The 7% Club

Episode 45: Why Writing a Book is One of the Smartest Moves You Can Make as a Service Provider

• Jenny Stilwell

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In this episode of The 7% Club Podcast, I dive into one of the most powerful strategic moves a business owner can make: Writing a Book.

I share why a book is far more than a passion project or a nice-to-have. It’s a credibility booster, a clarifier of your intellectual property (IP), and a door opener to new opportunities. From sharing my personal journey of writing two books (and a third in the works) to practical advice on mapping your IP and building a book structure, this episode is packed with insights for any consultant, coach, advisor or agency owner who’s been thinking “one day” they’ll write a book.

If you’re ready to scale your impact, stand out in a crowded market, and finally make sense of all the knowledge sitting in your head - this episode is your starting point.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Why writing a book is a strategic business asset, not just a personal goal
  • How publishing boosts your authority, visibility and trust
  • The unexpected power of clarifying your IP through the book-writing process
  • The role of stories and case studies in making your book resonate
  • A clear starting point: how to extract and structure your IP into a book
  • How to move from “I’ll do it someday” to taking action

📌 Key Takeaways:

  • Authority: A book instantly elevates your credibility and sets you apart in your industry.
  • IP Clarity: The process helps you distill years of experience into structured, repeatable frameworks.
  • Client Attraction: A book pre-sells your expertise and helps prospects self-select before they even contact you.
  • Framework First: Don’t start with the writing - start by mapping your IP and refining your core methodologies.
  • Keep It Clear: Aim for clarity, not complexity - structure your content around 3–5 big ideas or stages.

Thinking about writing a book? Start with what you already have. Document your frameworks, processes, and client stories. Whether you finish the book or not, the act of getting your IP out of your head and into a structure will transform how you communicate, pitch, and scale.

The 7% Club | A practical & inspiring book for founders and CEOs

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The 7% Club audiobook - Jenny Stilwell

If this episode gave you a push to finally start writing your book - or even just start organising your IP - reach out! I’d love to hear your thoughts or answer your questions.

Connect

💡 Need help scaling your business from 7 to 8 figures? Get in touch jenny@jennystilwell.com.au

Remember: Better strategy, better business, better life! See you next time!

SPEAKER_00:

