Leadership In Law Podcast

04 Make the Difference You Were Born to Make with Nicky Billou

• Marilyn Jenkins • Season 1 • Episode 4

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What if you could transform your professional life and find true balance, all while making a substantial income? This episode features the incredible stories of Nicky Billou  from The Thought Leader Revolution Podcast, as he navigates his path to success. Nicky, an immigrant from Iran, shares his journey inspired by his father's dedication to freedom and people-centric business principles. His insights into the entrepreneurial spirit, the power of solving problems, and the importance of building solid relationships will leave you inspired and motivated to rethink your approach to business.

This discussion underscores the crucial difference between being an expert and a thought leader, and why positioning yourself as a recognized authority can propel your career forward.

This episode also covers the importance of personal branding and how reflecting on your life experiences can help you uncover unique strengths. Discover the process of positioning yourself as a thought leader and capturing significant opportunities by overcoming industry-specific challenges. Tune in and equip yourself with the tools to enhance your professional impact and achieve sales success.

Nicky Billou is the number one international bestselling author of the book, Finish Line Thinking: How to Think and Win Like a Champion, The Thought Leader’s Journey: A Fable of Life and The Power Of Connecting: How To Activate Profitable Relationships By Serving Your Network.

He is an in-demand and highly inspirational speaker to corporate audiences such as RBC, Lululemon, Royal LePage and TorStar Media. He is an advisor and confidante to some of the most successful and dynamic entrepreneurs in Canada. He is the Cofounder of eCircle Academy (www.eCircleAcademy.com ) where he runs a yearlong Mastermind & Educational program. He’s working with coaches, consultants, corporate trainers, clinic owners, realtors, mortgage brokers and other service-based entrepreneurs, positioning them as authorities in their niche. He’s the creator of the Thought Leader/Heart Leader Designation.

Follow Nicky Billou on Social: LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins. Cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom. So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. I'm your host, marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming Nikki Ballou, who has been called the world's greatest podcast guest because he's been on 600 podcast shows. He always brings power, passion and actionable tips to every appearance. He's the number one international bestselling author of the book Finish Line Thinking how to Think and Win Like a Champion. The Thought Leader's Journey A Fable of Life and the Power of Connecting how to Activate Profitable Relationships by Serving your Network All sound incredibly exciting. He's a two-time New York Times best-selling author and he is in demand and highly inspirational speaker to corporate audiences such as RBC, lululemon, royal LePage and Tourstar Media. He's an advisor and confidant to some of the most successful and dynamic entrepreneurs in Canada. He's the founder of E-Circle Academy, where he runs a year-long mastermind and educational program, working with coaches, consultants, corporate trainers the list goes on Entrepreneurs positioning themselves as authorities in their niche. He's a creator, a thought leader, heart leader designation. Wow, nikki, thank you so much for being here, welcome.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, Marilyn. It's an honor to be here. I'm looking forward to it.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, I'm excited. Tell me your backstory. I'm excited to hear this.

Speaker 3:

Well, thank you, marilyn. So I'm actually originally an immigrant from the Middle East. I'm a Christian from Iran. When I was 11 years old, the Islamic Revolution took place in Iran and that was a cataclysmic event for myself and a lot of other people around the world. But my late father, god rest his soul he could see the writing on the wall that this wasn't going to be a great place to raise a Christian family, and so he and my mom, they made a plan and eventually they executed and got my brothers and I out of Iran. Now it took him about four years to get it all done. So from the time I was about 11 until I was almost 15, we settled in Toronto, canada, where I now live. Now you got to understand. I was a kid back then, right, I didn't want to leave my home, I didn't want to leave my friends, but in retrospect it was the single greatest thing mom and dad could have done for me and my two brothers, because they took us from a legacy of tyranny to a legacy of freedom.

Speaker 3:

I believe, marilyn, inside every human breast beats the living heart of freedom. Every man, every woman on this planet wants to chart their own course, wants to march to the tune of their own drummer. And I think this is important for entrepreneurs to understand, because the bedrock of entrepreneurship is freedom. Without freedom, you can't have free expression. Without free expression, you can't think of new, creative ways to get into business for yourself. Whether you want to get into law, whether you want to get into coaching or another form of business, you really need freedom. Freedom allows for free enterprise, which allows you to go and chart your own course, march to the tune of your own drummer.

