There are way too many things to say “Yes” to.

About 5 years ago, I started growing pretty quickly on social media. As a result, I’ve been blessed with more messages, notifications, requests, opportunities, side quests, and shiny objects than one could ever possibly hope to manage.

One benefit of having too many opportunities is you can’t do them all. In some ways it’s actually easier, because you have to learn how to say “No.” Which is how I came up with what I’m going to share with you today: How to create simplicity in your life and business, through what I call the art of subtraction.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Before we get to the lessons, you must understand why you have such a hard time saying “no” in the first place.

Why it’s hard to say “no.”

Problem 1 - We are wired for addition.

At a biological level, we are wired to solve problems by adding things. It’s called The Additive Bias. The study “People systematically overlook subtractive changes,” which became the book Subtract, reveals our biological preference toward addition.

Take the research study pictured above on the left. In it, participants were faced with a simple challenge: Make the LEGO bridge level so it can stand on its own. Nearly all participants solved the problem by ADDING a brick. Wrong! The most efficient solution is to simply REMOVE a brick.

Put simply, our brains struggle to subtract. We often don’t even see it as an option. When there is a problem to be solved, the solution humans default to is MORE.

• It’s why we try to lose weight by buying a treadmill, instead of eating less.

• It’s why we think we need more clients, instead of just raising our prices.

• It’s why we gather more information, instead of removing distractions.

This affects every area of our lives, but is especially problematic for entrepreneurs because in business, the problems never stop. When faced with a never-ending series of problems to solve, and a bias toward addition, the only logical outcome is more complexity.

It’s why you have too many commitments, too many apps, too much shit in your house, and never enough time. We are built to say yes and do more.

But I want to be clear - addition is not inherently bad. Addition is how we create new things. It’s how we experiment, iterate, and discover new ways of solving problems. The REAL issue is our unchecked bias toward addition which causes us pain.

As we add more things, take on more commitments, and grow our businesses, our lives get full. And as much as it is a joy to have a full life, it can quickly turn into stress, burnout, and resentment, if we are not intentional about what we say “Yes” to.

So why do we say “Yes” when should say “No”? Just turn on the TV and you’ll get your answer…

Problem 2 - Saying yes is rewarded.

We live in a “Yes” culture. It’s not surprising that a species with a major bias toward addition would base its culture and economy around overcommitment and overwork. The incentives and messages we hear are to “do more.” Not “do the right things.” Just do more.

Saying “No” is frowned upon in our society. And most people want to fit in, avoid conflict, and feel like they are helping others. So when we say “No,” even if it’s the right thing to do, it goes against our wiring as social creatures.

Even worse, it literally hurts us to say “No.” Studies show that the brain makes no distinction between possible social rejection and physical pain. That’s right, even your nervous system wants you to say “Yes.”

Problem 3 - Busyness is a great excuse.

We are addicted to being busy. There is a certain sense of smug satisfaction we get by saying how busy we are. We say we don’t want to be busy, but secretly, we love it.

Busyness is the ultimate smokescreen. No one could ever accuse an entrepreneur with a complex, convoluted, crazy business of not working hard enough. Nor could they accuse them of not being successful. For many, busyness equals success.

I’m rarely impressed by busy people. I believe we use busyness as a way to avoid dealing with reality. Out of control busyness is more often a symptom of poor prioritization, problem-solving skills, and emotional regulation than a sign of being important, efficient, or effective.

Busyness fills the void by giving us a convenient (and socially acceptable) excuse to avoid the uncomfortable silence of sitting with ourselves and asking - is this what I really want?

Problem 4 - AI is making all of this worse.

AI is not helping matters.

Efficiency is about doing things quickly. Effectiveness is about doing the right things. AI is a tool for efficiency.

The problem with being 10x more efficient is it says nothing about whether you were effective. AI allows us to say yes to many more things without ever having to think about whether they are the right things to do. Driving 100 mph in the wrong direction won’t get you any closer to where you want to go, but at least you’ll be able to post online about how fast you’re going!

Maybe giving millions of people who already struggle with prioritization a tool that allows them to do more things faster wasn’t a good idea? This is why every entrepreneur is using AI and very few are making more money as a result.

How to say “No.”

With all these chips stacked against us - our brains, our culture, our egos, and even our AI - how can we possibly dig ourselves out of this mess?

The answer is simple: We need to learn to say “No.”

The good news? In this life there are just two people you need to learn to say “No” to:

1. Yourself.

2. Everyone else.

To that end, here are 16 lessons and insights I’ve learned about how to create simplicity in a world optimized for addition.

1. You can’t do everything.

Before we go any further, you must become willing to let go of the version of yourself who believes they can do everything.

In your life, you can do anything. Just not all at once. The more you sustain your attention and focus on one problem, practice, or business, the greater your results will be. You’ll accomplish much more focused on one or two important things at a time, than by living the fantasy that you can do everything.

2. Start by removing the easy stuff. (your phone)

If you don’t know what to do, you can start with removing what you don’t want to do. I’m sure the 7+ hours of daily screen time wasn’t part of your life plan. If your goal is to create space to let new opportunities emerge, limiting time spent on your phone is the most obvious place to start. (I use Brick to limit screen time, but you could also just put your phone in another room).

3. Subtract like you’re tending a garden.

Life is going to create complexity. It is a law of the universe - by just being humans, we will acquire more things and make things more complicated over time. Subtraction is like weeding and pruning a garden - it requires constant maintenance and awareness. But the beautiful thing about removing what doesn’t belong, is it creates lots of room for what you want to grow.

4. One in, one out.

Along the way, you are going to be tempted to add more things. One of the best ways I’ve found to combat this tendency isn’t by resisting it, but by working with it. When you add something new, take something away. Minimalists call this “one in, one out.” For example:

• When you add an event to your booked calendar, remove a commitment as well.

• When you buy something new, donate something that you already have.

• When you add a new initiative in your business, remove something that isn’t working.

5. It’s worth thinking about how you spend your time.

Because our time on earth is finite, the leverage will always be in how we spend our time, as opposed to how much time we spend. That means what we do is much more important than how much we do. You can never work your way out of working on the wrong things. As a result, time spent thinking about what to do is overpowered.

6. Your priorities are what you actually do.

What we say is important and what we actually do are often radically different. To hammer that home, I have entrepreneurs I work with do a Calendar/Priority Audit. Here’s how it works:

1. Write down the top 5 things that are important to you in your life and your work.

2. Pull up your calendar.

3. See if the things you listed are consistent with how you spend your time.

If they are different - congratulations! You’ve found your real priorities. They are how you actually spend your time. If you don’t like how it looks, I’d start by removing some of those things from your calendar.

7. Say “No” to good things.

“Anyone can say no to crappy opportunities. Only a master will say no to good opportunities. If you don’t say no to good opportunities, you’ll never have the time to pursue great opportunities.” - Shane Parrish

And while we’re on that point…

8. Leave money on the table.

There will come a time in your life where you will have to say “No” to money. You will probably feel weird when it happens. That is normal. But you should leave money on the table because not all money is good money.

9. You can say “No” after you’ve said “Yes.”

This is a hard one for people to wrap their brains around. Sometimes we say “Yes” without thinking and regret it later. It happens. You can fix this easily - my wife calls it The Circleback. Say something like, “Hey, it turns out I’m actually not going to be able to make that commitment. Hope you have a great time!”

10. Set your boundaries with words AND actions.

We teach people how to treat us. Saying one thing but doing another is confusing to people. Communicate your boundaries through being consistent with your words AND actions.

11. Create systems to say “No.”

Rather than rely on willpower, it’s easier to just create systems to say no. Ask yourself: “What’s one decision that can remove 100 future decisions?” Here are some ideas:

• Policies. Like other rules, policies are all made up. But people respond well to them. I don’t know why. But you could have a policy such as… “I don’t take meetings on days other than Tuesdays.” “I have a minimum rate of $X.” “I don’t check email until 12pm.” “I don’t do discounts - full price or free.” etc. Then just tell them to people.

• Filter to paid. If you get too many requests to “chat,” get guidance,

  or “connect” for free, filter them toward a paid offering (consulting, coaching call, digital product).

• FAQ page. Make a page explaining what you are available to work on, what your values are, and what you don’t do. This is the gold standard.

• Not-To-Do list. Create a list of things you don’t do. A classic since Tim Ferriss posted it in 2007.

12. Realize complexity is a coping mechanism.

We create complexity in our lives and businesses as a way to avoid pain. The next right thing is often dead simple. It will also cause us to feel something we don’t want to feel, so we construct a complex path around it instead. The pain you’re avoiding is the path to what you truly want.

13. Do less, but better.

When you say “No” more often, the work you’re left with requires greater attention and greater effort. If you cook a meal with only 3 ingredients, each one matters much more than if you cook a meal with 30.

Distilling something down to its essence means each component is measurably more important. Rick Rubin says, “less is more, but to get less, you have to do more.”

Simplicity creates space for real innovation to take place. It’s much more likely that you’ll innovate something meaningful by going deeper in your work, than by adding another shiny object you learned about from a YouTube video.

14. Space is valuable.

When we are clear on what we want and what we don’t, it creates space. This space can be uncomfortable, but this is the place where new opportunities emerge. All of the best relationships I’ve built in my life have been as a result of a chance encounter. If we’re maxed out constantly, we won’t have the bandwidth to see the opportunities or signals that are waiting for us.

15. Simplicity is earned.

Saying “No” and practicing the art of subtraction is not easy. We must earn simplicity. Simplicity is earned because it requires sacrifice. It requires us to remove things we once thought were important in order to create space for things that maybe haven’t even arrived yet. It’s not easy.

16. Subtraction helps you discover who you are.

So much of self-help is centered around doing more things in order to become more like someone that you’re not. I believe discovering who you are is more subtractive than additive. Architect John Pawson describes simplicity as, “the perfection that an artifact achieves when it is not possible to improve it by subtraction.” I think that’s a better way to think about personal development. There is nothing outside yourself that will make you whole. Who are you when there’s no attachments, no stories, and no fear? That’s worth finding out.

Finally, if you’re curious about working with me, I current have two offerings:

1. High-level 1:1 consulting for creative entrepreneurs earning $500k-$5m/year.

2. Custom advisory services to select brands, leaders, and companies on creative strategy, inner work, and influence.

Today we’re talking about sales - specifically, your fear of it.

There’s a whole micro-industry that is devoted to selling solutions to your sales shame:

• “How to sell without being salesy.”

• “Build your business without sales calls.”

• “Sell without selling your soul.”

Resistance to sales is one of the most common issues I see with entrepreneurs. It even affects those operating at a high level. The reason is simple - sales hits on a lot of hot button issues that go much deeper than business - asking for what we want, facing rejection when we do, handling objections, our beliefs around money and self-worth - stuff like that.

Most often, resistance to sales takes the form of avoidance. It’s tempting to just try to avoid sales and hope for the best. But I have a different perspective. Engineering your life to avoid problems will not actually make them go away.

I believe everyone should learn to sell. Everyone. And when I say sell, I mean one to one, in a conversation, with a real person. It is the fastest path to understand both yourself and your customers. Not to mention, learning how to sell means you can make more money, which you might want also.

But if all of that isn’t good enough, let me try this…

If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for them.

Your fear of sales is selfish.

Yes, I said it. There are people out there right now who would benefit massively from your work. By avoiding sales, you’re literally robbing people of the ability to be helped by you. You owe it to your clients to be good at sales, because it is the only way that you will be able to help them.

Let me put this in perspective. After doing hundreds of sales calls and reviewing hundreds more, I can say this math holds up pretty well:

• 1/3 of customers will say yes, no matter what. You can have the worst sales call ever (I’ve done it) and they’re still gonna move forward. If you’re bad at sales, these people are your whole business.

• 1/3 of customers will say no, no matter what. They just aren’t fits and there’s nothing you can do to change that. They may not see the value, they may not be an ideal client, or they may just not be ready. Let them go.

• 1/3 of customers are truly on the fence. They are at a crossroads in their life. And for them, a powerful conversation with you might be the most consequential 60 minutes of their YEAR, because it represents a choice between one of two potential futures for them.

So yeah, about that last 1/3… if you are bad at sales, they don’t get helped. They just get filed straight into the “No” column. And that should be unacceptable to you.

Think about some of your BEST customers. The ones who you have had the biggest, most life-changing impact on. Now imagine that you never met them. That you were too scared to take their call. That you didn’t help them make the decision to work together. Where would they be right now? And would you be okay with that?

Not only should you want to excel at sales for yourself, you should want to be good at sales for your customers. So today I want to offer you a new perspective that has served me very well. Here it is:

We owe it to our clients to be good at sales.

You literally cannot avoid selling. You are in business - you have to sell. Even if you’re bad at sales, or you’re trying your best to avoid it, you’re still doing it. Everything is sales (it’s a book).

