Winning The Scalability Game With Erin Austin

How can you scale as a soloist in the expertise space? You turn your expertise into assets that will work for you. Erin Austin—strategic lawyer and consultant—explains how to increase your revenue and impact by moving from fully customized services to leveraged income streams.

We talk about:

The eight business problems we create for ourselves when we only provide custom services.

The “buckets” of intellectual property and how to think about them in your expertise business.

How to decide which of your ideas make sense to protect and nurture.

Why you want to develop a signature service that only you can provide—and how to get there from where you are now.

LINKS

Erin Austin | Website | LinkedIn | Hourly to Exit Podcast

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter| Instagram

GUEST BIO

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Erin Austin is a strategic lawyer and consultant who uses her 25+ years of practicing law to help female founders of expertise-based firms meet their growth goals through the creation of scalable IP-based revenue streams.

Her experience as a lawyer and as an executive—at the intersection of business and the law (including roles as COO and general counsel at IP-driven companies such as Warner Brothers, Lionsgate (formerly known as Artisan), MGM, Teaching Strategies, and M3 USA Corp)—informs the elevated legal and strategic business advice she provides to her clients. Through her Hourly to Exit podcast and her legal practice, Think Beyond IP, Erin guides women on the journey of transforming their businesses from an unscalable income-generator into a saleable wealth building asset.

In her spare time, Erin likes to clear brush on her farmette, search for the perfect gluten-free baguette (all leads are appreciated!) and work on her backhand.

RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

Join the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.

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The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – 00:34
Erin Austin: If you are someone who’s just kind of selling your time, like as an extra pair of hands, you’re a very good marketer, you’re a very good copywriter, you’re saying, I can write whatever you need me to write for you, but you don’t have, you’re not developing your own signature solutions, your own signature methodologies or frameworks, then you probably have some very weak positioning. People are gonna have you talk about this all the time, you know, the ability to be referable and for people to kind of understand, you know, exactly what you do and who you do

00:34 – 00:44
Erin Austin: it for. And so if you are using your expertise to create really strong packages, and that helps cement your positioning in the marketplace.

00:49 – 01:30
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist   Women, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton. And today I’m here with Erin Austin, who, in my opinion, is the maven for female founders of expertise firms who want to build scalable IP-based revenue streams. Erin, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Rochelle. I’m excited. So 1 of the many reasons that I’m so excited to have you on the show is you have this 100% clear-eyed view on what it takes to scale an expertise business using your intellectual property. And plus, kind of

01:30 – 01:45
Rochelle Moulton: like as a bonus, I’d really love for our listeners to hear how you’ve gotten to this place because in my head, you’re the poster child for carving out the life you want in the place you want to be. So I want to dig into that a little bit too.

01:45 – 02:26
Erin Austin: It too. Well, thank you. Well, I do kind of describe myself as my own avatar as a female founder of an expertise based business who has taken that journey from having, you know, unscalable hourly based business to creating 1 that is expertise based, creating intellectual property, creating a new revenue streams that decouple my income from my time. That is why I’m here and to help other women do that. And So just a teeny bit of my back story is I’ve been working with intellectual property based corporations, large corporations, my entire career. And then I got to

02:26 – 03:00
Erin Austin: a point where I wanted to not just help big companies get bigger, but to help women, especially women who have expertise-based businesses, maybe they are lifestyle businesses, but they have a mission and a purpose. They want to do more for their families, for their communities, to help them increase not just their income, but hopefully to build wealth with their businesses as well. You know, I like to say that wealth in the hands of women can change the world. And so helping men, yeah, you know, helping women build wealth because, you know, at the end of the

03:00 – 03:12
Erin Austin: day, wealth, you know, has influence in this world. And so if we want to spread more of that wealth around, we need to help more people get access to the tools of wealth, which is ownership of assets.

03:13 – 03:24
Rochelle Moulton: Well, Erin, In all the time I’ve known you, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this question. What actually made you decide to start your own business? Because I mean, you worked for some very top names in America.

