HOW TO SCALE A BUSINESS USING YOUR OWN BRILLIANCE

Posted by Renwick on January 5th, 2021

What is Brilliance Extraction? It is a powerful method to scale your business. Let me explain.

Brilliance Extraction is about taking the stuff that you have in your head, i.e., your expertise and your wisdom you have gathered over many years, and making it into a system. It's this intangible wisdom that you have that becomes systematized and then becomes accessible to others.

Brilliance is, of course, a flattering term, and it's true. And at the same time, it includes things that are maybe not things that you think of as being outright brilliant. It's not all about stuff that you would storm off with to the patent office, but it's the kind of knowledge that is necessary to operate and grow your business. It's the expertise that, if you're without it, you (or someone else) is going to hurt. And so that's what brilliance and Brilliance Extraction is about. It's about preserving and protecting what I call intellectual capital. It's much broader than just intellectual property. Intellectual capital is much bigger than that.

You have a business. You might be the owner who created it all. Likely you have a few key people around you who you've taught some things, too. However, I'm willing to bet that there is a wealth of knowledge that only you have. It's only in your head. The same can also happen to some of your key people. It's only in their head. Therefore it's not usable by other people. When they don't show up someday, which someday that will be the case, then you don't have it anymore. That's the intellectual capital that I'm talking about.

People sometimes get the advice, "You should write this down, because if anything ever happens to you, we won't know how to do such and such..."

It is true. Of course, there are a few issues with that. Number one, most people don't like doing it.

Number two, they are often too busy to do it. So they think I'll do it tomorrow, I'll do how to scale your business it next year, I'll do it in 10 years, and that day never comes. Unfortunately, they end up taking much of their expertise to the grave. It's a massive brain drain. The third issue is that they can't write it all down. Even if they're willing to write it down, a lot of it, they cannot write it down. The reason lies in the way we learn. First, we find out we don't know something, and we have an interest or a need for learning it. While we're learning it, we're actually aware that we're learning it. But then, as we become good at it, now we start to become more and more automatic in applying that knowledge. Then sometime later, we completely forgot that we learned it. That happens for a lot of things.

Many Brilliance Extraction clients say, "Wow, I didn't even realize there was so much that I know that I totally forgot I know." And that is what makes it so challenging to write it down even if you have the best intentions. That also makes it hard to be an effective trainer because you leave out many stuff that you don't even remember is essential. You do these things automatically.