The central theme of our discourse revolves around the transformative potential of expertise, specifically how one's accumulated knowledge can be harnessed to operate autonomously, thus alleviating the constraining bottlenecks that often impede progress. Our esteemed guest, Maeve Ferguson, is at the forefront of this paradigm, assisting distinguished thought leaders in converting their intellectual capital into frameworks that not only enhance their influence but also ensure a lasting legacy beyond their immediate presence. Throughout our conversation, we delve into the intricate interplay of leadership, innovation, and the imperative of creating scalable systems that foster impactful legacies. We shall explore the methodologies that underpin Maeve's approach, particularly how she empowers her clients to develop sophisticated diagnostic systems that facilitate deeper connections with their target audiences and optimize their business operations. Join us as we unpack the nuances of transforming knowledge into a movement that resonates and endures. The discussion navigates the transformative landscape where expertise can transcend the limitations of a traditional practice. Maeve Ferguson, our distinguished guest, elucidates the profound potential of intellectual property as a cornerstone for sustainable business growth. By codifying knowledge into sophisticated diagnostic systems, thought leaders can create an enduring impact that not only qualifies ideal clients but also fosters a legacy that resonates long after their departure from the professional arena. This episode delves into the intricacies of leadership and innovation, emphasizing the necessity for modern entrepreneurs to shift from transactional models to those that build lasting relationships and communities. By listening to the market and aligning one's skills with the needs of the audience, entrepreneurs can not only elevate their influence but also ensure their initiatives contribute to a greater movement that transcends individual success. Ferguson’s expertise in developing frameworks that facilitate this transition offers invaluable insights for entrepreneurs eager to scale their efforts. Through a meticulous process of IP extraction and assessment design, she reveals how leaders can distill their unique methodologies into actionable strategies that engage and serve a broader audience. The conversation highlights a pivotal theme: the future belongs to those who can effectively transform knowledge into scalable systems that empower others to succeed. This episode serves as a clarion call for leaders to embrace innovation and legacy building, ensuring their contributions are not merely momentary but instilled within the fabric of their industries.

Takeaways:

• Leveraging your expertise can create a legacy that continues to influence others long after your departure.
• Effective systems and processes are essential for entrepreneurs to scale their influence and achieve lasting success.
• The ability to listen to the market and adapt offerings accordingly is vital for successful business growth and client satisfaction.
• Surrounding oneself with exceptional talent is crucial for personal and professional growth in the entrepreneurial landscape.

Links referenced in this episode:

• maeferguson.com
• substack.com

What if your expertise could work for you around the clock without you being bottlenecked?

What if the wisdom you've spent decades building could qualify ideal clients, elevate your influence and create impact long after you're gone?

Today's guest is helping some of the world's most accomplished thought leaders do exactly that.

Stay tuned as we explore leadership, legacy, innovation and why future belongs to those who can turn their knowledge into a movement.

I AM your host, Reverend Dr. Keith Hayne.

Today we're joined by a remarkable entrepreneur who and strategic innovator who is helping thought leaders transform their expertise into lasting impact.

May Ferguson specializes in helping six figure six and nine figure experts, consultants and authors codify their intellectual property into sophisticated diagnostic systems that do far more than generate leads.

Her framework helps leaders scale their influence, qualify ideal clients and build businesses that create lasting legacy rather than dependency.

Her clients have generated substantial pipeline growth, dramatically reduced time spent qualifying prospects and elevate their positioning in marketplaces.

She has featured in Forbes, shared strata stages with leading industry influencers and widely recognized as a pioneer in helping experts transform knowledge into scalable infrastructure.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much.

I am so excited for this conversation and thank you for having me on.

I'm looking forward to it.

It'll be a great conversation.

Thank you.

I'm going to ask you my favorite question, kind of get us started.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Listen to your market and give them what they want.

I see so many entrepreneurs trying to put a square peg into a round hole and trying to convince their audience to buy from them.

Instead of listening to their audience and then matching that with your skill set to give them exactly what they want.

And the conversion just then becomes a competition.

That's really good.

Have to take that down and, and, and mark that.

Make that my own.

That's really good advice.

