Hello, ladies, welcome to this week's episode of the hourly to exit podcast. I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Scott Ritzheimer. He's the host of the secrets of the high demand coach podcast, and it was such. A fun, fast paced interview. It was almost like whiplash, but so much good stuff in there. As soon as we finished recording, I immediately told Stacey, I want to release this as an episode of the hourly, the exit podcast as well. So enjoy. Thanks.
Hello. Hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I'm here with high demand coach, which she's actually an attorney and a strategic consultant. This is the one and the only Erin Austin. She's a graduate of Harvard law school, and she uses her 25 plus years of practicing law to help female founders of expertise based firms to build and protect saleable. Assets so that the business is ready to sell when the founder is ready to exit.
And Aaron's experience as a lawyer and as an executive at the intersection of business and law informs the elevated legal and strategic business advice that she provides to her clients. Her expertise includes roles as COO and general counsel for, MGM Teaching Strategies and M3 USA Corporation. Well, Aaron. this feels like it's been forever and coming, but I'm so excited that you're here with us now on the show.
before we get into how you're helping particularly female entrepreneurs, I'd love to just hear a little bit of your story. What were you doing before helping, founders build saleable and scalable businesses? And why did you ultimately make the leap?
Yeah, well, I thank you for having me, Scott. So I've spent a career helping big businesses get bigger, frankly. And, that's probably way a lot of lawyers start. We come out, we go to big firms, we end up in house at big companies. And, obviously, you it's.
It's a great way to make a living, of course, but there came a time when one, as my career matured and I was looking for something just a that was more, a little bit more aligned with my personal goals, as I have a son who's getting older, I'm about to be an empty nester. and have a little more time on my hand. And I'm like, well, what can I do that has more impact?
I think all of us kind of get there eventually about how we can, use our expertise to have greater impact and trying to figure out like how to. Translate my big company experience into working with a different population. And it took me a bit to figure it out, frankly. And then I realized, you know, a lot of my big clients, they are in the IP space and I work on, protecting their intellectual property. And a lot of it is with services. And so I'm like, well, wait, there's.
Other populations who have service based businesses that they have intellectual property that they need to protect and that I can translate. It's not, the same scale, but also use my IP based experience working with service based businesses to help them protect their IP and in particular, with respect to women. I mean, it's no secret.
I don't think that wealth, Has a voice in this country and in order to kind of, spread some of the wealth, spread some of the influence that comes with it, to more people to work with, women in particular, I believe that wealth in the hands of women can change the world. And so helping them turn their businesses, not just into income, providers, but also wealth builders. So that's how I got
here. I love that. I love that. And, I was telling you before we hit record here that I have no idea how to get all the questions that I have for you down into about a 20 minute block. So we're going to try and do this as best we can. but, I just want to start off and say. Head over to Aaron's site.
We'll put the link in the show notes, and we'll talk a little bit about it at the end here, but there's so much good stuff on there, so go check that out, you're not going to regret it, but I'd love for you to just unpack a couple things for me, you make some pretty profound statements on your site, I'm going to read them back to you, and then I want to hear your thoughts on them, so One of them is owning and controlling intellectual property is the prerequisite to scaling your
B2B expertise based business. There's not a lot of people saying that right now. So tell us what you mean by that.
Yeah, that makes me insane. That a lot of the day, if we want to stop selling our time, as an expert, so to speak, and, instead sell our expertise, then we have to have an asset there, either we're selling our time or we're selling. An asset. And so if we want to build assets, when we're experts, it's not something that's patentable, like a, you know, a car or pharmaceutical, it's not something that's like a trade secret, like Coca Cola.
Our expertise is saleable in the form of copyrightable intellectual property. And so if it's a book or a course or the, workshops that you provide, the trainings you provide your clients. All those things are copyrightable assets and we can't copyright something if we don't own it. And so I keep kind of like, people like, well, I get lots of questions about, registering stuff, like, well, do you own it?
just because you worked on something doesn't mean you own it just because you created something doesn't mean you own it. so we have to be aware of the whole life cycle of, from creation. Ownership, utilization, registration of our IP assets. And so you don't want to create, a course using, stuff that you got off the internet or materials that you got from a certification program or something that you took from your corporate job. you can't create courses out of that.
So you need to make sure you own your own assets in order to do that.
Yeah. Oh, that's so good. you made another statement here. It's a little bit longer, but again, I want to read it because I think it's fascinating. And that is that the biggest threat to your expertise based business isn't AI. AI might be able to write a cookbook, but it can never be a chef.
The bigger threat, is failing to build a business that can run without you failing to build your business so that your income is decoupled from your time and failing to adapt to the changing market forces, such as low cost competitors or micro learning, learning on demand. In other words, you need to build a business with multiple revenue streams that can scale. so, some people, especially with how trendy AI is know, that's probably pretty drawing for them.
So. Again, what do you kind of mean by that? And what can we actually do about it?
