Are you tired of customising every single client project and feeling like scaling your expert business is impossible? In this episode, Anna Lundberg reveals why every independent expert needs a signature method to grow sustainably, and how developing your own intellectual property (IP) can elevate your confidence, perceived value, and income. If you want to stop trading hours for money and start building a stand-out business, this conversation is your essential guide.

Key moments:

[00:00] Introduction: The problem with scaling custom client work

[02:31] Why a signature process matters for experts and founders

[04:24] How a defined methodology increases confidence and value

[05:35] Transitioning from freelancer to thought leader using frameworks

[07:33] Well-known signature methods and how they work

[08:14] What makes a great process: Simplicity, transformation, and flexibility

[10:09] How to uncover your existing process and start naming it

[13:13] Steps for building your signature method and next actions

Resources mentioned:

• The Business Accelerator Programme: OneStepOutside.com/accelerate.
• Anna’s 5 pillars book: Outside of the 9 to 5
• Connect with Anna Lundberg: Get in touch on Instagram or LinkedIn.
• Daniel Priestley
• Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO Podcast
• Brené Brown
• Donald Miller

Defining your signature process

This one’s for you if you keep hearing you need to scale, but scaling feels impossible because every single client engagement is custom, every piece of work is bespoke. If you want a smarter, more sustainable way to grow, then your signature process may well be the missing piece. Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. Hi, I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility and the fulfilment you’re looking for, ready to redefine success and build a business that you love. Let’s get started.

Okay, we’re talking intellectual property today, and I’m not talking about registering trademarks and so on, although that could be part of the process. But that’s not the important piece. The point is that clients buy your method, not your minutes. Isn’t that catchy? So we’re looking at having a signature process rather than, you know, charging by the hour or saying, hey, we’re going to do three months of coaching or I’m going to be on a retainer for this, that and the other. You know, the power in having a signature process and having that IP as an asset. So this is what we’ll be diving into today. Quick heads up that the doors of the accelerator are opening for our June intakes. This is the second intake of 2025.

Can’t quite believe it, but there you go. We’re looking forward to bringing on new people to our little group. The business Accelerator is my signature programme for founders, solopreneurs who are looking to build their expert business a little bit differently, with strategy, sustainably and with integrity. So if you’re interested in that and if you’ve been listening in the last, well, weeks, months, however much you’ve been listening to the podcast have been resonating. I’d love to have a chat with you to see if it’s the right fit. You can go to onestepoutside.com accelerate to read more and to apply either to join if the doors are open when you’re listening to this episode, or to apply to join the wait list for the next time we open our doors. We’d love to have you Looking forward to chatting. So back to this method, not minutes, topic for today.

So many Brilliant consultants, coaches, creatives I work with are finding themselves in this loop that every proposal is custom, every client experience feels slightly different, and we’re stuck kind of selling our time, not our thinking, constantly reinventing the wheel. And I think, and I mentioned this, if not last week, then the week before, about being in love with our work. It’s so nuanced that it’s like, I couldn’t possibly standardise this. It’s so bespoke to the organisation, to the culture, to their objectives, to the individual and their situation and so on. Yes. But if you’re totally bespoke, which I don’t think you are, if. Then let’s dig into this. But if you’re completely bespoke every time, reinventing the wheel, you cannot scale, you cannot delegate anything, and you’re going to be always doubting about, you know, whether this is enough.

Every time you deliver a keynote, it’s going to be different. And every time you do a workshop, oh, my gosh, I don’t know if this is the right thing. You never craft. You never really get super good at a particular methodology, a particular way of doing things. Right. So I guess the good news is that I’m pretty sure you already have a process, you just haven’t necessarily named it yet. So let’s look at how we can reframe our expertise as IP and why it’s important. What are we even talking about here? So, as I said, it’s not about legal registering.

I’m not a legal advisor. I do have a couple of my methods formally registered as trademarks in the uk. It’s not super complex, it can be expensive, depending on what you want to cover, and it could be a good idea in some cases. However, that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about defining and articulating what the method is. This is your way of doing things. What’s that going to do for you? Well, it’s going to instantly increase your confidence because, hey, I’ve got this methodology, I know exactly what I’m doing. I know that these are the steps.

