Thought Leadership Deep Dive w/ Peter Winick
Peter Winick is the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. For the past two decades he’s helped individuals and organizations build and grow revenue streams through designing and growing their thought leadership platforms as well as acting as a guide and advisor for increasing business to business sales of thought leadership products.
His clients include New York Times bestselling business book authors, members of the Speakers’ Hall of Fame, recipients of the Thinkers50 award, CEOs of public and privately held companies, and academics at prestigious institutions such as Yale, Wharton, Dartmouth, and London School of Business.
In this episode, Peter talks about what thought leadership is, how his company helps his clients develop a thought leadership system, and of course, there’s a lot of talk about how authors can achieve their objectives by becoming thought leaders.
Peter’s Links:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Today, my guest is Peter Winick. Peter is the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. For the past two decades, he's helped individuals and organizations build and grow revenue streams through designing and growing their thought leadership platforms, as well as acting as the guide and advisor for increasing business-to-business sales of thought leadership products.
His clients include New York Times bestselling business book authors, members of the speaker’s hall of fame, recipients of the thinkers 50 award, CEOs of public and privately held companies, and academics at prestigious institutions, such as Yale, Wharton, Dartmouth, and the London School of Business.
Peter, welcome to the show.
Peter Winick: Hey, thanks for having me.
Josh Steimle: We're excited to have Peter on today because funny thing, Peter is not an author. You might actually be the first non-author we're having on the show. We may have had one or two others. We’re over a hundred episodes at this point, but you might be the first one, but your expertise in the area of thought leadership is exactly what we focus on with this podcast, because we've got entrepreneurs who are listening to the show, trying to figure out how they can become authors and build a thought leadership system. And so I thought this would be a perfect fit for helping our audience out, especially because you have a lot of experience working with other authors. But before we dive into that, Peter, give us a little bit more background on yourself. Who are you?
Where'd you come from? How'd you get to where you are today?
Peter Winick” Yeah. Really two different pieces of the story that merged together to get me where I am, which I see life as a Venn diagram sometimes. One is entrepreneurial. So from an early age, starting businesses, growing businesses, selling businesses, et cetera. I love the challenge of the entrepreneur, doing things that hadn't been done before and all that sort of fun stuff.
And then the flip side of that coin, which I thought was totally unrelated whatever was we didn't even have the term thought leader, it's called a nerd, right? Like just always consuming a ton of content articles, magazines, books, whatever part of it was. I'm curious, part of it was being a lifelong learner. Part of it was being like every entrepreneur, underfunded and looking for answers to questions and not having abundant resources to hire experts to do those sorts of things.
Eventually, those two things came together. I'll give you the short version of the story, but I was brought in to do a turnaround in a communications consulting organization in 2003, almost 20 years ago now. And what I learned there was that basically there was a business that was a $40-50 million global business that was based on a book someone had written 40 years earlier. Jeez, all the hundreds and hundreds of books I bought over my life and being entrepreneurial, I never asked myself the question, how does that person make a living? And that's when the two things came together where I'm basically a specialist in helping authors, thought leaders, speakers, and organizations develop, deploy, curate thought leadership in a lot of entrepreneurial ways.
Josh Steimle: Got it. So how long have you been running Thought Leadership Leverage, this organization?
Peter Winick: Yeah. So I started Thought Leadership Leverage about 14 years ago as a consultancy.
Josh Steimle: And now what does that look like? What does your day-to-day look like? What does your organization look like?
Peter Winick: Yeah, so we're small, I've got 10 folks on staff. And I'll give you sort of a little bit of the history lesson, because it speaks to your question. So when I started it, the focus was working with individual authors, speakers, academics, consultants, thought leaders, your audience, quite frankly. And helping those folks figure out their are strategies, figure out their brand, figure out their platform, figure out how to productize the ideas that start in their head, that typically, although not exclusively, landed in a book and then ultimately supporting them and things like sales, marketing, product development, business development, et cetera.
