Peter Winick and others discuss how thought leaders should pick three specific markets to serve, understand how each one consumes content, and actually execute new formats instead of just advising others. They stress the gap between what you publish and where your audience actually listens.
Give me one thing that I might not be doing that I should be doing that I wouldn't have heard from every other author summit.
Do you have a strategy in place right now? What are the 3 markets you want to serve? 3?
Huh? You said 3 markets? Well, I'm asking you a question.
Do you have a strategy in place? Yes, I do. Yes or no? Okay. What are the markets you want to serve? I have them. Okay. How do they consume content? Yes. Okay. What's the gap between where your content lives now in terms of a format, so is it just books, and how they consume it? How are you closing that gap?
Yes and no. Yes, I have it. No, I haven't been working on it. Okay.
What's your distribution strategy?
Have that.
Okay.
Then we don't need to change it. Okay. So those are the questions that you're asking, but you go in depth and then find those answers.
That's really nice to hear. Well, it's not just about the answers. I actually, Where I have fun is— I mean, the reason I do what I do is because I love it, right? And where I have fun is most strategists in the Fortune 1,000 world, go ask Booz or McKinsey, can you now implement that for me, right? And then you hear them laughing on the floors. We don't do stuff. I love working with the client all the way through, rolling up my sleeves, and actually selling to a big organization a client's content in a format that didn't exist 6 months ago based on ideas that we had. I love eating my own dog food, and I love doing the implementation, and I love doing the execution. And it's different for everybody.
And the other thing I found is, again, the opportunity to bounce ideas off somebody else. Here's what I'm thinking. What do you think? And will this actually work in the kinds of clientele that I'm working with, and/or if I want to get this to a viable place?
