Let’s talk about becoming an expert.  First of all, what is an expert and why is it important for you?  

The dictionary definition of an expert is “a person who has special skill or knowledge in some field.”  For our purposes I would like you to think of an Expert as someone who provides knowledge to others, gained either through study or experience.  Financially speaking, your ability to provide your knowledge (through education, products or services) to others is what gives you a business and income. 

The reason being, as an Entrepreneur, positioning yourself as an Expert allows you to become a big fish in a small pond, you don’t need to be known all over the world to make money, you just need to be known in your specific niche. Think of it like cream rising to the top, people begin to know and trust the real estate agent that has a column in the newspaper and was interviewed on TV, or has a real estate TV Show in their local area. Often times, increasing your status to being the Expert in your specific field, can earn you 100,000 to over 1,000,000 in products and services sold annually. Customers come to you because you’ve earned the reputation as being the “best” in your field. 

Side Note: Just to be clear, establishing yourself as an Expert in the field may bring you customers, but to keep them you must live up to their expectations and not take advantage of them or give them garbage, treat your customers with respect and make their experience with you way above what they expected.  Marketing may position yourself as an Expert but in my opinion, delivery is really how you “earn” the title of the Expert.  So earn it!!

Some other reasons of why is it important for authors, speakers, financial planners, coaches, doctors, lawyers or entrepreneurs to be seen as Experts is because, being viewed as such can give you:

ü      Perceived Market Value.  It can increase your value in the eye of a buyer, as most people would rather pay for training from an expert than a jack of all trades.  As an Expert you need to know your value and not be afraid of asking top dollar for your product or service.  If you are bargain basement Jim, you’ll attract those kinds of customers and you’ll have a heck of a time later trying to increase your fees.  There is a reason people pay more for Gucci.  You want your name associated with quality.

ü      Credibility. It can give you credibility with the press.  There is a great cycle in publicity, as when you brand yourself as the expert in a particular field the press can call on you for comment or your opinion on current events related to your field.  And the more they label you as the expert in your field you can then use their quotes for additional press and credibility. You tell them you’re the expert, they print it and you now have a valuable quote.

ü      Referrals. It can help people refer business to you when they say, you know, I met an expert on that subject at a seminar I attended, let me give you his number.  Being identified as an expert also helps you get booked at conferences and events as organizers can get a fast idea of what you do and where you’d fit into their event.

So how do you find your expertise? 

This answer may come instantly to you, but for most people they need to ponder it awhile as we tend to typically see ourselves as our job.  I believe we are not our job. Our job(s) may be several extensions of ourselves certainly, but it does not entirely define who we are. So…

• What do you love to do?
• What do you excel at?
• What is “common sense” to you that does not come easy to others?
• What lessons have you learned in your industry that you could teach others?
• What do people want and would pay for in your field?
• Do you have an interest or hobby that you’ve immersed yourself in for years?
• What do people tell you you’re good at?
• Have you learned something the hard way (sometimes that is business, sometimes that is parenting lessons, or health vitality lessons)?

Be clear about who you are and what you know.

Here’s another way to think about it:

Review all of your life lessons, both in the personal arena as well as your career experiences.  Don’t think of what you did necessarily but more what you learned.  Maybe you worked for a big company and now you want to work with small entrepreneurs or something totally different but use your skills to help stay at home moms become leaders at home or delegate tasks or organize their homes. 

Your hobby may also be where your expertise is residing.  I know a woman that was a sales whiz but she decided to pursue her hobby which was meditation and built a business around that.   Truth is, there may be several things you COULD do, but we want to find what excites you the most.  What is the most deeply rooted to what you stand for and who you are.

I believe everyone has value, something to contribute or teach that could enrich or improve another person’s life or business.  It’s pretty hard to get through life without learning a few things. Do you have some knowledge or expertise or experience that you know could help other people?  What lessons in life or business have you learned that could be of value to others? 

The fact is, you may have developed an experts instinct and not even be aware of it.  I read this interesting book called “Blink”1 by Malcolm Gladwell, who was recently called one of the most influential thinkers of our time.  He writes about Thin Slicing or the ability to get a fast amount of information (in a blink of an eye) when you’ve immersed yourself in its study. He illustrated this point with the Getty Museum in California who bought a marble statue for 10 million dollars and had a geologist testing the surface of it to make sure it was authentic and after 2 days that geologist determined it was. Then the Museum decided to brag about it.

Shortly thereafter they were showing this sculpture to an Italian Art Historian Frederico Zeri who served on the Getty’s board of Trustees and Evelyn Harrison one of the world’s foremost experts on Greek Sculpture.   When Zeri was taken down to the museums restoration studio to see the korus, he found himself staring at the sculpture’s fingernails.  They somehow seemed wrong to him, but in a way that he couldn’t immediately articulate. 

When it was Evelyn’s turn, the curator took her down to the basement, swished the cloth off the top of it and beamed, “well it isn’t ours yet, but in a couple of weeks it will be.”  To his shock Evelyn turned to him and said “I’m sorry” she had no idea why she said that, she just had a feeling, a hunch.  You see these two individuals had spent most of their life pouring over original sculpture and art and became experts..  Something got recorded in their brain that they cannot explain.  They absorbed a complicated amount of clues along the way and it turned into instinct. This happens to me with marketing and perhaps to you with your expertise.  When they looked at it, right away in a “blink” of an eye, those two individuals instinctually knew it was a fake, although they couldn’t logically explain to the Curator why they had come to that conclusion. This area of our brain is not connected to our speech.  In 2 seconds they knew what eventually took the museum 14 months to confirm. Successful people in business or even stock investing can often get unexplainable feelings or indications that something is not right or when something is great and they should move on it quickly.

I bet you have your own unique expertise and instincts based on your life experience, hands-on experience and training, and that you could teach that valuable info to another human being who could really use your help and guidance.  What information or skill is literally immersed into your being, your brain that has become your instinct?  Answer that, and your life could change.