The Income Stream You Have Already Built
Last week I wrote about side quests, the second streams of income that run alongside your main business. The response told me something. Plenty of you are ready for one. So this week I want to talk about the side quest most established business owners never consider, even though they are better placed for it than almost anything else they could start.
Licensing.
A conversation that ran out of hour
On Wednesday I spent an hour with two women who are each thinking about licensing what they have built. Within minutes it was clear an hour was never going to be enough. One of them, Joanna, put it beautifully. She said she wanted to plug into my brain.
I understood exactly what she meant, because 21 years ago I was her. When I began licensing The Athena Network in 2006 there was nobody whose brain I could plug into. I learned by doing it. The good, which is real and lasting. The bad, which is survivable if you see it coming. And the third category, the things you would never even think to consider until someone who has lived them mentions them, at which point you cannot believe you nearly signed an agreement without them.
Both women left with pages of notes. Whether they act on them is up to them. But the conversation confirmed something I have believed for years. The knowledge gap, not the business, is what stops most women from licensing.
What licensing actually is
Strip away the legal language and licensing is this. You give another person the right to run what you have built, under your name and your method, in their own area or market. They invest in the licence. You support them. Your business grows through their energy rather than your hours.
It is not the same as hiring. It is not the same as teaching a course. A licensee is running a business of her own, built on the foundations of yours. Which means the thing you are really selling is not a logo. It is everything you know about making the model work.
You do not need decades. You need a decision.
Here is a confession. I did not wait until Athena was established to think about licensing it. I licensed it from the day it was created. I had read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber and I knew this business would be licensed one day, so I built it as if I was going to do it. Every system, every process, every way of working was designed to be run by someone who was not me. At that stage I had no idea whether it was possible. I built it as if it was.
That decision, not the years, is the real asset. The years added the judgement. You learn what a good client looks like. You learn which parts of your delivery are essential and which are style. You learn the mistakes, because you make them, and the shortcuts, because you earn them. But the foundation is a choice any business owner can make at any stage: to build a business that could run without her, whether or not she ever hands it to anyone.
That is the licence. The manual, the agreement and the training simply give it a shape someone else can hold.
The questions that separate a licence from a liability
The difference between licensing well and licensing painfully lives in questions like these. What exactly does the licensee get, and what stays yours? What happens when someone stops paying, or stops caring, or wants to leave? How do you protect your name when somebody else is wearing it? What does support look like in year one, and what does it look like in year seven?
None of these are difficult once you know to ask them. All of them are expensive if you do not. That is the difference 21 years makes, and it is why I am no longer content to give it away one hour at a time.
Who should be thinking about this
More women than currently are. If you have an established business with a method that gets results, a way of working you could teach and a market bigger than the patch you can personally serve, then licensing deserves a place on your list of side quests. Possibly at the top of it.
And if your business is younger, do not rule yourself out. You may simply be where I was in 2005, building something with licensing already in its bones. The one honest caveat is this. If the business only works because you personally are in the room, there is nothing to license yet. The work is to change that first, and that work is valuable whether you ever license or not.
So here is your assignment for the week. Think of one woman you know who has built, or is building, something that genuinely works. Send her this and ask her the question I asked on Wednesday. What have you built that somebody else could carry?
If the woman who came to mind is you
Then I have built something for you, because an hour was never going to be enough.
License Ready is my six week programme for women with established businesses who want to explore licensing what they have built. Over six weeks I will take you from “could I license this?” to a clear, honest answer, and for those who can, the foundations to do it properly. The model. The protections. The questions you would never think to ask. Everything I have learned in 21 years, in a room small enough to shape around the women in it.
The founding cohort begins on Monday 28 July.
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