And the reason I started the firm is I saw that if you were a thought leader, however you define that, we can get into that as well, there's a lot of people that care a little bit about you for a short period of time. And it's not because they're bad people, but if you have a book agent, they care about you for a millisecond. If you have a speaking agent, they care about you for this. But nobody was looking at this holistically. And I said, “Wow, it's hard enough to have the gravitas to put out a great book, but how will you possibly know what to do in social media?” Like there's hundreds and hundreds of other things, and everyone was an opportunity, quite frankly, to screw up.
So I was like, okay, I need to take a more holistic perspective, a more strategic perspective. So that's where we started the business. It's still a big part of the business, but then right at the end of 2019, remember pre COVID, remember when we actually left our house. Way back in those days, we launched a new practice area in the business that we call the Organizational Thought Leader. And what we're doing there is applying our same models and methods and frameworks and processes against large organizations. And those organizations aren't in the business of selling or monetizing their thought leadership, but they do need to put thought leadership out to the communities that matter to them. So if you think about high-tech financial services, professional services, those are the type of global organizations that we work with on their thought leadership as well.
Josh Steimle: So what's your ideal client look like? Can you give us some examples? Some case studies, people you've worked with that were the perfect client for you.
Peter Winick: Oh, there's several, I'm trying to think. I don't want to necessarily get into naming, I mean there are tons of testimonials and all that sort of stuff on the site, but there's a couple of profiles, right? So it could be a world renowned academic at a place like a Wharton or a London School of Business or such, where they've got amazing work, amazing thought leadership, really deep thought leadership, but are probably lacking in the sales, marketing business development productization. So that's one piece to help.
We do a lot of work with very senior level executives. Think CEOs, think C level think founders that have achieved a level of success in other domains of their lives that's unimaginable to many, but there's something else driving at them. It could be the way that they run the business from a leadership philosophy perspective to a growth perspective or whatever. And they really are in a phase of their life where they're jumping into thought leadership to be more legacy, evangelical. It's not as much about the money, although we keep score with money. That's not really the piece.
We have others that have been just at it a long time and are struggling. So maybe they're doing some coaching, doing some consulting. They're doing okay. But it never really clicked from a marketing side. It never really took off. They’re working really hard, they have a practice, not a business, where if they're not in the room or in the zoom, ideas don't get exchanged, dollars don't get exchanged. So how do they take those ideas and productize them and scale them?
So those are the types of things that we work on. And everything is global right now. It was pre-COVID, but COVID has accelerated the global nature of the business.
Josh Steimle: And let's talk about that word Thought Leadership for a bit, because that means different things to different people. How do you define it and what are some of the misconceptions around the term thought leader?
Peter Winick: Yeah yeah, this is a bit of a pet peeve. So when I started the business 14 years ago, the word that made me cringe was Guru. So Guru to me, and what do I know should be some dude with a really long beard sitting cross-legged teaching you yoga and get your chakras out of whack or something like that. But that was what people were using.
So thought leadership, I put it out there for a reason. So how I define thought leadership is really two elements. There's the thought piece, right? So what does that mean? It means that you've actually put in the reps, you're putting in the work. It could be based on research. It could be based on your client work. It could be based on you synthesizing ideas that come from different domains into a different way. But there's something thoughtful. It's not just sharing the best practice. It's not just regurgitating to something that's already well-known with a little bit of a kick or a stick to it. There's really got to be thoughtfulness to it. And people are smart. People understand the difference between a lazy thought leader and someone that, “Wow, Josh has put a lot of thought and work into what goes on into the mind of an author or someone that's a professional or an entrepreneur that wants to get a book out. There's a reason I want to go to him.”
And then the leadership piece of this to me is, do they have the courage to put out there the ideas that might not the norm? That might be a little bit different. That might be adding to the conversation in the discipline. And it's not being contrarian for the sake of getting attention and lighting your hair on fire, but you're taking a discipline or a subject matter and elevating it and moving it.
