Productising your knowledge is the best only way to leverage your expertise.
Chances are you’ve spent years obsessing over your craft to become the brilliant expert you are today. No doubt it’s taken sweat, determination and solid hard graft along the way. Now it’s time to bank that knowledge.
Now the bad news, hope you’re sitting down.
You’re under attack. Knowledge experts in all their forms, subject matter experts, coaches, authors, speakers, consultants and more are under attack like never before.
A decade or so ago Doctors, Accountants, and Lawyers were considered to be amongst the very best jobs. Reliable, high earning, stable careers – every mothers dream. But that’s all changing…
Doctors:
More people are reaching for google and other web services than visiting the doctor than ever. The web service WebMD for one example is huge, and was sold for $2.8 billion (Billion with a B). There are some huge game-changing medical services coming down the pipe that is going to shake up the whole industry even more.
Accountants:
New banks like Monzo are managing people’s finances in ways that ‘banks’ have never done before, automatically storing enough money for tax, simplify financial matters significantly.
Other digital services are sweeping up jobs throughout the world – Xero is just one example has 1.386 million subscribers.
Lawyers:
AskALawyer among others, offers free leal services – Free! This is an industry just waiting for massive disruption. And it’s coming fast.
And the list goes on.
Tech
Technology allows the delivery of information, instantly, any where That is no small thing. So if you’re in the knowledge delivery business, as I said before – you are under attack.
So it’s time to fight back, but how? How can we stop the incessant march of technology?
We can’t. Instead we must embrace it, and use it!
Product. Product. Product.
It’s a land grab. Digital technology has fundamentally changed the ratio, there are no geographical barriers any more.
Even if you are choosing to only serve a local audience, using traditional business models (I’m trying to be polite I was tempted to say out-of-date if I’m honest), your competitors aren’t.
That basically means they can steal your customers, but you can’t steal there’s. That sucks. And is just not for your business.
In the good old days, we went to our local doctor, our local lawyer, and our local Accountant. Today, there’s no reason to pick local. Why pick the best one in your town, when you could learn from the best person in your country, for the same cost, or less?
So you absolutely need to have digital Products.
Job loss
The quantity of jobs that will disappear in the knowledge space over the coming few years is truly frightening. It’s like the industrial revolution all over again, just this time it’s hitting a different segment of society.
More importantly it’s hitting you. So you have to get on the right side of this thing. Only those that distribute their assets better, and faster than others are going to survive. Make sure it’s you.
Walk my talk
I created my first digital course back in 2010 I believe. A box set of 12 DVDs (DVDs remember them). Sold it for around $1500-2000 per set.
Transformed by business overnight.
Over ten years later, and still so many ‘experts’ are relying on physical events to generate their income – it makes me want to cry.
In about 2018 my then wife came crying to me asking me to help save her business. She was delivering an excellent coaching service, her clients loved her, and she was achieving massive transformations, but the business was losing significant money every month.
The problem was she didn’t have a product family.
Product family
I usually call this Product Architecture, but that sounds rather stuffy and elitist. A product family is better description for what’s needed.
A modern business needs to have a family of products and services at different price points, serving different needs that work together to form a cohesive harmonious overall viable business structure.
All good business have this – and you (and I) need it too.
This is a significant topic in it’s own right and I don’t want to short change you – so I will create a new blog on this subject alone and go into greater detail. For now, I’ll give you the nickel-dime tour but keep a look out for the other article it will explain a LOT more.
There are 6 key product categories;
Gifts – free assets to attract prospects and get attention to your services.
P4Ps – Products for Prospects – low cost items that you might call a spontaneous purchase. Help prove your knowledge and authority and lead to bigger sales. Think of these as the ‘convincer’.
P1 – Product One – your core products and services.
P2 – Product Two – your VIP product or service.
PR products – these are items that attract attention, elevate your brand. Done well like a tide they lifts the desirability and sales of all your products.
And lastly,
RR products – Recurring Revenue products – such as a monthly membership site for example. What I call a sanity product.
In-time, and after hard work we created products and services across all of these critical product areas.
Step One:
We created a compelling online test (gift), that then sold a digitally personalised report (P4P), that directed them to our core services. This was a first big step.
Step Two:
The next big step, was creating the VIP P2.
A business always makes more money from it’s P2 than all it’s other services put together. Most businesses don’t even have a P2. I’ll go into this in more detail in my next article.
Step 3:
Then finally we created the RR. In our case an ongoing monthly coaching package we called ‘Momentum’. This was as important as the P2, possibly even more so.
As I said above I call this the sanity product, because it helps you keep sane.
It provides regular reliable monthly income. It means you can take a holiday, pay the mortgage, take a day off when you need it. It’s the backbone to the business. A small business owner will literally go mad, and implode if they don’t have a RR product within about three years of opening. Because they will simply run out of energy.
Move the dial
The result of these products was to move the business from one that was losing around £5k every month, to one that reached the very summit of it’s niche.
That’s all the detail I’m going to go into here, look out for my next article for a deep dive into product. That’s the really fun stuff.
Over-and-out! Speak soon.
