Peter Winick explains how thought leaders can earn more: generate more leads, raise your fees by restructuring how you charge, and digitize your expertise into scalable products that don't require your presence.
This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. In today's fast-moving world, the business side of thought leadership, the business side of being an author, a speaker, or a thought leader is getting really, really complex. Things are moving quickly. There's social media, there's authorship, there's speaking, there's serving your clients, At the end of the day, there's only 3 things that any author, any speaker, any thought leader can do to increase their income. Number one, they need to do more of what they're doing. If your book of business is not full, whatever that means to you, you need to create more business. You need to generate more leads. You need to generate more interest in what you're doing. That sounds simple. Second thing, if you're already at capacity or comfortable with the amount of business you have in, then what you need to do is charge more for what you're doing. Sounds easy. Again, not so easy. How do you take your fee structure, whether it's, it's based on deliverables or hours or whatever the case it is, and generate more income per each engagement that you're working on? That's the second piece. The third piece, where we as an organization spend most of our time with our clients, is helping them digitize and helping them get that content out there in ways that aren't dependent on them being in the same room as their content in order for dollars to change hands. Even as a great speaker, even if you're doing 100 gigs a year, you cannot be in Cleveland and Cincinnati at the same time, nor would you want to. So how do you take your work, how do you take your content and get it out there so people can be paying for that content in a wide variety of mediums and modalities, and it's not dependent on you jumping on a plane? Those are the things that we spend a lot of time, energy, and effort working with our clients on.
