Episode 12: Creating assets to leverage

Transcript

Welcome to meaningful work remarkable life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy, and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unseeded lands of the Cammeraygal people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact, and doing work you feel born to do, we explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work, and the meanings we derive from work.

Hello, I’m Brook McCarthy, and welcome to episode 12. Today, we are talking about creating assets to leverage. Now if you didn’t listen to the last episode, I recommend you press pause, go back, check it out, that was all about creating space between yourself and your business creating a little separation and starting to divorce your hours from your income. And now we’re building on that theme of creating assets to leverage now.

Now firstly, you may not be thinking about assets, the way I’m thinking about assets. So it’s very, very likely that you have assets in your business. And it’s likely that these assets are all around you. They include things such as your process, questionnaires, Client Onboarding processes, presentations, whether you got PowerPoints, you know, you got keynote, you’ve got Canva presentations, PDFs, videos, audios, articles, blog posts, white papers, lead magnets, email funnels, these are all assets that you’ve got.

The next thing I want to talk about and what you can do, if you haven’t done this for a while, I highly recommend it and winters a great time to be doing this kind of thing is to do an inventory of your assets, because God knows, we do acquire assets. So we do create assets that we put into the digital drawer and never look at again. And you know, it pains me to think about how many PowerPoint presentations I must have created and delivered once or maybe twice, you know, some presentations are delivered dozens of times. But you know, the amount of fabulous things that I’ve done once thought, God, that was fun, I enjoyed that. And then you know forgotten all about it. So, you know, this is a challenge if you’re up for it, to do an inventory of your assets, digital and otherwise.

But I want to shift gears slightly into, you know, what tends to be the major assets. And the order that people do the same when it comes to online businesses. So in the online business world, and God knows there’s a lot of us, there are many, many online businesses. And even if you you know are a bricks and mortar business, or you’re you’re a bit more traditional, it’s quite possible that you do have an online business component and more than possible that you have the capacity for this online business component to grow and scale.

So what is typical, what we see a lot of is we see the business owner who writes a book, yes, kind of hand in glove with that is the business owner that speaks on stage. And it’s almost an assumption. I know, I pitched myself to a conference organiser the other day and they said something about my book, and I’m like, No, I don’t have a book, you know, these things tend to go hand in glove in the online business world. So in that scenario, the speech, the keynote speech, maybe there’d be more than one, you know, maybe there’s talks that are given over and over again, become the asset, right?

If the if the talk is given once and once only it’s an asset. If the one talk is given multiple times to multiple different places, it is a leveraged asset, then we have our free content. And then we have a gated content. So to clarify this, a free content means anyone can access it, it’s up on YouTube, it’s on your website, it is on Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever. And there’s no gate to it right.

Gated content means that there is some kind of hoop the person has to go through in order to access the content. So typically, that means they have to fill out a form they have to give their email address, perhaps their phone number depending on how you know the perception of value this content has. And then the next thing is the On Demand low cut cost downloads.

So we are having a bit of a renaissance period. I think right now, with the on demand, low cost downloads, and you know, anything from $7 upwards, I would say $7, all the way up to perhaps $100. These things aren’t necessarily always courses, or trainings, they may be spreadsheets, they may be resources, they may be formulas, they may be ebooks, there’s all kinds of stuff, templates, copy and paste, swipe files, all manner of different things, anything and everything you can imagine, you can imagine, there is someone selling it, low cost on the internet, then we have our kind of mid range course, then we have our premium group program. And when I say I should clarify, mid price course, I would typically think is about 500 to $1,000, maybe 1500 Premium group program, I would say would be 2000.

Plus, then we have franchising. And then we have licensing. So franchising, of course, is when we you know create the processes, create the brand, build the brand, build the team, you know, make sure it’s a working business model, and then sell the franchise sell, you know the option for somebody to come in and get a turnkey business, where everything in theory is easy for them to just come in and follow instructions, and Bob’s your uncle.

