Stop Selling Your Time, License Your Expertise w/ April Beach

[00:00:00] Picture yourself two to three years ago and ask yourself if you still want to be the one deploying and teaching what you are. If the answer is yes, then that is not a licensable asset. April Beach is the founder and CEO of The Suite Life Company. For nearly 30 years, April has been coaching leaders and established entrepreneurs to design business models that scale through licensing. We only can license something that's great.

[00:00:24] When you develop processes that are unique to you, they become licensable because they aren't generic and they're yours. What is licensing? Renting your methods, processes, frameworks that you created to another business to use for a certain period of time under certain rules that you set. There's going to be people out there that are like, is my stuff good enough? Has what you have created saved you time or saved you money or made you money?

[00:00:53] The reason why this is so mind-blowing when people understand that they can do this is because... April, I am so excited to welcome you to ReLaunch to a Rich Life. Thank you so much for having me here. As you were reading that, I was kind of getting a little emotional because of the evolution of our friendship and then being introduced to your space and your community.

[00:01:20] And it's not very often that I get invited into a space that are like my people. My women, my age group. I tell you, they are so your people. They are so you. They are you. They are me. They are like, you know, I feel like we're wonder twins. You know, what was it? Wonder twins, you know, form of and like form of success right now. Because this is where, you know, this is where it all happens.

[00:01:47] Even if those people out there, the women that are listening are like, I don't know about this. Understand, there will be a golden nugget in here that you will take away. That's how much I respect this woman that you will be able to leverage. That will end up making you a significant amount of revenue, success. It's just what she does. This is just what she does.

[00:02:13] But I have to always go back and we have to always lay the groundwork of the most significant relaunch that, you know, you've been building businesses for decades. And we talked about you were a lifestyle entrepreneur long before it was trendy, which I love. What do you think right now has big, has been actually the biggest relaunch moment?

[00:02:37] The point where everything shifted from growing more clients and more programs to actually scaling through licensing and your expertise. So my moment was actually back in 2009. And at that point in time, I was being a business strategist, like we're all familiar with. We actually had online courses. We were teaching companies how to launch online courses at that time. We were running webinars.

[00:03:07] And the tech stack back then was like duct taped together. It was like go to meeting. And it was just a terrible undertaking to be able to run these online business models. We had courses and groups and funnels and all these things. But at the same time, I had three little kids at home and my business was successful. I have a solid six figure business and clients coming in and events that were happening all

[00:03:32] over the country and people that I was coaching and everything on paper looked absolutely perfect. But I was exhausted. And at the time, my husband was a restaurant manager. So if anybody knows what that life looks like, it was, I was basically a single parent. And I had a kid also who had special needs. And so he needed extra attention. And so I knew that there had to be a different way.

[00:03:59] And so my relaunch was thinking outside of the box and saying, okay, I have this IP. I have these courses and frameworks and methods and I'm delivering them. And I'm on a wait list. And I was charging as much as I could charge for them at the time, a reasonable fee. But it was even as scaled as they were, it was never going to get any more than that. And everything was breaking. And as you mentioned before that, I was a lifestyle entrepreneur, which basically means I had a life

[00:04:27] of travel and location freedom. And because of all these different things that were happening in my life as a parent and my company and my family, all of a sudden my world became very small and I knew I needed to fix it. So what I did was I looked at all my IP and I said, okay, if I'm not going to be the one delivering it myself, how else can I expand this? What do I have that would make another business successful or would save another company time?

[00:04:56] And so that's when I created a model that we now know is content licensing. It's a little bit different than logo licensing and brand licensing and music licensing. It's where we take our IP and our methods and frameworks and processes and courses and actually allow other companies to use them either internally as training for their team and sell them to their clients for facing as well. And so I took everything that I had built, literally shut it all down and packaged it up

[00:05:25] and instead started selling it as licensing packages for other businesses to deploy the SOPs, systems, frameworks, processes, and forward facing products and trainings and courses that I had. And that was within 18 months I had, you know, I went from my individual consulting business to having licensed companies in multiple other states.

