Are You Sitting On A Fashion Business You Haven't Built Yet?

The Slightly Ridiculous Moment We Realised We Had Been Describing Our Own Business Wrong.

A little while ago Mark and I were doing one of those jobs that begins with a perfectly sensible intention and ends three hours later with neither of us quite remembering why we started. In this case we were looking back through some of the projects we had worked on over the years, partly because we were updating the way we talk about the business and partly because, after more than four decades of working between us, there is an alarming amount of stuff to look back through.

There were the familiar things, of course: courses, websites, Kajabi builds, memberships, academies, corporate programmes, books that had become learning experiences and enough automations to make a normal person close the laptop and go outside. But the longer we looked, the more I realised that the finished thing was rarely the most interesting part of the story.

The Interesting Bit Happened Before We Built Anything

Before the course, there was usually somebody chatting with us who knew an extraordinary amount about something. 

Sometimes they had written a book, and sometimes they had years of workshops, presentations and client material. Often almost everything was still in their head, where it had become so familiar that they no longer regarded it as anything special. We started asking questions, pulling at threads, and moving things around, and eventually something that had existed as experience began to look like something that could actually be taught, sold, licensed, repeated, or used by people without the expert having to be in the room every time.

And that was the moment I thought we may have spent years describing our own business from the wrong end.

We Kept Talking About The Container

We have always said we built courses because we do. We talk about Kajabi because we have used it for over 16 years. We described Mark as an instructional designer, and me as a creative designer, writer and long-time fashion educator, because that is exactly what we are. Yet all those descriptions begin after one rather important question has already been answered: what on earth should we do with everything this person knows?

That question is much bigger than course creation, because a course is only one possible answer. Years of expertise might become a professional development programme, a certification, a membership, an academy, a specialist toolkit, a methodology, a resource library, a licensing model, a coaching system or an educational product for an audience the expert has never considered. Occasionally the best answer may be to leave it exactly where it is, which is not nearly as exciting for people selling course platforms but is considerably more useful for the person whose business we are supposed to be thinking about.

Then There Is The Knowledge You Have Forgotten Is Knowledge

This is where things become slightly peculiar, because the longer you have been good at something, the less likely you are to notice all the things you now know. You remember your qualifications and the obvious milestones, but you do not necessarily count the judgement that tells you a project is heading for trouble within ten minutes, the question you always ask because twenty years of experience taught you why it matters, or the method you gradually developed because the standard way never worked particularly well.

We inventory almost everything else in a business. We know what equipment we own, what products we sell and, after the monthly card statement arrives, we are occasionally reminded of several pieces of software we had completely forgotten we were paying for. What we rarely inventory is the knowledge that took half a career to acquire.

Which Is How Knowledge Asset Studio Appeared

Once we saw the pattern, the name became rather obvious. Knowledge Asset Studio is our way of starting before the build, with the knowledge itself, the material that already exists, the experience behind it, the people who might need it and the sort of business its owner actually wants to have. Only then do we decide what it should become.

There are two ways we work. If somebody has a substantial body of expertise but has no idea which opportunity is worth pursuing, we can go through it properly and create a Knowledge Asset Blueprint. If they already know exactly what they want to create, there is no point paying us to rediscover the answer, so we move into the Knowledge Asset Build and help turn it into the finished thing.

The bit I keep coming back to, though, is how many experienced people have never asked the question at all, because their knowledge has always arrived disguised as work. It has been the thing they do for clients, the advice they give, the problems they solve, and the judgement people pay them to bring into a room, rather than something they have ever stood back and looked at as an asset in its own right.

So Here Is The Question That Started All Of This

Imagine that tomorrow somebody introduced a ridiculous new law saying you could continue running your business, but you were no longer allowed to sell another hour of your time. You could sell something created from what you know, but you couldn't personally show up and do the work for the customer.

What would you sell?

If you already know, there may be something waiting to be built. If you have absolutely no idea despite spending twenty or thirty years becoming very good at what you do, I would argue the second answer is even more interesting, because a business may be sitting there that you have simply never had a reason to look for.

Want To Find Out What You're Sitting On?

If this has made you look at your own experience slightly differently, get in touch and tell us what you do and, more importantly, what you know. You don't need to arrive with a course idea, a product name, or a neat plan, because figuring out what deserves to be built is part of the conversation.