It’s really quite strange how resistant we are to selling, because we actually LOVE buying things. I would argue we actually love being sold to as well. Take a look around your room. How many things in it did you buy? Think back - why did you buy it? Who educated you about the product? What was the process like? What convinced you to purchase it? What finally put you over the edge? That’s all sales. If you enjoyed buying that thing, you probably actually enjoyed being sold it as well. And your clients will too.

Why you avoid sales.

Whether you think you like or hate something - you’re right. Your opinions about sales are a direct reflection of the beliefs that you hold about it. If you were to audit your beliefs around sales, we would probably surface some stuff like this:

1. I’m not good at sales.

2. Salespeople are bad.

3. Sales is manipulation.

4. Confrontation is scary.

5. I don’t want to be rejected.

6. I don’t know how to sell.

7. Salespeople are pushy.

Sound familiar? That’s just scratching the surface. But my point isn’t about the specific beliefs themselves. It’s about how our brains interpret them.

Our brains behave like a GPS. If you plug a belief in, our brains will do everything in their power to make your reality consistent with that belief. So if you believe that sales means pain, you can bet your brain is going to create a way to make that a reality. And you’ll probably end up signed up for a course on how to sell without sales calls.

7 better beliefs about selling.

Since we established that our mind is like a GPS, it would probably benefit us to plug in some better directions.

Personally, I love sales. I am also great at sales. You may think that the reason I love sales is because I’m good at it, but you would have it backwards.

You can love something before you’re good at it. I loved playing the guitar before I was good at it. I love sales not because I’m good at it, but because of the beliefs that I have about sales, which as a result, means that I have gotten good at it.

So let me give you a belief I hope you take with you today:

Selling helps people.

Hopefully that’s uncontroversial. I assume you have a business with a bunch of happy customers that are glad that they bought something from you because it made their lives better. And they would be sad, and worse off if they hadn’t. Right? So yes, selling helps people.

I want to share a handful of beliefs that I have about sales. You’re welcome to choose to believe anything you want, but my experience has been that having more empowering beliefs generally leads to better outcomes. So maybe borrow some of these for a week or two. See how it feels. If you can reframe what you believe about selling, you can also lose your negative association to selling.

Here are 7 more useful beliefs to try on:

1. When I sell, I help people. You are in business to help people. The only way to help people is to do sales. And when you help more people, you make more money.

2. The first person I must sell is myself. The first client you must convince is always yourself. If you don’t believe in the value of your work, the people you speak to won’t either.

3. The goal of a sales call is to help someone make a decision. You are not here to pressure someone into saying yes. The goal is simply to help them make a decision. Whether it is a yes or a no, the call is a win. Bonus: When there is no pressure say yes, it creates trust, which ironically makes them more likely to say yes.

4. People only buy when they believe the value they will get is greater than the price. If they decide to say no, it’s not personal. It just means it is not a fit for them right now.

5. I only work with people I know I can help. Sales is as much about us vetting the client as it is about them vetting us. Part of the sales process is understanding whether we have the best solution to help them, and if we want to have them in our lives. If it’s not a fit, we don’t make them an offer.

6. A sales call represents an inflection point in someone’s life. Most people don’t jump on a sales call just to chat. They have a painful problem or an exciting goal that they have been marinating on, and they’re ready to (possibly) do something about it. It is a privilege to meet someone at this point, and in many cases, we get to be a catalyst that nudges them into the next phase of their journey. Sales is simply advocating for a better future for the person you’re talking to.

7. Selling creates relationships. Every time you get on a sales call, you never know whether you’re going to meet someone who will be in your life for a long time. Some of my best relationships have come from a sales conversation, even if they never became a client. Don’t be transactional, play the long game.

As you can see, these are some empowering beliefs. Based on them, it’s no surprise that I enjoy sales. If you had some of these beliefs, I bet you’d love sales too.

How to improve at sales.

Hopefully at this point your thoughts have shifted to:

“I’m sold on sales! How can I get better at sales so I can help more people?”

It’s easy! You learn to sell by doing sales calls. The same way you learn guitar by playing guitar. Or you learn to paint by painting. Watching videos and reading books only gets you so far. Once you learn the basics, you need to treat it like a deliberate practice.

A good rule of thumb is you will need to take 10-30 calls before you start to see some serious improvement. That should take the pressure off - you will not be great at first and that is OK.

The better you get at sales, the less it will feel like sales. Eventually, it will just feel like having a conversation. But it takes practice to get there. Over time, you’ll improve. And you’ll learn - a lot. Not just about your customers, but about yourself.

And that’s what this is all about anyway, right?

P.S. You ALSO owe it to your clients to be good at marketing. But I’ll save that for another one. :)

Work with me.

My work is currently limited to 1:1 partnerships with creative entrepreneurs earning $500k-$5m per year and consulting with large firms. If you fit either of those descriptions, I do sales and deal consulting, which you can learn more about here.

1. Sell outcomes. Clients don’t care what you do. They care what they will get. Talk about outcomes - not deliverables, tasks, or time.

2. High prices create better clients. Cheap and expensive clients take the same amount of energy to manage. People who pay more are more committed, have more clarity, and get better results.

3. Never lower your prices to win a client. It devalues your best clients, who happily pay in full. It rewards bad clients, who will leave for someone cheaper. If you must negotiate, never lower your prices without taking something away.

4. If you’re comfortable with your prices, they’re too low. Your rates should increase as you get better. If you’re comfortable with your rates, they probably don’t reflect your work’s current value.

5. Sell to clients with money. The bigger the client, the greater the value you can create for them, and the more you can charge.

6. Sell to clients who value your work. If the client believes they can do what you do (even if they’re wrong), they won’t pay a lot of money.

7. Be an expert, not an order-taker. Order takers sell deliverables and are treated like employees. Experts sell outcomes and are treated like partners.

8. Sell yourself first. The first sale is to yourself. If you don’t believe your work is worth it, your clients won’t either.

9. Price based on value. Your price reflects what you believe your work is worth to the right client. Selling value removes the limits on the prices you can charge. Provide at least 10x more value than your price.

10. Do the inner work. Better clients start with a better relationship with yourself.

11. Have more conversations. Selling value is a relationship game, not a volume game. If you say you want new clients, but your calendar has zero meetings with new prospects scheduled on it this week, that’s your problem.

12. Speak to your clients. Talk - on phone, on zoom, or in person. Do not email a proposal. Big agreements happen in conversation.

13. Lead the call. Experts lead, order-takers follow. If the client is interviewing you, you’ve already lost.

14. Be confrontationally curious. Experts ask deep questions and listen until they understand. Find the goal behind the goal. Your #1 question: Why?

15. Talk about money on the call. Proposals should only summarize what’s already been discussed. Say the price and shut up. Don’t fidget, explain, or apologize.

16. Help prospects make a decision. Either a yes or no is a win. Don’t tolerate maybe.

17. Have a DGAF attitude. Clients can sense desperation and neediness. When the can tell you don’t need to close them, they will trust you more.

18. Use FU pricing. When you are very busy, or meet a client you’re not crazy about, set your prices much higher than usual. This is an experiment. You’ll be surprised how often it’s still a yes.

19. Practice lifelong learning. Always be learning. Go deep in a few areas, and wide in many. Be better every day. Strive for greatness.

20. Believe in your work. Keep a list of wins. Build a daily body of evidence for your work’s value through wins, testimonials, outcomes, and proof, so your conviction doesn’t depend on your mood. Speak about your wins with your prospects.

21. Believe in yourself. When you believe in yourself, you believe in your work. When you believe in your work, your clients believe in your work. When your clients believe in your work, they pay what it is worth.

One final note:

These 21 rules of pricing, when practiced consistently, will allow you to command much higher rates.

They work across all levels, whether you’re closing your first $10k consulting client, or you’re selling $100-300k+ projects monthly (like my 1:1 clients).

But understanding the rules alone will not get you results.

They must be put into action.

I hope they serve you as well as they have served me.

💸 Work With Me: How To Charge More (Cohort 2)

If you’d like my help to charge (much) higher prices, you’re in luck.

I teach a live program called How To Charge More.

Over four weeks, you’ll:

• Raise the price of your offer ($10k minimum)

• Lose the fear of charging more.

• Attract better clients.

• Sell with confidence.

Our second cohort starts on May 4th (that’s in a few weeks!)

Click here to join the Waitlist

When I ran my design agency, I made $500,000 a year while only working 10 to 15 hours a week.

How was I able to do that?

A couple of reasons:

1. I charged high prices and had only a few clients. (If you want help with this, How To Charge More Cohort 2 starts in a few weeks!)

2. I built systems to free up my time.

3. And most importantly, I delegated often, both with freelancers and assistants.

Today I want to share a short training I originally included in my 🏖️How To Work Less® program in 2024.

That program is no longer available for sale.

But I believe that this single training was worth the $3,000 program price tag alone, based on how much value it generated for my business (and my clients!)

TO THIS DAY, I send it to my 6-7 figure clients as a playbook for when they want to start getting out of the weeds of fulfillment in their business and buy back some of their time.

(By the way, it’s actually a two-parter - the other half is How To Hire Admin/VAs - I’ll share the second half in the coming months for my paid readers)

Here’s what I cover in the training:

• Learn how to build a rock solid all-star async team that will increase your output by 10x for 1/10 of the cost, with no risk.

• Understand how to hire for creative and high-skill roles without sacrificing quality (and keeping costs down).

• Get the exact systems I used to manage my team flawlessly with one short meeting a week. (In Notion - 🗄️ Freelance Rolodex, 📂 Simple Project Management, 📬 Freelancer Onboarding Guide)

• I’ll also share a case study of how I used this skill to spend $8-9k to hire a freelance animator that helped me grow from 104k to 250k followers on Instagram.

If you want to get instant access to this, plus my library of monthly trainings/workshops, just become a paid subscriber to inner entrepreneur here. ⬇️

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“I’ve never regretted charging higher prices, but I’ve regretted charging less every time.”

I read that comment from a reader today and it hit home.

We know we should be charging more.

We’ve known it for a long time.

But knowing and doing aren’t the same.

So instead we look at what everyone else charges, go a little lower, throw in some extra value, and call it a day.

Meanwhile, the gap between our prices and what our work is actually worth keeps getting wider.

I want you to understand there’s another way.

My 1:1 clients regularly charge $100-300k per engagement, even in “AI-exposed” fields like web development, design, and consulting.

I’ve also helped hundreds of entrepreneurs to close their first $10k-50k+ deals.

So why are they able to charge so much money?

That’s what I’m going to teach you today.

Learning to advocate for the value of your work will change your life and business.

My client Taylor said it perfectly: “Once I learned how to do it, I never had to worry about making money again.”

So today I’m going to teach you how to raise your prices.

But there’s one big caveat before we get started…

Charging more is just as much an internal game as an external one.

You’ll quickly realize that the reasons you’re not charging more have less to do with how good you are, and more to do with your relationship with yourself.

Let’s get started.

The 4 pillars of price.

There are only four reasons you're not charging more money.

I know that sounds crazy.

But after working with over 500 entrepreneurs (consultants, designers, developers, coaches, agency owners) to help them charge more, I keep seeing the same patterns over and over.

I call them the four pillars of price.

They are:

1. Your skill (the value you bring to the market)

2. Your clients (the customer you’re selling to)

3. Your articulation (your sales and marketing)

4. Your belief (your self-esteem)

Pillar 1 - Value you create.

Let’s start with the basics.

If you want to charge a lot of money, you need to be good at what you do.

This may come as a shock to some of you, but yes, you must be an expert to charge a ton of money (more on that in Pillar 3).

And when I say “value you create” - I don’t mean your value as a person.

I mean your work’s value in the marketplace.

Don’t even get me started on “Charge what you’re worth.”

Your worth as a human being is infinite.

That has nothing to do with what you charge.

But your work has worth - clear, measurable market value.

And most entrepreneurs have very little clarity about what that value actually is.

They know they’re “good” because they have happy clients and sometimes get referrals.

But if you asked them to explain, in specific terms, the full scope of value they bring to a client engagement (tangible and intangible), they’d struggle.

So step one is awareness.

Get clear on the value you bring to the table.

Clarity of value.

If you don’t understand your work’s value, how will your client?

And before we move on, you need one more thing:

Mastery of value.

The way you continue to increase the value you create over time is by going deeper into your craft.

We gain mastery through practical experience (doing the work) and theoretical experience (studying the work).

But one thing you’ll notice is nobody has just one skill anymore.

It’s 2026, everyone has a stack of skills they bring to the table.

When I was running my design agency, I was probably an 8/10 as a designer.

Not the best in the world.

But I had a bunch of other skills stacked on top of that.

I’m extremely strategic, I’m great at sales, and I’m great at managing relationships.

I can take in a ton of information and distill it down to the one thing that actually matters.

That stack of skills allowed me to charge more than 99% of designers out there.

Because the value I brought wasn’t just design.

