Episode 162. 6 Stages of Building a Successful Thought Leader Strategy & Personal Brand Business

Becoming known for your unique thought leadership and building a body of work is fundamental to being a successful solopreneur and a prolific and consistent content creator. 

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Becoming a Successful Solopreneur via Thought Leadership 

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Over the past four months, as I worked with four amazing clients inside the first ever cohort of TLC, I’ve started to observe different stages that clients tend to walk through when they’re inside the program.

During our time together, we work on getting them to the next stages and set them up for success beyond our coaching together.

We’re going to discuss the 6 stages to building a successful thought leader business and personal brand.

You’ll learn exactly how to level up from your current stage of your thought leader business and brand, as well as what to consider as you approach the stages ahead.

Stage One: Do you know what you want to be known for?

The first step to build a successful thought leader business and personal brand, is to build a body of work centered around something you’re known for.

Naturally, the very first stage requires you to make a decision on what matters to you and what you want to become known for, without the infiltration of surrounding voices, boxes, or norms.

For instance, what topics do you want to be known for? What skills do you want to be known for being good at? What characteristics and values do you want people to remember you for?

Note that your answers shouldn’t be just based on how you are right now, rather it should be centered around who you want to become and are working on becoming.

This means that if there is a topic you want to be known for, start writing about it so that others are able to see your perspectives on that topic and start associating you with that topic.

Truth be told, there’s no clear cut definition of what it means to be known for something, and there’s surely no clear cut pathway to becoming known for something.

There are many, many ways to make this happen.

But if I had to identify a common denominator between successful entrepreneurs and creators who are well known for something, it would include the following:  

First, they have evidence that they are good at what they do.

For some, maybe they’re seen as the best of the best. For others, that’s not necessarily the case, but still, they are good at their craft and it also took years to build up a name and reputation for themselves.

It wasn’t a quick success. There were years of hard work and often failure and really tough times in order to be good at what they do and also to become known for what they do.

Second, in this day and age, if you search any of the above example’s name online, there is a “body of work” even if it’s not necessarily created by the person themselves.

Whether it’s a YouTube channel that you’ve created or it’s someone else narrating your work or story, or NBA fans analyzing the performance of their favorite players, it’s now more important than ever before that you have some sort of online presence that really captures the scope of who you are and what you do.

Especially because if someone who isn’t familiar with you wants to learn more, they’ll then have the information available to them on the Internet. 

That said, the common thread between the two things is you first have to know what you want to be known for. You have to make a decision on that before you can start honing in on your craft, collecting proof of results, building up your street cred, and so on.

Likewise, you need to have made a decision on what you want to be known for before you can start building an online presence and digital body of work that showcases and documents what you’re doing, what you’re working on, and how you’re impacting the world.

Once you have a clear, committed decision, that leads us to the second stage which is starting to literally build your body of work.

Stage Two: Have you started building your body of work?

Here’s what’s happening for a lot of folks entering this stage. They are waiting to finish their coaching certification before they start building a body of work.

Or they’re waiting to reach a certain level in their career first. Or they’re waiting to finish building a website first or waiting until they finish working with some beta clients for free.

What’s *really* happening here is that you’re waiting for the certification to give you the “authority” to speak on topics that you care deeply about.

You’re waiting to get an external title to validate you and deem you as worthy of sharing your story and ideas online. You’re waiting for your website, your 3 beta clients to give you that confirmation, that permission, that sense of safety, that you are now “ready” or qualified enough to say something online.

And this makes sense.

Afterall, we’ve been told repeatedly by the marketing gurus and business coaches to be an “authority”.

But you’re thinking: “What authority!?!? I don’t have any…”

So you sign up for a coaching certification, for example, in hopes that you’ll not just learn the relevant coaching tools and skills, but also gain the confidence to start showing up online to share your story, showcase your work, and sell your coaching.

You keep waiting to accumulate more street cred in your profession. More social proof. 

But if you’re waiting and waiting and waiting, you’re missing out on tremendous opportunities.

… The opportunity to share what you’re learning in real-time while you’re still a student.

… The opportunity to start developing your unique voice as an entrepreneur.

… The opportunity to start resonating with your target audience and ideal clients. 

… The opportunity to start teaching and helping others through your content.

… The opportunity to start building a body of work that’s going to compound week after week, month after month. 

“Beginner energy” is contagious AF. Because it’s genuine, sincere, and honest.