I love that.

So let's talk about what you do because what you do is unique in this, in this area, in the world and business.

What inspired you to focus your career on helping thought leaders scale their expertise?

Yeah, so I've, I've kind of like every entrepreneur, I've had a journey to get to where I am now working with some of the world's greatest thought leaders.

And my background was in accountancy.

I worked in private equity for a number of years and I've been very pro process driven person.

So when I jumped into this online world and was working with executives, I very quickly discovered that my true skill set lies within systems and automation.

And infrastructure and that type of thing.

And then I discovered the quiz funnel many, many years ago through a mentor of mine and realized the power of segmenting your list and putting the right message and the right offer in front of the right person at the right time.

So I, you know, I had evidence time and time again that these worked.

So I really just went all in on that aspect of things.

Moving on then, to build much more sophisticated assessments.

Like if you've ever been through Myers, Briggs or disc, we build those types of assessments for the true thought leaders of the world.

So tell us more about that process you developed.

I'm curious about.

I love processes, my doctorates and process.

So, so dig as kind of unpack for us a little bit about that process.

Yeah, I love it.

Yeah.

So for me, the everything is, everything in the world is process.

Everything is about data.

And so I'm an absolute kind of data junkie.

And I really, really want entrepreneurs to understand that when they have a process inside of their business, scaling that business just becomes a matter of optimization.

But what most people have is they, they don't actually have the infrastructure required to have seamless processes within their business, which means inevitably they cannot scale.

They'll get to a certain stage, sure they will, but they'll reach a cap and they will not be able to scale beyond that quite simply because they don't have the right infrastructure to generate their leads, qualify their leads and put their leads in front of the right offers.

So one of the things I studied in my doctoral work was Jim Collins is good to great and I love the fact that he broke down successful organizations versus those who struggle.

As you work with high achieving entrepreneurs and consultants, what patterns do you constantly see in those who are successful in scaling their influence?

Beautiful question.

So for me, the biggest one has to be tenacity and grit.

Because most entrepreneurs bail out when the going gets tough.

They try a few things.

They run what I call a hobby business, like an online business that's half hobby, half a real business.

They don't actually run it like a real company.

And they're not, not showing that tenacity that is required to see it through, to get through those painful years.

Because that explosion is always just moments away.

And so many people don't have the grit required to get through the tough years before that big breakthrough comes.

So we're going to dig into your experience and for the young entrepreneurs that are listening, what lessons did you learn in your early entrepreneurial journey that still guide you today?

Right.

Well, where can I start?

With this one.

So the first one is that I have invested very, very heavily in myself.

I bet on myself all the time.

I have surrounded myself with world class authority in terms of my mentors, my advisors and I have followed success clues.

So when you see somebody super successful, look to see what it is that they're doing.

Now you're not going to copy anything but what patterns of behavior do they have?

How are they showing up, what is their, you know, how is their energy, what are the systems that they have in place, what are the things that they are doing, being so that they can have what they have and then mirror your version of that as you are figuring out this whole entrepreneurial world.

So very much kind of one of my main mantras is success leaves clues and Then another is 100% possible 100% of the time.

So, so when we come at everything through that lens of 100% possible a hundred percent of the time, everything becomes doable.

Nothing is unsurmountable, no task is too difficult, nothing is too great.

A mountain decline.

And all you have to know is exactly what it is you want to do and build a process, a step by step plan to get there.

I love that.

I talked to a, a leading salesperson and she told me that one of the things that entrepreneurs had to learn how to do is not just learn how to sell, but learn how to ask as an entrepreneur, how do you get beyond the confidence, maybe risk of what I have to offer is valuable.

And I really, I really feel comfortable necessarily selling this to people or the customer.

So I think there's a double sided coin to this one for me.

So first of all it is having the skill set to know that the product or the service that you're bringing to the market is worth what you're selling it for.

So we, you know, we've got multi six figure offers.

We know what we are doing for our clients is literally world class.

So that side of things becomes a really easy ask because we know we have the evidence that what we do works.

So that's one side of things and then the other side of things.

Again, it ties back to this theme of the the hobby, business owner.

