MIND. BLOWN.
The only two words that come to mind after my interview with Todd Herman.
This podcast episode is one where I’ll look back on my business in the future and say, “This interview changed the trajectory of my business.” We actually made changes from things that we personally learned in the interview.
If you still haven’t listened to it, go listen to it now.
We talked about how you can scale a coaching company, how to license your intellectual property, and the importance of trademarks in the world of personal branding.
What’s crazy to me is that very few people have actually scaled a coaching business or scaled intellectual property to the point where it became a sellable asset. So there’s not that many people who actually know the information that Todd shared.
Today, I’m gonna share with you the top three takeaways I got from my interview with Todd.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRADEMARKS
My first takeaway is about the power of trademarks or, I should say, the financial value of trademarks. One of the things that Todd said is that if somebody is going to come buy your personal brand, the first thing they’re going to ask you is, “How many trademarks do you own?”
What?!
No one has ever said that before. We have not spent a lot of time focused on our intellectual property.
He said if you win an IP infringement case, in the US, you get a minimum of $250,000. So Todd doesn’t send cease and desist letters, he just sues people. And that may seem pretty aggressive, but I gotta tell you, we’ve been getting the short end of the stick here. There are so many quotes of mine that get ripped off and stolen and put all over the internet. Here are a few,
“Success is never owned, it’s rented and the rent is due every day,” that originally appeared in my book, Take the Stairs.
My “Be the Buffalo” story. People are now putting that in their TED Talks.
“Do it scared,” again, we published that in a New York Times Bestselling book 10 YEARS ago.
We almost NEVER get cited for those things.
What Todd was talking specifically about was our visual frameworks. We have a bunch of them, the Brand DNA Helix, the Modular Content Method, the Service Spectrum, I can go on and on. What we haven’t been doing is actually protecting them legally. And this is the part that blew my mind,
Each trademark is worth approximately $250,000 to your valuation.
We have 14 topics in our curriculum.
Each one of those has 3 frameworks.
A total of 42 frameworks.
250,000 x 42 = $10.5 MILLION
We can add $10 million to our company valuation just by going out and getting trademarks. So guess what we’re doing?
We are getting trademarks like crazy.
If you don’t know what frameworks are, request a free call with us.
Seriously, we’re talking about millions of dollars. If we teach you how to create a couple frameworks, it can be worth a million dollars.
LICENSING TRAINING PROGRAMS
My second big takeaway from Todd is something that we’ve done really well at, but haven’t spent a lot of time teaching people how to do, which is how you create a licensing program.
What does it really take?
How do you create the content for a licensing program?
Todd described it like this:
- Record yourself while you’re training people on licensing. That becomes your content.
- Go back and record yourself explaining why you trained it the way you trained it. That becomes the “Train the Trainer” content. The “Train the Trainer” model has been around for decades and Franklin Covey, one of the world’s largest coaching companies, went public by doing this.
I remember someone had invited Dr. Covey to our house and we had this little get together.
And he was explaining to me how they did their whole business.
A big part of it was this “Train the Trainer” model.
Let’s say you have your normal course and it takes two days for someone to go through your full experience.
When you sell it, you can say, “Come through the full program for two days, and pay $X or pay $X plus $Y and stay a third day and I’ll certify you.”
So, not only will they go through the program, they also become certified to teach the program to other people.
And that’s what the “Train the Trainer” model is.
The crazy thing is that you don’t make the most money from just selling the certification.
The way that the “Train the Trainer” model works is you make money selling someone to come to your two day event, you make more money by certifying them on how to teach your content, but where you make the most money is by letting them charge whatever they want to put people through their class.
The only legal caveat of the arrangement is that they had to buy their kits for certifying people through the home company.
The model’s potential is endless!
CLIENTS ARE KEY
The third takeaway for me from this interview, is something you can’t hear enough of.
Todd said, “Everyone spends all their time on the marketing and sales side of the business, but when you’re building a truly scalable coaching company or trying to create intellectual property that has enterprise value, it’s really all about the delivery.
It’s all about the implementation.
It’s all about the execution.
It’s the clients’ success that grows the business.”
The way that we say this is that the best form of marketing is to turn your customer force into your sales force.
How do you turn your customer force into your sales force?
You help your customers succeed. You have to become completely infatuated with helping your clients succeed faster.
What tools do they need?
Can I help them to implement faster?
What support do they need?
What type of training?
What type of structure?
These are all questions you should be asking yourself if you truly want your clients to succeed faster. It’s not so much, “Oh, I need to teach you everything,” focus on helping them get results as fast as possible.
These three takeaways are changing the way my business and I operate for good and I know they’ll do the same for you. I’d suggest, for the full experience, check out my interview with Todd Herman.
If you want to come alongside us and let us be your personal coach and help you implement these things directly and apply them faster, so that you can get results quicker, book a free strategy call with us today.
