Episode 82: Why Aren’t We Making More Money?
In this episode, we answer listener Max’s question from Twitter: “Why aren’t the two of you making more money?”. We go inside our own businesses to examine what we’re working on. We discuss when you can say “I have enough” as a business owner and stop focusing on growth.
Summary
Nick Disabato and Kai Davis answer listener Max McCow’s question about why they aren’t making more money. They each diagnose concrete weaknesses in their own businesses, from Nick’s sparse launch calendar and missing entry-level product to Kai’s fear of scaling and habit of undercharging, and they work through why the growth path past $250K in solo consulting has no obvious map.
Highlights
- The path to $250K is well-documented: sharper positioning, charging more, anchoring on value, a book for authority, defined marketing channels. Past that, the options narrow to three: scale headcount (adds revenue, rarely profit), tighten process and automation, or move toward offerings where income isn’t tied one-to-one to hours worked, like a $10,000 two-day workshop or a book with no fulfillment cost.
- Nick puts draft’s revenue at roughly $228K last year and believes $500K is reachable, but getting there would mean more client engagements than he wants. He has stayed solo with one assistant.
- Nick’s self-diagnosed weaknesses: he writes weak marketing pages when not financially pressured, launches only about three times a year, has no entry product coherent with his A/B testing work (his cheapest is $125), and doesn’t deliberately move people up his product ladder.
- Kai’s self-diagnosed weaknesses: bad at delegation (the thing he says he’s working hardest on), keeps doing the 20% of tasks that don’t need doing, and consistently undercharges on new offerings.
- Kai’s framework for creating a product: pick the price point first, then the medium (what $50 actually buys in video versus written format), then find the specific problem through market research. He ran a questionnaire to his list about email-writing challenges before designing any product around that topic. The hardest transaction in an online business, he says, is taking someone from never having paid you anything to paying more than zero.
- Kai uses a 50-point business health questionnaire with his coaching students to get a 5,000-foot view of a business. Nick assigns Kai the homework of running it on his own business and sharing the answers with students to show a measure of honesty about where his business actually stands.
- Kai advocates breaking growth goals into $50K annual increments rather than targeting a jump from $250K to $500K in one move. He points to Jason Zuk’s income planning spreadsheet, which breaks monthly revenue targets down by product and service line, as the tool that makes that concrete.
Read the transcript
So we got a reader question, listener question. From the wonderful and lovely Max McCow. And I can’t tell if he was joking when he asked this question, but I’m going to take it really seriously and almost accusatorily. And the question is: why aren’t you making more money? We on a previous episode talked a little bit about kind of Maslow’s hierarchy questions and How draft isn’t growing, and how I actually feel okay with that, and how we’re making less money this year than we did last year, and how I feel okay with that. But I think that there is A deeper question at play for the two of us, and that we’re going to have slightly different answers to these things. And I think it’ll result in a a fairly interesting conversation around it. So one of the reasons that I’m not making more money, because I think another thing is You can choose to make more money. One of the nice things that happens in this industry, uh, and also with the game plan that we have put together over however many episodes we’ve done, at least 69 episodes. Um we you can choose to make more money. Now the trade-off with that is sometimes that doesn’t actually map into profit, right? Like You may be hiring people, right?
Sometimes it doesn’t map into profit, and I’d add to it ten staffle. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. If you’re choosing to make more money You are getting an outcome and output. There’s some cost to that, be it hiring, be it spending more time working, be it spending less time doing other things. There are trade-offs.
Right, exactly. So you end up with this. you could make twenty million dollars a year. However, I think that there’s a huge cost in terms of your personal life, in terms of the trade-offs. And so draft has remained a solo business. And so, when I hear this question, why aren’t you making more money? I think about it in the terms of why aren’t you making more money without being able to, without having to hire somebody, right? Because I could make more money and run a 20-person consultancy. I think everyone on earth wants me to be doing that. And I’m not doing that. Because I like snuggling my dog in my own house and not running a 20-person consultancy, and not, you know, right now it’s me and my assistant, and that’s basically it. And I feel very comfortable with that. But I’ve also chosen probably to leave quite a bit of money on the table, right? I think that draft could probably grow. To about $500,000 a year at the current rate that it is, and I would have less time to do the aforementioned dog snuggling. I would have more discretionary money and I’d probably be able to travel a little bit more. And I think, you know. I would be able to have a lot more freedom on certain fronts, but I would also feel shackled to a lot of client engagements on a lot of other fronts. This is talking very abstractly and obliquely. Like I’m not really I know what the game plan is to get to 500, though. And I think that’s something that is not broadly shared in the industry. I think that there’s a clear game plan to get to 500. 250, right? And draft is around there. I think it was 228 last year. So you round up to the nearest 250.