You’re going to have more clarity and you’re going to have greater perceived value. So you’re not a freelancer, you’re a founder, let’s say that. And you’re not just delivering a service, you’re, dare I say the word, a thought leader. So instead of, like, here’s what I offer three calls of this and hours of that and blah, blah, blah, here’s the proven path. I guide my clients through step one, two, three, Renee Brown has her daring leadership framework. Donald Miller, you haven’t heard of him. He’s great, has his story, brand, method. Anna Lindberg, have you heard of her? She has her five pillars and many other methods as well.

I’ve got my intentional business triad, I’ve got some work that I do more with organisations around the ambidextrous leader and so on. Right, so these are models that are anchoring your thinking and client experience. And in fact I have, you know, both. Let’s take the five pillars example. They structure my whole book outside the nine to five. It’s five sections on the five pillars. So the five pillars itself is a model, but then each of those pillars has then sort of a double clicked layer, if not multiple layers of smaller models within those models. These frameworks aren’t just marketing tools, they’re delivery tools.

They’re going to help you deliver, whether it’s a coaching programme, a workshop series, a keynote talk, whatever it is, it’s going to facilitate, enable, make it a whole lot more fun. That process of drawing on your methodology and translating that into a particular delivery method. It’s also a pricing tool and as I said, it’s a confidence tool. It’s like, yeah, I’ve got this thing, I can help you. These are the steps, these are the pillars. When you name and own your method, a few things going to happen. One, and I’m pretty much guaranteeing this, you’re going to stop undercharging because again, you’re not trading hours, you’re delivering a transformation. My own, this, this is the result, this is what I help you do.

Boom, boom, boom. You’re going to attract more aligned clients because they can see themselves in your process and they can trust it. They’re like, oh, yeah, I can see this working for me. This really resonates and I can see that I would get results from it. You’re going to build trust more quickly again because people believe in those systems. Oh, let me tell you these, these steps again. Daniel Priestley, if you’re not familiar with him, some people aren’t outside of the uk. He’s actually from Australia originally.

I followed him many years ago, but he’s kind of exploded onto the scene now thanks to being on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast. But he’s all about these frameworks. He has his five Ps for the KPI, he has his name, fame, game, same name something or other framework. You know, every time I see a video, every time he does a Podcast, he’s like, yeah, these are the five things, these are the three things, these are the two Ps, these are the 10xs and it’s such an easy, memorable thing. And you know, no shade on him because he is amazing and I think he is a credible experts and he doesn’t need me to say that anyway, he is what he is. But these aren’t necessarily, you know, there’s nothing new under the sun, right? I have versions of that as well. Far, far smaller scale than his massive empire. But you don’t have to say things that are completely new.

You probably shouldn’t say something that’s completely new because then it will be so far from people’s reality they won’t understand. But it’s your spin on things, right? It’s your particular way of doing an elevator pitch or discovering your North Star and your care or whatever it is. Okay, so what goes into a great signature process? Well, as ever, it doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, the simpler it is, the better. A solid framework is typically going to have a, typically going to have, gosh, a clear before and after. That’s the transformation. It creates some kind of distinct phases. It could be chronological phases, step 1, 2, 3, or it could be principles, pillars that are guiding the journey.

And it does need to have flexibility to adapt, right? It has structure to anchor the delivery, but then of course, flexibility to adapt. And within coaching, if you are a coach, you will have probably studied and even if you’re not, you may be familiar from your own corporate work. What are they called coaching frameworks? Like GROW was a traditional one, you know, and, and it’s often an acronym and then it’s okay, you set your goal and you do this and the other and it’s the steps, right? It’s a kind of cookie cutter to some extent. But setting your goal is just a very high level action. And of course then what that means is that with every client you then set a specific goal and that’s going to guide the rest of the process. So it’s very flexible, but it’s structured and that you know that you have to first set the goal before you go on to whatever it is. So think of it kind of like a map, right? It helps both you and your clients know where you are and also where you’re going. And you might start by asking, okay, what do I do almost every time with almost every client? When I first started my coaching many years ago, I did one to one coaching, but after a while I realised hang On a second.

I seem to be helping them do the same thing. I seem to be helping them clarify them what their values are and then I’m going to help them overcome their limiting beliefs and then I’m going to help them develop the business model. Right. So then I mapped out what became the five pillars further down the line. So what am I doing almost every time with almost every client? What are the questions that I always ask them and the questions that they always ask me? Right, but what are the things I need to know from them? And what principles am I bringing into the room? If you find, you know that you’re always saying, oh, but I always say you put the what before the why. Or yeah, you have to go with the values. Or Stephen Covey said, you know, first things first, or seek first to understand, then to be understood, even if you’re not naming them and they’re not so fancy pants yet. What are the principles that you kind of believe in? And we talked last week about having a point of view and so that can be really powerful as well.

