In this episode, Erin Austin, Owner of Think Beyond IP, shares how she left the corporate world helping big businesses get bigger to help expert-focused founders to move from hourly to exit.
You will discover:
– Why AI is not the biggest threat to knowledge businesses and what is
– What IP you already have but may not know it
– The biggest mistake founders make when trying to protect their IP
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I’m here with a high demand coach, but 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 Erin’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 CEO and General Counsel for things. You might have heard of them Warner Brothers, or MGM teaching strategies, and M three, USA Corp. Well, Erin, no, this feels like it’s been forever and coming. But I’m so excited that you’re here with us now on the show. I’d love if you could do before we get into how you’re helping, particularly female entrepreneurs, I’d love to just hear a little bit of your story. Where were you doing before helping to founders helping founders build scalable and scalable businesses? And why did you ultimately make the leap?
Erin Austin
Yeah, well, I thank you for having me, Scott. So I’ve spent a career helping big businesses get bigger, frankly. And and that’s probably why a lot of lawyer star become avid go to big firms, we end up in house, big companies. And and obviously, you know, it’s a great way to make a living, of course, but there came a time when one you know, as my career matured, and I was looking for something just a little more. That was more a little bit more aligned with my personal goals, as I have a son who’s getting older about to be an empty nester and, and had a little more time on my hands. 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 I’m 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 a lot of my big clients, you know, they are in the IP space. And I work on, you know, protecting the intellectual property. And a lot of it is with surfaces. 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 to not, you know, the same scale, but also use my IP base 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 our, the influence that comes with it to more people to work with, you know, 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, you know, providers, but also wealth builders. So yeah, that’s how I got here.
Scott Ritzheimer
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 site, we’ll put the link in the show notes. We’ll talk a little bit about 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?
Erin Austin
Yeah, that makes you say that though, I feel Yeah, at the end of the day, if we want to stop selling our time, like as an expert to speak and instead sell sell our expertise, then we have to have an asset there. Neither we’re selling our time, or we’re selling an asset. And so we want to build assets, those when we’re experts, you know, it’s not something that’s patentable, like a, 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 we read 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 on it. And so I keep kind of like, you know, people like, well, you know, I get lots of questions about, you know, registering stuff like, Do you own it? Yeah, that’s 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 lifecycle of from creation, ownership, utilization registration of our IP assets. And so you don’t want to create, you know, a course, using, you know, 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. Like, you can’t create courses out of that. So you need to make sure you own your own assets in order to do that.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Oh, that’s so good. You made another statement here, and it’s a little bit longer, but I want to get 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 falling, as the biggest threat sorry, is failing to build a business that can run without you failing to build your business so that you 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 like how trendy AI is, there’s like, you know, it’s probably pretty jarring for them. So, again, what do you kind of mean by that? And what can we actually do about it?
Erin Austin
Yeah, I mean, obviously, AI is at the top of everyone’s mind, and I get that you get a fair amount of information about it. But the end of the day, you know, AI is just another way of accumulating already known information. And so, you know, it’s, it’s just a better version, Google, frankly, you know, and so if you have your intellectual property, your expertise, your, you know, publishing it, you know, you should be publishing it. So you’re developing your thought leadership, every single human with Internet has access, whether they use chat GBT, or whatever other ai ai they have access to, 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, you know, and someone can, you know, does it make it easier for me 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, the marketplace is through our expertise, by providing the Michelin, you know, 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, you know, by somehow keeping everything secret, because it’s not gonna help you you can’t keep if you keep yourself secret, you’re gonna stay secret, right. And, and so if you but if you want to scale, you know, on the other hand, if all you’re doing is kind of, you know, 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, you know, creating assets that you can use to put leverage into your business, like, you will obviously top out, that’s why we’re here, you know, that’s gonna be the end, 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 yet, you can’t be obsessing about AI. That would be
Scott Ritzheimer
So your, your, your concepts here, they challenged a little 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. And here’s, 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, right. I agree with you there, but provide the highest value for your time. And so how do you help folks navigate like, are you creating courses just because someone told you to create courses? Are they really a strategic step in the right direction?
Erin Austin
Yeah, I’m using courses is like kind of just a cheap example. But it would also apply to productize services like even even if not packaged as a productized service. If you’ve systematize your services, so you create a so you can expand you know, eight By 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, you know, delegate those less expensive pieces so that you can just operate the genius level. And then you have less expensive resources doing some of the groundwork. Yeah. So it can be either things that you’ve said literally, or assets that use within the business to make your business more efficient and profitable.
Scott Ritzheimer
And that I could not agree more with one of the biggest things that I’ve found in doing this podcast and in an interviewing near about 1000 coaches now is the number one thing that separates what I would call like a high demand coach from kind of your average coach that not, neither of them is a bad person, but some of them have figured it out, they’ve unlocked something and some haven’t yet. And 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, scalable business, I would actually say you’re doing a disservice to your clients. Right? Because it’s, it’s completely dependent on how you show up that day. Yes. And you’re gonna have good days, you’re gonna have bad days, right. And so what I what I did love about the the way that you laid this out, and, and the idea of creating these processes, one, so people can help, but I think a bigger part of it and, 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 client 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.