It was design + strategy + relationships + judgment.

This is often described as a “T-shaped” skill stack.

You go deep in one or a few areas, and then go wide in many areas.

This breadth of wisdom amplifies your core skills dramatically.

It’s why when we teach our clients in How To Charge More how to sell, position, and communicate the value of their work, they see outsized returns in their prices.

Because they already have the depth, they just need the right breadth.

Pillar 2 - Value to the client.

Pillar two shouldn’t surprise you:

The simplest way to increase price is to find better clients.

Here’s how I explain it:

Your skills are like fuel.

• You can put that fuel in a lawnmower, and the outcome you get is a mowed lawn.

• You can put that same fuel in a car, and the outcome is a drive across the country.

• Or you can put it in a rocket ship, and the outcome is a trip to the moon.

Exact same fuel, wildly different outcomes.

Your clients’ businesses are the vehicles.

Your skills are the fuel.

Better clients can get more value from your skills (which means you can charge more money).

I had a conversation with a client recently who runs a branding agency.

He told me his team runs the exact same process whether the project is $10k or $60k.

Same expertise, steps, and quality of work.

The only difference was the size of the client’s business.

So if you’re not charging enough right now, I bet you’re working with a bunch of lawnmowers.

So my question for you is:

Why are you not going after cars or rocket ships?

Now, whenever I tell people this, the first thing they say is:

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t know where to find bigger clients.”

And then they stop. That’s it. End of exploration.

But you’ve just identified the number one constraint in your business!

Don’t give up!

You have a computer. LinkedIn exists. Google exists. AI exists.

You should be spending a massive amount of your discretionary time trying to figure out how to build relationships with these types of clients.

You can figure out how to talk to these clients.

(Or let us teach you in How To Charge More.)

But most people won’t.

They accept the limitation as a fact instead of treating it as the problem to solve.

So yes, this is the simplest way to charge much higher prices: find clients who can get more value from what you already do.

Here’s one red flag to watch for if you want to move up-market:

Stop selling to clients who think they can do what you do.

If the client believes they know how to do what you do, they will not find it as valuable.

Non-experts buy based on value.

Experts buy based on features and data.

Think about it - if someone knows how to change their own oil, they’re going to think the mechanic is ripping them off at $100.

This becomes a big problem if you are in a specific industry.

For example, if you are in the design industry and you are a subcontractor for a bigger design agency, you will have a ceiling for how much you can charge.

But when you step outside that bubble and go where people value your work more, the entire pricing conversation changes.

So just to recap:

Work with bigger clients who value your work.

Pillar 3 - Articulation of the value.

Pillar three is where your value and your client meet.

Articulation is how you tell the story of what happens when you and your client intersect.

Of the value that’s created and the outcomes that happen.

Pricing happens before anyone spends a dollar.

It’s all about perceived value.

And you shape that perception through your positioning, your marketing, and your sales.

Think of it this way:

Pillar 1 times Pillar 2 gives you the maximum possible value you could create.

That’s the ceiling.

But your ability to capture that value is limited by how well you can communicate it.

If you’re a 4 out of 10 on articulation, you’re only going to capture 4 out of 10 of your potential value.

So it’s pretty important.

If you want to get started, just follow my articulation guide:

You’re welcome.

Pillar 4: Your conviction in the value.

This is the bottleneck to everything.

Your price reflects your internal conviction in the external value of your work.

It’s your belief that to the right person, your work is valuable.

Here's the thing most people won’t tell you:

Your ability to advocate for your work is directly correlated with your self-esteem.

They’re not the same thing.

But they are connected.

If you have an underlying belief that you’re not good enough, that you’re worthless, or that no one values you - that’s going to leak into how you price.

For many of you, the biggest lever you can pull right now is not a tactic or a strategy.

It’s inner work.

Getting honest about the beliefs running the show.

Beliefs like:

• I’m bad with money.

• I’m not good enough.

• Rich people are bad.

• People won’t pay that much.

• Who am I to charge that much?

Your beliefs about money, about success, and about your own ability are determining the actions you take in your business.

Whether you realize it or not.

If you believe confrontation is unsafe, you won’t push back in a negotiation.

If you believe rich people are greedy, you’ll unconsciously keep yourself from making too much money.

If you believe you’re the type of person who makes $80k a year, you’ll sabotage every time you start to break through that ceiling.

I guarantee that if your identity was fully aligned with charging more money, you’d already be doing it.

So we have to work at the identity level.

Read more here:

Putting the 4 pillars together.

The four pillars work together.

Skill × Client = the maximum value possible.

Articulation × Conviction = your ability to capture that value.

Most entrepreneurs are sitting on way more value than they’re capturing.

So where do you start?

Ask yourself which of the four pillars needs the most work right now.

Is it your skill? Maybe it’s time to add a complementary skill to your stack instead of going deeper into what you already know.

Is it your clients? Maybe you’re fueling lawnmowers when there are rocket ships out there.

Is it your articulation? Maybe you’re doing expert work but getting paid like an order taker because you don’t know how to communicate what you actually bring.

Is it your conviction? Maybe you know exactly what you should be charging - and you just can’t make yourself say the number.

Start with the weakest pillar.

That’s where the leverage is.

When you pull these four pillars together, here’s what you get:

A high-value, high-price offer.

An offer that represents a dramatic return on investment for the (right) client, and equitable compensation for you.

An offer you’ll feel good marketing, selling, AND fulfilling.

A 2-10x Offer.

(P.S. That’s exactly what we teach you how to do in How To Charge More.)

💸 How To Charge More (Waitlist) 💸

If you’d like to learn how to charge (much) higher prices and advocate for the value of your work, I can help. I teach a live cohort called How To Charge More. Our second cohort starts on April 27th.

Join The Waitlist

Never lower your prices to win a client.

Yes, I said it.

It devalues your best clients, who happily pay in full.

It rewards bad clients, who will leave for someone cheaper.

There are more than enough people telling you that the market is bad, AI is coming for your job, and you’re lucky to get the work.

I am not one of them.

After working with nearly 600 entrepreneurs, I can tell you one fact:

The vast majority of entrepreneurs are undercharging for the value of your work.

Even those who think they’re charging “high prices.”

You don’t need to lower your prices.

Here’s why:

First of all, the price isn’t even the issue.

Over the past few years, I’ve reviewed hundreds of sales calls for my clients.

When we do a debrief of a call that didn’t close, I’ll ask them:

“What happened on the call? Why do you think they didn’t say yes?”

And they’ll respond with something like:

• “Well, I told them the price, and then they said no.”

• “I told them the price, and then they asked me for a proposal.”

• “I said the price, and then they ghosted me.”

They assume the price lost them the sale.

And it’s a pretty logical conclusion to come to.

In a typical sales conversation, around the 70-80% mark you’re going to start talking about money.

You say the big number, and quite soon after, you’re going to hear a “yes” or a “no.”

The big misconception here is that the price is the CAUSE of the rejection.

I can tell you, that is almost never the case.

And that should actually make you feel better.

Because here’s the truth:

By the time you say the number, the call is already over.

Everything leading up to the price drop is where the “no” happens.

The yes or no is a SYMPTOM of all the things that you did or didn’t do in the first part of the call.

So when you master what happens before the dollar sign, you’re never again going to feel like it comes down to just the price.

People buy when they believe the value of your work is greater than the price.

Rather than ask, “How can I make them see the value?” - most people instead see this play out and think the logical solution is to lower their prices.

Seth Godin explains why this is a huge mistake:

“The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win.”

Rather than trying to lower your prices, instead you should focus on trying to increase the perceived value of your work in the eyes of the client.

Here’s how to do it:

• Understand the deep problems and goals of the person you’re talking to - and articulate them back to them.

• Connect your work to the outcomes they actually care about. If you’re selling to businesses, show them how working with you will make them money, save them time, or increase their happiness.

• Lead the conversation like an expert. Here’s a hint: If they’re interviewing you on the sales call, they don’t see you as an expert.

• Talk about outcomes, not deliverables.

• Believe in yourself. The client needs to feel that you believe in your work before they believe in your work.

• Listen more than you talk.

• Give them space to decide. Say the price and shut up. Don’t explain, apologize, or fill the silence. Their brain needs 6-8 seconds to process a big decision.

• Finally, detach from the outcome of the call. Focus on what’s in your control. Their decision is up to them.

Rather than worrying about how you can lower your prices to get people to say yes, you should be focusing on how you can articulate the value of the work, so a yes is a no brainer.

So now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about why you should stand your ground on your pricing.

The price is the price.

You need to understand this truth:

Your prices will cause you to lose clients.

Charging high prices will lose you clients.

Charging low prices will lose you clients.

Which ones would you rather lose?

The cheap, price sensitive clients that come with low rates, or the high quality, value-focused buyers that come with high prices?

I’ll let you decide.

Now that you understand that no matter how you price, you will lose clients, I want you to repeat after me…

“The price is the price. If it’s not a fit, it’s okay.”

Your prices should reflect a fair exchange of value between both parties, where everyone feels like they’re getting a great deal.

Your price is what you believe your work’s value is… to the right person.

If a client is negotiating on price, it’s never about the price.

It’s always about something deeper.

It is either:

1. You have not communicated the value of the work effectively.

2. They are not a fit for the value you provide.

3. They don’t trust you can deliver on your commitments.

4. They are the type of person that always negotiates (beware).

When you realize this, it becomes clear that…

Not everyone is the right client.

There’s no amount of selling that will make the wrong client into the right client.

I can rarely, if ever, think of a situation where a client who negotiated on price from the start ended up magically becoming an incredible client to work with.

The client who negotiates on price will negotiate on everything else:

• Your timeline.

• Your scope.

• Your boundaries.

Will you be happy delivering more for less?

Or will you resent the client (and yourself)?

You need to stop caring whether your clients say yes or no.

That decision is completely out of your control.

Instead you need to focus on what’s within your control:

• How you articulate the value of your work.

• How thoroughly you conduct a sales conversation.

• The level of mastery you have in your craft.

• The belief you have in your self and your work.

When you don't strengthen these areas, you start compromising in other ways.

Saying yes to something we know we should have said no to takes a toll on us.

We either become angry at the client for “taking advantage of us,” or we beat ourselves up for folding so easily.

In both cases, what’s at the root of these emotions?

A broken boundary.

Your price is a boundary.

Your price is a boundary.

When you uphold it, you attract clients who respect it.

When you break it, you attract clients who will keep pushing.

Whether you hold those boundaries is a reflection of your self-esteem and your conviction in the value of your work.

And here’s what’s interesting…

The people in our lives (especially our clients) tend to mirror our own self-esteem.

If our prices reflect a lack of conviction in our work’s value, we will attract clients who don’t see the value either.

So once again, it all starts internally.

Think of it like this:

The first sale is always to yourself.

When you believe in your self, you believe in your work.

When you believe in your work, clients feel it.

We spend so much time worrying about the clients we might lose because our prices are too high, and not nearly enough time considering the clients we might never meet because our prices are too low.

At the end of the day, we teach clients how to treat us.

Your prices are lesson one.

💸 How To Charge More (Waitlist) 💸

If you’d like to learn how to charge (much) higher prices and advocate for the value of your work, I can help. I teach a live cohort called How To Charge More. Our second cohort starts in April.

Join The Waitlist

Thanks for reading. It would mean a lot to me if you shared this.
It would mean even more if you implemented it in your life and business.

Share

Readers,

On Friday, March 20th, I hosted a live workshop for my paid readers of .

It was about how I’m using AI in my business, right now.

It is a topic I’ve been getting a lot of questions about.

During the workshop, I broke down some of the tools I’m using and how I’m using them.

I have a pretty high bar for AI, so all the workflows I’m going to share are actually going to do something, not just make you feel productive.

Here’s what we covered, plus more:

• My “commandments of AI” that I teach to all of my clients.

• What I consider to be the most important asset you have in your business to leverage with AI (you have them, and you’re probably not using them).

• How I use AI to get inspiration to create my content and writing.

• The tool I use to speed up my writing process by 300% (don’t worry - I’m not outsourcing my writing to AI).

• And finally, my most-requested workflow - how I’m creating viral images for social media.

If you want to access the replay, plus all tools and resources mentioned, sign up for the paid tier; $15 a month to get access to this workshop and my other paid resources (cancel anytime).

Subscribe now

If you’re already a paid member, read on below for the workshop replay and resources:

Read more

This week’s issue is sponsored by Sublime.

Sublime is my favorite tool for creative thinking and cultivating my taste. I use it daily (literally) to collect references, images, quotes, articles, and ideas that move me, which I can later use in my life and work.

Sublime also happens to be my favorite kind of business: built by an inner entrepreneur who openly shares the process in the company newsletter and treats the internal work of building a company as seriously as the external one.

You can try it here and use code RICH to get 20% off a paid subscription.

The best business decision you’ll ever make is learning to trust yourself.

Right now you have access to an advisor better than any coach, consultant, or therapist.

