In this episode, I answer a question asked by Cheryl about being a Thoughtpreneur. She asks about how I started and what was done first. She wants to know whether I did my courses or the book first, or whether I did them simultaneously. She also inquires about the time it took.

When we talk about building an Expert or Thoughtpreneur Business, it’s about taking experience, education and expertise to create a difference in people’s lives. My journey in this business is a bit different as I came in as a CPA.

• The book is an offspring that came out of the 30+ years of business that I have done.
• he training course and live events were created to deliver my expertise, experience, background and wisdom. They were created separately to leverage my time consuming one-to-one consulting business.

What I Did First – I did was native and natural for me:

1. I started with consulting.
2. Then I started speaking and writing.
3. Then the training programs were started.
4. Then I did recorded programs.
5. Finally, I did the book.

The journey that I took isn’t necessarily what everyone should follow. You have to figure out what is right for you. In the Expert Business, there are six primary modes of delivering our wisdom and experience.

You can do it:

1. As an Author
2. An a Speaker
3. As a Trainer
4. As a Mentor
5. As a Facilitator
6. As a Coach

What You Should Do

Figure these out:

• Message: Get the message straightened out and build it into a framework that’s teachable, memorable and commercially viable.
• Market: Figure out who you want to take the message to.
• Mode: Decide on the ways to deliver your message to the market. It should work for you as well as your audience.

Combine these three. Figure out the easiest ways to do it and make it your starting point. For example: Start with a coaching program. Build and refine content through the group. Now, bridge this to actual training programs.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey there, I’m Mel Abraham, the author of the brand new number 1 best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy where we teach you how to design a business and create a life: Create a life of financial freedom and peace of mind.

In this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show, I get a chance to answer a question that came in through our AskMelNow.com line. And this is a place that you can go if you have questions about money, success, business, entrepreneurship; those types of things or any other questions for that matter. Go to AskMelNow.com and you’ll get a chance to record your question and I can bring it on one of my upcoming episodes.

This is from a young lady Cheryl out of Michigan who was watching what I’d done. She’s been part of my book release and watched the book release. She got introduced to some of my training courses and she’s part of the training courses. She is in the portal and she’s in the groups and seeing some of that.
She was trying to understand, “God, Mel. What did you do first? Did you write the book first? Did you do the training courses first?”

There’s a bunch of stuff out there and there’s things that you’re doing. What did you do first?

And I think that there’s a lot of people that may struggle with that.
What do I do first?

Because I know I did. When I came about, I was trying to figure that out. So, when we come back after this brief introduction, I’m going to answer Cheryl’s question and hopefully give you some guidance of
• What do you do first?
• Where do we go from here?
• Where do we start?

So, look forward to seeing you right back after this brief introduction. See you soon.

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Hey there, welcome back to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show. We’re going to get a chance to get to Cheryl’s question. But before we get there, let’s listen to her question. Let’s see what she’s got to say and see what she’s got to ask. And let’s see if we can give her some guidance and you some guidance along the way because I think this is a question that comes up rather often. I know that I had it and I know that a number of entrepreneurs in this experts space have it as, “What do I do first? Where did I start?”

So, let’s listen to her question. I’ll see you right back after we’re done listening to it.

Hi Mel. This is Cheryl Vowels. I had the pleasure of meeting you and hearing you speak at Brendon Burchard’s most recent Expert Academy at Santa Clara and I quickly purchased your book and really enjoyed your presentation and I’ve gotten a lot out of it so far. I’ve also taken advantage of your mini-online resources and just bought the Business Builder Toolkit today as well.
My goal is to become a Thoughtpreneur and I’m just in the very beginning stages of developing my plan. And I’m curious about your journey. Specifically:
• How and when did you start?
• Did you create your online courses first?
• If so, which was your first course and how did you progress online?
• Did you write your book first? Or
• Did you create it all sort of simultaneously?
• If so, how long did that take?
I’m really impressed with your comprehensive offerings and really curious how you put this all together. Thanks.

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Great question! Wonderful question Cheryl and as I said this is something that, that many of us struggle with including myself. When we’re talking about building an expert business—a business is based upon:

• Our experience,
• Our expertise,
• Our background,
• Our message,
• Our purpose,
• Our wisdom, if you will.

