentially alter your business in a way that's unimaginable, do everything you can to figure out who those people are by name and get it to them. To me, it's block and tackle. It could also be going back to some of your biggest fans, and I mean fans, clients that have done stuff with you and say, hey, Josh, I know you're a big fan. We've been working together for a long, long time. You know what I'd love to do? Give me the name of 3 of your friends that you think could benefit from my book, and I'd love to send it on your behalf as a gift, gift from you on my behalf. Right? Why? Well, people hang out with people like them economically, demographically, socially, etc., etc. And it feels that's a win-win. Like, wow, my friend Josh is saying I can give 3 books away to my friends based on his book that I like. Yeah, why wouldn't I do that? Right? So I think it's being creative. About getting it into the right hands to the right people in a high-touch, sort of personalized way.

What are some of the mistakes that you see authors make with their books in terms of marketing or promotion or leveraging it?

How many hours do we have? Well, I think some is not realizing that when you are an author— I'll give you the wise guy version of that. I was invited to leave a meeting at McGraw-Hill several years ago. When I suggested, when they put a contract in front of my client, that there needed to be a disclaimer on there, like when you go to Disney World and it says, if you're pregnant or have a back condition, you shouldn't go on Space Mountain, that the author acknowledges that they are taking on the role of SVP of sales, marketing, and distribution for the book. They didn't think it was funny. I was deadly serious. So I think that is really the gist of it. Part of being an author is, quite frankly, the hard work The harder work starts on release date. What are you going to do? If you're shy, if you're not willing to ask, if you're not willing to go through your network, if you're not willing to go on, whatever, 100 podcasts to really, really push the book, unless lightning has struck, it's not going to work. It's just not going to— you've got to put in the hard work. And what's interesting is lots of authors, by their very nature, are quiet, are reserved. They're introverted. They don't want that sort of attention. So to ask them to go out and ask people to do things like— Oh, that, that makes me cringe. But if you're not going to do that, then don't, don't invest in the book, right?

Because what's the point of writing it if nobody's going to read it? And if you're not going to promote it, nobody's going to read it, right? That's one of the things that surprised me when I wrote my first book was I thought, I get the book deal, I write the book, they make it, edit it, they make it look nice, they design a great cover, and then they market it and sell it. And then I realized No, I do pretty much all of that. And I mean, even when it came to editing, I was doing my own editing. I ended up designing the book cover because I didn't like the one they delivered, right? I mean, I ended up— or I hired somebody to do the book cover, but I ended up doing almost all of it, which is why I ended up self-publishing my next books. I thought, well, if I'm doing all the work for this, I might as well have control over this.

Why only make 15%, right?

Right.

And when you do your own, it's far more, you know, you're not going to write as many books as a publisher is going to publish. It is far more important to you than it is to them. And it doesn't mean that they don't treat books well or with respect. But if the average person, the average author is going to write 1 book, 2 books, 5 is a lot of books. You know, that's blood, sweat, and tears. And you want to know that you put everything in your head to make that book as successful as you possibly could. And by the way, let's just push on success. Success isn't only measured by number of units sold. And I would, in fact, argue it's probably one of the worst metrics, which is a little counterintuitive.

No, it's true because I'm sure you've seen examples where somebody sells 300 books and maybe they bought them all themselves and sent them out to clients. But if they're landing six-figure deals off of sending these books out, who cares that they only sold 300?

Right, right. Book sales are one metric and an insignificant metric at that. I'll give you an example. I was speaking, and I've done it several years in a row, at a book award event. So I had a room full of 100 people, business book authors that had just won gold, silver, or bronze in this book award. So these were good business books. So this isn't whatever. And I asked them, show of hands, whatever, how many of you, what percentage of your time did you spend on this book from, let's say, from the writing stage to 6 months post-release date. So call that a year, a year and a half. And on average, it was over 60% to 65%. And I said, directly attributable to the book, meaning number of units sold times a profit of X dollars per book, what percent of your income was it? And it was like single digits. And I'm like, do we see the problem here? Like, do you see what— because if I made you that deal, hey, Josh, you make X dollars a year, I want to pay you 5%. For 80% of your time, you're going to tell me that's crazy. Why would I do that? Well, that's part of the problem. You have to have all these other things in place where the book is a raving success, even though number of units sold, it might look like mediocrity.

Yeah, exactly. So tell me a little bit more about your programs at Thought Leadership Leverage. Do you have a standard program? How do you work with people? Is it all customized for everybody or What's your process like?

