An eight-week engagement that gives an expert-led business a clear direction to become an Undisputed Authority, with a pipeline of excess demand, and a two-year plan to get there.
This engagement is about making the decisions on how to build your authority: how to position your brand, who to write to, what to write about, how to develop unique perspectives that you own, how to get your insights in front of the right people, and how to tie all that back to what you sell.
These are the strategic moves you make to become recognised as an authority within the next two years. When that happens, you no longer go looking for ideal-fit clients. They come to you.
What does winning look like? Aim paints a picture of where you want to be, by when, and what your business will look like in the future. Every other choice is made to lead to the outcomes we determine here.
Who are the people you'll serve? Your people are the specific group defined by what they have in common in relation to your work. Identify those patterns from your best real clients, and everything you make is designed to delight and compel them.
What one frustration or task will you obsess over? Like a diamond, your body of work has a grain, the through line that shapes everything you publish, build, and offer. Find it, and everything aligns.
What do you need in place to successfully execute this? Stamina is where you decide how much time, energy, money, and resource you can throw at this, and whether that investment squares with the Aim. It holds Yellow Pad, Campfire, and Tour.
What practice will develop your insights? Like a comedian working out material in small clubs, the Yellow Pad is how you generate and test new opinions in public.
Where will you publish your insights, and in what form? Invite your people to the Campfire, hosted on ground you own. You captivate them through stories, welcome interaction, and build relationships that turn strangers to fans to clients.
How will the right people discover your insights? Tour is how you get in front of audiences others have built, the podcasts, stages, and rooms where your people already gather. You earn their attention and send it home.
What will you sell and how will you deliver? Offering is where you package your expertise into formats the market wants to buy, shaped by the conversations you've had with your people. Every prior decision leads to the opportunity to present the offer.
You lead an established business where your expertise is the product. Clients love your work and refer you to others like them. But outside that circle, the market doesn't know you exist. Almost everything you win comes by referral.
You feel powerless over your own pipeline. You know that thought leadership is the way out, but part of you questions whether what you know is distinctive enough to build authority on, or just what everyone in the field already knows.
Your head has been down in the work for years. Now, for the first time, there's room to look up and decide where this is all going. You don't want to be living on the revenue rollercoaster in two years' time.
It starts with a conversation. Complete the form to book a call. I'll get an understanding of your situation, you can ask any questions you have about the engagement, and we'll figure out whether this is a fit.
By the end of the engagement, you will know exactly what to do, and why. Every piece of insight you publish is coordinated, working toward a defined end goal, so if execution gets hard and you can't see progress, you can confidently keep moving forward instead of second-guessing.
An objective synthesis of where you are, where you want to go, and how that meets what your clients want and value from you.
The one frustration you'll own, framed as a single question and scored against five criteria. The through line every piece of insight answers.
Every topic and sub-topic to write about, sequenced so each piece builds toward a body of work that moves an ideal-fit client from stranger to fan.
Email, and specifically the type and structure you'll build your insight on, whether it's supplemented by other owned channels like a podcast, and how you'll entice your people to subscribe.
The stages, podcasts, and events worth pursuing, discovered by mapping where the authorities you'd share a stage with already appear. Plus an approach for how you'd get selected to feature in rooms like these, and the order to approach them in.
One line that captures the essence behind who you serve, the frustration or responsibility you'll own, and the change you'll make. All of which feeds into the engagements you sell.
The order of execution across 24 months, from the first artefact to build (often a book) through the phases, milestones, and timing, paced to fit alongside running the business and designed to meet your authority goals.
When you move to making, I offer Thought Partner: an engagement where I work alongside you to shape your insight into the artefact and body of work. And where the roadmap calls for more, things like messaging, visual models, a documented sales-facing methodology, I offer custom engagements.
“What surprised us most about working with Liam was his restraint. He didn’t try to manufacture certainty. He helped us remove what didn’t belong so the value The Society of Advice offers to financial advisors could stand on its own.
If you’re building an expertise-led business and struggling to explain it without overpromising, Liam understands that challenge. Working with him feels like having a thoughtful mirror. Liam helps you get precise about what you actually do and who it’s for, without turning it into something it’s not.”
His book created excess demand, so much so that he had to hire to fulfil it. In his words, "I got a 19:1 ROI on every dollar I spent with you."
How I worked with Nigel