How To Become A Thought Leader - With Lacy Boggs

Tom Bailey, Founder of Succeed Through Speaking, Interviews Lacy Boggs 

Lacy Boggs is a content strategist and director of The Content Direction Agency. She helps business owners create content in their own voice that supports their business goals.

Why you've got to check out Lacy's episode: 

- Discover how Lacy helps visionaries, authors, coaches and people with a big personality brands, influence the conversation in their industry.

- Understand the challenge these businesses face with the lack of time as their business grows and how this limitation prevents them from creating the content they could be creating.

- Learn why it's unhelpful to post generic social media content i.e. quotes and short overused hints and tips and how this means you just become part of the noise that's already on social media. And why producing content now could help you six months down the line.

- Why CEO's and business owners need to create time in their day or week and the power of accountability and surrounding yourself with other business owners facing similar challenges.

- How to get access to Lacy's Thought Leader Lab and how you can book a free call with Lacy to discuss what it takes to become a Thought Leader and what this might look like for you and your business.

Resources / Link

https://lacyboggs.com/book-a-call

https://lacyboggs.com/blog

TRANSCRIPT

014 - Lacy Boggs

Tom Bailey: Hello and welcome to the Flow And Grow Expert Interviews. The place for experts and entrepreneurs who want high value ideas to boost business results.

Hello, I'm Tom Bailey. And I'm joined today by Lacy Boggs, who is the director of the Content Direction Agency. So Lacy, hello, and a very warm welcome to today's episode. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming then. Whereabouts are you in the world right now?

Lacy Boggs: I live in Colorado between Denver and Boulder.

Tom Bailey: Beautiful. Thank you so much. And just to get onto the subject of Lacy. So Lacy is a content strategist and helps small business owners to create content in their own voice that really supports their business goals. And by the way, I've been checking out Lacey's blog and it's amazing. So, you need to check it out and I'll share a link below this episode.

The title for today is How To Become A Thought Leader. And Lacy is going to show us how to do that in just under seven minutes. And Lacy, first question is who are your ideal clients?

Lacy Boggs: Sure. So ideal clients for, for thought leadership in specific would be anybody who is a visionary who has a big vision for their business or for the world who wants to influence the conversation in their industry.

Also, authors coaches, people with a big personality brand.

Tom Bailey: Great. And, and these people with big personality brands, authors, coaches, business owners, what, what challenges do they typically face from your perspective?

Lacy Boggs: Sure. So, a lot of times what's happened is that their business has grown and they've run, they've run out of time to do the deep thinking, the visionary work and the writing, the thought leadership that they may have enjoyed doing early on.

So probably time is the biggest challenge.

Tom Bailey: And, and would you say this this time almost prevents them from doing the creativity? That, that they're so great at?

Lacy Boggs: A 100 percent, because it's not just the time to create, but also the time to, you know, consume other people's content to have the big ideas to do the work, to come up with those thought leader ideas.

Tom Bailey: Yeah. And I guess if they're not creating content and creating thought leader ideas. What, what impact does this typically have on them? You know, in the, in the short term or even in the long-term?

Lacy Boggs: Sure. So, what can happen is you can start to become part of the noise online, right? And nobody wants to just be part of the noise.

You start sharing soundbite content on your social media or just sharing other people's quotes or things like that. And that doesn't help you stand out. And so, when you start neglecting this, you're neglecting your leads short-term or long-term right. I have a very long lead funnel for my business.

And so, if I stop producing content now, I will feel it in six months to a year. For sure.

Tom Bailey: Yeah, I see. Perfect. And what's one valuable piece of advice, therefore, that you would give someone to really help them solve this problem in their life or business.

Lacy Boggs: So really it becomes like as the CEO, as the business owner, as the visionary, you have to make that a priority.

Right. And so that can mean a lot of different things for different people. It might mean getting help producing some of the content. It might mean that you take something else off your plate, so you have time and it also might mean getting in a group to help you do this so that you can prioritize it.

Because if people are anything like me, if I say to you, I'll do it, I will do it. And if I just say to me, I'll do it there, it might not get done.

Tom Bailey: But it's really, it's all about having that accountability. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I understand. Because like you say OK. I can write a long to do list, but unless I've got someone to hold me accountable, they're probably not going to get done are they?

Lacy Boggs: Well, and it's that they become those things that are important, but not urgent. And so, they fall off the bottom of our to-do list.

Tom Bailey:  Yeah. Yeah. I've got a few of those there for me at the minute. Right? So, given this, what is one valuable free resource or how can you help people with this problem personally?

Lacy Boggs: Yeah so, I've, I've just started a new group of program that we're, we're filling right now. And it's going to be a six month experience. I'm calling it the Thought Leader Lab. And the idea is that it's an intimate group of business owners who are going to go through a framework I've developed to help them come up, you know, find this time again and come up with those visionary ideas and then get them out into the world.

How are we going to publish it? How are we going to share it, etc. So that's what I'm doing right now. And I've got I'm doing free calls. Anybody who'd like to talk to me about what it takes to become a thought leader or what that looks like. I'd love to talk to you.

Tom Bailey: Nice. And how would they book a call with you?

Lacy Boggs: Sure. It's at Lacyboggs.com/book-a-call  with hyphen. So book hyphen a hyphen call.

Tom Bailey: Excellent, thank you. What I'll do is I'll post a link to that URL just below this video or podcasts, so people can click that and they can dive in and get booked on to have a great conversation with Lacy herself. And another question slightly off topic, you could say it is. What is your, what would you say is your greatest failure that you've ever made either in life or business? And what did you learn from it?

Lacy Boggs: I was thinking about this before we got on the call. I think the biggest failure I made in business is. Listening to other people more than I listened to myself.

So around 2016, I decided that everybody else was building courses and doing passive income and all those things. So, I was going to do the same thing. So, I spent the entire year growing my email list in anticipation of selling these courses. I tripled my list in like six months, it was amazing. Did a launch, the launch didn't go as well as I wanted.

And I realized I hate launching. So, I spent a whole year growing my list with people who were interested in freebies and, and do it yourself type programs when really I like selling ‘done for you’ programs. And so that was a big aha moment for me. It's like, Oh, that's not good.

Tom Bailey: And, and the instant social media is full of the, the next best strategy.

Right. But it doesn't mean it's the next best strategy for you does it. So, and like I said, listen to your own intuition sometimes and go with what works for you and your clients.

Lacy Boggs: A hundred percent. I was ready to burn down the business at the end of that year, but I'm glad I didn't.

Tom Bailey: Yep. And you probably learned a little bit along the way as well.

I'm sure. Absolutely. And the final question from me today is, what is the one question that I should have asked you that will also add great value to this audience?

Lacy Boggs: So, I know that because CEOs and visionaries are busy. One question I get sometimes is can you outsource thought leadership content? And the answer is like, yes and no. So, you can't outsource the ideas. The ideas have to come from you. I can't crawl into your brain and figure out what the next big thing is. However, you can outsource the production. So, you know, we have an agency that employs writers to write content in other people's voice. And so, if you have the ideas, we can help turn them into brilliant content that you can share all over the place.

So, it's yes and no answer.

Tom Bailey: Great. Perfect. And I guess people can, can reach out again to Lacy if they do need any help or more advice on that subject. Absolutely. So Lacey, thanks again so much for your time, today. I really appreciate you sharing this message and there's a ton of value in such a short episode.

Lacy Boggs: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.