03:25 – 03:57
Erin Austin: Yeah, well, it really was moving to middle of nowhere, frankly, and having a kid. So I was at the front end of being able to work remotely. When I first moved to, I live in the exurbs of Washington DC, which at the time I had dial up and I was able to work with my former clients doing work with them. At the time, I was still doing a lot of film work, and I had, 1 of my old clients had a film library that they wanted me to look at, and it was easier for them to

03:57 – 04:17
Erin Austin: download the documents, put them on a CD, and mail them to me than for me to try to do that remotely. Over time, I’ve been able to work from home while raising my kid out here. And so fortunately, I’ve been able to have the best of both worlds of working with my large clients and working remotely, working for myself as well.

04:17 – 04:40
Rochelle Moulton: I guess the other thing that I know from other conversations we’ve had is that you have Really for a long time walk this intersection between law and business, right? You trained as a lawyer, but you’ve been in business almost forever So can you talk us through what it was like entering the consulting space and then finding your niche with helping women experts scale?

04:41 – 05:15
Erin Austin: Yeah, it took me a little bit. I mean, you know, I get I’ve been practicing law for 30 years, working with large corporations, and having to kind of do the type of business development that’s required to work with, you know, a larger audience and 1 that’s different from the 1 that I’ve worked with traditionally has been some work for me to learn how to make sure I’m showing up in the places where my audience is, learning how to stop with the legal speak, you know, the large corporations that I work with. I mean, they all totally

05:15 – 05:55
Erin Austin: get it. They have legal departments. They, you know, their assets are intellectual property. They love lawyers, frankly, versus a different population, which might be afraid of lawyers might think that they’re inaccessible or not understandable. And So being accessible and understandable and having materials that are implementable has been a real process for me and 1 that I really enjoy. Like I found that people tell me I’m pretty good at translating the legalese into things that make sense and that are applicable. I love a good analogy. I love a good graphic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so to me, that’s

05:55 – 05:59
Erin Austin: part of the joy is being an educator along with being a lawyer.

06:00 – 06:18
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. Awesome. So 1 of the questions I’ve been asking guests is about revenue. So how long did it take you to hit your first like 100, 000 after you went out on your own? Like was it really fast because of your legal background or did it take a while? Yeah, it did.

06:18 – 06:35
Erin Austin: I mean, because I just kind of flipped from being in house to being an outside resource. And so it did not. I mean, that was my first year, frankly, of, you know, doing retainer work, or doing flat fee work. And that is just, you know, a function of yeah, where I was coming from.

06:36 – 06:44
Rochelle Moulton: And did you plateau or did you find that, you know, since then, or do you find that you have kind of a steady climb over time? Just curious.

06:44 – 07:19
Erin Austin: Yeah, there were some plateau mostly because, you know, I had whale clients for a very long time and I’ll say I still have 1. And so you and there’s a comfort with having those whale clients and so long as they stick around right. But it makes you a little bit lazy and I was very comfortable and so I definitely plateaued And so it was on me to kind of find that fire, just do business development as I’m working with this new audience. When you have when you still have those clients. But yeah, yeah.

07:20 – 07:26
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. Well, you know, you can make a wonderful business with whale clients, right? As long as you don’t just have 1,

07:26 – 07:26
Erin Austin: you

07:26 – 07:59
Rochelle Moulton: know, you’ve got 3 or maybe 4 or 5, I think any more than that’s probably not a whale. But so let’s get down to scaling our expertise businesses, a subject I know you and I both love to talk about. And I really want to talk about how we can scale even if we want to stay solo. And I was looking at your website before we talked, and I just want to read what you said on there. If the only way you make money is you providing custom services, your score is 0 out of 8 in the

07:59 – 08:12
Rochelle Moulton: scalability game. And then you go through basically 8 different points in the game. So can you walk us through the business problems that we create for ourselves when we focus only on custom services?

