What Does an Experienced Professional Need to Do in an Online Business?
The Five Essential Activities of Every Expert Business
If you've spent much of your career working inside an established organization, becoming an independent coach, consultant, advisor, trainer, or other expert business owner can be a bigger transition than you might expect.
That was certainly true for me.
During my corporate career, I spent more than 30 years working with organizations including Exxon and NASA. I managed software development teams, led projects, and delivered valuable products and services to the people we supported.
But when I left corporate life and began building my own coaching and consulting business, I discovered something important:
Knowing how to do your professional work isn't the same as knowing how to run a business.
From Employee to Business Owner
Inside a large organization, most of us specialize. We become very good at our part of the enterprise while other people handle marketing, sales, finance, technology, strategy, and the many other functions required to keep the organization running.
When you become an independent business owner, suddenly you're responsible for the whole enterprise.
Then you start hearing about everything you're supposedly supposed to do online: websites, social media, email marketing, lead magnets, funnels, webinars, online courses, communities, CRM systems, automation, and dozens of technology platforms.
It can quickly become overwhelming.
So instead of starting with all the tools and tactics, let's start with a simpler question:
What does your business actually need to do?
At the highest level, every business needs to do two things:
Attract clients and serve clients.
But there's an important distinction hidden inside "attract clients."
Marketing attracts, engages, and identifies interested and qualified leads.
Sales involves understanding what those leads want to accomplish, offering appropriate solutions, and converting the right people into clients.
Then comes Delivery, providing the products, services, expertise, and support those clients purchased.
That gives us three essential business activities:
Marketing → Sales → Delivery
For an expertise-based business, however, we need to add two more: Content and Community.
Together, they give us five essential activities.
1. Content: Scale Your Expertise
Your knowledge and expertise are among your most valuable business assets.
Content allows you to share that expertise beyond individual conversations.
Free content, including social posts, articles, videos, podcasts, newsletters, and presentations, helps people discover you, experience your thinking, and begin building trust.
Purchased content, including courses, guides, workshops, and client resources, allows you to extend the value you provide beyond your live interactions.
Content is how you scale your expertise.
2. Marketing: Attract and Engage Leads
You can be exceptionally good at what you do, but if the people who need your expertise don't know you exist, you don't have much of a business.
Marketing creates awareness and gives prospective clients opportunities to discover you and engage with your ideas.
You might do that through content, speaking, networking, referrals, events, partnerships, or lead generators.
The tactics can vary. The purpose remains the same:
Marketing attracts and engages people who may eventually become clients.
3. Sales: Offer Solutions
Marketing generates leads. Sales helps those leads determine whether working with you is the right next step.
For many experienced professionals, particularly those providing coaching, consulting, or advisory services, this often happens through personal conversations.
You learn about someone's goals and challenges. They learn about you and your approach. And when there's a good fit, you can offer an appropriate solution.
Sales converts the right leads into clients by offering solutions to what they want to accomplish.
4. Delivery: Create the Promised Value
Once someone becomes a client, you need to deliver what you promised.
That could involve private consulting, coaching, workshops, courses, group programs, masterminds, digital resources, or some combination of these.
Online technology allows you to combine your live expertise with reusable digital resources, improving the client experience while enabling you to serve more people.
Delivery helps clients achieve the outcomes they came to you to achieve.
5. Community: Scale Your Relationships
Community can support both marketing and delivery.
A free community gives prospective clients opportunities to continue learning from and interacting with you and with each other.
A client community extends those relationships after someone begins working with you, providing opportunities for peer learning, support, ongoing conversations, and access to additional resources.
Just as content helps you scale your expertise:
Community helps you scale relationships.
Putting the Five Activities Together
These aren't five disconnected tactics. They work together as a business system:
Content → Marketing → Sales → Delivery → Community
Your content communicates your expertise. Marketing helps prospective clients discover and engage with you. Sales helps qualified leads select the right solution. Delivery creates the promised value. Community strengthens relationships throughout the journey.
Once you're clear about what your business needs to do, you can ask a much better technology question.
Instead of:
"Which online tools should I buy?"
ask:
"What systems do I need to support the activities my business needs to perform?"
There's Still a Bigger Picture
These five activities describe much of what you need to do in an expert online business.
But three additional elements help you decide how to do them successfully:
Business Strategy defines who you serve, the value you provide, and the customer journey that connects everything.
Business Systems provide the technology and processes needed to support that journey.
Personal Growth develops the capabilities and practices you need to lead the business successfully.
Together, these form the Eight Essential Elements of an Expert Online Business.
Want to See How All Eight Pieces Fit Together?
I've created the complimentary Expert Online Business Launchpad to help experienced professionals understand the bigger picture before getting lost in technology and tactics.
You'll learn more about the eight essential elements, designing your customer journey, streamlining your online systems, and building an online business around your expertise.
