E2A 034: A Book Blueprint Teardown of Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestley and Mike Reid 

We can learn a great deal about writing by examining how others have structured their books. By being a student of those who’ve written popular, successful, or impactful books in your genre.

In this episode of The Entrepreneur to Author Podcast, your host Scott MacMillan does a Book Blueprint Teardown of Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestley and Mike Reid to help inform and inspire you to build a Book Blue for the book that’s going to change the trajectory of your business.

EPISODE LINKS

Key Person of Influence on Amazon: https://amazon.com/dp/1781333831/

Key Person of Influence Book Blueprint Teardown 1-Pager: https://entrepreneurtoauthor.com/resources/

Dent Global: https://www.dent.global/accelerators/

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Episode Transcript

Please note: The transcript is produced by a third-party company from an audio recording and may include transcription errors.

Scott A. MacMillan:

You're listening to The Entrepreneur to Author Podcast.

Mike Manz:

Welcome to The Entrepreneur to Author Podcast, the podcast that brings you practical strategies for building authority and growing your business. And now here's your host, Scott MacMillan.

Scott A. MacMillan:

In the last episode of the podcast, I introduced a new format that I promised I'd bring back again in future episodes, the book blueprint teardown.

Now little did I know how enthusiastically the teardown concept would be received. It clearly hit a chord. And so we're back with another teardown even more quickly than I'd expected.

Why did you feel this was such a valuable episode format? Well, I'd encourage you to shoot me an email or direct message me to let me know, but here's what I suspect…

Theory is important. It helps to put principles in context, it ensures that there's a cohesive frame that ties the components together and that those using the framework understand not just what and how, but also the why. But examples, like what we get with a book blueprint, teardown, help make the theory real. They show how a framework plays out in the real world, in the wild.

Examples, thrive with variety, with diversity. That helps show how the framework can play out in different situations, different fields, different subjects, different topics, and with different types of authors and readers. And so let's take one step down that road to variety, to diversity in this edition of Entrepreneur to Author.

The book blueprint teardown. If you missed episode 32, here's a quick refresher. In a book blueprint teardown, I take a popular expertise-based nonfiction book and break it down into the core strategic parts that make up its book blueprint. These episodes, which will be interspersed amongst our regular episodes, all follow the same format in which I extract the key book, blueprint components of the book that we're looking at, including the ideal reader, along with the current state that they're in and the future state that they'd like to be in.

We'll then pull out the reader's core need and then convert that into a question, the central question that the book answers for the reader. And finally, we summarize the solution that the author provides to answer that central question, which is effectively the big picture brainstorm stage of the book blueprint process. In doing so my hope for you is that it will both inform and inspire you to build your own book blueprint for the book idea that you have.

In this episode, we're looking at a brilliant book called Key Person of Influence: The Five Step Method to Becoming One of the Most Highly Valued and Highly Paid People in your Industry.

Originally written and published in 2014 by Daniel Priestley. Since then, new additions have been published, including the Canadian edition, that I have, which is co-authored by Mike Reed. Now Mike is a good friend and my business coach and has a ton of insight around entrepreneurship and business building, so I'm sure I'll get him on the podcast for an interview at some time in the near future, but in the meantime, let's dive in to a book blueprint teardown of Key Person of Influence.

The ideal reader for Key Person of Influence is the owner of a six to seven figure annual revenue service-based business. Their current state is that of spinning their wheels a little bit, they're not getting the traction that they need from their business. A big part of that is that they're not seen at all different from all the other businesses providing similar services. But where do they want to be?

Well, as the title of the book suggests they wanna be seen as a linchpin in their industry, as an influencer, a thought leader, a go-to authority in their field because they know that's gonna bring business success. Framed as a need, what they need is to figure out how to build their profile and stature in their field of expertise.

Now that makes sense, doesn't it?

But as I've said before, it can be tricky to write to a broad statement, like that. So, let's consider what that might need to sound like framed instead as a question, the central question that the book answers for its readers. Recall that the key to an effective central question is to phrase it the way your reader would ask it, keep it short and simple.

In this instance, I'd say that a great framing for the central question would be. How can I become a key person of influence in my area of expertise? Short and sweet, but straight to the heart of what the reader's looking for from this book, right?

The solution comes next. The solution is the answer to that central question and a good place to start when reverse engineering a book blueprint is the contents page. Why? Because it clearly shows the structure of the book, which reflects the structure of the author's IP, and it's that structure that takes the reader on the journey from the current state we identified earlier to the future state they hope to get to by the end of the book.

So, here are the major topics that Daniel and might cover in key person of influence.

First, they make the case for change. They lay out the reasons why becoming a key person of influence or a KPI as they call it is important. And that's a great place to start. Next, they lay out the five components of the KPI framework, which they call the Five P's. These are Pitch, which is all about how you communicate, who you are, what you do, and for whom and why you do it. Publish, which is about developing intellectual property, thought leadership and publishing it out into the marketplace. Much of this is about writing and publishing a book, but extends to other content formats and distribution channels as well. Product. This is about productizing, what you do and assembling it into a unified ecosystem that attracts customers establishes a commercial relationship with them, delivers a core Folsom result and then maintains and builds that relationship over time.

Next is Profile, which is about honing and then building your professional profile as a mini media mogul. And finally, Partnership is all about how you bring together other complimentary partners to support one another and grow beyond what would be possible alone.

Pitch, Publish, Product, Profile, Partnership, the Five Ps of the key person of influence.

Now as usual, you'll find a one pager that visually summarizes this teardown over at entrepreneurtoauthor.com/podcast/resources. That's a free resource for you, and I'll put that link in the show notes for easy access.

My goal with these teardowns is to help you bridge that knowing-doing gap, so you can put the concept of a book blueprint into action.

And as you do. Remember this…the clearer your structure, the clearer your message will be for your reader.

The key to a clear structure is to plot it out explicitly before you even begin writing. And the book blueprint is a simple and intuitive way to do just. If you are keen to learn more about how to build the book blueprint for your book, visit entrepreneurtoauthor.com, grab a copy of my book, entrepreneur to author and pay special attention to chapter four.

Now is the time, time to write time to publish and time to grow.

I'm Scott McMillan.

Until next time.