Ep. 176 How to make money as an expert

*Resources mentioned during the episode*

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How to make money as an expert

Transcript:

Hello there. Welcome back. This is Anna Lundberg speaking to you and I want to take you through three ways to make money as an expert today. Simple. So the reason I’m coming to this topic at the moment is that first of all, it’s my third pillar of my five pillars of building a life outside the nine to five. So choosing the right business model, I’m going to talk you through these three different business models. Although as ever of course, they can be combined and built upon. The second reason is that I’ve had a lot of people recently, I’ve been doing lots of calls and conversations and dialogue to understand what people are struggling with. And I’m getting more and more people getting stuck at that first hurdle, which is, I just don’t know what to focus on. I’ve got too many of ideas. I don’t have any ideas.

How do I choose the right thing?

So again, I want to really help you understand a few core options in a way, the easiest options, although nothing’s ever easy, easy in the sense that these are businesses, where you can literally take your skills, your hard skills, soft skills, personality, strengths, and preferences, expertise experience. You can package that up and sell it right away, meaning you don’t need a massive VC investment. You don’t need to have lots of co-founders. You probably don’t want co-founders. You don’t need to invest loads in inventory and storage and products and prototypes and all these things. It’s literal. You, you are the business, personal brand business expert. You are it, which is exciting and also puts pressure on you, of course, but that’s what, uh, that’s what makes it exciting. As I always say scary and exciting comes together, but it’s in my experience.

The, and again, I hesitate to use the word easiest, but let’s say the smoothest transition out your corporate full-time employment into working for yourself. So three options I want to talk you through today. Number one is to do it for them. And obviously it and them are to be defined, but you’re going to do something for someone you are actually going to provide a service where you are delivering a finished product, let’s say, so that’s number one. Do it for them is to teach them how to do it. So you’re going to give them the information, the tools, the steps, the processes, to learn, how to do it themselves. And the third one is to guide them through it. So you’re going to give, use your expertise and knowledge and support them through implementation through actually getting the results and then letting them sail off into the sunset afterwards.

Right? So those are the three options I want to talk to you about. Now. I’ve said it and them, and as I said, to some extent, I’m assuming that you know what it and them are, but let’s break that down before we go into them. So it is something that you are good at. It’s something that you enjoy. It’s something that you really can see yourself doing for the next X number of years, right? So I’ve talked before about this idea of your purpose and your icky guy, which is a whole other episode. And I’ll link to that and just message me if you don’t know where it is on any social channel, you can email me@podcastatonestepoutside.com, however, understanding what you’re good at, what you enjoy, the difference you want to make in the world essentially. Right? But really look at your experience, look at your work experience of course, but not just your current look beyond your current role to your previous experiences.

Look beyond the job title and job description, digging into, especially the softer skills.

You know, again, I have another episode on this, but all the experience you’ve had from negotiating presenting, pitching project, managing some of those things, you might hate some of them you might love, and I’d suggest you go in the direction of the love rather than the hate, but there are so many aspects, so many nuances to your work, this role, previous roles, volunteering roles, uh, personal hobbies, you know, things you’ve done at your kid’s schools, whatever it is, outside extracurricular as well, right? Think really creatively about what you could do, but let’s assume that we kind of know your experience, your expertise, right? So you are an amazing writer or brand manager or designer, whatever that is. Let’s again, look at the, the phrasing. I said, so I said, do it.

And then I said, for them, the them is who you go going to do it for. And again, I’m afraid that’s a whole other episode, but you are doing this. You are selling this to someone, right? So understanding who your client’s going to be, understanding whose problems you’re going to solve, understanding how you can add value. And they need to be able to see the value, appreciate the value, be willing to best in your solution, but let’s not complicate things. I wanted this to be super simple. So let’s look at the three options. So number one, do it for them. Number two, teach them how to do it. Number three, guide them on doing it. So the first one do it for them. You’re providing a service. You are going to be a freelancer, essentially, possibly a contractor. You’ll be a freelance designer, copywriter brand strategist.

You’re actually delivering a piece of work, a logo, a brand kit, a, uh, blog post, a set of emails, copy for somebody’s website, a brand strategy, peer Reid, a content strategy, whatever that is, right. You’re providing that service. In fact, virtual assistance, admin services could go in there too, right? So you are providing a service. And in fact, again, using that word a little bit, tentatively easy, this is the easiest thing to do. First, you start by actually doing it for them. You just offer, Hey, I can do this for you. So something you were doing in your job before you can now do it for external clients. This assumes again, not to complicate things, but this assumes that either there’s a, a, um, not a conflict of interest, of course, with your current job or you’ve left your job. But, but I’m saying again, in simple terms, you can deliver this for someone externally.

Secondly, is teaching them how to do it.

So teaching them is something that a lot of people jump on, but in the form of let’s say delivering a course or even an ebook or a guide or thing, but really obviously a course is the thing that’s going to, you know, with multimedia video, audio, PDFs, whatever guide people on really learning something. That’s great. However, generally, because you are, you are just providing that information. You are not getting involved. You’re not necessarily giving them tailored support. It’s not really your time. Hence the attraction for you. That means probably that the price is going to be lower, their results. Aren’t going to be as impressive because there are stats on, you know, how many people actually start a course that late and finish. And, and unfortunately they’re not very good, but you can teach them how to do it.

