In this episode, I talk about the four different ways that you can share what you know to generate income. You are going to learn about the four primary business models and get an introduction about how you can scale and leverage it.

Why this is important is because if you don’t get it right, you get tired, have no impact and there is no future with what it is you’ve got to work with. But when we get it right, you will feel a greater flow, you will be valued higher and it leads to better income.

So, the things that you need to know are:

• What fits with you: How you want your life to be in this lifestyle business
• Create curriculum and process: Package your knowledge properly to be effective
• Scale vs leverage: How you leverage what you know versus scaling and growing everything together

The Practice Spectrum

This framework helps you decide on the type of practice that you can do. On one axis there’s ‘process’ and on the other it’s ‘intellectual property access’.

• 1 to 1: It is the hours for dollars model. You have a specific hourly rate and you swap your time for it. It has a limit to it when it comes to increasing your income as there are limited number of hours in a day. You have to think about moving up from here.
• 1 to Many: There are different ways you can do one to many like with seminars, speaking sessions, online video/audio. A lot of times it is in speaking sessions where you impact many people with a single content that you deliver.
• 1 to Few: It’s about giving more access to you. So you limit the number to small groups. It is higher priced as you give more access to your intellectual property, wisdom and knowledge.
• Many to Many: A higher level situation that you need to build up before trying. You can go many to many by licensing your process. Train other people about your results, procedures and frameworks so they can deliver for you.

We will talk about Scaling and Leveraging a Practice in the next episode but to set the lay of the land, there are four primary ways of business models: (1) Time, (2) Product, (3) Hybrid and (4) License based.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey there, Mel Abraham here the author of the #1 best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Thoughtpreneur Academy where we teach you how to capture, package and monetize what you know, the ideas in your head to create something that moves people from belief change to behavior change and to help you out with that.

And welcome back to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show and in this one, I’m answering a question again that I answer a lot and I get it because it’s a challenging question in this space. When you’re talking about entrepreneurs that deal in the wisdom area, in what they know; infopreneurs and coaches and speakers and authors and trainers and those types of folks that will ask you, “How do you scale? How do you scale your business?”

For those of you that aren’t clear in that, scaling meaning growing your business.

• How do I grow my coaching practice?
• How do I grow my consulting practice?
• How do I grow my infopreneur practice?
• How do I grow that?

And the interesting thing is that the traditional methodologies, the traditional strategies and tactics and elements to growth of an entrepreneurial endeavor, an entrepreneurial business are not the same as what you would use in this type of business or what we call a practice, what I call a thoughtpreneur practice. I coined the term thoughtpreneur because I really believe that what we’re doing is we’re combining that creative nature of the entrepreneur, that ability to think differently, that ability to see things from a different perspective and to give that, those thoughts to someone else that gives them insights that are different than what their current insights are, that shifts them to behavior change, that allows them to change their lives for the better.

So, in this episode, I’m going to talk a bit and I’m going to break this up a bit because in this episode I’m going to first talk about kind of the lay of the land, the spectrum of types of business models then I’m going to give you the four primary business models, the ways you can make money in this and then, I will come back in another episode and we will say, “All right, let’s talk about how do you scale it and how do you leverage it” because they’re not the same thing. So, let’s jump into scaling your wisdom, the four ways to have more impact and more income in this episode. So, here we go.

One of the things that I look at is that why is this, why is this so important in the context of what it is you do and one of the challenges is this, is that if we don’t get this right, you freaking get tired. It really gets tiring. You can’t sustain it for any length of time because of that.

Realizing that and this is the game that I play it as a CPA is that if you’re swapping your hours for dollars, in other words, your time for money, there’s only so much you can do. There’s a limit to that and it becomes unsustainable if we don’t get that done correctly, if we can’t figure it out. So, you cap yourself out on your revenue. Or you cap yourself out on your productivity. And you cap yourself out on the lifestyle that you can create because there’s only so many hours in a day.

I haven’t figured out how to do it. If you have figured out how to do it, let me know but you can only get 24 hours in a day and we need to do other things with those hours other than just work.