[00:05:51] My revenue had tripled and I started receiving requests for my content to be licensed by corporations and not just other small independent consultants like myself. And it was game changing for me. Okay. April, before you continue any further, let's go back and really look at what is licensing. And I know there's people out there that have, you know, heard of white labeling.

[00:06:17] They've heard of all these things and there's, you know, might be concern of if I give it all up, do I still have a company? Can you just start with what is licensing? And I know you are like screaming at the top of a mountaintop that everybody needs to be doing this because this allows you, hear me, everyone listening. It allows you to scale. It allows you to scale without absolutely breaking down. Yeah.

[00:06:47] So many people are familiar with licensing when we reference licensing imagery or licensing music or patent licensing. And the type of licensing that I'm talking about is actually licensing your training or your process or your method. And so licensing the way I define it and a way that all of us can understand, because I'm not an attorney is actually like renting. So I want you to swap out the word

[00:07:13] licensing for renting. So you are renting your methods, processes, frameworks, courses, whatever they may be that you created to another business to use for a certain period of time under certain rules that you set. And it's different than franchising because franchising enables you to have complete control. And for me, I didn't even want that. That wasn't, I had no interest in being a franchisor. And so that's a completely different model. So with licensing, we literally

[00:07:42] can package up what you have and allow another company to rent it where you still get to set your rules. And I'm sure this is a question that comes up all the time. People are thinking, well, what is white labeling? That is one of seven different rules that you can set about how you want your content to be utilized. And so just think of it as taking something that you've been selling yourself or you've been doing or deploying, even if it wasn't built into a course, it could be your

[00:08:11] process of sitting down and completing a customer intake process, whatever it is, it's your unique and special way of doing something that in the past, and here's the key, has to have delivered predictable, transformational, measurable results. We only can license something that's great, which is why when you develop processes that are unique to you and that are brought in from your experiences

[00:08:40] and your methodologies, and they're your secret sauce, they become licensable because they aren't generic and they're yours. And so just think of licensing as renting something that you have built. It could be a forward-facing product, or it could be a step-by-step process that you use. Say you created a great, I don't know, employee onboarding process. That's still very valuable for other companies and might not have that. Or it could be a training course on how to sell high ticket

[00:09:08] offers. Whatever it may be, you can take that. You don't have to be the one to deploy it yourself. So the reason why this is so mind-blowing when people understand that they can do this is because you are scaling, as you said, you're expanding the reach of your work faster than any ad spend, any partner JV campaign can do, any marketing funnel that you could ever put

[00:09:36] behind it because in those cases, you're still the one delivering it. Okay. I know that there's going to be people out there that are like, but is my stuff good enough? Do you have something that you can share that would be like, I mean, I think my stuff is good enough, but I mean, you know, how do I not waste a lot of time on this? How do I know, yes, I'm ready for this model? Well, across the board with any business advice that I give, we like to sell things that are

[00:10:06] valuable to other people, right? So has what you have created saved you time or saved you money or made you money? If it has done one of those things, and let me go back to these three benchmarks, does it deliver predictable, transformational, and measurable results? So have you through your processes taken somebody from point A, and it can just be to point C, doesn't have to be all the way

[00:10:34] to D, but if that's the transformation that's defined in that process, is it predictable? Are people or companies being transformed? And is it something that you can measure their transformation? And measurement isn't always by numbers. Measurement is maybe before they were stressed out about something and now they have peace, or before they were unhealthy and now they're sleeping better, or before they didn't know how to run a sales call and now they know the exact process to go through,

[00:11:03] to close those high ticket deals. So whatever it is, we're not the licensing police, there isn't any licensing police, but I want you to look at it and say, hey, listen, how long did this take me to build? Because think of all the things that we as business owners have built, that's when we get into your SOPs and processes and you're thinking, oh my gosh, it took me 15 years to perfect this thing that you might

[00:11:29] not necessarily think is valuable as a forward-facing product, but imagine how much time you could save another company by saying, hey, listen, don't waste five years and you don't have my experience in the trenches. I'm just going to give you my whole system. Amazing. It's turnkey into place. Is there a dollar amount? Like there might be people listening that, you know, I got a low-end offer that I figured out.