08:12 – 08:53
Erin Austin: Yeah absolutely and These are all indications that we aren’t taking advantage of our expertise and turning it into either assets that we can use internally to become more efficient or perhaps even assets that we can sell externally. So the issues that are the symptoms that you have a problem if you’re not effectively using utilizing your expertise as an asset are 1, you know, you have a client concentration problem. I mean, there are only so many clients that you can serve at 1 time. You know, whether or not you want to increase your revenue through the addition

08:53 – 09:32
Erin Austin: of employees, and let’s just say we were soloist women, and we’re all, we all wanna stay soloist, but there are ways that we can use our expertise to create efficiencies in our business so that 1, maybe you have that will client problem. And so you can handle more clients when you build efficiencies into your business through standards and procedures, through templates, through models, so that helps you be more efficient. Other ways that helps you perhaps create other offerings that you can provide at different price points. So maybe you’re only doing very custom services, maybe you add

09:32 – 10:10
Erin Austin: some productized services to the mix too because you have developed a specialty, you know, so that kind of signature solution that you have productized that you can deliver more efficiently at a different price point and so that would also appeal to a different client as well. Other ways you might have problems is you know when you have client concentration problem you usually have a revenue concentration problem. So you just have that 1 type of revenue in this case we’re talking about one-on-one services And so when you are packaging your intellectual property, packaging your expertise into intellectual

10:10 – 10:37
Erin Austin: property assets, then you can create new revenue streams off of that. Not just one-on-one services, but also some leverage services that decouple your income from your time, such as maybe workshops or digital products. Another problem will be the earner concentration, and that’s just you. It’s only you out there. If you’re not delivering services, there’s no money coming in.

10:37 – 10:39
Rochelle Moulton: No passive revenue.

10:39 – 11:14
Erin Austin: Yeah. And you know, 1 of the ways to create, you know, more earners in your business is either through, you know, effective use of employees, if that’s 1 way you wanna go, but also using contractors as well. There are people who do workshops and some of them are doing them on their own. They’re traveling, you know, if they’re doing them in person, They’re traveling around the country to deliver those workshops. If you are able to systematize your workshops and document them, then you’re able to engage facilitators on a subcontractor basis so that there’s somebody else delivering

11:14 – 11:48
Erin Austin: your work. But you’re getting paid for it without you going on the road or out that without that taking your time personally Mm-hmm, then the revenue ceiling problem, you know, I like to say unless you’re Tony Robbins You know, there’s only so much you can charge for a private coaching session, right? And so, you know, even making a very good hourly rate, there’s still a ceiling on your hourly rate. And so if you haven’t figured out a way to, again, to decouple your income from your time, then you will hit that revenue ceiling. I like to

11:48 – 12:23
Erin Austin: talk about the licensing process of having your expertise packaged in a way that someone else can deliver it, whether it is through a facilitator like we mentioned earlier, or perhaps it’s something that a client can license directly for you. If we go back to that workshop model and you have been the facilitator for your clients, they may have someone in-house that can be the facilitator. And so you license your workshop to them and then you are getting paid a license fee for them to deliver it internally using their own resources.

12:25 – 12:25
Rochelle Moulton: Train the trainer.

12:26 – 12:59
Erin Austin: Yeah, train the trainer model. Other symptom is that inconsistent cash flow. You have that feast or famine cycle when you’re doing you know high ticket, high touch custom services. Those can have very long sale cycles. So you’re you know you’re working, working, working to get the sale and and then you get it. Then you have all the work. Then you’re completely overwhelmed by the work so you’re not doing anything else until the engagement’s over, then you look up, okay, now I got to go do it all again. And I guess it’s like kind of a, what

12:59 – 13:34
Erin Austin: is it, the hunting, like big game hunting, right? Where you go, you feast, and then once you’re out of meat you gotta bring it back out there and bring down another beast but when we you know set up multiple revenue streams we have 1 that is not necessarily passive but 1 that’s perhaps recurring such as you know maybe you have resources that you can sell subscriptions to, or maybe you have a community that you can sell subscriptions to, or other types of assets that can be offered on a recurring basis so that you can even out

13:34 – 14:10
Erin Austin: your cash flow. Another symptom would be your weak positioning. Like if you are someone who’s just kind of selling your time like as an extra pair of hands, you’re a very good marketer, you’re a very good copywriter, and you’re saying, I can write whatever you need me to write for you. But you don’t have you’re not developing your own signature solutions, your own signature methodologies or frameworks. Then you probably have some very weak positioning. People are going to have you talk about this all the time, you know, the ability to be referable and for people to

14:10 – 14:25
Erin Austin: kind of understand, you know, exactly what you do and who you do it for. And so if you are using your expertise to create really strong packages and that helps cement your positioning in the marketplace.

14:26 – 14:28
Rochelle Moulton: And makes you worth more in the eyes of the market.