What principles are you bringing to the table? So again, your method is probably already there. It just needs language, it needs structure and you need, like to put that TM symbol on there just to demonstrate, this is my model. It needs, you know, acronyms, it needs alliteration, it needs something to make it feel like, you know, the 3Pmethod or whatever it is. So I hope I made the business case here for creating your ip. Obviously it’s not as simple as just saying, hey, step one, two, three. I, I suppose I should have a signature method for developing your signature method. Hold my beer. I’ll just go off and create that right now.

But this is about feeling confident, right? That’s part of it. But it’s more than that. It’s actually a growth strategy because when you can articulate your process again, you can build more scalable offers. My one to one coaching then became the business Academy, the business incubator. It can become a group programme because you’re walking people through the same steps in theory or in practise. You could actually then go into licencing because you have your methodology that you could then teach associates. You could be a train, the trainer, you can licence it to organisations and so on. You can delegate delivery more easily.

So then you’re disconnecting yourself from the delivery which you may or may not want to do. You can certainly create stronger marketing assets as a result and again importantly, increase your perceived value and of course price accordingly. So, and this is what we do inside the business accelerator. I know I joked about not having a signature framework. Of course I have exercises and frameworks you can move through to develop your signature process. We can also do that in a more deep dive, one to one coaching session. But if you want help, not just in marketing your work, but really designing a business around your unique way of doing it, then do get in touch. You can apply to the accelerator@onestepasside.com accelerate.

That’s the best step, to be honest, because you’ll be asked some questions around your business and then we’ll have a call anyway. But if you aren’t sure, if you’re not at all interested in the acceleration, you want to work with me one to one. You can also book that call directly@onestepoutside.com call simples. Okay, so as I said, you know, if you’re circling this idea, refining a method, building a more scalable offer around your expertise, do get in touch. But if nothing else, when you leave, why don’t you grab a pen and paper if you can, or by all means, sort of just reflect as you’re out walking the dog, going for a run, having a bath, whatever it is, and think, what were the steps I took my last client through? What are the things that I stand for? What are the things? Oh, you’ve got to get clear on your purpose before you do anything else. Or, oh, no, first you have to get the system in place or first you have to have awareness, then you can take action, you know, play around with those words and then of course we can look at, okay, how do we visually represent that in a diagram or something? And can we find a better word to name it? Is there an ownable name for the whole thing? But that’s just, you know, semantics. That’s just the icing on the cake. The core power comes from this signature process or methodology that you’re going to own and really stand from.

People will come to you to work with you because you’re the only person who takes people or companies or whatever it is through that process. So I hope this sparks something for you. Love to hear what, what IP and methodologies you’re creating do. Get in touch and I’ll see you next week when I believe we have another interview for you and it’s a good one. So see you then. Bye for now. In the business accelerator, we do things a little differently. This is my signature programme for independent experts who are ready to grow sustainably, strategically and with integrity.

If you want more income and more freedom, but without the hustle, the hype, or the one size fits all formulas. Then you can learn more and join us at onestepoutside.com accelerate. Register your interest or join the waitlist at onestepoutside.com/accelerate.

In the Business Accelerator, we do things a little differently. This is my signature programme for independent experts who are ready to grow sustainably, strategically and with integrity. If you want more income and more freedom, but without the hustle, the hype or the one-size-fits-all formulas, then you can learn more and join us at onestepoutside.com forward/accelerate. Register your interest or join the waitlist at onestepoutside.com/accelerate.

WORK WITH ANNA

Let us help you design a business and a life that gives you freedom from the 9 to 5. There are several options for how you can work with us. Choose the programme that’s right for you.

The Outsiders Business Accelerator

A mastermind for service-based business owners, freelancers and online entrepreneurs who are ready to achieve success on their own terms. onestepoutside.com/accelerate

The Outsiders Business Academy

A self-paced course for you to work through in your own time, to learn – and implement – the foundations of building a profitable business that lets you escape the 9 to 5. onestepoutside.com/course

1:1 Coaching & Mentoring

If you’re looking for one-to-one support to help you achieve your specific life and business goals, Anna has a limited number of spots for individual coaching and mentoring. onestepoutside.com/coaching