People LOVE learning what you’re learning. We want to see your behind-the-scenes and follow your journey of growing into an incredible entrepreneur  and thought leader in the industry.

People don’t want the “perfect” version of you. We don’t want the “authority” version of you. We want REAL. We want the real YOU.

When you’re willing to show up as a work-in-progress, that is what will help you stand out as an emergent entrepreneur, creator, and thought leader.

But if you wait another 6 months, and another 6 months to finish that coaching certification, rise up the corporate ladder, get your website up, work with more clients for free, you’d miss out on opportunities. Both client opportunities and growth opportunities.

Time will pass and this is not something you can ever get back. Stop waiting to start building your body of work and thought leadership.

The question is: What are you going to do with this time?

Are you going to start putting in the reps to build your body of work and thought leadership, hone in on your unique voice, build brand awareness for your work or offers?

Or are you going to wait another 4 months? Another 6 months?

This is such a crucial time to start building your body of work and become known for your unique thought leadership. You have nothing to lose, truly 🙂

Once you start building your body of work, the next level is to be prolific and consistent at building your body of work. That’s the third stage when it comes to building a successful thought leader business and personal brand.

Stage Three: Have you been prolific and consistent at building your body of work?

Here’s how I define the following:

1) Prolific = Rather than focusing on the quantity of content, I care more about staying top of mind because of the quality and substance of your output (i.e. The depth, caliber, and value that you’re embedding in your body of work)

2) Consistent = This refers to whether your audience can rely on you to show up week after week.

The key thing to note here is the emphasis on quality, rather than quantity.

Our favorite creators, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders are known because they have a spectacular QUALITY of an online presence. Not necessarily because they have a large volume of Instagram posts, for example.

That said, I believe that quantity and quality both can help you practice and contribute to your body of work and to you becoming known for something.

If you’ve been prioritizing consistency for the past year and you’ve been very diligent in posting weekly on Instagram, LinkedIn, or whatever your platform of choice is, I want to first reassure you that no efforts or time was ever wasted.

You have been contributing to your body of work and you’ve been practicing various skills consistently. That’s really important and none of that time or effort was wasted.

When it comes to building a prolific and consistent body of work to help you build a successful thought leader business and personal brand, there is no shortage of best practices for your messaging, content, copywriting that you can implement and hone. 

Although all of them are likely helpful, I would suggest picking just a handful to practice at a given time. This way, you can learn to really milk the benefits of these tips and best practices so you can turn up the overall impact and potency of your content without necessarily having to turn up the quantity and frequency of how often you post.

When you are known for really good content that is helpful, thought provoking and well produced or articulated, people start to pay attention even more to what you have to say next.

Being prolific and consistent is also precisely how, moving forward, when clients hop onto a discovery call with you, they’re very likely to already have decided that you are the coach for them.

For instance, when clients now come to my discovery calls, more often than not, they come to me specifically wanting to learn how to build their thought leadership in order to grow their business and personal brands.

Some might specifically reference how they resonate with my journey while I was a side hustler, and others may mention how they appreciate my emphasis on keeping things light and simple as a solopreneur.

The reason why clients are able to be specific in their reason for hopping onto my discovery calls and for wanting to work with me, is because I’ve been prolific and consistent in my body of work.

That said, I first had to learn the skill of being prolific and consistent.

That took time. It took time and repetition to build up the skill of being prolific and consistent, which then allowed my body of work to “compound” on its own.

Although putting in the reps and practice does require time in the long run, it’s still a really simple and really doable process, even if you’ve literally got only 30 minutes a day. 

You CAN create a very compelling body of work even with just 30 minutes a day. 

And hey, I know that for many of us, we get tired easily.

Maybe you had a rough day. You’re drained from work. Whatever the reason for your low energy is, it’s very common to find yourself just not feeling motivated to work on your body of work that day.

And what often happens is, you simply don’t do anything. You don’t show up for your audience, you don’t show up for your 1-3 year dreams and goals.

But chances are, we’re always going to be tired from life or work. Like, all the time. So when are we ever going to feel motivated to show up?

The truth is, you are capable of showing up regardless of your feelings that day. The reason is because you have the skill sets you need to help someone. Your skill to share your story, your knowledge, and experiences is not dependent on your mood.

Your ability to help someone and also your skill to market and sell your offer, are not dependent on your emotional state. You can still help people even if you had a really draining day.

You can still show up, no matter what happened earlier that day. 

Remember, it’s these little decisions, not the big decisions, that allow you to not only become prolific and consistent, but also to pave the foundation of a successful thought leader business and brand.