The if you look at the biggest companies in the world, they are not scared of selling you their stuff.

The reason that they are in business is because they are selling stuff.

So we must make offers every single day.

And I always had, when I used to have a coaching business before we moved into, you know, the done for you services model, I used to always say to my clients you know, if they were complaining about this, you know, this wasn't going well, or that wasn't going well, or that it's like, okay, well, how many offers did you make today?

I didn't make any.

So if we don't make offers, we don't make money.

So by virtue of being a business owner, your job is to run that company and make it profitable, which means we must make offers if we want to make money.

So it does.

It's.

It's not about getting.

Getting into your head or anything like that.

It is simply, are you running a hobby business or are you running a real company?

And that, to me, was the easiest shift to just move into this like we're running a company.

And this is what companies do.

They make offers, they make money, they make profit, they survive.

If they don't make offers, they're not a company.

Exactly.

All of us go through certain challenges in our career and our journey.

What were some challenges that you had to overcome that really shaped you as a founder and an innovator?

Hmm, interesting.

So for me, it actually happened before I became an entrepreneur.

So I used to work in corporate ex, kind of big four consultants, moved into private equity for a number of years, and then I became very, very sick with the virus and spent four years in bed, incredibly ill. And the.

The skill set that I had to build inside of myself to get through that chapter allowed me to then have the tenacity and the grit that I mentioned earlier on to navigate everything that entrepreneurial life throws at you.

The ups, the downs, the ins, the outs, the good days, the bad days.

Everything, everything is navigatable because of that, that skill set and because of that journey that I had been through.

It was the greatest gift I ever got, because it was terrible at the time, obviously, but I learned so much through that experience.

That's powerful.

So as we set this interview up, one of the things that fascinated about the work that you do is that you're helping people transform what they know into a system that operates beyond them personally.

As we talk about codifying intellectual property, what does that mean in practical terms?

Yeah, brilliant question.

So a lot of experts that I work with, they don't actually know that they have intellectual property.

They don't label it as such.

They've never thought of it through that lens.

But essentially, you know that you have IP intellectual property as ip.

You know that you have that if you have a way of doing things, a way of being, a way of taking people through your process that is unique to you.

And if you are bringing in or everybody is bringing in different life experiences, different qualifications, different expertise, and you're bringing people through a process that is yours, whether or not you label that as ip, that is an actual fact ip.

So the beauty of that is when you have this amazing IP that is just between your two ears, you will for sure have an impact working with a few people.

But if you actually want to grow your business and impact more people around the globe, we got to have a way of taking what goes on between our two years and translating that into infrastructure that allows us to serve more people.

And that's where the assessment comes in.

The assessment, if you think of it like a quiz funnel, except much more sophisticated, it is based on, this is not some sort of like Disney princess quiz.

It's based on your ip, it's based on your framework and it gives people a label or a score.

So for Myers Briggs, for example, I am intj, for Enneagram, I'm a three with a four wing.

So you get, people get a label that then they get a greater understanding about themselves because of this label.

Or if we're doing like a score based assessment, they will get a percentage score against each pillar of your framework so that they understand what's going really, really well, what's not going so well, and therefore what they need to focus on.

So if someone reaches out to you and say, I want to learn how to take my IP and turn into a scalable process and you have this assessment, what can they expect as they're working with you to kind of help them identify what that is?

I mean, what, what you're doing is so unique in that it's, it's almost unimaginable to figure out how do I take what I do and turn that into a, a process that can be replicated.

So as I'm thinking about it, it's exciting, but I'm going, I don't even know where I would start to figure out how to turn out what I do into a process.

So tell us a little bit about that.

So surprise, surprise, we have a process to do this.

So essentially everything begins with the end in mind.

So we start at the very end and where are we sending people off the back of this assessment?

Okay, so we have to have some sort of offer, whether it's a, we've got a client in the golf industry industry that sells golf clubs and digital courses about golfing.

And in person golf schools, we have thought leaders who have memberships with tens of thousands of students in there we have.

So we have to decide.

We have, you know, people who have like really high ticket masterminds, service providers, consultants, one on one coaching, etc.

Where are we sending people off the back of this assessment.