Yeah. I mean, obviously AI is at the top of everyone's, mind and I do get a fair amount of inquiries about it, but the end of the day, AI is just another way of accumulating. Already known information and so, it's just a better version of Google, frankly, if you have your intellectual property, your expertise, your, publishing it. you should be publishing it. So you're developing your thought leadership.
Every single human with an Internet has access, whether they use chat, GBT or whatever other AI, they have access to it right now. They can go on Google and get it right now and copy it right now and steal it right now. Right. So that's not going to change. and someone can, you know, does it make it easier for them to take your materials and stick it in the AI and change it enough. But at the end of the day, you can't stop copycats because we can't protect ideas.
So the way we protect our position in the marketplace is through our expertise by providing the Michelin, level service to your clients, becoming the go to person in your space, becoming the leader, the thought leader. And so. That's how you combat, whether it's Google or AI or other bad actors. It's not, by somehow keeping everything secret because it's not going to help you. You can't keep it. If you keep your stuff secret, you're going to stay secret. Right.
but if you want to scale, on the other hand, if all you're doing is kind of, selling your time, doing custom work that you don't own, you're not developing processes, you're not developing your own solutions. You're not, Creating assets that you can use to put leverage into your business. you will obviously top out. That's why you're here. You that's going to be the end of, you know, that's it. That's all you want then.
But if you want to grow your business, then you have to be creating assets and you can't be obsessing about AI. That
some of the advice that I'll give, especially to those in the coaching profession. and so I want to have a fun little conversation around this. I think that, for a lot of coaches, maybe not as much writing a book, but creating courses or other kind of lower market engagements is oftentimes a distraction. here's, why I think one of the things that happens if we're not careful, we do it for the value of leverage, right? Because it doesn't take my time, but it takes a long time to do it.
And we do it so clumsily that it actually takes more time for the value that we get back out of it. Right. And so for me, I've always encouraged folks to go after the thing that provides the highest value for time. Don't sell your time, agree with you there, but provide the highest value for your time. And so how do you help folks navigate? are you creating courses just because someone told you to create courses or are they really a strategic step in the right direction?
Yeah, I'm using courses as a kind of just a cheap example, it also apply to productized services. even if it's not packaged as a productized service, if you've systematized your services, so you created, so you can expand, as an agency, you need to have processes in place. It just can't be your genius sitting down every day, genius saying, and order to improve your business, there has to be processes in place. So you can either, delegate those.
Less expensive pieces so that you can just operate at the genius level. And then you have less expensive resources doing some of the groundwork. So can be either things that you sell literally or assets that use within the business to make your business more efficient and profitable. Yeah.
And that I could not agree more with. One of the biggest things that I've found in, in doing this podcast and in an interviewing near about a thousand coaches now is the number one thing that what I would call like a high demand coach from kind of your average coach that neither of them is a bad person, but some of them have figured it out. They've unlocked something and some haven't yet. the thing to unlock that something is what I call a structured offering.
And I think this is where you and I are on exactly the same page that if you're just making it up as you go, I would go so far as to say, it's not just that you haven't built a scalable saleable business. I would actually say you're, doing a disservice to your clients, Because it's completely dependent on how you show up that day. Yes. And you're going to have good days. You're going to have bad days, right?
And so what I did love about the way that you laid this out and the idea of creating these processes one, so people can help, but I think a bigger part of it and what's really helpful for a lot of coaches, because. They want to know that what they do matters and is helpful is the biggest thing that I've seen to generate higher ROI for your clients is to actually do what you're talking about here.
The really cool thing that you bring to the table is that it's not just for the ROI for your clients, but that it actually can end up being an asset for you for the long run.
Absolutely. And what you mentioned, it reminds me, frankly, of the legal industry, where we typically build by the hour. And so we are disincentivized from finding really efficient ways to deliver services. But as a consequence, a lot of times we are kind of just starting from the beginning with. Each engagement, every time I pick up a services agreement to review it, I, have, and I will confess, just kind of read through it by my lines. I do have to read the whole thing.
I can't skip through it, but I have put in place, checklists and sample language and things like that. So that every time I go through it, another, a hundred page services agreement that I don't miss anything because these things can happen. And so you take some of the risk out for you and your client when you Scott Ritzheimer: have these things. And I think there's something again, this really cool that happens. And, amazing thing about doing this, really approaching it this way is one.
If you just want to do your own thing and you just want to increase the, what you can build per hour, right? By increasing your value and, optimizing your time, this is the best thing to do. the biggest thing that I've seen accomplish is the amount of time you spend between sessions, right? So for coaches, you don't typically build by the hour you build by the session and where a lot of coaches get really stuck.
And a lot of service providers, just in general, I just happen to work with a lot of coaches, but, is. They're not billing for the two thirds of their time that's not in the session room. And you can dramatically reduce that with, things like checklists and processes and following the same thing the whole way through. The other really, really cool thing about it is that it's a very incremental step to moving towards certification. and allowing other people to step into that.