[00:11:57] It's, I can't really imagine it in a university or in corporate. Is there a dollar amount that you're like, you should be thinking about before they get into licensing? Yeah, no. And that's what's so fun about it. So our clients' licensing started as low as $27, all the way up to programs that they're currently selling for $50,000. So you can actually take any sort of system process or framework that you are currently selling it for retail

[00:12:26] as long as it hits those metrics of delivering results. When you sell it, however, now it depends on who you're selling it to. If you're selling, say, an intake process you charge $100 for, and that's normally what it would be retail value. If you sell it to another business that has a thousand clients, you can sell it in bulk, and then it starts adding up based on their number of users. So we have a couple of different levels of licensing packages that people tend to sell.

[00:12:56] The first one, and honestly my favorite, are what we call licensing quick sells. A licensing quick sell is something that doesn't require selling to a huge corporation, doesn't require multiple decision makers. And so these are deals that range anywhere from $10,000 to $35,000. That would be the face value of it. They are easy to explain the outcome of what this training or program or process delivers,

[00:13:21] and it's an already identified value in another business of a problem they're trying to solve. And the reason why this $10,000 to $35,000 is kind of the sweet spot for quick sells is because $10,000 still fits into other established, even solo and micro businesses. Like I'm a solo micro business. We only have seven people on our team. If you would think about me as your buyer, that $10,000, if you're going to give me a framework or a process that's turnkey,

[00:13:50] that already solves something I'm trying to fix, would be a no-brainer for me to pay you for. Also, that same process, if you went and sold it to a corporation, if you're trying to sell to an organization anywhere between the $25,000 and $35,000 mark, is usually something where individual departments have a budget for, and one person can just quickly sign off on that. Those are the easiest ways to kind of dip your toe in with licensing.

[00:14:16] You can literally sell the same product, the same solution to small businesses like me, mid-sized businesses, and large companies. That's what we're looking for is one solution that we can sell across multiple industries, and you price it according to the industry and their use of it. Okay. That is corporate. Those are going into those businesses or even the smaller businesses, if you have that, like you said, even your example of seven people. University.

[00:14:46] Different. Different, different, different. If you're talking about the actual educational component, tell us what you suggest. Educational licensing is so exciting, and many of us know that universities are in a little bit of trouble because it's hard for them to keep up with the fast pace of business, and things that we as founders and business owners, we're always in learning mode. We're always learning new things, and universities aren't really being able to keep up at the speed of AI and the future of business,

[00:15:15] and so they're very interested right now, particularly in licensing those post-grad continuing education classes. So the certificate classes or adult learning, that's one space that we see many of our clients are actually licensing to in universities. Undergraduate licensing, so if you have a training or a program that we want to put into, like an undergrad degree or even a master's program, they're also very valuable. Those take longer to close because they have to go through a curriculum review committee, but they're also very valuable to schools,

[00:15:43] but it's really that post-grad continuing ed. So if you have a training or a process, which usually in this case, it's mostly business, leadership, communications, AI, sales, marketing, identity, any of those type of trainings or programs, companies are looking to put their employees through them, and employees are looking to level up their skills,

[00:16:09] and so those are trainings and courses where many of our clients are actually licensing that can just fit into something like a six-week course. If any of you follow like eCornell online or, you know, Maryland University Global Campus, those type of things where anybody can come in and actually, Harvard, you know, business, where anybody can come in and take a class that's a shorter term class, those are very valuable to the right schools.

[00:16:36] So your clients right now have licensed, like you've had Fortune 500, university, international, I mean, non-profits, everything from a few thousand dollars, you've heard six figures. Without naming names, can you actually share a couple of real world examples of how licensing has transformed the way experts work and how they earn?

