Build Your Expert Business

It's time to change your content strategy from random to revenue-generating. From a focus on getting followers to a focus on getting clients. Followers don't generate revenue, clients and customers do. No business can survive without generating revenue and, more importantly, profit. The earlier you are in your online business journey, the more important this is.Get the FREE revenue-generating content planner that helps you put together a content plan for the entire year in just an hour: https://join.expertbusiness.com/content-planner---------------------------------------------------

In this episode, I'll give you 3 simple steps to 100x your content publishing. By following these steps, you can increase your organic traffic and social media followers by publishing more high-quality content in less time.Get the FREE revenue-generating content planner that helps you put together a content plan for the entire year in just an hour: https://join.expertbusiness.com/content-planner---------------------------------------------------

In this episode, I'm going to reveal the 9 essential systems all online businesses need for success. You can't build an income and impact-generating online business if you're missing even one of these systems because they all work together to enable growth. If you're not making at least 6 figures in revenue, it's because you're missing one or more of these systems.I call these systems because they are major business functions with inputs, outputs, and metrics. They should be continuously improved as you grow.Get the Expert Business System, a free guide and 7-day email course here: https://join.expertbusiness.com/the-expert-business-systemMentioned in this episode:Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group!Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

In this episode you'll learn the four pillars forming the foundation of all successful online businesses. Grab my free guide and 7-day email course on how to put all these in place here: https://join.expertbusiness.com/the-expert-business-systemIf you are missing one or more of these, your business is like a table with only three (or two) legs, it will tip over and fall.The reason most coach, course, and membership creators fail to reach their goals is because they don't have these pillars in place. They believe these pillars are things you put in place WHEN you are successful. In reality, these need to be put in place IN ORDER to be successful…All online businesses need these four pillars for success:Strategy - Following a proven strategy and sticking with it until you are successful.Tools - The right tool for your specific business.Systems - The specific processes and procedures needed to build and run your specific business.Team - The people, vendors, and service providers that execute your strategy, tools, and systems.---------------------------------------------------

Are you creating content like an amateur or a professional? Creating content that attracts your ideal customer is crucial for the success of an online business. The return on investment hinges upon how you approach content creation, amateur like or professional. Your choice will greatly impact your efforts quality, effectiveness, and results.For more details, check out my free guide and 7-day email course on how to create a content engine in your business to 100x your publishing: https://startyourcontentengine.com/now---------------------------------------------------

Today we're diving into a game changing topic that could revolutionize the way you manage your business. Online business managers, or OBMs. I'll be answering the 10 most frequently asked questions about OBMs so you can determine if hiring one is the right move for you. Let's get started.---------------------------------------------------

Are you a coach, course or membership creator struggling to keep up with all the tests necessary to build and run a successful business? Do you wish you had a team member who could create massive amounts of content, answer sales and support questions, and optimize your business processes? Well look no further than artificial intelligence.In this video, we'll explore how you can leverage AI to enhance your project management, process management, sales funnels, products and content traffic and marketing, sales, and support pretty much every aspect of your online business. We'll also discuss how to increase your team's productivity with AI, how to deploy AI responsibly, and how to monitor improve AI performance.Apply for my free training where I show you exactly how to use a three part framework I've developed to create high value and high converting content at scale without a huge time investment.

In this video. I'm gonna show you the fastest way to start a coaching business online in 2023. Whether you're a business life, or relationship coach, or any other form of coaching, the key steps are similar.

In this episode, I'll show you the exact steps you can take to turn your expertise into a successful online coaching business. Be sure to say to the end, because I'm gonna show you a way to get your entire coaching business built for you so that you can be up and running within a few weeks. But first, let's talk about what an online coaching business is.

I'm gonna show you how to delegate everything in your online business. Stick around to the end for a bonus tip that'll help you avoid a critical mistake and help you delegate 10 times faster.

Did you know there are turnkey tech platforms for coaches course and membership creators? Business in a box solution. So you never need to struggle with choosing and setting up your tech platform. I don't mean tools like Kajabi or Dubsado that claim to be all in one. But where you still need a lot of others, like project management, webinar tools and more.

In this episode, I'll show you how to use a fractional team to build and grow your online business 10 times faster than you can yourself.

If you're struggling to consistently publish content at scale that attracts an audience of your ideal customers, it's likely one of these three things I cover in this post. Be sure to stick to the end for a strategy that removes all of these roadblocks.

If you're attracting an audience but not converting them into customers, it's likely one or more of these three things.

There are three mistakes almost every online entrepreneur makes that stall their online business, many times before they even launch. I'm going to show you what they are and what the successful online entrepreneurs do instead. Be sure to stay until the end because the last tip will save you months of time and effort building your online business.Take my FREE Quiz

You can get your online course membership or coaching business launched in the next two months, but it's gonna be tight. Hi, I'm David Ziembicki and you're about to learn how to grow from struggling solopreneur to successful virtual CEO of your own expert business. Your knowledge and skills can change lives and make the world a better place. Are you ready to hit the accelerator to scale your results and impact and it's time to build your expert business? It doesn't need to take months or years of preparation and work. You just need to choose the right path.Be sure to take the free team model assessment to see if and what type of fractional team could accelerate your online business and enable you to launch quickly: https://expertbusiness.com/teamtypeMentioned in this episode:Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group!Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

It's normal to think that an offshore general virtual assistant should be your first hire. Many of the online business gurus tell you that.When the online business gurus and influencers hype VAs, they make it sound like a single offshore VA will be an expert in everything your online business needs, things like tech, content, editing, social media and ads, and willing to work for $5.They also make it sound like all you have to do is hire the VA and it will take on all those things within days of starting. Oh, if that were true. But look at James Wedmore, Amy Porterfield, and Pat Flynn or others that you follow. They don't rely on a single, general virtual assistant to run their business.Find out if a virtual assistant or other models like fractional teams would accelerate your online business. Take the free team model assessment here: https://expertbusiness.com/teamtypeMentioned in this episode:Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group!Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

There are nine foundational elements an online business needs to hit seven figures. In previous episodes, we covered the first six. In this episode, we'll cover the final three essential elements: traffic, automation, and team building.Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 1)Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 2)Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 3)Take the Team Model Assessment to see whether a fractional virtual team would accelerate your online business!Mentioned in this episode:Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group!Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

There are nine foundational elements an online business needs to hit seven figures. In previous episodes, we covered the first three. In this episode, we'll cover the final three essential elements: traffic, automation, and team building.Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 1)Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 2)Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 3)Take the Team Model Assessment to see whether a fractional virtual team would accelerate your online business!Mentioned in this episode:Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group!Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

There are nine foundational elements an online business needs to hit 7 figures. Let's find out if you have them and if not, how to put them in place rapidly. If you are trying to start and online business, build an online business, or grow an online business, these elements are essential.Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 1)Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 2)Ultimate 7-Figure Online Business Foundation (Part 3)Take the Team Model Assessment to see whether a fractional virtual team would accelerate your online business!Mentioned in this episode:Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group!Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

If you aren't putting all of your focus into these three steps, you won't be able to reach 7- or even 6-figures in your online business.**** Take my 90-second, FREE

To build an online course business in 2022 and beyond, there are three essential elements. Whether you're an expert, coach, consultant, or thought leader, you need these elements if you want to be successful. Most expert business creators struggle, especially in their first few years of business. Why? Because you have a lot of skill and experience in your specialty, but building and scaling a business requires a wide range of skills and expertise that no single person possesses. The biggest difference between what I call the struggling solopreneur and the successful virtual CEO of their own expert business is how quickly they realize that trying to do it all by themselves is a serious mistake and how they fill those gaps. Here is a link to the Expert Business System mentioned in this episode: https://expertbusiness.com/expert-business-system/ Mentioned in this episode: Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group! Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

Without an OBM, your online business will almost certainly fail. I don't want that to happen. So let's find out what an OBM is, what they can do for you, and how to find one. Hi, I'm David Ziembicki and you're about to learn how to grow from struggling solopreneur to successful virtual CEO of your own expert business. Your knowledge and skills can change lives and make the world a better place. Are you ready to hit the accelerator to scale your results and impact then it's time to build your expert business! According to the International Association of Online Business Managers, an OBM is a virtual support professional who manages online based businesses including the day to day management of projects, operations, metrics, and team. They also say that the role of an OBM is to make sure the right things get done at the right time, in the right way by the right people. Let's find out how... Also, click the link below for a quick 90-second assessment that will show you which online business team model is the best fit for you right now: https://expertbusiness.com/teamtype Mentioned in this episode: Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group! Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

You don't need a big (or even small) email list to make money online in 2022. I'm going to show you that you don't need to wait until you've built an audience or email list before you start selling your online course or program. Then I'll show you how to build an email list WHILE selling your courses and programs... If you don't have a course or program yet, I also cover how you can pre sell your online course BEFORE you build it. Check out the show notes and resources at https://expertbusiness.com/byeb19 (expertbusiness.com/byeb19) Mentioned in this episode: Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group! Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

As I worked with clients this past year in our agency program, helping them build or scale their expert businesses, one factor stood out between the successful and those who struggled. In this episode i'm going to show you exactly what that success factor was and how I'm learning from it as well. Mentioned in this episode: Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group! Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

