Betsy Jordyn (00:00.13)
I've identified three types of expertise that consultants and coaches have to make it super easy for you to name and claim yours and discover how do you use the right expertise as the foundation of your profitable purpose-driven business that you and your clients love. So learn more on today's episode of the Consulting Matters podcast.
Betsy Jordyn (00:33.272)
And welcome to the Consulting Matters podcast. This is the show for purpose-driven consultants and coaches who are ready to own the power of what they do and position themselves for greater impact and income. I'm your host, Betsy Jordyn, and I am an ex-Disney consultant and consulting business owner, turned business mentor and brand positioning and messaging strategist. So you can find out about all the things I do to help my clients turn their expertise, their strengths, their passions into a standout brand and a thriving business that they love.
on my website at www.BetsydJordyn.com and don't forget Jordyn is with a Y. So let's get into what we're talking about today. So last week I shared with you some big picture ahas I got about branding and its true value from tearing my own process apart for the purposes of writing my first book and workbook which is much harder than I expected. But I got really excited about the real purpose of this work that I do with my clients in that.
I'm gonna help you do with your clients, which is all about instilling trust. So I shared passionately about this insight because of my own experience of having to find a trusted expert to help me with my skin cancer cure and recovery. And it's been such a powerful process. Who knew I would get so excited about finding a skin cancer surgeon and the impact on branding, but you know, here we are. So if you missed the episode, definitely go back and tune in. There's a lot of other things outside of my passion around how branding instills trust that I went over in that episode.
So be sure to get back into that episode if you missed it. But the other thing that I know for sure from that episode and from this whole process of writing this workbook is what I do all day, every day with my clients matters. And that I have built an expertise that is unique to me and valuable for the clients I'm meant to serve. And the same goes for you. So you have an expertise that the clients meant for you need and represents the solution that
they've been looking for, you know, that they've been on a search for, for maybe like days, weeks, years, who knows, but they are looking for help from somebody with an expertise that can help them solve their specific problems and achieve something that is significant and meaningful to them. So the only question is, do you know what that expertise is? And perhaps a follow-up question is, are you friending it in a way that makes it really clear to those clients like, yes, this is the person for me.
Betsy Jordyn (02:54.358)
So that is what we're gonna get into today on this episode. We're gonna get into what constitutes an expertise and how expertise is not the same as skills, strengths, or things that you simply have mastery in. And more importantly, we're getting into the three types of expertise that consultants and coaches have and how to figure out which one is yours and how to use it as the foundation of both your business and your brand. So before I got into my whole brand process teardown, I actually thought there were only two types of expertise.
So I'm gonna be sharing with you this third one that's brand new to me and fresh off my mental presses. So I'm excited to hear your thoughts on it and how it resonates with you. So I can't wait for you to listen into today's episode because I am here to help you better frame, name and claim the expertise that is uniquely yours and relevant and much needed for the clients you're meant to help. Real quick though, before we dive in, I wanna tell you about a special I'm running on my VIP brand positioning and messaging program.
So I'm working hard on this workbook book, I call it a workbook, it's also a book, and I wanted to create tremendous value. I really wanna deconstruct this process so I could help lots more purpose-driven consultants and coaches out there. I'm offering a limited time discount on my VIP programs in exchange for feedback on my workbook drafts. So if you've been thinking about needing help and wanting to work with me, now is the time. So head on over to my website at www.bezzajoran.com forward slash services, learn more about my programs.
Book a free discovery call and let's chat about this. Now is a great time for both of us, you for you to get a discount and for me to get some feedback. So without further ado, let's get into the show and let's talk about what is an expertise. So I knew that defining and labeling expertise was something that I needed to work on for my workbook because of how my clients started answering my questions about their expertise.
I don't know if it's the advent of chat TPT, but I'm starting to get a different set of answers to the questions that I'm asking my clients around what they are an expert in. And now I'm starting to get a lot of laundry lists of like all these skills, like something that you can endorse on LinkedIn, or the tools that you've mastered, or people are giving me like all these methods that go along with their expertise, like strategic facilitation, or listening, questioning, or habits of way of being that makes you easy and pleasant to work with, or.
