Turn What You Know Into Something Other People Can Learn
What you know by heart is not just expertise. Arranged with intention, it becomes something other people can actually learn from you.
Somewhere in your business right now, you are sitting on a body of knowledge that took years to earn and minutes to explain badly. You know the three mistakes almost everyone makes before they call you. You know the order in which problems actually get solved, even though clients assume it is random. You know the questions that matter and the questions that are only noise. Very little of that knowledge has ever been written down in a way someone else could follow.
I understand why. Most of us are too busy using our expertise to stop and shape it. But I have come to believe that the businesses people trust fastest are rarely the ones with the flashiest marketing. They are the ones who teach. Not sell, not hint, not tease. Teach.
This week I want to talk about what it means to treat your expertise as a curriculum rather than a secret, and why that shift changes how people experience your brand long before they ever hire you.
Expertise That Never Leaves the Room
Most organizations keep their best knowledge locked inside the heads of their most experienced people. It comes out in a sales call, in a one-on-one consultation, in an answer given once and never repeated the same way twice. The knowledge is real. It is simply unorganized, which means it cannot travel, cannot scale, and cannot build trust with anyone who has not yet paid for access to it.
This creates a strange problem. The organization is genuinely expert, but from the outside it looks like every other option in the market, because nothing distinguishes it publicly. Prospective clients cannot tell the difference between a business that has done the work for years and one that opened last month, because neither one has shown its thinking.
Meanwhile, the instinct many business owners have is to market harder: another testimonial, another offer, another post about results. Those things matter, but they are evidence of outcomes. They are not evidence of how you think, and how you think is what people are actually trying to evaluate when they decide whether to trust you with something important.
Jessica LaShawn’s Perspective
I have spent a long time building curriculum, first in classrooms and youth programs, later in business education. The discipline is the same no matter the audience. You take something you know intuitively and you break it into a sequence someone else can follow without you standing beside them. That sequence is the actual gift. Not the fact that you know something, but the fact that you can hand the knowing to someone else in a usable form.
When a business does this, even in small ways, it signals something audiences are quietly starving for: confidence without condescension. A short explainer that walks a visitor through how your process actually works says, we are not afraid to show our thinking, because our thinking holds up. That is a far more persuasive message than any claim of being the best in the business.
I also think curriculum-building forces a kind of honesty. You cannot teach something you have not actually figured out. If you try to turn fuzzy expertise into a lesson, the fuzziness shows immediately. The discipline of teaching clarifies the knowledge itself, which is often the real reason organizations resist doing it. It is easier to imply mastery than to demonstrate it step by step.
Personal Reflection
I did not arrive at curriculum design from a textbook. I arrived at it from rooms full of middle schoolers who had very little patience for anything that was not clear, honest, and useful to them immediately. If a lesson did not hold together, they told me with their eyes before they ever said a word. That accountability shaped how I think about teaching anything to anyone, in a classroom or a boardroom.
There is also something deeply tied to purpose in this work. For a long season, I was simply surviving, gathering experience without a clear sense of where it was headed. It was only later, through reflection and through the discipline of building programs for Mogul Academy and the schools I partner with, that I understood the surviving years had actually been training. The knowledge I picked up while rebuilding became the curriculum I now hand to other people. Nothing was wasted. It only needed to be organized.
What the Familiar Names Teach Us
HubSpot Academy is one of the clearest examples of a company choosing to teach publicly rather than simply sell. It offers structured, sequenced lessons on marketing, sales, and service, available to anyone, whether or not they ever buy the software. People who complete those courses do not feel marketed to. They feel taught, and that feeling builds a kind of trust advertising cannot buy.
LEGO Ideas operates on a related principle, inviting its community to submit, vote on, and help refine new product concepts. The company is not merely selling bricks; it is teaching a community how its creative process works and inviting people into it. Whatever you think of any particular product, the platform itself demonstrates a brand willing to show how it thinks.
Neither company treats its expertise as something to protect at all costs. Both treat it as something to structure and share, trusting that clarity builds loyalty rather than giving away the advantage.
Putting this into practice? Explore Product & Service Development with SOPs with Jessica LaShawn.
What the Research Suggests
Edutopia, the George Lucas Educational Foundation’s publication on teaching and learning, consistently emphasizes that information becomes learning only when it is sequenced and made relevant to the learner’s own context, not simply transmitted. That principle applies well beyond classrooms. A list of facts about your services is information. A sequence that meets someone where they are and moves them forward is a lesson, and lessons are what people remember.
Google’s guidance on helpful, people-first content echoes this from a different direction, encouraging organizations to create material that demonstrates real expertise and serves the reader’s actual need rather than content built primarily to attract attention. The overlap is worth sitting with: content that teaches well and content that earns long-term trust tend to be the same content.
The JLC Teach What You Know
How to turn lived expertise into a sequence someone else can follow.
- Name It: Identify the knowledge you explain most often.
- Order It: Decide what must be understood first, second, third.
- Simplify It: Strip the explanation down to what a beginner needs.
- Share It: Put it somewhere people can find it without you present.
- Protect It: Keep your deepest tools for paying clients.
Teach What You Know treats expertise as raw material rather than a finished product. Naming it means noticing what you repeat; ordering it means building a sequence instead of a pile; simplifying it means removing the jargon that only makes sense to you; sharing it means publishing the lesson somewhere beyond your own memory; and protecting it means knowing the line between teaching your philosophy and giving away your methodology.
Organizations that walk through this sequence once usually discover they have more teachable material than they realized. The knowledge was always there. It simply needed a shape.
What This Means for Your Brand
For your brand, this starts with an honest inventory. What do you explain over and over in sales conversations that you have never written down clearly? What is the sequence, the order in which a client needs to understand something before the next idea makes sense? That sequence is your first lesson, whether it becomes a page on your website, a short guide, or a workshop.
Resist the instinct to hand over everything at once. A curriculum is not a dump of information; it is a path. Decide what someone needs to understand first, second, and third, and build the experience around that order rather than around everything you happen to know.
This is also where discipline matters. Teach your philosophy and your thinking generously. Keep your proprietary tools, your scoring systems, and your implementation sequences for the people who have actually hired you. Generosity with ideas and protection of your real intellectual property can and should coexist.
You do not need a new credential to become a teacher in your industry. You need the discipline to organize what you already know into something someone else can follow.
Start small. Teach one thing well. The trust that builds from a single clear lesson often outlasts a year of louder marketing.
Sources & Further Reading
- Edutopia — George Lucas Educational Foundation
- HubSpot Academy — HubSpot
- LEGO Ideas — The LEGO Group
- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — Google Search Central