So that's where we start.

And then everything has to be reverse engineered from there because we don't want to have an offer that is about synchronized swimming.

And then we have an assessment that's all about gardening.

Okay.

There's complete funnel incongruence.

This thing is not going to convert.

And you would actually be amazed at how many people have incongruent funnels and systems in their business.

So that's kind of really, really important to start with.

Begin with the end in mind, then the next step we reverse out of there and we say like, right, what is our sales mechanism?

So you're not going to have a wait list process, for example, where we've got a wait list and then a two call close.

You're not going to have that if it's a $47 product.

Okay.

You're not going to have a team of closers or setters if it's a digital product.

And likewise, you're not going to be like, right, well, here's my $250,000 offer.

Click here to purchase.

Pop it on PayPal.

It doesn't work like that.

So we got to then decide the sales mechanism that's appropriate for the offer that we're putting in front of the lead.

And then from there it becomes a dance between what is the question that is so profound that our lead simply has to know the answer, which means they start the assessment and then what we must do then in the questions in the assessment, we must make sure we're asking questions that discern exactly what they're struggling with, exactly what it is that they want, exactly how much they're able to invest in themselves so that we're not trying to sell our six figure offer to our $47 person or vice versa.

We want to make sure that we are finding out how soon they want to solve for this problem.

Because we don't want to be jumping on sales calls with a whole lot of tire kickers we gotta discern in there.

And we call them platinum leads.

Who are the platinum leads who are able to invest in themselves right now?

And also this is a right now thing, so we're able to identify their level of buyer awareness on that journey so that we can discuss concern.

Here are the people that we need to get our sales team in front of today.

And here are the people that we can nurture for later down the road and how that works.

So that's kind of the main cogs of the wheel, if you like.

And then what we want to do in there is showcase the thought leader or the expert's IP in a way that the lead going through it discover something about themselves or sees something in themselves that they have not never seen before.

To the extent that they're like, like looking over their shoulder like, this is creepy.

Like, are you inside my head?

How on earth did you know that?

I feel like that.

And this is the beauty of where the IP we use a process called IP extraction where I take, you know, our clients through a series of questions that extract all of that ip, truly understanding how it is they do, what they do, the nuance underneath, how they do what they do, the pieces of their IP that make them completely unique in the marketpl.

And then my favorite piece or the absolute beauty of assessments is that the copy that every single lead sees is completely unique to them, completely bespoke to them.

So the copy you see is different to what I see is different what Bob down the row sees, which means it is very, very resonant.

It is literally speaking to them because the copy and how we build these completely dynamically, the copy is literally speaking to how they answered their questions.

And this is where you get a real shift in the lead.

Instead of some crummy PDF lead magnet that nobody ever opens.

Like, does anybody even read those things?

Instead of that, they've got a completely personalized experience and all of their follow up campaigns are dynamic, so they're speaking to their specific situation.

It's a completely different marketing machine and it allows you as the business owner to put the right message and the right offer in front of the right person at the right time.

And it allows you to do that at scale because whether it's one person goes through the assessment or like some of our clients, where there's hundreds of thousands of leads going through per month, all of those people are being served a personalized experience and that collapses that know like and trust timeline that it takes to, to warm up a lead and bring them through to get so much value that, that no like and trust timeline collapses way down.

Wow.

And thinking what's been the most unique client you've helped with this process?

I mean I'm sure every client's unique, but is there, is there one that you thought, you know, maybe even this is going to test the algorithm of what we're trying to figure out.

To figure out their ip.

Yeah, really interesting question.

And the answer nowadays is no.

So we have an agentic AI division of our company.

We do a lot of work at the AI, and basically everything is possible now, which is so exciting for us.

But I do remember an assessment we built a couple of years back for a thought leader.

So she hit all the bestseller lists and all the rest, and we built her assessment.

And her IP was so sophisticated that the SaaS platforms available in the market literally could not physically do what they needed to do to showcase her IP correctly.

So I ended up building the statistical modeling behind this thing was like a work of art and lots of duct tape and all of the rest holding it together because we had to basically build bespoke workarounds because SaaS couldn't handle the sophistication of the IP.