Erin Austin
Absolutely. And what you mentioned, it reminds me, frankly, of the legal industry, you know, where we typically build by the hour. And so we are disincentivized, from finding really efficient ways to deliver services. But as a consequence, you know, 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, but I have, I will confess, you know, just kind of read through it by my legs, I do have to read the whole thing, I can’t skip through it. But I have put in place like, you know, checklists and sample language and things like that. So that every time I go through it like another, you know, 100 Page services agreement, yeah, 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 have this.
Scott Ritzheimer
And I think there’s something again, that’s really cool that happens. And the amazing thing about doing this a really approaching you 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 it 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 a lot of service providers just in general, I just happen to work with a lot of coaches, but is there not billing for the two thirds of their time that’s not in the session room. And you can dramatically reduce that with you know, things like checklists and processes and pulling the same thing the whole way through. The other really, really cool thing about it is that it’s 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 to, how does that play into this idea of of moving from your hourly to exit?
Erin Austin
Yeah. So just quickly, on the IP side, it goes back to owning the elements that you’re using, you know, when we are providing one on one services to our clients, we may have third party materials that we’re using there, and it’s fine, we have the the right to use it, say we got it from another certification program, our continuing education or something, we can use it with a one on one clients, well, we can’t license that on to a third 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 adding experts internally or you can grow externally by licensing other experts to use your expertise. And so that’s what certification would be, you know, it can 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 you’re 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, you know, Scott. And that’s why I do what I do. So yeah.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s awesome. We had a guest on a few episodes back. And he was Mitch Russo. And he talked about this idea of certification as well. But I would imagine when you’re working with probably blows them away, what they’re sitting on to them, even though they have it. Would you agree with that? I would say, would you say, let me say it this way? Would you say that most, especially female entrepreneurs are sitting on more value than than they that they didn’t even know they have?
Erin Austin
Yeah, I mean, what is it that your clients come to you for? Like, I mean, there’s something 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 you know, 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, you know, extend that reach either, you know, through other experts, or through some, some products. And so there’s more than one way to get, you know, to leverage your your expertise. Yeah.
Scott Ritzheimer
Oh, so good. So good. So, there’s a question I like to ask all my guests is this, what is the biggest secret that you should just wish wasn’t a secret at all? What was that one thing? You’re sitting there? And you just wish everyone listening? Or watching today knew?
Erin Austin
Yeah, well, I, you know, it’s gonna 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, where, you know, 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, like the, the external things, but it’s all the things that we create, that are the way we express our intellectual property, the way we use, I mean, I’m sorry, our expertise, where we use our expertise, all that stuff is intellectual property. And the issue isn’t, do you have any, the issue is, are you owning and controlling it?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Wow, well, yeah. That’s a great point. So another question here. We’ve talked a lot about you kind of how you help your clients, but I want to turn things around a little bit, take off your kind of attorney consultant hat for a moment, put on your your CEO hat kind of jumped down into the ring with the rest of it. What’s the next stage of growth look like for you and your business? And what challenge we have to overcome to get there?
Erin Austin
Oh, boy, well, this has been a tough one for me, you know, because as a lawyer, you know, I do have like confidentiality issues. So group programs are tough. And, you know, if I do products, well, can I disclaim, you know, liability for our products. And so I am, but nonetheless, I am working on some group programs regarding copyright registration, because we have a lot of questions about it. And so to be able to do that in a group context, and then I am, you know, like, you know, not just templates, but developing some negotiation guides, you know, when you it’s one thing if you’re, you know, an online business, so to speak, but when you have corporate clients, like, templates don’t really help you, because your corporate clients send you their agreements, and say, you need to know what to do when your clients send you their agreements. So that’s what I’m gonna help people do.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. Wow, fantastic. Well, I, again, I love, love, love the way that you approach this. And it’s, it’s very rare for those listeners, very rare to have an attorney who’s able to enter into the business world like this. This is one of the things that’s so profound about you, Aaron. And so for folks who want who need that legal advice, who are maybe sitting there thinking, hey, I probably have more IP than than I thought. And they want to know what the next steps are. They want to know how you can help where can they find more out about what you do and connect with you?
Erin Austin
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, you know, kind of what the requirements are to have copyrightable material. And from there, you know, 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 Erin well the original Erin Austin and I mentioned that came after me, but just my name Erin Austin’s there.
Scott Ritzheimer
The OG Erin Austin. That’s right. Oh, that’s so good. So again, Erin’s website is fantastic. Thinkbeyondip.com. It’s in the notes. We’ll put her LinkedIn profile there as well. So you can click right to it. And Erin Thank you so much for being here and it was just an honor having you and for those who are watching you’re listening today you know your time and attention mean the world to us 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.
Contact Erin Austin
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Erin Austin is a consultant and lawyer who uses her 25+ years of practicing law, to help female founders of expertise-based firms build and protect saleable assets so that the business is ready to sell when the founder is ready to exit. Erin’s experience as a lawyer and as an executive–at the intersection of business and the law–informs the elevated legal and strategic business advice she provides to her clients. Her experience includes roles as COO and general counsel for including Warner Brothers, Lionsgate (formerly known as Artisan), MGM, Teaching Strategies, and M3 USA Corp.
Want to learn more about Erin Austin’s work at Think Beyond IP? Check out her website at https://www.thinkbeyondip.com/ or connect with her on LInked in at https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinaustin/
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