14:29 – 14:34
Erin Austin: Absolutely. Speaking of which, you know, stagnant profitability would be 1.

14:34 – 14:35
Rochelle Moulton: 0, there’s that.

14:36 – 15:14
Erin Austin: Yeah, absolutely. Well, 1, you know, it depresses what you can charge, right? But also, if you’re starting from scratch with every engagement, then how do you get the benefit of efficiencies? How do you get the benefits of systemizing your services? How do you get the benefit of having templates and models that you’re starting from? When you aren’t billing by the hour, you know, the more efficient you get, the more profitable that same service becomes. And so that means not just having your expertise in your head, but actually creating systems from it. And that can also become

15:14 – 15:49
Erin Austin: more profitable when you lower the cost of the resources, you know, you are the most expensive resource in your business. You know, can you use less expensive resources such as contractors or even technology, maybe even, if you understand like where the elements are that you might be able to plug less expensive resources in. And then the last 1 is the impact ceiling. I mean, we all got into this business because there’s something that we wanted, there’s some change you wanted to bring to the world. For me, it’s helping women create more wealth, and I can only

15:49 – 16:20
Erin Austin: help so many women on a one-on-one basis. I like working with people on one-on-one basis and I do work with people on a one-on-one basis but there will be only so many people that I can help if I don’t also create other resources that can be delivered without me. So I will, you know, in the future, you know, have some leverageable income streams that would include courses and group programs and books. Of course, podcasting is 1 of the ways I also help people that’s not, obviously it’s a free resource, but these are all ways that we

16:20 – 16:22
Erin Austin: increase our impact as well.

16:22 – 16:46
Rochelle Moulton: Well, and I don’t want to denigrate the free resources because that is a way that, I think it was Jill Conrath said that, I charge the people who can afford it a lot, and I give away a ton for free. So there’s a way to look at that. And sometimes the way we develop our products and services comes from something that we did for free. And then we realize that there’s some legs to it that we can monetize.

16:47 – 17:13
Erin Austin: Yeah. And I imagine, I mean, this is something that I struggle with, you know, because I like to give away information for free and I do. But you always wonder like, where’s the limit of free versus what I should charge for? But I’ve heard that, you know, if it’s something that you wonder whether or not you should be charging for it, that’s the right thing to be giving away for free, like for really kind of being generous with your audience. So I do like to do that.

17:13 – 17:43
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, generous is good. So I love how you’ve positioned this because I think that for those of us who have done lots of one-to-one work, whether it was custom or following a particular model, what you’re really saying is that there is room. There is room to grow and by grow, I mean revenue. There’s room to monetize. So talk to me about how does intellectual property fit into all this and maybe we should start with a definition of intellectual property.

17:43 – 18:33
Erin Austin: Yeah well Intellectual property is the bucket of rights that are protected via our intellectual property laws, kind of circular, but basically the main buckets are copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. And so there are a number of intangibles that we have, such as our reputation, such as our SOPs, that are an important part of how we express our expertise. And some of it can be protected through intellectual property laws, and those provide exclusive rights to use whatever that asset is. If it’s under copyrights, exclusive right to use that literary work or that song or that painting,

18:33 – 19:17
Erin Austin: you have exclusive rights to copying it, selling it, performing it. If it’s a script or music, distributing it, that means something, providing something for sale. So we have exclusive rights, exclusive copyrights to exploit that work. Patents protect inventions, trademarks protect the origin of a good or service. So that tells the world, if I have something from McDonald’s, nobody else can pretend to be McDonald’s and that protects the source of that good or service. And then trade secrets are those things that we protect by keeping them secret. Literally you don’t register your trade secrets like the others.

