Peter Winick walks through his three-phase strategy session for turning thought leadership into a scalable business. Over 5-6 weeks, he reviews all your existing content, runs a full-day whiteboarding workshop to map your platform and business models, then delivers a strategic roadmap showing what to build, when, and what to cut.
Strategy session is where I start with each and every one of my clients, regardless of whether they're multiple New York Times bestsellers or just dabbling or starting out into the world of content. My clients come from academia, they come from the C-suite, they're folks that have been consultants or developed a process, a methodology, some thinking about something and are now trying to figure out what to do with it. So what the strategy session is, it takes about 5 to 6 weeks for us to complete together, and there are 3 phases to it that I've developed. The first phase is where I consume all of your content. And when I say consume content, it's meaning I take that in in whatever format it's in. If it's a video, I'm watching it. If it's audio podcasts, I'm listening to them. If they're PowerPoints or client deliverables, I'm reading them. It could be a book manuscript, it could be a finished book. Whatever is representative of your thinking. It could be a back-of-an-envelope idea that you've had that you haven't done much with. So I need to kind of consume your content, and when I do that, I do that on 2 levels. The first level is like a normal person would. I read through it, I understand your voice, I understand what the model is promising to do, what it's supposed to do, what it might be replacing in terms of something people are using. And I'm also starting to productize that initially in my head, thinking, wow, that's kind of neat. I might turn that into a coaching model for high potentials. That could be a great tool for newly minted sales managers in a certain industry. So whatever the specifics are, I start to do an initial productization in my mind as I'm diving into your content. I spend a lot of time really getting into the content. We'll have a few phone calls during this process, and we'll talk it through if there's something I don't understand or something I'm not picking up on or something you want to make sure that I'm getting clearly. Second phase is we get together somewhere, doesn't matter where, And we'll spend about 5 or 6 hours whiteboarding out what your platform is, what your markets are or should be, where your content is and how it needs to be reformatted into different mediums or modalities. We'll discuss various business models. We'll discuss your capabilities in terms of where that fits into the business. Not everyone should be the CEO of their own entity in terms of what a CEO means versus a content creator and someone that's entertaining and engaging on stage if you're a speaker, thought leader. We will whiteboard out an initial product roadmap. When should we be productizing things, in what sequence, against what milestones or events? And typically we get through about 80 or 90% of that in real time. Inevitably a couple things that'll come up that we won't know the answer to that we'll parking lot, we'll do some research on and come back to. Then I come back to you about a week after we've gotten together, sometimes 2 weeks depending on scheduling and timing, and present to you a high-level strategy. And that strategy, ultimately what it does, it gives you the clarity that you need to move forward, the clarity that you need to make decisions and to decide to do things and decide not to do things. From that strategy, you can now build the business and leverage it. And leveraging your platform into a business as opposed to a practice that's contingent on you being in the same room as your content in order for dollars to change hands. So that's the strategy session. That's my short explanation of it. Hope that helped. Talk to you soon.
