The Quiet Compounding of Authority

The slow payoff of being known for something specific

This January marks two years of my focus on authority-building. In January 2024, I began running Authority Club, and over the 24 months since have grown my own understanding of Authority as a concept.

That's included 2 years of understanding the topic better, writing my own hero pieces on the topic (examples here and here), as well as the delivery of coaching and mentoring support to 80+ authority-led businesses. Oh, and writing this newsletter to you most weeks on the same topic.

Same territory and same questions. But explored through different angles, offers, services, and formats.

As we head into 2026, I’m more convinced than ever how much this topic matters.

Generic ideas are even cheaper now, accelerated by AI. That shift has made your taste, lived experience, and point of view developed over time even more valuable to your clients. If you grow your Authority this year, I believe it will be time well spent.

I can now tell you this with data: in those two years, something also happened quietly in my own business.

By becoming known for something, recognition has brought a level of financial security, ease, flow, and consistency I hadn’t really experienced in the years prior. There was no viral moment here.

This has happened through a sense of Coherence, through ongoing Commitment and the subsequent Compounding that happens from here.

Those three I’ll explain today so that you can see how you too could apply these principles in your work this year.

You need Coherence

Authority is about demonstrating depth of thought, original thinking, and a distinct way of framing problems and guiding people through them and that matters now more than ever as in this era, audience-for-audience’s-sake is out. Algorithms don’t reward big players the way they once did — rather today, quality and relevance are the bigger currencies.

Chasing mass reach worked before in a distribution-era where you could reliably post more, grow followers, wait for something to click. But influence forms differently now.

As friend Will Mannon puts it, we’re living in a boutique impact era. The internet connects niche interests at speed. Which means a small number of deeply aligned readers or listeners can create more momentum than a large, indifferent audience ever could.

This is why Authority-led work doesn’t obsess over algorithms or “For You” pages which are inherently designed like doing the lottery is. Luck through repetition and throwing caution to the wind.

Rather than seek random luck, Authority asks for you to control factors such as specificity and quality of your thinking. Together, these form coherence. And soon your ideas, words, and frameworks need to stick together rather than exist as scattered outputs, but as something cumulative and directional.

Too many businesses are writing posts, recording podcasts, and sharing ideas that don’t connect.

This is why I don’t talk about content in an authority-led business. I call it building a body of work.

A body of work is what accumulates when your ideas (writing, frameworks, processes, talks, programmes) connect and point in the same direction. That’s a coherent message, and a steady reinforcement of what you believe, what you stand for, and what you want to be known for. Not individual attempts to land grab attention.

When your work connects, the logical next step for people who get guided through your world, after their precious time and attention has been spent, is to enquire working with you.

You need Commitment

Many people never reach coherence because they won’t commit.

If you’re super early on, then experimentation makes sense. It’s how you find your thing. But if you’re in your next chapter, where you’d love the market to have real clarity about the work you’re here to do… your commitment becomes essential.

Commitment to your ideas and approaches, and staying with something long enough for it to mean something. Commitment to the potential for boredom that comes from reputation. That’s a big fear, I get it.

But when you commit, like a loyal romantic partnership, people learn to trust you to keep showing up. You become their favourite — the go-to for a specific way of thinking or area of expertise.

Commitment also gives you the added benefit of having real time and space to build a range of assets and formats: your beliefs manifesto, a playbook or methodology, excerpts from deeper work.

Some of these become outward-facing assets that bring people into your world, and others become delivery assets that support clients through their work with you. Some founders will use the same for both, giving it ‘away for free’ almost.

Together, this becomes your IP. And that IP does two things at once: it attracts aligned clients, and it serves those same clients as they work with you.

You have to start this process with a commitment to a clear positioning, as without it, IP can’t form, and you flip-flop between blog titles, lead magnets, quizzes, event series ideas … always seeing only trade-offs between options.

I don’t want you to keep seeing trade-offs. Only the benefits of commitment.

That’s why we start here inside Authority Club: sharpening or repositioning your place in the market (you have 2 days left to join us for the next cohort, running Jan-July)

Everything else aligns from there.

You get Compounding

Coherence and Commitment get you Compounding.

I alluded to this earlier, Authority-led businesses scale differently. And the shifts have felt incremental to me, but I see them more clearly now than before — and that is the slow divorcing of the time to money equation.

With Authority, you don’t have to show up every single day to get sales. You can sign clients up to packages, programmes and ways of working with you that aren’t tied to the hour of your time they get, because the assets and IP and structures in place are supporting them, too.

I couldn’t have run my programmes like Authority Club and Authority Letters a few years back. My work hadn’t compounded for long enough and I wouldn’t have had the skillset, network, and depth of IP I have today.

Compounding is the accumulating of advantages that come from coherence of your work and ideas, and the commitment to showing up over time. Compounding looks like certainty, income secured, and a market recognition of your work that gets you fully booked or using waitlists.

A member of Authority Club, Alan wanted to testify the difference this has made for his business going into 2026:

Reducing stress, increasing the lifetime value of clients without increasing the time you spend, becoming more confident at raising your rates… these aren’t the sexiest, shoutiest marketing messages you’ll see online.

But they make the day-to-day reality of business ownership SO much more enjoyable.

Building a Body of Work doesn’t mean narrowing your skills or scope or fitting yourself into a rigid, uncomfortable box. It means committing to a One Big Idea (OBI) you want to be known for — one that can be expansive — and then matching your offers and services to the different points your clients go through in their journey relating to that OBI.

It can feel uncomfortable at first especially if you’ve built your business through custom work, 1:1 delivery, or saying yes to whatever comes your way, you might hesitate to narrow focus. I know some people who’ve inquired about Authority Club realised they weren’t, in fact, ready to choose a lane.

But I’m so grateful to 2024 Ellen for taking that leap, and know the confidence of others I’ve helped to do the same, has only grown in their commitment to doing the same.

So if you want to spend the first six months of 2026 building more coherence, and commitment to your ideas, and executing consistently to grow your IP and offers around your One Big Idea, that’s what Authority Club is for.

It’s a great fit if you’re in step one or two of the Authority Entrepreneurs journey.

To do this work deliberately rather than haphazardly (and get my expert feedback along the way) then Authority Club is your next step.

Doors close at midnight on Friday. Read full details & secure your seat here or book a 25 min free consultation to discuss the fit to your stage.