Yeah, so where we start with every— it's not really— well, I guess you can call it a program, but where we start with everybody is in a strategy development process because everybody wants to start with the tactics. Everybody wants to, oh, what am I doing on Twitter? What am I doing on social? And it's like, okay, timeout. For lots of reasons, thought leaders don't invest in strategy early on. Why is that? Well, in many instances, they got into the business accidentally, serendipitously. They didn't even think it was a business. It was, they started to write an email to friends and that became a blog and that became— it wasn't as deliberate or planned as most other businesses are. And it typically didn't require outside funding. So it just sort of serendipitously, it happened and good things happened and you worked hard and it happened. So I'm like, okay, first thing you need to do is to have a very clear strategy that dictates who you're going to serve, How are you going to serve them? What sales, marketing, and distribution looks like? What your goals are, intrinsic goals, income goals, exit goals. What are the pieces here you can sell? That's where we start. And that process, net-net, the outcome is now they have clarity. And the power of clarity is you can then effectively prioritize what you could do, would do, should do, and equally as important, what you don't do. Because typically I come in and I feel like The visual I get in my mind are you've got 28 plates spinning as fast as you can, but, but, you know, activity isn't productivity, and we all tend to confuse the two.

And so once you have that strategy in place, are you helping them with execution and planning? Are you coaching them? What does that look like?

Yeah, so once the strategy is locked and loaded, um, we— listen, you know, the client can, uh, you know, we don't, we don't operate in a black box or behind a curtain. They can clearly implement or execute on their own. Some do, or some will say, hey, I'm going to take this, uh, you know, there are elements of this that I feel really comfortable doing. Let's reconnect in 3, 4 minutes because there's some house cleaning I need to do, or I've got some folks that can get these things done. But ultimately, we're full service, right? So we can go full in on implementation, execution. I, I say to our clients early on, we go from sort of back of the envelope, you know, meaning whiteboarding, sketching, whatever, the back of the check. Like, how do we help you getting the, you know, signing the back of the checks, meaning sales, marketing, business development, delivery, all those sort of things? Because a lot of folks don't think that part of it through.

And so what is a typical engagement? How long does it last? How long do you work with people? What kind of time commitment is it, or is it just different?

Sure. So the strategy development piece is the most predictable. That typically takes about 6 weeks. Because there are a couple of phases to the engagement. We've got to come up with strategy, we have to review it, we've got to review all the materials, etc. After that, it could be on the low end, the client will work with us to get stood up and ready 4 to 6 months. On the high end, we've had clients with us for many, many, many years. It's a function of what do they want. Some clients will say to us, build a moat around me, here's the list of things I really want to do, and protect me from everything else, including myself sometimes.

So, so give me the pitch here. If I'm an author, for example, I just published my latest book in October. It's 60 Days to LinkedIn Mastery. So I've got a LinkedIn book. I'm a LinkedIn expert. And I've got this book. I come to you and I say, how do I leverage this book? Where do you start with me? What are some of the first questions you would ask? Or, or where would you guide me?

Yeah, so I'd want to figure out what the strategy is. Who are you selling that to? Is it to individual contributors on LinkedIn? Is it to organizations? Is it to associates? So who's the buyer or buyers? We need to be really clear on the avatars there. Then we need to figure out the pain points. Why do I care about being successful on LinkedIn? Like, why? What's in it? How— I've been doing fine without it, right? So what are the pain points that they're in? Um, Are the services limited to you, or have you codified the processes and methodologies in such a way where Josh doesn't need to be in the room or in the Zoom for the ideas to be exchanged or the dollars to be exchanged? Is it put into programs or slices? Is it licensable? Because I always say, let's start by thinking big and then get reductive. Why couldn't this be licensed to a distribution arm in Brazil? So we'd think through all those things. We'd look at goals, What would success look like for you? Is this something that should spin off $1 million a year in cash? Is the reason that you're doing this more intrinsic? I think the world would be a better place if everybody mastered LinkedIn. Are you positioning this as something that a boutique agency might gobble up and buy, using it for deal flow? What are the other sort of non-tangible, non-balance sheet things that are showing up, Peter? Then I would also look at the business models.? So a book is not a business model, right? What are the other formats? How many ways can I pay you to get that information? I can be in a very exclusive mastermind with you, right? I can be in a very non-exclusive cohort of, you know, 100 people that go through a series with you. It could be asynchronous, right? It could be a series of tools. Are you going to do the agency work of actually doing the implementation for me? So we need to think through the business models and then figure out how to go out there. Those are all strategy issues.

Got it. And so you work that out. So for example, in my case, I actually do have an agency that I created around the book, and the book is a marketing tool for the agency. So where would you take me as a next step then if I say, okay, I've got the book, I want to leverage the book to grow my agency, to get clients, to generate leads, where do you take me from there?

Sure. So, um, We need to think about, are you selling one-to-one or one-to-many? I don't know how the agency works, but is it, hey, Peter, we will charge you X to tune up your LinkedIn, right? And X is probably, that sounds to me like a fairly high volume, low-ish ticket model, right? So that's cool.

Yeah. I mean, we do multiple, but let's say the audience I want to push the most is corporate. So I want to get into corporations. And I want to come in and overhaul the LinkedIn profiles for all their executives or for their sales teams or something like that. If I'm going after that, so then we want to figure out what corporations—

where are they? High growth? Are they private equity funded companies? Are they Fortune 100? You know, like, so corporations is a big, big term, right? So we have to get really tight there. So maybe as an example, you said, you know what, you know, it might be interesting Let's go after companies that have gotten some funding from a private equity firm that are high growth, that are maybe a little bit immature in terms of their marketing, or maybe it's tech companies that the tech is really good, but they're immature. Why don't we partner with a whole bunch of private equity firms who make it part of a standard of being a portfolio company that you work with Josh and his agency for your 8 or 10 senior leaders, because the LinkedIn thing is something that's lacking and there's an ROI on that, et cetera, et cetera. Now, maybe the private equity firm pays you, maybe the individual portfolio company pays you, but it would be nice to have a portfolio company that can push out 6 or 8 clients a year to you that can each deliver 10 individuals, right? Like that's creating a channel.