Betsy Jordyn (05:08.0)
a myriad of other strengths. So I've gotten this like laundry list of things. So then I realized like, I gotta do something about this expertise thing. And I need to get clear about what it is. Because if you can't name and claim and label your expertise, you're gonna have a really hard time getting focused for your business, for your brand, and really setting up your business on the right path. So the thing about expertise is it's the broader field of mastery that you have accomplished. So it's a broader professional field and it's relevant
to your potential consulting or coaching clients. So the word expert means a person wise through experience. So it's someone who has a comprehensive knowledge of a particular area or is an authority in a particular area. So let's say you're an organization development consultant like I was, I might have a lot of things that I had mastery in. I could lead a meeting, I could write a workshop, I can do org design, I could do strategy development, all those types of things, but underneath the label of
organization development or organizational transformation or something along those lines. Like it would be something broader. So it's not all those little ticky tacky things that you could do, it's the overall thing. And why this matters is the expertise that you have more than anything else is the pointer to the clients that you're meant to help. Like this is what became really clear to me when I was working on the workbook is I did not realize like that this is the actual pointer to who you are meant to help, the problems that you're driven to solve
and what is the right business that's meant for you. So framing your expertise is really the most important decision of everything else. And what's more important about that is you have many different types of expertise, especially because you're a mid-career professional. So you have a lot of life experience, you have a lot of different ways that your business can go. So it's important to name and claim all the different types of expertise that you have, and then consciously choose the expertise that you wanna use as the foundation of your business.
And that is where all of this gets tricky. So let me explain the three types of expertise, but your expertise in summary at this stage of this episode, I want you to be clear that it's like this broader professional field that you have achieved mastery in, but there's different types of expertise. So let's get into that. So the first is your formal expertise. This is the most obvious one because it's what you've been paid for. This is what you built through your education and your professional track record.
Betsy Jordyn (07:33.996)
So it's connected to what you've been hired to do, promoted for doing, formally recognized throughout your career. It should be relatively easy to see and label. And so this is something where you are going to look at your track record and say, okay, so what line of business have I spent a lot of time in? What industry have I spent a lot of time in? What kind of roles have I had? That's where you kind of put it together and say, okay, because of all of this, I'm an expert in that. So when I first started my consulting business, I based it on my formal expertise.
So I had a master's degree in organization development. I spent a decade as an internal organization development consultant. So when I left Disney and I started my own business, I built it on the foundation of this formal expertise in organization development. So with all my clients, I believe that our starting point really is this label, that you need to label your formal expertise no matter what.
Even if you kind of feel like, know what, I think I want to start a coaching business and I want to do something totally different, it's really important to label this because this is still going to inform some aspect of your expertise. So the other thing I want to say about your formal expertise and labeling it, I've had some clients kind of have a little bit of heart failure because they're like, I don't want to label myself this way. I don't want to label this expertise because I don't want to be narrowed down to what I did in the past or I'm not sure if this is what I want to do. Don't worry about that right now.
Right now is just important data. So how you uncover your formal expertise is you just reflect on your career. So think about your formal education that either led to or enhanced the effectiveness of your career, especially the degrees, advanced degrees, anything that you did that was in support of your employee career. And then look at the line of business that you spent the bulk of your career. You were you in marketing, were you in sales, operations, human resources, finance, IT, where were you?
Where did you spend the bulk of your time? Then you create a label for this professional domain that you've achieved mastery in. I want it to be super short. Like, I don't need a whole big novel on it. If you did, you're not really in the right label for your expertise. So as I mentioned, mine was organization development, or it could be lean and continuous improvement, operations leadership, learning and development, direct response marketing, sales leadership. It's something like that. It could be change project management, whatever you would have as a professional domain, you want to put a label on it.
Betsy Jordyn (09:55.138)
And then you want to add to this label, make it more interesting based on your industry you worked in and or company size. So you could say for me, I had expertise that I really did not see name or claim, which is disappointing. Now I look at it in retrospect as I had expertise in organization development in large complex hospitality and theme park operations. Like that's where I built my expertise. I could have added that. Or it could be that you are a lean and continuous improvement expert in manufacturing and healthcare.
or it's not just that you are an expert in sales, maybe it's timeshare sales leadership, or maybe you don't just do general leadership development, but maybe it's leadership development in faith-based organizations. So adding in like a company size or adding in the industry creates more of a clear picture of this expertise. So that's the formal expertise. So take a beat right now, label your formal expertise.