Even if you think it’s just a small thing, like showing up on Instagram stories. And maybe, even if your brain is thinking, “Oh it won’t matter if you don’t show up today.”

Just know that this is exactly what will compound. The more you compound not showing up, the more you compound your lack of results.

Here’s something I recommend: When you’re exhausted, you don’t have the cognitive capacity to think about what you want to work on or create that day. Have that structured plan already in place.

For days where you literally don’t want to use your brain to think of what you need to do, already have that plan mapped out beforehand, exactly for days where you just don’t want to use your brain.

It could be as simple as creating your own content bank beforehand, where you just whip out, look through it, and be like, that’s what I want to talk about today in the 20 minutes I can give today.

When you start to become prolific and consistent in your body of work, you’ll naturally find yourself in the next stage of building a successful thought leader business and brand, which is becoming more and more confident in your unique voice.

Stage Four: Are you confident in your unique voice?

To do this, you’ll first need to develop an acute understanding of what your voice is, and start to build the muscle of identifying when you’re speaking from someone else’s voice.

A mistake that a lot of people fall into and fail to build the foundation in their business, is that they are editing their story, words and message, in order to make it more palatable, more polished, to sound smarter.

However, what happens is that when you edit and polish your story, although your story might read well and sounds crisp, clean and clear, people can’t feel you. It’s just nice sounding. That’s all.

It doesn’t impact people deeply. It doesn’t make them think. It doesn’t make anyone pay more attention to who you are and how you can help them.

When you’re editing and editing and polishing and polishing out of the fear of being judged, not wanting to ruffle feathers and pleasing people too, I’d argue, you end up becoming just another entrepreneur or creator in a saturated niche.

A brand that looks and feels like everyone else. No one sees you as a thought leader and your content doesn’t stop the scroll. 

What often happens simultaneously is that a lot of folks will also spend so much time looking at what their colleagues online are doing and model after them in their content, in their marketing, on their websites , and so on.

When you do this, this is not communicating to your audience how you are positioned to help them, how confident you are that you can help them, or why they should work with you today.

It doesn’t communicate any of that when you are crafting your every step after what others are doing. Instead, you are now just a watered down version of your colleagues and that’s what is communicated to your audience.

An exercise I suggest doing is to look back at your content from the past 12 months and ask yourself: Are there certain phrases or language you’ve used in the past 12 months that no longer feel resonant with you or simply do not feel aligned to you at all, right now?

For each of them, ask yourself – Why did you use them initially? And why does it no longer feel resonant with you?

I also think that there is an element of creativity when it comes to being highly attuned to what your unique voice is.

To a certain extent, building a body of work that’s aligned with our voice will require creative expression and creating something out of nothing.

Because for many of us, we start out our entrepreneurial journey with zero idea what our own voice is. So to a certain extent, we are starting with a blank slate and have to learn to turn inwards to figure out what our unique voice is.

This process will require us to stop looking around to see what others are creating, especially if you’re committed  to speaking from your own voice, which is uniquely our own. 

This means you’ll need to use your own brain and heart to create from within, and emanate that out into the world through your content, marketing, selling, your visual brand, how you embody what you teach, and so much more.

This is vital to building a successful thought leader business and brand.

Also, think about it. The thought leaders, creators, entrepreneurs who you can just feel that they have a uniqueness to them, an energy that is uniquely theirs, as if they’re in their own lane. It’s because they aren’t creeping around their industry and thinking about, “So and so is talking about XYZ or so and so is selling this new offer, so I should do that too.”

NOPE. They’re focused on themselves, what they do best, how they can best serve their people, and continue to focus on honing their craft.

As a result, their overall business and brand is not contaminated by their own assumptions or self judgments or insecurities, which is often what happens when we get so caught up in what others are doing.

All that to say, stage 4 is integral to building a successful business and brand. When you’re able to express your unique voice through your ever growing body of work and combine that with your ever growing thought leadership, that’s when you start to find yourself in stage 5, which is leveraging your body of work and thought leadership to create opportunities.

Stage Five: Are you leveraging your body of work and thought leadership to create opportunities?

For myself and my clients inside TLC, we leverage our body of work and thought leadership to create opportunities through focusing on honing in on the following skills: 

  • Talking about our work by building our confidence and conviction in speaking about our offer and inviting best-fit people to work with us.
  • Amplifying our content by repurposing your short form content into long form content, and vice versa (i.e. long form to short form), so that every piece of content is working together to help us become known for something.
  • Building genuine relationships and community by curating an audience that not only enjoys consuming our content and hearing our perspectives, but also shares the same values as us and with each other.

