Entrepreneurial You: Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams, and Thrive
Dorie Clark, 2017
You can be well known in your field and still live on one salary. Dorie Clark, laid off from a newspaper the day before 9/11, built an income from seven sources and interviewed people who took a similar path. You will learn the order in which to build that kind of income: first trust, then the nerve to name a price, then testing a new idea with a small step.
Who it is for
For people who know their craft well but live on a single salary or sell nothing but their hours. And for anyone who has long thought about coaching, a course or a podcast but has no idea where to start or how to ask to be paid for it.
I had signed on to the industry at the exact moment it started its inexorable collapse, but I couldn't see it at the time.
Laid off the day before 9/11
In 2000 Dorie Clark took a job at a Boston weekly and was sure she would be a journalist for the rest of her life. Newspapers were living on generous advertising money back then, and the internet seemed so minor that one connected computer was enough for the whole newsroom. On September 10, 2001, Clark was laid off. The next day came the 9/11 attacks, and finding a new job in journalism became almost impossible.
She got by on freelance assignments, then worked as a spokesperson on political campaigns, one for governor and one for president, and later started her own business. From that autumn she took away the conclusion the whole book rests on: income from a single employer only looks safe.
You may know a situation like this. You are good at what you do, your colleagues value you, but the money comes from one place, and what you mostly sell is your hours. And the thought of a course, consulting or a podcast of your own runs into two questions: where to start, and how to ask to be paid for it at all.
Clark, a former journalist, took on those questions like an investigation. She interviewed coaches, consultants, podcast hosts and online course creators who make money from their knowledge, and she tested their techniques on herself. By her account, in 2016 those techniques added $193,000 to her income compared with the year before.
The book came out in 2017. Its point is that knowledge can be turned into several sources of income, but in a particular order: first earn trust, then find the nerve to name a price, then test new things with small steps. Further on you will see how that order worked for the people in her book and where it breaks down.
One salary is like one stock
Few people keep all their savings in the stock of a single company: if it goes under, everything is gone. Even people who have never bought a share know this rule. Yet most people hold their income exactly that way: one salary, one boss, one industry.
Clark sees this as a dangerous habit. If you live on a single salary from a single employer, she writes, you may be asking for trouble. Her own story proved it: a newspaper that seemed secure let her go in one day, and she had no backup source.
This is where her key term comes from: the portfolio career. It is work built from several sources of income that support one another. By the time the book came out, Clark herself had seven sources of income: books, speaking, teaching at a business school, consulting, executive coaching, online courses and affiliate marketing, that is, recommending other people's products for a percentage. If one stream dips, the others take up the slack.
What matters is how Clark looks at risk. The usual view is that a salaried job is safe and a business of your own is dangerous. She suggests seeing entrepreneurship as an insurance policy for your career. The real risk is depending on one decision by one boss.
There is a money reason too. Clark notes that it is very hard to earn big money from fees for service alone, that is, from selling hours: everyone has the same number of hours in a week. A course or a book is sold to many people at once, and its ceiling is higher.
Turned into steps, Clark's idea looks like this:
• Work out the shares. Write down where your money came from over the year and see how much of it comes from the main source.
• Look for a new form for the same knowledge. Clark's books, talks, courses and consulting are all about one subject; only the way she sells it changes.
• Don't drop your main support. A new stream grows alongside your main job, not in its place.
A common mistake: reading the portfolio as a call to grab everything at once. Clark's seven sources appeared over years, and each one rested on the one before. The next chapter shows what exactly they rested on.
About the author
Dorie Clark is an American marketing strategy consultant and executive coach who teaches at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. She is also the author of “Reinventing You” and “The Long Game”.
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