One of the elements of a successful practice (according to us at Thought Leaders anyway) is about legacy. Running a practice allows you to make the difference you were born to make. But not just yet.

Here's a plan for how you could possibly spend the next 5 – 10 years working out what your legacy is going to be: it starts with our plan for getting to black belt and beyond.

In this plan, you’re going to take care of yourself first. Before you can save the world, you need to look after you. So, first order of business is earning money, but we're going to do it in a way that allows your legacy cluster to emerge.

To start with come up with 20 (or more ... could well be 50) clusters. Programs that you could run and things you could do to bring money into your practice. Ideally each cluster will earn $10k a month – this is our definition of a successful cluster.

We'll narrow these down to 12 clusters that we're going to try over 3 years. We expect 50% of these to fail.

So, over the three years the 12 will converge to 6 successful clusters. This equates to $60k a month or $720k a year – a black belt practice. Congratulations, you've now hit black belt after 3 years ... right on schedule.

But we don't stop there. Out of the six successful clusters, three mega-clusters will emerge. How we go from $720k to $1m or $1.5m is not by launching more clusters, but by consolidating back to 3 mega-clusters, each turning over $20k - $50k a month.

Then over the next, say, five years give or take, one of these mega-clusters will emerge as your legacy cluster. The thing that will live beyond you. The thing that you will be remembered for.

The mistake I made was to try (for a decade ... I'm a slow learner) to make my first cluster my legacy cluster. Love Your Business was the first thing I did ... and it took me 10 years to fail that cluster. Now, almost two decades after launching my first coaching cluster my legacy cluster has emerged. And ironically Thought Leaders Business School is all about helping business owners (who happen to be thought leaders) love their business – where we do work we love, with people we love, the way we love.

How cool is that?