19:17 – 20:00
Erin Austin: And when we protect those, then the law actually protects them as an asset, not just as a contract right with your NDA. And so but that is a smaller group of assets than the broader group of things like positioning that also are important part of our expertise and the value that we bring to the market. And so I just the other day I had a newsletter piece, that’s also my blog by the way, about how to protect our ideas. And so, a lot of people think about our ideas as something that’s very valuable. And it is,

20:00 – 20:39
Erin Austin: however, how do you protect an idea? How do you profit from it? How do you prevent other people from using your ideas? And so if we want to equate our expertise with how we provide value with our ideas, then there are a couple of things that we can do. Like 1, we have the statutory protections that we get through intellectual property laws. So statutory means by statute, by law. So if we have our expertise expressed in a way that is protectable by intellectual property laws, then we have the statutory protections. The things that I mentioned that

20:39 – 21:18
Erin Austin: you have exclusive, you basically have a legal monopoly. So IP law gives you a legal monopoly to exploit your work, But not everything will fall into that bucket such as a reputation, things like that. So, and the other way that we protect our expertise is through our contracts. And so things that aren’t protectable by IP law, like our ideas, for instance, because you have to have something in tangible form, we can’t just protect our ideas by intellectual property law, we protect it by contract. So that is using our NDAs so that if we’re sharing our ideas

21:19 – 21:57
Erin Austin: in a way that’s not yet protectable by an extra property law, we protect them by entering NDAs with people so that other people aren’t using our ideas for their own purposes and aren’t publicizing them. We protect them with our services agreements. So when we are working with our clients and part of the value we provide to them will include some of our original ideas, some of our expertise, some of the materials that we’ve created before our engagement. And we want to make sure when we’re entering those agreements that we aren’t assigning rights to our original ideas

21:57 – 22:31
Erin Austin: to them. So we do need to be mindful of those when we’re using subcontractors and we are having them help us develop some of our ideas. Because sometimes we will need other people’s input for these things. And we want to make sure that we are getting all the rights that we need from our subcontractors when we are engaging them to help us develop some of our ideas, as well as making sure that they aren’t using them without us, making sure that anything they deliver to us is original and then they’re not getting it from AI, which

22:31 – 22:52
Erin Austin: is a whole different thing, but making sure that what they’re delivering to us is original. Those are all important elements of making sure that our intellectual property is clean, for lack of a better word, is that having those contracts make sure that we own all the rights in our intellectual property, and that they aren’t infringing a third parties.

22:53 – 23:24
Rochelle Moulton: Question I don’t want to take us down a rabbit hole, but I’m just curious. So as a business owner in the expertise space, let’s say you’ve got big corporate clients, can a sort of specialized business lawyer help with those? Or like, when does it make sense to bring in an IP specialist as a business owner? Because I’ve seen how tricky some of these contracts can be especially if you’re getting something from your fortune 500 client and they want you to sign sort of their standard deal. Yeah

23:24 – 24:06
Erin Austin: the fortune 500 client will definitely have their their services agreements or a vendor agreement they might call it or supplier agreement that they want everyone to sign, whether you’re providing custom marketing materials or you’re coding app for them or you’re, frankly, maybe even to cleaning their offices even. And so a lot of times we do need to be mindful of the intellectual property provisions in there. They will all have very client favorable provisions in there. And most lawyers that are familiar with commercial transactions would be familiar with the provisions in those agreements and would be able

24:06 – 24:57
Erin Austin: to negotiate those on your behalf. The super specialized IP lawyers are mostly on the patent end. Because the nature of 21st century business is that almost all of our corporate transactions, our commercial transactions are IP related. And so, is it 90% of the gross domestic product in the US, I think is IP related. And so almost all commercial transactions are going to involve intellectual property. And so any lawyer with a robust commercial transactions practice can help you. If you yourself need to protect intellectual property there are a number of specialists, there’s a number of you know

24:57 – 25:32
Erin Austin: trademark specialists you’ll see who their entire practice is just helping you get your trademarks. Certainly patents or attorneys are always specialists. Trade secrets in the form of NDAs is a pretty common part of commercial transactions practice as well, But if you have something that’s super secret, you know, like you are a pharmaceutical company and you’re at the, you know, you’re protecting trade secrets in anticipation of a patent, then you definitely want to be with a patent lawyer for something like that. But for most of us, most of the people listening to this, who are, you know,

25:32 – 26:12
Erin Austin: experts provide professional services, creative services to corporate clients, your main issues are going to be protecting your copyrightable materials, which would be your workshop materials, your templates and frameworks that you have, and those are all matters for copyright. And those can be protected. You know, copyright is protected at the moment you create it. If it’s original and it’s created by human, it is protectable at the time it’s created. But you do want to register it if you want to protect it or enforce it against an infringer. It has to be registered to enforce it against an

26:12 – 26:19
Erin Austin: infringer. So, but that would be something that a commercial transactions lawyer can help you with as well.