If you’re an online expert course creator, coach, or consultant, you may be making a critical mistake that’s killing your odds for success and growing your online business. And that mistake is staying solo for too long… Now, this is a mistake I made myself. It went on for a couple of years. It takes a bunch of different forms, but basically has the same end result, which is no growth or very slow growth. Also spending tons of time, money and effort with nothing to show for it. What do I mean by staying solo for too long? What I mean is, thinking that you have to learn everything yourself, do everything yourself. It’s thinking you have to produce everything yourself, support your audience and your customers yourself. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode. I'm going to show you five reasons why you need to graduate from solo to virtual CEO if you want to be successful in your online business. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward raises and promotions, or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki. Welcome to the Build Your Expert Business Show Hey everybody, Dave Ziembicki here from the Expert Business Agency. If you're an online expert course creator, coach, or consultant, you may be making a critical mistake that's killing your odds for success and growing your online business and that mistake is staying solo for too long. Now, this is a mistake I made myself. It went on for a couple of years. It takes a bunch of different forms, but basically has the same end result, which is no growth or very slow growth, spending tons of time, money and effort with nothing to show for it. Now what do I mean by staying solo for too long? What I mean is, is thinking that you have to learn everything yourself, do everything yourself, produce everything yourself, support your audience and your customers yourself. Any version of you having to do everything is a giant mistake and trying to grow your online business. Now in this episode I'm going to cover five reasons why you need to graduate from solo to what I call virtual CEO. And if you stick around to the end, I've also got a little bit of a bonus section, where I'm going to show you some ways to do exactly that. So what is a virtual CEO? It's a leader, not a doer. It's a mindset and a way of organizing your business and starting to build a team around yourself that can perform all of the different functions and tasks that are required for you to be successful in an online business. Now, a virtual CEO is what a lot of you think that you will be in a couple of years once you are successful. But the most important point that I want to make in this episode is a virtual CEO is what you need to be right now in order to be successful. So here are five reasons why you need to graduate from solo to virtual CEO. And the first is that success requires far too many skills than any single person has. So if you've been trying in this game for any amount of time, you've already run into many different roadblocks, whether it's technology, marketing, advertising, webinars, email lists, groups, community management. If you've wrote down and you sat even just for 10 minutes and wrote out all of the different categories of tasks that need to be done in order to be successful, let alone all of the tasks within them, you'll quickly realize that 95% of them are outside of your area of expertise. There are just far too many skills to learn in order to be successful yourself in any kind of a timeframe. Yeah. If you want to defer success for 10 or 15 years and go off and learn all of this stuff, you know, that's a mistake that most people make is definitely a mistake that I've made. I have wasted several years and tens of thousands of dollars of courses bought, trying to learn all of the different skills of of online business. Okay. Huge mistake. Huge cost. And again, it stems from being solo for too long. Instead of thinking about how could I find other people with these skills to do those things for me. And the difference there is really time. Okay, so what I mean by that is if you are not technical, it's going to take you five to 10 times longer to do every technical task compared to an expert or a specialist in that area who can do them in a matter of minutes because they've done it hundreds of times before. It's just one of the easiest illustrations of why it's a big mistake to stay solo, to try and learn all of this stuff and do all of these things yourself. The second reason why you need to graduate from solo to virtual CEO is even if you had all of the skills in the 30 or 50 different areas of online business that you need to know to be successful, even if you had the skills, even if you were an expert, it still takes more time than any single person has to go do those tasks. Even if you can do them quickly, even if you know exactly what to do, it still takes too much time, more than any person has in a week, no matter how productive they are. And again, this is another mistake that I've made that I'm kind of relaying to you. I am an expert on productivity. I am a very productive person. I've been building businesses alongside of a very successful corporate career, and regardless of how good you are, a productivity, there are not enough hours in the week, even if you are working every single hour, 24 by seven to do all of the tasks required to be successful yourself. So the first two were skills and time. Nobody has the skills and nobody has the time to be truly successful by themselves. The third reason why you need to graduate from solo to a virtual CEO is that no single person can create enough content and marketing assets by themselves in order to be successful. Now what I mean by that is you've seen a lot of the people in your feeds that are experts, that are successful in building their online businesses and what you'll see is they're putting out dozens and dozens of pieces of content every day. They're providing value to their audience. It's keeping them front of mind with people. The environment has gotten so competitive that you have to be producing a lot of valuable content at scale in order to build and sustain an audience. Now, you probably wonder to yourself, well, how do they do that? How does Gary Vaynerchuk create hundreds of pieces of content a day? Right? How do some of the other experts that you follow do Facebook and Instagram and stories and all the different formats and maintain a YouTube channel and so forth? You're going to start to get the inkling of the answer to that as we go through the rest of this episode and it again comes back to this concept of being a virtual CEO. The fourth reason why you need to graduate from solo to virtual CEO is that it takes more money than most people have when they first start out in order to be successful in creating an online business. Now, what I mean by that is the reason most people fall into the trap of trying to do everything themselves is because they feel like they don't have enough money or they don't have a budget to be able to hire the help that they need in order to be able to scale out their time and their results. Now, the reason I put this in there is because this is probably the number one thing that keeps people solo for too long. They think that budget is a problem. Oh, well, I can't hire assistants. I can't hire a team. I can't hire an agency. Okay. Now at the very beginning, that may be true for some people and then that leads them into a bunch of paths that don't lead to success. One of the ones I see the most is they'll listen to gurus that'll tell them, we'll just go find an offshore virtual assistant, right? So if anybody read the four hour work week with which a lot of people have, you know, in this space and what's just now, whatever, 10 or 12 years old, there's a lot of great advice in there. On how to think about outsourcing, but the idea of finding this mythical virtual assistant for $6 an hour in the Philippines that knows everything about WordPress and Facebook ads and messenger bots and marketing and all the other skills that we've talked about here, it's a myth. It doesn't exist. You're not going to find an offshore person or even 10 that have all of these skills that are deep experts and all of them and that are going to work together as a team in order to move your business forward. That doesn't exist. That doesn't happen. The cases where people have been successful with virtual assistants basically turns them into a project manager. So what that means is yes, you can find 10 or 20 different individual skills out there pretty cheap, but pulling those together into an integrated team basically just turns you into a project manager. You're going to spend all of your time managing those people and doing QA checks and trying to make one talk to the other. Even though one's in India, one's in Pakistan and one's in Romania or something like that. So a lot of people will go down that path for a while, but eventually they come back to this concept that we're talking about here, which is being a project manager is not being a virtual CEO. You need to be able to delegate entire categories of activities, entire functions within your business in order to be able to scale in order to be able to spend your time where it needs to be, creating your products, serving your customers, and then handling the strategy and the long term direction of your business. The fifth and final reason why you need to graduate from solo to virtual CEO comes back to mindset and approach. Now, what I mean by that is you need to ask yourself a question, one that's very powerful that I learned from Russell Brunson and that is you need to be thinking about the who, not the how. So what he means by that is whenever there is a set of tasks that need to be done, let's say I need to create a new webinar to market, of course, that I'm going to be launching. Okay? 95% of you that are listening will probably go down the path of no one and looking at five different webinar platforms and then not really maybe understand the technology. So get confused about, Hey, which one should I choose? Or which one's better? Or who does my favorite guru use? You'll go into forums and ask questions. Hey, which webinar platform should I use? And you'll start listening to people that are in forums that also know nothing about technology, right? So the idea there isn't to think about how am I going to do this? The best question to ask is who can do this for me? Who is an expert in webinar platforms and launches and you know, configuring all of that stuff and creating all the campaigns around it. It's the who, not the how. That's basically what a CEO would ask. So the second thing you need to do once you've started asking yourself who instead of how and figuring out who can help you do the tasks and the functions that you need to do is also continuing to think like that virtual CEO and thinking about what type of teams do I need, what type of processes and what type of procedures do I need in place in order to be successful? So again, it's not you going and learning everything. It's finding the right expertise, having them help you with that particular topic. So again, if it's webinars and everything surrounding that, it's finding the right expert who's actually going to do work for you. Okay? I don't mean going out and buying a $2,000 course on how to deliver webinars, right? That would be falling down that path of trying to learn everything yourself. Find somebody who's going to help you, coach you, and actually do most of the work for you. And then that's what you bring in. Now as you bring in that expert and you add them to your team, you need to make sure that they are documenting all of their processes and procedures. Figuring out are there any other team members required. And then basically building that into a repeatable function. Okay, that's what's going to let you then later push down the cost. Maybe you don't need the expert the next time. Maybe you can do it yourself because everything's written down and you know exactly what buttons to click and you don't even have to think about it anymore. So that last one is really that mindset shift of who not how. And then figuring out how do I turn that into teams, processes and procedures to make it repeatable in your business and then push the cost down as low as it can go. So let's take a day in the life, look at what that transformation or that graduation from solo to virtual CEO would look like. And then at the end, I'll tell you exactly how you can do this in your own business. So today you know, much like I have up until recently, you probably wake up with a huge task list in your mind. Okay, so again, if you're thinking about you've built a course or you're building an online course and you've decided webinars are going to be your launch mechanism, you're waking up every day thinking, geez, I still have half of this course that I have to record and I don't like the way my videos looked. I don't know how to make my audio quality better. I don't think my lighting looks good, so I'm just worried about the overall quality level and once I get all the content created, I've got to figure out how am I going to put this into my website or should I use a Kajabi or Kartra or WordPress or all these different tech platforms in order to get the course even up and running. Then I'm not sure how I'm going to do payments. Do I need Stripe or PayPal? Then thinking about the webinars like, well, yeah, I'm going to have to record the webinar. Am I going to be able to do that live? What kind of internet connection do I need? So I better start writing down all the things I need to check for the webinar. Oh and yeah, I've got to write a 15 different email followups for people that join and leave early and don't hear the offer and so on and so forth. I could go on for another hour in the episode just outlining the list of tasks for a single course and a single live webinar launch. Okay. That's where most of us wind up overwhelmed. We write out or think about these huge task lists, and to be honest, it's even worse than that because most of us don't even know all of the tasks that we really need to do on these things until we get into it and then we realize we missed something. You know, in the middle of the live webinar, it's like, go, whoops, you know, there's something wrong with with my microphone or something like that. So there's a lot of different things there that in the normal day when you're going solo, you get overwhelmed with these things. And then the real killer is when you run into one of those tasks that you just flat out don't know how to do, but that are critical for the thing that you're trying to accomplish. So again, in that webinar example, you know, if you didn't know how to get your camera hooked up to your computer and able to broadcast live during this webinar, you're going to be stuck, right? And you may lose eight hours going and trying to find online how to do that, whereas an expert, it's done in a minute. It's never even a problem. So that's what the day in the life of solo looks like, feels like. And I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this, that's what you're experiencing every day, just like I have experienced for a couple of years. Now let's take a look at the difference. The flip side, what if you actually were a virtual CEO? So there it's completely different. Now you wake up and instead of you having to worry about a bunch of things, imagine you have a virtual chief operating officer. That's what I call it. A CEO does not do the day to day operations of their company. They have a chief operating officer sitting on top of all of their different divisions and people in teams that handle the day to day letting the CEO focus on strategy and and longer term goals. So how do you affect that inside of an online business, which may today just be yourself? The way to do that is by finding and bringing in what I call a virtual chief operating officer. Okay. Some people call this an integrator. So Amy Porterfield talks about that a lot on her podcast. There's her as the CEO of her, you know, while they successful online course business. But then she has what she calls an integrator. It's basically a second in command in charge of the day to day operations and managing the large team of people that she has. So if you're a virtual CEO, what happens in the morning is you wake up and your first call of the day is going to be with your virtual chief operating officer and they are going to give you a briefing of what's going on in the business. What are the tasks that need to be done that week? Who's working on what, what their status is. And most importantly, what are the few key areas where they need your input, either in terms of a decision, in terms of a piece of content that needs to be created or uh, you know, a call that needs to be had with a customer or whatever it may be. So instead of you waking up with this huge overwhelm of tasks, you're going to have a single person and a team working for you that are taking your direction and taking initiative on their own to get these things done. And you would have that chief operating officer in the middle so that you're not getting peppered by questions from, you know, 10 different freelancers and different service providers that you might be using. So your day is entirely different there because after that initial call, you know exactly what you need to do in order to keep the team busy and getting all of your goals accomplished and then the remainder of your day can be focused on thinking forward, what's the next product I'm going to create? What's the next launch that we want to do? What's the next strategy that we want to try and test in the business to accelerate our growth? Okay. When you're stuck in that solo mode and you're just dorking around with cameras and webinars and you know, technical widgets here and there, you rarely have time to think ahead about, you know, what strategy makes sense or, or you know, actual growth of the business. So that's a huge difference in the day in the life between solo and virtual CEO. So the final point before I show how to start making that transition is I want to really just hammer home that the people that you see online that are successful may have already done this. Okay. They a lot of them, whether it's on purpose because they sell courses or just whether it's inadvertent, they put out the perception that Hey, they've created this incredible, you know, seven and eight figure passive income, you know, type of business just sitting by themselves on the beach with a laptop typing away for a couple of hours a day and then the money flies into their, their bank accounts. Okay. These days, nothing could be further from the truth. If you take a look at any of the experts that show up in your feeds frequently, the ones that are making millions of dollars, all of them, bar none, have some form of team supporting them that they've either built themselves or agencies that they've hired or the Dave kind of built up over time. The reason I know this is that a couple of years ago I did a virtual summit and I reached out to about a hundred different six, seven and eight figure online entrepreneurs and invited them in for interviews to see how were they successful, how did they go from scratch to six, seven or eight figures? And in the end we netted it down to interviews with about 20 successful people. A lot of whom show up in some of your feeds. Chris Ducker, John Lee Dumas, you know Lauria Petrucci, you know a bunch of others that are probably in your feeds now that have very successful businesses. And what we found was none of them did it by themselves. All of them started by themselves. All of them grew over time, but none of them that are successful today are sitting there on a beach by themselves doing every task in their business alone. So that's what I want you to think about is how do you get there? Okay. Now at this point, the, by far the biggest objection that's in your mind if you've made it this far is that sounds really expensive. And how can I afford that if I'm still working in my regular job and trying to build this business on the side when I don't have tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars to go hire a team? And that's a great question and then leads into, well how do you actually make this transition? So when I interviewed those 20 online business experts that had been successful at building their businesses, I asked them how did they make that turn from solo and doing everything themselves up to the success that they were having today with the teams that they had built around them. And the answers were all very similar. It took time, it took them time to go from solo to maybe an assistant to then a couple of freelancers to then making their first full time hire to then growing their team out to the five 10 or 15 that it generally is today for the folks that are successful. And I really thought about that a lot cause you know what was nice was those folks were being honest or in these interviews they weren't making it sound like they were overnight successes. You know, several of them, uh, I think it's Chris Ducker said, you know, they're a 10 year overnight success, right? It took years to get up to those points. Now I'm an impatient person. Um, I had already spent a couple of years trying and failing. I did not want to spend another five or 10 years before experiencing success. So I went back and thought about that quite a bit and I said, well, how could we reverse engineer what some of these folks have today? Maybe there's a, an a company out there that provides those services. Is there anybody out there that it gives you a team of people that basically become your team that you can leverage for building your online business? Is there anybody out there that knows of course, creation and webinars and membership sites and podcasts and all this stuff that we have talked about in this episode that we need to do. So I looked high and low. I was in the fortunate position of, you know, longterm successful career at Microsoft. I had budget I could put into growing my online business and even with a budget of five thousand ten thousand twenty $50,000, there was nobody out there providing the set of services geared towards course creators, coaches and consultants online for any reasonable cost. I mean, of course there's marketing agencies out there that you can go hire, but they're the ones that you know, charge you $50,000 just to get a basic website. Okay. There wasn't anybody that provided a team like Amy Porterfield has or Gary Vaynerchuk has or Chris Docker has or any of the other ones that, uh, that many of us love and follow. There was nobody out there providing that breadth of service at a cost point that was achievable for an individual to bring in, in that first one to three years of their business. And in the end that, I spent a lot of time on this because this was the key problem that I saw in this entire online business space. Thousands of people come into it, only a few hundred are ever truly successful. And I started digging into why is that the case? And every single time it came back to what we were talking about in this episode, people get excited by the idea of I'm on a beach passive income, write a couple of blog posts or record a couple of podcasts, got some sponsors, and suddenly I'm making $1 million a year. They get pulled in by that marketing message, right? The hope of that scenario. Okay, I did myself. The problem is like we've seen they run into this solo trap, try for a couple of years, then burnout and give up. And that's why any of the gurus that you follow, if you really dig into how many actual successful students they have, it's in the single digit percent if they're lucky. Okay, one, two, 3% ever even finished courses, let alone go on to be successful and build their own businesses. So again, I kept asking over and over again, why is that and how could that be fixed? And I came back to was this concept of how would you get people from solo to virtual CEO? It's what I started doing. I said, okay, I've got budget. I'm going to go hire people, service providers, services, you know, assistance and so forth. I'm going to start building this team. So I had the luxury of having the budget to start doing that myself. Most people don't necessarily have that. So I thought, again, okay, let's see, maybe there's somebody out there offering those set of services. When I did all that research and found that there wasn't, that's when the light bulb went off and I said, Hm, here maybe is the opportunity that I've been looking for that ultimate win-wins scenario to both help a broad set of people, unleash their expertise, build their businesses, you know, achieve the, the wealth and impact and legacy they want while at the same time, you know, enabling me to make that transition myself. And that's when the idea of the expert business agency was born. And I said, Hey, reverse engineering the people that are successful, you need a team. You need to be a virtual CEO. You need to be able to delegate and outsource, you know, a wide range of tasks, even entire business functions like tech and marketing. And I said, well how could we deliver that to customers in a way that was affordable to them and allowed us to generate a, you know, a small profit that we need, you know, just to be a functioning business. And that's what led to the, what I call the expert business accelerate program, which I'll give you some information for at the end of the episode. And the idea there is create a world class team, but then share that amongst 10 15 or 20 aspiring online business owners who can't afford yet to buy and fund their own team full time until they start generating some cashflow. So the idea is how to get you to be a virtual CEO in the first one to three years of your business, maybe before you're generating a national enough cashflow to be able to hire 10 full time people. Because if you think about 10 full time people, a designer and editor, a copywriter and ads person, a project manager, a support person, you know even at you know, 75,000 bucks a year or even $50,000 a year for each of those, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of payroll to support if you needed to build your own full time team. Most of us just starting out can possibly afford that. So the idea of a shared team of experts where we do all of the work for you and we have experts that you can cycle through when you need them. When it's time to build an ad campaign, you go to the ad experts that we have on the team. When it's time for some design work to be done, you go to the designer that's assigned to you. These are the ideas that really bore out the, the concept of the expert business agency. And then the final piece of the puzzle, um, you know, that we just kind of fell into in the last couple of months was that concept of a virtual chief operating officer. So a lot of agencies and partners and things like that, they'll give you like a success manager or you know, a project manager or something like that who's really just kind of shepherding tasks, you know, through to completion. What we're doing is we're providing what I call that virtual chief operating officer. Okay. So what that is is that's somebody who is a very senior resource, has a lot of experience in, in this world and is going to not only help get tasks done for you, but they are going to work paired up with you on strategy. And what I mean by that is thinking about what are the products that you're going to offer, the positioning, the value, what marketing strategies make sense to add. So they're going to work directly with you on strategy. Uh, so what types of products to create, what types of positioning to use, what type of marketing strategies help you with the longterm planning help you with building out the virtual team? So it's not a project manager. You'd have access to one of those two, but it's more of that partner that you're going to share access to that can really help guide you in the right direction. And all of these things that we've built into the offer, I think address the issues that I've come up with and trying all the different things that are out there. So again, I've bought every course under the sun. When you get into courses, even the ones that provide some kind of support or access to the guru or add basketing, you know, a half hour of their time, usually in a group of a hundred people and maybe once a week you get to ask a question and get an answer on the contrast of virtual CEO, which we offer up. You have them in Slack every day. You have as many calls with them in the week as you need. You have a true partner in working with you to build and grow your online business. Same thing with the shared team, okay? It's not going to be just fire a, a task off out into the ether and then you know, wonder when it's going to come back. You're sharing access to a team that's assigned to you and you'll interact with them every day. So the reason I'm bringing this up is a, you know, not to kind of do a on the fly webinar about the expert business agency, but just to show that there are answers in between his solo and then hiring a full time team of your own. And that's what I call building a virtual team led by you as a virtual CEO with a virtual COO as your partner. So do you want to learn how to graduate from solo to virtual CEO and not have to hire a team of experts and 10 different people full time that you need to figure out how to pay for, manage and make work together? If so, then I want you to head over to expert business.com/accelerate for a new training video that I've posted that goes into all of the details of exactly how we enable you to be a virtual CEO, the team of experts, the tools and the processes that we use and that we can build around your business in order to take most of that load off of you so that you can focus on those strategic activities that a CEO should be doing. So again, if you're interested in learning more, head over to expert business.com/accelerate and once you've gone through the video, there's a little button you can click, go through a short application process and then you can jump on a phone call with us and we'll go through your business goals, what your strategy is, and figure out if there's a match for our services, whether we can help you accelerate the growth of your business by giving you a virtual chief operating officer and then acting as your team to help you grow and accelerate your business. So I look forward to hoping you hop on that video. I hope you jump on a call with us and, um, you know, we'd love to help you and we'd love to accelerate your progress. Thanks. Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success. 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In this episode, we’re going to take you behind the scenes of the agency. We’re going to talk about what we’re building, why we’re building it, where we are, where we’re going, and how that might be of some value to you. I think you’ll find it interesting to see how we’re starting a brand new agency from scratch, as well as all the different tools, technology, processes and procedures, and things that we’re implementing to help clients. And then you’ll also see what it looks like to just get a new venture off the ground in this business world – in this online business space that we talk about quite a bit here. So that’s something that I tried for awhile, and in failing a few times, it really led me to discover that there was a gap in the marketplace that maybe we could potentially fill that would be a win win situation for both myself and you know, the clients or the audience that I might serve. That’s really where I started to discover this expert business model that we’ve talked about a lot on the show and this gap in the market of somebody that was going to do done for you services to help people be successful in growing either their career or the business that they want to build around their expertise in other way that we’ve been talking about some of these challenges recently is an analogy of building a personal marketing team and technology team for the individual. So what I mean by that is as a few have been exposed to any of the corporate leaders in the companies that you work for, a lot of them have a dedicated marketing team just to do, build and market the brand of the leader or the CEO of that company. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, we're going to go behind the scenes of the expert business agency. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward raises and promotions or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families. This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build, and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki. Welcome to the Build Your Expert Business Show. Hey everybody, Dave Ziembicki here from the Expert Business Agency. In this episode, we're going to take you behind the scenes of the agency. We're going to talk about what we're building, why we're building it, where we are, where we're going, and how that might be of some value to you. I think you'll find it interesting to see how we're starting a brand new agency from scratch and all the different tools and technology and processes and procedures and things that we're implementing to help clients. And then you'll also see what it looks like to just get a new venture off the ground in this business world - in this online business space that we talk about quite a bit here. So the first thing that I want to get into is what problems are we trying to solve that led us into this particular direction. If you've listened to some of the previous episodes, you know that a lot of the analysis and the steps that we go through when we look at figuring out whether we want to build some kind of online business. Whether we want to choose courses or to be a service provider or any of the different derivations of ways to build a business around your expertise. You know that we talk about, what are some of the highest value services that you can provide that are also in the highest demand? So as I started looking at those things and as I started trying to build online businesses myself and think about teaching things that I know or are building a business around my expertise around courses and coaching and things like that, I went through a number of different programs from different experts that have been successful in various business models. And I tried a couple of different attempts at different things, with pretty limited success, or in a lot of cases, no success. As I went through that process, I started realizing that there was a major gap in the marketplace, which is somebody that wanted to build an online business that had the right expertise, that was a leader in their industry, really did not have a support system for how to do that. Okay. So there's plenty of courses out that it'll tell you to do these 5,000 things and then you'll be successful. But those of us that are in a demanding corporate jobs and in successful careers, we don't have 40 to 60 hours a week to go do all of these things. The marketing and the content and the promotion. And the technology and all those different things. So as I had struggled with doing that myself, even well-funded, I mean I can hire a contractors and freelancers and try and manage all of these people. Um, and really all that was kinda turned me into a project manager and then trying to pull all the strings and all of these different people. So that's something that I tried for awhile, and in failing a few times, it really led me to discover that there was a gap in the marketplace that maybe we could potentially fill that would be a win win situation for both myself and you know, the clients or the audience that I might serve. And that's really where I started to discover this, uh, expert business model that we've talked about a lot on the show and um, this gap in the market of somebody that was going to do done for you services to help people be successful in growing either their career or the business that they want to build around their expertise in other way that we've been talking about some of these challenges recently is an analogy of building a personal marketing team and technology team for the individual. So what I mean by that is as a few have been exposed to any of the corporate leaders in the companies that you work for, a lot of them have a dedicated marketing team just to do, build and market the brand of the leader or the CEO of that company. You're really starting to see this emerge and kind of the medium business space as well as, you know, fortune 500 executives where when you think about a long career and moving up into these higher levels of leadership, um, people are starting to hire like a video crew to follow them around and create content. And to document the journey of that leader and everything that they're doing inside of their company. Um, so these are some things that are happening in the marketplace today at the high end, but nothing like that really exists at a level that's feasible for, you know, maybe the individual or the, the senior technology, you know, a person like a lot of us that listen to this podcast are. Um, so that's another way that we've been starting to describe the services and the problem that our agency solves is it provides that technology and marketing department to help individuals who are experts or you know, want to position themselves as leaders, give them the team, the tools, the technology, the marketing skills and so forth to be able to do that. So it's not teaching somebody to have to go do all these things. What we're talking about here with an agency model is actually doing these tasks for the individual, for our clients in order to really accelerate their career. Again, without them having to learn how to do all this stuff. It's basically like hiring and sharing a team and a platform that's able to do all of those things for you. So that starts to get into the question of why choose an agency model. So again, as I just mentioned, there's a bunch of different models that you can choose from that we've covered in previous episodes for building your own expert business. It can range from being a dollars per hour freelancer to building your own courses to, you know, doing consulting or, or you know, high end coaching programs, creating online courses all the way up to, you know, group coaching and then into done with you and done for you services. So there's a whole spectrum of different options for creating a business around your expertise. There's different amounts of labor associated with each of them. There's different, you know, profit and margin profiles of those different businesses. And there's also a huge difference in the actual outcome that it delivers to the end customer. Okay. So I've done courses before and I've obviously been in consulting and professional services for 20 years. So I've seen a lot of the different ends of the spectrum there, but in particular when it came to this challenge of trying to solve, you know, um, the expert business challenge that we all have, the real answer that you know, came to me was again, focusing on these done for you services. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on courses, taken them, gotten some great information out of there, even implemented a lot of those things. But again, like I was mentioning, there's just not enough time in a day, no matter how productive you are to do both things, to stay in a corporate career and Excel there and to build either, you know, this personal brand or separate business on the side, it's almost impossible to do by yourself. So what I wanted to do was actually really help people. Okay. Um, it's definitely higher margin to just do a course and, and throw that out there because yeah, you do it once and then hopefully thousands of people buy and you make a lot of money on that. But I didn't really want to do that in this space. I wanted to go deep, I wanted to build a team, help people be really successful. So that's why I decided to choose done for you services and go with this agency model. And to be honest, it also puts things back in my comfort zone. I mean, like I said, I've been in consulting for 20 years and you know, solar delivered over $200 million of professional services. So I really like helping clients and there's nothing like that one on one interaction. I'm going deep with them on their challenges becoming a true partner to them to actually get those results. So that's one of the reasons why I chose the agency model. Another was, um, there really was nothing else out there in this space. There's thousands of courses about how to build an online business around your expertise, but there's almost zero done for you service providers out there that target the individual. There's plenty of agencies that will help small and medium businesses and even large corporate businesses where you're talking like $100,000 just to get in the door to get a basic, you know, brand and website going. So that's a whole different ballgame. Whole different spectrum. We're trying to target that scenario again for that individual. So again, seemed like a market opportunity, did a ton of research. I'm like, I always tell a potential clients if there was such a solution out there as ours, I would have been using it, right? I would have paid 10 2030 $40,000 to do that and save a lot of trouble since there wasn't found a business opportunity. And that's why we decided to go into that direction. So if you followed any of my previous content or episodes or if you've actually gotten into what we call the expert business roadmap or the expert business blueprint, you'll note that some of the things I've already covered are the first couple of steps that we talk about in there. And that is figuring out what your mission is. So our mission is to help, you know, the individual technical professional, build a business around their expertise or accelerate their career in their corporate. So we have a mission, we have a market. You know, we basically narrowed up to technical professionals. A lot of different reasons there. It's my background, it's who I will resonate with more because I've got, you know, 20 plus years of experience in the technology space and it's just, that's what I'm interested in and that's where all my experiences are. So when you do think about starting your own business, that's one of the key things that we always teach people in our programs is you got to think about what is that niche? What does that narrow market that you want to serve that you have some expertise or some experience in that you're basically gonna immediately resonate with people. So that's why we've tilted the focus towards that. Can these services by used by people who aren't technical professionals? Absolutely. You know, we have doctors who are clients now and you know, other what I call skilled professionals. So people, you know, doctors, lawyers, accountants, technologists and so forth. And so it doesn't mean we won't serve those people. It just means for our content, for our marketing, for all the activities that we do, we decided to narrow that up and go pretty deep into that market, um, with that particular messaging. So again, we have our mission, we have our market. Now the next step is figuring out what is our business going to look like. So what services are we going to offer? I mentioned done for you. Yeah, it's a broad category. We could do anything in there. So we decided to do is to zone in on two things that are key elements that an individual needs if they want to accelerate their career or if they want to build a business around their expertise. And those two elements are the underlying technology platform to use to build your brand and to build your content on. And then also the actual content engine itself or how you're actually going to produce and deliver value to your potential audience at scale. So the first key element is again, that platform and that content engine. And then the second is once the tools and the technology and the processes are in place, it actually takes a number of different areas of expertise to run an expert personal brand or to build an expert business. So what I mean by that is, you know, uh, technologists, developers, designers, copywriters, editors, everything that you would find in a technical marketing department you need those expertise is inside of your brand or inside of your business if you want to be successful. Now, where most people fail, like I mentioned, is thinking they need to go learn all of that themselves. The key is finding the right team to be able to do all of those things for you where you're acting as the CEO of your own business, of your own brand, and you have that marketing department that you can rely on, you direct them and then they go off and do those things. So that's the second key value that we decided to build out inside of the expert business agency is a shared team. So we have a shared technology platform where we've integrated a whole bunch of different best of breed components together and we share that with our clients. And then I've also assembled a team of people with those different expertise as people in partners. So you don't have to go design your own logo or build your own website or you know, mess around with you know, how to set up a blog or any of the other things that are in there. Even advanced scenarios, advertising, online automation, all the different things that are, you know, modern marketing today. They are what people do and use. But you don't want to have to go out and learn those things yourself. You want to be able to share a platform, share a team that already exists. And again, that's why we decided to build that out inside of the agency. We determined that those were the two biggest gaps that prevented people from reaping all of these benefits. They didn't understand the technology because it's different than, you know, the tech that they, you know, design and do every day. And they also had no idea about what type of team and different forms of expertise were required to be able to do that. Um, so again, it was an analysis of the market, look for gaps that are in that market and then design some services that are high value and will be in high demand and then tee them up, uh, to our client base. So again, it's the same type of process that we take our clients through to help them figure out what market they want to serve and what services they want to use and what type of thing and value they want to deliver to their audience or to their potential customers. So once we decided on those two key elements, the, the platform and the sharing of the platform and then the team and how to share the team out with clients, we needed to dig one level deeper and figure out, okay, well how do we actually want to deliver those services? Because in a lot of these things, there's a large amount of onetime setup collecting requirements. You know, a typical design, let's collect requirements. Let's see what the customer or the client needs, um, what type of solution is going to be a fit for them. Try and use our standard packages so that we don't have a, you know, a custom platform for a hundred different clients and so on and so forth. So we've saw pretty early on that there was going to be a onetime effort that was pretty substantial to get somebody up and running in, you know, these different things that we're talking about here. But then also from my own experience, I know that in trying to provide consistent value, consistent content over the long term can be very difficult. So just here, you know, doing this recording that I'm doing, I mean I'm surrounded by lights and cameras and mixers and microphones and equipment and all of this kind of stuff. I have to create notes ahead of time to say, okay, well what am I going to talk about, you know, during this a 15 to 30 minute segment, how is that aligned to a larger strategy? Okay. Once the recording is done, I mean this is actually the easiest part is standing in front of the camera and talk. There's editing that has to happen afterwards. It has to get uploaded to a bunch of different places. We cut up the content into highlights and quote images and social media posts, right? So to be successful today and it kind of break through a recording like this and needs to be put into like 50 different locations and social media posts and all kinds of different, um, you know, social media strategies applied and even paid advertising, um, to make sure that people are actually seeing the content that you create. So everything that I just said, uh, is downstream from this half hour recording and that's, you know, uh, at least like four to eight hours of work for every episode that goes out. Again, uh, somebody like me, very busy professional, uh, in my career, I don't have time to do all of that stuff. So that's why I built the team to do that. And then that's why we share that team at any agency. So consistency is key in, in breaking through, in the online space to positioning yourself as a leader. You gotta be constantly creating content, providing value out to your audience with a goal in mind, whether it's to accelerate your career or to build your own business around your expertise. So that was the other leg of services. There's the one time setup and then there's, we decided to have an ongoing monthly service where our clients can continue to share our team to do all of that stuff that I just talked about for them. So one of our standard offerings is a client, you know, records 30 minutes of raw video, uh, in a week, some kind of content episode, just like what you're seeing here. And then they just give us that raw video and then our team does all of the rest of the work that I was outlining for the client. So again, we do that on a, on a monthly basis and there's a whole bunch of other things that are included in, in that particular service. Um, but that's what we've been designing and building. Now from a business perspective. Um, my profit comes from being able to do that as quickly as efficiently as possible. So I don't want to just throw labor at it. Can I throw automation at it? Can I use services? Can I use offshore? That's a big part of what the agency has been doing in the last couple of months is evaluating different service providers, different services that are out there that, you know, the do some of the, the tasks that we're talking about to assemble the set of people and services that can do that in the least cost, least costly way with the highest quality level. And then the value that the agency is providing is coordinating all of that stuff, managing that end to end flow so that the client doesn't have to worry about any of it. So we basically call those two different services, accelerate and then operate, accelerate as the onetime set everything up, get people's websites going, their sales funnels, if they have products, um, their coaching or consulting appointment scheduling, you know, if, if that's what they offer or if they're on the corporate career track, we work with a client to figure out what is their next goal, is it a promotion, is it a new position? And then we align all of our activities around that. After that we built all their websites, all their social media channels. We help them get that content engine up and running so that they can supply that, that raw content that we're talking about. And after that we look at whatever, you know, promotional and advertising type of strategies make sense to ensure that their content is going to be seen by their target audience. And then we move them through automation and a whole bunch of other things. We basically have a nine step program that we take customers through for that accelerate phase. And then, uh, if they want to continue on with us, which most of our clients do, then that's when we turn on the operate phase. We move into that month to month mode and then they continue to share our team. So accelerate and operator the two services that we've been building out are in the agency over the last couple months. And then we've been starting to run the first wave of clients through all of those services. So in terms of behind the scenes and what's in place over the last couple of months, um, as we started to launch this concept and start to build it out, we've been spending a lot of time on platforms and infrastructure because we know that as soon as we got the first round of clients, we were going to need to be able to have in place things like project management and collaboration tools. Um, the ability for clients to review design work and deliverables that we were giving them, you know, sharing of files and so on. And already we knew that because we have such a high touch and a high amount of done for you services that we're doing for clients, we were going to need to start documenting our processes and implementing automation as quickly as possible. So we've put a lot of time into that. We've established all of that base infrastructure. We're using some tooling, you know that's called process street, which lets us create very detailed step by step checklist and process flows for everything that we're doing. Again, as I mentioned over time, what I need to do is to push all of the activities that we do to the least costly resource that's able to hit the quality level that we need. So the way to be able to push tasks to a lower our dollar per hour resource to execute is to document the heck out of them so that they don't really have to think about it. We can just push that out and it's very step-by-step and so forth. So basic flow that we use is we will figure out what we want the process to be tested out a few times, document it step-by-step, screenshots, videos, you know, every different way that you could do that. Put that into our tooling. And then we have people start testing that out and then we see how far down into the cost model we can push these tasks. Some tasks can be done by, you know, a $6 an hour resource offshore. Some need a 20 or $30 an hour, you know, stateside resource and some need an expert, you know, somebody that's, that's worth, you know, uh, paying a hundred or $200 an hour really depends on the task. And then again, part of the value that the agency provides is we source all of that talent we've added and then we do all of that routing and management of those tasks to the right resources that are able to do it and hit the quality level. So a lot of base infrastructure in place. The next thing that we have is, you know, again, processes and procedures and then the first round of customers coming through. So it's all well and good to talk about these things and build up some of this stuff. But then as soon as you get, start getting customers onboarding, that's when you see all of the holes in your process. So in the last couple of months as we've gotten, you know, initial wave of clients on, um, we've really already seen a lot of things that we need to streamline things that when you're managing a scale of anywhere more than two or three, it's just a different way of thinking about things. You really have to be efficient in the communications. You really have to push on the client. Um, fairly hard to provide all of the input to be for us to be able to stay within that eight week commitment that we make to clients of getting their, uh, expert brand or their expert business launched in eight weeks. Um, while we do a lot of the work, we can't do it without the client's input. Um, so that's something I've constantly been working on last couple months is how do we collect that input early? How do we go deeper with the client to make sure we're pulling out of them everything that we need to get websites built and products built and you know, landing pages and marketing are created and so forth. So that's where we've spent a lot of time too, which is kind of one of the first lessons learned, which is really push on getting that information as early as possible in the client onboarding process. The other thing that we learned early on is that while my very strong desire is to have a standard set of services that we use for all clients, not every client is the same. They do have some varying requirements there. And in order for them to select us, we've had to be a little bit flexible on the services that we provide. So in one case, um, you know, I hadn't been planning on doing, uh, e-commerce based businesses, but one of the first clients that we had that signed up for the service, um, they created a daily planner. You know, a physical planner, um, you know, with schedules and habit trackers and all this kind of stuff in there. Um, and one of the things they wanted to do was to start bringing that into their own website, their own online store, get away from some of the Amazon fees and some of the challenges that they were having there. So in addition to all the normal stuff that we do, that was one of their key requirements. And I had to think about that for a little bit, cause it's technology that wasn't in our base platform, you know, that we didn't initially have a lot of expertise with. But you know, my thinking was, Hey, it'll be worth investing maybe doing that client work at break even or maybe even a little bit of a loss because it will give us another service that we can add to our standard because we'll have learned how to do that or we're sourced the right experts that know how to do it. And then we can build that into our base package. So again, just to get that initial wave of clients and start getting testimonials. And, and some of the real world, um, lessons learned, we decided to be flexible there and, um, yeah, and, and basically do that and invest a little bit ourselves to, to do that learning. And so we're continuing to do that. Just a few other clients coming in with a few different needs, a little bit off center from what we were planning. But again, we're going to do that for this initial round just to build up that experience and then broaden out the portfolio of services that we're able to deliver. So finally, I would just want to cover a little bit about what's coming next. Um, so lots of work going on. Um, you know, just tonight as I was recording this, we had another client sign up for the, for the service, the, the full package, the accelerate and operate phases. So we're pretty happy about that right now. For the last month we've been averaging, you know, a client or two coming in per week and you know, this is a pretty, uh, high ticket program. So, um, we don't expect to get 10, 20, 30, 50 customers in a week. If we get a solid one to two or three every week. Yeah. Then we're going to hit our first year goals there. So, so far, so good on that. Um, so some of the things that are coming next is you're actually gonna see a second studio. Um, so what you see here is in my home office I've recorded out of here for the last year or two and from, for various things. Um, but one of the things I'm very challenged by in the home office is even though I live on a amazing house on a Lake in the mountains, in, in, uh, you know, the Pacific Northwest, we have absolutely horrible internet, uh, where I am. Um, if we're lucky we get maybe a half a megabit per second upload and then download is, is only three or four megabits per second. Recently, my son, who we has started to do a lot of online courses and we actually cannot both be on a video or a conference call at the same time without basically crashing the internet connection. Because of using too much bandwidth. So, uh, I've rented a space in the closest little town nearby. It's in a small creative center there and they do have access to fiber and high speed internet. Um, so one of the things we're going to do in document a as part of this behind the scenes series is you're going to see me turn a very echoey, uh, wood paneled and wood hardwood floored a room in this creative center into a professional recording studio. So we're going to go through soundproofing, lighting, design, all kinds of different things. I think it's interesting to this audience because one of the things that is absolutely key to all of our strategies is providing consistent content and value, especially in the form of video or tutorials or demonstrations. And you know, if you want to do that in a professional way, have good audio, good lighting, a good background, all these types of things. Um, yeah, most people don't know how to do that. So we're going to teach you how to do that. Yeah. Cause I do think, and I know a growing trend in this, uh, space today is people turning their offices, turning their work location into a content creation studio. So I think you'll find that really interesting. So that's one of the things that's coming up as well. As I mentioned, we have more customers starting to come into the pipeline. So as we start servicing, you know, this first wave of customers, I'll start doing a lot more demos and tutorials and we'll be mixing in a lot of, um, you know, screen recordings and so forth, uh, inside of these episodes. Just to give you a feel for, you know, what does a content creation process look like? How do you write a good blog post? How do you create a video like this and get it in all the different locations? One of the big advantages to the whole done-for-you service model that we have is information can be free, right? We're going to provide a lot of information that others might charge for because we all show you how to do it, but we know you're probably not going to have time to do it yourself. So we'll show you. If you have time, great. You can do it yourself. If you see the value in it though and you want some help, then obviously that's what we're here for. And then all that goes together with, with just more content. So you know, this show will continue on as, as it has and we'll come up with a, you know, we've got a whole raft of different topics that we'll be talking about and building out over the next months. And then we're also going to be laying in, you know, again more behind the scenes, more demo in tutorial. Um, so again, it's really just a, a all about providing as much value as you can. Um, you know, how much of a leader you are seen as is proportional to how much value and help you're providing to others. So we're going to amp that up significantly, especially as we're starting to build out this agency team and I've got a bigger set of people that are able to help and again, fire up that, uh, that content engine that we keep talking about. So those are some of the things you're going to see. I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes episode. I know it was a lot about what we're building and some of these details, but I do know, you know, from, from comments from folks that they do want to hear what's going on, why are we building this business, why are we making the decisions that we're making? Um, again, we'll sprinkle some of this behind the scenes in there [inaudible] from time to time on these episodes. And also as I get into like Instagram stories and, and some of these other things, you'll just see some daily behind the scenes stuff starting to pop up as well. So I want to thank you for joining me today. If you're interested in what we're talking about here, if I, if it's resonated with you, this idea of having your own personal technology and marketing department. If you want to accelerate your career by positioning yourself as a leader in your industry, head over to expert brand system.com and I've got a 15 minute training video on there that's going to show you the nine step process that we talked about here. It's going to go a little bit deeper on what those steps are, how those things get set up, how you um, can learn more about the services that we provide and even how you can hop on a 30 minute call with me and we'll talk about strategy. We'll talk about, Hey, what do you want to accomplish in your career? Is there a, an expert business within you that you're trying to unleash and to build around your expertise? Um, so we do a free strategy call with anybody that wants to go through our application process and we'll get on the phone. We'll talk about what makes sense, and if at the end it looks like something we can help you with and you're interested, we'll talk a little bit more about the services that we offer there. So again, if you want to check that out, that free 15 minute training video, head over to expert brand system.com and thank you and I will see you in the next episode. Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