So that's how I define it. I think that word gets thrown around a lot now. One general rule that I think everyone should follow is do not ever call yourself a thought leader. It is a term of respect that others should bestow upon you. It's almost like being knighted if you will. But to run out there and say, “Oh, I'm a fault leader.” It's like, really? According to what standard? I couldn't get up there and say I'm a dentist or a CPA or something without having the credentials. And I think that's really important. That it's up to others, other peers, other folks that you respect in the industry to bestow that title, that comes from someone you respect, to bestow that onto you.
Josh Steimle: Cool. And I agree fully, nobody should call themselves thought leader, guru, or visionary, or a bunch of other terms that get thrown around there and put on people's LinkedIn profiles.
So let's tie this into books then, when you're working with people, where do books generally fit in? You work with authors, but you also work with speakers, you work with other people putting out other forms of thought leadership content.
What do you see as the role of the book in that mix?
Peter Winick: Yeah. At the risk of sounding like a consultant. It depends. So I would say that I don't know, 70, 75, 80% of our clients have or are in the process of writing a book. I will also say that I've talked more people out of writing a book than anyone else I know.
And I've been told that by many people. And it's not that I say, “Josh, you're a Dodo bird. You should never write a book. You have nothing to say.” I would never say that. I might but probably not.
But what I would say to folks is, “Okay, that potentially has the making of a book. That might even have the makings of a good book. But, so what? Like what does success really look like?”
Because then I have to go through an educational process with the client saying, “You know what? The average business book only sells 1200 units. The average person only reads 18 pages. Here's the data. You're not going to make money on a book.”
I got to burst the bubble and say, “No, this concept of a publisher doing everything and rainbows and unicorns doesn't happen.” I have to explain to them and say, “Okay, How does the book fit into your overall thought leadership strategy? How does it fit into your business? Where does it warrant the investment of time, energy, effort, and money? What are the outcomes looking for?” So in some instances, at some points in time, it's absolutely essential for someone to get a book out. It is a table stakes to do certain things. That has changed a lot, right?
So it used to be only 8-10 years ago to really kill it on the speaking circuit, you needed to have the book. That was like the prereq. Now, a book, I read two to three books a week, but that's not normal. When you look at the data for many people, you can effectively put out short thought leadership, assuming it's real thought leadership, in the form of a video in the form of LinkedIn posts and lots of other forms to make the point that you're trying to make. And maybe the book is a compilation of that two years later. So I think, most people don't realize what it takes, how much energy effort goes into, not just writing, but making it successful, making it something that you're proud of.
I don't know if that answered your question or confused you.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. So let's say that somebody comes to you and they've got the makings to be a great thought leader, expert, and they say, “I want to write a book.” And you sit down and you decide, “Yes, it would be a good idea for you to write a book.” What do you tell them at that point? Do you say, “Go write a book, come back in two or three years once you're done with it.”
How do you work with people through that process?
Peter Winick: Yeah, there are a lot of variations on that theme, right? So one, we might say, “Okay, let's write the book, but we're not going to stop everything else.” Okay, so we decide to write a book today. That book's not going to be on the shelves for what, pick a number, nine months, 18 months, whatever it is, right? Books are like house renovations. They never come in on time and they never take less time or less money or less energy than you thought.
So we say, “Great, we're going to do the book. What else needs to be done in parallel with that?” So for example, if it's a self published piece, they could be pushing out short form pieces of that book along the way, dropping some crumbs along the way to stimulate the market, to build the brand. They could be using the book or any form of thought leadership in a way that drives the business. You can conflate content development with business development because there's two calls you can make, “Hey, it's Peter. I got a book coming out next year and we'd love to talk to people like you that have amazing podcasts, that are charming, and whatever.” Great. You'd say, “Hey, that's interesting. I'd love to talk to you about that.”
Or I can say, “Hey, it's Peter, I'm a consultant trying to sell you some consulting services.” Which calls more likely to get scheduled? So I think being deliberate and thoughtful.
There were other times when we might say to a client, “Wow, that book's a heavy lift.
That's going to take two years and requires all this research. Let's touch base in six months.”