Now let's get into the second type of expertise. So this is what I would call the school of hard knocks expertise. So this is the professional field that you've achieved mastery in because you've overcome something significant in your personal life or made some sort of major transformation in your career. So I used to call this your informal expertise for years. I decided to call it school of hard knocks expertise because there's another informal expertise that I'm going to tell you about in a minute.
But I started adding this type of expertise inventory back in 2019 when I started expanding my focus beyond just helping consultants to also coaches because I noticed more than half of the people that I worked with initially thought they wanted to start a consulting business, but really wanted to start a coaching business. There's two places you might get this school of hard knocks expertise. One way is from the things that you consistently did to help other people alongside and not directly related to your job.
So I have had Siri on my show who was a former educational leader. So she was a principal and she was dealing a lot with parents who coming into her office dealing with children who had a lot of behavioral issues. And so she spent a lot of time coaching these parents. And so when she hit that pivot point where she wanted to do something else with her career, wanted to start her own business, she really wanted to build her career off of that. And so she became a parent coach. You've heard me talk about Denise many, many times who's a CIO who turned an executive coach.
Betsy Jordyn (12:17.632)
She is fascinating to me because she's got all of this experience of being a leader of technology in school systems and she could have built her business on that. But what she noticed is that she had this other expertise around mentoring other people, especially other diverse leaders through the journey of getting to the top spot. So she had spent a lot of time, not just like mentoring other people in her workplace, but also in professional associations and many other places. So she became an expert as an executive coach.
without even necessarily realizing it and then she formalized it. Or you get this expertise. So this is the second place. It could be from overcoming something significant in your life that either becomes a standalone of something that you are building your business on or you kinda add it to your formal expertise with a little twist on it. So Rochelle is somebody, I've had a lot of these people on my shows. Actually I'm gonna put in the show notes all of these interviews that I had with different people so you could hear their stories directly. But Rochelle is somebody who overcame burnout. So she would say her life
imploded after she was this meeting and events executive and she just burnt out completely. And she went through this whole process of recovering from burnout was super powerful to her. She became a coach and then she wanted to offer that, but she still didn't get rid of her formal expertise. She still knows how to help people achieve success, but now it's more along the lines of achieving success without burning out or navigating transitions without burning out. I have other clients that have been on the show who talk about their expertise in overcoming toxic relationships.
Or it could be someone like Rachel who developed this expertise in dating after she was a direct response marketer in her professional career. And then when she got divorced and she was after 40 and she was learning how to go out and date again, she applied that expertise. So she became an expert in online dating. know, Regender used to own a lot of pharmacies and she went through a really significant midlife reinvention. And so she didn't get rid of all of her skillsets around
around how the human body works and functional medicine. She just added it to her own experience and now it's about this midlife reinvention. You've heard Pamela and Brad on my show recently talk about how they took their own personal experiences and wanted to add that into their own business. So it's the school of hard knocks expertise that drives many people to get a coaching certification because that is the way you formalize what is a very informal expertise.
Betsy Jordyn (14:39.17)
So to learn more about these stories, I'm definitely gonna put in the show notes, like lot of the links to the different stories that the people have been on my podcast. So how do you figure out the school of hard knocks expertise? Is you just look at your life and say, all right, have I gone through something that's super challenging, that really turned my life upside down? Or did I do something alongside of my work that it's like, wow, this could really be beneficial to other people?
And so what would that be? You know, like you didn't necessarily ask for this expertise, but now you have it. So what could be a benefit to other people? My business that I have right now in part is from my School of Hard Knocks experience. I went through the process of leaving corporate and starting my own consulting and now coaching business. So I have both. So I've gone through this and this is part of the expertise that I bring to the table is because I went through this experience and because I hone this other expertise along the way.
So label your School of Hard Knocks expertise. If you don't have one, then just skip it. And let's move on to the next one. So the third one is your applied expertise. And I'm going to give a shout out to my client, Sean, who helped me identify this label for this expertise. So Sean and I have been working on his brand positioning and messaging for a while. And when we were working on his expertise, he hit a wall. And so this is something that is more recent. And he was so great in giving me feedback on where the wall was. He's so great at giving me real-time feedback.
Despite decades in operations leadership in the retail industry, he resisted labeling it. And so when we kept going around and around and around, that's when we hit the reality of like, okay, this is where the challenge is, is that he had this expertise, he didn't wanna label it because that's not the expertise he wanted to build his business on. So as I started to think about Sean's story, it was like, wow, like he has another whole type of expertise that I didn't even have a category for that I wasn't really asking my clients around.