In this episode, I’m going to show you how to position yourself as an industry leader. So first up, was what does it actually mean to be positioned as a leader? What does that actually mean? I mean, instinctively you may have a couple of things you can think of there. It could mean  people recognize your name, or you speak at conferences, or you’ve written books. We’re going to talk about all of that in this episode. When a topic comes up that’s related to your industry or to your particular topic space that you cover, being a leader means that your name comes up as one of the first things people think of when that topic comes to mind. Example: If I throw out terms like cloud computing, infrastructure as a service, IOT virtualization and so on, depending on if you’re close to that space, certain names are going to come to mind, right? Out of the thousands and tens of thousands of people that focus on any one of those areas, there are tens of thousands of cloud computing people. There’re tens of thousands of IOT people now. But if you’re in that space, the names that are going to pop to your mind are probably going to be three – ten. Those names are the leaders in your industry. When we talk about what does it mean to position yourself as a leader, what I mean is what do you have to do? What do you have to know? What do you have to put out there to be one of those three to 10 people that come to mind when somebody brings up a topic in your area of expertise? Before I lose some of you that are introverts, or don’t think that you want to be out there and recognized as a leader, I just wanted to tell you a quick story about that. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, I'm going to show you how to position yourself as an industry leader. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this - how can we pull forward raises and promotions, or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build, and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki, welcome to the build your expert business show. Hey everybody, David Ziembicki here from the expert business agency. Today we're going to talk about how to position yourself as an industry leader and we're going to cover three important points. The first is the value of positioning yourself as a leader or why you would want to think about doing that. The second is whether you can be seen as a leader despite where you are in your career. So whether you're just starting out, whether you're midway through your career, whether you can actually be seen as a leader if you're not the world's foremost expert in a particular topic area. And then the third thing we're gonna cover is regardless of where you are in your career, how do you actually position yourself as a leader? What are some of the things that you need to do? And if you stick around to the end, I'm also going to point you to some free training that we have on these topics on how you can position yourself as an industry leader in as little as eight weeks. So first up was what does it actually mean to be positioned as a leader? What does that actually mean? I mean instinctively you may have a couple of things you can think of there. So it could mean you know, people recognize your name or you speak at conferences or you've written books and we're going to talk about all of that in this episode. But what it really means is, is that when a topic comes up that's related to your industry or to your particular topic space that you cover, being a leader means that your name comes up as one of the first things people think of when that topic comes to mind. So depending on where you are, I mean we cover, you know, the technology industry primarily on this show. So if I throw out terms like cloud computing, infrastructure as a service, IOT virtualization and so on, depending on if you're close to that space, certain names are going to come to mind, right? And why do they come to mind? Out of the thousands and tens of thousands of people that focus on any one of those areas, there's tens of thousands of cloud computing people. There's tens of thousands of IOT people now. But if you're in that space, the names that are going to pop to your mind probably going to be three, four, five, 10 maybe those are the leaders in your industry. So when we talk about what does it mean to position yourself as a leader, what I mean is what do you have to do? What do you have to know? What do you have to put out there to be one of those three to 10 people that come to mind when somebody brings up a topic in your area of expertise. So now before I lose some of you that are introverts or don't think that you want to be kind of out there and recognize as a leader, just wanted to tell you a quick story about that. I would consider myself an extreme introvert. Okay. When I first, uh, at Microsoft I had been a pretty senior consulting resource in companies previous to that. But you know, 15 years ago, you know, when I started there, I was an extreme introvert. When I went to internal technical conferences, I would go sit in the sessions, but as soon as it was done, I would go back to my hotel room. In fact, I would even hide in my hotel room, you know, not wanting others to see that I was there having to talk to anybody. So I was very anti networking, you know, extreme introvert and social situations and so on. And so I was far from being, you know, known at all or seen as a leader or anything like what we're going to talk about in here. So you'll see an evolution of that as we go through this episode and some of the stories. But just realize, you know, the starting point for a lot of us is we're not comfortable with this topic at all. The reason why I bring it up though is because of the huge benefits both financially and in terms of career growth and, and, uh, accelerating your career that can be found if you are able to position yourself as an industry leader. So that's why we're going to cover it in some depth here. And that's why again, at the end there'll be some additional training on this just because of how much of an impact that's had both on my own career and in a lot of people that I work with and that I've mentored over the years. So I wanted to bring that to you and that is the reason regardless of your starting point, it is possible to get to that leadership position in some ways that might surprise you, which we're going to talk about. So first up is why is being a leader or being positioned as a leader in your industry or in your area of expertise, why is that important? Why is that worth pursuing? Well, again, when you think about a topic and you think about the names that come to mind in that topic, think about when those people are going to be selected or what opportunities are going to have whenever jobs come up, right, new jobs, new career opportunities, you know, new positions that open up in your company for strategic projects, who tends to get those positions? The people that are already known as leaders in their particular area. And by that, I don't know, I don't mean managers, right? You don't have to be managing a hundred people to be a leader. I mean technical individual contributors who is going to be the lead architect on the next project, right? When the flagship deal gets signed by the CEO and you're going to go implement something or design something or deliver for a customer, the people that get selected for those are the ones that are known as experts known as leaders in those areas. So both within your company in terms of different projects, different positions that might open up. That's valuable. Obviously if you have to move between companies, if you're getting a new job or you know want to do a change in your, in your career or something like that, if you're already a known leader in one space, it's going to be a lot easier to move over to another space. Um, if you're on your own, if you're an independent freelancer consultant or something along those lines, for sure. Being known as one of the experts in your field is going to allow for the bigger deals. The more important deals to come in for you to be able to grow your business. Okay. So in almost all cases it is better to be known and positioned as a leader in your field then otherwise. Right? If you look at any of the technical areas like we've talked about, um, let's just take cloud computing. You know, by now we're many years into this trend, tens of thousands of people are in cloud computing, right? How many of them can you name? How many of them are actually visible? It's a tiny slice. It like the top one or 2% in any given topic area that are really out there and known and visible. And that is really one of the key differentiators. Now is that because those people are smarter? No. Is that because those people are more of an expert than you in a particular area? Probably not. The main difference is they're actually putting in the effort to make sure that what they are doing is known to the rest of the world. Okay. Most of the people that I work with, super intelligent people, highly capable people inside of large technology companies are completely invisible in their industry. Nobody knows they exist. Nobody knows about their work. Nobody knows about their results. Why is that? Because they never tell anybody about it. They never put themselves in a position to be recognized or to have their work be noticed. Okay? That's what positioning yourself as a leader is all about, is setting in place the right pieces of the puzzle to make sure that your results and the value that you can provide and deliver are known within your company, known within your industry, and establish you in that leadership position. So what I mean about positioning yourself as a leader is not that you have to position yourself as the absolute top, most expert in your industry. Depending on where you are in your career, that may or may not be possible, or it may or not make sense for you to do. But if you think about every level from you and appear at work to the project that you're on to the division that you're in at your company, to the company that you're in within your industry, at each of those levels, you can start positioning yourself as a leader using some of the techniques that we're going to cover here in the rest of the show, and by doing that at the first level, it starts to prepare you for the next level. Okay. Once you're recognized as a leader, just within, let's say your project or the group you work at at your company, now you can think about, well, how do I position myself as a leader more broadly over, let's say that whole topic within your company? Okay, how do you branch outside of your company and say, okay, how do I start getting known and visible out in the industry? These are some questions that you can ask and you can always demonstrate and establish leadership regardless of where you are in your career and what position you are in your career there as well. I mean, again, quick personal example, I mean pretty much as soon as I graduated college, I was into the consulting ranks at Deloitte. So you know, one college graduate kid, you know out of hundreds or thousands that they, they hired in that season. But it didn't take that long to start positioning myself as a leader just within the four person team that I was put on inside of a a team of a hundred at our first customer. Okay. Was I known to the, the leader of the whole project? Not in the beginning but within a year for sure. I was right. So just within the me and the peer that I was working with, then within that team of four, then within our work stream then within our project, right. So you can start doing these things and you can start establishing some of these, these leadership positions pretty early on, no matter where you are in your career. And then just keep building that up over time. So if you've tuned some of our previous episodes, you'll know that we've covered this topic in a couple of different ways. And at this point when I talk about positioning as a leader, when I talk about becoming known and so forth, a lot of us in technical fields or in professional fields, we don't like the idea of self promotion. Okay. We don't want to be blasting out on social media. You know about all of our accomplishments and no look at me and how great I am. Okay. A lot of us aren't comfortable doing that. A lot of us don't want to do that. A lot of us realize that if we did do that, it wouldn't have the results that we want. We wouldn't be seen as leaders. We would be seen as you know self-promoters. So one of the things that I talk about a lot and then I teach pretty much in all of our programs is positioning yourself as a leader is all about providing instead of promoting. And what I mean by that is you can demonstrate leadership and expertise by providing value, sharing your knowledge, helping others not through, you know, shameless self promotion and look at me posts and things like that. So when I talk about positioning yourself as a leader, it's all about figuring out how do you provide that value instead of doing self promotion. And we're going to cover a couple of examples of that here. So the way that I want to cover that is basically a case study or an example. So the idea here is is how do we position ourselves as a technical expert and a leader in a particular topic area. And so I want to break that down a little bit. You know, this is kind of my, you know, base level definition of leadership and what that is all about and what I think leadership is all about is first collecting information, being a consumer of all that's going on in your particular industry or in your topic area. And then starting to form an opinion on the direction of your topic or your technology or your area of expertise. And what I mean by that is what's working today in that area? What are some gaps? What are some things that need improvement in your topic space in order for it, you know, and customers or users of your technology to be successful. Okay. Forming that opinion is actually the biggest differentiator I see between leaders and non leaders across all of the companies that I've worked for, the thousands of people that I've trained and mentored and you know the hundreds of customers that I've been to and and projects, there's a small group of people that usually understand they need to form an opinion to help set a direction and that's where their leadership derives from. A lot of people just float. They don't really have an opinion. I don't know. I just work in tech, you know, just work in cloud. I'm just trying to, you know, figure out how to make the virtual machines work or you know, monitor something or backup something and so forth. They're not taking a look at, well what's working about this versus not? What is the, you know, the next a hundred companies that are going to go into this space. What challenges are they going to encounter? How do we fix them? That forming an opinion of your space, your industry, your area of expertise and where it's going and how to get there faster is really the most critical first step. And again, you can do this at any level of granularity. So even if you're like a junior member, you know, two years into your career, just on your project, just narrow up the scope. You know, if you're there to just configure a network switch, start thinking about well what works and what doesn't work. What's hard about doing that? Now this can work at any level of granularity like we were talking about. So if you're the junior member on a project team, and let's say you're just there to help implement a network switch or something like that, you can start forming an opinion. So what I mean by that is think about your activity. I need to configure a network switch. What's easy? What's difficult about that? Is there software that makes that easier or harder? What's the difference between how it's done now, how it was done a year ago? How is it going to be in the future? Okay. So you might think, why it even this whole idea of configuring an individual network switch, maybe that's going to go away because this management software lets us do it across a whole bunch of different ones, right? Maybe your company or the group that you work for doesn't have something like that in place right now. So you can provide leadership. I doing some studying up on that and saying, well, Hey, uh, talk to your manager and say, Hey, you know, I was looking at this software, um, you know, if we use something like this, it means we don't have to manually configure these things anymore. Think it would save some time. Um, yeah, the software costs 10 grand, but you know, look how much time we're spending on this. We might have a payback of, you know, an or a return on an investment in six months if we buy the software implemented and then we can move on to higher level tasks that we never get to. Like, you know, backups or recovery or something like that. Right? So that's something even super early in your career, you can start taking initiative, forming an opinion, providing some leadership. Okay. Further into your career. Same thing, just on a wider scale, right? So in my career a lot of times this is something that I've done and it's consistently been one of the differentiators that that's really helped me accelerate. And that is taken a look at the state of the industry. So I've always been in the it infrastructure world and take a look where is the cost, where is the challenge, where are the top complaints by users? How do we fix those things? Okay. So you know a bunch of different examples there. I've used a few in previous episodes, I've done this in the virtualization space and in the cloud computing space where you look at those and like early on they were just kind of neat technology. But then as you started to think about it and how it was going to dramatically change how it could be delivered and how costs could be reduced and so on, forming early opinions there and starting to inspire that direction is a key aspect of leadership. So again, getting back to that definition, the first step is forming an opinion. Take in the data, use your experience, figuring out where this industry is going or where it should go form that opinion. And then what you want to do to start doing is you want to start talking about it. You want to start writing about it. You want to start inspiring others to agree with that opinion and want to help you in getting there. It doesn't mean you want to inspire followers. Like I don't think leadership is defined as just, Oh, you just a desire for people to follow you. Real leadership. True leadership is about inspiring people to align with the direction, the mission, the objective that you've put out there and have them want to join you and want to help you not follow and you know, take orders. Yes sir. Yes ma'am. But more want to actively help you. And then as a group you move forward towards that goal. So again, continuing on with this example. Let's say you formed an opinion about where you know this technology space that you're in is going to go. Next step is writing it down. Write a white paper, write some kind of a, a blog post. Write a position piece that lays out your thinking. Make it logical, make it have a progression, have a story, but outline what your vision is. I think the industry is going here. Here's why. Here's what we could do to accelerate how to get there. And if we get there first, here's how we can be a leader in that particular area and at minimum, kind of get the thoughts down on paper or get them in a video. You know, whatever format makes sense to you, but put that vision out there so that you can then start showing people that, sharing it with them, asking them for their thoughts, and then that will start attracting towards you. The people that agree with your vision that want to go make that a reality, that want to be part of a team that's going to do that, and that automatically starts establishing your leadership position. The next thing that you can do is now that you've written that down, be on the lookout for any opportunity to actually test out your vision. So if you're in a company and a kind of a corporate or it world, then start listening for, Hey, when's the next time we need to implement that technology? Or is anybody in a company having a challenge with that because you actually want to put your ideas to a test. Can you go do a minimum viable product somewhere and try out your ideas? Okay, so in that networking example, it could be, yeah, let's go select the software, getting an evaluation account. Let's bring it in. Let's try it out. Let's see if it actually saves time. Try and get to a minimum viable product as quick as you can to start proving your ideas out or not. Being a leader isn't always about being right, so you're going to form an opinion. Sometimes they're going to be right and sometimes they're going to be wrong. Um, the true test is how quickly do you change your opinion once, once the facts change. And you know, I like to say to people, uh, you know, it wouldn't be my opinion if I didn't think it was right. But then it also wouldn't be fair to say, be stuck in an opinion. When you get more information, you don't change your mind. It's not about being belligerent or stubborn, it's about being adaptive, but always having that forward looking view there. So in this case, if you've done a minimum viable product, let's say it proved out your vision and say, yeah, this did save time, this did earn an ROI. Um, we think this should be rolled out more broadly. The next step is again, trying to bring more people into this effort that you're doing. Teach people how to use that software, teach them how to implement it, teach them how to leverage it. Start scaling out the number of people that are operating in this particular space. Again, by helping others and providing that value to them. You continue to establish yourself more and more as the leader in that particular space. The next thing you want to do is think about it more broadly than just your work group. Are there other divisions within your company? Are there other customers within the client base that you serve that can basically be get some advantage from this particular solution? So starting to make it repeatable, starting to package it up so that you can offer up this solution to others is the next step in establishing that leadership. Now you're spanning out into your whole company. During that time you're going to encounter other experts and again you can build up this base of support where you're continuing to be seen as the leader because you're the one actively trying to pull the company or push the company into that particular direction. It's not because you're out there self promoting or anything like that. It's like you are just delivering value and then you're pulling people into that to keep up the momentum and they'll come along with you. Then the final step is, well maybe this direction that you're starting to pull your company is relevant in the broader industry that you're in. So what you might do is to start writing, you know, public blog posts or you know, submitting papers to, you know, to industry journals or submitting for sessions to speak at industry conferences to talk about this solution or this, you know, this innovation that you're doing in your particular area. This is what really starts separating you from everybody else. Because I guarantee no matter what company you're in, less than 1% of people are doing anything like this, trying to speak at conferences or getting known out in the industry. So the more you can do that and the more that you can serve those audiences and serve those customers broader than your individual company, that is now the path to establishing yourself as an industry leader. So, you know, it's a pretty simple example and we went through it relatively quickly. But imagine yourself, wherever you are in your career at each step of those paths, how can you either be the leader of those or how can you be the second or third tier of leadership, you know, that is helping your company or your team go into that particular direction. These are different ways that you can establish that leadership. And then it's all about, you know, providing that value instead of the self promotion that none of us really want to want to get into. Okay. So that's a quick example, but it's really key and what I'm hoping that does is connect with you regardless of where you are in your career because these opportunities are there but only as tiny amount of people will actually take advantage of them. And that's a shame because there's plenty of leadership opportunities to go around. Um, I'm now kind of in a management position within Microsoft. And one of the things that we really struggle with is even amongst the company that has an incredible set of talent in there is the people that are willing to take that initiative, put their reputation on the line, set a course, start going after it and try and inspire people to follow them. Only a few percent really actually do that. And uh, you know, the opportunity is there for a lot more to do that and then to reap the advantages that come from being seen as that type of leader. So now that you understand how to start actually being a leader, the positioning part is the last thing that I wanted to cover in this episode. And again, what I mean by that is getting it known that you are doing these activities and they're, they're being successful but without being very self promotional about it. And so again, the number one way to do that is to teach others how to have the same success and results that you're having. Sharing that knowledge shows that you're confident enough to put that out there. You're not trying to hoard that knowledge. You're not trying to make yourself be the only expert in this particular thing to the exclusion of everyone else. It just shows confidence and a giving attitude to be able to put that knowledge out there. Okay, so think of it more like an open source type of scenario. You discovered something, you proved that it was successful, you're going to share it out with the community. You're not going to hoard that knowledge because now you're going to move on to the next thing. You're going to stay a leader by constantly evolving and looking at, okay, what's the next step after the direction that you just pulled everybody towards? So again, a lot of the different ways to do this. Yeah. Really need to think about it. Like we've talked about in previous episodes of your expertise as a business that you are cultivating, and what I mean by that is businesses have marketing departments, they have technology departments, they have support departments and so on. You need to think about your career in that perspective. Who is the marketing department in your career? Most of us have zero. Okay. The successful people out there actually look at it that way and they, maybe they do all the marketing themselves or what's increasingly starting to happen is people are starting to build up teams that support them from a personal marketing perspective to accelerate their careers. Okay. It's a lot of work to have a blog and a website and to keep social media up to date and to have a YouTube channel and to create courses and to do all of this knowledge sharing that I'm talking about. But there are a lot of people doing that now that are very successful. I just did some research in the last month and I've collected out 25 examples of technical professionals that have incredible personal brands and presence out in the industry that is establishing them as leaders and basically separating them from their peers that aren't doing any of those things. So from websites to blogs to YouTube channels to tutorials and courses that they build and sell or give away for free. Um, I'll include some examples in the, in the links and in the comments below of of those. But that is what is the state of the art today. Thinking about your career as a business and in addition to having the engineering and the technical department, which is where most of us focus our time, cause that's our job. Also think about what is the marketing department, what's the support department? How do I help answer questions that people have within my company or within my industry by answering those questions that again, positions me as that leader. There's a number of different things that you can do there. That's something that we're going to talk about in the free training that I mentioned at the top of this show. It's going to go step by step of how to build that marketing team around your career that really is going to accelerate things for you. So if you're interested in that, if you're interested in learning how to accelerate your career, how to establish yourself as a leader in your industry or in your area of expertise, how to get that positioning done, how to build that expert personal brand. Then what I want to invite you to do is go on over to expert brand system.com and on that page I've got a free 15 minute video that's going to show you step by step, a nine step process for establishing that marketing department, establishing that personal brand and beginning to position yourself as an industry leader in as little as eight weeks. So you can go from zero to very well established, very high levels of assets and design and value being provided out to the industry in as little as eight weeks. So again, I'd invite you to head over to expert brand system.com. Check out that free video and um, I'm pretty sure that you're going to find some things that you have not seen before that the leaders in your industry, in technology are doing that you can easily replicate. It's just a matter of putting in the effort and putting the time into it. And then you can do the same and then you can reap some of the same awards as a, as those of us who have already done that. So I'll invite you over to check out that video and thanks for joining us today and I hope to see you in the next episode. Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