The second thing is this if we don’t get it right, we have no impact.

And I believe that all of us have a message in us. That all of us have a voice. All of us have insights that can shift and change people’s lives. And I believe that in today’s society, especially given all of the turmoil and the things that are going on out there,

• People are starved to hear a better way
• People are starved to think differently

People are starved and hungry to find a journey, a path that might serve them better than the old industrial age concepts or the old way of doing things or doing things just because that’s the way they have always been done.

I think that it’s time for us to challenge convention. It’s time for us to look at things differently so we can have a greater impact and have the impactful life while we’re here and to impact those around us. And I’m not talking about impacting millions. Certainly, I want The Entrepreneur’s Solution in the hands of millions if I possibly can have it happen but even at a smaller scale, if you just impact your family, if you just impact generations, if you just impact those that are dear and near to you, you’ve done all right while you’re here in doing that.

The third thing is that if we don’t get this right, there just is no future.

It just becomes challenging and there is no future with what it is you’ve got to work with because like I said, you’re going to get tired, you’re going to get burned out and then, you’re not going to be able to continue to operate your coaching practice, to operate your consulting practice, to operate your service based business in a way that really has a greater impact.

But when we get this right, wow. All of a sudden you feel a greater flow.

In other words, you’re coming around in this and saying, “Man”. It’s like me today coming in the studio to do this for you. It doesn’t feel like work. It’s like, alright, let’s get the camera on, let’s get the lights on, let’s get some things ready to go rock and roll and let’s have some fun with it. Let’s bring some things to life in a way that will serve you, serve the questions that come about, the things that I know that I was challenged with, I still get challenged with and the things that I hear from all the community of all my students and the people that I mentor, and the people that work with me in the context of ThinkTank and Thoughtpreneur Academy, Business Breakthrough Academy and Entrepreneur’s Solution; all of that in doing that.

But it’s coming from a place of flow. It’s not drudgery. It doesn’t even really feel like work. It’s about really getting out there and saying, “I know that I’m impacting and changing people’s existence with the things that we do.”

The other thing that happens when we get this right is that we’re valued higher.

We come at it. We are providing a much higher, higher value of the things that we do because we’re deep thinkers. If we do this correctly, we’re going to think deeply, we’re going to come up with new perspectives, new things, ways of doing things that’s going to allow them to look at things differently.

And lastly, what that leads to is better income.

But the real key behind this is that greater impact gives you greater income. Some of you have heard me talk about this maybe live on stage or in some of my podcasts or YouTube shows, my episodes of The Entrepreneur’s Solution. I truly believe wholeheartedly that we live in an exchange economy, a value exchange economy. We get caught up in things like cost and price and all of that.

It’s never about cost and it’s never about price. It’s about value. And the greater value you can create in people’s lives, either with products or services, it doesn’t matter what it is you’re doing, the greater perceived value and actual value you create in people’s lives, the greater they’re willing to pay for it because in their mind, they’re not worried about price and cost.

Believe it or not, they may talk about price and cost but what they’re looking at and analyzing is, “What’s the value I’m getting in return” and as long as the value they get in return is greater than the value they feel like they have to give up in time, in money, in effort, in all of those things, they’re game and they’re buying. And so, if we focus on higher impact, higher value, you will end up with better income. That becomes the by-product.

It shouldn’t be your primary focus. It shouldn’t be the focus at all because when we find the right market with the right message in the right way, we can increase the level of impact that we have, the level of value that is created and the level of income that is ultimately experienced. So, if that’s the case, if we know what happens, if we don’t get it right and we know what happens if we do get it right, what do you need to know?

What are they key things that you need to understand when moving forward, when really starting to understand and build this out?

So, if you know what happens if you get this wrong and you know what happens if you get this right, what exactly do you need to know? What does it take for you to really kind of get this dialed in and I think the first thing is to know what fits with you.

In other words, how do you want your life to be?

This is a lifestyle business—coaching, speaking, consulting. It’s all a lifestyle business I truly believe because I get a chance to do the things that I want to do. I get a chance to them when I want to do them, as much as I want to do them, as little as I want to do them and wherever I want to do them. And I can choose to not work with people or work with people and work in different ways.