[00:17:03] How can we relate this back to a real life example? Yeah, so I thank you for saying that about not naming names. Many of my clients, I can't say who they are, and I wish I could, you guys, because they're huge leaders, but all the way down to, you know, everyday Joes like me, who we would never know, whose lives are absolutely changed. So first of all, I want to say anybody can do this, you guys. If I was a mom with three kids, and I'm not an attorney, and I figured out how to do this, like once you understand the process,

[00:17:31] please know that this is possible for anybody. So one story that I love to share is a client who was a corporate consultant. She'd been doing this forever. It's her life's work. And she'd written a book, and she is going in and hired all across the country and delivering these corporate workshops and, you know, working with individuals and professionals. And we actually took her workshop framework and repackaged it into a licensing offer. And her first licensing sale was around $300,000.

[00:18:02] And then she did it. She was selling this workshop for $6,000 a pop. Same content. Repackaged. And she did it multiple times in. Talk about life-changing. I love this woman so much. She's become a very close friend. And I still remember being on a call with her, and she holds up this piece of wood. Okay, she's in her 50s. Let me just be real. Right? So she pulls up this piece of wood on this call. And she goes, look, I started painting because I don't know what to do with my time.

[00:18:30] And I'm like, well, I could fill in your time. She literally, and she was terrible. It was the worst painting I've ever seen. She goes, look at how terrible I am, but I figured out painting. And that was like three years ago. And since then, now she's gone back to actually, she's gone back for her PhD. She's completing that this month. And she's actually studying why her methodology, which is her training that's now licensed in multiple manufacturing organizations, works so well.

[00:18:57] She wanted to study why companies loved her program so much. So life-changing. That is life-changing. Okay, so I want to go back and talk a little bit more about your process, how you work with people if they're interested, because there's always that like, how do I get started? You created something called the Content Licensing Roadmap. And you have a starter guide to help really decide

[00:19:27] is licensing a good fit or not. But if you were to just share a little bit so that people are like, ah, it sounds good, wow. But how much work is this really going to be? Is this going to get me off in a different tangent? You know, how long do I need to focus on this before I start seeing results? I love all those questions. Smart, smart, smart. Yes. I added a ton. I just kind of kept going. No, but these are all the things that people ask me. So first of all, dive into the licensing starter guides,

[00:19:56] totally free. That will help you understand and evaluate the potential and what you have. So I love sharing that. That will just blow your mind. And honestly, everybody, even if licensing isn't for them, they walk away from that just saying, wow, look at all the things I created. I think sometimes, and I feel like it's important to say this, especially for go-getters like we are, sometimes we just build and build and build and build that we don't stop for a minute to perceive the value of all the things that we created

[00:20:25] because we're just on to the next thing. So even that, you're going to turn around and be like, wow, that was awesome. Look at that thing back there that I did and just understand value. I think that's enough in itself. How we work with clients is in a couple of different ways. So first I want to answer the question of time. So in order to be able to license, you have to be good at what you do. Not everybody can license or you have to have created a process that's excellent.

[00:20:52] And so that means you either are currently working in corporate or you currently have a business. So you are very, very busy. And licensing, which is the best part, actually doesn't take that much time. The most time-consuming part of licensing is understand what you want to license, get it organized and packaged on paper. And then we always sell it before we build it. It's lovely. It's like the most amazing process because- That's the best part right there.

[00:21:22] I think that's what sold me to say, I need to dive deeper into this with relaunch and what we can do here. Because I'm like, oh. And we can have a couple of different packages on paper. And as you start entering these sales conversation, if you might be having one with an educational institution, one with government, one with corporation, whoever it is, you're going to understand what they really want. And we want to find the common thread and create one core package to sell across multiple industries. We always do that on paper first.

[00:21:52] The reality is, is I tell organizations, I want you to have about two to four hours a week to dedicate to licensing. If you have that or 16 hours a month- For how long? Yep. Okay, for how long? For about the first 90 days. Okay. Or two days a month to dive in and just really understand this. Many of our clients, and this kind of goes into how we work with clients, we have three different levels of programming. Many of our clients start out in a really good process, what we call license to scale.