But after 250, you’re kind of. It’s kind of in the dark. It’s kind of opaque. The answers or the pathways that I see most often suggested are Scale through team, which as we mentioned before, doesn’t necessarily translate to profit. It’s most often revenue and a lot of maths to feed. Scale through process and automation. So you’re spending less time increasing your effective hourly rate. Okay, I like that one. and start launching higher leveraged service offerings. And diving into that definition for a second, it would be a service offering where it Not directly one-to-one correlated with your time. It’s not, I put one hour in, I get one hour out. Maybe this is something like a 20-person training where you could charge $10,000 for a two-day workshop. You’re making $5,000 a day to the company. It’s like, this is great. We’re training our team. To you, it’s like, this is great. I made $10,000 in two days. Oh my God, how do I do this again? So you migrate more towards these higher leveraged offerings. Books where there’s no cost of fulfillment, trainings where you get paid a very nice multiple over your time, and these become the pathways to The higher income states.
Yeah, yeah. Some of those involve travel, so you have to be comfortable with traveling, right? So, you know, you’re imposing. Effectively, you impose a series of constraints upon the business that are bespoke to your station, right? So if you’re listening to this and your name is Paul Jarvis, you probably don’t want to do on-site training. Paul Jarvis never leaves his house except to get. Vegan things and work in his beautiful garden, which is ostensibly outside the house and not in the greenhouse You know, you’ve recognized and you’re willing to make that trade-off. I think the fact that I don’t run Facebook ads and that I don’t run Google ads is probably costing me Low six figures.
Well, I mean, we could point to any singular tactic or strategy and say, like, here’s a book of 10,000 business tactics and strategies. Yeah, if we implement any one of them, you’ll most likely see a return more often than not. Ads are a big fucking one. I think this becomes a separate episode about the relevance of ads in our businesses. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there’s that, right? So there are just. Because trade-offs. The point being that I have imposed the constraint, no ads, and little travel. I travel, but like twice, thrice a year. I’m not. I’m not a roadhog that is going to go and do on sites in sundry conference rooms across the country and get paid $10,000 a day for it.
But this still leaves a huge range, just in your business in particular, a huge range of service offerings that do help you grow from 250 to 30 to 350 to 4.
Yeah, and I think that there are service offerings you can make that are amenable. to the higher value things. Like if you wanted to build a tiny video production studio in your house or something like that, you could just stamp out NAB testing manual A month. A month. You know, every so often, right?
Oh, find a video studio in my house. Believe you and me, my friends. Dear listeners. There would be a lot of products.
Right, right. And there’s like an audio studio in my house. We’re recording this together in my house today, right? Hello, I’m seeing Kai in person, which is rare. But there’s, you know, I took the trade-off and said, okay, well, I can basically soundproof my house and, you know, spend $1,000 on microphones and audio recording equipment and stuff like that. And I’ve recognized that that’s a sensible and easy thing to be doing. The problem is with the video studio, you probably have people, right? So if you’re on that level, like as Rafirestone, one of my clients, or Ramit Sati, or somebody like that. you probably have like an actual studio that’s separate from your house and then people to operate the cameras, right? It’s not just you running the camera and doing everything. So yeah, it’s definitely It’s definitely like that kind of trade-off you’re willing to make. And you know you’re able to leverage that into like, you know, potentially mid-six figures of revenue.
