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.

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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...