[00:22:22] All we do is get that whole package on paper and we price it and we align it with the right industries. So you guys can be out there having these sales conversations because you're clear on what you're selling, the problem it solves and what you're going to charge for it. It's people getting into trouble when they start having the sales conversations first and they don't have their decisions on paper because then it becomes very customized, which they could run into an issue before they accidentally give away their IP,

[00:22:50] which people have done before they've come to us. It becomes, it's a term called work made for hire. So if you basically, if you go into a sales conversation and it becomes this design by committee, if you will, they're like, well, could you do this? And could you do that? And all of a sudden you're making it up as you go. It's not going to be scalable. Don't do that. So that's why we want to have it on paper. So you have that clarity of how you communicate it. So that's why. I also think that this is also a really good thing to be doing from a strategic perspective on your business

[00:23:19] because what you're taking them through helps no matter what. If you decide like, hey, this isn't the time. Before you go on, can I just add, there's something that I really believe we have to address. And that is there's a tremendous amount of certifications out there. What is the difference between a certification program and license it? Yes. Good thing to hit on for sure. So a certification is when we teach somebody our methodology and we give them permission to reteach or to apply our methodology.

[00:23:49] That is certifying somebody in your specific way of doing something. You teach them how to do it. It doesn't include this. Most organizations don't understand this. It doesn't by default include a license. A license is where then we stack it on top of a certification and it gives the individual who is certified in your methodology a license to then utilize your processes, systems, and frameworks in a deployable way.

[00:24:16] So if you certify somebody in communication XYZ, you're teaching them how to apply communication XYZ to their consulting business. But the license also fits into one of those quick sells because you already have the ideal buyers. Then you say to them, hey, listen, now I'm going to give you a license to use all of my worksheets, trainings, programs, and all of the actual substantial blueprints

[00:24:43] that underlie the methodology that you have taught them to use. So licensing and certification usually goes hand in hand. Most people with certifications are actually giving away the licensing side for free and they don't realize it. It's just, they're just thinking that it just should go with it. But the way we teach organizations how to do it is if you have a certification, then the licensing is actually part two. And then you can really deploy them in a way that's going to help them to be more successful for longer.

[00:25:12] And it's also a greater residual revenue for you as the organization that's deploying those materials. And your company helps with both. So for experts listening who built these solid programs and they're ready to think much, much bigger, what is one practical relaunch step right now that they can take this week to start? So shifting from I deliver everything myself

[00:25:39] to my expertise is actually an asset that can be licensed and scaled. The very first thing that I want you guys to do is actually picture yourself two to three years ago and ask yourself if you still want to be the one deploying and teaching what you are. Do you want to be the leader in that? If the answer is yes, then that is not a licensable asset. If the answer is no, then there are licensing pathways where you can start now working towards getting out of being the one

[00:26:06] who is the primary deployer of the IP. So that's the first thing. I'm a big, it goes back to the lifestyle thing, right? It's I'm a big, let's design how you want to live and how you want your time and your work and your life to look like three years, five years, 10 years. And then whatever that is, we can reverse engineer the model. So step number one is truly give yourself permission to actually ask, well, what do I want to do on a Tuesday afternoon in 2030? And who do I want to be doing that with? And then look at what you're currently selling and then decide once,

[00:26:36] if you say, yes, I want to start scaling this or I want to figure out a hybrid way to still sell it myself and license, which is also part of what we help our clients do. Then the next step is great. What is the most valuable thing that I can deploy first that's going to solve a very expensive problem for another company, whether it's another consultant or another expert or another realtor or whatever space you work in or another company or an organization. You want to find

[00:27:05] the most expensive problem that you can solve for them because they have a line item in their budget to pay for that solution right now. So I have to go here. AI, how is this affecting people and what should they be thinking? Because I do believe a lot of people out there right now or just saying, I'm just going to run this all through AI. I can do it on my own. This is, what is kind of a myth

[00:27:35] around licensing and around AI right now? See, I only have like two minutes to answer this question. We could do a whole, we could do a whole show and this one's one of my favorite things to talk about. I'm like two minutes to end because I'm like, oh my God. You have to. You have to because people ask me. The question I get is, why would somebody license my IP if they can just go recreate it with AI? And so, and that was actually a concern in 2022 and 2023 that we were keeping an eye on. And I am so grateful that as a human race,