Entirely. Entirely. And I think that part of it comes from The path from we need to circle back to the main question in a couple of minutes, but I just want to answer this point. Part of it is the darkness of the path from 250 forward. But there’s a pretty clear path from, I think, from like $50,000 to $100,000 or $100,000 to $200,000. And it’s a lot of the points you, dear listener, hear Positioning is very important. You should charge more. You should make sure you’re anchoring on value. You should have an expensive problem that you’re selling. You should probably have a book that Positions you as an authority or an expert. You should have defined marketing channels. These are all things that Nick and I have both implemented in our businesses and helped us grow over the last three years. which is why we share them as tried and true tested strategies that have worked for us. But in terms of growing to that next level, in terms of why aren’t we making more money Uh uh there there’s a few different points I want to make, but I want to see the Florida mo to Nick for a second first.
What are you terrible at?
I have thought I’m terrible at I guess the the real answer is, I am terrible at delegation, and it is the thing I am working hardest to get better at. I’m also terrible at recognizing the 20% that doesn’t need to be done. And feeling like it needs to be done, and I’m terrible at charging more, charging a high amount for the initial version of a product or a service offering. I will undercharge. Those are three weaknesses I know of in my own business.
I’m terrible at writing marketing pages when I’m not hungry for money. If my needs are taken care of, I write poor marketing pages. And I know you’re all thinking, Nick D, you’re the grand vizier of marketing pages. They’re all amazing. actually strongly disagree with that sentiment. I have had dud launches in the past. People pick apart the marketing page, but I don’t care. I don’t want you to pick apart the marketing page. I want you to buy the thing. I want the marketing pages written so that it can convert to a revenue-generating activity. And my marketing pages. Are very strongly variable around revenue generating activities. I don’t write marketing pages for fun.
Would you say you have like a one out of three success rate? Would you say a one out of one? Yeah, one out of three is reasonable. So you’d be pretty decent if this was a game of baseball and you were a hitter. But this isn’t baseball. But there’s a lot of pitches that come. I mean, like, there’s a lot of launches and a lot of opportunities.
No, there aren’t. I don’t, another thing that I’m terrible at is I don’t launch often. Enough. Fair.
Right.
This would be easier to say if I launched more than thrice a year.
Yep. Yep. And I think that’s really like the preceding, not problem, but opportunity that might be present in your business. How do you scale from three to six launches? Okay, you now have doubled your launch opportunities. How do you scale from six to twelve? One launch a month, you won’t overly tire out your list as long as you’re providing value in the meantime. Okay, great, now you have 12 opportunities to present something. And it becomes much easier to say, okay, yeah, but one out of three success rate, so I had four successes this year. That’s pretty good.
Yeah, I’ll even take one because it usually means that I made six figures on it, right? Like, there’s a bare minimum that I need to be doing, and I’ve been scrapping too hard lately. Like, there’s that. I’m terrible at laddering people. I recorded two episodes on this podcast with Kai Davis about product ladders, and I will tell you, I am. Not good at intentionally moving people from one rung of the ladder to the next. I am not good at focusing on who is on my mailing list and getting people to sign up to the next thing, right? People who bought cadence and slang. I mean, obviously, they’re going to broadly be unlikely to buy the A-B testing manual, but I’m also terrible at like having introductory products. My initial introductory product is $125. I think it’s $125. Yeah, draft analysis is $125. AB testing manual, I think, is $150, something like that. They’re all these big courses and they don’t work at scale, right? And I do those things because if you’re basically going to do hello world of A-B testing, you should have $125, right? But not everybody does that. And I don’t have credibility among enterprise customers. And so they’re not even looking at the shit that I’m doing. And my biggest competitors are eating me. Are they eating you? They’re definitely capturing the bottom end of the market.
But I mean, like, how big is the pie here? Is it, oh my gosh, I have a smaller slice?
Oh, it’s a multi-trillion dollar pie. A-B testing involves multiple trillions of dollars of revenue. If you think about. What you spend your money on at dear listener.
Mostly sandwiches, honestly.
Mostly sandwiches, but those sandwiches probably came from a website that was A-B tested. If you went on Grubhub. It was A-B tested. If you went on Talk or Seamless or Open Table, it was A-B tested. If you somehow procured your sandwich through eBay, it’s been A-B tested for 25 years.
Neil Armstrong sandwich.
Ice cream astronaut ice cream sandwiches that you can get on Amazon have been A B tested within an inch of their lives. Right. And so if you think about the amount of your disposable income that goes into stuff that gets A B tested or optimized in some capacity, It’s probably like 95%.
