140: How to License Your IP (Intellectual Property)

Licensing your IP to companies can be lucrative and a tough nut to crack. Pricing is opaque, deliverables and tracking can get complicated, and companies with a smaller Learning and Development function may call it by another name (such as Train-the-Trainer). 

After many years working with a small handful of joyful clients—bolstered by many mentoring sessions, lessons learned the hard way, and a whole lot of experimentation—today, I’m sharing a few pointers on how to get started. I am not an expert, but I do believe in the power of licensing to help your ideas reach even more people who can benefit without you being the bottleneck. 

Because I get the “can I pick your brain” question often on this, more than any other topic: I no longer work with clients one-on-one, so if you are interested in learning more about licensing and implementing it in your business in 2023, I invite you to join the BFF community. Keep an eye on Pamela Slim too, who will also be releasing more resources on this in the year ahead.

🌟3 Key Takeaways:

• Be choosy about your end customer. Do you want to offer a public-facing certification that results in 1,000+ trainers and coaches who are your clients? Or would you prefer to work with a small handful of large companies instead? Both? Neither?

• When pricing, be sure to communicate the value of your training in terms of direct benefit to the organization. What bottom-line metrics will you improve, and what is the value of that to the company?

• Less is more. Don’t cram weeks' worth of content into a Train-the-Trainer program. Keep the material simple, streamlined, and easy to grasp, customize, and deliver.

💌Permission: Stop being the bottleneck for speaking engagements by empowering organizations to teach your material themselves, on-demand, through licensing.

 ✅Do (or Delegate) This Next: Create a page on your website that demonstrates the path to licensing with different scalable learning options. For example: kick-off keynote, online courses, Train-the-Trainer, unlimited use licensing. 

📘Books Mentioned:

• Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business 

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• The New and Complete Business of Licensing: The Essential Guide to Monetizing Intellectual Property by Craig Battersby

• Fix This Next: Make the Vital Change That Will Level Up Your Business by Mike Michalowicz

• Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown 

• Value-Based Fees (3rd Edition): How to Charge What You're Worth and Get What You Charge by Alan Weiss

• Million Dollar Consulting Proposals: How to Write a Proposal That's Accepted Every Time by Alan Weiss

• Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels (3rd Edition) by Donald Kirkpatrick

🔗Resources Mentioned: 

• Pamela Slim

• Jenny’s LinkedIn Learning courses

• Pivot Workbook

• Examples of Licensing Programs: Getting Things Done Practitioner Certification, Managing Your Energy by Tony Schwartz, John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing Certification, Danielle LaPorte's Desire Map Certification, Box of Crayons, Pivot in the Classroom, Pivot Programs Overview (Made in Canva), Profit First Professionals by Mike Michalowicz

🎧Related Podcast Episodes: 

• 122: My Top 5 Sources of Recurring Revenue

• 117: Tiny Marketing Actions with Pamela Slim

• 016: IP Licensing with Lee LeFever

• 037: The Ultimate Marketing Engine with John Jantsch

• Pivot 164: Fix This Next (And Stop Keeping Up With The Entrepre-Joneses)

• Jenny on Widest Net: 005: From Friction to Flow to Free Time: Finding Joy in Systems

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