[00:28:04] we've realized that actually nothing can replace your unique intellectual property. So what has happened, just giving you guys some numbers, we do a lot of studying with the future of jobs report. And so even when we work with our clients, we compare the model we're building to the future of jobs report to make sure the licensing model we're building will hold up in 2030 and as far away as we can see. Super important thing, right? And so with that being said, we know that 74% of organizations

[00:28:32] actually bought AI solutions in the last couple years. Of them, only 4% of them are using them well. And we know that 63% have reported the fact that everything is failing and they're starting from scratch. So in light of this jumping on board and going back, what we have really seen, and this is really larger corporations particularly, is they're saying, no, no, no, we really value the human. We want the human. We want to know that this has been deployed. That is number one. Number two, anything that can be created by AI

[00:29:02] doesn't always deliver a nuanced, predictable, transformational, measurable result that can be customized within an organization for their use case. That's very, very important. That's when AI gets really bumpy as there's a generic solution plugged into a very unique landscape and that's why it's failed again and again. What we're doing with our clients, because I'm an AI-forward company, I actually love AI, we are number one, first and foremost, protecting our IP and all of our clients'

[00:29:32] IP from AI. So that's the first thing, just making sure all of your contracts have an AI use clause that you're not allowing your clients to just upload their things to AI or your things that you give them to AI. Part two, we stack AI on top of many licensing programs. So that is licensing model number seven now. We have seven different strategic licensing models that our companies kind of choose from as they go through and it's where we take your IP

[00:30:01] and then we build some sort of amazing AI tool on top of it because the companies are going to ask for that. So what can we build that you can build that you don't have to have a hundred thousand dollar developer to build that increases your clients' wins? And so we're actually looking at our clients' programs in the lens of both the content of what we're licensing and then there are four different AI models that our clients are stacking on top. Everything from like a chat bot, which is super simple,

[00:30:29] to actually a custom AI LMS that goes with their content. So it's a really important question. I love having this question asked because I think it's going to be discussed and it's really important. And so identifying AI as a future of your business is very, very important to do. How can your IP work in harmony with AI? And that's now how we're licensing and package programs. So I brought you in

[00:30:59] as an expert. I had a in-person event recently and it was so great to see people's faces because you allowed for a completely different doorway to be opened. You know, we're really one that scales, you know, scaling isn't necessarily meaning the more hustle, more funnels, more launches, the blah, blah, blah. But it's like smarter use of expertise that they have already built.

[00:31:29] This is the best part. People are like, wait a second, I can go back to this old piece of information and utilize it and all this. And what I heard from you is that methods, frameworks, courses, they're not just products, they're assets that can be licensed, multiplied, put to work in rooms that I remember the faces, they never considered. So I can't thank you enough. You have, you have all of these

[00:31:58] different things that you offer. You've got the content licensing roadmap, the Suite Life Entrepreneur Podcast. But where can people connect with you and learn more about scaling through licensing? I would just love to invite anybody to go to aprilbeach.com. Just like you're going to the beach, just remember me as the little surfer girl or the 50-year-old surfer lady now. And visit me there. We get it. We get it. We all understand that.

[00:32:27] Visit me there. And there's just so much information. We have a fact page. But I have an open Q&A every single month where there's no agenda, where people just come in and bring their ideas and they're like, is this licensable? What can I do? It's literally my favorite thing to do. For 45 minutes a month, we just workshop and it's that same thing that you were saying in your group. People are just like, I can't believe it. So it's a gift to be able to see people see that for themselves in a way that

[00:32:56] they couldn't see it before. So it's powerful. We as a company are going to, this is initiative for 2027. So thank you so much. And if this episode sparked new ideas for your business, here's your invitation. Take a moment right now. Subscribe to Relaunch to a Rich Life if you haven't done so already. And if you would rate, review, it would mean so much to me. Your reviews help

[00:33:26] more founders, experts, find these type of conversations right here and now and discover new ways to build businesses and have those rich lives that they actually really love. So if you know another entrepreneur who's ready to think bigger about their expertise, make sure you share this episode with them. Are they not thinking what we just discussed? Because they need to. Because your one share might be the catalyst

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