In this episode. I’m going to give you three reasons why you need to overhaul your personal brand right now. Whether you work for a corporate employer or whether you’re a freelancer, independent consultant, it’s crucial that you overhaul your personal brand for three reasons… If you’ve listened to any of the episodes of this show before seeing any of our videos, you know that a personal brand is a lot more than a fancy business card or a resume… Even more than an online social profile or something like that. When we talk about personal branding, we’re talking about your network. The influence that you have within your career. The influence you have within your company. Also the influence you have within your industry. These things are directly proportional to how much value you provide. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, I'm going to give you three reasons why you need to overhaul your personal brand right now. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward raises and promotions, or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money for becoming a stranger to our families. This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki, welcome to the build your expert business show. Whether you work for a corporate employer or whether you're a freelance or independent consultant, it's crucial that you overhaul your personal brand for three reasons. Number one is the pace of change in technology. Number two is increasing competition, and number three is the risk of recession. In this episode, we're going to dive into the details of each of them. Luckily, so far in my career, I've never been fired or laid off from a job. But I do have friends and colleagues over the years who have. Especially 1.3 years ago in a company I was working for - one of the largest technology companies in the world, there was a round of layoffs throughout the organization that, so far as we can tell, were completely random. People woke up one day and basically they got a notice. Their job was being eliminated. They were being laid off - basically the equivalent of being struck by lightning. No rhyme or reason that could be detected. You have some obvious people that probably should have been moved that where, but some really good people that had been there for 10,15, 20 years also got let go with little notice - whether they landed in a new job or whether they found a good opportunity and how quickly that happened was directly proportional to how strong their personal brand and their network within the industry was. So if you've listened to any of the episodes of this show before seeing any of our videos, you know that a personal brand is a lot more than a fancy business card or a resume or you know, even a online social profile or something like that. When we talk about personal branding and your network and the influence that you have within your career, within your company, within your industry, it's directly proportional to how much value you provide. So personal branding is all about providing, not promoting. We talk about that a lot. It's what type of content do you create? What type of assistance do you give other people? How well known are you for the expertise that you have and the outcomes and the value that you can deliver. Okay. There's a lot of pieces that build up into having that personal brand, being recognized as an industry leader or an industry expert and the value of that is enormous, especially in times of challenge. Okay. So we're going to talk about the three things that I mentioned. And the first is the pace of change. The reason why overhauling your personal brand is important is because if you haven't taken a look at how you're presenting yourself within your company or within your industry for a while, maybe a couple of years or it's pretty likely that how you are presenting yourself is outdated. You know, you may have things on your resume, things that you talk about, the work that you're actually doing day to day may be in aging technologies. I mean it's, technology is changing so fast and you know, even the stuff that was the hottest thing years ago, like I used to be an industry expert on virtualization, right? I mean it's definitely still a thing. It's still important, but it's not in the top 10 list of hot technologies anymore. You know, it was there for five to 10 years and you know, it was good to be an expert in that. But at this point in time things have moved to the cloud, you know, moving towards AI and IOT and a whole bunch of different, you know, technologies that are out there. So if you don't overhaul your personal brand and you're still presenting yourself as an expert in these aging or, or even now legacy technologies, you're going to miss a lot of opportunities. And this is not something that's easily changed like on a dime. So you know, if you got a notice that Hey tomorrow, you know, your job is a is being eliminated or you know, you've got to go looking for work and you're looking for your next customer cause he'd been on the same one for a year or two. You can't just very quickly go change a few keywords and suddenly start looking like an expert in a new field. So that's why you really do have to look at your personal brand and the way that you present yourself and make sure that you keep that up to date from a technology perspective. Okay. So we focus a lot on technology professionals on this show and it's important in a lot of other fields too, right? So it could be in design or marketing or pretty much any professional field these days is undergoing quite a bit of transformation due to technology due to automation, due to AI. So again, if you're falling behind on this pace of change, that's something that you really need to be taking a look at and that's something you really need to think about in how are you presenting yourself? What are the things you're learning? What are the areas that you're creating content on? What are the things that you're talking about across the different channels that you have inside of your personal brand? Hopefully you have channels that you do maintain. That's something we talk about a lot here is the type of content that you provide, whether it's blog posts, podcast episodes, articles, books, whatever it may be. Just helping people out in groups and forums. How you present in there. The things that you talk about are what build up that idea or that brand around your expertise. So again, if you're not talking about commenting on and adding value in the leading edge areas of today, then your brand is going to be seen as something that's not current, that's not up to date. So that's the first one is keeping up with the pace of technology change. The second is highly related and that's competition. Okay. The market is expanding globally. Things that used to be a, you know, an expertise that was only available. You know, in first world countries are being delivered in second and third world countries at much lower costs. Okay. You see this in a lot of areas like design, low level, you know, coding and website development and things like this. Things that used to be you used to be able to charge 30 5,000 or $200 an hour for today are basically commodity services that are, can be delivered at five or $10 an hour. And in some cases, so again, you have to think about the competition in many areas is broadening out globally and that's starting to drive down rates in a lot of different areas. We're just outright elimination of the need for humans to deliver in some of these particular areas. So part of overhauling your personal brand is also looking at your actual expertise. What are the things that you're working on day to day? What are you learning day today? You know, I have a saying that I say a lot, which is if you're not learning, you're losing. And what that means is if you're not constantly learning new things, especially if you're in the technology field, you are absolutely falling behind. Okay. And that's something that takes a lot of time and effort to keep up with. Another thing I say a lot is that uh, you know, staying at the leading edge in technology is basically like being on a treadmill at sprint speed with it set going uphill, right? You have to be sprinting just to be able to keep up. And if you want to pull ahead, you really have to kind of be maxing out there. So that's something to think about is the competition. And again, we're all competing against the rest of humanity as well as the machines. Right? I mean automation is definitely coming for a lot of jobs that are out there, not just on the factory floor, but definitely in the white collar world, in technology, in finance, and all kinds of different fields. Okay, so one of the reasons again, why you want to overhaul your expert personal brand is because you don't want to be pinned to a particular type of job or a particular type of technology that is at risk of being commoditized or automated away. Okay. So what's interesting there is that's a really key distinction. So an idea, a, or as an example would be if you are a web developer, you don't want to just be talking about, Hey, this is what I can do in Java script, or this is what I can create and PHP or Python or any of this kind of stuff. What you really want to be presenting is the interface between the deep technology side that you're probably an expert at and the things that require human skill. So imagine requirements gathering, doing a design or, or a new design for a customer, right? Machines and AI and automation are not going to be doing that anytime soon. To be able to go into a room, explain some technology, explain what you can do, walkthrough, analyzing the set of customer requirements and translating that into a design that is a mix of a technical skill, kind of the science side of things. And art, you know, being able to work a room of people and lead them to, you know, a coherent and a design that's gonna work for them. Okay. So just a few subtle tweaks in terms of how you present your skills and what you can do. Make all the difference between something that looks commodity, you know, a, a basic web developer versus you know, an application architect or you know, a high end web designer who's actually gonna deliver some outcomes. Okay. So that's just one example, but you can carry that through into almost any area. Is that really focusing on where the technology and the human interaction happen? That's really going to be a key area that will likely never get automated away or commoditized in our lifetime, at least. So the third reason why you want to think about overhauling your personal brand is the risk of recession. Okay. So at the time of this recording, you know, the economy has been great. It's been a bull market in the stock market for 10 years, you know, since the last financial crisis. Am I any kind of prognosticator? Of course not. I have no idea whether a recession is going to start tomorrow or two years from now. But when you're 10 years into an expansion, that's already, I think the record for the longest ever. It is something that you need to be thinking about. Okay. So if you have been in your career for 10 years or more, you know, you remember what it was like in 2008 when the economy went off a cliff. If you'd been in your career for for 20 years or longer like I have then you remember 1999 and 2000 and the.com crash. That could obviously happen again at some point. And it doesn't take a gigantic financial, you know, problem in order for there to be difficulties for people in the job market. Okay? Now if you're listening to this show, you're almost certainly already an expert, you know, kind of leading edge in, in your field and so forth. So the risk is going to be lower for you, but it's something that you definitely want to keep in mind. Remember the example I talked about just a few minutes ago. I have seen, uh, industry leaders laid off effectively by an algorithm, right? Some combination of HR factors and time enroll and all kinds of other nonsense factored into a decision to just let people go, right? So it could happen to any of us at any time. And that's where you want to have this other key asset out there, which is this expert personal brand. Did I talk about this network, this value that you're providing to others so that if and when that happens, there's no stress. You just know, yeah, I'm cool. I'm certainly going to get a job somewhere else. I've got a huge network. I've provided value to tons of people over the years, had great results at clients that I can go back to and and see where they need help. Maybe even launch what I call an expert business, which is to say, all right, fine. If I get laid off, I'm done with the corporate world. I'm going to go start my own independent consulting company or a training company or anything along those lines. The entire reason why I've built the expert business agency is to enable people to have those options. So that's one of the things that we focus on, but what you really want to think about is imagine if that situation happened. That's really going to be the catalyst for thinking about, yeah, I really do need to overhaul my personal brand. Now, if you've heard these three reasons, the pace of change in technology, the increasing competition that's out there, the risk of recession, you know, these are things that hopefully will compel you to at least thinking about, Hey, what should I be doing in this space? And now that you're thinking about it, the next question is probably going to be, okay, well how do I do that? Yeah. So if you don't have a personal brand, then obviously there's no better time to start building one than now. If you do. That's what we're talking about here is basically doing an overhaul of that and make sure it's tuned to your specific goals and needs. So when you asked the question of how do you do that, well what we do inside the agency is it's usually a three step process with a whole bunch of bits and pieces in there. The first is start, the second is build, and then the third is expand. So what I mean by start is just start doing something. Okay. So a lot of us that work in the corporate world, you know, we just kind of do our jobs and, and try and do good and, but that's all we do. We go to the customer, we deliver every day or we, you know, go to our, our corporate job and we do what we're supposed to do. And you know, we hope we advanced. And so forth. But when you think about, okay, well what is building a brand? I mean there's a whole bunch of other things there. And like I said, it's all about providing, not promoting. So what that is is that's providing value out to others by sharing your knowledge. Okay? So that's one area where it's very easy to start building that brand. And that is just to simply start providing value. If your company has email lists or distribution lists or LinkedIn groups or any kind of place where people get together and collaborate, start adding your knowledge into that. Help people answer questions. That's the easiest way to get started. Once you've done that, there's a bunch of other things that we recommend layering into. They're building up assets that exist outside of the company. You work for your own website, your own blog, maybe even your own podcast or YouTube channels and so forth where you can start sharing your knowledge. So a lot of things that we talk about is like your internal personal brand within your company and your external personal brand. So if you're going to do an overhaul, you want to look at each of those and what you want to start thinking about is, okay, what are my goals now? Okay. So when maybe you first started, your goal was to, you know, get a job or get a promotion or something like that. Okay. Now your goals might be different. Now it might be like a, Hey, I want to rebrand and change my expertise from let's say virtualization to cloud computing, right? Or from on premises type of work into containers and cloud computing, any of those types of things. Or from, you know, old school kind of SQL database type of stuff into, you know, data science. There's any number of progressions that you might want to go through to kind of upskill or to repackage the base of what you know, how to do into something that's more relevant today. So when you started thinking about doing that, the idea, the first phase is to start, start delivering some value along the lines of the new direction that you want to go and to the people that can help you in that new direction. Okay. So when you want to think about maybe a different role, moving to a different company and getting that promotion, when you think about your goals, you want to think about who can help me get to my goals or who is a potential blocker for me achieving my goals? Right? So it could be the promotion review board at your company, it could be mentors or colleagues that need to, you need to influence it. You need to build up this brand of being an expert in this new area. So that's the first part is basically start the next phase is build and that's where you want to add in as many of those different channels as I was mentioning there. So it could start with just a basic website where it just gives fresh information about what you're doing, what you're working on, the skills that you have. Could be as simple as, you know, updating your LinkedIn profile to not read like a stale resume and actually show, Hey, this is the kind of value that I can actually deliver to customers, to clients, to employers. Okay. From there, the sky is the limit. We walk people through a progression from websites to building audiences all the way up to all the social channels. And that's really what that build phase is all about, is getting all of the different channels in place. And then the final layer is what we call expand. And what that means is start feeding content and value into those channels because that's what starts to build up your expertise. When you are seen helping others and delivering them value, that automatically elevates you to an expert status for everybody else in the audience that you know that might be seeing this going on. So if you're on LinkedIn and you're commenting on articles and you're helping people and you're providing expertise, you are going to be seen as the top 1% of anybody in that particular field just by showing up and providing some effort. You don't even have to be the world's leading expert in any of these areas. If you're providing value and helping others, it automatically elevates you over compared to almost anybody else that's going to be in there. So that's basically our recommendations is there's three reasons why you want to overhaul your personal brand now and again they are because of the pace of change, the technology, the increased amount of competition and the risk of recession or challenges in the work environment. And then the way to do it is to start, build and expand your personal brand. So if you want to learn more about building an expert personal brand, if you want to learn about how you can share my team of technical and marketing experts to help you build a world-class personal brand that positions you as an industry leader in your field, head on over to www.expertbrandsystem.com and I've got a free training video over there. It's about 10 minutes. It's going to show you our whole process end to end and how we can help you do everything that we've talked about in this episode without it requiring 10 2030 hours of your time a week. So I hope you go over and checked it out again. It's over@expertbrandsystem.com thanks, and I hope to see you in the next episode. Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

What I’m going to tell you about in this episode, so dramatically accelerated my career that I want to spend the second half of it teaching others how to get the same benefit that I did. That topic is the power of an expert personal brand and the impact that that can have on your career… My story in this case started out in 2006… I had just moved to Microsoft after about eight years at some other technology and consulting companies, and I was looking for a way to really accelerate my career – make a name for myself, get known inside of the consulting organization within Microsoft that I had just joined. Now at this time, there was a pretty big shift in the industry where this new technology called “virtualization”. It was really starting to have a big impact in the world of it. And so I made a decision that said, I am going to focus and I’m going to become known as one of the top experts in Microsoft on this technology. I decided right then and there that building a personal brand or building awareness of that expertise was going to be key to accelerate in my career. In this episode, I’m going to tell you exactly how I did that and how you can too… Just like any good architect or consultant or a technical professional, the thing you want to think about before you really embark on any path is what your strategy is. What are the outcomes that you’re going for? What are some of the requirements that you’re looking at? Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, I'm going to show you the power of an expert personal brand. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward with raises and promotions, or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build, and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki. Welcome to the Build Your Expert Business Show. Hey everybody, Dave Ziembicki here from the expert business agency. What I'm going to tell you about in this episode, so dramatically accelerate in my career, and I want to spend the second half of my career teaching others how to get the same benefit that I did and that topic is the power of an expert personal brand and the impact that that can have on your career. My story in this case started out in about 2006 I had just moved to Microsoft after about eight years at some other, you know, technology and consulting companies and I was looking for a way to really accelerate my career, make a name for myself, get known inside of the consulting organization within Microsoft that I had just joined. Now at this time, there was a pretty big shift in the industry where this new technology called virtualization was really starting to have a big impact in the world of it. And so I made a decision that said, I am going to focus and I'm going to become known as one of the top experts in Microsoft on this technology. And I decided right then and there that building a personal brand or building awareness of that expertise was going to be key to accelerate in my career. And in this episode, I'm gonna tell you exactly how I did that and how you can too. So just like any good architect or consultant or a technical professional, the thing you want to think about before you really embark on any path is what your strategy is. What are the outcomes that you're going for? What are some of the requirements that you're looking at? So when I took a step back and I said, okay, well what does it mean to become known within Microsoft as an expert in this technology or known within the industry? And I pretty quickly realized that it was going to require not only just actually learning this new technology and being a true expert in it, but also figuring out ways to make sure that people knew that I was an expert in this thing and in this technology space. And that's where this first real deep dive into personal branding that I'd ever done really came into play. So stepping back and looking at my strategy, I've really made a discovery there that had a pretty big impact on the rest of my career. And that was I needed to take two paths in parallel. I needed to build out my personal brand inside of Microsoft. And I also needed to build up awareness and a brand in the industry at large. Okay. Because if you're a true expert and you're just really known within the company that you work for, um, you're kind of invisible to the rest of the industry. So, um, there's a lot of reasons why you want to have both of those things going at the same time. And so I came to call that an internal personal brand where all of the efforts and the things that you do inside of a company that you work for augmented by an external personal brand where you also start to do activities and provide value outside of your company and in the wider industry. And it was really the combination of those two things that really caused that acceleration in my career. And that is also something that we do for people that are clients and customers of ours. So as soon as I started thinking about these things and going down this line of, uh, you know, trying to build out my personal brand, I made a rookie mistake that almost everybody does when they start thinking about personal brands and what does that mean and what do I do? And that meant I started talking about myself. I was, you know, promoting the things that I was doing. Or Hey, look at me, I just did this project. Or Hey, you know, look at what I accomplished over here. And that's the type of branding that technology professionals hate, right? We're not really self-promoters, we're not marketing and salespeople or anything like that, you know, but I thought, Oh, well how else is somebody gonna know I'm an expert unless I tell them, Hey, I just did this, this incredible project and you know, we pulled off all these, these crazy results. So again, I made another discovery at that point in time, which that was critical. And that was that the key to building a personal brand and becoming known as an expert is not promotion. It's all about providing, it's not about promoting yourself, it's about providing value to people that can help them and then position yourself as an expert if you're teaching, if you're providing value, if you're showing people how to do things, if you're doing demonstrations or tutorials or in any way helping other people that automatically positions you as an expert with that person because you both know more than they do about that topic and you're actually helping them, you're providing them value. So luckily I'm figuring this lesson how pretty quickly. Um, and then from there that really set my strategy and my direction for both the internal personal branding and the external personal branding and it was all about providing value. So I'm going to give a couple examples of what that's like and how you can model that inside of your own career as well. So we're going to start first with your internal branding efforts for internal. What I'm assuming is you're actually working for a company, you're not an individual freelancer or something like that. In a second we'll talk about some scenarios that make sense for you. But if you're working inside of a company, large or small, internal personal branding is all about helping people as often as you can and then also doing it in a professional and consistent way. Okay. So a lot of people, when they think personal branding, all they think about is colors and logos and design elements and all that kind of stuff. And that's important. And you want to get that stuff set up up front and get it done right and you got it done professionally. But after that it's all about the help and value that you provide. So when I started looking at what I was going to do for my internal personal brand, I decided that helping people on internal distribution lists and forums and collaboration channels inside of the, you know, the company that I was working for was the key way I was going to build up that brand and become known as an expert. So what that meant was anytime somebody asked a question internally about virtualization or data centers or all this, you know, technology background that I had, I was going to take the time on my own time. It's not something that we got paid for or you know, or, or, uh, bonused on or anything like that. But I was gonna take an extra hour or two a day up to whatever it needed to make sure all of those questions were answered. If I knew the answers, I was going to answer it. If I didn't know the answer, I was going to go do some research for that person and find out and see if I could help them. Every single time I did that, I would do a professional response, well-written. I would proofread it right. Even though it's just an email reply on a, on a distribution list. And I would put in my personalized email signature, you know, my name and my title and my position, but in the areas that I focus on. So every single time I would reply, people would know, Hey, this is going to be well thought out. Okay, Dave writes long emails. Why? Because he's answering the question. He's given the background, he's backing it up, he's showing examples. So you know, within a couple of months of doing that consistently every day I became known as, you know, the answer guy on these distribution lists. And by the end of the given year I might've answered a couple of hundred questions, you know, probably spent, you know, a hundred, 200 hours, uh, which is a substantial amount of time helping people out. But that very quickly built up my internal brand inside of the company that I was working for. In this case that was Microsoft. So really large pool of technical experts. So standing out there is pretty difficult, but that is one way to do that. And obviously that can lead to a lot of different opportunities after that, when it came time for, Hey, who gets the interesting and challenging projects or who gets assigned to these, you know, special internal initiatives, my name was front of mind in those areas because everybody in the, uh, you know, in the organization had seen me consistently providing that value. So the thing here is this is something easily done just with commitment, right? So if you have that commitment where you're going to go learn it and you're going to answer it, you can do that inside of almost any company that you work for. Now, I mentioned if you're a freelancer or an independent and you're not inside of a company, be exact same things can happen inside of technical communities in places like LinkedIn or Facebook or Reddit or all the other areas where people within your realm hangout. So you can do the exact same things in there, be known as the person that freely gives value and expertise, and that's gonna automatically start positioning you as an expert and then building up your personal brand in that space. So again, in parallel to the internal personal branding efforts, the other thing I did back in 2006 in 2007 and beyond was to start looking at that external personal brand. So at that time, blogging really had another kind of leg of popularity. At the time, Twitter was really starting to become popular among, you know, technology professionals and things like that as well. So I really didn't know much about that space at all, but I knew I needed to have some presence out there and I just started experimenting. So what I did first was set up initially a blog on Microsoft properties. So at that time anybody in the company could create a blog and it was, you know, your posts would get some promotion because it was coming from Microsoft and so forth. So initially I started building a blog there. I also got on Twitter and was, you know, doing a lot of stuff there, talking about virtualization and some of these technology things at the time. And again, trying to do the same thing externally as I was doing internally, answering questions, you know, curate resources and, and help people out a little bit. And pretty soon I realized though that generally it didn't make sense to build that external personal brand on, you know, a Microsoft property. I started to realize while I intend to be there for a long time and here I am 14 years later still working there and happy with the job there. I just realized that I wanted to build that external brand as an asset independent of who and where I was working for for a bunch of different reasons. We've talked about in different episodes to get some diversification, to also have some other, you know, options just in case disaster struck and got laid off or fired or something like that. Um, so there were a lot of different reasons to make the external be independent from the internal, even though there was a lot of overlap and um, you know, uh, benefits to doing both of those. So while at the time blogging and Twitter and a few other channels there were popular today, this could obviously still be the same things as could be LinkedIn, it could be Facebook, various other technical communities that are out there. It's really about finding out where are the people that you, that have an influencer will have an impact on your career. Where do they hang out? Where do you want to build up that personal brand? So it could be inside of these technology or professional focus groups could be in different areas, wherever that may be for the audience that you're trying to position yourself. And that's what you want to think about focusing on. Now, once you've decided on those locations, you know, what do you do in these areas? And again, like I said earlier, it's not about self promotion, it's about providing value. So what you want to take a look at is, okay, in that audience, what type of value can you provide in the technology space, there's tons of opportunity around teaching people things, doing demonstrations, tutorials. I'm writing white papers, writing blog posts, explaining how a concept works, taking something that works maybe in one industry and showing how it can work in another. Right? So like in my background with, you know, with virtualization and in cloud computing, you know, there's infinite possibilities there for showing. How does this work specifically in a certain industry? What's the same? What's different? Right? So again, it's really think about it from your audience's point of view and what will help them. One thing I talk about a lot is that everybody has what I call an automatic audience and what that audience is is the people in the exact same career path as you that are three or more years behind you. So what I mean by that is if you're in like let's say the fifth year of your career, you know, you're already starting to hit your stride, right? You've learned you'd got out of college, you're in your career, maybe you've done a bunch of projects or had a couple of assignments so far you've learned a lot of lessons on what it's like to work inside of that particular career path. Your automatic audience is the people just getting out of college or the people that just started their job yesterday. If you're further into your career like I am now, you know, kind of a senior resource move to the top of the pyramid is an individual contributor. Then moved into the management track. I have an automatic audience of the people that are just below, you know, let's say that senior individual contributor that are wondering, okay, what does it take to get to that, that top level, what does it take to transition into management if that's what you'd want to do. And I can do a ton of content on my experiences and what I've learned, you know, going through that process. So again, there's a lot of different places where you can provide that value. That again, builds up your expertise in there. But just remember, if you're not quite sure what that might be, think about your automatic audience to doing the same thing as you that are just a little bit more junior than you that you might be able to help out. That's a great way to start building that external or internal personal brand is helping out those type of people. So we've talked about some of the more entry level or easier ways to provide value, answering people's questions, writing those blog posts or doing demos and tutorials. Basically it's a content type of strategy, publishing things that help other people. The next thing you can do that goes even deeper that then builds even more influence with folks is actually giving one on one assistance, being a mentor for people, you know, doing some larger things like, you know, consulting for folks. Okay. So that's something I've done a lot of and I have a lot of peers that do as well. A lot of mentoring of other resources. Yeah. As an example, maybe when you are answering somebody's email in a distribution list or on a, on a, you know, LinkedIn group somewhere, something like that. Maybe they say, Hey, I'm still a little bit confused. Is there anybody, you know, you get some more information on that offer to call me and say, yeah man, let's, let's hop on a call. Let's do a video conference or something like that. Get that one on one interaction. That's a way to help people out that it doesn't scale, but the impact and the influence of that are huge because of the, you know, the value that that's providing to somebody. So remember the influence and the expertise that you generate is kind of proportional to how much value you're providing to somebody else. And just because it doesn't scale, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it because those people then are going to become really big fans of you and they're going to promote you throughout their own network. Like, Hey, Joe really helped me out. He took an hour out of his day even though we already worked 80 hours that week and he really helped me get over some kind of technical issue, you know, just as one example. Okay, so don't get down on something even if you don't think it can scale, because remember, it's going to be a proportional to how much value you provide. So you know what I guide people on and and what we coach is to do all of those aspects. A baseline level of scalable things like creating content, answering questions and things like that. Answer once lots of people see it, those are great. But we also say balance that with the deeper one-on-one interactions with people as well because that's going to build that network of people that are really become your super fans because of how much you know value and information and help that you've provided them. So again, as I like to say, the key here to expert personal branding is that it's all about providing, instead of promoting, if it feels like you're talking too much about yourself, then that's where you want to take a step back for a minute. So even in the course of this episode, I've used a lot of personal examples. You know, normally I wouldn't be all about, Oh look at all these different things that I did. I'm putting that in there just so you can show what this looks like in action in real life in the a, you know, a case that has turned out successfully. Okay. When you look at my content, a lot of it is trying to help you get from point a to point B, learn a particular topic, provide that type of value there. So it's okay to use personal examples. It's just not necessarily, you don't want to be in people's face of look how great I am. It's more like, yeah, Hey, I was the ranger. Right? Or I was the trailblazer and here's what I learned. Okay. It's not about, Hey look at how awesome I am. It's more about, Hey, here's what I learned and here's how you could get to the same place faster. Okay? That's the between self promotion and providing value. When you're self promoting, you're actually trying to separate yourself from everybody else and say, look how great I am when you're providing value. It's like, no, Hey I was able to figure this out and here's a shortcut you can take to get there. That's where you know, using personal examples and things like that is perfectly fine. It's just all about how you present them and package those up. So after you do a lot of these techniques and you're building that internal and external personal brand consistently over you know, months or, or a year or two, well you'll usually start to find is opportunities start coming in because you are the one that's out there. When somebody thinks about, Oh a I have a new speaking opportunity or you know, I have had publishers reach out to me because it's like, well, Hey, we've seen you all over the place and we know you know your stuff on virtualization. Hey, ever thought about writing a book on that. Right? So the opportunities start coming to you when you do this type of branding effort consistently and right. So again, for me it did lead to, you know, I got some book opportunities that came in. So I was able to publish a couple of books related to virtualization. Some big things internally was when we started thinking about building new services and new offerings and new ways of, you know, going to our customer and delivering services. I was asked to help, you know, lead some of those efforts. Those are things that really led to the massive career impact because we were doing work on things that led to tens and eventually hundreds of millions of dollars worth of services business to the, you know, to the part of the organization that I was working on. So in addition to just being known as kind of a technical expert or guru, it was also starting to lead to things that were really having a material impact on the overall success of the business. And that's when your expertise starts getting noticed by people beyond just your technical peers, right? It could be business leaders and VPs and executives within your organization, and then that's a whole different level. Once you have that type of awareness, because imagine when you go up for a promotion or a bonus or a raise or something like that. If the only person that knows you is peers or maybe your direct manager, not very likely that you're going to get a the high end rewards there. But if every person in the leadership chain all the way up to you know, your VP or whatever you know is toward the top of your org structure is if they know your name and the first thing that pops into their mind is that person's competent, they're an expert. I know they've had good results, then your chances of accelerating that promotion or that raise or that bonus are that much better. And that's really where the ROI of this whole branding topic starts to come in is you know, opening up those doors and then accelerating some of those career milestones. And again, you know, last a personal example here is for me during that five years, six year period where virtualization was like the hottest technology being known as somebody on the forefront of that wave led to multiple promotions, multiple, you know, substantial raises and all of that kind of stuff. So again, the idea of this whole episode is not a lot of self promotion, it's just to show you there are ways to get there faster. Okay. So if you think about the things that I've talked about so far in this episode, building up that internal brand by helping people, building up that external brand by publishing content and being consistent about it, and then offering up your one-on-one help freely and a, you know, as often you can. Those are the things that start opening those doors and the difference between people that do that and the people that just kind of do normal day to day. You know, heads down, I work on my project is huge. A lot of times I mentor people and they asked me, it's like, well how do the people that really have accelerated fast, how do they, how did they get there and what did they do different? Are they smarter than me or they, you know, do they work 150 hours a week, you know, and all this kind of stuff a week. And the answer is no. Usually the difference is in addition to great work and being an expert, they also did this type of branding activity, especially the providing value part and that was the key differentiator. Okay. That's what I want to try and get across. It's usually not that those people are that much smarter or they're an even bigger technical Guber or any of that kind of stuff is that they did both things in parallel. They probably took time out of their own schedule to go the extra mile to write in, publish the blog post, you know, on a Saturday when, you know, maybe they would've, you know, necessarily wanted to do something else. But they do it, they do it consistently. And that's what leads to the longterm results. So again, that's why we're laying this out in this episode is this is the way to accelerate the career growth. So if you've sat there and thought about, well, why am I not getting promoted? Why am I not advancing? Why does nobody know about what I'm doing? Or, you know, seem to care? These are the reasons and the ways that you can help fix that situation and then start accelerating that career path. So that is the power of an expert personal brand. It's the power to really dramatically accelerate the path and the direction of your career. So the most important thing that you can do is start building your expert personal brand. Now, if you already have some elements in place, maybe you have a blog, maybe you do a little bit of professional, you know, social media posting, you know about your profession. That's great. You know, if you already have some of those elements, good finish out the rest. Okay. When we talk about a robust expert personal brand, there's a bunch of different elements in there. Okay. So there are things like a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, you know, that you could create. There's all the different social media channels, you know, activity on LinkedIn, you know, Facebook pages and groups, you know, Instagram and things like that. Thinking about all those social networks and how you could present yourself on them as a professional on that side of things, that's something that not a lot of people do or not a lot of people do across all of those channels. So there's always more that you can do to set up that foundation. And then once you have those foundational elements and those channels in place, it's all about being consistent, figuring out the type of value that you can provide your audience. And then doing that day in, day out and you know with daily, weekly and monthly activities in there. So if you want to learn more about building an expert personal brand, if you want to learn how you can actually share the marketing and technical team that I use to run my personal brand, then I would like to help you show you how you can build your own world class expert personal brand. So I want you to head over to expert brand system.com for a free video that outlines our whole system. So we've got a nine step system that takes you from nothing if that's where your ad all the way up to a robust world-class personal brand and we provide end to end support for doing that. Okay. Everything I've talked about here, it takes time, takes effort. If you've got a really busy and high profile day job, you may not have, you know, the 20 or 30 extra hours to do everything that I've talked about here. But here's the secret. You don't have to, okay? Providing value is something that you would do as an expert, but all the other stuff, technical, set up, editing content and posting stuff, you know, comments, managing the whole end to end cycle, all of that stuff can be outsourced. That's what my agency does. So if you want to find out more about that, again, I've got that free training video over@expertbrandsystem.com. So I'd encourage you to head over there, check it out and see what the art of the possible is. And then, um, I appreciate you taking the time today. If you want to learn more about how you can share my team of technology and marketing folks to help you build your expert personal brand and run it on a day to day, week to week basis, head over to expert brand system.com for a free training video that I have over there that shows your entire system, the end to end services that we provide and how you can leverage those to go from zero to your own expert personal brand in as little as eight weeks. So I hope you check out that training. I'm sure you'll find it valuable and I look forward to talking with you in a future episode. Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