Hi there, this is Jenny Stilwell and welcome to the 7% Club podcast for the 7% of business owners who break through 2 million in sales and for those on track to join this club. If you want to upscale from seven to eight figures, you'll need to make some shifts in how you grow, structure and lead your company because you cannot get to 10 million in the same way that you reached your first one or two million in revenue. This podcast is to help you upscale. In today's episode of the 7% Club podcast, the topic is create a brilliant business asset, write your book. So today I want to talk about something that's not just a game changer for your credibility and visibility, but it's also one of the best ways to scale your impact and clarify your thinking and help build your business. And that is writing a book. So if you're a service provider, a consultant, a coach, an advisor, accountant, financial planner, marketing agency owner, writing a book is may be something that you put out there for one day. And I've had these conversations with many people. Yes, I'm going to write a book. When? Oh, I don't know, but I'm going to write one. It's that someday goal. Something for when you finally got the time to do it. But the thing is, writing a book is not just about I guess, the legacy of the book or, you know, being able to tell people you've written a book. It's about creating a strategic asset for your business. It really is. So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through why it's a smart move for service-based business owners, how to get started without overwhelm, and a really practical first step, which is documenting your IP and turning that into your book's structure. So I've written two books and I'm now working on my third. So I do know what I'm talking about when it's from the perspective of a service provider, taking the time and finally understanding the benefits of writing a book. With my first book, I had no idea and no plan and I had no marketing strategy in place. I just wanted to write the book. And I think it was probably about 20 years in the making. It's fair to say. Having said all of that, nine years later, it's still being sold around the world. It's still being read. And it's a core part of my IP. It's a really important pedestal in my whole IP structure. So why write a book? I think number one, it certainly builds authority and trust straight away. And you tell people you've written a book. And it's just a shift. And you could have two consultants side by side. One's published a book, one hasn't. Somewhere in your mind, your thinking goes straight to the one that's published the book as the one that has the most credibility. So it just positions you as someone who has deep knowledge about something, someone who's a strategic thinker. someone who's ahead of the rest of the pack. And it's a real difference that having a book can make. It just shifts you away from everyone else into a category of your own. Secondly, it clarifies your own IP. That's the biggest part of writing your book, just getting clarity around what your IP is, what you've been doing for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years. and how to get your own clarity around that so you can communicate that to other people. And it's all about the frameworks that you've created, the stories that you have with all the people you've worked with over the years, your philosophies about what you do. And you can turn, you know, really vague processes or things that are just in your mind somewhere into structured tools. And it makes everything else in your business stronger, from your pitch decks to your website pages to how you onboard your clients. And the stories that are part of that are really important. Now, I know from the two books that I've written, the stories that are scattered through there and in the more specific case studies I've included in the book, people love them. They absolutely love them because you self-select and You read a few stories and then you come across one that sounds just like your business or just like what you're trying to do or just like the roadblock that you've got. And you're completely engaged in it. How did this person get through? What strategies did they use? And it's the stories that are so compelling. I've had so many people say to me, I love the stories. I love reading the stories. So just remember that when you come to think about writing your own book, pull together all of those stories. And then number three, it really opens doors. And I know this firsthand. When you've written a book, you know, it's easy to get on a podcast as a guest. People want to come on your podcast if you have one as a guest, because you just have a different level of credibility. It's I know with my book, certainly the second one, because I didn't promote or do anything with the first one, that with the second one, you know, people would read the book and they would get in touch with me and they've already self-selected. They already wanted to work with me. So when we get on a call, it's a discussion. It's not me trying to sell or convince or do anything. I listen. We talk about their business. And that's the sale process because the book has already sold my capabilities and my services. And any service provider can achieve the same results. So three reasons for writing a book. Where do you start? Okay, start with what you already have, your own IP. And it can be pretty daunting and overwhelming when you sit down and think, okay, I'm going to write a book. What's my IP? Okay. And particularly if you've been in business for a long time and you've got so much IP you can draw from, you've got articles you've written, you've got blog posts, you've got frameworks and templates and checklists and schematics you've used with your clients to explain concepts and take them through a process that gives them enlightenment at the end and transformation in their business and step-by-step systems and questions you take clients through and, you know, slide decks and workshops you've run. You know, the amount of IP is vast. And if you just think about the core work that you do with your clients and the challenges that you help them with and how you do that, that sits at the foundation of your IP framework. And if you're still stuck with this, ask your clients about what they think. So read or listen to the testimonials they've given you to get to the essence of your true value. So what are the core stages or steps in the journey that you take your clients on? What questions or problems do you solve repeatedly? If someone wanted to learn about what you do and how you do it, where would you take them first? If you sat down to start that explanation journey, where would you take them first? And I'm not saying this part is easy. It's difficult. It requires a lot of thinking. I think it took me probably three months of solid thinking and analysis and fine-tuning and culling and clarifying to work through what my core IP was and that I take my seven-figure clients through. But the