So you can teach early stage startups, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs to do their own social media graphics. You can actually then sell them templates, right? That they could use in can, let’s say a free tool where you can design and do your social media posts. Let’s say Instagram or whatever. Uh, you can teach them how to do a simple ebook, in fact, so you can teach them how to do something. And that could be live. In fact, it doesn’t have to be prerecorded. It could be completely self-directed on the membership site. You could go via an existing course platform where you put your course and it gets sort of sold for you. But that’s one, the second option, teaching people how to do something. And then the third one is guiding them, meaning more the consulting coaching area. Again, you’re really focusing on imple implementation. You’re, you’re setting them up for success.

So if you’re going to, uh, sort of slice this, I guess, in, in a poetic way, let’s say number one, do it for them. That’s done for you, right? Done for you. Service. Number two is done by you. And number three is done with you. That’s the one, isn’t it so done for you done by you and done with you, the, you being the client. Now, of course you could do all three and it’s easy to go. Oh, why can’t do all three? Of course you can. You just can’t do them all three right away. So I would recommend that you start with actually done for you, then you upsell to done with you. So look, I can do it for you, but actually I find that it’s much better to involve you in the process. So let’s have a brainstorming, a creative brainstorm. Let’s have a workshop with your team.

I’ll provide you the framework. I’ll give you exercise. We’ll come together. I will refine. And so on. Right? So done with you. And then you can down sell to a course where if they can’t afford to pay you to do it, or they can’t afford to, to pay you to work alongside them, then they can actually learn how to do it themselves. And they could be different audiences, of course, but that’s a pretty good ecosystem of products you’ve got there. So to make this a little bit less, uh, sort of theoretical and conceptual. When I started, when I left my job, I was effectively, I call myself a marketing consultant, but effectively I became almost a contract or a freelancer because I’d come into the corporate roles I was doing to do the digital strategy. The training, I designed the trainings, I ran the training workshops.

I oversaw and managed the website re stayed redesigned relaunch, e-commerce launch and so on for clients. Then I gradually moved into a more coachy role in marketing that was more virtual, more online, smaller scale, where I was very much doing the done with you. Just checking in there, done with you. I dunno why that’s so hard done with you. Meaning that I was doing exactly. As I just mentioned now, I was saying, okay, this is the brand framework. These are the questions than want you to answer. Let’s go through it and then come back and I’ll give you feedback. Is that clear enough? Is it distinctive versus your competition and so on? Right. Ultimately I then moved into more of a personal development careers, focused area with my coaching. And then now as we record in March, April, 2022, I am finalising. And hopefully in fact, when this episode gets up, it will be ready.

I’m finalising a self-directed course, which is finally after many years of building an audience and honing my process and so on is going to really consolidate and bring together the things that I have been teaching, the things that I have been coaching people on, the things that I’ve been using in my own business and like life. So I hope that kind of populates the model as it were. So again, starting out by delivering a service then possibly moving into, okay, I’m not just gonna deliver, I’m actually going to support you in terms of implementing it longer term, and then ultimately, perhaps it down selling to teaching. So I, Hey, that’s clear. I feel like I went off a little bit, uh, conceptually there again, it was supposed to be super simple, three ways to make money as an expert, you can do it for them.

You can do the service for them. You can teach them how to do it, or you can guide them how to do it.

So how do you decide what to do again? You can longer term and, and it might not, it might even be a good idea to longer term do all three, but you want to prioritise and start with one. Um, I’d really spend at least a year on the first and then, you know, move into the second and third and so on. So really think about again, what you’re good at and what you enjoy. And this is not just the subject matter. So it’s not just, oh, I like to write, I like to design, but really thinking about how you’re going to deliver it. So do you really enjoy working closely with people alongside them, seeing the project from start to finish, then, you know, probably you’re gonna want to do the done with you because that’s me coming into the office.

I’m part of the team. I’m getting that dynamic, the group dynamic that you don’t often get when you’re working by yourself at home and you are really following it from a to edge, right. The project. And in fact, you know, with, with companies, with B2B, that’s a great model as well. You come in and, and support them. And then you can, you even upsell them to ongoing implementation and so on. If you love working from home, you want to be, you know, very flexible in terms of when and how you work and so on, then possibly be done for you. You know, somebody briefs, you, you have a call, then you go off and do your thing, and then you come back, you deliver it, boom done. And then of was the ultimate. So-called passive. If you do a passive self-directed course would be if you like to teach.

And in fact that’s live as well as, as we’ve recorded again, if you really like that, teaching people to do things, if you have that kind of educational pull, if you love putting together presentations or doing workshops homeworks and things like that, or again, if you really want that more passive income, if you want to do a recorded course, then that would be something to you again, though, that last one assumes that, you know what you’re talking about, you validated your ideas, not to mention that you have an audience to sell that course to. So again, I would suggest that that comes later in your business development, but really think about again, okay, I can do the interior design for you. I can support you, guide you on making the right choices and, and be there for you through the process, or I can teach you how to do it.

So let me know what you think of that. If you have any ideas, hands of what you’d want to do, if you have any follow up questions, which I’m sure you do again, you can get in touch on any social channel. Join us, say in the Facebook group where we’re going to be doing deep dive trainings on these topics as ever. And of course you can always reach me@podcastatonestepoutside.com. So I hate that was useful. Three ways to make money as an expert. Again, the so-called easy ways, the smooth ways of transitioning out of your corporate job and into monetizing that business right away. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you next week. Bye for now.

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