So, what is it that you want to do? Do you want to spend a lot of time one-on-one with people? May be that’s meaningful to you. May be you enjoy speaking and you want to get up on stage. And it’s not for everyone because listen, a speaker’s life a lot of times these speakers are on the road a hundred, a hundred and fifty days a year.

And I know I did it initially. When I was building my consulting practice, I was travelling a lot. I was speaking around the country and around the world on a regular basis almost weekly. And so, you don’t get two and a half million miles on an airline without doing that. And so, one of the things that you need to realize is that there isn’t one specific way to do it but there is the right way for you.

Now you may have some strengths that we can talk further about that, we dig deeper in that in Thoughtpreneur Academy and some of my mentoring programs but you may have certain strengths where strategically it’s best for you to start at a certain place in a certain way but by and large let’s get the vision and figure out where it is you want to go.

So first, what fits for you and I would write that down. I would take the moment now and to sit down and say, “How would this look for you a year from now? Two years from now? Three years from now? What do you want it to look like as you move forward?”

The second thing is to create curriculum and process.

I am a firm believer that your curriculum, your process, your knowledge needs to be packaged. Until you package it properly, you cannot transcend and use the different models as effectively as others might.

And here is what I mean by that. The challenge with a lot of folks in this space whether it’s coaching or it’s speaking or it’s authoring is that they get caught up in marketing. What I want you to get caught up in and fall in love with is in the creation and the packaging of your knowledge and your wisdom. The creation of taking your insights, the ideas you have and putting them together in a way that we can then communicate them on multiple levels in a way that really starts to drive people’s lives, that drives people’s decisions, that drives the difference that it’s going to make in there. So, think about: “How do I take what I know and create curriculum and process out of it?” And there are procedures and processes and tools that we use to make that happen.

And then, third, number three is this: Am I going to scale or leverage.

Now, we will come back in another episode talking about this more deeply and give you some of the avenues in which to do that but a lot of times we think that we want to scale a business when we really don’t—we want to leverage a business.

And I’m not talking about leverage in the context of debt. I’m talking about leverage in the context of you and your ideas. How you leverage what you know versus scaling and growing everything together. We will talk deeper about that in the next episode as we go through it.

So, what I want to introduce you to in order to understand this deeper is a framework that I use. I know, I know. See remember, curriculum and process; let me give you a framework on this. It’s what I call The Practice Spectrum that we walk from that we can turn around and say, “What is going on? What kind of practice can I have so I can figure out which one I want?”

And it’s not an either/or and there isn’t one that is better necessarily than the other. There is just a difference between them. In order to do that, I’m actually going to take you to my iPad. So we will kind of walk through what that looks like for you. So, let me just pop that on to the screen.

All right, so I’m going to talk about The Practice Spectrum and when I look at this, it’s really about a couple of different things that I want you to consider and that is this is that on one axis, I want you to think about what’s the process that you have in place?

Now, the greater the process that you have in place, the ability to duplicate and replicate the results that you have, the ability for someone else to do it, the easier it is to leverage or scale and allow someone else to do it other than you. So, on one side, the process, do you have a high level processes? Or you have a low level processes?

Then in other side of this, I want you to consider is this element of what I call access.

• That’s access to your knowledge.
• That’s access to you.
• That’s access to what people would call intellectual property, your insights, your wisdom in there.

So, as access goes up that changes things. So, we’re going to think about things on those two planes—process and access.

And so, one of the things that I think many of us are really used to is this concept of what we see in most coaching programs is this concept of 1 to 1. And when you think about 1 to 1, it’s really that that hours for dollars model if you’re not careful. It’s easy to fall into it. I’m doing coaching and I coach for (I don’t do this, this way). But I coach for a 150 dollars a session. That kind of economy. I came from that world. As a CPA they are constantly saying, “What’s your hourly rate? What’s your hourly rate?”