beauty of that process is once you've mapped out your IP, that then leads into creating a book structure from that IP. Now, when I was at that point, I thought, great, and I'd mapped it all out and I had about 11 or 12 big chunks of IP for my book. Then I started to do some research and talk to other people who'd written books and also read books on how to write a book. And I was told, no, no, no, no, that's far too much. You can't have 11 or 12. Try and distill your IP down to maybe five core principles, seven max, ideally three. And I thought, oh my God, this is ridiculous. I've been working for years and years and years. I have got so much IP. I create so much value for the different clients I work for and different aspects of their business. How can I possibly take all that experience and distill it down to three, five or seven core concepts? Well, I did. So what I did for the 7% Club book, I ended up grouping my core processes and methodologies down into three big, and they're big, chunks. Simplify and structure, develop and lead, and strategize and scale. So those big three chunks set up the key areas that seven-figure companies have need to focus on in order to make the shift from doing what they've always done to get to that point, to then taking their business and turning it into a far more strategic, well-structured and more professionally run company that's capable of growing to eight figures and beyond. So for example, in simplifying structure, in that big chunk, there's four key steps. In develop and lead, there's several key steps. And in strategize and scale, there's several key steps. Because when you're looking at the strategy for your business, it's not one step. You can break it down into several different components. And we're all pretty much the same. There can be one big thing that you're looking at, and it breaks out into smaller pieces underneath. So once you've worked out that IP, you can define the core stages of your methodology. Like I've just explained where I had simplify and structure, develop and lead and strategize and scale. So then when you've got your big pieces, whether you've got three, five or seven steps or six or however many you want, but not too many, when you've got the model for that IP, then that becomes the structure of your book. So once I'd worked through all of that, and as I said, it took three months of serious thinking and working. Once I had those big three chunks worked out, that was the main part of the book. And I had things that I wanted to talk about before that, for example, where the 7% came from and what that was all about, and then following up from there. But that gave me the whole structure and the the chapter structure for the book. And then once you've got those, you can think about case studies, the tools that you use, the philosophies that you have relevant to those different stages or chunks, the client stories, or the ideas and the processes that fit into that stage. So that's your raw material. And then as a bit of a litmus test, when you've put that broad structure together based on your IP, Then you need to be quite ruthless and ask yourself, what I'm putting in this chapter, does it matter? Or am I just putting it in because I know it? So you've got to be really ruthless with that. Just because you know something or you think you're a bit clever at something, it may not belong in your book. It might belong somewhere else. Or maybe it's just not as important to the reader as you think it might be. So you've got to really challenge yourself. Does it matter? And then you've got to ask yourself, what do I need to explain that's important? So yes, this part matters. It's really important. Well, what is the important thing? What do I need to explain to people? Why is this important? What do I want them to understand? And then am I giving the reader the next steps? So why is this important? What am I trying to explain in this that's important? And how can the reader take action? And then that gives your book a clear flow. And I know with my book, both of them actually, I've had feedback that people love the stories, as I said before, but they also love the fact that there's an action plan. They can take actions from the book and implement it in their own business. I've even had new clients come to me and they've pretty much implemented the entire book, but they still want to work with me. It's pretty amazing. I mean, I do the same thing. I read books and I implement what's in the book. But then the opportunity to work with the person who wrote the book would be amazing because then the depth you get from that experience can make so much difference to your business. That can really be transformational. And that's why writing a book is really important. So your goal with all of this is not complexity. It doesn't need to be complex. You want it to be clear. You want clarity. So when you go through this process of working out what your IP is, structuring it into three, five or seven big chunks and then identifying the why, what and how. Why does it matter? What's important that I need to communicate? And how am I giving away the next steps for the reader? Once you've done that, you've got your clarity and then you can start to populate the book with your stories and your IP and your checklists and so on. So finally, if you have been thinking about writing a book for a while and you're a service provider, I strongly urge you to just start with this process. And worst case scenario, you don't write the book, but you've clarified your IP and you've got some framework around your IP, that's going to be hugely beneficial to your business anyway. How you communicate with your clients and how you communicate that in all your content and then the conversion you get from that because people will get it. It will come out of your head and into a format or a framework that other people understand. So I strongly urge you to start working through this. And the process of documenting what you know is going to elevate everything else you do in your business. It really is. And if you start with your frameworks, you turn them into structure and And then you build out what you want to say. It just changes how you approach your communication. It also changes how you feel about your IP. It kind of up-levels you because you're not just talking about a generic service or outcome like everyone else. This is your IP and this is how you do it. So... Publishing a book is really an essential asset for your business. It's not just for your marketing, but it's for deepening your own thinking and your own authority. So hopefully this brief overview will give you some food for thought to start putting together a structure and a plan for your book. So I hope you found this podcast useful. And if you've got any feedback or you are starting to write a book, send me a message or email me. I'd love to hear about it. Bye for now. That's all for today's episode of the 7% Club. Thank you so much for listening. Better strategy, better business, better life.