Your Body of Work is your best salesperson.
Content that compounds trust and helps your ideas scale. Part 2 of 3 on "What it means to run an Authority-led business"
As a heads up… This essay is part of a three-part series on building Authority. If growing your Authority is a priority as an independent coach or consultant, add your name to this list to be the first to hear about something designed specifically for you.
In Authority-led business building your Body of Work is your product/service itself, how you package it and any activity that markets it.
So a compelling body of work seamlessly blends your intellectual property and approach with the ways in which you draw attention to it.
Austin Kleon describes a body of work as ‘the slow accumulation of little bits of effort over time’.
Here’s your checklist for your Body of Work as an Authority-led business owner:
A definition that reflects your depth of insight and experience
A clear proposition that communicates your Authority and who it’s for
A set of assets (content, IP, messaging) that allow others to engage with you even when you’re not in the room
We’ll cover each today and as a reminder, I wrote part 1 of this series here.
Let’s get into it!
P.S as a meta example as we go…. this 3-part email series doesn’t conceal the process of building an Authority-led business from you. Although that’s what my clients pay for. I blend ‘what I do’ seamlessly with ‘how I talk about what I do’.
If you want to engage with these topics more deeply than reading along, join me and a small group of peers next month. Sign up for your invite to the Authority Essentials workshop. It’s free.
1 / Define your boundaries
Your Body of Work needs clear boundaries and definitions.
If you’re looking for a new home, you can type the town itself into Zoopla to see what’s available, or you can ‘draw the map’ and show Zoopla the bits of the neighbourhood you’re really into, and which parts that frankly, you’d rather avoid.
Your Body of Work can be defined in the same way.
You can be in a broad field: design, psychotherapy, Go-to-Market strategy etc. But within those fields there will be your own territories map.
Your map might be tight: psychodynamic approaches to childhood intervention *googles if this is a thing before continuing, it is*. It might be broad, and either can work.
But you need to know what your body of work is, and importantly, what it is not.
It is your own unique way of working that you’ve developed over time by repeating your craft, spotting patterns, and building on these lived experiences.
For example: I spent time with coaches who coach founders last week (that’s me, too!). Even within this defined group there was an array of coaching styles, and founders that we coach. I was less able to engage with the session on coaching a founder and their team across departments of an organisation, for example. My clients are founders of small businesses.
So you must first define, and then spend time, to build Authority in a field.
There’s a reason I wrote about the Authority ’titans’ who’ve turned their expertise into 7 & 8 figure empires: these ‘titans’ had spent years developing their expertise privately before they became famous. If you try to seek fame first, you won’t get deep enough into your craft to be able to surface meaningful insights worth sharing.
put this point so beautifully:
I’m not trying to hem you into a box here — yes you do need to define this Authority area but you can choose to make it your own. To commit to learning about new fields, and new combinations of ideas and approaches. The main thing is that you are excited to spend time developing your thinking and deepening your craft.
One of the biggest newsletters in the world, Lenny’s Newsletter, said that product management alone wasn’t of enough interest to him to sustain a long term newsletter. He claims he’s far more interested in the “wider space of building products…improving your career, and building startups” which, “although made it harder to explain what my newsletter was about, the topics were close enough to make sense together, and I was able to stay excited about the work’”.
Stay excited.
2/ Carve a proposition that sells your Authority
Next up, you will share your Body of Work with others, so that they get it, and, get excited too.
I’m reading Ryan Holliday’s book, Perennial Seller, revealing what makes art, idea or businesses last a lifetime. AKA they keep on selling for years after their first creation.
Holliday emphasises that you must be able to say of any project it is THIS and for THESE PEOPLE.
It’s not trivial to spend hours tweaking and refining this tightly defined proposition.
In fact, it’s essential if you want to make a difference and be remembered for what you offer the world.
The choices you make here can’t be compensated for in the marketing later. In fact, they are the marketing
Ryan Holliday
Today, the barrier to entry for starting a business is so low, that I’d argue it’s not only advised but essential to care a lot about how you present your work. If you aren’t intentional, you’ll blend into the sea of sameness.
If you’re a consultant who sells time on a day rate for other businesses, you may not have had to consider this before. You never needed a tightly defined proposition to win the work… the client defined the scope of responsibilities for you. You’re a safe pair of hands to execute and your CV alone did the job.
But if you want to have clients seek you out, for something you do that is different, special, or commands well-beyond market rates? Something you could package up and sell to multiple different types of clients? You have to go away and do that thinking (spotting patterns and traits across your work and to define it into a set of activities) to define a your proposition.
Many clients reach out because doing this thinking is hard to do solo. “Help me to make sense of all my ideas and knowledge!” they say.
We spend time narrowing down exactly what they do, the steps involved, and put them into a process map using Canva or Miro, for example.
A lot of the best offerings have been crafted deliberately, and not in isolation.
Here’s an example of two different coaches to explain this point further.
Coach A has a new idea for a service offering. She puts this idea onto a new page on her Squarespace website. She creates a Substack post that tells people about her new offer, and shares it with her readers and her community, no problem.
Coach B has a new idea for a service offering.
She starts testing the water with some clients she already works with. She posts online that she is looking for some people to do market research calls with. She captures what language they are using to describe this problem field. She writes up her thinking asks some trusted clients to check it resonates. She then puts it on a private landing page which she shares with a trusted peers community for feedback. She then takes the final pass of the page to her own coach, for the most brutal round of feedback yet. She finishes by asking her designer for some new brand assets for this service offering.