To illustrate the impact of these skills, I want to share a particular client example.

Since we started working together near the end of 2022, Jennifer has been booking discovery calls with new clients. Every. Single. Week.

That continued to be Jennifer’s reality throughout 2023, and now into 2024. Last month, in January, she booked 11 discovery calls. Booking clients months in advance is now the norm for Jennifer. That’s awesome.

But that wasn’t always the case for Jennifer.

In 2022, Jennifer struggled to get out of a “client drought” for most of the year. She had lost confidence in her ability to show up and talk about her services. Business revenue dipped, and this was stressful, to say the least.

What we worked on specifically for Jennifer during the beginning of our coaching together was how to talk about her work. Specifically, we worked on rebuilding Jennifer’s confidence and conviction in speaking about her offer and inviting best-fit clients to work with her.

Combining this work with Jennifer’s already-existing body of work at the time, she quickly made back more than double her investment of our 1:1 coaching in 3 months. 

And the momentum never stopped since.

In her testimonial for our coaching together, Jennifer said the following: 

“I have definitely signed more clients than ever. For my business, in just a short few months, I have more than doubled my investment in this coaching program.

But beyond that, I have helped more people in deeper ways and found clear ways to talk about my business that go far beyond how much money I’m making. It goes far beyond the monetary value of this. And that’s important for me.

Talking about yourself is hard, especially in online places where you’re not sure what the reaction is going to be. It’s normal to feel like that.

I just know that the things that I share are just so helpful for people. I needed to feel more confident in being able to share those things while making offers at the same time.

What I didn’t realize because I was so scared of making offers when I first started was that people are excited to hear my offers. They’re excited to hear how I can help them. 

And because I’ve built such an amazing bank of content that is so helpful, educational, and shareable, I’m able to help more people, even the people who can’t work with me.

That has made me so happy in my business and myself in my life, like that has made me more fulfilled as a human being, to be creating value in the world, from my office here where I’m most comfortable.

So having the life that I want, and also making the money that I want to be making, these are amazing things to achieve.”

THIS is the potency and impact of having a body of work that helps people and compels best-fit clients to work with you.

THIS is the potency and impact of being known for your work and how you help others.

THIS is the potency and impact of building your confidence to show up and share your work and sell your services.

THIS is the potency and impact of having a vision for the impact and change you wish to create in this world.

THIS is the potency and impact of the work we do inside The Thought Leader Club.

If this is work you’re committed to doing, I want you to consider joining TLC. This is the work we do here. 

This is THE room to:

  • Start putting in the reps to create your thought leader career and become highly prolific and consistent at building thought leadership
  • Build a body of work that lets you become known for your unique thought leadership, your story, and how amazing you are at what you do
  • And ultimately set yourself up for making your 1-3 year dreams a reality.

Your next step is to book a discovery call with me. You can schedule a discovery call here.

Now, let’s segue to our sixth and final stage of building a successful thought leader business and brand, which is…

Stage Six: Are you showing up both online and offline as your “next level” self and embodying your thought leader identity?

Inside The Thought Leader Club, we discuss identity through the following angles: 

First, Fuck All the Boxes, Don’t Lose Your Voice  → Learning to unwind and unbind from what you think you *should* be doing in your business and brand, and redefine what thought leadership and success in your life and business is.

Second, Your Thought Leader Mindset → How are you incorporating mindset practices into your daily and weekly life so you can quickly shift back to “baseline”, tap into creativity, etc?

Third, Your Thought Leader Lifestyle → How are you incorporating lifestyle habits and routines to take care of your energy as a thought leader?

And finally, Your Thought Leader Self-Concept → Who are you now and who are you becoming? Most importantly: Do you like who you are and who you’re becoming? 

Because the thing is, signing clients, building your reputation as a budding speaker or author, or whatever your 1-3 year thought leader dreams and goals are, will require you to be consistent yourself.

Consistently showing up for both yourself and your audience, clients, and community at large so that others trust that you are a business owner, content creator, and thought leader that can help them. 

But if you yourself are shaky in your own belief and inconsistently believing that you have thought leadership and skills that can help others, then naturally the actions you take are inconsistent and you’ll be showing up inconsistently or from an inconsistent energy.

