Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

business model

Three ways to turn your content into assets

Every piece of content you create has the potential to be come an asset that works for you in your business.

By documenting your knowledge and processes, you can share your expertise once and have it teach people for a long time, creating more consistent and predictable results in the process.

This is how you create leverage as a consultant. It’s the difference between owning a business and selling your time.

Here are three ways to turn your content into assets that will work for you:

1. Your content attracts clients for a long time. Podcast episodes, blog posts, social media posts, and other forms of content can live a long life, working for you long after you publish them—especially if you re-purpose and bring the good stuff back to the surface from time to time.

2. Your knowledge can be turned into products, memberships, and training, allowing you to sell your ideas without your direct involvement each time. This is the key to creating scale as an advisor and educator.

3. They can be used to make your consulting work more efficient. By having a library of training, explanations, and documented processes, you can more efficiently guide your clients using these assets and allow them to download your full thinking without having to repeat yourself every time.

So, every time you create a piece of content, think about how you can re-use, re-purpose, and re-sell it.

Organize it. Put it in a community or learning management software. Spin off resources. Keep it up to date.

Doing this is the key to greater financial upside, more consistent results, and less effort per engagement.

Once you get busy, it’s the best way to expand without hiring.

Is it fear or a desire to do things right?

Sometimes, the right approach is to wait until your ideas are perfect before you share them with the world.

But more often, the better approach is to run with your best ideas, see how they perform, then iterate until you find the traction you need.

Ideas need oxygen to thrive. Maybe not at first, but they need it sooner than later.

The oxygen gives your ideas life. It gives you feedback. Your ideas need feedback to be successful in the same way plants need sunlight.

The key is knowing whether your need for perfection is based on fear or wanting to do things right the first time.

There’s a difference. Only you can know for sure what is driving you.

Either way, don’t suffocate your ideas.

Chase one shiny object at a time

Last week, several members of Mindshare got together for our monthly community coffee meetup.

The meetups are a chance for us to talk shop and get feedback on our immediate situations from others in the group.

One of the trends I noticed on this call—and in other contexts before this—was people wanting to do multiple things at once.

Multiple businesses, multiple target markets, and multiple value propositions across each.

There’s no shame in any of this. Literally all of us fall into this trap at some point. Including me.

That’s because as marketers, we have the skills to launch a number of ideas quickly and fairly easily.

We can help all kinds of businesses. We can do all kinds of things for people. And there are tons of opportunities everywhere.

But the problem is, when you chase too many things, it becomes hard to succeed at any one thing.

Our attention gets diluted, our energy is dispersed, and our time is always scarce. Our work suffers as a result.

And that doesn’t even take into account how the market perceives you.

When you confuse the market with mixed messages about various projects, markets, and claims of expertise, they begin to wonder what—if anything—you’re truly expert in.

It’s hard enough to get one idea off the ground, let alone multiple.

Better to get one thing going successfully first. Then, if you aren’t happy, consider trying something new.

Chase one shiny object at a time.

You can’t rush a new consulting business

There’s a tendency to think marketing isn’t working if it doesn’t get an immediate result.

Maybe you see that tendency in yourself, or maybe you notice some clients with it. Months go by and it feels like it’s crickets.

The reality is, even if you have the right positioning, messaging, offerings, and manage to get in front of your ideal audience, you still may not sell any of your consulting services for several months.

After all, hiring a consultant is not something people take lightly. It’s a risky bet for most companies, both in terms of time and money.

And that can be discouraging. Especially when you’re starting our or building in a new niche.

It feels like you have to constantly change tactics or try something new, when more often than not, you just need to grind it out a little longer.

To keep showing up. Iterating. Talking to people. Researching.

When you’re new to consulting, your goal is to learn as much as you can and add as much value as possible to the people around you.

You need to prove you can help people—even if it’s for free at first. That’s why I write daily and host a community full of free additional content.

It’s hard, but that’s the price of admission. It takes a long time to build people’s trust.

Referrals help a lot, but don’t expect them right away, either.

Sell what you need to to stay in business, then give yourself a long enough runway to make your ideal consulting busines work.

Desperate consultants don’t win business. You have to prove yourself first.

If it were easy, people wouldn’t need you.

Don’t just plan for fair weather, plan for reality

Rarely does achieving client results happen more easily than you think.

It’s better to price contingencies and unforeseen challenges into your engagement than to expect everything to go smoothly.

