Money talks, but it sure can sound like a foreign language to some of us! Melissa Houston, CPA, owner of She Means Profit, joins me in this episode to demystify a few financial realities about running an expertise-based service business. She has 20 years of experience diving into the numbers with her clients and putting them in control of their 1, 5, 10-year plans to make their business scalable and saleable.

How many of us who provide our services as a business actually think in terms of profit? The timing couldn't be better for my conversation with Patty Block. An expert herself, Patty works with female expertise-based service providers on being intentional in their business models, transitioning from transactional to transformative pricing structures, and better understanding how to integrate profit into their revenue model.

When it comes to copyright, there are a few rules that can make all the difference between scaling your business and getting tripped up by the counterintuitive rules of intellectual property law. You need to know who owns what, who has what usage rights, and what the consequences of misappropriation might be. This episode was recorded as a LinkedIn Live which I hold the last Wednesday of the month at 11 am ET (check out my YouTube channel if you want the full version with slides) and covers how to create, protect, and maximize your copyright assets.

I have been eagerly awaiting the release of this episode! Can I be so bold as to brag that Jessica Fearnley, of the “Seven Figure Consultant,” and I really do think alike. 😊 Jessica joined me and we got into the nitty gritty about how successful solopreneurs need to evolve to move from six-figure incomes to seven. We didn’t quite finish each other’s sentences, but there was a lot of agreement between us.

In this episode, we go over Launching into Web 3.0 With Your Expertise-Based Business.

I was so lucky to be joined in this episode by JoAnn Holmes, an IP expert who was able to provide some amazing insights into one of the biggest tech buzzwords: Web 3.0. Even those of us who practice in IP are still learning about this new frontier, which touches on finance, connectivity, asset-building, and product creation – topics that are near and dear to professionals with expertise-based businesses looking to grow. In an accessible language with useful examples, Jo walked us through the topic, and it sparked so many ideas for me, as I hope it will for you.

Do I Want to Franchise? (Hint: No)

In this episode, I share a LinkedIn Live event that I hosted to talk about some important Intellectual Property (IP) concepts and concerns. If you have a professional services-based business, a clear path to scalability and salability is finding an effective way to license your personal IP. Simple right? Not in today’s world. Depending on the scope of the license, and any additional bells and whistles offered as part of the package, you could be setting up a franchise structure. While franchises aren’t necessarily bad, they are highly regulated, and the regulations vary from state to state, so it is not an optimal first step when monetizing your IP.

In this episode, I was lucky to have Shannon Paris as a guest on this episode. As a member of the Mighty Networks team, Shannon offers a SaaS product to help people to establish, foster, and expand online communities. Shannon shared her journey with the company founder, who had monetized her network by creating a community and took the business to the next level by showing others how they could do what she did. Shannon explains details about the product, and she also delves into how the structure and strategic deployment of a successful community can drive profit.

In this episode, Leah Neaderthal from Smart Gets Paid got personal with us about the importance of humanizing yourself to your audience. She talked to us about the expertise/humanity scale. Women, including myself, tend to stick too close to the expertise end of the scale, and this doesn’t serve us well when running a professional services business. She reminds us that every business opportunity, even to corporations, involves a decision-maker who is a person, and making a connection with that person by showing our humanity can be memorable, engaging, and ultimately lead to successful sales. She shared with us the explosion of engagement that she experienced when she moved away from a pure expertise approach to sharing more about herself as a person.

Listen in on this enlightening conversation with Natalie Gingrich, the creator of The Ops Authority, a Director of Operations certification program. In this episode, we will explore, step-by-step, the journey of developing a certification program, from ideation to implementation.