In this episode, I’m going to outline the two different types of expert businesses and how to choose which is the best for you. So once I learned from a mentor that the secret to success in technical fields was managing your career like a business and thinking about strategy, product, marketing and support, I started looking around for success examples to model. The more I started digging into people’s success paths, the more I started seeing two patterns. Some were using their results to advance in their corporate careers, moving from consultant to senior to architect or transitioning into management. But others got to a point where they were so sought after for their expertise that they actually started building their own businesses around their expertise – either in coaching, consulting, training or things like that. That’s when I discovered that the essence of an expert business. It is how you monetize your knowledge either through strategic career growth in the corporate world or building a business around your expertise, choosing which one or both to focus on and when is a question I’m often asked and I have to reply with the standard answer. Your goal is to determine what type of expert business you should build. If you want to advance in a corporate career, then your expert business will center around delivering results and building your personal brand. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, I'm going to outline the two different types of expert businesses and how to choose which is the best for you. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer at some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward raises and promotions, or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families. This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki, welcome to the build your expert business show. Hey, everybody Dave Ziembicki here. So once I learned from a mentor that the secret to success in technical fields was managing your career like a business and thinking about strategy, product, marketing and support, I started looking around for success examples to model. The more I started digging into people's success paths, the more I started seeing two patterns. Some were using their results to advance in their corporate careers, moving from consultant to senior to architect or transitioning into management, but others got to a point where they were so sought after for their expertise that they actually started building their own businesses around their expertise, either in coaching, consulting, training or things like that. That's when I discovered that the essence of an expert business is how you monetize your knowledge either through strategic career growth in the corporate world or building a business around your expertise, choosing which one or both to focus on and when is a question I'm often asked and I have to reply with the standard answer. All consultants know, which is, it depends. Your goal is to determine what type of expert business you should build. If you want to advance in a corporate career, then your expert business will center around delivering results and building your personal brand. If you want more freedom and upside potential, then your expert business will center around creating products and services around your expertise. At the two ends of the spectrum from lifetime corporate career over to somebody who says, I could never work for anyone other than myself, some people very clearly know where they fall. For the majority of us, though, the answer can vary over the course of our careers. When I mentor folks in this topic, we talk about three dimensions, expertise, economy, and expectation. Deciding whether to remain in a corporate career or start an expert business, and my mind starts with your level of expertise. If you don't have a definable, sustainable and proven expertise in a topic, then I recommend staying with and steering your corporate career that direction until you do so. As soon as you go solo and start your own expert business, your time will by definition need to be split between growing and marketing your business and delivering results. It's difficult to maintain and accumulate more expertise at the same time. In this case, it's better to stick with your corporate career and accumulate expertise faster. Then think about going solo. If you pass that expertise filter. The next one is economy. In 1999 still early on in my career, I seriously looked into going solo and starting my own consulting company. I'm sure this would have been a disaster as the.com boom and recession and technology accelerated right at that time. Instead, I joined a new consulting company called Avenue that Microsoft and Accenture launched this. Let me sidestep the recession completely and grow my career and income substantially through that period. Also getting me on the radar at Microsoft, which I later joined and work for it to this day. The moral of the story is if the economy is up, then starting a solo business may make sense. If it's going down, stick with the safe paycheck while you accumulate skills and prepare for a future launch of your own business. The final filter is expectations. If you expect and need lifestyle freedom, then going solo can provide that. If you need security stability, then a corporate career is great for that, but if you have unrealistic expectations like running a solo business only requires four hours a week while you sit on the beach, then you're going to make some bad choices. The bottom line is the combination of expertise, economy, and expectations will help you determine which path to focus on. Now, one path I didn't mention yet is doing both. This is the path that I've chosen for the time being as it address all of the above concerns. Becoming known as an expert who is generous with your knowledge and assistance is the key success factor for both the corporate path and the entrepreneurial path. In addition to myself, I've known multiple people in Microsoft and other large technology companies who have advanced rapidly and built incredibly successful careers by using the expert business model and building an expert personal brand. I've also worked with over 20 experts who have taken their knowledge and built six, seven or even eight figures at businesses of their own. One thing I spent a lot of time on since I am doing both paths at the same time is looking for all the parts of an expert business that are the same between a corporate focus path and the entrepreneurial path. One thing sticks out. Both types of expert businesses rely on building a value based content fueled brand strategy that I call an expert personal brand. Creating content at scale that delivers value to your target audience that builds your influence and impact with them. Whether your audience is your peers and executives in your employer or whether they're potential customers for an expert business you've created. The benefit of building an expert personal brand is the same. Greater influence and impact no matter your choice of direction for your expert business, corporate, or entrepreneurial. One of the most critical pieces you should be building is your expert personal brand. So if you want to learn more about building an expert personal brand, head over to expert brand system.com for a free video outlining our complete system for building and launching and expert personal brand in as little as eight weeks. All you need to do is bring your expertise than leverage our state of the art team, tools and services to build and run your expert personal brand for you. Imagine our team working for you to accelerate your career. Check out how over at expertbrandsystem.com. Thanks, and we'll see you in the next episode. Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

If you’re an online expert course creator, coach, or consultant, you may be making a critical mistake that’s killing your odds for success and growing your online business. And that mistake is staying solo for too long. Now, this is a mistake I made myself. It went on for a couple of years. It takes … Why you HAVE to graduate from Solo to Virtual CEO Read More »

In this episode I’m going to tell you about a young technical consultant who learned the secret to success… So there I was, a young technical consultant trying to advance in my career. The thing is I was working hard, but no one really saw how much potential I had. Big problem was that I was working 80 to a hundred hours a week delivering great results, but no one outside of my projects even knew about it. That resulted being on the road 100% of the year at projects with no career advancement to show for it and almost burning out in my late twenties. Then, as is if by chance, something amazing happened. I found a mentor who revealed a strategy to me that skyrocketed my career. A strategy my mentor revealed was how to think about and manage my career like it was a business. I now call this an expert business. The business of being an expert. He said, think about the functions of business, has strategy, product development, sales, marketing and support. Within those they aim for continuous improvement. He asked me how successful a company would be with poor products and no marketing. He then challenged me to think about each of those functions and how they apply to an individual building their career. Here’s what I came up with. It became the foundation for successful career and millions of dollars of income. First is strategy, setting a direction, goals, and building a roadmap to get there. My goal was to become a world class infrastructure architect, able to head the most complex projects in the industry. The next business function is product. As a technical professional, your product is your expertise and the results you’re able to deliver are another part of your product. I put a major focus on improving my product, my expertise through learning certification, seeking out other mentors. I not only build out my technical expertise, but I also dove deep on project management, development methodologies, automation, and other areas related to my expertise to broaden out my skillset. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode I'm going to tell you about a young technical consultant who learned the secret to success. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward raises and promotions? Or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki, welcome to the build your expert business show. Hey verybody. Dave Ziembicki here. So there I was, a young technical consultant trying to advance in my career. The thing is I was working hard, but no one really saw how much potential I had. Big problem was that I was working 80 to a hundred hours a week delivering great results, but no one outside of my projects even knew about it. That resulted being on the road 100% of the year at projects with no career advancement to show for it and almost burning out in my late twenties. Then, as is if by chance, something amazing happened. I found a mentor who revealed a strategy to me that skyrocketed my career. A strategy my mentor revealed was how to think about and manage my career like it was a business. I now call this an expert business. The business of being an expert. He said, think about the functions of business, has strategy, product development, sales, marketing and support. Within those they aim for continuous improvement. He asked me how successful a company would be with poor products and no marketing. He then challenged me to think about each of those functions and how they apply to an individual building their career. Here's what I came up with. It became the foundation for successful career and millions of dollars of income. First is strategy, setting a direction, goals, and building a roadmap to get there. My goal was to become a world class infrastructure architect, able to head the most complex projects in the industry. The next business function is product. As a technical professional, your product is your expertise and the results you're able to deliver are another part of your product. I put a major focus on improving my product, my expertise through learning certification, seeking out other mentors. I not only build out my technical expertise, but I also dove deep on project management, development methodologies, automation, and other areas related to my expertise to broaden out my skillset. Over time. I sought out projects that will let me gain a diverse set of experiences. One of the biggest benefits of a consulting career, the fact that you get additional experience very quickly compared to just working in the same job. You know you're in, you're out at an individual company. The next business function I rejected for a long time, but thanks to my mentors questions, it finally clicked and that function is sales and marketing. I was the type that didn't really like salespeople or what I thought was the selling process and being like a used car salesman. My mentor and helped me see past that mental block. He said, remember to be successful, the business of you must have a sales and marketing function. He said, it's not about making the customer audience something they don't want to do. It's about demonstrating your expertise so that they want more. The key was building a personal brand around my expertise. I learned that if you want to position yourself as an expert, you need to provide rather than promote. Getting over that hurdle and starting to build my personal brand as an expert was the single biggest factor in my success. The final business function is support. Great businesses support their customers. With an expert business. You have many customers. Your employer is your customer. After all, they're the ones paying you, your colleagues or customers. The customers of your employer are your customers. Again, as the individual expert delivering your product, which is your expertise along with great support in terms of guidance, assistance and followup is critical. The ladder is what people will remember, not the specifics of your technical solution. To this day, 20 years after some of my projects, people still remember the quality of the process and the documentation that I provided. In many cases, great support means helping others one-on-one. It's often the actions that you take that don't scale are the ones that grow your influence and personal brand the most. Once I understood that the expert business model, I realized that most of the highly successful people I was around in technology and consulting, we're doing exactly this. Whether they conceptualized it this way or not, the people who were publishing books, speaking at conferences, getting the strategic projects and advancing rapidly. They weren't just delivering great results. They were sharing them and in so doing, elevating their personal brand and influence. Within a year of managing my career like a business, I earned a promotion at a sizable raise. Over the next five years, I doubled my salary and five X of my total income. Over the years, I continued to evolve this notion of an expert business and train and mentor others on these ideas. I came to call this the expert business model and I now summarize it with four functions: Strategy - setting your direction, goals and roadmap. Product - your expertise, building it up over time. Marketing - your personal brand and value - not self promotion. And then finally, Support - actually providing value to your potential customers. With technical professionals, I find the marketing function, particularly personal branding is their biggest roadblock. I just did an entire episode outlining the three critical mistakes technical professionals make with personal branding and the largest is doing nothing. The opportunity in ROI is so large and has had such a big impact on my life though that I'm dedicating the second half of my career to helping technical professionals manage their careers like businesses to get the same results. I have the last point I want to land in this episode. Is it just like a business? These functions don't all need to be entirely done by you. Top executives and senior resources build personal teams to support their careers. To learn more about building an expert personal brand, head over to expert brand system.com for a free video outlining my complete system and my agency has done for you services for building and launching an expert personal brand in as little as eight weeks. All you need to do is bring your expertise, then leverage our state of the art team tools and services to build and run your expert personal brand for you. Imagine our team working for you, accelerate your career, check out how over at expertbrandsystem.com. So I want to thank you for listening to the episode today and if you haven't already, I want to do to remind you to subscribe to this podcast and then head over and please leave us a rating and a review. I want to hear feedback on these episodes, whether the length is right at the topic area, the depth that we're going into, whatever your feedback is, I'd like to hear it, and we're going to continuously improve this thing over time, and I wanna make sure we're taking it in a direction that's going to provide the most value to you. So if you haven't already, again, please subscribe and then head over to give us a rating and review. Make sure that we read all of those, and then we'll take some action on that feedback. Thanks. Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

In this episode, we’re going to take you behind the scenes of the agency.   We’re going to talk about what we’re building, why we’re building it, where we are, where we’re going, and how that might be of some value to you. I think you’ll find it interesting to see how we’re starting a … Behind the scenes of the Expert Business Agency Read More »

In this episode, I’m going to show you how to position yourself as an industry leader. So first up, was what does it actually mean to be positioned as a leader? What does that actually mean? I mean, instinctively you may have a couple of things you can think of there. It could mean  people … How to Position Yourself as an Industry Leader Read More »

In this episode, I’m going to show you the three critical mistakes most technical professionals make with personal branding and how to fix them. If you’re not advancing in your career or income as fast as you’d like, I guarantee you’re making one or more of these mistakes and I’m going to show you how to fix them. Mistake number one is thinking that personal branding is marketing bs and just not starting the process at all. Less than 5% of technical professionals have a personal brand strategy team or platform. I get it. We’re technologists, not sales or marketing people, but technical professionals like us usually have more of a quiet confidence type of personality, or let the results speak for themselves type of mentality. But here’s the problem: Results do not speak for themselves, at least not loudly enough when it’s time for raises, bonuses, promotions, or new jobs. It’s the people with the best combination of results and awareness that when having a great personal brand pulling forward at $12,000 a year, raise and investing, that money results in almost $500,000 of additional lifetime income. If you’re able to do that twice, you’ve got $1 million or more extra lifetime income. Now, I also know the term personal branding may put you off – two sales a year that it sounds like marketing bs. You may hate sales and marketing people. You know? For a while I did too. Luckily, I had a mentor that completely changed my mindset. He taught me to think about my career as a business. Like any business, it must have a marketing function that compliments the product as an individual. The product is your expertise. Your marketing is the personal brand that you build around it, so ask yourself this: Would a company that had no marketing team, no website, no social media presence, no advertising, be successful? Of course not. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, I'm going to show you the three critical mistakes most technical professionals make with personal branding and how to fix them. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert, personal brand, and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward raises and promotions? Or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money, or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build, and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki - welcome to the build your expert business show. Hi there. My name is Dave Ziembicki. I help senior technical professionals build personal brands and businesses around their expertise. In my career as a senior architect, I've sold or delivered over $200 million worth of it services and risen to the top of some of the largest technology and consulting firms in the world such as Microsoft, Deloitte, SAIC, and others. Today, I'm going to cover the three critical mistakes most technical professionals make with their personal brands. If you're not advancing in your career or income as fast as you'd like, I guarantee you're making one or more of these mistakes and I'm going to show you how to fix them. Mistake number one is thinking that personal branding is marketing bs and just not starting the process at all. Less than 5% of technical professionals have a personal brand strategy team or platform. I get it. We're technologists, not sales or marketing people, but technical professionals like us usually have more of a quiet confidence type of personality, or let the results speak for themselves type of mentality. But here's the problem. Results do not speak for themselves, at least not loudly enough when it's time for raises, bonuses, promotions, or new jobs. It's the people with the best combination of results and awareness that when having a great personal brand pulling forward at $12,000 a year, raise and investing, that money results in almost $500,000 of additional lifetime income. If you're able to do that twice, you've got $1 million or more extra lifetime income. Now, I also know the term personal branding may put you off - two sales a year that it sounds like marketing bs. You may hate sales and marketing people. You know? For a while I did too. Luckily I had a mentor that completely changed my mindset. He taught me to think about my career as a business. Like any business, it must have a marketing function that compliments the product as an individual. The product is your expertise. Your marketing is the personal brand that you build around it, so ask yourself this: Would a company that had no marketing team, no website, no social media presence, no advertising, be successful? Of course not. No matter how good their product is, nobody would even know about them. If you're a technical professional and you don't have any of those things either, you won't be successful. This is what separates those struggling to reach six figures versus those of us making five x or 10 x more than that. Mistake number two is thinking that it's all about self promotion for the smart folks who are doing some personal branding. The next most common mistake I see is thinking that it's all about self promotion. You've seen the posts, the humble, the, I'm so fortunate that I won the Joe Schmo word at work this year, or the just completed my ABC certification, or the pictures of the person's standing in front of the logo at their corporate headquarters. I've been there and done that and had no results to show for it. These are better than nothing, I suppose, but they're not effective personal branding. The key to building a personal brand and positioning yourself as an expert is to provide rather than promote an expert. Personal brand is not shouting to the world about your accomplishments. It's about teaching others what you know and value. The influence and impact that a personal brand enables is fueled by the content and value that you provide. Remember, your accomplishments may impress people, but it's how you help them that creates the lasting impression. Mistake number three is no strategy or content. Now we know that we should be building our personal brand and that we should be providing value instead of self promotion. The final major mistake is just having no strategy or content supporting your personal brand. Again, managing your career like a business. You know that businesses align their marketing efforts around goals and campaigns. Sometimes it may be just to keep their brand front of mind with their audience, but usually it's aligned to a goal, like the launch of a new product and event or some other objective, and during the period of that campaign, all efforts are aligned toward the goal. You need the same strategy for your personal brand. If your goal this year is a promotion, then your strategy needs to be about providing value to the people between you and your goals, like managers at your company, peers, promotion boards, et Cetera, value that demonstrates you're already performing at that next level or have the ability to do so. This requires a plan for activities inside of your company, what I call your internal personal brand, as well as for activities outside of your company in public, in your industry. That's what I call your external personal brand. To move the needle in today's world of information overload, you need to be creating and delivering value and content to your target audience at a far greater scale than you're imagining. By content I mean written audio, video assets that truly help your target audience accomplish something. This can range from inspiration all the way to nuts and bolts, step-by-step tutorials and things like that. Remember, sharing your expertise is what builds your personal brand. Both myself and other experts in this field know that in order to break through and truly become seen as an expert and influencer in your company and industry, you need to be delivering 30 to 50 pieces of content per day in your personal brand. At first, this sounds ludicrous, but the ROI makes this a no brainer and there are ways to do this with only a few hours of work per week. A 10 minute video packed with valuable insight can be broken into 30 pieces of content and distributed across your internal and external brand channels. As just one example to become known, your content needs to be valuable and ubiquitous. So now we know the three mistakes most technical professionals make with their personal branding, not starting at all, too much self promotion, and no strategy or content. Do you see that if you're making any of these mistakes, not starting being self promotional or having no strategy, you're seriously limiting your career and income potential. Do you see that if you fix them and start moving to the forefront of your company and industry, the potential ROI is enormous. 500,000 all the way up into the millions of dollars by pulling forward and promotions. I bet you do. So I want to remind you of the guidance my mentor gave me: The business of you must have a marketing function, your personal brand that compliments the product, your expertise, but just like the business, personal branding and marketing is an expertise and a team you can hire or bring into your career. Imagine that every day you're republishing 20 pieces of valuable content or insight across 15 different audio, video or written channels, both within your employer and across social media, branded, professionally designed highly engaging content, not spammy and self promotional, but educational and helpful, thus demonstrating true expertise. Now imagine those were all lined around a goal like showcasing your readiness for a promotion or a new role. Imagine those were promoted in a way to ensure visibility by leaders in your company. You exponentially increase your odds of success compared to the colleague sitting next to you who's doing none of those better yet. Imagine if all of the above only required a few hours of your time per week. Sound impossible. It's not. It's exactly what leading executives and professionals are doing to accelerate their careers to help you get there. I might invite you to a free 15 minute webinar where I outline exactly how to start, build and expand an expert personal brand. I call it the expert brand system. The system I'll outline in the video enabled me to 10 x my income and earn a lifestyle. Most only dream of it has such an impact that I'm dedicating the second half of my career to helping others get there as well. Head over to expert brand system.com to take action and accelerate your career. In the video I'll show you how it's possible to establish an expert personal brand and how all you have to do is bring your expertise for a few hours each week and the rest can be done for you. Again, head over to expert brand system.com to take action and accelerate your career. I hope to see you over there. I want to thank you for tuning into today's episode of the build your expert business show. As a quick reminder, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and also head over and leave us a rating and review. I'd love to get your feedback on the show, the content length of the episodes, any other feedback that you have. We read through all of those reviews and we'd like to improve things, make things better for you. So it'd be great if you could, uh, give us an honest review over there and we'd appreciate it. Thanks. Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