Many people call it, our good friend, Brendon Burchard calls it the expert business. I call it the Throughtpreneur business because that’s what it’s, it’s about taking my experience in education and expertise and using it to create a difference in people’s life. A positive impact in people’s live that maybe in the health care industry; maybe in, in my case in the entrepreneurial business, success and wealth space. It could be in Brendon’s; in Brendon’s case it could be in high performance, motivation, influence, in that space.

That’s the … so, it’s in that arena and I know that Cheryl, you mentioned that this is something that you’re starting into and you’ve got a base of knowledge, you’ve got a base of experience that you want to take out to the world and give them the opportunity to grow from your experience and education.

• What do you do first?
• What did I do first?
• Did I write the book first?

My journey is a little different than most journeys. I didn’t come to this business or this industry to be in this industry. I’m educated as a CPA so I was out there to build a CPA practice. I was out there to build a consulting practice—to be a strategic consultant:

• To businesses,
• To board of directors,
• To entrepreneurs.

To help people build their businesses, to build success in their lives and to do that. And at the same time I was someone who valued businesses for a living and testified at trials as a financial expert. So, all of the work that I was doing was to try and build that practice based upon the degree I got, the licenses I had and that type of thing.

It wasn’t necessarily to write a book. It wasn’t necessarily to be in this expert space because I had been corralled, if you will, to thinking the CPA mentality and there’s only one way to do things. But I broke out of that mold. I went through a 12-step program and I’m healed in that process.

So, it’s a little different, my book. I know that you Cheryl, you watched the launch of the book and you’re part of the training courses and you’ve seen that dynamic. The book is an offspring, if you will. It came out of the business that I have done. It came out of the thirty plus years of being an entrepreneur and consulting with businesses and taking that and distilling it down into the book.

And along the way, I also realized that in this expert’s space that I had to find a way to be able to deliver my expertise, my experience, my background and all of that wisdom in a way that was separate from me a little bit to allow me to do what’s called leverage my business.

And that’s when I started to create the training courses, the live events and those types of things because the business model that I had was really one-on-one consulting. I would go into a business or into it with an entrepreneur and it would be one-on-one. That meant that it took the hours out of the day for that one person. I couldn’t help other people and I felt like I was confined in not able to help as many people as I wanted with my message, with my mission, with the wisdom that I had.

So, I tried to figure that out. So, once I got my business off the ground then the question was, “How do I not scale it but leverage it?” And that’s when I started to do some of the other training programs. And then, from that came the book.

Now, does that mean that, that’s the journey that you need to take or you should take and the answer is “No”.

That journey was right for me based upon my experience, based on my background, based on where I was and where I was coming from and where I wanted to go. It may not be in all likelihood it’s not right for you or anyone else out there.

The question is really, “What’s right for you?”

If we look at this expert’s space, there is really six primary modes of delivering your message, delivering your wisdom, delivering your experience.

1. You can do it as an author.
2. You can do it as a speaker.
3. You can do it as a trainer.
4. You can do it as a mentor.
5. You can do it as a facilitator. Or,
6. You can do it as a coach.

So, those are the six primary ways of delivering it. Now, it’s the same message, it’s the same mission. When I go out and speak to a large audience of a thousand or two thousand people, my message is the same.

• It’s about entrepreneurship.
• It’s about bringing possibility into their life.
• It’s about shaking up those dreams.

And bringing them to life and giving them a new paradigm for their life by building a business that’s based on purpose, based on meaning that gives them something beyond just profit.

Or I can go in and do a three day training like my Business Breakthrough Academy training where I spend three days with a smaller group where we roll up our sleeves and we dig into the businesses and say

• Let’s design our lives.
• Let’s design our businesses
• Let’s create it.

But the message is the same, the journey is the same.

Or I can write an article or my blog post or my podcast and again, it’s all built on the same messaging. The book is built on the same messaging. The question is just the mode of delivery.

And as you ask, what did I do first?

I think I went to what was native to me, what was natural to me first. I think that’s the easiest way for us to look at it. The idea here is this: To figure out what mode works for you once you have your message. So, get the message first and figure out:

• What mode works for you, and
• What market you want to work with.

And you combine those three together. I spent a fair amount of time doing this in the Thoughtpreneur Academy which I’ll talk about. Somewhere down the road, you’ll hear more about it. But the point is, is this—is to figure out:

• I get my message straightened out.
• I figure out how to do that.
• I figure out how to build it into a framework that’s – Teachable, Memorable, Commercially viable, and Something that is sellable and protectable in the process.