It's funny that you bring that up because I have another business marketing agency and we've actually done exactly that, partnering with private equity funds and VC funds for exactly this reason so that they— because what happened to us was somebody came along and bought our client and then said, hey, we just bought your client. By the way, we already work with another marketing agency, so we don't need you. We're like, well, how do we become that marketing agency that is the one that the private equity company turns to and says, hey, we just bought this company, we're going to fire their agency and bring you in instead? We want to be on that side of that. So we did that. I— it hadn't occurred to me to do the same thing with this other business, with the LinkedIn agency. Anyway, I'm asking you these questions because I want listeners to see this is the type of stuff that you can help them out with, that if they come to you, you can help them come up with these ideas, you can— they can figure out strategies.

Sure.

And then this is going to help them to either get their message out there or make money or build a business or make the impact that they're trying to make out there. And we all need coaches, every The Winter Olympics just ended. Every single Olympic athlete has a coach. Every professional team, sports team, has a coach. And all the executives out there running big companies, they all have a coach. And the rest of us need coaching as well.

Yeah, no, I, I think that's right. It's like, listen, everybody's got their deep expertise and their domain expertise, but I think the, the Achilles heel of a thought leader is Okay, now you need to be savvy at social selling. Now you need to be savvy at social media. Now you need to be savvy as an instructor. Like, here's 30 other things that you probably have no interest in and you're probably worse than average at if you tried because you've never done it before. Why would you, you know, hire B and C rate players to work for you when— and when you're doing things in an amateur way, it's in essence what you're doing, let alone the opportunity cost. Is that where you should be spending your time? Figuring out like how many times a day to post on LinkedIn, if that's not your jam? Probably not.

So now you have your fees. And I'm sure there's some people listening to this who say, hey, this sounds great. I'd love to talk to these guys. But maybe they come to you and maybe it's just not within their price range at the moment. Do you have any tips for where people can start if they can't afford a service like you? Like, what are— what's some of the low-hanging fruit that people can look at to say, hey, this is something I can go do today that's going to make a difference, that's going to help me get my name, my personal brand, my thought leadership content out there in front of people?

Yeah, I think spending the time and energy thinking about who benefits the most and who will pay the most. So my answer to your question, quite frankly, is listen, there's a massive market for people that can't afford me. That's not my market. I don't care. I don't spend any time thinking about those folks. I mean, listen, God bless them. They can read our stuff. They can get our videos. That's fine. My market has to have a certain level of ability to pay, or it's just not a market. And I don't spend any time thinking about non-buyers. I spend a lot of time thinking about those that can. So where could someone that doesn't have the resources? I don't know. They could read anything we put out. They can watch anything we put out. But I think that the things that they should be focused on is who benefits the most, You know, why you? Why would anyone listen to you? Right? What is it that you have to say that's different? And how are you going to get the message out there? Like, yeah, so what? You want to write a book? Great. That is but one step in a journey. Right? And what does that journey look like? And what does success look like? And what are you willing to invest to do it? Time, energy, dollars, effort, sweat, whatever.

Got it. So what are some of your favorite channels personally? I mean, for yourself, for Thought Leadership Leverage, how are you getting your message out? Obviously, you're here on the podcast, but what are some of the other channels that you like the best?

It's changed a lot over the years. There was one point in time where I would have said Twitter, and I wasn't a believer in Twitter, but it doesn't matter what I think. Right now, there are two primary things for us from a marketing side. Well, three. One is we have a beautiful referral network, so folks that we refer business to and refer to us that are just serving the same types of people from a different perspective. Or from a different area of expertise, that's awesome. Number— well, in no necessary order, LinkedIn is really, really strong for us. We put a lot of stuff up on LinkedIn. And then our podcast has been really, really great. It's coming up on 4 years, almost 400 episodes. It's a great way to meet people. It's a great way to put out great information. It's so easy for me to have conversations, as opposed to— we used to blog a lot. I hate blogging. On my best day, I'm a mediocre writer, and I just don't like it. But I would do it because it needed to be done. I actually enjoy the conversations on podcasts and the challenge and the, you know, having learning. I mean, it satisfies my urge to constantly learn from folks.

So perfect. Well, if people do want to reach out and they want to learn more about what you do and inquire about pricing and such, where's the best place for them to find you?

Yeah, so you could email me directly, at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Peter Winick, W-I-N-I-C-K. And obviously the website thoughtleadershipleverage.com and the podcast. If you Google us, we pop up. But yeah, shoot me an email. Happy to talk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So thanks so much, Peter, for being here with us today on the Published Author Podcast.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Jeff.

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