And then we have licensing, which is you know, you’ve struck a deal, you’ve signed a contract. And you’re getting some kind of royalty free some kind of licensing fee for somebody else to use your content. And of course, you can do it the other way around as well, you can be paying the licensing fee. So let’s pretend you’re a business coach, you might pay 20 $30,000 to license the content from another business coach, another business coaching institution.

And that gives you access to a whole bunch of different resources that you can pull off the shelf and use and you can leverage the brand of that organisation, you can perhaps get some coaching, support some training and how to sell and how to market and how to secure you know, customers advice on pricing or instructions on how to price. So kind of similar to franchising in a way. But perhaps there’s a little bit more room for creative self expression with licensing I don’t know after after think about that one.

I think when you’re last seeing somebody else’s stuff, or when you’re selling a license, you can have multiple things going on, you know, in that particular business and licensing is just one component of it. Whereas with franchising, it’s you know, it’s the whole business. So I’m not going to insult your intelligence and tell you there is only one way because goodness knows I’d be lying.

There’s always many, many ways to slice a cake. Yeah. And there is no secret, special Silver Bullet the thing. I’ve been looking for 15 years and I’m yet to find it. Like all things if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not. And there are pros and cons to every approach. There is no one, you know, way of doing this and creating assets to leverage. That is a surefire guarantee of millions. While you sail your yacht around the Mediterranean, it just ain’t gonna work like that there are pros and cons to both.

But I do want to talk a little bit about where I see there is more opportunity. And where I see that perhaps people are not appreciating the whole picture and making it seem easier than it actually is. So I have to start with the on demand low cost downloads, there is absolutely definitely something inherently sexy about the passive income dream, right? While lying on the beach. We are either getting a massage, and we have the sweet noise of our payment notifications coming through while we’re doing anything but working what’s not to love. Yeah.

So what I hear a lot of is business owners saying to me, Well, you know, what I just need to do is I need to get some low cost downloads, I need to get some passive income streams. And you know, they kind of know it’s not really passive and they’ll tell me yes, I appreciate it’s not really passive. But I think most people grossly underestimate how tricky this is to actually make a

viable income from it.And like many of these things, and I’m looking at the books now, and I’m thinking about books, you know, it tends to work well in conjunction with other things.

So the book is not going to make you wealthy publishing a book. Unless, of course, you’re some mega mega author is very unlikely to create a liveable wage for you. But it’s not the point we publish the book, so that we can leverage it to get the speaking gigs. Or so we can leverage it to get the corporate engagements or, you know, to give away to people that come along to our courses and programs like, there is multiple reasons why we want to publish a book, it is an effective business book is in effect, a pamphlet or a brochure that you can’t throw out or not without a lot of guilt, right.

So the on demand low cost downloads is definitely not somewhere I would recommend starting. And in fact, I would recommend starting with the premium group program. Now that might seem counter intuitive, I would always recommend to clients, if they have any experience, like that’s pretend they’ve been doing, they’ve been at their craft at their trade for 10 years or more.

They may be new to business, but they’ve been doing what they’ve been doing for, you know, 10 years or more, they’ve been honing their special skills to start at the top, not at the bottom, much harder to start at the bottom, and then work your way up. Yeah, and not only harder, but it’s going to be harder for the business owner to stay in business earning $7 $9 $27 $37 $12.50, than it is to be earning 2000 4000 6000 $8,000, it makes way more sense to start at the top, and then perhaps maybe work your way down. From there. Some of these things require a hell of a lot more marketing and sales skills and other things. And that goes absolutely. For a low cost items. So the books, the low cost downloads, and even the mid range course I would put that in the same category as well. You need a greater volume of people. And there’s a massive misconception that Oh, that’s okay, it’s cheap, or it’s reasonable, or it’s accessible, God forbid it’s accessible.

