When it comes to being a person of influence in your industry, one of our own here at Catalyst Brand Group, Jason Fleagle, has made waves in the marketing and branding industry.
Jason has also worked alongside Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank directly, learning from someone who has, quite literally, written the book on becoming a key person of influence in your industry. With these tips from Kevin, and with a few key insights from Jason and his team along the way, we have created this guide to help you learn what it takes to become a person of influence in your industry.
The 5 Steps to Becoming a Key Person of Influence In Your Industry
Pitch – know how to own your micro-niche and convey purpose in every conversation.
Publish – create a body of work proving your credibility behind your pitch and purpose
Product – not only being a thought leader, but an innovator in your industry
Profile – having strong character that makes people like you and want to know you
Partnership – be a strategic networker, knowing when your purpose is compatible with others
Vitality Is Key
As you begin this journey to become a person of influence in your industry, it is important to realize that there are certain qualities of influential persons no matter the industry.
One of the key qualities is constant curiosity, or, as Harrington terms it, vitality. Vitality is the essential quality of maintaining an open mindedness towards everything and wanting to absorb and learn and be curious as much as possible.
Vital people live life to the fullest extent and find all knowledge and learning valuable while also being creative enough to take advantage of that knowledge and turn it into a useful tool, service, or product.
The alternative to being a Vital person is to be a Functional person. Functional people do their job, and do it well. However, functional people can be replaced and can be trained over and over again. While they get the job done, they also rarely seek to grow or improve on the work or create something new along the way.
Vital people are always seeking what the next big breakthrough could be. They ask questions and allow themselves an open mind to ways things could be improved, yes, but also ways things could be different. Different is not always bad, but it also doesn’t mean better. The right kind of different, though, can completely upset the apple cart in the best way possible.
To be a person of influence in your industry you must be someone with vitality!
Micro-Niche Down
As you start to increase your vitality, you will begin to see things in your industry you never noticed before.
Your industry serves as your niche, but you begin to notice smaller niches within your own niche. To be a person of influence you need to find one of those micro-niches and claim it as your own. For example, if you are in the home gardening industry and start to uncover more knowledge and proficiency with home gardening for children, then this can become your micro-niche.
It takes an almost insurmountable amount of work to become a person of influence in a broad industry that overlaps with so many different concepts and unrelated knowledge. It takes a lot less work, some skill, and lots of creativity to become a person of influence in a very specific industry.
Choosing a micro-niche while maintaining a quality of vitality will go a long way in getting you started on becoming a person of influence in your industry!
Giving is Greater Than Receiving
One piece of the puzzle for influence that cannot be stated enough is this: it is greater to give than to receive.
If you are giving more than you are receiving, it is much easier for people to see value in what you have to offer and to quickly recognize you are a person who invests in building others up.
For example, Jason from Catalyst gives away as much value to others as he can. From being a guest on multiple podcasts, serving others through multiple businesses, and working with businesses of all sizes – billions to startups. As Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want. You’ve got to give before you can receive.”
When asked about what it means to be a person of influence in your industry, Jason states:
“True influence is about serving others first.”
As you start your journey on becoming a person of influence in your industry, never forget that the most influential people have been those who go out of their way to serve others first. Paradoxically, it has been proven time and again that the more you serve, the more influence you receive.
Step Into the Inner Circle
Research has shown the top 20% of companies are earning 80% of the revenue in their industry. Within those companies, the top 10% of workers in those companies are the ones making 90% of the money.
This top 10% is where the most influential people in your industry reside.
How you become a person of influence in your industry is by working your way into that top 10% of your industry – your micro-niche.
The rest of this guide will walk you through how to step into that inner circle. The concept is simple – put in the work by being a vital and giving person within your micro-niche while learning to define and clearly communicate your value.
Knowing and Communicating Your Value
It seems backwards to start thinking of yourself as a person of influence before you become a person of influence, but it’s actually the best place to start.
If you have done the work to learn, grow, and deliver some kind of value within your micro-niche, then you’ve begun becoming a person of influence in your industry, so start acting like it!
Kevin Harrington has stated he can know whether or not someone is a person of influence in their industry within a few minutes of a conversation. Why? He sees how they communicate their value with key questions and, based on those responses and observations, can determine if they are convinced of their value.
To become a person of influence in your industry you need to be able to know and communicate your purpose, credibility, innovation, character, and compatibility.
What’s your purpose, credibility, innovation, character, and compatibility?
Purpose
When someone asks you, “what do you do?” or “what is your business?,” are you the type to respond with your job title or company name? Or are you the type of person to respond with what you are building, doing, and creating?