The beauty of things now, we do everything completely custom.

We don't use SaaS platforms at all anymore.

And that actually wouldn't be an issue now.

But it was also a beautiful experience to go through something so challenging from a, you know, from an intellect point of view to get the modeling of that one right based on the restrictions that we had to face with the SaaS platform.

Since you've done this for so many clients, I am curious what is a common mistake experts make when they're trying to scale their expertise?

They don't consider traffic.

So having an assessment, and this is as an agency owner, and we literally build assessments for a living.

This is what we do.

Having a fancy thing on the Internet means nothing.

We gotta have a traffic strategy.

So organic traffic, depending on the size of your audience, People think organic is free.

It is not.

We pay with time or passage of time to get those conversions.

Then we have scalable organic, which is, to be honest, one of my favorites.

And this is where, like, I do a lot of keynote speaking, I do a lot of podcast guesting, where I can use the same amount of time that it would take to do an organic piece of content.

And instead of that, I go on stages or speak on podcasts where I can reach hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, even millions of people depending on the show with my message.

So that is scalable organic, and that's a really good option for people that might.

Might be like me.

And they, you know, they run a very busy business.

I have two very small children.

I run a farm.

I live on a farm and run a farm as well.

And my time is my most precious commodity.

It's a really good option.

And then once you get into true scaling conversation, it does require paid traffic.

And I'm not saying we need to be the like my client who spends a million dollars a month on ads.

You don't have to be that like straight out of the gates, of course.

But if we want to have predictability inside of our business, if we want to know our numbers.

So I'm obsessed with data, obsessed with numbers.

We gotta know the metrics in our business so that we can make decisions of what to optimize.

And you gotta have sufficient work water flowing through the pipes before you can make any judgment on those metrics or on those data points.

So if you've got like 100 leads through your thing, it's negligible, it's completely irrelevant for making decisions.

You put a hundred thousand through your machine, you know your metrics, you know which dials that we need to turn to optimize that end to end process.

You just mentioned data.

And some people hear the word data and they just go, ah, it's right.

So how do you really kind of help leaders understand how important data is to improving their offerings in our outcome?

Very easily.

We tell them that it's an income stream inside their company that they are sitting on and they don't even know that it's there.

So I will die on a hill for this one.

That data is the most valuable asset that you have inside your company.

Everybody is gathering it.

It just depends to what extent they're gathering it and, and what they're doing with it.

So what most business owners have is some sort of funnel.

They get a name, an email address and maybe a phone number at a push.

With these assessments, we're getting hundreds of data points per lead on all of their struggles, all of their desires, their investment capabilities, their location, their job titles, all of these different data points on every single lead, their psychographic profiles.

We have their purchasing behavior.

And all of that data is incredibly valuable, first of all from a monetization perspective.

But second of all, when we come to the feeding it back.

So we have AI agents that analyze all of this data and tell us literally, you know, this piece of content, this piece of copy, this ad creative brought in all of these leads, these, these ones brought in absolutely nothing.

And the agents then give direction to the top of funnel marketing team to tell them what to do more and more of and what to do less of.

So it just becomes a self optimizing machine because we have the data to analyze what is actually happening inside of our world.

We don't just whack up a funnel and that's it.

That's day zero.

Then we start the work.

That's good.

You have to obviously work a lot with building trust with leaders to get them to go with you as leaders.

As a marketing person, how do you build trust with high level leaders who have seen countless marketing promises?

So for us, it's very, very much word of mouth referral.

Our clients get results, our clients then tell their mastermind buddies and all of the rest about the results that they're getting.

And we have a huge referral network where we have, you know, a wait list of people waiting to work with us because of the quality of work that we do.

So I'm very much of the mindset that like, you know, let my work do the talking for me.

I'm not going to be sitting here like trying to convince anybody of anything.

It's like, there's our work, this is what we've done for X client, Y client.

And it's the proof is in the pudding.

So you've mentioned the technology and how it's advancing.

I'm curious.

Many people are worried about automation removing the human element.

Your work yet seems to kind of do the opposite.

How can technology actually.

Deep and human connection and when used.