Here’s the problem for that is that we need to think about, “How do I get out of that hourly rate situation?” because if you don’t, you’re going to run into a ceiling. The only way you’re going to increase your value, the only way you’re going to increase your income, the only way you’re going to increase your revenues at that point is either work more hours or increase your hourly rate.

Now for me, I worked a lot of hours and then, I started increasing my hourly rate when I was doing hourly rate work, got to be really, really high well into the four and five figures depending on what it was I was doing. The challenge is you still have a limit.

And I want you to start thinking in the context of again, value exchange. But the 1 to 1 model is something that is possible for you but here is how I like you think about it. Is a lot of times what happens, is that we look at a 1 to 1 model down at the bottom of an escalation where we’re really doing hours for dollars here. And that’s limiting.

What I like you to actually think about is how do I take that and move it up here so my 1 to 1 is now at the top and the actually the most expensive work you’re doing. The high level mentorship, the high level instruction, the high level consulting that you do at a high level. So, instead of doing it for a 100 or 150, 200 dollars an hour, you’re doing it for 10 – 20 thousand dollars.

But that takes time to get there. So, the 1 to 1 model is a model that exists and I want you to think about it. And that’s probably the place where a lot of people start and it’s a great place to start because it’s a great place to refine your content, your curriculum, your processes and all that to really dial it in to understand how to have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time to have the greatest value in the process.

Now the second way to do this is what we start to create more processes in place to allow them to be replicated and duplicated and that would be to go to a 1 to many model. This is typically something like a going out and speaking.

I do a lot of training programs. Now I do small masterminds like my Thinktank and I do larger trainings like Business Breakthrough Academy, Thoughtpreneur Academy where I’ve got hundreds of people in the room that allow me to then get myself out there and speak one to many. And a lot of times it’s in the speaking type of situation just like even this. Video is one to many.

Now maybe, you’re not all sitting in the same room. Maybe, some of you are sitting and watching this. That would be kind of cool. But it’s a one to many concept in there. So, is there a one to many in your future or in your present right now? Is there a way for you to take this and put it out there? This is something that you ought to think about.

The third possibility is that, that you may have a situation where they want more access to you. More access to you but there isn’t as much process. And that’s what I call a 1 to few situation. Those are your masterminds. Those are the small groups 5 to maybe 10, 20, 30 maybe as much as 40 people but it starts to not feel few at that point.

Higher priced because they have greater access to you. Higher price because they have greater access to you, the intellectual property, the wisdom, the knowledge, the insights in that process. So, that’s another model you might consider and then, the last model in this spectrum is what I call many to many.

This is a higher level situation. This is something that you’re not going to start off with. In fact, if you try to do this too soon in your business it’s going to hurt. It’s going to be painful and it’s not going to be successful. And this is where typically the best way to understand this is when you license your process, you’ve now got a process because it’s high process here and you’ve got access but now they’ve got access to the intellectual property because you got other people out there.

So, what it is really training other people:

• In your processes
• In your procedures
• In your results
• In your frameworks

In that knowledge of licensing them the ability to take what you know and put it out there instead of it all being you. It’s a great way to put things out there. Now, you can see it in the licensing model, you can see it in a franchise model.

Now be careful when you start thinking about franchises, there’s a lot of rules with respect to that well beyond this here and even the licensing you got to be careful about to make sure that you do it right. So, that’s the model that is available to you if you choose to do that. But I would urge you and invite you to not do it right away. If you try to do it too soon, you will get hurt. It will cost you a lot. It will fail and so what we need to do is focus on the other models that you have in here. Focus on these other models to really bring it home. To allow you to start to grow it,

• Refine the content
• Refine the process
• Refine the work that you’re doing

In a way that then you can:

• Templatize it,
• License it, and
• Extend it.

But really when you start talking about your practice, you’re looking at these models and saying, “Look, I got 1 to 1, I got 1 to few, I got 1 to many or I got many to many.” That’s it, that’s your choices. Now, remember I said earlier, it’s not an either/or. For an instance, I actually run in all these, in actually all of the circled ones.