So it’s a very large market, which I think speaks to opportunities to launch more, to develop new products. It’s not a market that’s constrained in the range of service offerings you can make available. So there is A surplus available for you to play in.
Right. And there’s no distinct entry product for me around AB testing. There’s the A-B testing manual. Right. That’s too expensive. Okay, well, there’s cadence and slang. But that’s kind of off topic, right? So there’s an incoherence in my positioning around some of the things that I’m putting together.
But on the plus side, once you recognize this dissonance, this problem within your service ladder and product ladder. You’re able to say, okay, I’m missing the $49 product that should ladder to the $129 product.
Now, this is the thing, right? There’s a Dunning-Kruger issue in execution, right? And I think a lot of people suffer from this, and it’s a very nuanced and detailed problem that is broadly unidentifiable, like unrelatable to other people. Because we have identified the problem, but then, okay, well, okay, all I need to do is come up with a $49 product, $50 product because I don’t believe in ending prices with nine. Great. Okay.
Turn pricing. $47. 97. Which is crazy. 4813. And I’m like, wow, we really A-B tested that one. So there’s this problem around: okay, we’ve identified you need a $50 product.
Right.
And. You’re struggling to say, okay, what the fuck is that product?
Well, yeah, what’s the outcome? What’s the thing that it should be? I could give you all my checklists and shit, but they’re decontextualized.
Well, AI, I think for anything like this, we’re starting in the right position of saying, we want to create a product, and this is a price point. This is what I coach all of my clients on when they’re looking to create a product. We pick a price point first. Then we move forward and say, what medium do we want it to be in? Well, $50 for a video, you’re not going to get that much video. $50 for a book, that’d be a pretty good book. Now, this isn’t to say video is the wrong format or a book is the right format, just how much time and effort do you want to put into it? A $50 book, you’re going to be writing a bit. $50 a video, it might only be an hour worth of video. Oh, yeah, it’s going to be short. It’s going to be short. So I think that answers question two. Question three is: well, what exactly, what problem does this solve, or what outcome does this provide for the buyer? That comes directly to customer and market research, I think. What questions are they asking? Or what similar products have people on your list bought in the past?
Yes, it’s funny. By the time you get this. Dear listener, I’ll have finished a survey of everybody on my mailing list.
It is mandatory for all make money online, listeners, to you.
If you haven’t filled out the survey, I’m going to be very disappointed and sad.
He wanted Pet Basil for a night.
Not in you, but in myself forever believing in you.
Could Sodi, just clip that and email it to me. Kai at KaiDavis. com.
I think that should be the Text message sound that comes up on your phone every time I send you a text message.
This text message is available for $19. 97. That’s my entry product, man.
We solved it.
We got it. But I think, like, the formula I’m outlining there: it’s great that you’re doing this market research. That you’re serving the audience. This is going to tell you specifically what pains and problems they have. And now that we’ve sort of painted by numbers our way into okay, it’s going to be a video product, it’s going to be $50, and we wanted to answer, let’s say. Two to four questions, or solve the one primary pain your audience has once you identify what those are, what that pain is, or what those problems are. Now you’re able to create the product specifically to fulfill those requirements and fill that hole in your product ladder. Yeah, so it’s
I would love to kind of abstract the process of identifying a problem and then conceiving of a solution to that problem and executing on that problem within the context of a business.
It’s called 30%. By 500. It’s run by Amy Boy.
You know what I’m talking about. You know what I’m talking about because this is 300-level shit. 30 by 500 is wonderful and tremendously valuable and helpful if you’re starting out, right? No?
Completely disagree. You’re bugged right now. No, completely continues to be the most valuable resource. I don’t even have the most current version. I’m operating off of the. 2013, the last time they did it live. Like eight versions ago. No, one version ago. One version ago. But it continues to be the most valuable resource. I have ripped the audio from every single one of the videos. I have it on my phone that I could listen to it. I’ve reviewed the materials three, four, five times. I have a friend who took the original version, took the second version, just purchased the most recent version. He’s been doing product creation for 10-ish years now. 30 by 500 was incredibly valuable for him. It, I think, applies across the board.