Speaker 3:

And my late father. He believed in freedom too and, marilyn, if you met him, you'd like him. He was a good dude, you know. If you were looking for work, he'd sit you down in his office. He'd call all his entrepreneur buddies until he managed to find someone who needed somebody and he'd get you a job. If you were looking to start a business, he'd sit down with you, help you think through what you were going to do, get you access to capital, get you access to customers and get you going, even if you were getting into a competitive business with his own, because he didn't really believe in competition. And if you were a friend of his, you were trying to buy a car or a house and the bank wouldn't quite give you enough money, he'd top you up with a loan that he'd never let you pay back.

Speaker 3:

And a lot of people say to me when I tell them this story okay, nicky, this sounds like too good to be true. Come on, this is like a Hollywood thing, right? I go, no, no, no, man, this is real. This is my dad, this is the late great Napoleon Ballou. And then they'd say, well, why the heck would he do that? Well, there was two reasons. One is he was duty as a Christian to share those blessings with other people. But secondly, he did it all because he could. He was rich, he was successful, you know, and I wanted to be like my dad. I was a kid man. My dad was my hero, you know.

Speaker 3:

He'd always come and tell me son, remember, life is a people game, it's not a numbers or money game. And I go okay, dad. And then he'd say even business, son, is a people game game, it's not about money or numbers. And I'm like, okay, dad, you had me at the first part, but this part, come on. Without money, there's no way that you do business. He said that's true, son, but without people, there's no need for any money, there's no need for any business, because all business is is about solving problems for people for a profit. That's the purpose of business. You solve solving problems for people for a profit. That's the purpose of business. You solve acute problems for amazing people and you make an awesome profit. And that's the awe-inspiring purpose of every business.

Speaker 3:

And my dad would come and tell me Marilyn, he'd say, son, you need to believe in people. Everybody me, you, everybody needs someone to believe in them, because there's moments when we don't believe in ourselves. And it could be that little spark of belief that you give another person could be just what they need to take their life from tragic to magic. And he was, yeah, he was. And so when I got into business, I wanted to help people like my dad, I wanted to help other entrepreneurs because I thought entrepreneurs are great people, man. They're the ones that are making all the jobs happen, they're the ones that are helping everybody. So I got into the business of serving entrepreneurs. Now here's what I found in Maryland, a lot of entrepreneurs are good people with the highest ethics, the highest morals, but their sales and marketing skills well, to use a technical term, they stank.

Speaker 1:

You know what I mean they stank right.

Speaker 3:

So they were afraid of selling. They didn't want to pick up the phone or call somebody because they didn't want to be seen as pushy or salesy or reeking of commission breath when they walked into the room. You ever heard that technical phrase, commission breath before I?

Speaker 2:

have. I have yes.

Speaker 3:

It's a good one, right?

Speaker 3:

So? But you know, what happened was they wouldn't go after business they should have gone after. And then some charlatan marketer would come in with the highest sales and marketing skills, but like really low morals and ethics, and they'd go scoop up the business and they wouldn't care if they delivered. If they delivered, it was a happy accident, right? Everybody loses that way. The good person loses in business because they don't get the business, the client loses because they don't get their problem solved. And even the charlatan loses because you know the law of what goes around comes around. Well, that's a real thing. It's going to come and bite them in the butt at some point.

Speaker 3:

And I saw this and I I realized that I could help people because, a I believe in people and b I never looked at sales that way. I never looked at it as a bad thing. I thought sales is good man, sales is how you get to serve people. And in fact I I reframed sales as service sales, as love, like I'll only sell to you if I really like you. It's an act of love for me. If I don't like you, it's okay, you can go somewhere else. As far as I'm concerned, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3:

And that's a thing where we started to have really honest conversations with people about sales, because we told them listen, if you're not selling, you don't have a business, you have a hobby. You have a hobby and there's nothing wrong with hobbies, but don't pretend it's a business. If you want a business, you need to look yourself in the eye, in the mirror. You need to put on your big boy or big girl pants and say I need to get good at this, I need to become a master at this, because if I don't do that, I don't have a business. And that's what we've really helped a ton of people do is really understand how to get really, really good at sales.

