3 Things Every Thought Leader Must Do To Maximize Their Income

Peter Winick

While authors, speakers and thought leaders tend to be more different than alike in many ways, from a revenue generation perspective things are not that complicated. You can have wide ranges of speaking styles from motivational to improvisational, comedic, Socratic and so on. Writing styles can vary as well. Dry and academic, anecdotal, autobiographical to analytical. But when it comes to generating revenue there are only 3 things that all authors, speakers and thought leaders can do.

3-things-every-thought-leader-must-do-to-maximize-income

Do more of what you're doing.

For many, they are not at capacity or near capacity. They speak (a little), consult (a bit) and do some workshops as well as advisory work. However they are not generating either sufficient revenue or the revenue they can easily handle. For these folks the focus usually needs to be on sales and marketing and making sure they have systems and processes in place to handle inbound queries effectively. If you aren’t at capacity (however you define capacity) that’s where you need to focus.

Do higher value work.

For many, they are at capacity from a time or bandwidth standpoint so doing more isn’t a solution. They have to figure out how to generate more for the equivalent inputs. In some instances it means moving upstream. For example, move your content from a “training” solution to a business solution. Focus on leaders instead of managers or managers instead of the front line. It’s amazing how solid content can and does extract more value for the thought leader in direct proportion to the value the client can benefit from it. It’s about positioning and packaging your work in ways that maximize value creation. It’s also OK to move away from markets that have served you well in the past but which you may have outgrown as you’ve evolved and developed your skills and content.

Digitize!

The ultimate way to scale and leverage your content is to digitize it. The limiting constraint is you! You can only be in one place at one time and at the enterprise level the client is far more interested in a consistent and scalable solution then they are in a personality based offering. There are multiple formats and modalities that content can be ported into. There are assessments, diagnostic tools, train the trainer solutions, video enabled e-learning. The list is almost endless. Ideally you create something (that is of high quality and that has been validated from a learning efficacy perspective) and you sell it in multiple ways to multiple markets. You can reach more people, have a far greater impact and increase your income exponentially.