Okay, so Right, but like the reason I’m saying this, and I think it’s because uh you’re saying this because they’re very like broadly applicable principles, right? Like there’s something that you can get from it when you’re 100 or 300, but I think that the reason The reason I’m saying this, and it’s not to target thirty by five hundred at all, is more to say that as you become more successful as a consultant, your issues become Both more bespoke and more unrelatable. So, um, and the fear shrinks, right? And the reason that I was talking earlier about once you get past 250 becomes kind of a black box is because everybody has their own executional path to get to a million, right? And especially to get to a million without scaling headcount. Right. That’s the big thing. The goal is to not scale headcount and capture more revenue.
I’d actually phrase it in a different way. Like, I dislike the Framing up it has to be a jump from 250 to a million or 100,000 to a million since it’s an order of magnitude difference essentially. I like saying 100 to 250, 250 to 300, and just scaling up that way because I think it’s a clearer it’s hard to say, like, okay, I make $100,000 a year. How do I make a million? Grow 10 of the same business and have them all be successful. You now have a million in real life. Work 400 hours a week? But the alternative of okay, how do I go from a hundred thousand to two hundred thousand? Yeah, you’re doubling, but okay, we can find the systems. You’re acting more efficiently. Yeah, it’s it’s a more efficient way to ask the question: we’re going to the same destination. But it’s sort of like saying, What do you want to be in 10 years? I don’t know. What do you want to be next year? I have a pretty good idea of that. And so we’re growing towards the 10-year plan step by step, we’re growing towards a million dollars or whatever the destination is. Step by step.
I mean, you have a limit of time, attention, and focus, and you start to asymptote out at 250. I really do believe that. You can be more efficient somehow, but then. You’re going to burn out if you try to act somehow. If you keep using focus and intentionality and double down on that, it will not get you anywhere. You’re going to. Just kill yourself working. So, how that’s another thing is like, how do you get things automated such that everything is working for you? And a lot of that happens with outreach, a lot of it happens with advertising, which is why I brought up advertising. You’re getting things to pass. To passively generate lower-tier income because you already built that system and it’s working for you in an effective way. I’m historically terrible at this. I’m good at pretending like you are someone that I am developing a more like deep and thoughtful and intimate relationship, right? And ultimately, you’re literally just signing up for my mailing list. But that shit doesn’t scale, right? I can do that. And I know the names of a lot of people on my mailing list. Like a lot of people on my mailing list. But it’s also that’s something that got built up over a really long period of time. And so I feel like I have several hundred. Shallower connections with these people. But that’s not how you sell at scale, man. You sell at scale by getting a volume of people into your mailing list whom you do not know intimately. You really do. And I’m horrible at that shit. That’s a large part of why I’m not making more money.
I mean, it sounds like it boils down to your list isn’t big enough and you don’t know the solution to the question of. How do I grow my list?
There’s that, I think. I mean, I know how to grow my list, and a large part of it is with advertising and free offerings and stuff like that. And I’ve got the latter, and I have outreach, which helps me out quite a bit. But my list is not growing as fast as it could be. My list also got thirded by spammers using it as a honeypot two months ago. So I lost a lot of ground. I also don’t know how to monetize my list, which is really hilarious and fucked up to say because my list is how I make almost all of my revenue.
So you do know how to monetize it, but you don’t know how to monetize it to the next level.
I don’t know how to monetize it intentionally. I know how to monetize it accidentally because I just launched stuff, right? And then people buy the stuff. But that’s so. 101 level, and I’m not at that level. And I know that I’m not at my that level, you know? And so the argument there is more that it’s more detailed than what it is that, like. But I’m just saying, like, oh, I’m not monetizing it. Well, obviously, I’m not monetizing it, but I’m.
Well, I think part of it boils down to like the lack of that clear entry-level product. So it’s hard to I’m a believer in always be pitching, always have some advertisements. It’s somebody’s first time on your list, first letter they receive, they should know that they that you have a service or a product available. As mentioned before, you don’t have an entry-level product that really is coherent with your other service offerings. So if in every single weekly letter you pitched cadence and slang, well, I’m sure you will sell copies from that.
Would get a lot of people curious about design and then they would buy research-driven E-B testing from me? Like, no. There’s not really a whole lot of money in just design qua design anymore.
So you need to, so filling in that offering gives you a clear thing to sell. which makes it easier to pitch to your list, which makes it easier to start converting subscribers to buyers.
