The Eight Steps to Authority Status
There's multiple leaps to take on your path to becoming an Authority Entrepreneur. This post breaks them down.
It might be tempting, if you’ve seen messages about the ‘death of social media’, ‘personal (un)branding’ or about society reaching ‘peak content’, to question whether becoming a ‘known’ entity online is still a valid strategy for business development.
It doesn’t help with LinkedIn reach being throttled lately. A lot of people are thinking, “What’s the point?”
But thought-leadership and Authority-building are absolutely not dead.
In fact they still remain some of the most powerful levers to pull if you want to differentiate yourself from everyone else doing and saying similar things.
And in an increasingly entrepreneurial world, standing out from competition is essential.
Authority-building is not about shouting louder, being the most popular, or most beautiful. It’s not about posting endlessly or being remembered simply because you’re consistent and therefore more visible.
Authority is being remembered because of your depth of thought. Original thinking. Commitment to your craft. Insights others aren’t sharing.
How? Having frameworks, signature processes and long-form content will demonstrate this. These assets assets accumulates into growing your Body of Work. These assets prove to clients that your business has depth, which makes you trusted and chosen.
Having these assets is valuable, and helps you out even more than you might think.
Authority-building is a savvy strategy
When you codify your ideas publicly, you consolidate how you work.
That gives you clarity on your methods, and that clarity allows you to iterate intelligently (not blindly) and in time, you’ll create leverage.
Leverage is what allows you to:
stop relying solely on selling clients “time with you”
charge based on outcomes rather than hours at your desk
deliver results without doing everything yourself aka subcontract or use IP
When you’ve built Authority your business gets to be scalable, profitable and rooted in your actual expertise, so you can spend time away from bums on seats to out and living your life. Not endless hours working just to keep the lights on. To realise you essentially have a full time job without any of the benefits.
It’s tempting as a coach or consultant to feel like you’re “cheating” your clients by taking away time with you from what they get.
Perhaps by offering group elements, async materials or self-serve deliverables.
As a coach I can speak from experience having run six scalable containers, I’m now highly convinced that these can end up being far more valuable to clients, than endless 1:1 calls with me and no process ever could be. Here’s a message from the community this morning.
My group programmes have scaled my time thanks to creating a set of frameworks that allow clients to get value not only from me, but from these frameworks, and from time with each other, too. A shared language is used across the support structure.
If you’re nodding, and you’d love to create leverage in your business, then here’s a map of this path to help you make sense of this exact process.
The Authority Entrepreneur’s Journey (in 8 steps)
So many new founders take inspiration from Authority Entrepreneurs (who are 10-20 years ahead of them) with multiple offers, courses, books, and therefore assume that's the model to success.
But every stage required an identity up-level and a skills-based leap from the entrepreneur in charge.
The very first step? Earning just any money on your own terms, without an employer.
Here’s how it goes:
Without an audience or experience earning money for yourself, you are unlikely to succeed launching a passive-income digital course.
I often have to bite my tongue when someone tells me their dreams to achieve passive income from a standing start, hoping to skip five steps and the jump magically happen.
What I’ve shared above is a framework to become known for your ideas, status and network aka an Authority.
The journey doesn’t end there. The journey continues and is one that I too, am walking, and by no means ‘finished’.
Here’s the second half of that journey: what happens as you continue rising in Authority:
For context, my own coaching and mentorship services have completely focused on this Authority Entrepreneur path.
I’m still in the phase of doing some bespoke work, alongside some scalable delivery and in some cases where IP delivers results” work myself.
Today, I’m best suited for guiding freelancers, business owners and early-stage Authority Entrepreneurs through these stages. My support covers both the skill building and the emotional shifts required. My coach training comes in handy helping clients with the mindset side, and business mentoring experience helps them leverage shortcuts, frameworks and momentum.
I am often approached by those further along the journey, too, who know that at each new level, new clarity and identity upgrades are needed, too.
The structure, process and moral support makes all the difference in crossing each threshold. If you want to build a sustainable, profitable business moving through this journey, then know it’s very valid, and expected, to invest in external perspective along the way.
What keeps so many stuck
Without a clearly defined message, offer or process, you stay in the ‘winging it’ stage.
This looks like taking on clients at whichever rate you can, just to win the business.
That’s often an hourly or day rate, where your time soon becomes capped by how many hours you can physically deliver. Or associate work for another business, which is also capped based on their rates. Or doing everything custom, which is also capped because custom work doesn’t scale.
Authority is the antidote to custom, unscalable work which so easily burns you out.
There is no shame or judgement here if you’ve found yourself doing a lot of that: I’ve been there and know that is often the reality required to keep the lights on.
But getting away from this, requires hard choices. Those are positioning and business model choices, and also setting boundaries. It requires sticking to your guns and not changing everything, bending into shape to please the client who wants it their way.
Where to begin
I’m a firm believer in creating long-form content because not only will it elevate you above the noise and help clients get to know you when you’re not in the room, or share with their stakeholder “Look, they really get it!” saving you endless unpaid consultations…
It is also a virtuous cycle.
Writing helps you think, which helps your insights, which shapes your positioning. Which attracts better clients. Which sharpen your IP.
Writing is one way to sharpen your ideas, but so is talking them out loud, and committing to them, sharing them, and building processes around them.
All of this forms the backbone of the work I do inside my 1-1 and group programmes.
I believe (though do not necessarily advocate for) a more entrepreneurial future of work. That many more people will soon enter self-employment, and follow similar path. Many people in their 9–5s are plotting their leap already, and will be building businesses around similar authority areas to those of us already in the field.
My encouragement is to move along this path now. Not to get famous, but in order to do meaningful, well-paid work you’re proud of.
I’m passionate about this because most people have to figure out entrepreneurship without a map, and I’m offering you one that has worked for me and many others.
Get in touch for support if you want to move through this Authority Entrepreneur process.
Especially if you are:
A coach, consultants or expertise-focused founder who wants to be known in your industry
Still consolidating your Authority, frameworks, body of work and identity or rebuilding after a pivot
Doing something complex, mission-driven or rooted in years of prior learning or building
Not yet operating at the level of clients, income or impact you know you are capable of
