So what’s the ‘turbocharger’ for your insights? You guessed it, IP.

As great as it is to have your pockets stuffed to the brim with insights accumulated over 1, 5, 10, 20 years in your domain, the most effective consultants will take the additional step of organizing their insights into intellectual property, or “IP”.

This doesn’t mean you need to run to your copyright office (yet). At this stage, IP can be thought of more loosely as an original synthesis of your insights on a topic within your domain.

Put another way, your insights are the ingredients for a recipe. Your IP is your signature dish.

A consultant's IP can take many forms:

• A mental model
• A framework
• A diagnostic checklist
• A tool or template
• A generalized project approach for a specific problem
• A playbook

So how does IP accelerate the Consultant’s Expertise Loop?

Instead of offering a scattershot of insights to a prospect, you can center your outbound marketing and sales conversations around a piece of IP, which:

• focuses the conversation
• demonstrates your domain authority
• provides visibility towards a solution within a client’s context
• accelerates trust
• shortens the sales cycle
• elevates your achievable rates
• BONUS: it often can even help structure the proposed project itself

I’ll continue to double-click into the process and benefits of deriving your IP.

For now, you can start to think: if I were to napkin-sketch a visual to depict a POV within my domain, what would it look like?

💡

-Wes

P.S. Here’s my first sketch of this exact framework! 🫣