But more often than not, we would be working in parallel because the book is just the beginning of another chapter of the business. It's not like opening day at a retail store. Where we’d say, “Okay, great!” Cut the ribbon, lines of customers, whatever.
Josh Steimle: Yeah, exactly. How does this differ from somebody coming to you who already has a book that's out there? Maybe it's been out there for years, it's doing pretty well. How do you work with that type of author or that type of thought leader and say, “Okay, here's how we take things to the next level?”
Peter Winick: Yeah, that's a lot of what we do. So one is most authors are not extracting the maximum value from their assets. Most thought leaders, I would say. So what do I mean by that? Let’s say we’re in the real estate business. Josh, you and I, so let's go form a real estate partnership. Great. What are we going to do? We're going to put up great apartment buildings. Oh, that's great. Let's go design that, whatever, but neither of us are really good at sales or renting. We would be bankrupt fairly quickly because we don't have an infinite amount of capital. You say, how many apartment buildings can we build? I don't know. I'm out of money. You out of money? Great. I guess we’re out of business.
Thought leaders constantly put stuff out in the marketplace that don't deliver the dividends that they are capable of. So for example, a pub date is a fictitious silly, ridiculous date that means nothing to the marketplace. It means something to a publisher, it means something to an author, but if a book is good and what I say to my clients is always think of a book as an investment with a five to seven year depreciation or amortization schedule.
And publishers tend to think of a book as a seasonal item, right? Oh, it's a spring release. Oh, it’s a fall release, whatever. I would argue if you pick the best bestseller off your shelf, nobody remembers that, “Oh, that came out when. That was oh yeah, let me smell the bouquet of that. Oh yeah, that's a spring of 2017 or whatever.”
So I think you have to make sure you're extracting maximum value out of a book. Now, if a book is dated based on the subject matter or whatever, I get it, I'm probably not going to buy Windows 11 for Dummies, probably not a big demand for that today. For most books, and most thought leadership books have a longer shelf life than we give it credit.
Josh Steimle: Look at some of the great books that we still read today. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. That's over a hundred years old, I think at this point, perhaps. Or Napoleon Hill’s book.
Peter Winick: Yeah. Yeah. Tom Peters, even, In Search of Excellence, I think is over 40 years old. I still send probably 10 copies of that a year to people.
Josh Steimle: Yeah, or 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey.
Peter Winick: Yeah, I think that just broke 30, 35 years, right?
Josh Steimle: Yeah, and there are these evergreen books that are out there. Now, of course, that's not to say there's anything wrong with writing a book that's going to be outdated in two years. Windows for Dummies or whatever, it has its place. It just has a much different shelf life. But we do sometimes get that impression like, “Oh, my book's going to be outdated so quick and everything.” Well who knows, it might be around in 80 years and people might still be reading it.
Peter Winick: Well and some of it is the confusion, which is easy to understand that an author has with is it that the book is stale or you're so bored with it, right? Because if the book's been out for four years, it's been in your head for two or three years before that, then you've got it out. You've talked about it at nauseum for, on and on.
Is it you’re bored or is it the market has given you an indication that it's no longer topical, relevant, valuable? And I think those are two very different behaviors, different signals.
Josh Steimle: Which brings up that there are some books that do sell themselves. There's some books that for whatever reason they take hold and they just sell themselves and they'll keep selling themselves for decades. And there are other books that can't sell themselves and can't be sold by the author either because nobody wants to read it. But most of the books fall into the middle where they'll keep selling, if the author keeps pushing, if the author keeps doing something to get the word out there.
What are some of the recommendations you give to people in that realm to say, “ Hey, you're going to have to keep on pushing this and here's how you do it.”
Peter Winick: Yeah. I think that's a great question because some books take off like a runaway freight train and you're like, “Wow, get out of the way, this thing's taken off.” And others don't. And it might be because they're just not that good, or their timing was awful, or whatever the case was.