A person of influence will not respond to this question by communicating what it is they do with their working hours and energy, but what it is they are creating and accomplishing.
They focus on the end result they are providing to the person they serve.
A person of influence passionately shares about the ways they are changing and improving their micro-niche in novel ways. If you want to be a person of influence in your industry, then your “pitch” about what you do is focused less on billable hours and more on industry-altering innovations.
When you are finally speaking with conviction on your purpose within your micro-niche, then you are becoming a person of influence in your industry.
Credibility
History has shown knowing and communicating your purpose will get you far in life.
However, a person of influence adds credibility to their purpose with respectable content and accomplishments. This can look like a number of things: a well-written blog, published work and articles, books, business accomplishments, industry standard records, etc.
While your purpose can be clearly communicated there still needs to be a sense of credibility based on the work you have done or are doing. When it comes to building and having credibility, Jason remarks:
“I think it’s all about first being trustworthy, authentic, and vulnerable.”
Being trustworthy is all about doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s about walking the talk. And authenticity is about being true to who you are. Don’t pretend to be someone else. Use the innate skills and abilities you were born with and have developed over the years. And finally, be vulnerable. Don’t be afraid to admit when you don’t know something or when you’ve made a mistake. It seems counterintuitive, but being vulnerable is the fastest way to display strength.
Be true to your word and your purpose and prove you are working towards greatness in your industry. You need to validate your credibility by letting your purpose drive your accomplishments to becoming a person of influence in your industry.
Innovation
While building credibility and influence in your micro-niche, there should also be the drive to innovate within your industry. Typically, this looks like new products, services, packages, etc.
If you aren’t creating within your industry, then you are truly only becoming a “thought leader” in your industry rather than a person of influence.
Jason says to:
“Give as much as you can to help people whether that’s sharing videos, audio snippets, writing blogs/books/ebooks, or some kind of content.”
Just as we have said with helping others, so should you be building and investing in your industry through products, content, and services. More specifically, you should be creating a wide array of products and services that fill gaps in your micro-niche in innovative ways.
Character
One key piece of becoming a person of influence in your industry is being a person who has character.
If you are communicating your purpose well, working towards the inner circle, innovating all over the place to build credibility, serving others first, but don’t have a following, then you truly have no influence. To have influence you must have people who are influenced by you and who you have contact with in order to influence them.
This means having an online presence and platform. Realistically, in today’s day and age, it means having a solid social network, an email list, and networking in person as much as possible. If your circle of influence are only your co-workers, you’ll never be able to truly build enough of a following to step into the inner circle of influencers in your industry.
Make sure you have a well-designed website, a supportive and engaged network both online and offline, an ability to capture emails for your email community, and a digital space to share and spread your influence in your micro-niche as it builds up over time (blogs, networks, podcasts, etc).
Compatibility
This last step in becoming a person of influence in your industry is about being able to connect with the right people and businesses, but also to create strategic partnerships that make sense for your purpose and micro-niche.
Everything else up to this point helps you invest in this compatibility. You will begin to find new opportunities for partnerships that make a greater impact on your industry.
Most importantly, it will lead to opportunities to drastically increase your role as a person of influence in your industry. As Jason says:
“And then if it [your products, services, or content] resonates with people they’ll want to not just learn from you but work with you and become a raving fan.”
This is the crux of becoming a person of influence in your industry. When people see what you are about, see what you have accomplished, and their heart is drawn to your innovation and authenticity, they’ll want to be part of the inner circle – the top 10% of your industry.
Putting It Into Practice Consistently
You may already be working on a few of these steps, and you just need to mind the gaps in your structure to build influence. The real work is creating a synergy between building your vitality, finding your micro-niche, and putting flesh on the bones of these five steps.
As you start your journey to become a person of influence in your industry, there is one important piece of information we have left out: consistency or persistence.
If this is a stop-and-start process for you, then you may not know your value or purpose. To become a person of influence you need to be constantly working within your micro-niche, regardless of where you may be getting your paycheck.
Becoming a person of influence is tough, and it requires persistence.
As others begin to see your dedication to this path, they will begin to see the person of influence lying just beneath the surface.
Looking For a Partner to Help You Become a Person of Influence In Your Industry?
Where do you see yourself struggling in the process of becoming a person of influence in your industry? Do you think we left anything out? We want to hear your successes and struggles and help where we can! At Catalyst Brand Group we focus on implementing proven growth strategies in brand, platform, and growth that will help your business grow by at least 2x-3x per year. If you are looking to implement some of these steps for your personal brand or business, then Contact Us to start a conversation about how we can partner together.