Starting From What You Know (One-Person Company No. 05)

You have spent years getting good at something: running supply chains, closing the books, training staff, passing audits, pricing hotel rooms, fixing machines. Your employer pays for that knowledge every month. Other organizations would pay for it too, if they could buy it in a form that made sense to them.

Starting From What You Know is a plain-English guide to turning your professional expertise into a one-person company. It shows you how to see what you know, find the offer inside your experience, package and price it, win your first clients, and build an expertise business that lasts.

Inside you will find:

• Your knowledge as capital: the four kinds of professional capital, an expertise inventory, how to surface tacit knowledge, and how to translate employee knowledge into market value.
• Finding the offer: who really pays, mining the problems you have already solved, choosing a niche, combining two fields, and testing demand before you leave your job.
• Six ways to package expertise: consulting, productized services, training and workshops, done-with-you programs and coaching, templates and toolkits, and fractional roles and retainers.
• Pricing and first clients: pricing the problem instead of your hours, building credibility, winning your first ten clients from your network, handling your former employer, and content that shows what you know.
• Growing an expertise company: staying expert, adapting when knowledge ages, building assets, ten profession-by-profession paths, common traps, a small scorecard, and a 90-day launch plan.
• Inside every chapter: an Across Asia section, a founder story, a worked example, myths and realities, common mistakes, field notes, a worksheet, and a running mentor conversation between a supply chain analyst in Jakarta and a veteran adviser in Singapore.
• 12 appendices: inventory workbook, offer templates, pricing worksheets, ten founders from ten countries, leaving your job well, 50 quick answers, 120 offer ideas by profession, outreach scripts, a year of content ideas, glossary, checklists, and a discussion guide.
• Your EPUB opens in Apple Books, Google Play Books, Kobo and most e-reader apps. Start with Part I and keep a notebook nearby: the "Your Turn" exercises build toward the 90-day launch plan in Chapter 28.

Examples come from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and India. This book is general education, not legal, tax, employment or financial advice.