One to many. I speak to a lot of large audiences, thousands to hundreds on a regular basis, on other people’s stages and on my own stages.

I do one to one consulting. It’s not cheap but I do one on one mentoring/consulting with folks on an ongoing basis.

And then I do one to few. I have a mastermind program called Thinktank that I use that I do with small groups to allow me to take them through to be more intimate, to be more hands on to give them access to that.

I don’t have a many to many model yet because remember, I don’t want to do it too soon. But it is in the works and it will be rolling out in the not too distant future at some point in time. There is many to many model on the horizon. It’s just not the right time strategically for us to do that.

So the point is, is that think about the model that you want to run or that you are running and say, “How do I build that?”

Now, what I am going to urge you to do is let’s give one of the models running right. Let’s get them where they are making money for you and doing it on a regular basis before you start trying to put too many things out there in the world.

So, given that let’s just think about what does it take, what are the other things that can come into play? This is the practice spectrum. What are the different ways you can make money in this? And we will work from there and then we will come back in another episode to talk about how do you scale that and how do you monetize that.

So, let’s go to another worksheet here and that is what I call the scaling, leveraging practice worksheet. Bottom line is that there’s four primary ways of business models that you can use to make money and the first we talked about which is the one on one I think, is literally time based.

So, this is the model and we will talk about in another episode, how do you scale it and how do you leverage it?

So, one is time based. Again, swapping hours for dollars and again, it’s not a model that I recommend on a long term basis. It’s probably a model that many of us have started out with and we realized this is hard work and I’m creating more value than just the commodity swap of an hour for a dollar.

The second possible model is product based. This is when you package up your knowledge, your information, your systems, your processes in a box and you ship it out to someone or they access it online or they download it and they get it on their iPods or their iPhones and their iPads and they work it from there. So, it’s product based per say. So, you’re pretty much removed from it. You create it once and it’s product based in that process.

The third model which is the one that I actually like a lot is this thing called Hybrid. A hybrid model uses both this and this together. So, for instance: Those people that join me on it and typically most of my programs, there’s an online version portion of it and then, that gives them the product portion of it and then, there’s a; and the higher level programs, there’s a live element to it. There’s an interactive element to it because I like the hybrid work so it allows me to leverage my time, leverage what it is I’m doing to give access to people but then give access on an ongoing basis by using a hybrid type of model.

And then, the last model to consider is this. And I kind of talked about this already. It’s the license model. And again, this is where you start to certify people in your process or procedures. Not something that I’m going to recommend you do by the way but those are the four ways. There’s only four ways to make money in this.

• I’m either going to sell my time,
• I’m going to sell a product,
• I’m going to sell both, or
• I’m going to license it.

Now, there’s new answers to each of those. So, the real question then becomes one of, “All right, so what’s next. How do I scale it? What do I need to do to scale it or leverage it?” and that my friends, we’re going to get to in the next episode. We’re going to turn around and we’re going to look at what does it take to really scale or leverage anyone of these models to really start to bring them to life in a way that you now can make more money, make more income, reach greater number of people to have that happen.

So, I hope that you found this of value. At least laying the foundation for the things that are going to come ahead and if you have, you know, subscribe. Stay with me. Leave a comment. Ask me a question. Let’s have a dialogue. I’d love to be kind of support you in this journey to coach you, to mentor you along the way.

And if you would do me a favor? Share this with a friend. Share this with someone else that might be served with this. Share it with a friend and if you have a question, if you have a question that you need me to answer, just like this question, go to AskMelNow.com. That’s ASKMELNOW.com. Leave me your question there and I will be sure to connect with you on a later episode and make sure that I answer that question for you.

And that question could be on wealth, it could be on thought leadership, it could be on thoughtpreneurship, it could be on entrepreneurship, it could be on money, success, whatever it is; I’m okay with it. I’m here for you, thank you and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode and until then,

May your vision be grand, your journey epic and your legacy significant!

See you soon. Cheers. Bye!!

— End Transcript —

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Like this? Please share it and help a few more people bring their dreams out of the darkness and give life to them again. Cheers, Mel

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