You just keep ignoring it.

Pick up any book about high performance, elite entrepreneurs, or the creative act, and you’ll hear them discussing the same thing a million different ways.

Steve Jobs used it.

Rick Rubin wrote a whole book about it.

It is the source of creativity, great decisions, and truth.

The connection between the body and the mind.

For some, it is their connection to God.

It has many names - your intuition, instinct, or conscience.

I call it your inner compass.

You can use it to make decisions faster (and more accurately), build a business more aligned with what you want, cultivate a higher degree of self-trust, and yes, make a lot more money.

Intuition is knowledge that we feel.

“Intuition is knowledge that we feel but cannot explain.” - Roman Tschäppeler

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes two systems of thinking, which he calls System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is your intuition.

It’s fast, it’s automatic, and it runs underneath everything you do.

The inner compass.

System 2 is the analytical mind.

It’s slow, deliberate, and logical.

System 1 is incredibly powerful because it harnesses the entire power of your nervous system.

It’s able to detect patterns, risk, and opportunity before the brain can even explain them.

According to a 2025 Caltech study, your sensory systems are able to gather 100 MILLION times more data per second than your analytical mind.

And yet most entrepreneurs have it backwards.

They constantly let their analytical mind lead, and overrule their intuitive mind.

When the brain says no.

“Founders tend to over integrate all the advice… In general you should go with what you feel that you should do. Because your emotional system is a great deal smarter than you give it credit for.” - Joshua Schater

Most entrepreneurs are running System 2 for everything, and it’s running them into the ground.

I call it System 2 Living.

I’ll give you an example:

I had a client who spent four months building a proposal for a partnership she told me felt off from the first conversation.

Four months.

When I asked her why she kept going, she said, “I couldn’t justify saying no. On paper, it made sense.”

Her body said no in five minutes.

Her brain spent four months rationalizing a yes.

The partnership fell apart within six weeks.

That’s the cost of System 2 Living.

Entrepreneurs can feel the intuition (this client is wrong, this price is too low, this project isn’t aligned) but then talk themselves out of it with logic and rationalization.

They based their decisions on what they THINK they should do, rather than what they KNOW they should do.

Don’t get me wrong…

The analytical mind isn’t bad, it’s just not designed to lead.

Ingmar Bergman perfectly describes it in this quote:

The mind acts as a quality control mechanism for the intuition’s work.

So why do we entrepreneurs ignore our intuition?

Because often, the places it can take us are frightening.

You can fool the world. But you can’t fool yourself.

I do a lot of consulting with entrepreneurs.

Oftentimes, they come to me with a problem, challenge, or issue that they can’t seem to solve.

When I ask them to pause, check in with their body, and tell me what they think they should do - it turns out they nearly always know the answer.

They just don’t like what they know they need to do.

“The beauty of our intuition is that it will not lie to us. The inescapable horror of our intuition is that we may not like what it tells us.” - Catherine Shannon

When we override what we know to be true, it creates serious problems.

Imagine a life where hundreds of times a day, our body is sending us signals about what’s right and what’s wrong for us. (And they’re accurate.)

And yet, rather than listening to those signals, we ignore them.

Multiply that by weeks, months, or years.

It’s why entrepreneurs wake up one day and realize they hate the thing that they’ve built.

Rather than listening to their inner compass, they listened to the market, the gurus, social media, the news, their partner, their friends, anything outside themselves.

Nathaniel Branden says, “Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.”

Overriding our intuition comes with a great cost: our self-esteem and self-trust.

At a retreat I hosted last year, my friend spoke to my clients about this process.

Here’s what he said:

“When entrepreneurs override their internal signals (taking on bad-fit clients, agreeing to unnecessary meetings, saying yes when they feel no), they erode self-trust.

This creates a cycle:

Ignore signals → Overcommit → Push through → Deplete → Lose awareness → Repeat.

Eventually they achieve external success but feel empty.”

The entrepreneurs who ultimately find fulfillment, both internally and externally, understand that the inner compass needs to be part of the process, from day one.

How to access your inner compass.

At this point I hope you’re on board that listening to your inner compass is a viable business strategy.

But how do we access our inner compass in a world designed to make us shut it off?

When we bury our intuition through social media, email, Slack, AI, and client demands, there is no space to listen.

And the more your ignore your intuition, the quieter it gets.

So how do we rebuild our relationship with our intuition?

Here are three places to start:

1 - Feel your feelings.

I’ve done a lot of inner work over the past decade.

14 years of twelve-step recovery, meditation, morning pages, IFS therapy, EMDR, neurofeedback, and most recently, Presence Partners (more on that soon).

One of the most surprising things that I noticed in my inner work journey is that intuition can be a physical feeling.

Not only a emotional feeling, but a sensation in the body.

For the longest time, I didn’t understand that emotions were felt in the body.

Emotions were just thoughts that I had about feelings.

This post from really put words to my experience:

Locally Optimal

“Wait, feelings are supposed to be IN THE BODY?”

Mentor: “…and how do you feel in your body about that…

Read more

10 months ago · 174 likes · 12 comments · Chris Lakin

He says when he wasn’t feeling his feelings, “life was in 360p when it could’ve been in 4k.”

He goes on to describe the benefits…

“Decision-making became so easy it feels like there isn’t even a “me” making the choice. I’m more empathetic and see others’ emotions without hesitation. I can tell people to fuck off without wavering. Insecurities can be noticed and released. I’m much more intuitive. I see more. I hear more. 4k feeling enables 4k being.”

These days I often feel my inner compass physically.

I know when things feel “right” and when they don’t.

I can feel the inner signals that tell me to go, to wait, or to stop completely.

This has dramatically impacted both my business and my enjoyment of life.

2- Use your taste as a guide.

“You could say it’s a feeling. An inner voice. A silent whisper that makes you laugh. An energy that enters the room and possesses the body. Call it joy, awe, or elation. When a sense of harmony and fulfillment suddenly prevails.” - Rick Rubin

If you’ve read The Creative Act, it’s abundantly clear that Rick’s superpower is his taste.

In a hilariously iconic interview, Rick admits, “I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.”

When asked by Anderson Cooper exactly what he gets paid for, Rubin replied, “The confidence I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel.”

Rick understands that one of the easiest ways to get in touch with your inner compass is to get in touch with your taste.

Taste comes from an inner knowing.

“I like this.”

“I don’t like this.”

Intuition is powerful because it is a direct channel to what is true to you.

So start asking yourself:

What do I like?

What am I drawn towards?

What resonates?

What do I actually want?

One of the easiest ways to hone your taste is to begin with a practice of cultivation.

By collecting ideas, images, sounds, and video, you are building the habit of discernment.

Recently I’ve been using a tool called Sublime to help me cultivate my taste.

Sublime is a search engine without answers.

Most people go to tools looking for answers, when they really should be looking for more questions.

With Sublime I’m able to discover ideas without compromising my taste.

(including many of the ideas, images, and references I mentioned in this piece.)

P.S. You can get a 20% discount by using code RICH here. 😊

3 - Use the Instinct Cycle to act on your intuition faster.

Ultimately, our intuition is nothing without action to follow it.

That’s where Phil Stutz’s tool the “Instinct Cycle“ comes in.

In order to learn to trust our inner compass, we must practice acting on it’s information.

It really doesn’t matter if we are right or wrong.

What matters is we’re building trust and confidence in our intuition.

The “Instinct Cycle” teaches you to compress the time between decision and action.

Here’s how it works:

As you move throughout your days, find every opportunity to make a decision, even if you don’t have enough information—particularly if you don’t have enough information—and take the action with speed. Everything you do is to train this organ to tolerate consequences; the point is to not get it “right.”

In the “Instinct Cycle,” the goal isn’t to be right, it’s to work the cycle the most times.

The more you do this, the less intimidated you’re going to be to take action and the more confidence you will have.

Most entrepreneurs would benefit from making faster decisions.

Especially about decisions that are reversible.

Every decision you’re delaying right now - pricing, hiring, launching, pivoting - has a cost.

Not just the opportunity cost of waiting, but the cost to your confidence.

The more time you let elapse before taking action, the more your self-esteem goes down.

Working the “Instinct Cycle” creates a positive feedback loop, more intuition, more action, more momentum.

Business mirrors life.

Entrepreneurship is abstract - no one hands you a script that explains what you should be doing, where you should be going, or how to do it.

But people have been trained to expect everything spelled out for them.

They want the framework, the formula, the five-step process.

During a speech, filmmaker David Lynch was asked what he thought about films simplifying everything for the audience.

He said:

“Life is filled with abstractions, and the way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition… People get used to film that pretty much explains it 100% and they kind of turn off that beautiful thing of intuition.”

He continues…

“You just feel it and think it, that’s kind of intuition - emotion and thinking together, and make it have a sense to you.”

Entrepreneurs have consumed so much content that they’ve outsourced the very thing that matters most: their inner voice.

And every time they do, the signal gets a little quieter.

That changes today.

Listening to your inner compass means decisions flow through you.

You act with less friction and more alignment.

Your inner compass is the best advisor money can buy, because it only knows what is true to you.

The more you act on your intuition and see the positive results, the more you learn to trust it.

When you can trust your self to guide yourself, it frees up bandwidth, creating more mental clarity and focus.

You stop second-guessing every decision.

You stop looking outside yourself for answers you already have.

You already know what to do.

You just need to trust yourself to do it.

Thanks for reading. It would mean a lot to me if you shared this.
It would mean even more if you implemented it in your life and business.

Share

If you’re curious about working with me, I have two paid offers:

1. 💸 How To Charge More (Waitlist): Live cohort for entrepreneurs who want to scale their business by charging much higher prices. Cohort 2 starts in April.

2. 🤝 Creative Partnership: 1:1 consulting for high-level creative entrepreneurs
   + consultants to looking to hit their first (or next) million in revenue.

Most entrepreneurs I talk to are terrified of sales.

It’s like a combination of public speaking, negotiating a hostage release, and asking someone out on a date all at once… and if you screw it up, you don’t get paid.

There’s just one problem:

If you want to charge a ton of money, you’re probably going to want to speak to the person you’re selling to.

But there’s hope!

Humanity has already crafted an elegant solution to this problem:

The humble agent.

Artists, athletes, and actors all rely on agents to keep their hands out of the dirty work.

Rather than engage directly with the market, they outsource it for a fee.

And for just a small percentage, you’ll never have to deal with an awkward negotiation, icky sales call, or challenging objection, ever again.

A great agent can even help you command 2-10x prices, for the same work.

Now I know what you’re thinking…

“I need an agent.”

Wrong.

I’m not suggesting that you go find an agent.

What I’m suggesting is that you become your own agent.

And that’s what I’ll teach you how to do today.

The Agent Gap

I do this exercise with every one of my clients to show them how much money they’re leaving on the table by not acting as their own agent.

It only takes 10 seconds.

Here’s how it goes…

If you had the BEST agent in the world to sell your work on your behalf, what price do you think they could charge?

Double?

Triple?

10x?

If so, then the question you should ask yourself is…

WHY AREN’T YOU CHARGING THAT PRICE?

That is The Agent Gap.

It is the gap between what you COULD charge, and what you ARE charging, if you could advocate for your work more effectively.

I bet it’s pretty clear you’re leaving money on the table.

Let’s talk about how to close the gap.

How to become your own agent

The easiest way to become your own agent is simply to model what agents do, but do it for yourself.

So let’s start there - what does an agent really do?

Put simply, agents advocate for the value of their client’s work.

A great agent has these qualities:

1. 100% belief and conviction in their client. There is no fear. They have seen what their client can do, and they trust that they will continue to deliver.

2. Deep understanding the value of their client’s work. Not only do they get the tangible value you bring to the market, your agent understands all the unique intangibles that make you unique, and advocates for them as well.

3. They don’t back down when things get hard. Great agents handle objections. They understand that negotiation is not personal - it’s about coming to a fair agreement for both parties.

4. They charge the highest possible price. They understand the work, the market, and the customer. Based on that understanding, they advocate for the highest price possible, based on the value of your work for the customer.

You don’t need an agent to do any of these things.

You can do them yourself.

And as your own agent, you can get started with these 5 steps:

Step 1: Stop confusing your price with your worth.

The worst four words in pricing are “Charge what you’re worth.”

I hate that phrase.

The price you charge has exactly nothing to do with your worth as a person.

As a human being, you have infinite worth.

But your work has finite worth - objective, clear marketplace value.

When your identity is blended with your work things get messy, which ultimately leads to fear-based business decisions like:

• Lowering your prices.

• Stopping your marketing.

• Not selling assertively on calls.

So this is the first and most important shift you need to make as your own agent: separate yourself from the sale.

Your agent would never confuse a prospect saying “no” with a judgement about who you are as a person.

Learn to practice detachment when you sell.

The work is not you.

The price is not you.

Start there.

Step 2: Find clients with big enough vehicles.