In this episode. I’m going to give you three reasons why you need to overhaul your personal brand right now. Whether you work for a corporate employer or whether you’re a freelancer, independent consultant, it’s crucial that you overhaul your personal brand for three reasons. Number one is the pace of change in technology. Number … Three reasons why you need to overhaul your personal brand now Read More »

What I’m going to tell you about in this episode, so dramatically accelerate in my career. I want to spend the second half of my career teaching others how to get the same benefit that I did and that topic is the power of an expert personal brand and the impact that that can have … The Power of an Expert Personal Brand Read More »

In this episode, I'm going to show you how to know your ideal customer better than your own family does. We're going to break this down for you into four steps. The first is choosing the niche for your expert business. We talked about it in previous episodes doing an expertise inventory. In the last episode we talked about the different types of expert businesses there are now we need to merge those two things together. The area of expertise you have where there's high value and high demand by a market, and then starting to dig into what is that market? What is the niche that you're going to focus your business on? The second step is doing immersion in that niche and doing a lot of research on the submarket that you're in, the particular niche or topic that you're talking about and then the customers that are within that, what are they looking for?For the full episode and resources, head over to:https://expertbusiness.com/BYEB9Mentioned in this episode:Join the Build Your Expert Business Facebook Group!Hey did you know that there's a private Facebook group for this podcast? Inside the group I've also unlocked one of our most important programs all about how to build and scale your expert business. Whether its online courses, memberships, coaching, masterminds, or anything in between the Build Your Expert Business podcast and Facebook group are all about helping you accelerate your results. I'd like to personally invite you to join us in the group. Just head over to expertbusiness.com/fbgroup

In this episode, I’m going to outline the two different types of expert businesses and how to choose which is the best for you. So once I learned from a mentor that the secret to success in technical fields was managing your career like a business and thinking about strategy, product, marketing and support, I … The two types of expert businesses (and which to choose) Read More »

In this episode I’m going to tell you about a young technical consultant who learned the secret to success. https://youtu.be/SoThVqFWKY0   So there I was, a young technical consultant trying to advance in my career. The thing is I was working hard, but no one really saw how much potential I had. Big problem was … Steal this strategy that skyrocketed my career Read More »

In this episode, I’m going to show you the three critical mistakes most technical professionals make with personal branding and how to fix them. If you’re not advancing in your career or income as fast as you’d like, I guarantee you’re making one or more of these mistakes and I’m going to show you how … 3 CRITICAL mistakes technical professionals make with their personal brands Read More »

In this episode, I’m going to show you the top five types of expert businesses you can build in less than eight weeks. What we want to really make sure everybody is clear about upfront is, the difference between revenue and profit. Revenue is just the money you have coming in from customers. So, you could easily have a business that generates, $1 million of revenue, but that could be at a negative profit… If you’re in a space that just doesn’t have any profit potential, you’re just going to be swimming upstream the whole time. Profit potential is a big one, you know, revenue versus profit. Another one is what are the onetime costs and what are the ongoing costs that it takes to start that particular type of business. So, some of the ones that don’t make it into the top five are something like a software business or something like that. Because in most cases a software business is going to have fairly significant startup costs unless you’re just talking about some kind of trivial app or something like that. Hiring teams of developers and doing testing and all this kind of stuff, that’s not going to make it into our top five that’s able to be done well in less than eight weeks. Nothing wrong with that business model. It’s just maybe a longer term play than what many of us are interested in at this point. And along the lines of those onetime and ongoing costs, ongoing costs can be high in particular types of businesses as well if they’re labor intensive or if they take a lot of time to create the particular products that that you want to go to market with. Check out the video for the five types of expert businesses that can be launched within 8 weeks! Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, I'm going to show you the top five types of expert businesses you can build in less than eight weeks. I've spent the last two years researching and interviewing some of the most successful online entrepreneurs in the world as they built their own expert businesses. Now I'm building an agency that helps skilled professionals like you and me do the same: build a business around their expertise that delivers wealth, impact, and legacy. The real question is this: How can we build six, seven, or even eight-figure expert businesses while still employed without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, succeed, and scale you're own expert business. My name is David Ziembicki. Welcome to the build your expert business show! All right, let's get it going. So today we're going to talk about the five different types of expert businesses that you can build in less than eight weeks. Now, the way we're going to talk about this is when I say type of expert business, that means different types of categories, so it could be consulting or freelancing or information products. We're going to go through a couple of the different types of expert businesses and the type really gets around what are the products, what are the market, how is that service or how is that particular product delivered? Now when we're talking about these and when we're trying to pick the top five, we're going to look at a couple of different dimensions that are important when deciding what is the form of this expert business that you're going to build. So we're going to look at a couple of different things in a few different categories. The first is profit potential. So what we want to really make sure everybody is clear about upfront is, the difference between revenue and profit, right? If a revenue is just the money you have coming in from customers. So you could easily have $1 million business that generates, you know, $1 million of revenue, but that could be at a negative profit, right? You can spend a million and a half dollars to earn that million dollars in revenue. That's obviously what we don't want to do. One of the keys is you see people really throw around the revenue number quite a bit, but then you don't hear as much about profit. So when we're looking at these different business models, that's one of the things that we want to look at is are we going to pick a model or a type of extra business that has profit potential? Because it doesn't matter how good your product is or how good your marketing is or your fulfillment. If you're in a space that just doesn't have any profit potential, you're just going to be, you know, kind of swimming upstream the whole time. So profit potential is a big one, you know, revenue versus profit. Another one is what are the onetime costs and what are the ongoing costs that it takes to start that particular type of business. So some of the ones that don't make it into the top five are something like a software business or something like that. Because in most cases a software business is going to have, you know, fairly significant startup costs unless you're just talking about some kind of trivial app or something like that. So you know, hiring teams of developers and doing testing and all this kind of stuff, that's not going to make it into our top five that's able to be done well in less than eight weeks. Nothing wrong with that business model. It's just maybe a longer term play than what you know many of us are interested in at this point and along the lines of those onetime and ongoing costs, ongoing costs can be high in particular types of businesses as well if they're labor intensive or if they take a lot of time to create the particular products that that you want to go to market with. So again, a lot of that factors into the the revenue versus profit and the profit potential that that business has. But those are some things that you want to be thinking about their the time and the cost required to fulfill on whatever it is that you're selling or delivering. The other factor that we'll talk about in terms of choosing which ones make it into the top five are the ease of starting that business. Because again, our goal here is to create businesses relatively quickly so that we can start generating that, you know, cashflow and building up the wealth impact and legacy that we talk about on the show quite a bit. So in terms of starting it, you know, what do you need to start that business again? If you're in a physical product type of business, it's another way that doesn't make my top five. There's a reason why it doesn't and that's because you need inventory to then be able to sell and there's lead times and warehousing costs and all kinds of challenges that come into the mix when you're looking at, you know, physical product based businesses. Again, nothing wrong with that model. Doesn't mean you should never do it. But in terms of an expert business and something that can be built in eight weeks, that one doesn't make the list because there's a lot that you need upfront in order to be able to start that business. Other things to look at and maybe not even inventory, but things like what type of technology do you need to get the business going? Do you need tons of software and different systems all tied together and set up? Sometimes that can take a little while to do. How much design work do you need? You know, is this in a space where you're going to need tons of graphical design and packaging, you know, creating all kinds of things like that. And then how much of marketing is required to get started in in this particular business model that you might be thinking of? Okay, so that ease of starting is something that you know, we're going to bounce a couple of these different business types against. And then the final one, especially as it relates to a couple of previous episodes where you were starting to think about how do I choose the market that I want to get into, or the type of topic or area that I want to focus on. A big thing is when evaluating these models is what would you find enjoyment in? What's the relative level of effort? Some of the ones that make the list actually have a high amount of effort that you'll have to put in as the founder of that business. So you definitely want to make sure that the work that you're doing is something you enjoy if you're going to have to be doing a lot of that work. And some of those particular business models, they're another big factor that I talk about quite a bit is what is the ability to automate or outsource within the type of business that you're talking about there. So if you do have something that is able to be automated where a lot of the work is able to be outsourced, then that's something that's gonna rank higher on our list. Because again, our whole goal with building an expert business is to be able to generate that wealth impact and legacy, but without having to work a hundred hours a week to deliver that. And then the final one is how much do you like and enjoy the actual work that you're choosing within these particular types? So those are a couple of the different categories that we'll talk about and evaluate. Some of these different business models against, I mean that is their profit potential, the ease of starting them and then the level of enjoyment that you would have in terms of delivering that particular type of business. So the first type of expert business that we're going to talk about is your traditional consulting or freelancing. And so what I mean by that is basically one on one service delivery. So taking whatever skill or expertise you have and starting to market yourself as a consultant or a freelancer, that space, there's a lot of pros to this. This is the way a lot of people get started in an expert business because the cost of startup, the, you know, the profit potential and all that stuff is in a pretty good sweet spot there. There's minimal startup costs to kind of, you know, start hanging out your shingle and social media and saying, Hey, I'm doing freelancing in this area now, or I'm doing one on one consulting. So it's very easy to get started there. You basically just have to declare, I'm a consultant and figure out what your hourly rate is going to be. And you can at least start down that path. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to be successful right away if all you do is go on Facebook and say, Hey, I'm now a freelancer. Depending on your skills that we've talked about in previous episodes, how in demand they are and how valuable they are to the particular target market you're going after, that's going to have a huge impact on how successful and how profitable that business can be. Again, you know, not to pick on designers, but if you're in kind of a commodity design space, like I can touch up an image in Photoshop or something like that, then you're competing against a million offshore folks that are going to do that for, you know, $5 an hour, right? So not likely to be very successful in that. If you're a high end logo designer though, and you go out and start your own business there, then you know there is a large potential there because in that high end, you know, people pay 10 2050 a hundred thousand dollars just for a logo. Okay. So even just within one niche and design, there's a wide range depending on positioning and all those other things. But in terms of being the expert business model itself, that freelancing or that one on one consulting have a lot of pros largely around the ease of starting that business. Now there's also a lot of cons in there as well. And so the con is the profit potential. So in any business model that you're looking at, if it's a model based on dollars for hours, meaning you are going to get paid some amount for every hour of your time, those inherently have a ceiling to how much money that you can make in there. You know, if you're really good and if you're really good at positioning and you know you have a lot of great results, you might be able to get to 50 or $150 an hour. And in certain scenarios, and my background in professional services in big companies, big consulting firms, yeah, in there you can get three, four or $500 an hour rate that you're charging to end customers. But that's pretty rare. And that's usually only when you're inside of those really large corporations. So as an individual, as an expert going and doing this, there's going to be a cap to how much you can make. Now it may be perfectly within your goals though because you can definitely get into six figure business scenarios with one-on-one consulting and freelancing, getting the seven figures, that's going to be extremely rare in that dollars for hours type of scenario. So that's the con to that particular model. It's a great way to start out because you get exposure to customers, you see what's resonating with them and as we'll talk about in a few minutes, it actually can be one of the best ways to ease into some of the other business models that actually ranked a little bit higher. So consulting and freelancing and one-on-one services was the first of our five business models that you can start up and see success in as little as eight weeks. The next one that we'll talk about is a large category called information products. So what that is is anything where you can basically package up the knowledge and expertise you have into some form of information product, whether that's an Ebook, an online course, you know some kind of, you know, a pdf, a document, anything like that, a video, any of these types of things that you can create and store in a digital format is considered an information product case. Obviously people buy and sell ebooks and courses and all that kind of stuff all the time. That's where you're going to see a lot of people that have started the six, seven and even eight figure businesses. Many of them do that within the information product space. So there are a large number of pros for this particular type of business model. When you look at that profit potential, the profit potential is huge because basically with an information product that you create at once and then you can sell it for a long time and your cost of supporting and fulfilling on that information product are very low. I mean, even in an online course, you know, maybe you get on a couple of group calls a couple of times a month or you know you're active in your own Facebook group or something like that. But once you've got a course out there that you can sell for 50010002000 dollars or even more per copy, that has huge potential financial numbers in the way that those business models where it's not zero cost, but it is actually the highest margin business that you can do in this whole expert business realm. So wherever you wind up on this spectrum of, you know, the type of business that you start with, having information products as a core element of your expert business is going to make sense in almost every scenario. So you may not start with that. You may start with the one on one consulting, learn what's resonating with your customers and then turn that into an information product. That's the way a lot of us get started in this business. Or you can be doing some of these other things that we're talking about and then create an information product based off of what you've learned. Okay, so there's a lot of pros to the information product business. The only con is that it's highly competitive, so in a lot of the niches and the markets and the sub markets that that make money like health, wealth, fitness related scenarios, how to start a business, you know like like my space and a bunch of these, the competition is very high. There's lots of people trying to do that because the barrier to entry is so low. You have a lot of competitors so it can be hard to get that initial attraction and differentiate in that space. It's definitely worth the effort if you can stick with it because of all the pros that we've already outlined. But it's just something to be aware of that it's highly competitive. So you may not see instant large scale success in that space. But because it's so easy to get into, it's definitely one that you want to, you know, think about starting out with as as your entry point there. And the first two that we've talked about, the one on one consulting or the information products because the barrier to entry is so low, I usually recommend that people start out with one of those two as that is going to get you engaged, get you moving, get some momentum going, get some initial cashflow and then you can start to evaluate a couple of the other models that we're going to talk about here next. So the third type of expert business that you can start up within eight weeks is coaching. And this is a really broad category. So this can include one on one coaching group coaching, a concept called a mastermind where you get together with a couple of other different types of experts and you do a, you know, a group coaching type of scenario, life coaching. So there's a million different things within this space. The pros of this one are similar to the one on one consulting. It's very easy to start up this business. You don't need tons of technology, you don't have any of the downsides of a physical product and all of that type of stuff. So it's very easy to say, yes, I am going to be a career coach or I'm going to be a life coach, or I'm going to, you know, coach people on whatever my particular area of expertise is. So like in my case with, you know, 20 years of success in professional services, I could easily be, you know, a coach to consultants, right? Whether it's corporate or technology, you know, high-end management consultants and so forth. That's a coaching business that I could start based on my skillset. You could figure out and think about whatever your topic areas and say, okay, well what type of a group coaching type of model might work in that scenario? Now the reason this is different from the, the one-on-one consulting though is because in a coaching model, you're selling your results or your outcomes are your product. So that means you're not having to work dollars for hours. You know, you don't define your coaching offer. As I'll spend four hours on the phone with you and charge you $100 an hour. What you'll say is, I have a transformational program. I am going to get you from point a to point B, and that's worth $3,000 so that's worth $10,000 or something like that. So there's, you're breaking that bond between the amount of hours you work and the price of the product that you're selling. So that's why this is a different category because it's, it's a different category and it's a different pricing model. There's some different, you know, marketing that you have to do. There's different skills that you have to have and so forth. So it is a distinctly different category, but it has a number of other more pros to it than the ones that we've already talked about. And namely, it is that profit potential. So now that you've broken that bond between dollars for hours, you can start figuring out how do I generate outcomes that warrant a much higher price point? Okay. How do I get to or set up a coaching program that will be worth $10,000 to each person that comes into it? Right? So if you can get into that type of scenario, now your profit potential is much, much larger than traditional freelancing or or one-on-one consulting. When you get into the group coaching scenario, then the multiplier and the margin goes up even higher. Because if, let's say you can do a $5,000 coaching program and you can support 10 or 15 people at a time in that program, and let's say it takes, you know, eight weeks to deliver, now you've got a scenario where you can get 10 1520 people times, you know, $5,000 and stamped that out, you know, every eight weeks, right? That's when the numbers can start to add up, especially if you can get to even bigger groups. If you can figure out how to support 50 people, maybe you bring in some assistant coaches. So coaching, you know by itself can be quite scalable and then very highly profitable. Now the downside or some of the pros to it are you have to have a steady flow of clients. Okay. And so that can be difficult to do, especially when you're in some of those, those higher ticket price points. So you may have a business where it kind of goes up and in terms of you know, the revenue and the profit and so forth. It's definitely worth considering though because again, it is one of the highest profit potential businesses in this whole expert business realm and again it is relatively straight forward to be able to get into that particular type of business. Again, it's one you can do within eight weeks if you have the right support, the right help, the right systems and processes and so forth. Like we always talk about here. So the fourth type of expert business that can be started up within eight weeks is what I called done with you services. Now this one is a little bit of a mix of some of the other ones that we've talked about here. Now, one of the challenges with the coaching scenario that done for you helps with is that once you try and get up to the more high ticket price points, you know, the ten thousand fifteen thousand and beyond, people need and want and expect more than just coaching more than you just you talking to them and telling them what they should do in order to get the outcomes or to provide outcomes that are valuable enough. So what a lot of people do at that point is they start to offer done with you services. And what that means is, is like you can help the customer, help your client actually do whatever you're teaching them to do. Okay? So one of these examples is, you know, like in fitness, right? So if you're going to have a fitness offer, then part of the done with you is you could do like video training sessions with your clients. Okay? So you're doing the work with them, you're showing them you're more actively engaged with them and helping them than just, you know, hey just talk to me on the phone and I'm going to go tell you what workout to do. Okay. In the technology space, you know, it's the same type of thing, you know, done with you services are, let's say you're going to start a website design business. Okay? And so rather than build everybody's website for them, you might be going after a market of other aspiring web designers. And so instead of you doing all the work and turning over a website and done with you service might be, Hey, I'm going to go onto like a video conference and I'm going to show you, here's how you use, let's say a page builder to go build a website or something like that. So you're showing, you're working with your customers and you're doing that product delivery with them. Okay? So that's what I'd done with you service is, and those are things that you can add to a coaching scenario or even to a a freelancing type of scenario that can increase the value of your offer. Okay, so we're moving up the spectrum here a little bit. The cons to this scenario are your fulfillment or the delivery of the service that you do is more complicated. You know, you have to schedule time with your clients. You do have to work with them. So it does have a little bit of a cap on it if you are the one doing the service delivery. But if you start building a team and you bring in additional people that can help your customers with those done with you services, then it gets back into a business model that can scale beyond just what you're able to do as an individual. Okay. So that's why I had done with you type of service is something that's growing in the market today because the market is just becoming saturated with pure information product and pure coaching scenarios. So finding a done with you collection of services that provides a great value to your customer but doesn't cost a lot for you to fulfill on. That is one of the sweet spots in the whole expert business world today. Then the final model that we're going to talk about is done for you services. Now done for you is near and dear to my heart because that's what I've decided to build my entire expert business around. Now done for you is done with you on steroids. And what that means is, is that you're going to help and actually do the work for your customer as much as you can to help them get to the outcome that they desire. So this model works in particular types of markets where let's say people have more money than time. And so what I mean by that is let's take a like a corporate executive, right? And productivity. Okay? You can go talk to an executive as much as you want about productivity. Most of them already are productive. What they need is additional help to take just entirely take categories of tasks off their back. So, you know, a prime example of this is, you know, virtual assistant type of companies where they'll say, hey, you know, we've got a team of people, we can do your flights, we can do your scheduling, we can do your calls, we can do all of this different stuff. We're going to take a whole set of work completely off your back and we're going to do that for you. Okay? That's what a, like a virtual assistant type of model looks like. Now you as an expert business owner, it should not be doing any of that stuff. So in that virtual assistant scenario, like let's say I was starting that type of business, of course I'm not going to go be doing flights and appointments and all this kind of administrative crap for an end customer. However, I would source people in offshore or in, you know, the cheapest locations possible that are qualified to do the work. And you're basically doing an arbitrage model of, you know, time and value to that executive versus how cheaply can I get that service delivered to them. Okay? So that's an example of one of the most simple types of have done for you type of businesses to get into. The reason done for you has a lot of positives to it is because the value is extremely high. Okay, so it's not a high volume business. Typically you're not going to have tens of thousands of customers. My business can be successful if I only get like 50 customers a year because I'm providing a huge value in helping somebody build their entire expert business inside of this eight week window that we're talking about that completely can change their life and their, their wealth and their impact and so forth. So the outcome that I can help provide has a huge value to it. So I can charge a high price point there which supports me building a team that can go deliver on that particular service. Now the cons are, you know, similar to what we've already heard, this is a complicated model to set up. It does require a team, it requires technology, it requires like super efficient processes and so forth in order to be successful at that. But the profit potential is very high and there's a lot of other benefits to that as well. So that's the particular reason why I've chosen to go that that particular direction. And then also the way I look at it is the competitiveness of the online in expert business space today just keeps going up. Like I've mentioned already a couple of times, pure information products, pure coaching and online courses is saturated at this point in many different markets. Can you be successful short, but you really gotta go deep and differentiate where I'm differentiating in my particular cases, the amount and quality of the services that we're able to provide. That's really the key scenario and that's why that done for you type of model can also be one that's very high in profit. So let's recap the five types of expert businesses that you can build within eight weeks. The first was consulting, freelancing one-on-one services, and again, pros were easy to start up cons where there's limited profit potential just because of the the dollars for hours balance. The next one was information products, which again, very easy to get into. Very high margin, potential, high profit potential in that business. But the cons were it's kind of saturated at this point, so you really need to differentiate and niche down. Doesn't mean you can't be successful. Tons of people successful in that space. Great way to start out. It's just something to be aware of that you're going to have to get, you know, pretty deep into that in order to see success quickly. The third one was coaching, which was a wide category of either one on one group coaching or masterminds. So again, pros relatively easy to get into. Definitely has a higher profit potential than than one-on-one consulting. Some of the cons were you really need a steady flow of clients coming into that in order to sustain that business over the longterm. The fourth was done with you services, so largely a combination of some of the previous models where it's a combination of some kind of program along with some set of services that you're able to deliver. But at that point you start moving into a mode where you're building a team, either of people you employ or of vendors and partners and service providers that you work with that can start to deliver some services to your end customer without you having to be the one directly doing those services. And then you can put a larger price point on those particular outcomes that you provide for customers. And then the fifth one was completely done for you services. So building up a little bit more complexity than some of the other models, but with some you profit potential and some strategic advantages to it. And that's where you take a whole category of work or outcome that you can literally do for that particular end customer. And that's the value you provide. And then that can warrant the higher price points, you know, that people are after to to raise the profit potential of that particular type of business. So at this point in your main question is probably, well, how do I choose? Right? All of them had a pros and cons. It's like, well that's life, right? I mean everything has pros and cons. The thing, and the reason why I wanted to outline those is you need to map those against your particular goals. So when we've talked in the past about figuring out your mission, okay, what type of impact do you want to have? What type of market do you want to operate in? What type of outcomes can you provide? Those are all things we're going to deep dive into in some future episodes, but those are some of the things you need to think about when thinking about this particular type of business model. Maybe that ease of starting up or the lowest cost way of starting up is most important to you. Nothing wrong with that. You would probably start with those consulting type or freelancing type scenarios where maybe the information products, if you're later in your career, maybe you have some money saved up and some budget and things like that. Then maybe they've done with you and starting to build out a team relatively quickly so you can offer more complicated outcomes to your customers that have higher value. You know, you might make that choice if you're in that particular state of life. And my case had been, you know, successful and have a pretty decisive budget to bring into this. I am strategically going into a business model that is harder to get into. Trying to find a unique niche within there where I can get into that fast, get into that in a big way and not be competing with the 10,000 other people that are trying to do ebooks or something like that. Okay. So you've got to think about what are your needs, what are your advantages, what resources do you have? And then that's going to help you decide between those, those particular business models. So if these ideas and treat you, if even if this is the first time you've heard of these different types of expert businesses or heard the pros and cons as as I've outlined them, definitely want you to think about that more. And then I also want you to think about learning more about this particular process. So one of the resources that I've created is something that I call the expert business blueprint. And that's where we go into a lot more detail in each of these particular areas. There's a whole section of that content and of of that training, which is all about figuring out what type of business model makes the most sense for you, how to productize your expertise. And what I mean by that is how do you turn what you know into some kind of a product that you can sell to customers. Again, not just dollars for hours, but an actual product with margin, with profit potential, then you can package up and sell. So the expert business blueprint really is going to take you step by step through that to really get you thinking about well what could my expert business look like based on my skills, my desires, the things I want to do versus these different business models with their pros and cons. So if you're interested in that, head on over to www.expertbusinessblueprint.com and then you'd be able to check that out. And I hope you do that cause I think it's going to really help you get some clarity on what path makes sense for you and for your particular expert business. So I want to thank you for listening to this episode. If you got some value out of this episode or any of our previous ones, please be sure to go over to iTunes and rate and review the podcast. I'd love to hear your feedback. I'd love to see some things that we can improve. The more and better ratings you guys put in there, the faster we're able to get the word out about expert businesses and get more people on this path to the wealth impact and legacy that they desire. So I'd love to, if you could go over and leave us a positive review. And again, thanks for joining and we'll see you on the next episode. Okay. Thanks for joining me on the build your expert business show. Please be sure to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. The key to building your own expert business is following a proven blueprint. After two years, $50,000 of research and working with over 20 successful expert business owners, I've created what I believe to be the most valuable resource that I possibly could for you, the exact blueprint for how to build your own expert business. To learn more, head over to expert business blueprint.com. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

In this episode, I’m going to show you how to know your ideal customer better than your own family does. We’re going to break this down for you into four steps.   https://youtu.be/SoLhxFMti2w   The first is choosing the niche for your expert business. We talked about it in previous episodes doing an expertise inventory. … How to know your ideal customer better than their family does Read More »

In this episode, I'm going to show you the top five types of expert businesses you can build in less than eight weeks.