But that middle ground is probably, I don't know, 80, 90% of them. So the question is, how do you continue to do that? And I think that there is a lot of frustration that I see in the marketplace or dissatisfaction with traditional PR as it relates to books. So tactics like AM radio, tactics like I don't know, book signings. It’s like these sort of things.
So I look at it and say, “Wait a minute. If you're really clear about who you want to buy your book…” Because I think that matters right. For most people, it's not listen, are you going to be the next good to great statistically? Probably not by a long shot. So I always think, okay, if there's a hundred people, 200 people, 500 people that you can get the book in their hands that could potentially alter your business in a way that's unimaginable, do everything you can to figure out who those people are by name and get it to them.
And to me, it's block and tackle. It could also be going back to some of your biggest fans. And by fans, I mean clients that have done stuff with you and say, “Hey, Josh, I know you're a big fan. We've been working together for a long time. You know what I'd love to do. Give me the name of three of your friends that you think could benefit my book. And I'd love to send it on your behalf as a gift from you.” People hang out with people like them economically, demographically, socially, et cetera, et cetera. And it feels, that's a win-win. Like, “Wow, my friend Josh is saying I can give three books away to my friends, based on his book that I like, yeah, why wouldn't I do that?”
So I think it's being creative about getting it into the right hands to the right people in a high touch, personalized way.
Josh Steimle: What are some of the mistakes that you see authors make with their books in terms of marketing, promotion, or leveraging?
Peter Winick: How many hours do we have? I’ll give you the wise guy version of that, I was invited to leave a meeting at McGraw hill several years ago when they put a contract in front of my client, that there needed to be a disclaimer on there. Like when you go to DisneyWorld and it says, if you're pregnant or have a back condition, you shouldn't go on space mountain. That the author acknowledges that they are taking on the role of SVP of sales, marketing, and distribution for the book. They didn't think it was funny. I was deadly serious.
So I think that is really the gist of it. Part of being an author is quite frankly, the hard work starts on release date. What are you going to do if you're shy, if you're not willing to ask, if you're not willing to go through your network, if you're not willing to go on, whatever, a hundred podcasts and really push the book. Unless lightning has struck it's not going to work. It's just not going to. You've got to put in the hard work. And what's interesting is, lots of authors by their very nature are quiet, are reserved, they're introverted. They don't want that sort of attention. So to ask them to go out and ask people to do things like, “Oh, that makes me cringe.”
But if you're not going to do that, then don't invest in the book.
Josh Steimle: Because what's the point of writing it, if nobody's going to read it. And if you're not going to promote it, nobody's going to read it. That's one of the things that surprised me when I wrote my first book was I thought, I get the book deal. I write the book. They edit it. They make it look nice. They design a great cover and then they market it and sell it.
And then I realized, no, I do pretty much all of that. And even when it came to editing. I was doing my own editing. I ended up designing the book cover because I didn't like the one they delivered. I mean, I hired somebody to do the book cover. But I ended up doing almost all of it, which is why I ended up self-publishing my next books.
I thought, if I'm doing all the work for this, I might as well have control over this.
Peter Winick: Why only make 15%? And when you do your own, you're not going to write as many books as a publisher is going to publish. It is far more important to you than it is to them. And it doesn't mean that they don't treat books well or with respect. But if the average person, the average author is going to write one book, two books, five is a lot of books, that's blood, sweat, and tears. And you want to know that you put everything in you had to make that book as successful as you possibly could.
And by the way, let's just push on success. Success isn't only measured by number of units sold. And I would in fact argue, it's probably one of the worst metrics, which is a little counterintuitive.
Josh Steimle: That's true because I'm sure you've seen examples where somebody sells 300 books and maybe they bought them all themselves and sent them out to clients.
But if they're landing in six figure deals off of sending these books out, who cares that they only sold 300.
Peter Winick: Book sales are one metric and an insignificant metric at that. I’ll give you an example. I was speaking, several years in a row, at a book award event. So I had a room full of a hundred people, business book authors, that had just won gold, silver, bronze. So these were good business books. So this isn't whatever. And I asked them, show of hands or whatever. How many of you, what percentage of your time did you spend on this book from let's say from the writing stage to six months post release date? So call that a year and a half. And on average, it was over 60 to 65%. And I said directly attributable to the book, meaning number of units times profit of X dollars per book, what percent of your income was it? And it was like single digits. And I'm like, do we see the problem here? Do you see?