I worked with an agency owner who did a branding project for two different clients.

Same exact process/team/deliverables in both cases.

One project was $10k, the other was $80k.

The only difference was the size of the client’s business.

I call this the “vehicle.”

Your skills and expertise are the fuel.

The client’s business is the vehicle.

Same fuel in a bigger vehicle creates dramatically more value.

• Fuel in a lawnmower mows the lawn.

• Fuel in a car gets you across the country.

• Fuel in a rocket gets you to the moon.

A brand strategy for a small business doing $200k in revenue is worth a very different amount than the same strategy for a company doing $20 million a year.

A good agent would never pitch a $100k engagement to a company doing $200k a year.

And they’d never pitch a $10k engagement to a company doing $20m.

They’d match the price to the vehicle.

A good rule of thumb: Clients can typically invest UP TO 10% of their annual revenue in something that’s strategically important.

So if you want to charge $50k, you need clients doing at least $500k.

If you want to charge $100k, you need clients at $1m or more.

A great agent prices the client, not the project.

Step 3: Talk about outcomes, not deliverables.

A great agent sells what the work does, not what the work is.

Your agent would never walk into a meeting and start listing tasks.

“My client will produce 12 wireframes, 3 rounds of revisions, and a final PDF.”

That’s how you get compared to every other person who makes websites.

The shift is from deliverables to outcomes.

As experts, we love to talk about what we do.

Unfortunately, clients don’t care what we do.

They care about the OUTCOME of what we do.

When you live in the world of deliverables, clients can compare you to anyone.

It’s apples to apples, and price becomes the only differentiator.

But when you live in the world of outcomes, you become 1 of 1.

Great agents know this.

Step 4: Actually sell HARD.

Selling like an agent requires this belief:

To the right customer, your work is tremendously valuable.

I’m talking LIFE-CHANGING!

If you had that belief…

• Wouldn’t it be much easier to negotiate?

• Wouldn’t it feel less stressful?

• Wouldn’t it maybe, even, feel good to sell?

The best agent knows that a great deal is a win-win.

And a win-win deal means we can actually put our foot down with some conviction.

It’s okay to negotiate.

It’s okay to say “No.”

It’s okay to push back.

A great agent knows that negotiation is part of the game, because when a deal gets done, both parties win.

Step 5: Detach from the outcome.

The last piece is the most counterintuitive:

Let go of whether they say “Yes.”

The best agents aren’t desperate to close.

They have a DGAF attitude.

They walk into every conversation with this mentality:

“The goal of this conversation is simply for me to understand if I can help you.

If I can, we’ll talk about what that looks like.

If I can’t, I’m not even going to make you an offer.”

The goal of a sales conversation is simply to help the client make a decision.

When you release the death grip on getting a “yes,” something crazy happens:

Clients trust you more.

And you sell better as a result.

No begging, discounting, or chasing required.

You need to advocate for your work.

No one is going to advocate for your work better than you can.

If you believe in your work, you owe it to yourself to advocate for it.

It’s time to become the agent you (and your clients) deserve.

You owe it to your clients to be good at sales.

Keeping yourself removed from selling helps no one.

You make less money, and you help less people.

Being your own agent means advocating for your self and your work.

It is having the level of detachment necessary to see reality clearly.

And it starts with this one question:

“If I had the best agent in the world, what would they do?”

And then go do that.

Thanks for reading. It would mean a lot to me if you shared this.
It would mean even more if you implemented it in your life and business.

Share

If you’d like to work with me, I have two paid offers:

1. 💸 How To Charge More (Waitlist): Live cohort for entrepreneurs who want to scale their business by charging much higher prices. Cohort 2 starts in April.

2. 🤝 Creative Partnership: 1:1 consulting for high-level creative entrepreneurs
   + consultants to looking to hit their first (or next) million in revenue.

I don’t think there’s an entrepreneur on earth who would mind being paid more for what they’re already doing.

Well, I’ve got good news.

The easiest way to do it only requires you to change one thing:

How you talk about your work.

Today I’m going to teach you how to articulate your work’s true value, so clients are more invested in it (and you make more money).

Let’s start with a quick exercise.

Think about your best friend.

Imagine they’re close to signing a new big client, and the client called you as a final reference.

If you were trying to convince that client to hire them…

• What would you say?

• How hard would you sell?

• How convicted would you be?

Now ask yourself this:

Why aren’t you doing that for yourself?

So often, we sell ourselves short.

We don’t advocate for our own work like we would for others.

That changes today.

It’s time to start treating yourself like someone who is worthy of being valued.

And advocating for your work starts with how you speak about the work.

Let’s get started:

Harsh truth: No one wants what you do.

Here’s the big secret no one wants to say out loud.

No one wants what you’re selling.

• No one wants design.

• No one wants software.

• No one wants coaching.

• No one wants writing.

• No one wants a website.

So, what do they really want?

They want THE THING THAT HAPPENS when you do what you do.

They want OUTCOMES.

And yet most entrepreneurs spend 99% of their time talking about what they do, instead of what their clients get.

Here’s the truth:

If you want to make the LEAST amount of money possible, talk about deliverables:

• Sell X social media posts.

• Y hours of coaching.

• A Z page website.

It’s the easiest way to commodify your work and minimize the value you create.

You’ll be perceived as an order-taker, not an expert.

Fortunately, there’s another way.

The 3 levels of communication.

It’s time to pull the curtain on the wizard.

Every time you work, three things happen:

1. Deliverables are what you actually do - the website, the product, the design, the social media graphics, the software, the coaching sessions, etc. This is the tangible output of your work.

2. Ideas represent how you think - your strategy, your methodology, your unique approach to solving problems.

3. Outcomes are what clients actually get - the real results that matter to their lives or businesses.

When marketing and selling your work, you are free to talk about ANY of these things.

Unfortunately, most people default to talking about deliverables.

That’s the problem.

Beyond the quarter-inch drill.

(The following is paraphrased from Seth Godin’s book This Is Marketing.)

Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said:

"Nobody wants a quarter-inch drill—they want a quarter-inch hole."

But it goes deeper than that.

Nobody actually wants a hole in the wall either.

They want a picture hook.

But they don’t really want the picture hook - they want art on the wall.

And they don’t truly want art on the wall - they want a beautiful space.

And when you ask why they want a beautiful space, the real answer emerges:

They want to feel peace and safety in their home.

You’re sitting there talking about a drill, when what your clients really want peace and safety.

That’s what you’re doing when you’re talking about deliverables.

3 ways to say the same thing.

You have three ways to describe the same thing, and they’re all true.

Level 1: Deliverables. You talk about what you do.

Level 2: Ideas. You talk about how you think.

Level 3: Outcomes. You talk about what they get.

You need to talk about your work in a way that helps your customers to see the value of it for them.

And by talking about “deliverables,” you’re doing them (and you) a disservice.

A real world example: Selling pitch deck design.

Let me give you a real-world example to help this sink in.

One of my clients came to me identifying as a “pitch deck designer.”

She was selling deliverables - work with me, get a designed pitch deck.

In that market, you might charge anywhere from $10 to $100 per hour.

Not bad, not great.

When you level up and start selling your thinking instead of just deliverables, you could describe yourself as a consultant.

Now you’re talking about strategy and expertise, and suddenly the same service commands $5,000-$10,000 or more.

But there’s one more level up, and it’s the best way to do it:

Selling outcomes.

What’s the outcome of a pitch deck?

A closed deal.

And the value of that is essentially limitless, depending on the client.

• What is $100 million in funding worth?

• What is a successful annual shareholder meeting worth?

• What is a trained, high-performing sales team worth?

When you shift from selling deliverables to selling outcomes, how much you can charge goes way, way up.

And here’s the key distinction - she’ll do all 3 things either way:

• She will design the deck (Deliverables).

• She will come up with the strategy (Ideas).

• The clients will close the deal (Outcomes).

All three things are true, but one pays much more to talk about:

1. Deliverable: Pitch Deck Design ($10-100/hour)

2. Ideas: Pitch Deck Consulting ($5-10k+)

3. Outcome: Closed The Deal (Limitless)

What your clients actually think about.

From a client’s perspective, it makes much more sense to talk about outcomes than deliverables.

Put yourself in their shoes.

What do they really want?

Well, after listening to and doing hundreds of sales calls, I can tell you they’re interested in exactly two things:

1. Their problems

2. Their goals

Their problems are the pain they’re experiencing, how much things suck, what they desperately want to improve.

Their goals are what they want to accomplish, what excites them, what would make them happy.

And only one thing speaks to what the client really cares about:

• It’s not deliverables.

• It’s not ideas.

• It’s outcomes.

Outcomes solve problems and achieve goals.

An outcome is the bridge between their current reality and where they want to be.

That’s what they’re actually buying.

The inner work of advocating for your work.

You owe it to yourself, your clients, and the world to advocate fully for the value of your work.

• You’re already creating outcomes.

• You’re already delivering results.

• You’re already changing your clients’ lives or businesses.

The only question is whether you’re going to acknowledge it.

When you sell deliverables, you’re hiding. You’re playing small. You’re saying, “Just pay me for my time and we’ll call it even.”

That’s not fair to anyone.

Your clients don’t want your time: they want their problems solved and their goals achieved.

And you don’t want to be an order-taker: you want to be valued for the transformation you create.

Selling outcomes is finally having the courage to say what’s actually true: That your work matters, that it creates real value, and that value deserves to be compensated fairly.

If that still sounds terrifying to you, I want you to read this next:

If you’re curious about working with me, I have two paid offers:

1. 💸 How To Charge More (Waitlist): Live cohort for entrepreneurs who want to scale their business by charging much higher prices. Cohort 2 starts in April.

2. 🤝 Creative Partnership: 1:1 consulting for high-level creative entrepreneurs
   + consultants to looking to hit their first (or next) million in revenue.

If you’re reading this, you signed up as a Founding Member to inner entrepreneur.

Read more

“The customer is always right” is terrible advice.

Most clients will not pay a ton of money for someone to tell them that they’re right.

Clients value someone who will disagree with them.

Someone who will push back.

Someone with a different perspective.

Someone who will tell them the one thing they need to hear, that no one else will say.

Serving and Servicing.

It’s the difference between Servicing and Serving:

Servicing is giving your clients what they think they want.

Serving is giving your clients what they didn’t know they need.

Servicing is for beginners.

It’s a good way to start a business.

Find a “market opportunity” or just ask people “what do you want?”

And then give it to them.

Serving is for experts.

It requires more skill, more depth, and yes, more confrontation.

You have to be willing to disappoint your clients.

To tell them they might be wrong.

To say “No.”

Serving is about creation.

Something new.

Something original.

Something elegant.

Something delightful.

Something strategic.

Something that exceeds expectations.

Or transcends them alltogether.

Serving goes beyond just one client.

It’s what you do when you answer these three questions:

• What am I here for?

• What is the one thing that only I can do?

• What is my life’s work?

Because here’s the thing...

When you service a client they say, “Thank you.”

When you serve a client they say, “You changed my life.”

One more thing…

On Wednesday, January 21st, I am hosting a 90 minute free workshop called “How To 2-10x Your Prices In 2026.”

In it, I’ll teach you:

✅ The 4 steps to structure your business to charge way more in 2026

✅ The surprising trend I’m seeing going into 2026 (based on my work with high-level clients)

✅ Exactly what I’m doing to help those clients to close $10k-$250k deals

✅ How to future-proof your business from AI by “racing to the top” instead of racing to the bottom

The free workshop will take place on Monday, January 21st at 12pm EST and you can register below.

Register Here For Free

This is the third post in a series on pricing and charging more money.
If you enjoyed this, you can read the other two posts here:

Let’s talk about the #1 problem in your business right now.

Let me guess…

“I want better clients, I just don’t know how to find them.”

Very common.

The underlying belief is:

“The only reason I don’t have better clients is because I can’t find them.”

It is diagnosed as a lead generation problem.

That is not the problem.

You’re not going to believe me, but hear me out…

I have a pretty solid track record of helping clients solve this problem.

Just a few examples from the top of my head…

• A client closed $49k of consulting deals in 24 hours last week.

• Another closed a $50k website/branding project.

• Another did $94k for 4 days of work in a market that is considered “commoditized.”

I can keep going…

• Another closed two CPG brands for $60k.

• Another closed a $9k/m e-commerce development retainer.

• Another closed a $25k/m full-service design retainer.

I hope you get the picture - I know what I’m talking about.

So let me say this clearly:

You pretending this is a lead generation problem is what’s keeping you stuck.

I promise it’s not.

If you want better clients, it starts with you.

You likely have the “skills” (i.e. you’re good at the thing you do).

But something is missing:

You need to become the person who can handle high-price, high-value clients.

Because let’s be honest, if a $10k / $100k / $1m client (insert your current ceiling) was sitting in front of you, you wouldn’t know what to do with them.

How do I know?

Because you’ve probably had great clients come across your path.

