In this episode I'm going to tell you about a young technical consultant who learned the secret to success. I've spent the last 20 years as a top performer in some of the largest technology and consulting companies in the world. Now I'm helping technical professionals like you dramatically accelerate your career by cultivating an expert personal brand and building a business around your expertise. The real question is this, how can we pull forward raises and promotions? Or build six, seven, or even eight figure expert businesses without spending all our money or becoming a stranger to our families? This show is here to give you the answers. Join me on this journey and learn how to start, build and scale your expert brand and business. My name is David Ziembicki, welcome to the build your expert business show.

Hey verybody. Dave Ziembicki here. So there I was, a young technical consultant trying to advance in my career. The thing is I was working hard, but no one really saw how much potential I had. Big problem was that I was working 80 to a hundred hours a week delivering great results, but no one outside of my projects even knew about it. That resulted being on the road 100% of the year at projects with no career advancement to show for it and almost burning out in my late twenties. Then, as is if by chance, something amazing happened. I found a mentor who revealed a strategy to me that skyrocketed my career. A strategy my mentor revealed was how to think about and manage my career like it was a business. I now call this an expert business. The business of being an expert. He said, think about the functions of business, has strategy, product development, sales, marketing and support.

Within those they aim for continuous improvement. He asked me how successful a company would be with poor products and no marketing. He then challenged me to think about each of those functions and how they apply to an individual building their career. Here's what I came up with. It became the foundation for successful career and millions of dollars of income. First is strategy, setting a direction, goals, and building a roadmap to get there. My goal was to become a world class infrastructure architect, able to head the most complex projects in the industry. The next business function is product. As a technical professional, your product is your expertise and the results you're able to deliver are another part of your product. I put a major focus on improving my product, my expertise through learning certification, seeking out other mentors. I not only build out my technical expertise, but I also dove deep on project management, development methodologies, automation, and other areas related to my expertise to broaden out my skillset.

Over time. I sought out projects that will let me gain a diverse set of experiences. One of the biggest benefits of a consulting career, the fact that you get additional experience very quickly compared to just working in the same job. You know you're in, you're out at an individual company. The next business function I rejected for a long time, but thanks to my mentors questions, it finally clicked and that function is sales and marketing. I was the type that didn't really like salespeople or what I thought was the selling process and being like a used car salesman. My mentor and helped me see past that mental block. He said, remember to be successful, the business of you must have a sales and marketing function. He said, it's not about making the customer audience something they don't want to do. It's about demonstrating your expertise so that they want more.

The key was building a personal brand around my expertise. I learned that if you want to position yourself as an expert, you need to provide rather than promote. Getting over that hurdle and starting to build my personal brand as an expert was the single biggest factor in my success. The final business function is support. Great businesses support their customers. With an expert business. You have many customers. Your employer is your customer. After all, they're the ones paying you, your colleagues or customers. The customers of your employer are your customers. Again, as the individual expert delivering your product, which is your expertise along with great support in terms of guidance, assistance and followup is critical. The ladder is what people will remember, not the specifics of your technical solution. To this day, 20 years after some of my projects, people still remember the quality of the process and the documentation that I provided.

In many cases, great support means helping others one-on-one. It's often the actions that you take that don't scale are the ones that grow your influence and personal brand the most. Once I understood that the expert business model, I realized that most of the highly successful people I was around in technology and consulting, we're doing exactly this. Whether they conceptualized it this way or not, the people who were publishing books, speaking at conferences, getting the strategic projects and advancing rapidly. They weren't just delivering great results. They were sharing them and in so doing, elevating their personal brand and influence. Within a year of managing my career like a business, I earned a promotion at a sizable raise. Over the next five years, I doubled my salary and five X of my total income. Over the years, I continued to evolve this notion of an expert business and train and mentor others on these ideas.

I came to call this the expert business model and I now summarize it with four functions: Strategy - setting your direction, goals and roadmap. Product - your expertise, building it up over time. Marketing - your personal brand and value - not self promotion. And then finally, Support - actually providing value to your potential customers. With technical professionals, I find the marketing function, particularly personal branding is their biggest roadblock. I just did an entire episode outlining the three critical mistakes technical professionals make with personal branding and the largest is doing nothing. The opportunity in ROI is so large and has had such a big impact on my life though that I'm dedicating the second half of my career to helping technical professionals manage their careers like businesses to get the same results. I have the last point I want to land in this episode. Is it just like a business?

These functions don't all need to be entirely done by you. Top executives and senior resources build personal teams to support their careers. To learn more about building an expert personal brand, head over to expert brand system.com for a free video outlining my complete system and my agency has done for you services for building and launching an expert personal brand in as little as eight weeks. All you need to do is bring your expertise, then leverage our state of the art team tools and services to build and run your expert personal brand for you. Imagine our team working for you, accelerate your career, check out how over at expertbrandsystem.com. So I want to thank you for listening to the episode today and if you haven't already, I want to do to remind you to subscribe to this podcast and then head over and please leave us a rating and a review. I want to hear feedback on these episodes, whether the length is right at the topic area, the depth that we're going into, whatever your feedback is, I'd like to hear it, and we're going to continuously improve this thing over time, and I wanna make sure we're taking it in a direction that's going to provide the most value to you. So if you haven't already, again, please subscribe and then head over to give us a rating and review. Make sure that we read all of those, and then we'll take some action on that feedback. Thanks.

Success requires taking action and definitive steps toward your goals every day. This is the difference between success and failure. I challenge you to take action today on the things you learned in this episode and join us on the path to success.