Your Expertise Could Be a Curriculum
Everything you know how to do that others find difficult is raw material. The only thing standing between your expertise and a curriculum is the decision to shape it.
Somewhere in your business right now, there is a skill you perform so naturally that you have stopped noticing it is a skill. Maybe it is the way you calm an anxious client in the first five minutes of a consultation. Maybe it is how you read a room before a negotiation, or how you diagnose a problem that three other people looked at and missed. You do it so often that it feels unremarkable to you. It is not unremarkable to the people who do not know how to do it.
That gap—between what feels obvious to you and what is genuinely difficult for someone else—is exactly where curriculum lives. Most professionals walk past this gap every single day without recognizing it as an asset, because expertise rarely feels like expertise from the inside. It just feels like doing your job.
I want to make the case that your expertise could be a curriculum, not as a side hustle or a nice-to-have, but as one of the most durable forms of brand authority available to you.
Expertise That Stays Locked Inside One Person Does Not Compound
Most professional expertise is delivered one conversation at a time. You advise a client. You solve a problem. You answer the same question you have answered fifty times before, phrased slightly differently by someone who has never heard your answer. Each of these interactions is valuable to the person receiving it, but none of it compounds. The hundred and first time you explain the same core idea, you have gained nothing structurally beyond what you gained the first time you explained it.
This is the quiet inefficiency at the center of many expert-led businesses. The expert becomes the bottleneck, the only vessel through which the knowledge can move, which caps how many people can be helped and how much the business can grow without the expert personally being present for every transaction. It also means that if the expert steps away—through illness, retirement, or simply needing rest—the knowledge largely leaves with them.
There is also a missed brand opportunity. An expert who only delivers knowledge one-on-one is perceived, accurately, as a service provider. An expert who shapes that same knowledge into something teachable is perceived differently—as an authority, a resource, someone whose thinking has been organized carefully enough to hand to someone else. That shift in perception changes what people are willing to pay for, refer, and trust.
Jessica LaShawn’s Perspective
I have built much of my own career on this exact belief: that expertise earned through lived experience and professional practice becomes most valuable when it is translated into something someone else can learn and use. This is the throughline between my work in mentorship, business education, and curriculum design. The underlying move is always the same—take something that lives in your head as intuition and turn it into something structured enough for someone else to follow.
I want to be careful here, because turning expertise into curriculum is a craft, not a shortcut. It is not simply recording yourself talking about what you do. It requires stepping back from your own fluency and asking what a beginner would actually need, in what order, with what checkpoints along the way. The expert’s instinct is usually to explain too much too fast, because what feels basic to them no longer registers as a necessary step. Good curriculum design slows that instinct down deliberately.
What I find most compelling about this work is how it changes the relationship between an expert and their audience. A one-time client is grateful and moves on. A student who learns something real from you carries your name and your way of thinking with them permanently, into every room they enter afterward. That is a different, more durable kind of brand equity than almost anything else available to a service-based professional.
Personal Reflection
A great deal of what I know, I did not learn in a classroom first. I learned it by living through seasons that required me to figure things out the hard way, and then by trying to make sense of them afterward—through reflection, through journaling, through looking honestly at what had happened and what it meant. That process of turning raw experience into understanding is, in many ways, the same process curriculum design asks of anyone shaping their expertise into something teachable.
When I work with middle schoolers and with young people in community and school programs, I am constantly reminded that knowledge only becomes useful to someone else once it has been translated into language and steps they can actually use where they are, not where I am. That discipline of translation has shaped everything I believe about mentorship, about education, and about what it means to turn a life into service rather than simply a résumé.
Expertise Shaped Into Something Teachable
HubSpot Academy is a strong example of a company recognizing that its internal expertise in marketing and sales had value far beyond its own client relationships. Rather than keeping that expertise locked inside sales conversations, it built structured courses that taught the underlying thinking to anyone willing to learn, and in doing so became a reference point for an entire industry’s vocabulary. That reach would not have been possible through one-on-one consulting alone, no matter how skilled the individual experts were.
