The Entrepreneurial Leap for Academics

Join us as we recount the entrepreneurial journey from academia to business, highlighting the critical role of acquiring essential business knowledge. Learn about the transformative impact of hiring an effective coach and joining supportive communities. We discuss the importance of stepping outside the academic bubble to gain fresh perspectives, build valuable networks, and appropriately value your expertise. Whether you're aiming to offer online courses or coaching services, these insights will guide you in building a robust and profitable brand. Don't miss out on actionable advice that can redefine your professional path.

Follow Dr. Sheena Howards' socials:
@drsheenahoward | Power Your Research

Chapters

• 0:00 Building a Brand for Academics
• 3:32 Entrepreneurial Journey for Academics
• 7:44 Expanding Your Brand Beyond Academia

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you're building a brand and you're I don't know trying to sell people your online course or your coaching thing or whatever it is, you need to know how to tell a story. You need to know how to tell the story behind the thing you've created, the story behind why you even want to build a brand. So the program that I am in is not just for writers, it's for everybody. I don't want my work to be stuck behind an academic paywall. I want to leave a legacy, I want to reach my potential and I want to change lives. This podcast, power your Research, is my attempt to help the smartest people in the world do that very thing. My hope is that you use the lessons I share to make more money than what your higher ed job can ever pay you. I've done it, my clients have done it, and so can you. My hope is that you'll apply what you learn here and one day join the Power your Research program, where you can work with me one-on-one. The title is the Best Way Academics Can Learn to Build their Brand, and I teach three main buckets in terms of building your brand how to increase your visibility, authority and income, income being the key piece, because building a brand is not sustainable unless you're making a lot of money doing it. By a lot, I mean at least six figures. There are three very, very, very important things if you're struggling on your brand building journey. Since there's so much free information out here on YouTube and all of that good stuff, it's hard to make sense of what you should be doing and when you should be doing it, and if your followership is not where it is. Sometimes you try things and it doesn't work, or someone promises you a three-step system and you do that system and then it doesn't work, and it could be super frustrating and confusing, and I don't want you to give up. So here are three things that I am going to tell you to do to help you, as an academic, build your brand. As it relates to those three buckets increasing your visibility, authority and income so the first thing is actually taking initiative to go meet people outside of academe. Now, this might sound obvious, but most of us are not doing that.

Speaker 1: 2:31

So when I first started with building the Power, your Research company, I started to just reach out to people on LinkedIn that were doing some of the things I wanted to do, and I asked to meet with them and I would send a message and I would be honest hey, I see that you're an academic coach or an entrepreneur or you have a nonprofit and it looks like your business is doing really well. I see that you've been in your field for a long time. I'm just starting this company. I have no idea what I'm doing and I would love to just jump on a call with you and I would send them the link to my Calendly. Calendly is free. You can have a free account and start setting up 30 minute meetings with people who are already doing the thing you want to do. And because I was doing that so frequently and, by the way, when I would meet with people, I would say hey, I have one final question for you. What's one piece of advice you would give me in terms of entrepreneurship? So I'd always ask at the end of the call, and so I would just meet, like I would meet with people that own finance companies, all types of things.

Speaker 1: 3:32

Because I'm an academic, I have a PhD, my business knowledge started at zero and sometimes I think, because we think we have a PhD, we can like just go do anything and you can, but you actually have to learn how to do it, and so, because I was meeting just all of these people on these Zoom meetings, they started to connect me to other people, and then that's how I found my business coach and the Upscale your Business program. That is the marketing agency that makes a lot of my things work. So that leads me to the second point, which is hire a coach. There are a lot of coaches out here selling a lot of things, so what I'll say about hiring a coach is they're going to help you to reach the goals you want to reach, because they've done it before. I've recorded multiple videos of how to choose a coach, because they are not all made the same. Just because someone's doing the things you want to do does not mean they know how to teach you how to do it. This is super important. You need to hire a coach that knows how to teach people to get results. So, as an academic going on this entrepreneurship journey because building a brand is entrepreneurship, getting media coverage, visibility and increasing your income is entrepreneurship you need to work with a coach that's going to show you how to do it, particularly the monetization piece. But if you're trying to build your brand, a coach that understands how to get media coverage and visibility.

Speaker 1: 4:50

Hey everyone, real quick. I don't run any ads on this podcast, so I have to rely on word of mouth. If this podcast has helped you in any way, please share it with a friend and follow me, dr Sheena Howard, on LinkedIn, where I give more free content on building your brand as an academic. If you tell me you came to my LinkedIn from the podcast, I'll make sure I accept your request. And then the third thing you need to do is get into different communities not related to academe, because, particularly for my tenure track and tenure professors, your community is just the campus or the conferences that you go to every year, and none of those people are entrepreneurs. But the 99.9% of your academic people don't have big brands. We're not taught to do this.

Speaker 1: 5:42

So when I say join communities, I would hear successful people talk about going to mastermind groups and joining communities, and I got it intellectually Like okay, yes, I know I need to join a community, but I did not understand what that meant and why that was important on the journey. I know that that was something I had to do, but I didn't know what it meant. And so when I say join a community. Here are some examples. So I belong to a couple of coworking spaces. The coworking spaces are specific niche spaces. Particularly the one I'm in is specifically for creative. So I got to meet other people that were creative like me, that have connection, all types of connections. They do events, they do networking events, they do, you know, including the membership is just all of these things that allowed me to meet more people, and nothing moves without people. You have to have people on this journey, you just have to.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Also, what I mean by communities there's like a lot of influencers on Instagram and there are all types of people that just have all types of programs with communities. You need to join them and I'm not saying to spend thousands of dollars on them. I'm in one community that is $5 a month I'm sure everybody has $5 a month and this particular community it's called Night Owl Nation and it teaches you how to become a better storyteller. If you're building a brand and you're I don't know trying to sell people your online course or your coaching thing or whatever it is, you need to know how to tell a story. You need to know how to tell the story behind the thing you've created, the story behind why you even want to build a brand. So the program that I am in is not just for writers, it's for everybody, right? And in that community there's a lot of different people that I've connected with in the online space. You know, I've actually met one of the members the other day in person for coffee, and they're entrepreneur and we can help each other on the path.

Speaker 1: 7:44

And so you need to get into communities of people that are not academics, which is why in the Power, your Research program, I connect people. There's a community I connect. Being in academia is a mindset, right? They teach you a particular mindset that is in direct opposition to the mindset of what an entrepreneur has, and you only learn that by being in other communities. This is how I know that academics don't charge enough for speaking engagements, because I'm in other communities with people who don't have PhDs and master's degrees that charge way more. It's actually kind of sad, but you need to get out of one community into another to understand that, all right. So those are the three ways that I would suggest for you to start building your brand. If you are an academic trying to figure all of this stuff out, start setting up meetings with people, hire a coach, join some communities outside of academia, so I hope this helps. If you have any questions, let me know you.