26:20 – 26:36
Rochelle Moulton: So actually, I want to hit that 1 just a little bit more on that you have to register copyrights because as an example, like we all put on our website, we put copyright with a year, We usually update it every year. We might put a copyright on a downloadable thing that

26:36 – 27:16
Erin Austin: we have on our website. So what should listeners be doing if they’re doing that? Like is that registration? I’m hearing that that is not from what you said. That is not registration. So again, copyright attaches at the moment of creation. There is no registration requirement for copyright to attach to the work as soon as it is created. We do want to put that copyright symbol with the year of creation and your name, whoever is claiming the copyright, and if it’s you or your LLC or your corporation, you want to have that on there. Not because it’s

27:16 – 27:49
Erin Austin: a requirement for to have copyright protection, but because it puts the world on notice that you are claiming copyright protection. And so if somebody does want to contact the owner for they want to license it or want to use it for some reason, they can find you and they can ask for permission. For as far as registration, I encourage registration for things that are your direct revenue makers. So if you have a workshop, if you have a book, you have a course, you have something that you are distributing to the public, I want you to register

27:49 – 28:28
Erin Austin: that. And the reason for that is that you are required to have it registered with the U.S. Copyright Office if you want to enforce your rights against a third party infringer. And so you can’t go to court and sue someone because they stole your materials unless it’s been registered in the copyright office. And if it is registered before you publish it, you have some additional protections than if you register it later after they’ve started fringing. So to get ahead of it, you would register it. When it’s something that is important enough that you would hire, if

28:28 – 28:37
Erin Austin: you’d hire a lawyer to enforce it, then that’s the thing that you want to make sure you have registered. You know, you’re not going to hire a lawyer because somebody, you know, stole 1 of your blog posts, right?

28:37 – 28:38
Rochelle Moulton: Right.

28:38 – 28:48
Erin Austin: But you are going to sue someone if they steal your workshop or steal your course or, you know, or they, you know, dupe your entire website, which unfortunately happens as well. But

28:48 – 28:52
Rochelle Moulton: yeah I’ve seen that happen to me. Yes I’ve

28:52 – 28:54
Erin Austin: never seen it but I’ve heard of it.

28:55 – 29:31
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah it was very interesting. So when you think kind of bigger picture like how do we decide which ideas we should protect and nurture and you just walk through why workshops, books, courses are so important. But are there any other criteria that we should be using when we think about what do we really want to protect? And I use the word nurture really intentionally because I think of it as something that is not a one-off but something that we’re going to keep using in our business going forward. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, because it is not

29:31 – 29:32
Rochelle Moulton: that

29:32 – 30:17
Erin Austin: copyright registration is expensive because it’s not unlike trademarks, which requires a 4 figure investment. You know, you can register a copyright, you can do that online and it can be a DIY. If you have the patience to do that, you can do that as a DIY process. But we want to register those things that do have kind of an evergreen value in your business. And looking at it as an inventory, I like to look at intellectual property and the assets in our expertise-based business in terms of what is a finished good inventory piece versus what is

30:18 – 30:58
Erin Austin: raw material versus what is works in progress and the finished goods you know I think of as those things that are publicly available that are important part of your reputation and an important part of how you create value for your clients and the things that a third party would find value in as well if they were to take it. And so that would be kind of your very big thought leadership pieces, like your books and your courses. And so those I would certainly encourage people to have registered. Things that are kind of come and go, I

30:58 – 31:37
Erin Austin: mean, our websites tend to be something that is frequently updated and changing. Even those of us who have, you know, back catalogs of things, they stay there, but are they still as timely as they were when we published them originally? So most people do not register their websites unless it is something that, you know, in and of itself is a revenue generator as opposed to a place where we add our thoughts as they develop. Yeah, so it is, it will depend on the nature of your business and how you create value for your clients. But yeah,

31:37 – 31:43
Erin Austin: the value creators, either for you or for your clients, are probably the things you want to start with.