Ones with big fat budgets and amazing work you’d love to be involved with.

Remember them?

• You exchanged some emails.

• Maybe had a “great conversation” or two.

• Sent a proposal.

But it didn’t work out.

And you have no idea why.

Until today.

The reason you’re not closing better clients isn’t because they don’t exist.

It’s not because you can’t find them.

It’s not even because you’re not talented enough.

It’s because when they show up, you’re not ready.

You don’t have the internal capacity to hold that level of client.

You don’t have the positioning, the pricing confidence, the sales conversation skills, or the energetic certainty that makes someone feel safe handing you five or six-figures.

And “fake it until you make it” won’t save you.

Better clients start with a better relationship with yourself.

“We tend to feel most comfortable with people whose self-esteem level resembles our own.” - Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

The quality of your clients is a direct reflection of your relationship with yourself.

To attract better clients, you must first become the type of person that high-quality clients want to work with.

And I mean this in the most loving way possible:

If you’re putting out weird vibes, it’s going to scare all the people with money away.

Clients are attracted to certainty.

They want to be sure they’re making a good decision.

Who would you feel more comfortable trusting your money with?

• Person 1: Clearly uncomfortable in their skin, doesn’t talk about money, second-guesses themselves mid-conversation, sends a proposal

• Person 2: Calm, confident, discusses investment like it’s the most natural thing in the world, doesn’t flinch when stating their fees

The answer is obvious.

I love the phrase, “we teach people how to treat us.”

It’s so true.

And with clients, we teach them how to treat us through how we show up.

Every interaction is an opportunity to demonstrate the value of our work and our character.

Every conversation is a window into our beliefs.

Your beliefs become your business.

I’ve listened to hundreds of sales calls replays at this point.

Listening in on a sales call might be one of the most intimate things to eavesdrop on.

And my god, I’ve learned a lot from it.

If you think you can hide your beliefs from clients, let me tell you something:

Those beliefs leak out.

They really do.

Your clients can feel your relationship with money.

They can sense when you’re insecure.

As humans, we are very good detectors for incongruence.

It probably goes back to our days in tribal living when letting in someone who was being deceptive could mean wiping out the whole village.

Or something like that.

The point is, when what someone’s words don’t match their energy, alarms go off.

Clients won’t even know WHY they don’t want to hire you - but their intuition will let them know.

And then a week later, they’re ghosting your proposal.

So I challenge you to ask yourself this:

What beliefs am I unknowingly transmitting to my clients?

• If you don’t believe in yourself, what makes you think a client is going to believe in you? (or even more important, believe that YOU believe in THEM?!)

• If you’re a cheapskate in your personal life, what makes you think a client is going to buy your expensive thing?

• If you don’t care about your work, what makes you think a client is going to trust you with their business/success?

• If you wouldn’t buy what you sell, why would your clients?

• If you don’t invest in yourself and your business, why would your clients invest in you?

These beliefs leak out into everything:

• How you frame your offer

• The confidence in your voice when you state your fee

• Whether you justify your price or simply present it

• How you handle objections

• The energy you bring to the conversation

Your client isn’t buying your work.

They’re buying your certainty about your work.

It all starts with self-esteem.

Nathaniel Branden’s The Six Pillars of Self Esteem is essential reading for entrepreneurs.

It shows that every business problem is downstream of deeply held beliefs that we have about ourselves, our worth, and the world.

I will share a few quotes from the book here that illustrate my point.

1. First, what is self-esteem?

“Self-respect is the conviction of our own value. It is not the delusion that we are “perfect” or superior to everyone else. It is not comparative or competitive at all. It is the conviction that our life and well-being are worth acting to support, protect, and nurture; that we are good and worthwhile and deserving of the respect of others; and that our happiness and personal fulfillment are important enough to work for.”

2. Entrepreneurs often find that their self-esteem limits their ability to grow:

“If a self-concept cannot accommodate a given level of success, and if the self-concept does not change, it is predictable that the person will find ways to self-sabotage.”

3. They often find that as their self-esteem improves, things get better in their business:

“There is a continuous feedback loop between our actions in the world and our self-esteem. The level of our self-esteem influences how we act, and how we act influences the level of our self-esteem.”

To that end, I want to leave you with one practice to help you build your self-esteem and self-worth that has been helpful to me.

It’s stupidly easy to understand and nearly impossible to master.

It’s truly a life’s practice.

A tool: Being your word.

“Doing what you say you will do—being your word—imparts power. Things get done. Efficiency soars. Frustration falls. It’s so obvious. It is surprising how frequently people don’t do what they say they will do. It is shocking how unaware people are of the discrepancy.” - Steve Hardison

This tool helps to address one of the big drivers of low-self esteem: Constantly breaking promises to yourself.

If you hang yourself out to dry, day after day, it starts to eat at you.

I know this well, as a person in long-term recovery from addiction.

For years, it was this promise to myself:

“I’ll get clean tomorrow.”

And tomorrow never comes.

It was only after I got clean that I was able to build some real self-esteem.

And it started by making a new promise to myself - one day at a time - that things changed:

“Today, I won’t use.”

Over 14 years later, I’m still running on the power of that promise.

The most important relationship you’ll have in your life is with yourself.

Most people would never talk to a partner, child, or friend the way they talk to themselves.

Having a great relationship with yourself starts with not breaking promises:

Steve Hardison calls it “Being Your Word.”

Here’s how it works (it’s really simple):

You do what you say you’re going to do.

Every time.

Sounds simple right?

Try it. Simple isn’t easy.

“It is surprising how frequently people don’t do what they say they will do... Most people say, ‘Let’s get lunch on Tuesday,’ knowing it isn’t going to happen. They don’t even have the intention of making it happen... We live in a world that isn’t rigorous about being your word. We let each other off for not being our word.” - Steve Hardison

There is power in Being Your Word.

Not only externally, but to yourself.

How many promises do you break to others and to yourself on a daily basis?

Based on Steve’s experience, most people think they keep their word 90% of the time.

When they are asked to track it, the result is something like 20%.

And these are HIGH FUNCTIONING people at the top of their game.

So I offer you this challenge...

Keep track of how many times you say you’re going to do something (to yourself or others), and then whether you do it or not.

You’ll learn a lot.

It’s time to believe in yourself.

It’s really important to understand that the highest leverage task you can do in your business is working on yourself.

And working on yourself doesn’t mean becoming someone that you’re not.

It means becoming more you.

We are attracted to people who are themselves.

Think about all of your favorite artists/actors/athletes/etc. - why do you admire them?

Not because they’re perfect (they’re usually not even close).

But because they are themselves.

And the same goes for our work:

Clients really don’t need you to be perfect.

They need you to be you.

The goal is to cultivate a powerful and loving relationship with yourself.

This is what happens:

• When you believe in yourself, you believe in your work.

• When you believe in your work, clients believe in your work.

• When clients believe in your work, they pay what it’s worth.

So just just to recap:

You don’t need to find better clients.

You need to find yourself.

Postscript: Wait, how do I find better clients?

You’re still curious huh?

If you want to find better clients, remember this:

The person who believes in themself has a level of resourcefulness to solve their own problems.

When you really want something, you go out and figure it out.

There are millions of people who have figured out how to do “lead generation” and “networking” - these just aren’t complicated skills to learn.

It’s not magic.

But there are some more nuanced hard skills you’ll need to pair with it:

• Value-based pricing.

• Sales conversations.

• Expert positioning.

• Building conviction.

If you want my help working on those skills, read on below…

One more thing…

On Wednesday, January 21st, I am hosting a 90 minute free workshop called “How To 2-10x Your Prices In 2026.”

In it, I’ll teach you:

✅ The 4 steps to structure your business to charge way more in 2026

✅ The surprising trend I’m seeing going into 2026 (based on my work with high-level clients)

✅ Exactly what I’m doing to help those clients to close $10k-$250k deals

✅ How to future-proof your business from AI by “racing to the top” instead of racing to the bottom

The free workshop will take place on Monday, January 21st at 12pm EST and you can register below.

Register Here For Free

This is the second post in a series on pricing and charging more money.
If you enjoyed this, you can read the first post here:

First at my design agency, where the minimum rate was $60,000/year.

Second in my consulting work with creative entrepreneurs, where they pay between $12,000 and $64,000 to work closely with me.

When it comes down to it, a lot of my work is simply helping clients to understand:

• What they want

• What to focus on

• How to get it

Over the years, I started to notice that EVERY TIME a client came to me with a challenge, at the root it was one just four core problems.

Every single time.

And once you understand these four core problems, you can’t unsee it.

This framework alone has helped me generate $5,000,000 in sales over the past decade.

It’s powerful because it addresses ALL LEVELS of business:

• Goals

• Priorities

• Solutions

• Internal Blocks

So I created a training, revealing the 4 core problems, how to diagnose them, and how to solve them (for both clients, and yourself).

This framework is designed to be revisited repeatedly.

Your business will constantly present new versions of these four problems.

The better you get at recognizing and answering them, the more effective you’ll become as an entrepreneur.

You can use this on yourself and your own business, or you can use this with your clients.

It really works.

I know because it’s helped me charge multiple 7-figures over the last decade.

Let’s jump in…

This training is reserved for PAID members of inner entrepreneur.

When you sign up, you’ll get access to this full training (including a 5,000 word written guide AND video of me teaching it to my clients).

Read more

Somewhere along the way, we mixed up our price and our worth.

We started believing that the price we charge measures our worth as people.

And it has a lot to do with this phrase:

“Charge what you’re worth.”

The worst four words in pricing.

The price you charge does NOT determine your worth.

As I’ll explain, the value of your work isn’t even determined by you.

(It is determined by your customers.)

To base your self-worth on the approval of others is setting yourself up for failure.

So let me make it clear:

You have infinite worth.

But with that being said, you should ABSOLUTELY:

“Charge what your work is worth.”

That’s what I’m going to talk about today.

Because those “charge what you’re worth” people weren’t TOTALLY off.

They correctly identified that our self-esteem, self-worth, and conviction have something very important to do with the prices we set.

It’s just the way they went about it was all wrong.

But before we get to that, you need to understand the basics of pricing:

What is price?

Price is the amount of money we charge for a good or service.

It reflects our belief and conviction that to the right person, our work is valuable.

We are free to set any price we want for our work.

Price is incredibly important because…

Price is the single biggest lever on profit in our business.

Pricing incorrectly can mean:

• Making zero sales because the price is too high.

• Making no profit because the price is too low.

• Leaving tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit on the table.

But you just need to remember one rule:

Higher prices = higher profits.

Why do people buy?

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
- Warren Buffett

When someone decides to buy something, they make a simple decision.

This decision happens every single time - whether it is a cup of coffee or a $30,000 consulting package.

They look at the price (what they pay), and they compare it to the value that they perceive they will receive from it (what they get).

• If they believe the value is greater than the price, they will buy.

• If they believe the value is lower than the price, they will not.

One important individual is missing from this decision:

The seller. (That’s us.)

That is because we have no control over this price/value decision.

It’s essential you understand this concept:

We cannot CONTROL the purchasing decision.

Yes, we can INFLUENCE it through our sales and marketing.

But at the end of the day, the decision happens in the customer’s mind, not in ours.

Think of it this way:

• Value is how much a customer believes something is worth to them.

• Price is how much we believe the work is worth to them.

That’s why “charging what you’re worth” makes no sense.

Your job is to advocate for the value of your work.

Price is where your self-esteem and the market meet.

And 99% of entrepreneurs are undercharging.

Here’s the breakdown:

1. You WORK.

2. To the right customer, that work has a great deal of VALUE.

3. Your job is to ADVOCATE for the value of that work.

4. You do that by setting PRICES that reflect that value, and advocate for it through your sales and marketing.

This simple process creates so much anxiety in entrepreneurs, and is usually the result of two factors:

1. External Value: We don’t know how to advocate for our work.

2. Internal Conviction: We don’t know how to advocate for ourselves.

Don’t worry, this is something you can learn.

And it all starts with healthy detachment.

Your work is not your worth.

There is a certain amount of healthy detachment needed in order to advocate for your work effectively.

As someone who loves their work, and identifies with it deeply, this was a confusing thread to unravel.

When you identify your work as YOU, a customer rejecting it can be crushing.

That fear of rejection often leads to fear-based business decisions like:

• Lowering our prices.

• Stopping marketing.

• Not selling assertively.

When you learn to practice detachment, everything becomes easier.

You realize pricing, marketing, and selling your work is not about you at all.

It is about the work and the customer.

You can still care deeply about your work, while still fully advocating for it.

How to charge what your work is worth.

Price is internal conviction of external value.

In order to charge what your work is worth, you need to improve two things:

1. External Value

First, you need to get clear on the value you’re creating.

I recommend starting with your best customers, and asking them about their experience working with you.

Ask them:

• What specific results or outcomes have you achieved since we started working together?

