Transforming a Practice to a Business

Peter Winick here, and today I wanted to talk to you about making the transformation from running a practice to having a business.

So first, let me define what a practice is: a practice is when both you and your content need to be in the same place at the same time for you to be monetizing it. Practices are things like speaking, like workshops, like consulting. Lawyers have practices, doctors have practices, consultant’s have practices, it’s a pretty traditional way of doing business. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s not that they’re good, they just don’t scale very well.

Having a business is when your content, your intellectual property, is making money, is being leveraged, is being monetized, and it’s not contingent on your presence. So, these are things like licensing your content to others to deliver, these are things like E-learning in video platforms, these are things like assessment tools, these are things like training programs that are delivered by other people. In a business, you’re not the one delivering the content, you are the creator of the content. Your content is being leveraged, being monetized, and you don’t have to be at the same place at the same time.

What I want you to think about is, as a thought leader, how do I start transforming what is, typically in my experience, a practice to a business? Businesses have a much higher value, businesses can be exited, people don’t buy practices—entities buy businesses. 

So, starting that process there’s a few things that you need to do.

First, you need to take an inventory of what it is that you have; what are the assets that you have created—not just recently, not just the ones you’re thinking about creating over the next six or twelve months, what have you created over the last five, ten, fifteen years? What format does it live in, and what format can it live in? How can you transform that into different mediums and modalities? How can you introduce it to new markets, globally, domestically? Different manager levels inside an organization; what can you do with that?

The last piece is really finding those partners that can help you monetize. That have the right distribution, the right technology, the right delivery mechanisms in place to help you monetize.

It doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s not necessarily an easy process, but you can transform your practice into a business, thanks.