Because if I made you that deal, “Hey Josh, you make X dollars a year. I want to pay you 5% for 80% of your time.” You would tell me, “That's crazy. Why would I do that?” That's part of the problem. You have to have all these other things in place where the book is a raving success, even though, number of units sold, it might look like mediocrity.
Josh Steimle: Yeah, exactly. So tell me a little bit more about your programs at Thought Leadership Leverage. Do you have a standard program? How do you work with people? Is it all customized for everybody? Or what's your process like?
Peter Winick: Yeah. So where we start with, I guess you can call it a program but where we start with everybody is in a strategy development process because everybody wants to start with the tactics. Everybody wants to, “Oh, what am I doing on Twitter? What am I doing on social?” And it's okay, Time out. For lots of reasons, thought leaders don't invest in strategy early on. Why is that? In many instances, they got into the business accidentally, serendipitously, they didn't even think it was a business. It was, they started to write a email to friends and that became a blog and that became… Like, it wasn't as deliberate or planned as most other businesses are. And it typically didn't require outside funding. So it just sort of serendipitously happened and good things happened and you worked hard and it happened.
So I'm like, okay, first thing you need to do is to have a very clear strategy that dictates who you are going to serve? How are you going to serve them? What sales, marketing, and distribution looks like? What your goals are, intrinsic goals, income goals, exit goals. What are the pieces here you can sell? That's where we start. And that process net the outcome is now they have clarity. And the power of clarity is you can then effectively prioritize what you could do, what you should do, and equally as important what you don't do. Because typically I come in and I feel like the visual I get in my mind are you've got 28 plates spinning as fast as you can but activity isn't productivity and we all tend to confuse the two.
Josh Steimle: And so once you have that strategy in place, are you helping them with execution and planning? Are you coaching them? What does that look like?
Peter Winick: Yeah. So once the strategy is locked and loaded, the client can, we don’t operate in a black box or behind a curtain, they can clearly implement or execute on their own. Some do. Or some will say, “Hey, I'm going to take this. There are elements of this that I feel really comfortable doing. Let's reconnect in three, four minutes. Cause there's some house cleaning I need to do. Or I've got some folks that can get these things done.”
But ultimately we're full service, right? So we can go full in, on implementation execution. I say to our clients early on, we go from back of the envelope, meeting white boarding, sketching, whatever, to back of the check, like how do we help you signing the back of the checks, meaning sales, marketing, business development, delivery, all those sorts of things, because a lot of folks don't think that part of it through.
Josh Steimle: And so what is a typical engagement? How long does it last? How long do you work with people? What kind of time commitment is it or is it just different?
Peter Winick: Sure. So the strategy development piece is the most predictable. That typically takes about six weeks. Because there are a couple of phases to engagement.
We've got to come up with strategy. We have to review it. We've got to read through all the materials, et cetera. After that, it could be, on the low end, the client will work with us to get stood up and ready four to six months. On the high end, we've had clients with us for many years.
So it's a function of what do they want? Some clients will say to us, you know what, build a moat around me. Here's the list of things I really want to do and protect me from everything else, including myself sometimes.
Josh Steimle: So give me the pitch here. If I'm an author, for example, I just published my latest book in October. It's 60 days to LinkedIn Mastery. So I've got a LinkedIn book and I'm a LinkedIn expert and I've got this book, I come to you and I say, how do I leverage this book? Where do you start with me? What are some of the first questions you would ask? Or where would you guide me?