Edutopia, maintained by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, offers a similar lesson from a different field: deep classroom expertise, gathered from practicing educators, shaped into articles, strategies, and resources that other teachers can actually apply. The underlying knowledge did not change by being organized this way, but its reach and its authority both grew substantially.
Putting this into practice? Explore Product & Service Development with SOPs with Jessica LaShawn.
Where to Start Without Overbuilding
Most experts overestimate how much curriculum they need to build before it is useful. The instinct is to create something comprehensive—a full course, a certification, a multi-week program—before testing whether the core idea even translates well to someone outside your head. That instinct usually delays the work indefinitely, because comprehensive things are intimidating to start and easy to postpone.
A more sustainable approach begins by identifying the single most common question you answer, the one piece of expertise people ask you about again and again, and shaping just that into something teachable. Notice where people get confused, where they ask follow-up questions, where the explanation needs more structure than you initially gave it. That feedback loop, repeated patiently, is how a rough explanation becomes a genuine curriculum over time.
It is also worth remembering that structure protects your intellectual property as much as it teaches. Describing the philosophy behind your approach and showing how you diagnose a problem builds authority and trust. Handing over your complete proprietary process, your specific assessment tools, or your exact implementation sequence gives away the business itself. The goal is to teach people to think the way you think, not to replace the reason they would still need you.
What the Research Suggests
Edutopia’s body of work consistently reflects a finding well established in education research: clear sequencing and attention to a learner’s starting point matter more to effective teaching than the sophistication of the content itself. Expertise that is technically correct but poorly sequenced often fails to transfer, while simpler material taught with careful structure succeeds.
The National Center for Education Statistics tracks broader patterns in how people pursue nontraditional and continuing education, underscoring that demand for structured, accessible learning outside of formal degree programs has remained a consistent and significant part of how people acquire new skills throughout their careers.
The JLC Teach What You Know
How to turn expertise that feels obvious to you into something structured enough for someone else to learn.
- Notice: Find what you explain again and again without thinking.
- Slow Down: Break your own fluency into visible steps.
- Sequence: Order those steps for a true beginner.
- Test: Teach it once and watch where confusion happens.
- Refine: Adjust based on what the learner actually needed.
Teach What You Know moves in a deliberate flow because skipping steps produces exactly the problem most expert-built curriculum runs into: material that makes sense to the expert but loses the learner early. Noticing what you repeat most often tells you where the real demand is. Slowing down to see your own fluency as a series of steps is the hardest and most necessary discipline in this process, because experts chronically underestimate how many small steps they are skipping without realizing it.
Sequencing for a true beginner, rather than for someone who already shares your background, is what separates a genuinely teachable resource from a collection of advanced tips. And testing it on a real person, then refining based on where they actually got stuck rather than where you assumed they would, is what turns a first draft into something that reliably works for someone other than you.
What This Means for Your Brand
For your brand, this means identifying the one piece of expertise people most often ask you to explain, and treating it as the seed of something teachable rather than something you simply repeat. Even a short, well-structured explanation of your thinking, shared consistently, begins to shift how people perceive your authority.
It also means recognizing that curriculum does not have to mean a large formal program. A clearly structured framework, a short resource, or a series of lessons can all function as curriculum if they are organized around someone else’s learning rather than your own convenience in explaining it. The structure is what makes it teachable, not the length.
Your expertise did not arrive by accident, and it does not have to stay locked inside one-on-one conversations for the rest of your career. Somewhere in what you already know how to do is the beginning of a curriculum, waiting for you to slow down long enough to see it.
Start with the one thing people ask you to explain most often. Shape it carefully. Teach it once. You will likely find that the people who could not afford or find you individually can still learn from you, and that your reputation grows in rooms you were never personally in.
Sources & Further Reading
- HubSpot Academy — HubSpot
- Edutopia — George Lucas Educational Foundation
- National Center for Education Statistics — U.S. Department of Education