In this episode, I’m going to show you our two step system for deciding which topic to build your expert business around. This is a subset of the full Expert Business System. Hey everybody. Dave Ziembicki here from the expert business agency. Today we’re going to talk about one of the most important factors in building a successful expert business and that’s finding a match between your skills and expertise and a viable market that needs your skills and expertise. So depending on the type of job you already have, the types of skills that you’ve acquired over your life or your career, you may already have some that put you at enough of a level of expertise that a market will be willing to pay you for access to your information, access to the skills you have or to the services that you can deliver. So how do you figure all that out? How do you figure out whether your level of skills that you have right now is viable? Well, the first step is you do what we call an expertise inventory. That’s a two step system that we have for finding out what skills and expertise you have and then matching them and finding out if they’re a viable market or not. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, I'm going to show you our two step system for deciding which topic to build your expert business around. I've spent the last two years researching and interviewing some of the most successful online entrepreneurs in the world as they build their own expert businesses. Now I'm building an agency that helps skilled professionals like you and me do the same, build a business around your expertise that delivers wealth, impact and legacy. The real question is this. How can we build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses while still employed without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, succeed and scale your own expert business. My name is Dave Ziembicki, welcome to the build your expert business show! Hey everybody. Dave Ziembicki here from the expert business agency. Today we're going to talk about one of the most important factors in building a successful expert business and that's finding a match between your skills and expertise and a viable market that needs your skills and expertise. Now, in previous episodes we talked about how the skills that you have may already qualify you as an expert. So depending on the type of job you already have, the types of skills that you've acquired over your life or your career, you may already have some that put you at enough of a level of expertise that a market will be willing to pay you for access to your information, access to the skills you have or to the services that you can deliver. So how do you figure all that out? How do you figure out whether your level of skills that you have right now is viable? Well, the first step is you do what we call an expertise inventory. And that's a two step system that we have for finding out what skills and expertise you have and then matching them and finding out if they're a viable market or not. So there's two steps in this system. The first is creating a list of all of the different skills or areas of knowledge that you have and that you've acquired over your life and your career. What's important is not just focusing on the things that you're doing today, like whatever you did today for your job or whatever you've been doing for the last couple of weeks or couple months or even a year or two. When you're doing the first step of this expertise inventory, you want to go all the way back and not just work skills. You basically want any types of skills, whether it's work, hobbies. We'll go through a list in a minute there, but step one is listing out and making an exhaustive list of the skills that you have or that you have had at various points in time. Then the second step of the system is going through a scoring or an analysis process to figure out which of those skills that you have have the highest potential, have the highest market potential, the highest potential for building an expert business around. Now on this episode we're going to cover that analytical framework and some of the ways that we do that scoring and ranking. But I'm not going to tell you them just yet because I don't want to color in your thoughts as we go through the list and as we go through, you're thinking of the skills that you already have. So we'll save that for the second half of the episode. And then I'm going to talk you through the two part system here. But if you want more details and if you want templates for being able to fill out this information and have it go through that, a ranking and scoring system, head on over to business blueprint.com and you can get access to our templates and our instructions and more details for going through this process. Okay, so in step one of the expertise inventory, we're going to go through and start listing out and thinking about the skills that you have. So we are going to start with what's most fresh and that is what you're doing today. So in your current job and your current career, whatever it is that you may be doing, what we want you to think about is first, what industry do you work in? And then the next step is thinking about what is the highest hourly rate or the range of hourly rates that let's say a freelancer can get in the topic area that you work in. So let's say you're in information technology, right? So that's super broad. You know, the ranges of hourly rates both as a freelancer or you know, in consulting companies range from, you know, the low end 10 $15 an hour, all the way up to two three, four, $500 an hour. I know, you know, in my role, that I've done at Microsoft over all of these years, our hourly rates are very high because the skills are in demand and so on and so forth. So, you know, what you want to look at though is in your particular industry and your particular current skillset, what do those things look like? Right? So some areas have become commodity, right? So if you're in the low end designer type of space or something like that - doing logos or touching up photos or something like that from a designer perspective that you know, is toward the commodity end of the market. If you're able to do high end branding and campaigns and all this type of stuff for customers, then that would be toward the higher end of the market. So think about your current job, current industry, your title within that industry, and then what that hourly rate type of range is there. The next thing is take a look at your level of expertise within that and consider that a little bit to think about are you towards the top end, are you in the middle or are you just starting out? You know, those are things that we want to track for each of these different skills is we're going to start thinking about what are the skills or expertise, what is the, you know, the, the dollar potential of it. And then what is your ranking within that area of expertise? So, you know, again, personal examples here, you know, through my career in information technology and high end consulting, there has been points of time where depending on the topic, I was at the lower end, the middle end. And then there were some times throughout my career where I've been in probably the top 10 in the world, you know, in particular narrow topic areas within tech, you know, and obviously the, the value of this skills and, and the, the money you can make depending on where you are in, in that particular spectrum. Next thing we think about is the years of experience that you have. That doesn't always mean better. It doesn't mean if you've been doing something for 15 years, you're better. Um, if you, you're doing the same thing for 15 years, then you know, maybe you haven't expanded your horizons much. But also if you're only two months into this particular topic area that you're thinking about, then you're not likely to be toward the high end of the expertise range yet. Obviously. So within your current job or a career, write down or think about a couple of the different skills that you have within that. So again, if you're in tech, maybe your skills are in you know, architecture and you know, designing complex systems or maybe you're in it support, you know, and you specialize in troubleshooting, you know, windows, desktops, whatever that might be if you're in design. Yeah. Use some of the examples that we talked about. Try and narrow up what your definition of you know, your current job, your current role, your current career is. Cause that's gonna help us later start zooming in on the particular topics within that area that you might be able to build your own expert business around. So now that we've gone through the easy part, which is just thinking about the things that you're currently doing day to day, the next thing we want to start thinking about is digging a little bit deeper. Maybe going back a little bit in time in your career. So what I want you to think about is now all of the previous jobs that you've had in your career and what your skill or your focus area was at those particular jobs. And either write those down or make a mental note about that, then go further. Think back to college. Okay. The reason we're doing this is because often the most successful expert businesses wind up being a combination of skills that people have that they put together in a unique way. Right? So it may not just be the professional skill that you have, it might be that plus some kind of hobby that you have or it might be that plus something that you focused on or, or did in college. You know, so like one kind of weird example for me is one of the things that I spent the vast majority of my time in college doing was basically leading the colleges engineering racing team. So there's a national competition among colleges where engineering schools, where the student teams design and build race cars and you know, they have to document the design, they have to build a business plan around it. They have to do a whole raise money sponsorships, design manufacturer, and build the car prototype and go race. So huge amount of stuff in there. And that's something I did in college. Right? And so that experience has really shaped a lot of things through my career. It's where I learned leadership very early on and how to run complex projects and things like that. So some of those skills actually factor into the stuff I've done in my career and some of the things that I'm doing in my expert business. So there may be examples in your history that you want to combine together. That's why you want to go pretty deep in this expertise inventory to dig those things out. Now another reason why you want to keep digging deeper into this and listing these things out is because you may feel like in your current job, your current role or career that you're not an expert. You may feel like, well, you know, thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people can do or do what I do. It doesn't seem unique. It doesn't seem like it could have value. It doesn't seem like I could build a six figure business, let alone a seven or eight or even eight figure expert business around it. And that's okay. That's why we're digging deeper because we do want to find those things that you can build on. So once you've gone through your career, all the jobs that you've had and the skills that you've identified and collected throughout that, and once you've looked at college and so forth, expand out a little bit further and start thinking about hobbies or other interest areas that you have. So just like with the college example that I just used, hobbies can come into play in a lot of cases. In many cases, people build their expert business, not around the thing that they're currently doing in corporate, but a hobby or a skill area or a passion that they have in some other topic area. So, you know, lots of people have lots of different hobbies. Uh, yeah, I'm into woodworking, amateur woodworking. I've got a whole woodshop in my garage and you know, all the tools and bells and whistles and you know, when I can scrape together enough time like to go out and build furniture, you know, and things like that. So does that factor into my expert business in this case? Not yet, but some people have built multiple six figure businesses online around just the topic of woodworking, filming different techniques, doing tool reviews and things like that. So there's definitely people out there that have been successful in taking a hobby or taking a passion project of theirs and then turning it into basically their career. You know, a very successful expert business. The next thing to think about is are there any topic areas that you have a sustained interest in over time? So what I mean by that is if there's a particular topic where maybe it wouldn't qualify as a hobby yet because you don't actually do it, but let's say whenever you get free time, you're always reading about a certain topic or you're always, you know, tuning into youtube videos or watching it about certain topics. Those also might be areas worth exploring a little bit more for building your expert business around. Because if you've sustained an interest in a topic over multiple years and it's not your job and it's not one of your hobbies and it's not something related to your family, then that means you have a pretty significant interest in that. And that might be something again that you can build on if the rest of these lists that we've been creating have come up blank or those topics just don't quite resonate with you. So then the final step in this information gathering phase is to ask some people around you. So ask your spouse or significant other, ask a close friend what it is they think you're particularly good at or the particular skills that they think make you unique. This is a really interesting exercise cause a lot of times you're going to get back answers that you did not expect or that might be surprising. So that's why it's worth doing, right? Because if people other than you are thinking, wow, this person, this defines them or this is one of their unique or key characteristics, that's again another clue that that might be an area that you want to double click on. Want to take a look at it a little bit more detail as potentially something you could build this foundation around. So by this point you should have a list of the skills are the topic areas from your work history, from your life history and so forth. Maybe a short list, maybe a really long list, you know the longer the better because we're about to move into the second phase of the two step system, which is the analysis phase and the scoring of different factors on each of those skills that we talked about there. Because we're trying to do is to narrow this list down and ideally get down to one where we say yes, that's the one that we want to move forward with. And then we want to start thinking about building a business around. So in our system there are four key ranking factors that we're going to apply to each of the skills. The first is what I call your level of enjoyment of performing or doing that particular skill or topic. Okay? So what we find with a lot of people is that their particular area that they may be the best at, maybe they've lost interested in, or maybe that's not what they want to spend, say the next 10 or 20 years of their career doing. So the reason we start out with what skill and ranking them off for your level of enjoyment is because we want that to be a very important factor in what you choose to build your expert business around. It is not easy to build a six, seven or eight figure expert business. And it's especially more difficult if you don't like the topic that you're going to be spending all, you know, all your working hours and blood, sweat and tears working on. Okay? So that's why that level of enjoyment ranking is something that you want to do right away and basically rank them all of your skills in order of your level of enjoyment of them. So again, personal example there, you know, for obviously for 20 plus years now, my career has been delivering a high end technology and strategy consulting to Fortune 500 companies and government customers. Okay. So climb to the top in that have been, you know, one of the top people in the road and my particular niche in those areas. But for the second half of my career, I don't want to continue down that particular path. I want to do something different. So when I went through this process myself, yes I could continue to be a very high level expert in that particular area. But in my case I decided, hey, second half of my career going to start doing something a little bit different and I want to help individuals and people as opposed to, you know, companies and agencies and these large organizations. So because of that, that ranking factor would be a little bit lower. So, not that I don't like my job or you know, my career that I've done so far just means you know, it's moving down on that interest level or that level of enjoyment factor. So be honest here. Cause again, this decision is pretty important. You know, you gotta spend a lot of blood, sweat and tears and, and investment of time and money in whatever you decide to build your expert business around. So you want to make sure that that enjoyment factor is accurate. So the second ranking factor is your level of expertise within each of those particular skills that you're evaluating in your list. Okay? So what we mean by that is that's a very difficult type of measure. This is a subjective thing, but we want you to be honest with yourself about it. So what we mean by that is just rank them in terms of low, medium, or high or you know, one to five where you fit within, you know, the spectrum of people in that particular topic. So what I mean by that is within any given topic area we need to figure out are you new to this topic and you don't have much expertise in it. Are you in the middle, are you around average or are you at the high end? And again, it's really going to depend on how narrowly you define the topic. So again, my background with all this information technology and all that huge topic space, but if we narrow that up to infrastructure architecture, you know, then my level of expertise starts going higher. If we narrow it up a little bit further to Microsoft infrastructure architecture, then I start to get into the top 5% and at various times of my history even higher. Okay. If it was for Linux or apple or other areas, then you know I would be toward the low end of expertise in those areas or none in some cases. So that's what we're trying to talk about here is you know, just a pretty high level subjective assessment of where you are within those things. Now, the reason for that is obviously because if you finding areas that you enjoy where you're towards the upper half or upper third or upper quarter of experts in that area or skills in that area, you know, then we're starting to get to something that we might want to take a little bit deeper look at. Right? So this is two out of the four ranking factors that are already working together to zone us into, you know, an area that might make sense to spend more time analyzing. Okay. The third ranking factor is basically the value of the skill that we're talking about here. So that's why earlier we were talking about using, you know, freelancers hourly rates as a proxy for that because that's a quick way to get a handle on how valuable is that particular skill worth. Right? So like I said, let's use a design example this time. So if you have modest Photoshop skills where you're basically just able to crop pictures and maybe remove a background or do some basic things like that to an image that obviously the value of that skillset is going to be pretty low. If you look for jobs online on like freelancer, upwork or other websites where you know freelancers hang out and congregate, you're going to see what those hourly rates are. Well why is that? Well, because there's people in other countries with lower, you know, cost of living and so forth that are able to do those commodity activities. So they're going to drive the hourly rate for those things down to $10 $5 an hour, maybe even less in some cases. So depending on where you live and here, cost of living, that's probably going to be a nonstarter. However, if you find that, hey, I do have skills kind of in the middle of the pack there and I look at what those hourly rates are, they get up to 50 60 $75 an hour or more, you know, then there's maybe some potential there. It doesn't mean we're going to go down the path of have hourly rates and hourly consulting and a future episode. We'll talk about the business models that make sense. This is just to get a quick proxy for the value of the particular skills that we're trying to analyze here. So again, for the main ones that you inventoried, go through that exercise of thinking about, okay, what is the the relative value of those skills. So then the fourth and final factor that we're going to be analyzing is the relative demand for each of the skills that you have inventory. Okay. So what I mean by demand is, and again we can use the job boards, the freelancing sites and things like that as a proxy, but we want to get a look at is how in demand is that particular skill. So like we were just talking about an ad design example, touching up or cropping or doing basic manipulation of of images is a pretty, you know, pretty in demand skill. If you go to the sites you're gonna see, you know, lot of people asking for those that don't have that basic background in Photoshop. But like we said, what you're looking at is something that's high demand, low value, right? There's, it's just a commodity basically in demand, but you're not going to get, uh, you know, any large dollar amounts of revenue based on, on that particular skillset. However, if you start seeing your skills listed and you see a lot of entries for it at the higher hourly rates, then that means they are in demand, right? So again, value and demand are two different things. Obviously a lot of times they're related, but in the huge market space that we have and all the numbers people are participating in that, they, they aren't proportional to each other. It doesn't always mean that something in high demand is going to have high value and high revenue potential. That's why these are two different factors that we're ranking our skills by. So then again, the final thing on that as you're going through this ranking process is to be honest, some people really put a lot of value on the skills that they have or think that they're highly valuable. But the reason we're going to some different sites and we're trying to be, you know, a little bit quantitative along with this objective here is because we want to get this right. You know, you don't want to choose the wrong area to go start building your expert business around. So that's why we're looking at those four factors. So again, to summarize them, the first is going to be your level of enjoyment. The second is going to be your level of expertise in each of those skills. The third is going to be the relative value of those skills. And then the fourth is going to be the relative demand for those skills. So once you've ranked those, now we can really start getting a good picture of the skills that we have and which ones have the highest potential. Because obviously what we're looking for is the ones that score well on all of those dimensions. So if in your list now you have a skill that you have a high level of enjoyment doing that you have a pretty high level of expertise in, let's even just say above average. And you found that it has relatively high value and is in relatively high demand, that's going to be a candidate that you really want to start looking at and thinking about, hey, maybe I can build my expert business around this. Maybe spending the next three to five years building products and solutions and services around that that I can sell out into the market that needs it. Maybe that starts making sense to you. Maybe that's something that starts to get you motivated. That's the reason for doing this exercise way at the beginning of this journey of building an expert business. So if you've been following along, you probably have a pretty good list of skills. You've hopefully gone through some of these ranking factors or at least in your mind you've done that and then after you get done, you know, consuming this content. Maybe we'll go off and do that yourself. As I mentioned earlier, if you want some templates and you want much more of a step by step on how to go through this expertise inventory with examples and you know some of the different hourly rates and ranges for all the different occupations that are out there, head on over to expert business blueprint.com because the expertise inventory and these tools and templates are just a small portion of what's in that overall solution that we have for you. Now, the one thing I wanted to cover here is, well, let's say you did everything that I just said and you're not really excited or motivated by the list of skills that you have. You may think you have a high level of enjoyment of some, but maybe in all the other factors they don't rank very high. If that's the state that you're in, that's okay, right? I mean, not every single person is going to go out and have an answer today for what they want to build their expert business around. The other way you can get to this is take a look at those ones that you have a high level of enjoyment or interest in and that may have some, some high demand and all of that, but that you don't have expertise in yet. And think about, well, what we'll see is a path or a learning path to get to a level of expertise or knowledge in those particular areas with the amount, you know, information and resources and educational opportunities that are available online today. You know, both free and paid. One of the other ways to get to this answer is to learn as fast as you possibly can. Okay. So you know, again, personal example, I mean in my career, in the first five or 10 years in consulting, you know, I always felt behind the curve. I mean, I think we talked about that in, in previous episodes. It's like tech moves very fast. You're almost never current or up to date no matter how much you work, you do. But where I was able to keep up and then exceed was by learning very rapidly, really deep diving into technology. What I call full immersion, right? So let's say there's a skill on your list, high level of interest, you have low level of expertise you currently have, but you see that there is high demand, high value for it. Think about what it would be like if you spent the next month going as deep as you possibly could and learning that technology or whatever that topic area is. You may be able to get to a level of knowledge and expertise that starts to move you into above average or even into the top 25% a lot more quickly than you might realize. I mean go on to the days where people need college degrees or any of this other kind of nonsense to, you know, be deemed an expert. You just need to know more than somebody who needs that particular skill or topic area taken care of. So if you can get them the results they need faster, then that's going to be a value to them. So you have enough expertise to do that. Then there's the potential for start building your expert business around. So just don't want you to be discouraged. If you got to that list and said, well, none of them really ranked high on all the factors that we're looking at. That's okay. May take a couple iterations. Again, may take learning a new skill as quickly as you can to get there. But either way, the benefit of doing this is obviously a business you own, you control that's in a topic area that you like working on. So that effort is more than worthwhile. So with that, we'll wrap up the topic of doing your own expertise inventory. Now in the next episode we're going to go deeper into the five most successful types of expert businesses. So in this episode we talked about the different skills and things like that that you might be able to build a business around. And then in the next episode we're going to talk about what does that business look like? What do I even mean by a build a business? You know, are we talking about consulting for, you know, dollars for hours? Are we talking about making a product or are we talking about something in between? Well, stay tuned. In the next episode we're going to go through the five most successful types of expert businesses that you can build. So thanks for joining us and hopefully we'll see you in the next episode. So I hope you got some value out of today's episode. If you did, please go over and give us a rating and review over in apple podcasts where a new podcasts, so the ratings and reviews help. It's going to help spread the word to other people that are out there who need to hear this information about building their own expert business. So we'd love to see your rating and review, commit to reading all of them and you know, listening to your feedback and hopefully making this show even better as we go. So again, if you could do a rating and review, we'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks. Okay, thanks for joining me on the build your expert business show. Please be sure to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. The key to building your own expert business is following a proven, after two years, $50,000 of research and working with over 20 successful expert business owners, I've created what I believe to be the most valuable resource that I possibly could for you, the expertbusinessblueprint.com For how to build your own expert business. To learn more, head over to expert business blueprint.com. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