Peter Winick: Yeah. So I'd want to figure out what the strategy is. Who are you selling that to? Is it to individual contributors on LinkedIn? Is it to organizations? Is it to associates? So who's the buyer or buyers? We need to be really clear on the avatars there. Then we need to figure out the pain points. Why do I care about being successful? I've been doing fine without it. So what are the pain points that they're in? Are the services limited to you or have you codified the processes and methodologies in such a way where Josh doesn't need to be in the room or in the zoom for the ideas to be exchanged or the dollars to be exchanged, right? Is it put into programs or slices? Is it licensable, right? Because I always say let's start by thinking big and then get reducted. Like, why couldn't this be licensed to a distribution arm in Brazil? So we think through all those things, we'd look at goals.
What would success look like for you? Is this something that you'd spin off a million dollars a year in cash? Is the reason that you're doing this more intrinsic? Like I think the world would be a better place if everybody mastered LinkedIn. Are you positioning this as something that a boutique agency might gobble up and buy using it for deal flow? What are the other sort of non-tangible, nonbalance sheet things that are showing up?
Then I would also look at the business models, right? So a book is not a business. What are the other formats? How many ways can I pay you to get that information? I can be in a very exclusive mastermind with you, right? I can be in a very non-exclusive cohort of a hundred people that go through a series with you. It could be asynchronous, right? It could be a series of tools. Are you going to do the agency work of actually doing the implementation for me? So we need to think through the business models and then figure out how to go out from there. Those are all strategies.
Josh Steimle: Got it. And so you work that out. So for example, in my case, I actually do have an agency that I created around the book and the book is a marketing tool for the agency. So where would you take me as a next step then? If I say, okay, I've got the book. I want to leverage the book to grow my agency, to get clients, to generate leads. Where do you take me from there?
Peter Winick: Sure. We need to think about, are you selling one-to-one or one to many? I don't know how the agency works, but is it, “Hey, Peter, we will charge you X to tune up your LinkedIn.” That probably sounds to me like a fairly high volume, low ticket model. So that's cool.
Josh Steimle: We do multiple, but let's say the audience I want to push the most is corporate. So I want to get into corporations. And I want to come in and overhaul the LinkedIn profiles for all their executives or for their sales teams or something like that.
If I'm going after that…
Peter Winick: Then we'd want to figure out what corporations, where? Are they high growth? Are they private equity funded companies? So corporations is a vague term, right? So we have to get really tight there. So maybe, as an example, you said, you know what might be interesting. Let's go after companies that have gotten some funding from a private equity firm that are high growth that are maybe a little bit immature in terms of their marketing or maybe it's tech companies and the tech's really good, but they're immature. And why don't we partner with a whole bunch of private equity firms who make it sort of part of the standard of being a portfolio company that you work with Josh and his agency for your 8 or 10 senior leaders, because the LinkedIn thing is something that's lacking and there's an ROI on that, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, maybe the private equity firm pays you. Maybe the individual portfolio company pays you, but it would be nice to have a portfolio company that can push out six or eight clients a year to you that can each deliver 10 individuals, right? That's creating a channel.
Josh Steimle: It's funny that you bring that up because I have another business and marketing agency and we've actually done exactly that, partnering with private equity funds for exactly this reason. Because what happened to us was somebody came along and bought our client and then said, “Hey, we just bought your client. By the way, we already work with another marketing agency, so we don't need you.” We were like how do we become that marketing agency that is the one that the private equity company turns to and says, “Hey, we just bought this company. We're going to fire their agency and bring you in instead.” We want to be on that side of that.
So we did that. It hadn't occurred to me to do the same thing with this other business, with the LinkedIn agency. Anyway, I'm asking you these questions because I want listeners to see, this is the type of stuff that you can help them out with. That if they come to you, you can help them come up with these ideas.They can figure out strategies and then this is going to help them to either get their message out there or make money or build a business or make the impact that they're trying to make out there. And we all need coaches, the winter Olympics just ended, every single Olympic athlete has a coach. Every professional team sports team has a coach. And all the executives out there running big companies, they all have a coach. And the rest of us need coaching as well.