Right, right. Yeah, I think that’s it. We’re talking about me a lot.
Let’s flip it around for a second.
Let’s talk about Kai Davis for a minute.
So before this episode, I went through it and I thought a bit about why my business in particular isn’t making more money. And it boils down to a couple elements that I will mosey my way through. The first is a combination of fear and comfort. It both is scary to think about growing the business and I don’t know if this is my anxiety or a shared experience other people have, but when I think about jumping from where my business is currently to, let’s say, $500,000 a year. It’s like, do I want that? Like, I feel fear and uncertainty around what that would look like, what my lifestyle would be like. And this plays into the second element, comfort. I’m comfortable with how my life is right now. I make a good living. I enjoy what I do. I’m able to go on fun trips. I’m able to. Do have interesting adventures, and I don’t necessarily need a bigger slice of the pie. I’m very content with where my business is. I want to grow my business, but I don’t feel that driving need to grow my business. So the first reason is: well, there’s fear, and I don’t quite know what the path is, and I’m also comfortable where I currently am. Why focus too hard on monetary growth?
I think that’s kind of that Maslow’s hierarchy thing we were talking about on a previous episode where, like, you’ve got all your basic needs taken care of. What now? You know, and like, does Kai need a solid gold couch? Like, not really. Not really.
No, I’m good. I’m happy.
Life is good. I’m not going to be good with your normal couch that usual people have.
I have no plans on buying a house. I love my car. 2003 Honda Accords, man, they run forever. They’re wonderful, wonderful cars. And I spend money on crazy things like go to Burning Man and travel a bit, and that’s really it. And do I need to grow? No, could I grow? Sure. Am I going to grow? In some way. What are the ramifications of it, right?
Mm-hmm.
Right?
So, what’s the next thing?
Well, we talked about the lack of the visible plan. Another one is work-life balance. And you touched on this and I touched on this. Yeah, we talked about that. And I think I mean, listen to our previous episodes as well, dear listener. You get to opt into what that work-life balance looks like. There’s also, let me read my own notes here. There’s also the issue I often talk about where clients very much understand the problems they are experiencing, but don’t know what solutions make sense. Outcomes are realistic. And in this scenario, Nick and I are both the client. We both are the ones inhabiting our own businesses, looking around and saying, Well, we know stuff is broken. We aren’t making a billion dollars a year. So.
Why aren’t we making a billion dollars? That’s a better question.
I mean, I tell you, all you need to do is adjust a couple numbers on your tax form and you could claim a billion dollars in revenue. It’s very easy. Can I adjust a couple numbers in my bank account? Unfortunately, no.
Well, shit.
I know. But we’re so steeped in our own businesses, we know what the problems are. But to circle back to that earlier point, we don’t have that visible plan, and we don’t know what those steps look like. In one way, I’m attacking the problem is simplifying it from how do I get to like half a billion dollars or how do I get to a lower threshold than that? So I’m doing Let’s say $50,000 increment. Since that’s something realistic, I think, like, hey, over the next 10 years, my goal every year is to grow my business by $50,000. Well, great, that’s a measurable amount of money that will impact quality of life. But won’t be like, okay, I got to go from $250,000 to $500,000 this year. That’s going to be pretty hard. I think staying independent by myself, running my microagencies, I could grow by $50,000 a year. That’s realistic and achievable.
Yeah, and I would think that growing by $50,000, if you make that a projection and a goal for yourself, then It seems a bit more achievable than Nick D is going to get to 500,000 by 2020. That seems like a huge gulf because I’m doubling my revenue. And for what? How am I going to get there? I don’t know. But also if you set like revenue projections for certain launches and stuff like that, like I think that’s one way to do it. But you’re also taking like a low A lower view of it, like a lower flying view.