Hence that leads to inconsistent results in your business and brand.

So what does it look like to be “consistent” in terms of belief and identity?

It means having the ability to keep going even when there’s no external validation.

Such as when things aren’t going as planned or at the rate or time frame that you were hoping for. You need to continue holding the belief in what you do, the belief in your people and what’s possible for them, and the belief in yourself as someone who has thought leadership and is committed to helping others.

Having that consistent belief matters in order to keep consistently showing up, keep bouncing back quickly, and ultimately to keep taking consistent and compelling action.

This is why I highly recommend having daily and weekly mindset and energy practices or tools in place to help you continue staying in the belief and identity of an entrepreneur, content creator, and thought leader.

This could look like not only getting coached and doing your self coaching, but also exercising and movement, eating foods that nourish your body, rather than drain you.

Putting on a nice outfit for the day, doing your hair in the morning rather than staying in your lazy potato clothes, creating an aesthetic workspace in your home that’s dedicated to you to work on your business, daily walks and getting fresh air, and so much more.

This is where you have to identify the practices and tools that work best for you, and commit to doing them daily outside of the scope of your business.

Overall, your thought leader identity is going to play a tremendous role in how you’re building a successful thought leader business and personal brand because your identity will guide the decisions you make moving forward, including the type of business you build and how you’re building a business that supports the lifestyle you desire.

I want to share a client example here to really illustrate this point.

When we chatted on the discovery call, we learned that Joshua wants both the dream business and dream lifestyle. But he was worried he’d burn out (which is something he experienced a few years ago).

So, we discussed how TLC will support him in balancing it all (ex: Personal life, growing your business via content, doing client work, etc) without burning out. 

To do this, we’ll focus on strengthening his “capacity” and “efficiency” muscles (ex: Increasing his capacity to handle additional clients easefully, creating LinkedIn articles quickly without sacrificing depth and caliber, etc).

Then, we will use these “reps” to move Joshua towards his vision of creating a business that supports his life.

We then kicked off TLC on November 1 2023. And by mid-January 2024, Joshua was already fully booked out for the entire Q1 2024.

But besides having a booked-out roster of clients and delivering superb client work, Joshua is also making time for the other parts of his life that matter.

This includes: Going to a Coldplay concert. Spending hours trying to buy tickets to a Mamamoo (K-pop) concert. Cooking and making new dishes. Having peaceful mornings that are free from all the hustle and bustle of life. Having weekends off.

And, I just found out that he and his wife are now ready to welcome home a PUPPY!!

Y’all. Pet parenthood takes time and commitment. The fact that Joshua now has a fully booked business and the additional capacity to welcome home a furbaby, that speaks volumes.

Inside TLC, you get to have it all and do it all. TLC is where you’ll get the coaching, community, and tools/resources to support you in building your thought leadership and setting you up for your 1-3 year goals in life, career, and business. 

Your next step is to book a discovery call with me. You can schedule a discovery call here.

Now, as we start to wrap up, let’s summarize the 6 stages of building a successful thought leader business and personal brand: 

  1. First, do you know what you want to be known for?
  2. Second, have you started building your body of work?
  3. Third, have you been prolific and consistent at building your body of work?
  4. Fourth, are you confident in your unique voice?
  5. Fifth, are you leveraging your body of work and thought leadership to create opportunities?
  6. Sixth and finally, are you showing up both online and offline as your “next level” self and embodying your thought leader identity?

Each stage plays on each other.

As you approach the sixth stage, you’ll start to see that as you tether more to your identity as someone whose thought leadership matters, and the more you continue to build a body of work that highlights your unique thought leadership, the more you naturally start emerging as a leader in the space and pave the way for a successful business and personal brand.

That is all for us for today.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode, and I’ll see you in the next one!

Sounds good? Awesome. Let’s get to work.

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Additional Resources

THE AUDIT: BUILD A DIFFERENTIATED & TIMELESS BODY OF WORK

– Audit 9 different parts of your body of work

– Identify the specific areas you can improve on right away to set your business apart from the rest

– Book a free 60-minute AUDIT CALL with Cheryl to create an actionable plan together

Get the free audit: https://cheryllau.com/audit 

Other Episodes You’ll Enjoy

Episode 145. Consistent Podcasting: What to Do When You Don’t Feel Motivated to Create Content

Episode 143. Building Thought Leadership: A Behind-the-Scenes of My Podcast Rebrand 

Episode 140. Best Tips for a Weekly Video Podcast

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