31:44 – 32:17
Rochelle Moulton: Got it. Got it. That’s really helpful, Aaron. Thank you. I’m thinking I have some work to do when we’re done. So I guess another question I have is about what you refer to as that signature program. And I know a lot of people talk about this, But how do we get to that signature program? Because when I was listening to your 8 different kinds of problems that are created, 1 of the things that really struck me is some of these are a function of when you first start your business and you’re figuring things out. So everything’s

32:17 – 32:47
Rochelle Moulton: custom because everything’s new because you’re not specializing even a little bit. It’s if somebody says they want you, you say, yes, here I am. Here’s my custom proposal. But at some point, you know, there’s some advantages, some of which you’ve talked about and getting to that signature program, how do you see people getting there on a reasonable trajectory versus the 1 that seems kind of twisty and crooked for a lot of people? Crooked in the sense that it’s not straight, Not illegal. Yeah, I

32:47 – 33:29
Erin Austin: mean, I think first of all, I encourage people to have their own original ideas. And so let’s say you start and let’s use the copywriter example and anyone who comes to you, they need copywriting, and you can do that for them. But at some point, you’re going to notice patterns. You know, when you have enough clients in a certain area, you’ll notice that, oh, you know, real, maybe, you know, realtors, they all seem to have some issue regarding how to make them feel more approachable and not too salesy. And you developed a way of expressing that

33:29 – 34:13
Erin Austin: and you continue to hone in on that and creating your own ideas around like, how do I help them express down-homeness? Right? I bet our down-homeness. And you’ll develop kind of realtor speak, right? And that will be your own. Like maybe you started with a certification program, I assume there was a copywriting certification program. And, but then you start to drill down on your specific audience and your specific success that you’ve had with that audience and you continue to develop your own original ideas because if you want to develop processes that would eventually be something that

34:13 – 34:43
Erin Austin: you’ll be able to decouple from your own work, it has to be original to you. It has to be something that you own. So it can’t be something that you got from a certification program. It can’t be something that you got from your former employer. It can’t be something that you got off the internet. It has to be something that’s original to you. And so start thinking about what your own personal spin you can put on either based on your niche or based on your specialization that you go from the general to the more specific to

34:43 – 35:01
Erin Austin: the signature kind of solution framework language that really speaks to your specific audience that you can then kind of develop something that’s just yours and that you can own and prevent other people from using unless they come to you for permission.

35:02 – 35:16
Rochelle Moulton: Love it. So Erin, I think just 1 more question, which is if you could go back to who you were when you first started your business, like what’s the 1 thing you would advise her to do?

35:16 – 35:51
Erin Austin: Oh my goodness. I would have advised her to start working on developing my own signature solutions then. I mean, you know, I’m certainly not going to be the first lawyer, the last lawyer who just sells her time, you know, very specific. I mean, I was very specific about the type of work that I would work on. I’ve always been very good about protecting, like, you know, I’m not a litigator. I’m not, you know, working on your manufacturing stuff. I’m not, you know, it’s always been kind of the intellectual property driven, you know, film, marketing, publishing, research

35:52 – 36:04
Erin Austin: area, and always on commercial transactions. But I was still just selling my time and working on more productized services. I wish I’d done that much earlier for sure.

36:04 – 36:19
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, I hear you. My hands raised. You can’t see it, but it is. So before we sign off, and we’ll put these in the show notes, but where can listeners go to learn more about you and your work and mention your podcast too. It’s awesome.

36:19 – 37:04
Erin Austin: Well, my podcast is Hourly to Exit where we talk about the journey from the unsustainable hourly business model and evolving into a sustainable, scalable, and hopefully someday saleable business so that the business is ready to exit when you’re ready to move on. And so you can find that at all everywhere you listen to podcasts. My website is Think Beyond IP And there I offer my services and resources to help experts, you know, protect their expertise so they can profit from it. And yeah, and I’m really excited about a new offer where I am going to literally

37:04 – 37:10
Erin Austin: help people copyright their expertise. And so I’d love to have you come check it out.

37:10 – 37:27
Rochelle Moulton: Awesome. Well, Erin, thank you so much. I just love how you translate all of this into business language for we non-lawyers to learn more about what we can do to protect our expertise and our assets. So thank you.

37:27 – 37:30
Erin Austin: Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.

37:30 – 37:35
Rochelle Moulton: So that’s it for this episode. I hope you’ll join us next time for Soloist Women. Bye-bye! You