And what his expertise is, is that he was the one that executives would turn to when they had a big strategic change initiative that was going on and it required a significant behavior change at the front lines. So he became an expert in operationalizing change. And that's what he wanted to use as the foundation of his business. So his experience was really top of mind as I went to work over the holidays on how do I improve this process around it? And it's like, okay, so what he has is this whole new
Betsy Jordyn (17:01.166)
or he's revealing to me that I had this other whole category of expertise. And I had this light bulb moment where it's like, this is what a lot of my clients have. I could just see like, like clients after clients, like, they all have this applied expertise. So the way I'm describing it is this is what emerged through the unique way you got results in your career or the responsibilities you assume beyond your formal scope. So.
When I saw this, was like, my gosh, this is a huge other category that so many of my clients want to use as the foundation of their business. So clients like Jason, when we were working on his, I wish I would have had this category because it was almost like trying to decide between the formal and informal, but there was this middle lane. So he had built, currently he now has a multimillion dollar consulting practice out of this applied expertise he built when he was a project manager in the mining industry. So he became really, really great.
at negotiating these massive contracts. And that's what he wanted to build his business on. Katie Anderson, who's been on my show multiple times, she has an expertise that she developed from her time as a senior internal lean and operational excellence leader who went through this transformation on how she worked with her clients from this doer to coaches and advisors. So she was able to lead her team. She went to Japan and really reinforced that. And now she has this applied expertise in transforming lean practitioners into influential change catalysts.
So that is her expertise. I'm gonna have to put a lot of links to past episodes because I'm bringing up a lot of my clients here. But Lori was this finance executive with the Six Sigma Training and she's had this natural mediation gifts. And so she developed an applied expertise around aligning senior executives around strategic growth priorities. So these are all these things that these clients did either through the course of doing their work where they got really unique results for their organization that was other people in their similar field didn't.
or something else that they assume, like Lori just assumed responsibilities that was outside of her scope. So the way that you find this expertise is to ask yourself, is there something unique about what it took for me to achieve my career success and or my approach to leadership responsibilities that translates to insights and best practices for others to follow? And if yes, what is that? Like if you're a woman who broke into a male dominated profession, like that might be.
Betsy Jordyn (19:17.038)
an applied expertise. Or if you're an HR leader who earned a seat at the executive table and now you have like a voice that's heard, maybe that's an applied expertise. Or maybe you were able to transform your leadership. Like maybe you were a leader and you made this transformation from command and control to more coaching and empowering and like, wow, this is so powerful. Now I want to coach other leaders on how to do this. Maybe you're a learning and development executive who transformed your learning and development department from order takers to strategic partners. It could be a lot of different things, but the key here
is to pay attention that maybe there's something about how you developed your career that is something that you can transfer to other people. Another way to look at it is if there's specific activities that went beyond your formal responsibilities, like if you're the person who is always volunteering for a large-scale change projects, that might be something. Or maybe like Sean, who is operationalizing global change into leadership and operating practices on the front lines.
You know, there, could be a lot of different things. Maybe there's a, expertise that you developed alongside or as a result of the unique approach you took to your responsibilities. Okay. So, so far we've discussed what an expertise is and what it is not. We talked about the three different types of expertise in terms of your formal expertise, your school of hard knocks expertise, and your applied expertise. Now we're at the most important thing of all, which is to consciously choose the expertise
that you wanna use as the foundation of your business. You wanna label them all and then consciously choose. And this is one of those moments that I tell my clients all the time, like, you you can make your own mistakes, please don't make mine. This is one of those expensive mistakes that I wish I could go back in time and somebody would have stopped me in the same way that I am stopping you. Like not being aware of or making conscious decisions and choices about my expertise has been my most expensive mistake of all.
So when I first started my consulting business, I had the great privilege to get advice from Disney's most senior branding executive. And she told me explicitly that I should build my business on now what I see as an applied expertise, which is around complex stakeholder management and horizontal leadership. Like that was my main thing that I got at Disney that was unique to me is I was able to herd those cats.