• If you had to put a dollar amount on the value you’ve received, what would it be?

• What would have happened if you hadn’t hired me/bought this service?

• What aspect of our work together did you find most valuable?

• If you had to do this over again, knowing what you know now, what would this have been worth to you?

You’ll be shocked that:

• The things you think are important, are not the things they value about your work.

• The value your best clients are getting likely vastly exceeds the price you charged them for the work.

• You may feel a bit silly for charging such low prices after these conversations.

Moving from vagueness to clarity around the value you are creating is essential if you want to price effectively.

2. Internal Conviction

Second, you need to cultivate internal conviction.

This internal work is about separating your self-worth from your work.

I’ll save this for a later article.

To get started, here are a few questions to reflect on:

• What would happen if you doubled your prices tomorrow?

• When you think about raising your prices, what physical sensations do you notice in your body?

• Do you truly believe that your work creates meaningful value for your clients?

• Do you believe that it is a good thing for clients to reject you?

• If your best friend had your exact skills, experience, and results, what would you tell them to charge?

When you have genuine conviction in the value you create, and see yourself as worthy of being compensated for it, you’ll naturally advocate for it with confidence.

You’ll set prices that reflect a fair exchange of value for both parties.

Postscript: No one is coming to save you.

You deserve to be compensated fairly for the value that your work creates.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way.

If you don’t advocate for your work (through your pricing, sales, and marketing), no one else will.

Your price is what you believe your work is worth.

It’s your job to do something about it.

One more thing…

On Wednesday, January 21st, I am hosting a 90 minute free workshop called “How To 2-10x Your Prices In 2026.”

In it, I’ll teach you:

✅ The 4 steps to structure your business to charge way more in 2026

✅ The surprising trend I’m seeing going into 2026 (based on my work with high-level clients)

✅ Exactly what I’m doing to help those clients to close $10k-$250k deals

✅ How to future-proof your business from AI by “racing to the top” instead of racing to the bottom

The free workshop will take place on Monday, January 21st at 12pm EST and you can register below.

Register Here For Free

This piece was adapted from a YouTube video I created called “Preparation, Ritual, and Abandonment: Life & Business In Flow.” If you prefer, you can watch it here.

This band has have never repeated a setlist in over 40 years of playing together.

Not once.

But it goes deeper.

When they walk on stage, they don’t even HAVE a setlist.

They just start playing, and the setlist emerges as they go.

How does a band play in front of 20,000 people with no plan?

They tap into flow.

*Before we go any further. I’m talking about Phish. And I’m a huge fan. I’ve seen them 17 times in the last 3 years. 🐟

My deeper understanding of flow all started with this short interview with Trey Anastasio, Phish’s guitarist.

If you understand Trey’s live performance process, you’ll understand everything you need to know about flow.

Step 1 - Preparation

Before the tour even begins, Trey practices with intense focus - running scales, reviewing the catalog of 300+ songs that might be played, getting ready for tour.

There is a tremendous amount of preparation needed to be able to call upon a massive songbook at will.

Once the tour starts, a typical show goes like this:

At the beginning of the day, someone from his team will print out a list with around 100 songs on it.

These are songs that are potentially going to be played at the show.

Trey walks around all day with this piece of paper, chatting with band members/crew, crossing things off, circling favorites - editing, changing, preparing.

Step 2 - Ritual

Then, 30 minutes before showtime, he stops.

Preparation is over.

The pre-show ritual begins.

He meditates, does his vocal warm-ups, and practices gratitude through prayer.

Then he visualizes the venue from above to get a sense of perspective, and see how in the grand scheme of things it’s all really small.

He avoids mirrors, because he doesn’t want to be the center of attention.

The ritual is the bridge between preparation and abandonment.

Step 3 - Abandonment

Then, 10 minutes before he steps on stage, Trey rips up the setlist and throws it out.

“When I walk on stage, I’ve pretty much trained myself to go completely blank. Until I step up, pick up my guitar, look at the audience, and I know what to play.”

When he walks on stage, all that preparation dissolves.

He trusts it’s all there.

Now his only job is to listen - to the crowd, to his bandmates, to the moment - and respond.

No setlist. No plan. Just presence.

“There’s a lot more preparation than might be seen, but there’s also probably a lot more abandoned than might be believed.”

Flow is a paradox.

It requires intense preparation followed by complete abandonment.

Entrepreneurs need flow.

An entrepreneur’s job is to create things that people value.

It could be products, services, or experiences.

Work of great value is usually created in a state of flow.

Flow is a transcendent experience where action and thought merge.

• Athletes call it being “in the zone.”

• Musicians describe it as becoming one with their instrument.

• Writers feel it when the words seem to write themselves.

While much has been said about the benefits of the flow state for productivity, entrepreneurs should be much more interested in its applications for creativity.

Because in a world of AI, productivity is a losing battle.

If the value you create predominantly comes from “getting things done,” someday, maybe soon, AI is going to eat your lunch.

So today I’m going to teach you how to create a state of flow for maximum creativity.

The true beauty of the flow state is not that you get more done.

It’s that it allows you to:

• Access your intuition

• Tap into a power greater than yourself

• Remove your ego from the equation

Three things that AI can’t compete with.

The three ingredients of flow.

This three step process creates the conditions for your best work to emerge.

It will allow you to access deep states of flow, do your best creative work possible, and create new value in the world.

You’ll need three ingredients:

1. Preparation

2. Ritual

3. Abandonment

Step 1: Preparation

A foundation of discipline.

In order to access the deepest states of flow, you have to do the work.

It’s unglamorous. It’s boring. It’s the stuff nobody sees.

Why do we prepare?

Because when people don’t prepare - it doesn’t go well.

Everyone wants the outcome, no one wants to do the work for it.

Guitarist John McLaughlin said it perfectly:

“Perfect discipline will lead to freedom… If you’re thinking, you’re not playing. If you’re playing, you’re not thinking. That’s where the real music comes from. It comes from beyond thought.”

Preparation is fundamentally about respect - for the work and for the individuals who will benefit from it.

• If we are writing, it honors the reader, and the fact that hundreds, or thousands, or millions more might read it.

• If we are on a sales call, it honors the other person’s time, money, and decision.

• If we are on stage, it honors the people who paid money to see us perform.

Preparation will look different for everyone, depending on what you’re doing.

Preparation Example: Sales Calls

If you’re an entrepreneur preparing for a sales call, you need to do research. When I ran my design agency, there was a certain amount of information and clarity I felt that I needed to have in order to feel prepared. I need answers to the questions: What do I want? What do they want? What should I offer? How much should I charge? Can they afford me? Preparing allows you to show up on the call at a higher level, because the basics are already established.

Preparation Example: Public Speaking

In 2024, my friend Blake La Grange did an extensive 3 day workshop for entrepreneurs in San Diego. I asked him how he prepared for over 20 hours of speaking. He said he spent nearly a week gathering his thoughts: walking, thinking, reading. Asking himself: What do the people here need to hear? So then, when the day finally comes, he could rip it all up and simply ask, “What does everyone want to talk about?”

Preparation Example: Art & Creation

Creativity requires preparation. It might mean laying out your tools and preparing your workspace à la French chef’s mise en place. It might mean filling up your cup with inspiration. Jiro Ono from Jiro Dreams of Sushi says “I need to be eating better food than my customers, so I know what incredible food tastes like.” It might mean creating an outline or a plan. For example, writers may “prep the page“ the night before.

It takes a lot of preparation to be able to rip up the plan completely.

Step 2: Ritual

The bridge between states.

Ritual is how you transition from preparation to performance.

It’s the bridge between your thinking mind and your intuitive mind.

Without ritual, you carry the energy of preparation into performance.

You stay in your head.

You can’t let go.

Your ritual doesn’t need to be complex.

It just needs to be consistent.

It could be:

• Three minutes of meditation before you write

• A specific playlist before important calls

• A walk around the block before creative work

It’s a simple trigger that tells your nervous system:

“We’re shifting now. It’s time to let go.”

Step 3: Abandonment

Letting go of control.

Most entrepreneurs are terrified of abandonment.

So instead, we cling to our scripts, our formulas, our frameworks.

And our work becomes mechanical, predictable, and soulless.

Your clients feel it.

They might not consciously know what’s wrong, but they sense the disconnection.

The lack of presence.

The absence of real listening.

Abandonment means releasing your agenda, your plan, and your need to control the outcome.

It means trusting your preparation will serve you and being present to what wants to emerge.

Abandonment Example: Sales Calls

At this point, I’ve reviewed hundreds of sales calls that my clients have done. They are often prepared, but they don’t let go. This is the telltale sign: Rather than LISTENING to the human in front of them, they are thinking about what to say next. They’re so focused on the solution they never hear the real problem. I always tell my clients: Everything you need to close the deal is found in the person right in front of you, not in a script.

Abandonment Example: Coaching

For the longest time, I felt like I needed to have something “prepared” for a coaching session. I’d put together a presentation or a topic, because I felt like if I didn’t put on a show, it wouldn’t be valuable. What I’ve realized is the most value comes from meeting clients where they are. These days I show up to a client call and simply say, “What should we talk about?”

Abandonment Example: Job Interviews

In his book Uncommon Hospitality, restaurateur Will Guidara talks about how when he was younger he took a lot of pride in coming up with interview questions. But as time went on that shifted. “I now believe the best interview technique is no technique at all: You simply have enough of a conversation that you can get to know the person a little bit.” He has enough interviews under his belt to know that if he is present, he’ll get the information he needs to make a decision.

With all of these examples, you can see that abandonment is not lack of preparation.

It’s trusting your preparation enough to let it go.

Your work wants to flow through you.

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete. - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Flow is what happens when you finally get out of your own way.

When we prepare fully, shift our state, and let go, the only thing left is creation.

The less you try to control, the more creativity you can access.

Your best work - the work that changes lives and creates real value - isn’t something you can control.

First, you have to create the conditions for it to arrive.

Then, you show up and wait for it to find you.

It always does.

Thanks for reading. It would mean a lot to me if you shared this.

Share

It would mean even more if you implemented it.

If you’re interested in working closely with me, watch this.

We all have an inner thermostat for the amount of money we feel we “should” earn.

• When we make less than that number, we scramble to earn more.

• When we make more than that number, we self sabotage or take our foot off the gas.

Many people get “stuck” at a certain income level for years as a result.

I’ve seen it with my clients (and myself as well).

• The fear of failure motivates us to maintain our current standards.

• The fear of success stops us from exceeding those standards.

• The pain of change feels more scary than the pain of staying the same.

So we stay stuck.

But it’s not just about money.

We have similar inner thermostats for nearly every aspect of our lives:

• Love

• Happiness

• Health

• Family

• Success

• Creativity

• Self-worth

• Productivity

• and more.

Just like physical thermostats regulate temperature, our internal thermostats regulate our life experience.

The good news? These thermostats are adjustable.

The bad news? It only changes from the inside.

The thermostat is controlled from the inside.

“The tragedy of many people’s lives is that they look for self-esteem in every direction except within, and so they fail in their search.”
- The Six Pillars of Self Esteem

Most people believe they need something outside themselves to solve their problems.

But it’s just not how it works.

Your internal thermostat isn’t controlled externally.

Consider lottery winners (who often go broke within a few years) or celebrities/artists (who reach success, then self-destruct).

The problem isn’t a lack of money, love, or happiness.

The problem is your internal beliefs aren’t calibrated to bring those things into your life.

Success doesn’t erase insecurities.

It amplifies them.

When we gain success, recognition, or money beyond our conception of self, a great conflict emerges.

We all desire alignment between our external reality and our internal self-image.

If the outside and inside don’t match, we will (consciously or subconsciously) find a way to restore equilibrium.

That’s why many people implode after a big win.

They’re not prepared for what success unlocks:

• Old wounds

• Childhood scripts

• Self-worth questions

• A deep reckoning with your identity

So they return to the familiar pain they know.

The fear of success

People say they’re afraid of failure.

But the real fear that paralyzes people is success.

It’s not the money or the attention or the bigger audience that freaks them out.

It’s the internal consequences of success.

The identity shifts, the psychological weight, and the emotional exposure that trigger resistance.

We sabotage our success for a variety of reasons.

But they’re usually based on invisible scripts:

These unconscious beliefs about money, love, family, faith, and success silently govern our actions.

These stories are transmitted to us early on and we run them like a script, often without even realizing it.

Three scripts that hold us back from success:

1. “Success is evil.”
Our culture teaches us to associate success with corruption. Hollywood conditions us: success = greed, villainy, or moral failure. When your subconscious associates success with ego, greed, or disconnection, you will block it. Period.

2. “Change means pain.”
Success means change. If we internally associate change with pain, we will avoid it at all costs. This can manifest as procrastination, justification, or imposter syndrome.

3. “I’m not ready.”
If you’ve been hurt, neglected, or abandoned in the past, you may unconsciously reject the very thing you say you want. Most people aren’t afraid of achievement; they’re afraid of letting good things in.