Speaker 3:

And then we help them understand how to stand out, because in the world of business you know you need to be different from the other fella, because if you're not, they're going to buy from the other fella. They're not going to buy from you If you sound like everybody else. That's not a good thing. So we showed people how to be seen as the go-to authority in the space. So those are kind of like the two main ways that we've been going out and serving people. You know, for the last almost a decade or so and we love it. We love meeting really good people. We love meeting people that have big hearts and want to do the right thing and we love seeing them succeed. We love showing them how to become, you know, ethical at selling, ethical at marketing, but make no mistake about it, very also effective at selling and very effective at marketing.

Speaker 2:

I love that. You know, just by reframing the whole thought process around selling to being of service to someone else Again, you know I agree with you wholeheartedly. If I don't like you, if it doesn't sound or feel like a good fit, it won't make any difference. You know I don't want your business because you're not going to be happy. But reframing it, being of service, being, you know, going through businesshanded sharing and that sort of thing, I think is what makes a big difference in this world. So I noticed also that you have a way of adding $20,000 to $100,000 a year to a business. How is that something? Can you explain how that works? And I'm assuming it's how you do the sales?

Speaker 3:

For sure. Well, let me give you a story. I think it'll illustrate it quite nicely.

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

Okay, I think when you and I spoke off camera a few days ago, uh, before we decided to do this podcast together, I briefly mentioned to you that I had worked with somebody, um who had been, um, a uh, high level executive, like an executive vice president of a manufacturing company. His name was Carl Kramer. God rest his soul. He passed away from pancreatic cancer two summers ago around this time. But when I met Carl, he was a vibrant man of about 57. He'd been an executive vice president of a manufacturing concern and he made good money, like he was making $350,000 a year. But he was burnt out, like Carl was working 50, 60 hours a week or more and he's just like I've had it. So he he quit. He decided to become a business coach and um call himself your peak potentials business coach, which sounded really good but didn't really say anything. And he came to me because he loved what he did, he loved his hours, but he only made about $70,000 a year. So he took an 80% haircut, leaving his job to go work for himself. So I said, okay, carl, you obviously want to make more money. He says, yeah, I'd love it if I could just make the same amount of money I made back then but not work as hard. I said, okay. So the first thing we looked at for him and this is really important is well, who do you help? And he said, and I quote, I can help anybody with any business problem. And he was really proud of it. And I'm like, yeah, carl, that's why you're only making $70,000 a year. He said what do you mean? I said you don't stand out. Nobody knows your point of difference, why they should work with you. He said okay, how do we change that? I said, well, let's take a look at narrowing your focus from anybody with any business problem to a very specific group of people with a very specific business problem. So it took us a while. I'm not going to pretend this happened overnight, because it took a few months, two, three, four months to really hone it, but what we finally came up with was Carl loved scaling. That was his thing, he was good at it, he understood how to help people scale. That was like the last thing he did at the manufacturing company is. He was helping them scale. And for some reason, he really liked the idea of working with lawyers. It's really neat that I'm on a podcast that helps lawyers, right.

Speaker 3:

So so, and here's what he figured out, that he really wanted to work with solo practitioners, not partner law firms, right, and he wanted to work with successful solo practitioners. So they had to be at at least in or around the low seven figure mark in their billings, right, he didn't want to work with a brand new person with no business whatsoever. That didn't appeal to him. But if they had like low seven figures, let's say a million million, two a year in business, he came up with a formula to help them go to 2 million, 3 million, even 5 million, fairly rapidly, right, using what he would teach them. Good promise, right, really really good promise. So you know, not going after everybody, going after solo practitioner law firms with at least a million million, two in billings who were keen to double, treble, quadruple or more their business. Anyways, long story short is this positioning allowed him to attract a lot of these solo practitioner law firms to want to meet with him.

