Teach Your Expertise

Alex Charfen: This podcast is for all the coaches, thought leaders, experts, content creators, course creators, the teachers of all kinds, and even CEOs out there who are building and growing your business. This advice is for you.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will.

We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future, and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

I'd like to share a quick story about something that recently happened and use it to demonstrate why I think it's so crucial that you teach your expertise. So recently I taught some of our materials for a program, and I spent a day going through some of our highest level stuff, and what I went through was the five core functions of a business and also our communications cadence and our meeting cadence, how we create, instead of meetings, targeted ... Excuse me ... targeted interactions, and what the targeted ... how you run the targeted interactions and how they work. And essentially, the whole system we have is about simplifying your meetings, making them be the same way every time, creating routine and process around your business that really helps grow the business and scale it quickly.

That was a few weeks ago, and this morning there was a question from somebody in the group asking, can we teach your materials? Can we teach the five core functions and the meeting processes and the cadence and everything else to our clients? And my answer was we suggest that you teach your expertise and that you use our materials to grow your business, and there's a reason why I always answer this way, is I think that as content providers, as experts, as people who are coaching people, you should teach what you're an expert at. You should teach what you're really good at. You should teach what you are passionate about, and you should teach what you've discovered, created, made happen, and really dug in and understood, and you should teach what you can answer all the questions about.

Here's the issue when somebody asks about using our materials. You know, we're not an average content provider. When you look at the materials that we've used and that we teach, we've been perfecting them, or I've been perfecting them in different iterations of companies for over 20 years. When you look at how we conduct an annual meeting or a quarterly meeting or a monthly meeting and how they all fit together, I've been in hundreds of those meetings with hundreds of different clients. There was a point where we were doing one-on-one consulting with that. There was a point where we were working with dozens of clients around the country, and we were in all their meetings. There was a point where I was flying around the country and actually participating personally in meetings, and now we have created systems to teach people how to run our whole program in their business.

And here's the difference between our materials in most people's materials, is that we take a very long time horizon. We actually work with people for a year, two years, three years, sometimes even longer than that. As a consultant, I've had clients over 10 years working with us on our systems on growing their business, because at each new iteration of a business, our systems and our structures adjust a little bit. Here's the challenge for anyone who tries to jump in and teach our content, is if you haven't been in the room, if you haven't listened to the questions, if you haven't been through dozens of these interactions with people and you answer a question wrong, here's the issue: not only are you going to send an entire team in the wrong direction, but if you don't have an answer, if you take them down the path and then you leave them hanging, they get stuck, and here's something that your clients will never forgive you for. If they realize you've gotten them to a place where you're stuck or if they, in retrospect, figure out you put them in a place where they're stuck, they will never forgive you. You will break trust with your clients and they won't come back. So I always coach people to be very careful of trying to share our materials.

Now, next year sometime, we are talking about doing a coaching certification where we start working with coaches and show them how to coach our systems, because anyone who's coaching business owners to grow in any way should use our systems, but we're going to spend several days with coaches creating a level of expertise where they can answer most questions, and then we're going to create a program where we support those coaches so that longterm they get their question's answers and their clients get their questions answered, because I don't want anyone to end up getting stuck, and I don't want any coach who's teaching our stuff to lose trust with a client.

And so when it comes to, if you're a coach or an author or a speaker or an expert or a content creator or a content provider, whatever you call yourself, here's my advice. Find the area of what you coach. Find what you do that you absolutely love. Figure out what it is that lights you up more than anything else. Like when I look at one of my clients, Nicole Moore, Nicole teaches women how to find the person that they want to be with, how to find a real lasting, contributory relationship, a relationship that's going to be with them for the rest of their lives and that really contributes to their lives and lights them up and makes them exciting. And if a woman has a question about how to find the right person in their lives or how to bring the right man into their lives, Nicole can answer any question.

Now, here's the reality though. You watch a few of her webinars and you see some of her materials, you might actually think you can start to talk to people about it, but here's the issue. You're not going to have the time in the chair that Nicole has. You're not going to have the expertise she has, the hundreds of women she's talked to, the experiences she's been through, the actual ... You know, she actually went out and used her materials to find Mike, her husband, who's amazing.

And so she teaches her expertise. She can answer questions on her expertise. She knows it inside and out, and the challenge in the market today is that the time between when someone learns something and when they want to teach it is like a day. They want to be able to just assimilate it and go, and here's the issue. The way our content lays out for somebody, we're helping them plan an entire year, and then we're helping them plan a quarter, then we're helping them plan a month, and we're helping them with strategic planning over a period of time. If you are just introduced to our content and you haven't even applied it yourself for a year, you have no basis in which to coach people. You have no basis with which to give them answers or provide them support or make suggestions.

In fact, until someone's been in our content for a year and actually planned their business and their lives for a year with our content, you don't really understand how it works. You can have perspective on how it works. You can understand the explanation of what we teach. You can understand the words on the paper, but you don't understand how everything that we teach fits together with something else. You know, I started my life as a programmer, so all of our content fits together. Our personal planning content mirrors our business planning content. The way that you plan your annual goals is the way you execute your annual goals. The way we set up your strategic plan is exactly the way you're going to meet with your team and execute the strategic plan, and it all fits together in a system that allows business owners over time to start spending less and less time trying to get their team going in the same direction and all be aligned, and more and more time executing their greater vision for the business.

But the understanding of that content, the execution of that content, it's taken decades to understand how to put this together. It's taken hundreds of meetings with clients to get the clarity to know that we are moving everybody forward and not creating constraint or moving people backwards, and it's taken all of that effort and time in the chair and meeting with clients to know where the pitfalls are so that we can tell people where they're going to have problems before they ever start and show them how they can create massive momentum without hitting walls.

See, that's just not possible by seeing our content in an event and then a week later trying to teach it, and I would say that that's not possible for a lot of the content that you see out there today. I think one of the biggest issues we have in the coaching and consulting market is that there's a lot of people who are learning something and trying to turn around and teach it immediately. Now, with simpler concepts, where you have proof of concept, where you've done it a few times yourself, you've helped other people do it, I think you can do that. But when you're taking concepts like helping people lay out multi-year strategies for their business and at least a one year strategic plan and then execute that plan over the year, I would suggest you go through it yourself first, understand it in an intimate level, and then perhaps you start talking to other people about it.

If you coach your expertise, if you teach your expertise, the market is going to trust you. If you put yourself in a position where you are willing to answer any question from anyone because you know you have the answers, the market is going to trust you. If you're willing to dig in and create a level of expertise greater than anyone in the market has, you are going to dominate the market, and that is how you become better at what you do and you become the thought leader, the speaker, the teacher, the educator, the course creator, the content creator that you want to be. So teach your expertise. Commit to a market, commit to a subject, and then learn more about it than anyone ever has, and you will dominate. That's what we're doing. That's what I think you should do.

If you are ready to start growing your business and you're interested in the strategic planning that I just talked about, it's simple to connect with me and my team. Just go to billionairecode.com/apply. Fill out the simple application. We get back to 100% of the people who fill out the application, and you'll get in touch with a member of my team. We'll give you some next steps so you can understand how we help business owners, how you can get involved, and understand exactly what we offer. Billionairecode.com/apply.