Jason Zuk has a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I don’t have a link to it, unfortunately. Otherwise, it would be in show notes. Income planning spreadsheet that he uses to plan out, okay, this is my target income. These are the projects, these are the products, these are the recurring streams I have. This is how it all adds up. I’m going to spend March and April building a product and launch in May and June. And then this is how much money I’m expecting it to bring in. And it just gives a very nice entrepreneurial view. 12-a month breakdown month by month. Well, how much income do I actually need to be bringing in to make my goal? And where’s that income going to come from? And it’s an exercise I recommend. Everyone go through. Look at how much income you need from each different stream and figure out, okay, so to make $10,000 a year, or not $10,000 A year, $10,000 a month. Please don’t make $10,000 a year. Unless you want to. To make $10,000 a month, well, I need to sell this mixture of services. It might not just be one $10,000 engagement, it’s $200,000, $500, $2,000, $1,500. And a scattering of the rest to bring you to that target, but it’s only by breaking it down by sort of line item, skew, product line that you’re able to see for each month and for the year overall, what do sales need to look like for the business.
I think the takeaway with all of this is that it always helps to kind of zoom out and think more critically about the way your business is operating. The more you can kind of Ditch your own perspective and adopt a different perspective about it allows you to think more critically about how you’re operating. Not just how the business operates, but what specifically you are executing on on a day-to-day basis. And that doesn’t come easy, right? Like it’s not something that anyone is wired to do. So it’s a very asymmetric, counterintuitive move. I think that is mostly the key, though.
I think it is. I mean, one of the exercises I have every single coaching student I work with go through is filling out a business health analysis. It’s a 50-point questionnaire about their business. And it forces this 5,000-foot view. It forces us to back up out of the business and say, okay, big picture. How is the business doing? How are you doing on these metrics? Are you using these systems? Yes or no? And it works very well for my coaching students to help us get that perspective of how business is doing and then say, Okay, from the 5,000-foot level, where could we see inefficiencies we need to correct? And that gives us a game plan.
And that’s something you can use yourself, right? If you, Kai, Davis, and even me, if we’re not using that sort of questionnaire about our own businesses from time to time, we are fucking up. So that’s your takeaway. I’m going to give you some homework, Kai. You run that questionnaire about your own stupid business. And you dog food it. And you can even share those answers to your coaching students after they fill out their responses. Oh, that’s great. And then it shows. A measure of vulnerability to them, right? But also a measure of honesty with yourself. And so do that and let me know how it goes, man.
Yeah, no, that’s a good next action.
What should I do?
I think you need to focus on the $49 or the $50 product. Yeah, I do. And honestly, I would say you want. Two separate products. You want a $25 product, something that’s small and easy. And another $25 product, equally a $50 product.
You buy them together for $50 in a bundle. It’s very special.
I think there’s value in having, I mean, the hardest, hardest part of selling anything online, being in a service or a product, is taking somebody from having never paid you a dollar. To having paid you more than zero dollars. And so, yeah, the goal is to pay me. Yeah. I mean, having a $50 product that solves an obvious hole that we’ve discussed on numerous episodes of Make Money Online. But I think there’s also a justification for like, well, what does a $25, very short, very small video product look like for draft? And then creating it, launching it, time boxing it so you aren’t spending more than four hours. Live video. I think it’s quicker for you to ship a video a short video thing than a short written thing, but either way, any type or any type of solution you want. Having a scoped to $25 option available for people to purchase. Maybe it’s draft method. Maybe it’s a collection of audio interviews you’ve done, plus a video interview you’ve done. Maybe it’s something else. Something that introduces people to your worldview, provides them with direction and a solution to a problem they’re experiencing at that $25 and then that $50 price point. What’s the outcome? For you or for them? For them. For them, well, I think the answer is.
I mean, for me, it’s that I make money, but for them, there’s got to be some sort of concrete value, right?
That comes from market research you do on your list, surveying them, figuring out the questions they’re asking. I just did this, if you’re on my list, about a A month and a half ago from the time you’ll hear this episode, you participated, or some people participated, in a questionnaire about email, challenges they have writing emails. Most difficult email they sent. And that was a market research activity on my side to understand, well, what outcomes do I want a product centered around how to create or write better emails to generate for the reader? And I couldn’t have it spring forth from my head. Sight unseen, I don’t know what that solution should look like. But by asking people on my list and viewing those responses in aggregate, I could see the commonalities that jump out. And those commonalities say, oh, I need something that leads somebody to this type of outcome. But it all comes from market research.
Well, all right. So I guess I have to run the survey and then figure out what it is I’m going to be doing, and then I can go and do the thing.
That is a very good plan for business.