Speaker 3:

And Carl was old school, right, he was 57 when he met me and you know he was in his early sixts when he passed away. So he believed in the belly to belly like. He didn't do any of the zoom or the. He would just go meet you in person and he was very persuasive, very engaging. And I'll tell you something it took three, four months for us to get him to actually even come to this space. So for three, four, he didn't really grow his business too much, a little bit. But month four, boom, he popped. He went to $50,000 in billings for himself as a coach that month, working 25 hours a week.

Speaker 3:

Months five and six, he was right around $55,000, $50,000, $60,000. And then he got excited. He said I bet you I could do $100,000, 60,000. And then he got excited. He said I bet you I could do 100,000 in a month. So in month seven he amped it up and he made a hundred thousand dollars in in sales and buildings for himself. But you know what? He was working 50 hours a week. He didn't like that. He said, oh, my god, no, no, okay, we're gonna dial it back. I'm good with 50 000 a month if I can do 25, 30 hours a week. So he settled in at that and, um, he knew he could do more if he wanted to.

Speaker 3:

But he created a beautiful lifestyle for himself. He made a wonderful amount of money. Fifty thousand dollars a month, just to do the math is around six hundred thousand dollars a year. So he was making two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year more than he made. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year more than he made as an executive vice president while working half the hours like that is pretty darn amazing, and the key to it was carl became known for knowing something. So one of the questions that a lot of people ask me when I go, you know, and speak at events or on podcasts is so Nikki, you're into this thought leadership. Well, what is a thought leader and what's? What's the difference between an expert and a thought leader? And I go great question. So an expert is someone who knows something right. Experts are a dime, a dozen. Experts are usually invisible, right?

Speaker 3:

But a thought leader is someone who's known for knowing something. They're rare and valuable and they are professionally famous. Carl became professionally famous inside his little niche and that's how come he was able to become this successful and able to add not just a couple hundred thousand a year to his income. But honestly, he went up from 70,000 to 600,000. That's over a half a million dollars a year, which is a wonderful way to think about how to get your expertise position out there in the marketplace and that's exciting because you, you helped him create his, his coaching program around.

Speaker 2:

What he really enjoyed so is is it really work where you work in half the hours? You're doing everything you enjoy, you're sharing and helping other people grow? So, yeah, that's, that's quite interesting. And how did you help shape that? Was it strategy sessions that you're sitting with over determining what he really likes to do? See what lights him up? I'm just thinking about you know, any of our listeners that might want to talk with you about getting better and becoming a thought leader. How would that process work?

Speaker 3:

So so it started with an initial strategy session. That, you know, is one of the things that we ask you know anybody who's coming into our world to do with us? We call this strategy session a success session, right, so we kind of like our own branding about that. So, and in there we ask them some very specific questions and we get to the nub of what isn't working in their practice at the moment or in their business right now. Once we have that, we'll outline a roadmap to get the right answer, because getting the right answer can take time, like I got to.

Speaker 3:

Let everybody listening just know this is not a light switch, this is a process. You know what I mean. It is a process and if you are willing to go through the process, like Carl was over a period of time, you can get your results. Now are there people who get results faster. I'll tell you another story in a moment about someone who got his results a lot faster. But you got to be prepared for it not to be super, super quick. I'm not saying it's going to take years and years, but it's definitely going to take for the average person 90 days, 180 days or more to get this dialed in enough so that you see an appreciable difference in the process.

Speaker 2:

And that's just getting your thoughts together, becoming a thought leader, getting in front of the right people. That's not instantaneous. You can't even, you can't buy that. It's that something that takes time. True.

Speaker 3:

A hundred percent, but I'll tell you a story of a young man who did it relatively quickly because you know that does happen. So I don't want to pretend it never happens. Because it does happen I'd say probably 20% of the cases. The results are pretty quick, but usually there's reasons for that and those reasons aren't easily duplicatable for everybody. So one of the things because I've been a guest on a lot of podcasts, I went through a process of understanding how to be a podcast guest and have that podcast guest appearance result in leads, clients and sales. So I call the whole process get booked and get paid, kind of like it.