I figure out who I want to take that to and I figure out what is the best way to take it out there. And when I say the best way, there’s two things to consider.

• What your audience wants in the way to digest it.
• What you feel comfortable doing.

For instance, let me just, let me clarify that. Your audience may be the type of audience. Let’s just use accountants for a moment. Accountants are the type of people that want to go in, sit at desks and chairs, and go through a training program. They want to go through workbooks and worksheets. They want to do that. So, the best way to get some of my messaging out to that audience in their preferred mode is training. So, I’m going to create training programs with that marketplace and give them my message that way.

There may be other folks that just want to go to a conference. So, you’re going to do a 90 minute or 60 minute keynote or you’re going to follow it up with a webinar. Or, you’re going to do a book.

So, the question is, who’s your audience and your market that you want to deliver it to?

How are they used to digesting the information?

Making sure that, that coincides with what you want as your delivery mode because if it’s something that you hate doing; if every time I got on stage, I hated getting on stage—that wouldn’t be a good way to live.

Now, we need to develop those skills over time but that’s probably not the first place I’d go Cheryl. So, what I would do is look at

• What have you done?
• What’s your experience in the past?
• How have you delivered your message, your mission, your purpose, your wisdom in the past?
• Has it been in a coaching environment where you’re coaching people?
• Which is one of the easiest ways to do it and typically the place where a lot of people start.

Maybe, that’s what you do, is you take that and say, “I’m going to do a coaching program first. I’m going to build my content and refine my content through that to this group. And as I build that I can go from coaching and now I can bridge that to maybe speaking or an actual training program.”

When I say training program, it doesn’t have to be live. It can be recorded just like you’re participating in some of my programs or even this is a somewhat a … it’s a recorded training. So, that’s the key behind it is to understand that you’re not tied to a specific mode only.

But where you’re going to start in all likelihood

• Is the place that you have the most comfort.
• It’s the place that you have the most history.
• It’s the place that you may have been able to deliver your expertise, your experience and your wisdom most readily in the past.
• Because that’s what’s comfortable for you and then bridge out from there.

There’s a lot more we can go into that, go into digging deeper but we’ll get to that another time. I hope that helps you to just understand that let’s get the message right.

Let’s figure out what it is:

• Your wisdom is,
• Your experience,
• Your background is right.

Let’s,

• Figure out who you want to take it to.

• Figure out what your most comfortable mode is of delivering that information.

Make sure that it coincides with the audience preferences, your market preferences and go out and deliver it and you’ll build from there.

When I first started, all I was doing was consulting.

• Then I started speaking and writing.
• Then I started getting paid for speaking and writing.
• Then I did training programs. I did a live training program, three day seminars and training programs.
• Then I did recorded programs.
• And now I have the book.

That’s my journey. That’s the journey I’ve been on.

• There’s going to be more books coming.
• There’s going to be continually training programs coming.
• There’s going to be a lot more live training coming.

So there’s a lot of things that I have in the works all of it revolving around the same message to the different markets that I want to serve and the perspective to do that.

That’s the way I would start. Hopefully that helps you as you move forward. I’m going to put together a little bit of a guidebook here. If you want to get the guidebook for this episode, go ahead and go to MelAbraham.com/session021.

If you happen to not be at your computer where you can write that down, just text if you’re at the gym or you’re running or out and about. Go ahead and text MYLEGACY to 38470. That’s MYLEGACY with no-spaces, one-word 38470. It’ll give you the download link.

If you have a question just like Cheryl did that you want me to answer on one of the upcoming episodes go ahead and go to AskMelNow.com. Leave me your question and we’ll make sure that we’ll get it on one of the upcoming episodes. Make sure that we guide you to move you forward.

That’s what I’m here for. I want to be your entrepreneurial mentor. I want to be there to not only help you through the struggles of your entrepreneurial journey but to celebrate the successes, to hear about the successes and to work with you to bring those dreams to life.

So, I hope you found this of value. If you haven’t already, go ahead and subscribe so you can continually get these … the free trainings and the resources that I’m going to give you and might as well—while you’re at it—share it with a friend. Let’s give a friend the gift of bringing their dreams to life.

And until I get a chance to see you in one of the next upcoming episodes,

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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