Betsy Jordyn (21:35.296)
And I did it in a way that they all enjoyed getting herded. So it was a huge expertise, but like all new entrepreneurs, I let scarcity decide. And I wound up with this vague OD generalist type of business model. And I used this vague OD as an expertise and it led me to success, but also a lot of hit or miss with the right clients. And like all new entrepreneurs, I let scarcity decide. And then what was the result of that is I wound up with this vague, unmemorable organization development business.
and I used that as my expertise that led me to success for sure, but hit or miss with the right clients in a business that I eventually found myself resenting and burnt out on a few years later. So I imagine that I would have pivoted from consulting altogether to the brand positioning and messaging I do now, but I know for sure I would have enjoyed my consulting business more. And speaking of my pivot, my gosh, my gosh, I wish I would have paid attention to this developing expertise in branding.
I remember a former mentor who considered my move from consulting to helping other consultants at the time sort of like a threat. And he made some sort of comment about me to others. He's like, well, I guess like Betsy could just help with branding. And because it kind of came off in this dismissive way, I didn't really appreciate like, yeah, you know what, you're right. I could help people with branding and I didn't see this expertise and I didn't value it for so long because I didn't go to school for it. It's something that I developed along the way. Like now that I've gone through this whole process of deconstructing
my process for my workbook, it's like, wow, I really have learned and mastered quite a bit, particularly for consultants and coaches. But I didn't trust that I had an innate ability around this back in the day because I didn't go to school for it. And I think that's the biggest challenge that we have when we're consciously choosing is we look at like, I have degrees in this, this is what I've done, but we don't see all this other stuff that we've developed. So I wasted...
way too much time, way too much money thinking that people wanted my expertise in landing six-figure executive-level contracts when what they really wanted was the expertise that I most wanted to get. So the whole idea here is that it's not like you have to just go straight to say, I got a school of hard knocks expertise. I should build my business off of that. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that you should choose what you are building your business on.
Betsy Jordyn (23:51.028)
Name and claim them all and then decide like, no, this is where I want to go. Maybe there's like a brand X out there. One of my clients that I'm working with right now, she's like, I know that there's another brand out there for me, but right now I want to use my applied expertise. It's ready to go. I feel safer with it. I'm excited about it. I'm jazzed. know maybe in several years from now I want to pivot and that's fine. You could always pivot. That's why I'm a high fan of just using your name for your own business so that you can pivot. But whatever you do, make a conscious choice.
Right now it's about making your expertise conscious and then consciously choosing what you wanna use as the foundation of your business. So with this choice, when you make this choice with intention, all of your other brand positioning decisions will come into clarity. Once you decide like, you know what, this is my expertise, this is what I wanna build my business on, who you help, the problems you solve, what you do, how you're different, all of this will come into view. So now we have learned a lot about
what expertise is, what it's not, the three types of expertise, and the importance of making a conscious choice. And I cannot emphasize this enough. You do wanna mine and label all three so you can wind up with a conscious choice of the expertise you really wanna use as the foundation of this iteration of your business. It might be different than your career or a previous version of your business, and that's great. That's a sign of growth and opportunity.
but you won't seize it if you're still grabbing onto what you did in the past. So quick recap is your expertise is not a laundry list of skills. It's a broader field of mastery. There's three types, formal, school of hard knocks and applied. You wanna name and label all three and make a conscious choice. That's the gist of this episode in a couple of sentences or so. So anyway, where you might get stuck though is framing and labeling your expertise and naming and claiming it at the right level.
So in last week's podcast, I shared how there were certain parts of my process that were hard for me to turn into steps. And this is one. So I was able to label all three. How you actually get to the frame of all of them, it's not like a step-by-step fill in the blank. So I'm thrilled now that I have this applied expertise label, like this is so great. I can see it people all the time, but I'm not 100 % sure how I see and feel into other people's superpowers. Like I do not know how to feel into
Betsy Jordyn (26:15.586)
how their unique combination of expertise and strengths like kind of come together. It's sort of like my superpower. So if you get stuck, it's normal. A lot of my clients get stuck and even I can't 100 % tell you how I do it because it really is something that is in my zone of genius. So if you need more help from me and my brand whispering gifts, like let's do this, know, head on over to my website at betsyJordyn.com forward slash services to learn more.
and definitely book a discovery call with me. Now is a great time because I'm offering discounts in exchange for helping me refine concepts like these in my workbook. So that is it for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, rate and review the episode and please share it with your colleagues. And until next time, thanks so much for listening.