Not only will this allow you to be more profitable, it will also allow you to do the often-necessary additional work required to get results for your clients.

You’ll be happier and your clients will be happier when you do.

Don’t just plan for fair weather, plan for reality.

Price accordingly.

Paying Yourself

Last week, I was invited to be a panelist along with two other entrepreneurs at a local meetup for startups.

Beside me in the hot seats were owners of two very different but successful companies.

One panelist, Avery Swartz, owns a tech/digital marketing training company called Camp Tech. The other guest, Jackie Schwarz, owns a dance program for youths, whereby the students make their own music videos and develop self-confidence along the way.

Avery has, to this day, never paid herself from her training business. Instead, she consults on the side to pay her bills. Her business is growing steadily as she continues to reinvest her earnings back into the company. Smart move.

Jackie is now starting to take some income from her company, but she has already sold multiple franchises of her business and is on pace to sell many more.

I have no doubt that both of these companies will be million-dollar businesses soon if they aren’t already. But what strikes me as interesting is that they put their business’ health before their own personal profits.

Never did they eat the fruits of their labour until (in Jackie’s case) the fruits were plentiful enough to eat AND grow the next crop at the same time.

Let’s continue with the fruit analogy.

When you’re a farmer, you start with a few seeds and perhaps a small plot of land. It’s your job to grow those seeds and nurture them until you have a ready harvest.

The problem I see with many startups is that when they plant the seeds in the beginning, they are already hungry. They have no stockpile or alternative means of survival.

So when the first harvest arrives, they need to eat some; half, most, or any.

And now they have the same amount of seeds that they had in the beginning, or even less. So, they put them back into the ground for another season and hope for a larger harvest next time.

Do you see the problem with this? By eating the fruits of their labour too soon, they never grow their output. They eat the fruit and the seeds, so the next harvest is simply a repeat of the last season, or worse.

When you’re starting a business, the biggest piece of advice I can give you is to:

  1. Have a stockpile so you don’t need to eat your own fruit too early.
  2. Reinvest as much of it as you can for as long as you can.

Does this work in the real world?

Many will know Amazon for the success that they are today. And if you follow the stock markets, you’ll know that for a LONG time people waited for Amazon to turn a significant profit, which they started doing somewhere around early 2015 (but I could be wrong so don’t hold me to that).

Nonetheless, we’re talking about more than a decade with almost no profit and major reinvestment.

They simply kept reinvesting their profits into new business models, new ventures, lowering overhead, etc., until one day they finally decided to turn a real profit.

Former Amazon Employee described their business strategy back in 2013 like this:

To me, a profitless business model is one in which it costs you $2 to make a glass of lemonade but you have to sell it for $1 a glass at your lemonade stand. But if you sell a glass of lemonade for $2 and it only costs you $1 to make it, and you decide business is so great you’re going to build a lemonade stand on every street corner in the world so you can eventually afford to move humanity into outer space or buy a newspaper in your spare time, and that requires you to invest all your profits in buying up some lemon fields and timber to set up lemonade franchises on every street corner, that sounds like many things to me, but it doesn’t sound like a charitable organization.

I was lucky enough back in 2014 to realize this truth.

While I was new to the stock investment game at the time, I knew they couldn’t hold off on taking profits forever without major shareholder upheaval.

I also knew they were investing in an entirely new business model, consisting of cloud services (AWS). I knew that their cloud services were slowly and quietly becoming massive.

You’d pay fractions of a dollar to upload or download gigabytes of data, and big organizations and small alike were using their hosting service to host their entire platforms. This was the future for Amazon, and the retail business was the tip of the iceberg.

So I invested in Amazon at about $330 per stock, and today it’s worth over $850. Not a bad ROI in roughly 2 years.

The moral of the story

The moral of the story is that if you truly want to build a business with a moat around it (lots of capital and a competitive advantage), you need to invest as much as humanly possible back into the business.

Buy the tools you need to grow, invest in the next employee or team member, take that course, go to that conference, spend that money on things that will enable you to sell more of what you sell in the future.

Don’t squeeze the oxygen from your business too early – it doesn’t matter what vanity metrics your take-home salary is at the end of the year. What matters is the long game.

But you need to find a way to survive while the long game plays out, and that’s where your resourcefulness as an entrepreneur comes into play. It shouldn’t be beneath you to have a job or side hustle while you build your early-stage business.

That’s what I did and I wouldn’t do it any other way.