In this episode, we’re going to cover the nine steps to building your own expert business. In previous episodes we talked about what I call the expert business roadmap and today we’re going to detail out the nine steps on that roadmap to building your own expert business. Now, the key with this roadmap is that the steps are in a very specific order and they actually go contrary to what most of the gurus and some of the other people out there that you might have heard. The order of the steps is as important as the steps themselves and that’s why we’re going to cover it sequentially from step one all the way through to step nine. Now, why do I start off by mentioning the order? Well, one of the things that you’ll see if you listen to some of the gurus that are in this space around building your own online business or making money online is they will teach you that you have to go create a blog or create a podcast or just create huge amounts of content over a long period of time before you ever even start selling anything to your audience. They basically call it “building an audience first”, or “building an email list first”, and they use numbers like having a certain list size means a certain percentage are going to buy something from you. Therefore if you just build a list, you’re automatically going to make money. And that really couldn’t be further from the truth. Most people who start out and fail trying to build their own expert businesses, are part of the ones that are listening to that advice. They’re going with their heads down for a year or two, three years or even more, just creating content that churn all of that work and all of that effort before they even put a product into the market. They may build an audience, bu they have no idea is any of them will buy something from them. With the Expert Business Agency and the model that we use, based on the proven success of many online entrepreneurs and expert business owners, we do things in the order that works, and that’s what we’re going to cover on this particular episode. So let’s dive right into step number one, which is called building your expert business blueprint. Transcript Email Download New Tab In this episode, we're going to cover the nine steps to building your own expert business. I've spent the last two years researching and interviewing some of the most successful online entrepreneurs in the world as they built their own expert businesses. Now I'm building an agency that helps skilled professionals like you and me do the same: build a business around their expertise that delivers wealth, impact, and legacy. The real question is this: How can we build six, seven, or even eight-figure expert businesses while still employed without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, succeed, and scale you're own expert business. My name is David Ziembicki. Welcome to the build your expert business show! Hey everybody. Welcome back to the show. In previous episodes we talked about what I call the expert business roadmap and today we're going to detail out the nine steps on that roadmap to building your own expert business. Now, the key with this roadmap is that the steps are in a very specific order and they actually go contrary to what most of the gurus and some of the other people out there that you might have heard about our talk about. So the order of the steps is as important as the steps themselves and that's why we're going to cover it sequentially from step one all the way through to step nine. Now, why do I start off by mentioning the order? Well, one of the things that you'll see if you listen to some of the gurus that are in this space around building your own online business or making money online or any of the other sort of titles that you want to use for this is they will teach you that you have to go create a blog or create a podcast or you know, just create huge amounts of content over a long period of time before you ever even start selling anything to your audience. They basically call it "building an audience first", or "building an email list first", and they use numbers like, you know, having a certain list size means a certain percentage are going to buy something from you. Therefore if you just build a list, you're automatically going to make money. And that really couldn't be further from the truth. Most people who start out and fail trying to build their own expert businesses, are part of the ones that are listening to that advice. They're going with their heads down for a year or two, three years or even more, just creating content that churn all of that work and all of that effort before they even put a product into the market. Basically, they're trying to figure out is the audience they're building actually an audience that's going to buy something from them. So with the Expert Business Agency and the model that we use, again based on the proven success of many online entrepreneurs and expert business owners, we do things in the order that works, and that's what we're going to cover on this particular episode. So let's dive right into step number one, which is called building your expert business blueprint. So before you start off on any kind of strategy or implementation or choosing tools and people to work with, having a plan for your expert business is the most important steps so that you're always moving in the right direction that's going to get you towards your goals. So there's a few key elements to building your own expert business blueprint. The first is defining your mission, both the mission for yourself and for your particular goals and where you want to go with your life. And then also the mission that you have for your customers, your audience, the people that you want to serve. One of the keys to long term success is making sure that your personal goals, objectives, and mission are aligned with the outcomes that you can for your particular customers or the audience that you're going after and that you want to serve. So the first step of the blueprint is designing your mission. The next step is finding your market. So what is the target market? What are their characteristics? What are their demographics? How much can you find out about that market so that you can design your offerings in your products and your services as close to what their needs as possible? There's four parts to defining your own expert business blueprint. The first is defining your mission. That's basically your own personal goals and objectives and what you want to get out of starting your own expert business, but also the mission that you have for the audience that you want to serve. So why are you going to pick a particular market? Why are you picking a particular subset of your skills that you want to go redeliver? What is that mission? What is that service you want to be able to provide here in customers? After you have your mission, the next thing is your market. So getting very detailed on the market (the submarket, the niche that you're actually going to serve), and what are the characteristics of those people (the demographics about them, their needs, wants and desires) - you know, all of this information that you can find. The closer and the better you can define your market, the more successful your expert business is going to be. So once you have your mission and your market, next thing you want to focus on are your outcomes. What are the outcomes that you can provide for your customers with the products and services or the skills that you think you might be able to redeliver? What is the transformation? What is the outcome that you can provide for your customers? And then finally with mission market and your outcomes, you can start to shape the outlines of what your business is going to be. How are you going to deliver that knowledge? What type of model are we talking about? Information products or physical products or freelancing and so forth. There's a lot of different ways that expertise can be packaged up and delivered and getting at least a rough idea of that as part of your blueprint is really going to help you direct the next steps and the next things that you need to do in building your business. So again, step one is one of the most important, and that is building your specific expert business blueprint. Step two is what I call productizing your expertise. So what that means is taking the skills, taking the knowledge, taking the outcomes that you can provide, and figuring out how to package up those outcomes in a way that you can sell and deliver them to your customers and your target market. So there's a lot of different ways to do this. I'll talk about a couple of the different ones. So the first is something as basic as freelancing or consulting. And what that basically means is charging a certain amount of dollars for a certain amount of your time in order to help your customer or you know, whoever your target audience is, solve the problems that you're able to help them solve. So there's a lot of examples as designers and copywriters and executives and life coaches, you know, there's a whole bunch of different ways in almost any niche that you can define some kind of freelance or consulting service to wrap around the skills and the knowledge that you have. So the benefits of that are: it's very easy to do and very easy to get started. It's just a matter of defining those services and then starting to market them. The problem with that is, is that it's not a scalable model. Now of course you can get well into six figures just with consulting. If you're in a high demand area and you can get high hourly rates. But the problem is the business can only scale to a certain point. And that point is how much you want to work in any given week, month, or a year, right? So if you don't want to be doing two thousand/three thousand hours of work a year, then you know, that might not be the best path there. However, to get started, that's where a lot of us start out going independent, doing freelancing, doing consulting and things like that. It's a perfect entry point, but it's not really the textbook definition of an expert business because you want something that can scale something that you can eventually step back from, and that will still operate on its own. So there's other ways to productize your expertise. You can take the consulting that you did before and you can build that into what I call product tie services. So what that means is, taking the same outcomes that you can provide yourself and training others to be able to provide those outcomes. So you may be able to find less expensive resources that with your help can deliver the same outcome to your customers. Now you can scale out your team, scale out the number of customers that you have, and then deliver those services in a different way. There may be ways to package up those services into automated solutions or things that a customer could then go do themselves. You could package up your outcomes as a course to teach her and customer how to do it and then you don't have to be doing it for them. And then you break that kind of one to one scenario there where now you can serve a number of different customers. So there's a lot of different ways to productize your expertise. We've got whole modules and pull sections in additional episodes. We'll go. We'll go into that in depth. But that's what step two is to have the roadmap is to start thinking about how you could productize your services and your skills, because that is what you're going to go to market with. You're not going to go out there with your hours for sale. It's going to be your productized services and solutions are going to be the product of your expert business. Step three and building your own expert businesses have what I call firing up your funnels. So once you've started to productize your service is the key there is that you don't want to actually go out and build those particular products until you've done what's called validation. So the last thing you want to do, I spend six months creating courses and implementing tools and paying for contractors and all of these types of things before you actually validate the concept of what you're trying to sell and before you actually have people buying your products. So that might be a little bit confusing. It's like, well, how can I sell my products before I've built them? But the key is is you want to sell the idea of your products. You want to get some buyers in to validate your sales message, your offers, the way that you're describing your products, the targeting that you're doing to make sure you're gaining the right audience and the right people willing to take out their wallet and buy something from you so you can ethically do that while or before you've even created your products. As long as you disclose that up front, you can basically say, I'm in the middle of creating this product. Here's the outcomes that it's going to be. Here's what it's going to include. I'm starting a Beta program. You can purchase for this price and then there's a 60 day money back guarantee. For some reason we don't get a finished or it doesn't meet what your expectations, where you'll be able to get your money back and that type of scenario. You can get people to pay you for a product that's not built yet by including them in the process of building it. And that's one of the biggest differences between the people that are successful in building their expert businesses and the people that fail is really digging into doing that product validation before spending all that time, money and effort creating the products. If you don't do it, you've got very high odds that you'll spend a lot of time in dollars building something and then it'll be crickets when it comes time for people to buy from you because you had a mismatch, there was something wrong in your product, your messaging or the fit with your particular target market. So the reason fire up your funnels is step three is because a sales funnel is the way that you can sell your products and services online. That's the minimum set of pages and credit card processing and stuff that you need to be able to put an item out there on the Internet for sale and have customers come in and do that transaction and then get into your particular products or services. So again, this is very different from what a lot of gurus teach, where they'll have you be doing blogs at this point in creating content and all this kind of stuff. We want you building those funnels very early on so that you can validate your products so that all of the steps after this go much more smoothly and let you scale faster. Step four in the expert business roadmap is what I call powering up your web presence. So you'll note that we're about halfway through the process of building your own expert business before we even start talking about websites. So by this point you've created your blueprint, you've productized your expertise and you fired up your funnels and you've done validation of your ideas, validation of your services, and you actually have a few buyers at this point. So you've got the flywheel of revenue generation started in your business. Now is the time where we'll get into some of the things that you might have thought we were going to do. First, powering up your web presence is all about getting a basic website up and running, built around your expert business. The brand that you're starting to create that is going to be your headquarters online. It's where you're going to direct things back from all the different social networks and all the other stuff that we'll talk about in a couple of steps. Getting that website build is key for a couple of technical and other reasons and that's why we want to do that right here, right now after you validated your product. Now, the key here is is not spending much time or dollars on your initial website where you're still in the very early stages of your expert business. You don't need to go out and spend thousands of dollars on logos, tens of thousands of dollars on a website learning wordpress and all this tech and plugins and all of that other stuff. All of that should be outsourced. All of that should be kept within a boundary of just what you need to move on to the next steps. I've seen people get bogged down for weeks or months just trying to pick a theme that they're going to install on wordpress to then figure out what their website is going to look like. Again, all of these are time and money killers when you should be focusing on your products and services and getting that revenue flowing. So again, powering up your web presence is about getting that base websites stood up as quickly and efficiently as you can. And then moving on to the next steps. Step five of the expert business roadmap is turning on your social channels. So what this means is starting to think about the blog podcast, Facebook, Facebook groups, Instagram, the social media types of channels, and the content channels that you need to create that are going to be wear, what's called your organic traffic comes from. So that's where you're going to start publishing what's going on in your business, publishing information about your products and services, publishing information about the case studies and the success stories that you're going to have from your initial customer set. So at this stage in the roadmap with your blueprint, complete your services, productized your funnels, fire it up, and your website built. Adding the social channels is what's going to start generating traffic that is going to flow back to your sales funnels and to your website and to the products and services that you're delivering. So when it comes to these social channels, you don't want to have to be active and engaged in all of them, but you do want to claim that the names of your business, your brand or yourself, you do want to get all of the basic profile information set up and you want to set up the things that are going to let you post content into all of those different channels. So at this stage, powering up and turning on your social channels. Again, this is something relatively easily outsourced. It's something that my agency does for our customers as part of implementing this whole roadmap. And again, it's what you want to get going at this point because pretty soon you're going to start generating content that needs a place to go and the publishing point for your content is going to be the social media channels. Then direct back to your website or your funnels. Step six in the expert business roadmap is starting up your content engine. So what I mean by that is that now that you have your funnels set up, your website set up and all your different social channels set up, where you need to start doing now is filling up those outlets with content that's useful to your target audience and that is going to draw them back into your sales funnels so that you can start selling and delivering your products and services. To start in your content engine basically means picking what type of content you are most comfortable creating and then implementing an engine and automation that's going to get that content out into all of the different channels that you have set up. Ideally without you having to do any of that other than create the original source content. So what I mean by that is thinking about what you're most comfortable with. Are you most comfortable talking on video? Are you most comfortable just recording audio? Are you most comfortable writing whatever the type of content that you're most comfortable with creating right now. That's the one that you want to start with. Now if you can get yourself to start with video, that's going to be the best way to go because with video obviously it's pretty straightforward to chunk that up into all the different types of content. That's part of it. So what I mean by that is imagine just like I'm doing right now, you record a 10 15 or 20 minute video, which you can then turn into a podcast by just stripping the Audio App, which you can then turn into a blog post by getting a transcript of the video or the audio and then putting that into a blog post. If you'd start with video, there's also different images you can pull outs is a lot more re purposing that you can do if you start with video. But if that's a hangup for you or if that's something you're just not comfortable with yet, pick the one where you're going to be comfortable and that you can be consistent in weekend week out creating interesting and original content for your target market and the topic that you have this expertise in. Because once you do that, what the idea of a content engine is, is having a team or a service or an agency who was going to take your raw content and break that out and distribute that into as many different formats and channels as you possibly can. Now, a lot of you may think, well, isn't going to be weird if my audience sees the exact same thing on youtube or in a podcast or in Facebook or all over Twitter, aren't they just going to see the same thing a hundred times in a week and the answer's definitely no. If you do this properly, you know the way my agency does or the way you might design yourself, you're not going to just plaster the exact same content on every channel that you have at exactly the same time. However, you do need to realize almost nobody, no matter how popular you are, has an audience that is looking at every single channel you have all the time constantly that would see the same thing posted most times. Most people have their preferred channel or two, that's where they're going to want to consume your content. And from there not even going to know that you may have something distributed on five other channels that's that's similar or the same. So the secret sauce that we use inside the agency is a, we offset when all these things are posted to these different channels and be, we help you figure out a way to record the content once but to have social networks specific introductions, calls to actions and endings and so forth so that the content is tailored towards each of the social networks because it really isn't all that effective to use exactly the same, let's say video across Facebook and youtube or an Instagram because the users on that network expect different things there on those networks for different reasons. So you may be able to use the same poor content, but just by making a few tweaks to it, you can actually tailor that more towards each particular network. And that's what creating your own content engine is all about. And that's one of the key elements that we help you with inside of my agency because it's very time consuming to do all that stuff yourself. To really do that, you need a designer, a video editor, a copywriter, somebody who's good with images and so forth, to be able to take your content, understand it, and then break it up into all these different chunks that are going to really perform on all of those social networks is definitely something you need to do to be successful and expert business. But it's not something, again, that you need to do yourself. Step seven in the expert business roadmap is greenlighting your traffic. So what we mean by this is now that you've got everything set up, your website, your funnels, you know your social media channels and your content engine is now pumping content into all of these different channels. And next thing you need to do is start scaling your audience. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, all you needed to do was to create content and then the audience would come to you, right? But these days there are so many different people publishing all the time that it's difficult to build an audience organically from scratch in a fast enough time where it's going to make sense for your expert business. We don't want you waiting around for a year or two years, three years, five years to be successful. We're trying to drive success inside of eight weeks, 12 weeks, 16 weeks, much, much faster. So there's not time in that model to just wait for the organic traffic to come, to wait for Google to index your stuff and make sure that people are getting there. So greenlighting your traffic means smart use of paid advertising to build your audience and your results faster to get them looking at your content, driving them towards your sales funnels and making actual sales and revenue as fast as possible. So the reason we do things in this order is because at this point you have a validated product. You've have had your sales funnel running for a couple of weeks, at least by the, you get to this step. You're already adjusting your product to be a better fit for your market. And your marketing to make that fit more apparent to your customers. Now is the time that you've, since you've had some success to start scaling by taking the revenue that you're generating from your initial sales and putting that into paid traffic strategies. So this could be Facebook ads, could be Google ads, could be you know, Instagram influencer, you know, outreach and stuff like that. The exact method will depend on your particular business and so forth. And that's something we work with you to figure out. But you are ready to do that at this point. And that's what's going to make your growth be, you know, potentially that much faster. So the idea with the paid strategies again is to get people aware of your products and services and your funnels and to start having there be that accelerator to your particular results. Step heat in the expert business roadmap is engaging your autopilot. So what I mean by that is taking advantage of all of the different types of automation that are out there to make all the day to day activities of creating your content, managing your team, running your expert business as efficient as possible. This is where you can start to remove yourself from some of these day to day activities so that you can continue to focus as much of your time as possible on creating content, creating better products and services, servicing or fulfilling on the sales that you have now. So if any kind of coaching or handholding or calls or masterminds or anything that requires you to be engaged in as are part of your product or service, you obviously have to free up your time to be able to fulfill on the stuff that you've sold to your customers. So engaging your autopilot is about doing a top to bottom view of your particular business and looking and figuring out how much of that can be automated and then getting that automation created. Now again, it's another thing that you don't have to do yourself and you shouldn't do yourself because most of you probably don't have that expertise. That's something again, that you should outsource. That's something that inside the agency, that's a huge focus of ours for a bunch of different reasons. It's good for the end customer because it makes their day to day more efficient and then it's good for my business to the more of that I can automate, the less people I have to hire. Right, and the more profitable the businesses to that principle of automation carries through the entire chain. You know that we're talking about here with expert businesses and these days you'd probably be surprised at how much stuff can be automated across all of these different tools and all of these different processes. The ideal state is again, you come in a couple of days a month, you create content record videos for a day or two, record audio for a day or two, and then once you upload those videos, a whole raft of automation should start up where it's going to trigger the fact that you know, those videos need to be split. Transcripts need to be created. All of the different steps that we've talked about. Much of that can be automated and then the parts that can't be automated, that's where you start thinking about outsourcing to people or contractors or agencies. So the ninth and final step on the expert business roadmap is team building to win. So by this point, we've gone through a lot in this process, all the way from your blueprint to your products and services to your funnels, getting your websites that of turning on your social channels, firing up your content engine, greenlighting your traffic, getting everything as automated as possible. The last step is the team building side of it. So that's finding the right set of contractors, employees, agencies, service providers, vendors, whatever that combination that you need to really start scaling your business. Now the interesting thing about the agency that I've set up is it's directly targeted towards people building their expert businesses from days zero up to about the second year of their business. Because the problem is it takes time in order for you to start generating revenue. But when you look at everything that needs to be done in an expert business, there's, you know, eight to 10 roles that are critical in having an expert business running. All of the people that hit seven figures have a team, they're not doing it themselves. So what does that team look like? Well, it almost always will include a virtual assistant, a project manager, or some kind of high level coordinator, almost a COO of the business designer, copywriter, video editor, Facebook marketing or Facebook or Google ads person, right? A support person or multiple support people to help fulfill on the products and services you're delivering. Maybe even a community manager if groups and community are a big part of your offering. So again, at scale, an expert business requires, you know, again between seven to 10 people at a minimum to be able to generate, you know, seven figures and beyond. So here's the problem. Almost none of us, unless you're very independently route wealthy, are able to afford a 10 person team before you start generating revenue. Okay? You didn't go to a certain point bootstrapping trying to do everything yourself, but if you're bootstrapping, it's going to take you two or three years to even hit six figures, let alone seven or eight. The trick is getting enough revenue to be able to pay to get things outsourced so that you can scale your business quicker. Now that challenge the days zero to two year to the getting to six figures so that you can then afford the the team to get to seven and beyond. That's exactly the reason why I stood up the expert business agency. So what we have is basically a shared team type of model. So I hire the whole team, right? The 10 people, the 20 people, whatever that takes e with expertise in each of those areas. And then my customers share that team from day zero up to day one or two for however long they stay in our program and for however long they stay a customer of the agency. So that gets past that chicken and the egg problem of I don't have enough revenue to build my own team. You don't have to do that. You're paying a fraction of the price because you're getting shared access to a team that that already exists. And that I use for multiple customers. So that's one of the keys. Now, how my model is not to trap everybody inside of our agency permanently. So there is a phase of the development once you get into seven figures where it starts making sense for you to build your own direct team. So when I say team building to win as the final step, that means doing the preparation to be able to have your own team, the roles, the job descriptions, the processes and procedures to be able to give to those people when you hire them so that they're productive from day one. All of the different elements of hiring people, managing people, collaborating amongst your team and yourself. That's where we want our agency customers to be able to succeed enough that they graduate into doing that themselves. And we'd let them then take all of our processes and procedures and basically we share everything we use with our customers that are going to graduate to that level so they can start building their own teams. So that's the final step in scale is building out that team. And where that gets fun is then you can decide how much of the business you want to remain involved with. So if you're really into this particular space and you liked the products and services and your customer base, then you can continue to be as hands on as you want. But if you want to start stepping back, live in that kind of independent, you know, financially free lifestyle where you only want to work a couple of days a week or a couple of days a month, now you can start doing that because of the automation outsourcing and the team building that you've not. So that's what's key to this whole model. The whole steps from step one all the way up to step nine is doing those things in the right order so that you can be as successful as possible, as fast as possible. So there you have it. The nine steps to building your own expert business starts with building your expert business blueprint. Then productizing your skills and expertise, firing up your funnels and validating your products and services and getting some initial revenue powering up your website to give yourself an online headquarters to point everybody back to turning on your social channels. You have outposts and people coming into and learning about your solutions, creating your content engine, which is turning on and building content that gets distributed through all of your social media outlets that drive people back to your website, into your sales funnels and into your products and services. Then greenlighting your traffic utilizing paid traffic strategies, using the revenue that you're building up from your initial sales to accelerate your growth. Once you greenlight your traffic, then it's time to thinking about engaging your autopilot, automating your business, making things more efficient. Getting it to the point so that you can focus mostly on creating products and services and the content that's going to pull people in and then finally team building to win. Now that your business is up and running and successful things are automated, it may be time to start building your team out further so that you can scale out and accelerate your growth even faster. Those are the nine steps that we've reverse engineered from multiple successful six, seven and even eight figure online entrepreneurs and how they've built their expert businesses. It's also what we've designed our entire agency around is getting people through those nine steps as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now obviously in this episode, we've gone through these pretty quickly, right? There's a ton of detail and information and best practices and expertise and so forth behind each of those steps. So what I'd like to encourage you to do is go over to expert business roadmap.com if you want to get a copy of the roadmap itself, the nine steps, and then also a special bonus video, a bonus training video that I've put in there that goes a little bit deeper into each of these steps. So you're probably thinking, well yeah, this kind of made sense. You know, the titles make sense a little bit. I understand the importance of the order, but I'd really like to know a little bit more about what does fire up your funnels mean or what does a content engine look like. If you go over to our and download our free roadmap, you're going to be able see the visual, see all the steps in there and some detail, and then also you'll get access to a training video that we do that goes into a little bit more detail in each of those steps. So again, that's available over@expertbusinessroadmap.com hey, thanks for joining me on the build your expert business show. Please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. The key to building your own expert business is following a proven blueprint. After two years, $50,000 of research and working with over 20 successful expert business owners, I've created what I believe to be the most valuable resource that I possibly could for you, the exact blueprint for how to build your own expert business. To learn more head over tech expert business blueprint.com. Scroll back to top Sign up to receive email updates Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast. powered by

In this episode, we’re going to cover the third and final secret to building your own expert business and that has had a skip the cost, time and learning curve and build your own expert business and as little as eight weeks… Today we’re going to talk about the third secret to building your own expert business. In previous episodes, we talked about how knowledge or expertise can be used to build an expert business. We also talked about how your knowledge, your expertise as it exists today, may already qualify you as an expert able to build an expert business. Today we’re going talk about how to skip the learning curve and rapidly build your own expert business in as little as eight weeks in some cases. So most people think that it costs, hundreds of thousands of dollars, takes dozens of people, lots of complex tools and technology in order to be able to build a business. We’re talking about something that’s capable of generating that six or seven figures or even more. When I started building my own expert business, I was just like everybody else. I fell into what I call Shiny Object Syndrome. I was thinking that I needed to learn all of these different tools and technologies, learn all these things about marketing and advertising and email and you know, tools and all these different things. I felt like in order to build my business, I had to first go learn all of these things and then figure out how to implement them and then slowly just start setting up all of these different things that you need for expert business. The problem with that is that takes months, years, tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to do. So what happens is a lot of people think, okay, well I need to go out and buy courses on all of these different things. So if I want to build a blog, I need to go buy a course on blogging and learn how to do that and learn WordPress and all this technology. Dive into the this episode and learn why that’s the biggest mistake you could make! (and what you should do instead)… Transcript

In this episode. I’m going to cover the second of three secrets to success for building your own expert business. How your knowledge already qualifies you as an expert… Today we’re going to cover the second out of three secrets to success for building your own expert business, and today’s secret is how your specific knowledge positioned with the right customers already qualifies you as an expert. Some people think that being an expert means, you know, being a doctor or a lawyer, someone with a huge amount of credentials or 30 years of experience in an industry or all kinds of different certifications or other things that bless them or bestow them with expert status. That you have to be like in the top one, two or three or even 10 in your particular field or industry to be categorized or qualified as an expert. A lot of people think that somebody else decides who an expert is, whether it’s some kind of governing board or standards body or certifications or you know, just the people that you report to in your corporate career. Let’s break that down a little bit. Transcript Email

In today’s episode, we’re going to cover the first of three secrets to success in building your own expert business. Secret number one is the expert business model itself. How knowledge and expertise can be used to build a seven figure automated expert business. Some people think that it’s impossible to make six, seven, or even eight figures in online business that it’s all smoke and mirrors, rented Lamborghini’s and private jets and all kinds of fake, nonsense. Or that only a few people can really ever be successful or that it’s limited to just a handful of people that are, that are real outliers. Here’s what I discovered is when I decided to create a virtual summit and started interviewing dozens of successful online expert business owners. I began putting together lists of people that I wanted to potentially. I was trying to, thinking to myself, well, how many successful people could there be out there? My bar was really anybody that was full time doing an expert business either by they’re still employed or, or on the side, but basically putting full time effort into it and was making at least six figures a year from their expert business. So I thought it might take me a couple of days or a week to find the 10 or 20 people that I wanted to interview there. But once I started doing that research, it was actually pretty easy to find a lot of people that we’re reaching those levels of success. So I was pretty quickly able to get to the, 20 or so that I wanted to interview for that particular virtual summit. It actually only that one sent me an hour or two to discover over a hundred people that fit those categories and was more time. I’m sure I could have found a few thousand at least. So in the end I found a lot of people that were building expert businesses. And then obviously the next question was, well, how are they getting to six and seven figures and beyond? Transcript

We left off in the previous episode where I mentioned something called the power pyramid, which outlines the types of income levels that are available to you at the different paths you might take from both the corporate world up to building your own expert business. Now at the bottom of that pyramid is basically just being employed. Okay. It’s obviously better than being unemployed, but if you’re just employed, that means you have a job, it’s paying you something, but generally your income level is going to be capped out, right? Maybe you can make 50k, 75k or if you really lucky maybe even up to $100k a year in some kind of a corporate job. But one of the biggest things that I talk to people I mentor about is the difference between a job and a skill and the difference between a skill and a career. Okay. So just having a job is step one. I mean obviously you got to get there before you can do anything else. Then developing a skill that is useful is the next step that you should do, right? That’s what separates you just from anybody that could be interchanged into the position that you have. Transcript Email