Therefore, it’ll be easy to sell, it’ll just sell itself because the price point is so reasonable, right? I hate that word reasonable in relation to

a killer Raisable. Let’s just stop using it. Hey. And, you know, the short, brutal truth is that you have to sell a much greater volume, you still have to sell, you still have to communicate value, you still have to convince people that you’re going to do what you say, you’re going to do that whatever resource you’re selling, is going to deliver on its promises. Yeah, because none of us want to waste our money. None of us want to experience buyer’s remorse or feel like a deal.

We’ve all had that experience, and we don’t want to repeat it. So the gated content can also be a really useful place to start. And I think again, a lot of business owners kind of skip over that point because they go oh, well, you know, a laid back at home Oh, my goodness, it’s so complicated. I’ll just go straight into the course or the program. When actually the gated content, the lead magnets, you’re going to be using the exact same digital skills to set up the lead magnet as you are to set up the delivery and the sales and marketing the sales, marketing and delivery of the low cost downloads, the courses and the programs, the exact same skills, the email funnels, the emails set up the signup forms, the headline writing really important the headline writing the messaging, the you know, who is it for? Why should you want it? Like what is it, you know, being able to communicate the value being able to convince people to hand over their precious email address is just as much skill as it is handing over cash. So, what I suggest you start with, you start with the free stuff, start with the free stuff. And when I say the free stuff, I’m not talking about social media posting, I’m not talking about being more regular on social media.

I am talking about the long form content that is a business asset of yours that in effect makes you accessible and means that anyone Aal over the world can find you on Google can binge your website, you’ve got more than enough awesome materials more than enough entertaining materials for them to see that you know what you’re talking about there to have those interesting in depth discussions, it just so happens that on the internet, they are not face to face or one to one, they are now one to many.

So you have in effects created scale, you are scaling your influence, you are scaling your IP, through your free content through your long form free content hosted on your website. Second thing I would recommend is starting with the premium group program. Like I said, price is not as big a deal, as we oftentimes think it is, yeah, we are not necessarily going to buy the $7 thing, we’re not more likely to buy the $7 thing, and less likely to buy the $2,000 thing. It’s it’s just simply not true. You have to communicate value to the right audience to the relevant audience. Yeah, you need to deeply understand their pains, problems, worries, issues, inconveniences, situation and circumstance that leads them to want what you’ve got.

And you need to be able to, you know, sell it effectively, through storytelling through you know, skillful persuasion. And you need to do that regardless of the price point. So I would argue it’s much easier to sell the premium group program, which is high touch, which is perceived high value, which has the accountability baked in, then it is to sell the kind of hands off more passive pieces that tend to be lower priced. And then the gated content. So we’ve got free, we’ve got premium group, premium group programs.

And then we’ve got gated content. And again, the gated content, otherwise known as lead magnets, enables you to sell effectively, yes, you are still having to convince people to hand over their email address more than ever. And if you’re also asking for a phone number, you know, I will happily give my phone number, my real phone number in a form where I perceive the value that I’m going to receive is higher. And I don’t mind the phone call and I might be expecting the phone call. Because I’m so interested. I’m so intrigued. I’m so impressed by you know, the gated content that I’m just about to get my hot little hands up. So you are using the exact same skills, you’re building an audience, you’re testing your ideas, you’re testing your topic, you’re testing your headlines, you’re using the exact same digital skills that you’ll be using, you know, for launching for group programs for mid range courses and on demand low cost downloads.

Yeah, the first time you enact these skills, it’s massive, giant, big deal. And then you know, after a while, it becomes pretty straightforward. So I hope you’ve enjoyed creating assets to leverage I hope your brain is marinating and percolating on all the possibilities of what you could award or should create, what you feel driven to create.

And if I can say one final thing on the topic, please do create out loud do not retreat to your creation cave. And pull down the blinds of course caves don’t have blinds and you know, create it all by your lonesome and then jump out from behind the bush tomorrow when it’s ready, and try and sell it. CO create it with your audience.

Create out loud, yeah, test your headlines test your ideas, test your names, test your sub tight, you know your taglines rather, your storylines co created with your audience it will make it far more enjoyable and ultimately far more successful.