Finding Your IP: How To Monetize Your Unique Skills

What do acrobatics, cupcake baking, and ukulele have in common? They’re all skills that highly successful business leaders decided not to monetize. (Sergey Brin, Marissa Mayer, and Warren Buffett respectively, if you’re wondering.)

Most independents have more skills than they can possibly monetize: technical proficiencies, industry insights, management experience, and maybe even a wicked jump shot or stunning contralto. Your success depends on selecting the right skills and turning those into intellectual property—IP. Choose unique, high-quality IP, and you’ll build a strong, differentiated business that delivers value to clients. Choose generic IP, and you risk becoming a commodity: fungible and replaceable, with limited ability to dictate the terms of your professional life. 

Defining your IP as a first step helps you lay the groundwork for your consulting business. 

IP for independents

In legal terms, intellectual property is an original work produced through the human creative process and protected as a trademark, patent, copyright, or trade secret. For you as a consultant, though, your IP is the knowledge central to the services you provide—which, unless you’ve done cutting-edge research on, say, the science of getting uncooperative clients to pay on time without having to hire a bounty hunter, isn’t something you can protect legally. 

Rather, you can think of your IP as what you’re really selling. It’s your special sauce. It’s not the deliverable, it’s the thing that gives the deliverable value. Consider an HR consultant asked to create an employee handbook, for example: The deliverable is the handbook, and the consultant’s IP is their decade of experience leading a corporate HR department that informs the handbook’s contents. The experience gives the handbook value. 

You can develop your IP over time, but you can’t start building it at the same time you go solo: High-value IP takes time to develop, and it’s backed by tangible proof points acquired over the course of your career.

How to define your IP

Defining your IP is one of your first tasks as an independent. You’ll inventory your unique skills and experience and then gradually narrow your list of options until you arrive at the core assets your business will monetize. Here’s how to do it. 

1. Identify your spikes

Do you ever find yourself caught up in good-natured debates with your peers? Do you have strong opinions about developments within your field? If so, you’ve likely identified a subject on which you have a spiky point of view—a unique perspective you're willing to passionately defend. A spiky POV is an indicator that you have a depth of expertise about a given subject—and you can think of your different areas of expertise as your spikes.

Consider these examples of each type of spike:

• Specialized knowledge. You’ve spent 15 years in educational technology sales and have a deep knowledge of the major players, market conditions, leading edge technologies, and product or service gaps. 

• Unique methodology or framework. You’ve developed an original collaboration model designed to help distributed teams increase efficiency through asynchronous work. 

• Specific technical skills. You’re a white-hat hacker who can find and exploit the vulnerabilities in any cybersecurity system. 

Start by making a list of your skills, knowledge, and methodologies. If you're stumped, ask yourself: About what subjects do people constantly want to pick my brain? You might be too close to a subject area to recognize your own expertise, but your friends and colleagues won’t have the same problem.

You’ll refine and add to your abilities as you go, but your spikes are the skills that come pre-installed, so to speak. You can only build skills so fast, so you’ll provide more value to clients if you monetize your existing spikes.  

If you’re wondering, yes it is possible to go independent too early in your career. While you can develop skills and learn through your projects, your starting point is defined by the professional experiences that precede you going out on your own. 

At times in your journey, you might “give yourself a promotion” and seek to do more strategic work for better clients. The less proof points you have of doing work like that, the more difficult it is going to be to convince those clients of the quality of your skills.

2. Figure out what you can prove 

To successfully monetize a spike, you need proof points—clear achievements and accolades—that tell the story of your skills. Make a list of your relevant experience, proven results, awards, public recognition, work samples, certifications, and testimonials. Here’s an example of each type. 

• Relevant experience. Clients often prefer to hire you to do something you’ve already done, so significant work experience in a role or industry can substantiate your claim to a particular spike. You might cite your decade of experience creating innovative marketing campaigns as a proof point for your independent work as a growth hacker, for example. .

• Proven results. You can also identify past projects or initiatives that generated impressive, measurable results. For example, a digital marketing consultant might reference an SEO campaign that boosted site traffic by 30% and conversions by 15%. Project-based proof points can be particularly valuable selling tools: Your clients can say, “Build me a [project] like you did at [company].” A work sample can help sell your achievements.

• Awards or grants. Industry awards can lend authority to your claims. A healthcare industry startup consultant, for example, might use an NSF research fellowship to substantiate claims of scientific expertise. 

• Public recognition. Positive media or press coverage can also provide a proof point for a spike. If you’ve been cited as an expert by a reputable publication or directed a campaign that earned media attention, you can use the coverage to validate your claims.

• Degrees or certifications. A master's degree or doctorate is a meaningful shorthand that validates your achievements, no reading time required. You can reference a degree, certification, or license from a reputable institution as quick proof of relevant experience and knowledge. 

• Meaningful testimonials. You can also identify notable figures in your industry who will vouch for you. If the CMO of Adidas speaks highly of your graphic design talents, for example, you can leverage this relationship to substantiate your skill set. 

You want to demonstrate a clear pattern of driving results, so eliminate spikes with few or weak proof points and focus on those where you have multiple pieces of convincing evidence. Be honest with yourself about what you can prove, and don’t be afraid to postpone your move to consulting if you can’t thoroughly substantiate your spikes. It takes time to build a demonstrable record of success, and your business will be stronger if you acquire multiple proof points before you make the leap.

3. Figure out what you actually enjoy

Now that you’re down to provable spikes, it’s time to eliminate skill sets that you don’t like using. This is more critical for independents than it is for employees: Generating an entire business’s worth of energy and momentum is a tall order, even if you’re passionate about what you do. If you don’t like your work, you’ll be on a fast track to burnout. 

So, for example, if you have experience in both HR compliance and employee relations but find the former stifling and a bit too “corporate,” nixing it from your IP on offer and focusing solely on the latter can help you avoid getting trapped in work that doesn’t interest you. 

In addition to bringing energy to your daily work, focusing on spikes you enjoy can encourage you to continually build your skills, help you inspire your community and clients, and make it easier to run effective sales calls. You’ll also be more likely to stay motivated and engaged—and produce higher-quality products and services as a result.

4. Assess the market need

The final step in finding your IP is figuring out which skills are in demand in the market and which can command a high enough price to support your business. You can learn more about how to gather data on market needs in our guide to finding product-market fit. Often, how much you can charge depends on your client’s budget and how directly your services connect to revenue generation for your client.

If you provide strategy consulting for local nonprofits, for example, you may not be able to charge top dollar: You can’t directly attribute significant amounts of revenue to your services. If you help ecommerce brands optimize checkout processes to boost sales, on the other hand, you might be able to charge a lot more (particularly for your most profitable clients).

Finding your sweet spot

Looking for a sounding board as you zero in on the IP you want to monetize? Leverage the power of collective wisdom with Pollen’s member community of practicing independents and seasoned experts-in-residence. Learn more about Pollen membership.

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