Speaker 2:

I like it. It's got a ring. Like it, it's got.

Speaker 3:

It's kind of yeah, in fact, we, I myself and and, and my, my mentor we, we wrote a book with that title and we, we, we teach a course with that title as well, a workshop. But here's what. Here's what we did. We taught the workshop. I mean, I taught the first one on my own, um, and there was a few people in the workshop. I mean, I taught the first one on my own, and there was a few people in the workshop, and one of them was a 38-year-old at the time, 39-year-old fellow from Belgium, and he, he was a coach who coaches you on how to create a garden. Of course, that is such an in-demand thing, right, I'm being a little facetious right now, but he loves it. He loves creating gardens and regenerative and sustainable farming and that's his thing. And he's Belgian and he has this lovely, thick Belgian accent, right? So English is not his first language, so his name is Mathieu Math machu machu mehus, but we call him matthew, my house, you know just that's his, that's his nickname.

Speaker 3:

He's just a fellow with high energy. So matthew comes, does our program and goes I love it, I'm gonna get on podcast.

Speaker 3:

He gets on a podcast his first week. He gets on the show and, from utilizing what we taught him, he made a 3,000 euro sale, which is just under 4,000 US dollars. Right, and he's all excited and he said okay, nikki, this is amazing and you know what I think? I want to. I want to come and be a part of your sales accountability program. I want to blow up my sales. So we got this accountability program. We call it 90K in 90 days, which is about adding $90,000 in additional sales to your business in the next 90 days. It's heavy duty on sales accountability. We get you on the court, feet to the ground, get it going. You know what I'm saying. So Matt should join us.

Speaker 3:

He's doing the podcast, guesting, and one of the things I told him that if he wanted to make 90 K in 90 days, he needed to, like, redouble his efforts and speak to more people. It's incredible how so many people don't understand this that sales involves having conversation with human beings. They're thinking, posting on social media. They're going to come to me. No, maybe they will, but no, don't rely on that. You go to them. You be the person. You got to be the suitor. Right, you got to be the suitor in this case. So Matthew was all over it. He started to like reach into his network. He started to go to past clients, he was going on podcasts, he got to speak at some events and, lo and behold, in 84 days he made 120,000 euro in sales. Wow, 84 days. Now, remember, he sells how to create a garden. Marilyn, how to create a garden.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's pretty niche, isn't it?

Speaker 3:

I mean, listen, do you wake up today going I need a new garden? You don't, right, Most people don't. But there's a way. If somebody can tie that to an emotional need or an emotional pain or an emotional want, you can make that sale. So Mathieu started to see there was people that love nature. There's people that are looking around and going. You know what World's going a little crazy. Maybe I should learn how to grow some of my own food. You know what I mean? And that's kind of the messaging he put together 120,000 euro, that's what Close to 140,000 USD, something along those lines.

Speaker 2:

84 days Wow.

Speaker 3:

So here's the story If you're in business for yourself, if you're an attorney and you've got a firm or whatever and you're thinking, oh my God, I want more clients, I want more of this, I want more of that One of the things that'll get have you get more clients, get more leads is you need to be mentored by someone like myself who's going to show you how to rewire how you think about selling, because the reason you don't have more sales, the reason you don't have more clients, the reason you don't have more leads, is because you are not attracting them to yourself. Your attitude about sales, what you believe is possible in selling, is not positive. I submit that you probably have a and again we're going to use that technical term a stinky attitude about selling Stinky, and we need to rewire that so you have a beautiful attitude about selling. The people who are good at sales are people who love sales. That just makes sense, doesn't it? The people who are not good at sales are the people who hate it, look down their noses at it and think there's something wrong with it.

Speaker 3:

But here's the facts. You can continue to do that and you can struggle with sales, okay, or you can choose to say I'm going to change my attitude and I don't want to struggle with sales anymore. I want it struggle with sales anymore. I want it to come easy, I want it to flow. The father of modern psychology is a fellow named dr william james, and when they asked him what was the most startling discovery that psychology has made and this was 100 years ago he said that a human being can change the circumstances of their life by changing the attitudes of their mind mindset exactly very good, that's.