Which coach is more likely to sell out this offering?
I’m a proponent of the second way of doing things. Does it cost more, to have the communities, the design, the phone calls? Yes it does. (And that doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally create things on a whim)
But your most important work?
It needs designing with care, thought and attention if you want results that are long-lasting.
I really dislike when people in the online space rip off others’ ideas and messaging statements etc (it happens, a lot). They are trying to take the finished product of someone else’s work, and haven’t put the work in to figure out their own unique messaging, proposition and ideas.
It’s like when I use ChatGPT too much for condensing my thinking... I end up not really connecting fully to the outputs it spits out, because I didn’t do the work.
Here’s another line from Ryan:
If you’ve fallen into the sway of tracking your fellow creators on social media or you check the charts every week to see what other people are doing, you’re going to sap yourself of the discipline required to do what you are trying to do.
Ryan Holliday
Discipline is the perfect way to describe it.
A Body of Work requires your discipline, as well as your focus, your curiosity, your passion. There are no shortcuts.
A friend of mine, Ruth Penfold, just announced her latest service offering. She emailed me “Bloom 3.0 is here!”. Meaning, that Bloom is her life’s work and is now in its third iteration. Ruth has shown that discipline and energy to her work like no other. P.S. if you’re a woman in corporate or employee settings wanting to progress your leadership and career without sacrificing your femininity, you need to check out Bloom.
3/ Create assets that showcase your thinking
Now you have your wonderfully crafted offering, it is time to deliver it to your people.
And, to be able to deliver it, you need to be able to sell it.
Many artists detest this part of the process, and feel literally, like a ‘sell-out’ when it comes to getting money for their work.
Novelist Ian McEwan said it like this “I feel like the wretched employee of my former self. My former self being the happily engaged novelist who now sends me, a kind of brush salesman or double glazing salesman, out on the road to hawk this book. He got all the fun writing it. I’m the poor bastard who has to go sell it.” (Source).
Yep, the selling can suck.
But we, friends, are Authority-led business owners and selling is a skill-set we must master to stay afloat.
Thankfully selling doesn’t have to involve megaphones, cold calls or pestering.
Authority-led businesses (in my definition at least) should be putting the same time and attention into selling their thing as they did into marketing it.
That looks like inviting people to engage with your work, like a whisper not a shout, so they feel excited to engage with.
Assets are your friends here.
Developing a bank of assets (not just one, I’m afraid) is what will equip your business with the tools to grow, attract ideal clients and to showcase your Body of Work whilst you sleep. Assets include but are not limited to:
Blog posts / Substack posts
A book, ebook or zine
YouTube videos
Podcasts
A free course
An email series
Crucially, these assets should be either free, or significantly cheaper than your actual service is.
And, the more bingeable these assets, the better. You’ll then create the conditions for an ideal client to spend hours of time with you (even when you are not in the room) and get to know your thinking, approach, personality, and style to the point at which a ‘sale’ feels effortless. They are bought into you, uniquely.
Ensure that your assets reveal who you are and how you help in a way that feels like an invitation. That feels exciting, or even… mind-blowing.
I once went through an asset for a digital programme that was like a digital story. Clicking the ‘Next’ button excitedly, I was taken on a journey to the point that purchasing this programme was a no brainer.
In its most crude, ugly expression, assets could be called a ‘funnel’. But this isn’t just about data driven ads, clicks and upsells. It’s about treating your marketing like the product in and of itself. It’s about being generous with your ideas, and casting them wide.
I like the visual of planting flags. Wherever you go, leaving a little mark of yourself for others to find you. That podcast guest. The workshop for the community. The LinkedIn post. The free download.
Your people will discover those flags on their own journey, and come back to you to share that.
Like this person who reached out to me this week:
A nice byproduct of these assets, is how they connect to your existing clients, too.
They are like free gifts they get alongside working with you. Or reinforce why they chose you! Here’s an example of a client pinging me in Slack last week about one of my Substack ‘assets’:
Assets, unlike your time, have an infinite growth potential, and may even go viral from time-to-time.
As Seth Godin describes it in his book Purple Cow:
The power of our new networks allows remarkable ideas to diffuse through segments of the population at rocket speed.
And if you do get lucky and go viral, you’re in a great position if you have all those bingeable assets available for your new found fans to go through!
Whilst virality can’t be planned - and is outside your control - what you can control is consistency. Consistently putting the time on your calendar to go away and to create ideas you are proud of. Putting in the reps and turning them into digital assets. So that in time, you keep getting better at producing them and the world takes notice. It’s the whole ‘luck meets preparation’ thing. So focus on process, and the outcomes might just surprise you.
As I wrap up this ‘asset’ and Substack warns me I am ‘Near email length limit’ I recognise that these assets can only ever say so much about my Body of Work in themselves. As many words as I might try!
I need not stress, though. Here’s how a member of the first cohort of Authority Club, Matilda, put it:
Phew!
So before I let you go today: Do you have a defined boundary for your Body of Work? A clear proposition? A set of assets?
If you want to think more deeply about each piece sign up to join me inside this masterclass for nailing your positioning, on 24th April.
And, keep your eyes peeled for part three of this series, in two weeks time, all about creating clients and connections for your Authority-led business!
Thanks so much for reading as always!
Until next time,
Ellen from The Ask.
Great read! Love the visual of mapping what you do / don’t do