Building Out Licensing in Your Business

Licensing your IP to companies can be lucrative and a tough nut to crack. Pricing is opaque, deliverables and tracking can get complicated, and companies with a smaller Learning and Development function may call it by another name (such as Train-the-Trainer). 

After many years working with a small handful of joyful clients—bolstered by many mentoring sessions, lessons learned the hard way, and a whole lot of experimentation—today, I’m sharing a few pointers on how to get started. I am not an expert, but I do believe in the power of licensing to help your ideas reach even more people who can benefit without you being the bottleneck. 

Because I get the “can I pick your brain” question often on this, more than any other topic: I no longer work with clients one-on-one, so if you are interested in learning more about licensing and implementing it in your business in 2023, I invite you to join the BFF community. Keep an eye on Pamela Slim too, who will also be releasing more resources on this in the year ahead.

🌟3 Key Takeaways:

• Be choosy about your end customer. Do you want to offer a public-facing certification that results in 1,000+ trainers and coaches who are your clients? Or would you prefer to work with a small handful of large companies instead? Both? Neither?
• When pricing, communicate the value of your training in terms of benefit to the organization. What bottom-line metrics will you improve, and what is the value of that to the company?
• Less is more. Don’t cram weeks' worth of content into a Train-the-Trainer program. Keep the material simple, streamlined, and easy to grasp, customize, and deliver.

💌Permission: Stop being the bottleneck for speaking engagements by empowering organizations to teach your material themselves, on-demand, through licensing.

✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Create a page on your website that demonstrates the path to licensing with different scalable learning options. For example: kick-off keynote, online courses, Train-the-Trainer, unlimited use licensing. 

📘Books Mentioned:

• Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business 
• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
• The New and Complete Business of Licensing: The Essential Guide to Monetizing Intellectual Property by Craig Battersby
• Fix This Next: Make the Vital Change That Will Level Up Your Business by Mike Michalowicz 
• Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels (3rd Edition) by Donald Kirkpatrick
• Built to Sell: Creating a Business that Can Thrive Without You by John Warrillow
• Value-Based Fees (3rd Edition): How to Charge What You're Worth and Get What You Charge by Alan Weiss
• Million Dollar Consulting Proposals and Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss

🔗Resources Mentioned: 

• Pamela Slim
• Jenny’s LinkedIn Learning
• Pivot Method Workbook
• Examples of Licensing Programs: Getting Things Done Practitioner Certification, John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing Certification, Box of Crayons, Pivot in the Classroom, Pivot Programs Overview (Made in Canva)

🎧Related Podcast Episodes: 

• 122: My Top 5 Sources of Recurring Revenue
• 117: Tiny Marketing Actions with Pamela Slim
• 016: IP Licensing with Lee LeFever
• 037: The Ultimate Marketing Engine with John Jantsch
• Pivot 164: Fix This Next (And Stop Keeping Up With The Entrepre-Joneses)

💻 Access Free Time episode transcripts on Podscribe » 

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