Cash Flow from Your Creativity

How consultants and professionals sell the fruits of their creativity many times over

Michael Van Horn 
#18 in the series

As consultants and professionals, one of our prime assets is our creative problem- solving ability. We continually come up with one-time solutions for clients. But what if we could sell the fruits of our creativity many times over? That is called leverage.

To leverage your practice, you must boost your ROC (i.e. your “return on creativity”). You can earn more money this way, spend less time at it, generate passive income, and perhaps build a business that can be sold.

Here's a step-by-step way to do this.

Topics covered

  • The “ladder of leverage” has two legs:
    1. Your content. The ideas and tools you create.
    2. Your process. The ways you work with your clients.
I will give examples of each step and show how it grows from the one preceding. You will apply these steps to your own business, and sketch out your own ladder of leverage.  

  • Greater ROC + ROT = Greater ROI.
  • Leg 1. Leverage your content. The sequence of ways to generalize and re-sell the intellectual property you create.
  • Leg 2. Leverage your profits. Each step up the ladder of creativity increases the return on an hour of your time.
  • Tackle the barriers to leveraging.
  • Your action plan to leverage your creativity
  • “Yeah, but…” Many consultants by nature resist taking these steps. I’ll show you how to tackle the most common challenges consultants encounter while climbing this ladder—including carving out the time to do it.

Warm up exercise

From the workbook

Creativity Killers for Small Business Owners

Do any of these sound like you?

  • Creating new things is "overhead" and you need to keep focused on billable work.

  • You get dragged out of creativity by the demands of running the business day-to-day.

  • Lack of support. Nobody is pushing to take the creative leap, or problem solving how to overcome the hurdles. No-one to follow behind, handling the details, executing the vision.

  • Lack of systems. Seat-of-pants management. Thus your franticness quotient increases exponentially with growth.

  • Accounting systems that don’t give you info needed to gauge the ROI and payback period of new things.

  • Too much “by the book” or “bean counter mentality.”

  • Bad prior experience. You had one good idea, and stuck with it too long “Tried that, got beaten down. It didn’t work, now I’m gun shy.”

  • You get out of touch with new technologies and opportunities, what your competitors are doing or not doing.

  • You get too comfortable. The balance between work and life tips toward Maui.