Speaker 2:

That's very interesting and I love it. Even with gardening he made that kind of money and I guess you know there is that is kind of a thing going around people growing, uh, food in their yard instead of grass. You know, in some locations it is an interesting hobby that a lot of people have and so that's very interesting. So how would you go about creating a personal brand, a compelling personal brand? If you were, say, a solo lawyer, like the gentleman was working with you know, to become a thought leader, what would you suggest? The starting point would be a thought leader.

Speaker 3:

What would you suggest? The starting point would be Okay, great question. So, honestly, if you want to take a deep dive into it, I recommend somebody like just jump on my calendar and let's have a call, but I'll give you a quick, kind of down and dirty five minutes to spark some thinking for you and your people. So number one is you've got to be able to take a deep dive into you. What do I mean by that? I know you're a lawyer, but your thought leadership isn't in law and this may sound counterintuitive. Your thought leadership is as a result of your, the entirety of your life experiences the good, the bad and the ugly.

Speaker 3:

Great movie by the way right from back in the day, back in the day but, uh, you know, you've got to be able to look at that and go, ok, what's my life? Well, I'm, say, 52 years old, I've been married, I've been divorced, I've had great career highs, I've had great career lows. We map it all out for you and the adversities that you've dealt with in your life and, by the way, this is an exercise that's intense and, again, is not a light switch, it's a process, right right right but, um, there'll be a moment where there'll be a common thread from those adversities and you will notice that you have handled all those adversities.

Speaker 3:

And those adversities and what you've struggled with are what actually give you the right to call yourself a thought leader about what you've struggled with. You think about this it's what you've struggled with most deeply, marilyn. That is the basis of your thought leadership.

Speaker 2:

And your resiliency of pulling through that and coming back from the other side of it.

Speaker 3:

You got it. It's very difficult to do this by yourself. I didn't do it by myself.

Speaker 2:

I'm just telling you flat out Well, it's like I've got a friend that says you can't see the whole picture if you're in the frame. So it does help to have another opinion. Beautifully put Someone else, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, another way to say it is you can't read the label from inside the bottle, right?

Speaker 2:

That's another one. Yeah, that's very good, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:

You can't. So that's where it is and that's why these processes take time. But I'll tell you a story of another individual inside of our work. So we had a wonderful lady In fact she's still a client of ours. She was a medical doctor, md and she was like, okay, what's my thought leadership? What's my thought leadership? And she said, I'm, I'm like, I'm good with injecting, like you know, botox and things like that.

Speaker 3:

I'm good with teaching people that it took a bit of time, but we helped her see that really what she was really good at is she was meticulous, like she was from south africa. Her father was an md there and he used to fly in a helicopter, in a turboprop plane, to like remote areas, to work with the villagers and and and bring health care to them, because there was no doctor for miles and miles and miles and miles around, and he had to be really really good at um details and he had to be really really good at um making sure everything was done, just so. And he brought his daughter with him at the time when she was a little little girl and into her teens. So this is something she had to learn is detail oriented, no understanding something to the nines. And so what this helped her see was she.

Speaker 3:

She had a med spa of her own and she was able to run it and make a lot of money from it. She started to see that there was a lot of people who had med spas who, frankly, didn't run them the way that she ran hers. They left millions of dollars on the table Millions, 7 million, 10 million, 15 million. It's a lot of money, and so she said okay, my thought leadership it's not in med spasas, but it's in helping to optimize how to run something properly. But I'm applying it to med spas and the message we helped her put together is you're leaving 7 to 15 million on the table. Would you like to recapture some of that good message?

Speaker 3:

that's powerful, that's very powerful, yeah so anyways, um, it took her a few months to get all this figured out and I I work with my better half a wonderful woman named theresa theresa dugwell, and so theresa went with dr dia is her name helped her set up an event in toronto. She invited a dozen potential med spa owners to watch a presentation. Four of them were really interested. One of them bought with the one person who bought, paid her five hundred thousand dollars to consult with putting your med spa together. And then stage two was another five hundred and fifty thousand thirty two days apart. She made a million fifty thousand dollars 32 days apart.

