Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to learn a particular expert's method, you had to get in a room with that expert. The expert's calendar was the whole business, and when the calendar was full, so was the business.

Today, authorities in wellness, leadership, therapy, business strategy and dozens of other fields are "replicating" themselves in markets they might never reach. How? By training and certifying other professionals to deliver their curriculum to unique populations, unrelated clientele, international audiences, and other end-users around the world.

Dr. John Maxwell certified over 45,000 leadership coaches in 167 countries. And Jack Canfield has certified trainers in The Success Principles methodology in 107 countries.

You might be wondering, Could I really train other people to deliver my work? If what you have is a genuine method and not just a set of good instincts, the answer is very likely yes. And you don't have to be famous to start (in fact, certifying others is a powerful way to expand your influence and brand).

How Certification Differs From the Rest of the Consulting and Training Industry

When you sell a course, you are selling knowledge. Someone buys it, works through it, and the transaction is over. You have a customer.

When you sell coaching, you are selling personal access to you and your expertise. It's excellent work, but your clientele and income is limited by the hours you have available.

When you license your material to a company, you are granting an organization the right to use your content internally, usually per seat and renewed annually. The buyer is a business.

When you certify someone, you train an individual professional in your method, hold them to a standard, and grant them the right to deliver that method to their own clients under conditions you set. You don't have a customer. You have a practitioner whose own success now rests partly on your work.

That last difference is what changes the economics. A course buyer finishes and moves on. A certified practitioner has a professional stake in your method continuing to be respected — so they renew, they refer, they buy your materials, and they uphold your standards, because your standards are now part of their own credentials.

Certification is a well-established model, not a fringe one. Countless authors and experts have developed a certification program and significantly elevated their profile in their industry as the person who trains their peers. What's surprising is how few individual experts with perfectly good methods ever consider it.

Why It Works

Your practitioners are not your staff. They find their own clients, pay for their own marketing, and run their own businesses, so you are not adding payroll or management. They also reach markets you never will. One of my clients, the Oola Global Coaching Network, launched a certification program with my help, and within the first month they had certified coaches in 14 countries and all 50 U.S. states.

Plus, every practitioner who delivers your work makes it more legitimate. Joanne Callahan, president of Callahan Techniques Ltd., the originators of tapping therapy, described our years of work together as helping "substantially expand our licensed-practitioner business around the world." A body of trained professionals practicing your approach is a stronger credential than any book or keynote.

Certification is one of 65 revenue streams available to an expert, and most people have never seen the full list. I've put it in a free guide, Business Beyond Your Book — get your copy to read more about certification and other proven formats for selling your expertise.

What a Program Includes, and How to Build It

A certification program is a real product, and buyers at this price expect to see its parts: the training itself, a practitioner manual, client-facing materials they're licensed to use, a written agreement covering your trademarks and your intellectual property, a directory listing, and an annual recertification cycle — to name the basic tools.

Most programs run $3,000 to $15,000 to certify, with $300 to $1,500 a year renewal fee to stay current. Price it the way other professional trainings are, because a cheap credential attracts people who want a badge for their website rather than a practice they intend to build.

The practitioner manual and training resources are the part experts dread, but they're actually the easiest. Collect the questions your practitioners will face, answer them out loud into a recording, have it transcribed, then organize the transcript into sections. You'll produce in a few afternoons what would take months of staring at a blank page — and it will sound like you, which matters, because practitioners are buying your way of working.

It Doesn't Have to Start Big

I once worked with a financial advisor named Mike Steranka who began by mentoring a handful of his peers in his own client-recruitment formula. With marketing infrastructure built by me and my team, he developed that content into a subscription consulting program with hundreds of advisors, and eventually sold the program to one of America's largest financial marketing organizations. He coauthored a book and became the most in-demand speaker in his category. Later, he built his second program, with 2,000 advisors running his formula — and as general agent over those advisors, earned a percentage of the $1 billion in business they wrote every year.

He didn't start with an empire. He got proof of concept with a few people, then took the next obvious step. Then the next.

If certification sounds like the next step for your career, let's create a custom road map for successfully launching it. Here's how we'd work together.

Is Your Method Ready?

Here are three criteria to consider:

It has to be a repeatable process. This is the test people get wrong. They assume that because their work depends on judgment, it can't be taught — and that isn't so. Most business consulting is judgment work, and a great deal of it certifies very well, because what you certify is not the answer but the way you arrive at it: the questions you ask first, what you look for, how you weigh one finding against another, what you recommend when a client's situation looks like this one rather than that one. If you can describe how you decide, you have something to teach. The only work that resists certification is the kind where even you can't say why you chose what you chose.

It has to work in someone else's hands. Can a competent professional, properly trained, get results with it? If the results depend on being you — with your background and connections — you have a practice rather than a methodology.

You have to let other people deliver it imperfectly. Some experts can't bear this, and the instinct is understandable after a career spent on the work. But the answer to that concern is rigorous ongoing training, not keeping the real gems to yourself.

If you can say yes to all three, the rest is simply a matter of effort and a definitive plan — but it's the most valuable effort for the biggest payoff to most established experts.