Owning your own expertise

Most experts do not own their expertise. They rent it to their employer and call it a career.

For fifteen years I have written that ownership is a skill, not a position. The same applies to your own expertise. Either you manage it like an asset or you let it drain onto someone else’s balance sheet.

I made the mistake myself. For the first fifteen years of my career my best thinking lived in other people’s PowerPoints. I talked in meeting rooms, drew on flip charts, solved clients’ problems. Everything good stayed in the house. When I left, not a single document and not a single reader came with me. Every time I started from zero.

In spring 2011 I turned my thinking around. I began to publish. Today villetolvanen.com holds 1,493 articles and 479,000 words. It is my only professional asset that cannot be dismissed.

This is how expertise becomes a holding:

  1. Publish under your own name, on your own platform. LinkedIn is a rented flat. The algorithm decides who sees your message, and the platform can disappear. Your own domain is a home you own. Publish there first, share elsewhere.
  2. Give your expertise a name. Expertise without a name is not an asset but a way of working. I named my own board-work method Board Magnet. Only after it had a name did it become something that can be sold, taught and left as a legacy.
  3. Document, do not invent. I have never sat down to invent content. I write about what I do: board meetings, mistakes, owners’ questions. The work produces the raw material. Publishing refines it.
  4. The machine reads only what is published. AI searches, summarises and recommends what exists on the web. If your expertise lives only in an internal Teams channel, it does not exist for the machine or the market. The machine calculates, the human decides, but the machine calculates only what it can see.
  5. Test your expertise like a holding. Does it produce? Does its value grow? Does it transfer to another role, another company, another decade? Does it make you curious in the morning? If even one is missing, do something about it this year.

In 2018 I wrote that a personal brand is professional life insurance. I am changing my position. Insurance compensates for damage afterwards. A holding produces all the time.

Owning your expertise is not self-promotion. It is asking yourself the same question I ask every owner: am I the best owner of this, and what will I do for its value this year?

Do you own your expertise or do you rent it out?

By Ville Tolvanen. Originally published in Finnish: Oman osaamisen omistajuus. More in English: Aura Boards — start here.