Speaker 2:

Wow, this is thought leadership.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I wrote a book. I don't seem to have a copy of it here right now, but it's called the Thought Leader's Journey, and the Thought Leader's Journey is a book that's really about how to how to go through the process of creating a powerful thought leader brand, and it's available on Amazon. Or, if you want to go through the process of creating a powerful thought leader brand and it's available on Amazon, or if you want to go and get a free Kindle copy, go to ecircleacademycom. Forward slash TLJ book. Tlj book.

Speaker 2:

And we'll put that in the show notes.

Speaker 3:

If you're interested in getting a copy, just go ahead and do that. It will show you what you need to do. But thought leadership first begins with a deep dive into you and then some of the other things we talked about get clear on who you're going to help, get clear on what pain points they have and how you can help them, and you put all that together and you can bring a wonderful offer out there into the marketplace. But the beauty about thought leadership is it's not about one offer one time. Thought leadership will allow you to create multiple offers, even to multiple audiences, over time. It gives you a skill set that'll allow you to continue to reinvent yourself as the world and the market changes, and that's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 2:

It is. It is so. So in thinking of um, say, maybe an estate planning attorney or a family law attorney, something like that, what you're you're getting at is it's going to be easier for them to um find the pain points of the person present an op, the, the correct option and be able to work with them um on a more synergistic level and people they want to work with.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, 100%, and I think it's really smart, you know, to tighten your focus. If you're like an estate planning attorney. If you say I can do an estate plan for anybody, sure you could. But if you, for example, said I specialize in doing estate plans for families that have owned manufacturing firms or families that have owned real estate firms or families whatever, you know what I mean and you are the person you know everything about that, it'll be really easy for you to attract those people to what you do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, nitching down to to expand. Yes, absolutely. Well, this has been really incredible. Um, not lots of great information here I've got. I love your books and I'll definitely put links to your books in the show notes. Um, so, other than your books, is there a book that you would recommend to the audience? What helped you and what? What kind of or what are you reading now, recommend to the audience? What helped you and what?

Speaker 3:

what kind of, or what are you reading now? Well, that's a great question. What am I reading now? Um, at the moment I'm actually reading, uh, some cold war history. Uh, I'm reading a book called uh strangers, uh strangers on a bridge, which is about a spy exchange that happened between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962. But some of the books that I've read recently that I think could be of interest to folks. One of them is called 10x is better than 2x, which is going after a bigger dream is better than going after a smaller dream, and I'm a huge fan of the late, great Aug Mandmandino, who wrote the Greatest Salesman in the World, who wrote Mission Success. I think people should go and discover those books. They're still in print. Go to Amazon.

Speaker 2:

I agree, those are great books.

Speaker 3:

Read them. They're awesome books.

Speaker 2:

So where can our listeners learn more about you, connect with you and just learn more about you?

Speaker 3:

Well, my name is unique. I'm the only Nikki Bilou on the planet. So if you type in Nikki Bilou, n-i-c-k-y-b-i-l-o-u on any social media platform, you can find me and just you know, friend me, follow me, whatever, and say, hey, I heard you on Marilyn's podcast and I'll accept and we can connect that way. If you are interested in having a success session, then get on my calendar and the way to do that is go to ecircleacademycom forward slash appointment.

Speaker 2:

That sounds perfect. Well, I'm excited to see where this goes. You know it's a great story. I love the way that you help people really niche down and go after what they love to do and, in the same way, multiple ROI their their income based on that.

Speaker 2:

That's great, that is so nice thank you so much for being here. This has been really exciting. So I'm just tickled to hear that and I look forward to getting your book. I'm gonna grab the journey hear that and I look forward to getting your book. I'm going to grab the journey book as well.

Speaker 3:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me on the show. You're a great host. You ask fantastic questions, thank you.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. Remember you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at lawmarketingzonecom. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep leading with vision and keep growing your firm.