Correctly, I think when it's used correctly, you can embed all of you into the machine.

And that's exactly what we have done.

So we have everything that goes on inside my brain when I'm having a conversation with somebody and turning their IP into an assessment.

I have programmed systems to think like me, behave like me, make decisions like me.

And that all comes from having our.

It's like a cognitive architecture or what we call internally or second brain, where we are training AI day in, day out with every single conversation, every decision point, every single move that is made inside my company.

It informs the second brain.

And over time and my personality and what I stand for and what I don't stand for and all of those different types of things are all built in there.

And what that allows you to do then is to make sure that at scale, everything still runs as though it is you.

You're just utilizing the incredible gifts that we have been given with these tools to serve more people.

So you said something I want to go back to, you said IP extraction.

It reminded me of like a Star wars scene or something where all of a sudden there's a poor guy on a table and the computer's extracting their human essence.

But I'm curious, how do you ensure when you talk about IP extraction that you, in trying to scale to something, you don't lose the expense of people's authenticity and the humanness in it.

Yeah.

So the IP extraction is very much a conversation that is on purpose, but the participant in the conversation doesn't know essentially the road that we're taking them down.

How the way we are framing questions, the way we ask different questions, the little avenues that we allow ourselves to go down, the rabbit holes that we run down, the rabbit holes that we choose not to run down throughout that conversation really allow us to understand the IP at the deepest level.

Because we must construct all of the questions in the assessment in the right way so that the results they get on the back end of the assessment give a proper result that is truly reson.

Part of that, part of that process to answer your question is teasing out a lot of story and a lot of, you know, opinion and thoughts about different aspects of things.

And I often, in these easy processes, I use myself as a guinea pig and I will really get into the IP as though I am their client and allow them to showcase their brilliance, bringing me through what it is that they do.

Because that's when they are most alive.

They're not just like, you know, writing it in a Google Doc and, and hoping that I might translate it correctly.

We bring them through it one on one real time over the course of a VIP day to truly, truly extract that human element.

So that then when we build the IP into the infrastructure that is all immersed in there completely.

That's good.

So what concerns you most about today's business and leadership landscape?

Ooh, people being asleep.

So I.

This kind of scares me, to be honest.

The.

And depending on the vertical.

So some, some verticals are very advanced in the AI world and they are full steam ahead and some of them, I'm genuinely sitting there with a bowl of popcorn like they don't even know what's coming.

They just don't actually know what's going on out there in the world.

In the world.

You know, in AI, they think AI is like chatting to ChatGPT and it's.

That concerns me because this is never going back, in my opinion.

This is never going to be undone.

It is only if you look at the speed of what has happened in the last.

I've been down this, we've had an agentic AI division now for about 18 months.

So I've been down this rabbit hole in a big way for a while and the level of advancement in the last quarter has just been Mind boggling.

Nevermind.

If you look back to like this time last year, you can almost laugh at what we were doing back then.

You were like oh my goodness.

Remember we used to like that.

Oh my, isn't that so funny?

And then this is getting to the sage now where you know, it's like you look back three months and you're like my goodness, like look how far this has come.

And I think there are a lot of verticals, a lot of industries where people have their head either stuck in the sand or they just don't know or they are too scared to know or too scared to like face it head on.

And I think they're going to get gobbled up.

Wow.

With that in mind though, if you were mentoring a young thought leader today, what would be the top three piece of advice you would share with?

Top three?

Okay, so number one, get really, really good at what you do.

There are so many half baked like hobby business owners out there that are just alright at what they do and they have no qualms in selling their rubbish on the Internet.

Okay.

So for me it is like when you are world class, the very best in the world at what you do, everything else becomes a certainty because your reputation follows you and on and on it grows.

So that's the first piece.

Second of all would be to surround yourself with people who are better than you.

And what I mean by that is that I am pretty smart human being.

I am exceptionally hard working, very tenacious, I am a go figure it out type person.

Also one of my favorite sayings is that we don't know what we don't know.

So my lens like we have a very kind of agile small team of nine people but true experts at what they do.

And what I have done is surrounded myself with people who are better at their subject matter expertise than I am.

