Are you creating or monetizing?

Transcript

Hi there, it’s Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and here’s the thought that I’d like to share with you today, and that’s this: in my work with authors, thought leaders, academics, speakers, consultants, etc., one of the things that I always ask early on is some questions around where they spend their time, and then I also ask some questions around where the issues and problems are in their business.

Nine times out of ten, the results I get back are something along the lines of this: “I spend a lot of time creating thought leadership. I love to do the research; I love to write; I love to speak; I love refining the ideas; I love polishing the models and validating tools and all that sort of stuff. I love the creation.” Cool. The problems are in the monetization of the intellectual property, of the thought leadership, of the health and state of the business.

Okay, so if the problems are over here and we’re spending our time over here, it becomes clear why it’s a problem. And I’m not advocating that as a thought leader you don’t spend time creating great stuff; that’s the core, that’s the essence of probably who you are and what you do best. But what I am suggesting is that you need to spend the time, the effort, and the energy thinking about sales, marketing, distribution, strategic partnerships, productization, how you get your stuff out into the marketplace, how people pay you the most that you can extract in terms of value for your work in a consistent way.

Creating new stuff before you’ve cracked the code on how to monetize kind of the old stuff or the existing stuff is really a bit futile. So anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where you are and where your problems lie and what you might do differently to close that gap. Thank you.