So tell us a little bit about, how does this idea of certification plan one? What are the IP considerations just quickly that we might want to consider? And then two, how does that play into this idea of, moving from your hourly to exit? Yeah, so just quickly on the IP side, it goes back to owning the elements that you're using. when we are providing one on one services to our clients, we may have 3rd party materials that we're using there and it's fine. We have right to use it.
Say we got it from a. Another certification program or continuing education or something. We can use it with our one on one clients. Well, we can't license that on to a 3rd party certification is a license. So that would be a sub license. So we had to make sure that anything that we're proposing to certify, we own it 100%. and then it helps us move to the exit because it helps us.
We take our expertise instead of, you know, you can grow either internally by What Adding experts internally, or you can grow externally by licensing other experts to use your expertise. And so that's what certification would be. without kind of the certification part, it could just be a license, but the certification part usually comes with some kind of training element and some kind of proof of competency.
So depending on the nature of what your expertise is, you may want to go the certification route. But that also helps kind of extend your own, brand because people like, Hey, I was trained by, Scott and that's why I do what I do. So yeah. Scott Ritzheimer: That's awesome. I had a guest on a few episodes back, his name was Mitch Russo, and he talked about this idea of certification as well.
But I would imagine when you're working with, it probably blows them away what they're sitting on and they don't even know they have it. Would you agree with that? let me say this way, would you say that most, especially female entrepreneurs are sitting on more value than they even know they have? Yeah. I mean, what is it that your clients come to you for? you're doing something that's providing value to your clients. They're choosing you instead of choosing somebody else.
And so if they're willing to pay you for that, outcome, then, there's only so many people that you can service that there are other clients that you couldn't service that could have benefit from. Whatever the transformation is that you provide and you can, extend that reach either, you know, through other experts or through some, products. and so there's more than one way to get, to leverage your
expertise. Yeah. Oh, that's so good. so good. So, there's a question I like to ask all my guests. It's this, what is the biggest secret that you just wish wasn't a secret at all? What's that one thing you're sitting there and you just wish everyone listening, you're watching today, new
Yeah, well, it's going to be about IP. So I like to say IP is everywhere. It's literally all day, every day when every time we sit down as experts sit down at our desks, we're creating intellectual property. We're using our intellect. We're creating intellectual property. We're talking here. We're posting on LinkedIn. We're, creating deliverables for our clients. We're training people online.
All that that's intellectual property, people think IP is just software and books, you know, external things, but it's all the things that we create that are the way we express our intellectual property, way we use our expertise, all that stuff is intellectual property and issue isn't. Do you have any. The issue is, are you owning and controlling it.
Yeah. Wow. Well, yeah, that's a great point. So, another question here. we've talked a lot about, you know, kind of how you help your clients, but want to turn things around a little bit, take off your kind of attorney consultant hat for a moment, put on your, CEO hat, kind of jumped down into the ring with the rest of us. What's the next stage of growth look like for you and your business and what challenge will you have to overcome to get there? Oh, boy, well,
this has been a tough one for me, because as a lawyer, I do have like confidentiality issues. So group programs are tough. And, if I do products, well, can I disclaim, liability for our products? but nonetheless, I am working on some group programs regarding copyright registration, because people have a lot of questions about it.
And so to be able to do that in a group context, not just templates, but, developing some negotiation guides, it's one thing if you're, an online business, so to speak, but when you have corporate clients, templates don't really help you because your corporate clients send you their agreements. And so you need to know what to do when your clients send you their agreements. So that's what I'm going to help people do. So, well,
Wow. Fantastic. again, love, love, love the way that you approach this. and it's very rare for those listening. It's very rare to have an attorney who's able to enter into the business world like this. It's one of the things that's so profound about you, Aaron. And so. For folks who need that legal advice, who, maybe sitting there thinking, Hey, I probably have more IP than I thought. and they want to know what the next steps are. They want to know how you can help.
can they find more out about what you do and connect with you?
Yeah. Well, you can find me at my website, thinkbeyondip. com. And there I do have a free assessment. That's. Called is your expertise, copyrightable, and you can take that and it can give you an initial analysis of, kind of what requirements are to have copyrightable, material. And from there, look at the other ways that you can work with me online and then you can always find me at LinkedIn as well. I've been on there. Forever. So I am the only Aaron, well, the original Aaron Austin.
I imagine there are others that came after me, but, just my name, Aaron Austin. Scott Ritzheimer: The OG Aaron Austin. That's right. Oh, that's so good. So again, Aaron's, , website is fantastic. Think beyond ip. com. It's in the notes. We'll put her LinkedIn profile there as well. So you can click right to it and Aaron, thank you so much for being here. and it was just an honor having you. And for those who are watching or listening today, you know, your time and attention.
I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care. Thank you.