Peter Winick: Yeah, no, I think that's right. It's listening, everybody's got their deep expertise and their domain expertise, but I think the Achilles heel of the thought leaders is okay, now you need to be savvy at social selling. Now you need to be savvy at social media. Now you need to be savvy as an instructor. Here are 30 other things that you probably have no interest in and you probably look worse than average at if you tried cause you've never done it before. Why would you Hire BNC Ray players to work for you when you're doing things in an amateur way. So in essence, what you're doing, let alone the opportunity costs. Is that where you should be spending your time figuring out like how many times a day to post on LinkedIn if that's not your jam? Probably not.
Josh Steimle: You have your fees and I'm sure there are some people listening to this who say, “Hey, this sounds great. I'd love to talk to these guys.” But maybe they come to you and maybe it's just not within their price range at the moment. Do you have any tips for where people can start if they can't afford a service like you? What are some of the low-hanging fruit that people can look at? To say, “Hey, this is something I can go do today that's going to make a difference. That's going to help me get my name, my personal brand, my thought leadership content out there in front of people.”
Peter Winick: Yeah, I think spending the time and energy thinking about who benefits the most and who will pay the most. So my answer to your question quite frankly, is listen, there's a massive market for people that can't afford me. That's not my market. I don't care. I don't spend any time thinking about those folks. Listen, God bless them. They can read our stuff. They can get our videos. That's fine. My market has to have a certain level of ability to pay or it's just not a market. And I don't spend any time thinking about non-buyers. I spend a lot of time thinking about those that can. Where could someone go that doesn't have the resources? I don't know. They could read anything we put out. They can watch anything we put out.
But I think that the things that they should be focused on is who benefits the most?
Why you? Why would anyone listen to you? What is it that you have to say that is different and how are you going to get the message out there? Yeah, so what, you want to write a book? Great. That is, but one step in a journey. And what does that journey look like? And what does success look like and what are you willing to invest to do it?
Time, energy, dollars, effort, sweat, whatever.
Josh Steimle: Got it. So what are some of your favorite channels personally? For yourself? For Thought Leadership Leverage? How are you getting your message out? Obviously, you're doing the podcast, but what are some of the other channels that you like the best?
Peter Winick: It’s changed a lot over the years, there was one point in time where I would've said Twitter. And I wasn't a believer in Twitter, but it doesn't matter what I think. Right now there are two primary things for us from a marketing side, well three. One is we have a beautiful referral network. So folks that we refer business to and refer to us that are just serving the same types of people from a different perspective or from a different area of expertise. That's awesome.
Number two, well in no necessary order, LinkedIn is really strong for us. We put a lot of stuff up on LinkedIn.
And then our podcasts has been really great. It's coming up on four years, almost 400 episodes. It's a great way to meet people. It's a great way to put out great information.
It's so easy for me to have conversations, as opposed to… we used to blog a lot. I hate blogging on my best day. I'm a mediocre writer and I just don't like it. But I would do it because it needed to be done. I actually enjoy the conversations on podcasts and the challenge and learning. It satisfies my urge to constantly learn from folks.
Josh Steimle: Perfect. If people do want to reach out and they want to learn more about what you do and inquire about pricing and such, where's the best place for them to find you?
Peter Winick: Yeah. So you can email me directly at Peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Peter Winick. And obviously the website ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com and the podcast. If you Google us, we pop-up. But yeah, shoot me an email. Happy to talk. Yup.
Josh Steimle: Perfect. Is there anything we didn't cover that we should've covered?
Peter Winick: Anything that we didn't cover? Yeah, no, I don't think so. I think you've done this before, Josh. You’ve done a stellar job.
Josh Steimle: I interview a lot of authors, so I'm really good at asking the questions of authors. Like I know what I'm going to ask way ahead of time. With you it’s a little bit different. So I'm like, I gotta cover my bases here and make sure that we got everything out that Peter wants to get out. So if we did, then great.
Peter Winick: Yeah, I was gonna say, you have to ask me the origin story of the subtitle, right? So there you go.
Josh Steimle: Thanks so much, Peter, for being here with us today on the Published Author Podcast.
Peter Winick: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Josh.
