Are You Sitting on a Business You Haven't Built Yet?

The strange thing about becoming an expert is that eventually you stop noticing how much you know.

How many years have you spent learning what you know, and how much of that knowledge currently earns money only when you personally turn up and use it? If tomorrow you were no longer allowed to sell another hour of your time, would there be something else you could sell from everything you've learned, developed, tested and occasionally discovered the expensive way?

Mark and I have been asking ourselves that question recently because, when we started looking back at the projects we've worked on over the years, we realised that the most interesting part of what we do often happens long before anybody opens Kajabi or starts building a course. It begins with somebody who knows an enormous amount about something and has never really stopped to consider what else that knowledge could become.

A few weeks ago Mark and I were talking about some of the people we've worked with over the years, which is something we tend to do when we're supposed to be talking about something completely different.

One name led to another, and before long we were remembering courses we'd built, books we'd helped turn into learning programmes, academies, memberships, professional training and some extraordinarily complicated Kajabi builds that I'm quite glad I've forgotten the finer details of.

One project started with the client's knowledge in a book and, by the time we finished, it had become a seventeen-module learning programme. Another client had years of professional knowledge and a growing business, and together we turned part of that into an academy.

We've worked with doctors, lawyers, coaches, trainers, consultants, authors and people working in industries so specialised that I occasionally have to ask Mark what they actually do before I can understand the project.

Somewhere in this conversation, I realised we'd been describing what we do rather badly.

Perhaps It Was Never Really About Building Courses

We've called ourselves course creators, we've called Mark an instructional designer and, because we're Kajabi Certified Experts, we've inevitably spent years talking about Kajabi. All of that is true, but none of it explains what happens before any of it, because before somebody has a course, there is usually just a person who knows an awful lot about something.

They may have spent twenty years learning it, written a book about it, developed their own way of doing it because the conventional way never worked particularly well, or accumulated hundreds of presentations, documents, videos, workshops, client conversations and scribbled notes across several computers and at least one drawer they haven't opened since 2017.

What they very rarely have is a neat box marked MY VALUABLE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, and perhaps that's the interesting bit.

When Did You Last Take an Inventory of What You Know?

We take inventories of almost everything else in business. We know what equipment we own, we know what software we're paying for, or at least we discover it when the credit card statement arrives, and we generally have some idea what our products and services are worth. What most of us don't do is stop and put any sort of value on what we've learned.

I don't mean qualifications. I mean the things you know now that you couldn't possibly have known when you started: the judgement that tells you within five minutes that a client is heading in the wrong direction, the process you've refined over fifteen years, the question you always ask that nobody else seems to ask, or the mistake you can see coming because you've watched it happen fifty times before.

That knowledge has taken years to accumulate, yet very often the only way it earns any money is when you personally turn up and use it, which is rather a peculiar business model when you think about it.

The Course Isn't Always the Product

This is the bit Mark and I kept coming back to. Someone comes to us and says they think they should create an online course and perhaps they should, but perhaps they shouldn't. What they know might be far more valuable as a professional certification, a membership where people continue learning from them for years, a methodology that could be licensed, a professional development programme, an academy, a coaching system or something neither they nor we have thought of yet.

The important thing is that we shouldn't decide on the container before we've properly examined what we're putting inside it. The course isn't always the product.

Your knowledge is the asset.

We've called it our Knowledge Asset Studio, although in truth it has grown out of work we've already been doing for years. The difference is that we've now put a proper process around what usually happens before the build.

The first route is the Knowledge Asset Blueprint, for someone who knows they have considerable expertise, experience, or intellectual property but isn't yet certain what the strongest commercial opportunity is. Mark gets underneath what you actually know, including the things you've probably stopped recognising as expertise because they've become second nature, and we look at what already exists, who might need it, where the commercial possibilities are, how involved you want to remain and what sort of business you actually want this to become.

The process takes approximately seven working days following the initial Knowledge Asset Session. At the end, you'll have a commercial and product Blueprint showing what we recommend, how it could be structured, and what's involved in taking it forward.

But What If You Already Know What You Want?

If you've already decided you want to build an academy, course, certification, membership, or professional development programme, and you need someone experienced enough to take it from idea to finished product, you probably don't need the Blueprint. That's our second route, the Knowledge Asset Build.

Mark leads the instructional architecture, learning strategy and technology; I work across the editorial, creative, presentation and customer experience side, and between us we build the thing rather than handing it down a chain of freelancers you've never met. It is essentially what we've been doing together for years, only now it has a much better name.

Which Leaves Me With One Question

If you've been working in your field for ten, twenty, thirty or forty years, imagine for a moment that tomorrow you weren't allowed to sell another hour of your time. You can still earn money and run a business, but you can't charge anybody for an hour of your time. What would you sell?

If you know the answer right away, you may already have the beginnings of a Knowledge Asset. If you have absolutely no idea despite knowing there is an enormous amount sitting inside your head, I think that's even more interesting because that is exactly where we start.

Want to Find Out What You're Sitting On?

If you'd like to talk to Mark and Cheryl about the Knowledge Asset Blueprint, or you already know what you want to create and would like to discuss a Knowledge Asset Build, we'd love to hear from you.

Tell us a little about what you do, what you're thinking about creating and, most importantly, what you know.

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