So even though I have built 90 AI agents myself, I still have a ceiling on what I know versus our head of agentic AI that is based out of New York.

He knows infinitely more than me about this even though I'm pretty knowledgeable.

So what I don't ever want to be is to be the cap of the brilliance in our business.

I don't want to have a team where I'm telling them how to do things.

I want my team to be coming in and absolutely blowing my mind.

So that would be the number two would be surround yourself with truly exceptional talent.

And yes, you're going to have the argument and that.

Yeah, but that's not easy for me because I can't afford to hire them.

And that whole narrative will come up, I'm sure, But then that circles Back to point 1.

Get really good at what you do, earn the money to hire these people.

It's just everything is a self fulfilling prophecy.

And the third one would be to make sure that you're in the right rooms.

So this has been a huge shift in my business.

As I mentioned earlier.

Like I've invested very, very heavily in myself.

I've made sure that I'm in all the right rooms.

I invest in all of the rights, you know, super high ticket advisors and all of these things.

But being present in rooms, whether it's mastermind rooms or retreats or even one day live events, whatever it may be, to surround yourself with the types of human being that are going to raise you right up.

And if you're hanging around with people who are, you know, just living an ordinary life, like they're beautiful people, but those people are not going to stretch you beyond what, what you're currently achieving.

And it's for me, the more and more and more I've surrounded myself with people who are way beyond my level, the faster and easier I've been rising through the ranks rather than puddling around in my own little puddle and just staying where I am.

I love that somebody, somebody once said, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

You're in the wrong 100%.

So I'm going to ask you some of my favorite lightning round questions.

Okay?

Coffee or tea?

Oh, coffee.

All right.

Book or podcast?

Tricky one because I would have said book before I had small children who now rip books.

So I would say podcast or audiobooks because they can't rip.

They can't.

Well, they can't technically rack it, but they can't rip them.

Ego builder or visionary?

Ooh, I'm a builder.

I am a builder.

Builder.

This will be a tough one.

Data or intuition?

Data.

That's easy.

We don't build businesses on feelings.

On data.

Morning routine or evening routine?

Oh, morning.

One word that defines great leadership.

One word possibility.

Most underrated business skill.

Understanding metrics.

One habit every expert should develop.

Strength training.

Best leadership book you've ever read.

10X is greater than 2x.

Okay.

Scale or simplicity?

Scale with simple simplicity.

Biggest mistake entrepreneurs make.

Quitting too soon.

One characteristic of world class thought leaders?

Obsession.

What motivates you every day?

Winning.

I like that.

I like to win.

I do too.

One word that describes your leadership style.

360.

Okay.

I'm going to ask you my other favorite question.

What do you want your legacy to be?

I want my two young kids to be anything they want to be because they saw their mama did.

Wow, that's cool.

So we have something new on the show this year.

We have a surprise question.

Pick a number between one and ten for your surprise question.

Oh, my number seven.

Number seven.

This is a fun podcast.

Thank you.

When you think about success, who comes to mind and why?

My advisor.

They have achieved exactly what I'm on track to achieve and they still share their brilliance so openly.

I love that.

So where can people find you and connect with you and follow along what you're doing?

Yeah, so the best place to find me is on LinkedIn.

So if you just go to Maeve Ferguson or over on Substack as well.

Just me Ferguson there as well.

Or mayfurgason consulting.com.

Thank you.

Maeve, thanks so much for joining the show today.

For your insights, your wisdom, your passion for helping leaders create impact that last your story reminds us that true leadership isn't simply about being a successful business.

It's about creating something larger than ourselves, something that continues serving people long after we've moved on to the next chapter.

You've demonstrated that when expertise is transforming into meaningful infrastructure, knowledge becomes legacy, influence becomes scalable, and service becomes sustainable for our listeners.

If this show really moved you, please leave a review.

And we encourage you to connect with people with Maeve Ann Ferguson.

Learn more about her work helping experts, consultants and thought leaders transform intellectual property into world class diagnostic systems that create clarity, scale and lasting impact.

As always, keep building bridges, keep living your dream and keep building a legacy that lasts forever.

Thanks so much for being a guest on the show.

Thank you so much for having me.