Getting unstuck.

We’re all on a lifelong journey of raising our standards and becoming our most authentic selves.

If you want to raise your internal thermostat, here are a few places to start:

Step one is awareness. Ask yourself:

• What level of success feels “right” to you?

• What income level feels “normal” to you?

• How do you feel when things fall below your standards?

• How do you feel when things get “too good”?

• What are the things you know you “should” be doing, but you’re avoiding?

More insights can be uncovered by doing deep personal work.

I endorse Morning Pages journaling and Internal Family Systems therapy.

Once you have awareness, you need to learn to raise your standards.

You can either “be” your self into a new way acting, or act your self into a new way of being.

Either way, your new identity requires new actions.

Finally, one of the fastest ways to raise your standards is to surround yourself with people who have what you want.

Observe: What do they do? How do they think? How do they show up?

Grow from the inside out.

“If you can’t be happy with a coffee, you won’t be happy with a yacht.”
- Naval Ravikant

Many people seek success through material possessions.

They secretly hope that fixing their outsides will magically fix their broken insides.

It doesn’t work.

The work must happen internally.

As you solve the internal blockages, you’ll experience the external shifts.

You’ll suddenly see yourself taking the actions that create the outcomes that you want in life.

That’s how you’ll know it’s working.

Thanks for reading. It would mean a lot to me if you shared this.

Share

It would mean even more if you implemented it.

If you’re interested in working closely with me, watch this.

In business the problems never stop.

Every day you’ll encounter them.

• Client issues.

• Cash flow.

• Team drama.

• Tech failures.

It never ends.

It feels like for every problem that you solve, another one (or two) pop up to replace it.

Therefore, most entrepreneurs believe the secret is to try to eliminate their problems.

To fix, manage, and control until life finally feels calm.

But here’s the truth:

As an entrepreneur, your success is ultimately limited by your capacity to manage, solve, and sit with unresolved problems.

So today, let’s talk about problems.

You’re supposed to have problems.

“The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.”
- Theodore Isaac Rubin

First lesson:

The source of your business issues is the belief that you shouldn’t have problems.

It’s not really the problems that cause us pain.

What hurts is our resistance to them.

Deep down we think:

“I shouldn’t have to deal with this.”

The pain comes when reality doesn’t match how we believe the world should be.

There will never be a magical time where all our problems go away and everything is perfect.

And yet most people act as if there’s some way to make it happen.

They’re always looking for some strategy, hack, secret, or plan that will create a business with no issues.

And it creates more pain.

If you believe the only way to be happy is to have no problems - you’ll never be happy.

The more we accept that problems are a natural part of business, the less they’ll affect us.

You’re an entrepreneur.

You’re supposed to have problems.

Be grateful, because it means you’re still in the game, and you’re still playing.

Searching for stability.

When we say we want “no problems,” I believe we’re actually after stability.

Most entrepreneurs look to their business for that stability, and believe they can find it in money and control.

“If I have X, then I will be okay.”

But if your stability is contingent on anything external (money, success, control, no problems) you’ll never feel safe.

Yet we continue to chase the dragon:

“If I can change this ONE thing, THEN everything will be okay.”

Second lesson:

Real stability can only be found on the inside.

It starts with the belief that no matter what happens - market crashes, failed launches, team implosions - we’ll be okay.

This belief grounds us.

Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to create a “problem-free” business, we surrender to the reality of entrepreneurship: challenges are constant.

This surrender frees up our energy to address problems appropriately, because we’re no longer wasting effort resisting them.

• When we resist problems, we tend to worry, hide, blame, and control.

• When we accept problems, we either act or we wait.

Eventually, we learn to see our problems as teachers.

Each challenge becomes an opportunity to learn and grow, developing our capacity to handle what’s next.

Accepting what you cannot control.

Think back to the last time your business felt under control.

You’ve likely experienced this feeling many times:

• The business is taken care of.

• Things are running smoothly.

• There are no fires to put out.

It’s easy to attribute this fulfilled feeling to having “no problems.”

Wrong.

In that moment, you’re not problem-free.

You’re simply at peace with the problems you can’t control.

Even when things feel perfectly calm, there are still problems below the surface.

• Clients could leave

• Markets could shift

• Systems could break

You just aren’t resisting them.

You know problems are a part of business.

And you believe you can solve them.

So they don’t affect you.

Then, when an unanticipated problem occurs:

• You lose a big deal

• A team member quits

• Cash flow gets tight

Suddenly, your peace is shattered.

Because this is a problem you haven’t accepted.

So as you can see, the goal is to not have problems (that is impossible).

The goal is to expand your capacity to sit with uncertainty.

Sitting with the unresolved.

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
- Reinhold Niebuh (The Serenity Prayer)

One of the most important skills you’ll learn as an entrepreneur is the ability to sit with the unresolved.

It’s easier said than done.

As your responsibilities increase, problems compound, and things become messier.

All at once, you may need to hold space for:

• A failed launch.

• A pending lawsuit against your company.

• A key team member threatening to quit.

And still show up to move the needle forward on the things that matter.

The best entrepreneurs I know have a remarkable ability to sit with the unresolved and not have it affect their happiness, creativity, or perspective.

But accepting life on life’s terms doesn’t mean inaction.

It means knowing when you need to move.

To gracefully move through states, feelings, and problems.

It means knowing which things you can control and which things you can’t.

The greater your ability to sit with the unresolved, the greater your ability to focus on the things that matter.

Because problems aren’t obstacles to success, they are the price of success.

Only after we accept we are powerless, do we discover our true power.

Thanks for reading. It would mean a lot to me if you shared this.

Share

It would mean even more if you implemented it.

If you’re interested in working closely with me, watch this.

Right now, there is only one thing limiting the growth of your business.

As an entrepreneur, your job is to:

• Figure out what it is.

• Unblock it.

The process I’m describing is called bottleneck analysis. It’s not new.

It has roots in the Scientific Management principles of the 1900s-1940s.

“The maximum efficiency of any process is limited by the weakest link in the chain.”
- Harrington Emerson, 1911

It works like this:

In any system, there is always one part that is the slowest or most constrained. When you fix the constraint, things flow faster. The faster things flow, the more efficient the system becomes.

Scientific Management is great for machines, assembly lines, and businesses alike.

But for entrepreneurs, a massive piece is missing.

To unblock the constraints holding you and your business back, you need to look inward.

But before we get there, it’s time to go back to school.

How to discover your business bottleneck.

There are some principles that every entrepreneur should know.

Bottleneck analysis is one of them.

It tells you exactly what to focus on to grow your business.

Here’s the process:

Step 1: Get clear on what you want.

You can’t solve a bottleneck without identifying what to improve.

Entrepreneur’s goals tend to fall into three categories: money, time, and happiness.

Decide what you want. It could be:

• Double your revenue.

• Work 20 hours a week.

• Do less of what you hate.

Step 2: Figure out the constraint

Once you know what you want, identify what’s impeding your ability to get it.

The question to ask yourself:

What is the ONE thing that is MOST constraining my ability to get what I want?

Notice that I didn’t say, “What are SOME things.”

Your ability to solve bottlenecks depends most on your ability to identify that number one blockage.

It is also important to consider time and effort in this decision.

Some constraints may unlock a lot if unblocked, but could take years to implement.

We want the constraint that optimizes for the most results with the least effort.

Step 3: Measure it

Once you’ve identified the constraint, you need a system to measure your progress in unblocking it.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Step 4: Unblock it

Finally, devote as much of your discretionary time as possible to fixing it.

If it is TRULY the number one constraint to what you want, anything that isn’t fixing it is procrastination.

Examples

If your goal is to double your business, the bottleneck process might be:

• Sales bottleneck → If you improve at sales and your close rate goes from 20% to 40%, you have doubled your business.

• Leads bottleneck → If you double the amount of quality leads that you get, your business will double.

• Pricing bottleneck → If you double your prices and work with clients that can afford it, your business will double.

• Conversion bottleneck → If you improve at copywriting and CRO and get your landing pages to convert 2x, your business will double.

Very logical. Very simple.

The massive problem with bottleneck analysis.

There’s one problem with applying bottleneck analysis to your business...

It assumes we’re cogs in a factory.

If you spend enough time working with entrepreneurs, you’ll start to notice a weird pattern:

They are people.

People with emotions, thoughts, fears, and beliefs.

And guess what?

People have issues.

Issues that block them from getting what they want.

In theory, every business bottleneck is an external bottleneck.

There will always be one action or area of focus that will provide the biggest returns for the business system.

In reality, figuring out the external bottleneck is only half the battle.

The truth: You are the bottleneck.

Most businesses are constrained more by the founder’s internal bottlenecks than the external bottlenecks of the business.

Entrepreneurs often “know” exactly what they should do in order to grow their business.

Yet they’re still not doing it.

(Maybe you’re one of them).

There’s more information available on how to grow a business online than ever.

But what there is a massive shortage of?

People with the internal capacity to build great things.

This is because internal bottlenecks are the real limiters for our capacity to take action and do the things that scare us.

How to discover your internal bottleneck.

There’s a reason I taught you how to identify your business bottleneck first.

The external bottlenecks reveal the inner work to be done.

Here are 3 examples of how I helped my clients diagnose their internal bottlenecks.

See if you can figure out the pattern between them.

Example 1: Marketing → Perfectionism

Last week, I spoke with a struggling 6-figure entrepreneur.

External Bottleneck: Marketing

We hopped on the call and he was despondent.

His head was down and his energy was low.

I felt it.

He was frustrated because his product had been stuck at the same sales plateau for the last few years, despite working tirelessly on improving it DAILY.

We got to the heart of the bottleneck when I asked him:

“What percentage of your time are you spending on marketing and sales?”

He responded sheepishly.

Zero.

He didn’t need to keep improving his product. (It’s already amazing.)

There was just a massive misalignment between his goals and actions.

He said he wanted more money (which requires marketing), but his calendar said he wanted a better product.

Internal Bottleneck: Perfectionism

As we drove deeper, it became clear he knew he needed to market.

But an internal block stopped him from doing it.

He knew he needed to start, but since he didn’t have a ton of experience, he knew it would not be perfect initially.

That truth kept him from taking action to solve his problem.

This perfectionism was already playing out in other areas of his life, but it was his business that finally made it click.

The perfectionism that helped him build an incredible product was now blocking him from marketing it (and himself).

Example 2: Sales → Confrontation

Another entrepreneur I work with built an incredible service business but was stuck at the same revenue plateau for months.

External Bottleneck: Sales

Her marketing worked, her product was solid, and clients were happy.

But there was one glaring problem: She was barely closing any sales calls.

Her close rate was a dismal 15%. (Industry average: 35-40%)

We calculated that if she could just double her close rate from 15% to 30%, the business would double overnight.

Same leads, same time investment, double the revenue.

Sidenote: We could have also solved this bottleneck by hiring a salesperson, but it is my belief that the founder MUST be able to sell their product before delegating it. I’ll talk about why in a future issue.

Internal Bottleneck: Fear of Confrontation

When I listened to her sales call recordings, I heard a pattern repeated over and over again.

When we spoke 1:1, she was confident, articulate, and warm, but as soon as she got on a sales call, something would shift.

Her energy would drop.

She would get quiet.

She shut down.

Her lack of conviction and confidence meant that:

• She would state the price and immediately start negotiating against herself.

• The client would raise an objection and she would immediately fold.

• She would end calls with “I’ll send you a proposal.”

She believed asking for a clear yes or no was somehow wrong.

This stemmed from a deep belief that confrontation was dangerous and that good people don’t pressure others to buy.

In her mind, being direct about money felt “pushy” or “aggressive.”

The problem?

Clients want to work with someone who is confident that they can help them.

The irony?

Her internal blockage wasn’t helping anyone.

It turned away clients she could truly help and her business stayed stuck.

Example 3: Complexity → People Pleasing

Recently, I worked with a brilliant entrepreneur who couldn’t say no.

Business Bottleneck: Complexity

When we dug in, the external bottleneck was clear - this entrepreneur was overwhelmed by the many things he had said yes to:

• Too many clients.

• The wrong team.

• 10+ offers.

If the business was simplified, he could double down on finding and serving more of his highest profit clients.

He knew about this problem for years.

But didn’t take action.

Internal Bottleneck: People Pleasing

The underlying internal bottleneck was a serious issue with conflict.

As a people-pleaser, he only felt comfortable when there was zero conflict in his business.

His sensitivity to the needs of others served him extremely well initially.

• Clients were always well taken care of.

• Problems were avoided at all costs.

Then it stopped working.

Whenever a conflict occurred, his nervous system felt like it was on fire.

He would shut down completely and take a whole day to recover.

As a result, he developed a habit of making decisions to avoid conflict.

This led to a collection of clients, offers, and people that he didn’t say “No” to.

In business, conflict and confrontation are inevitable.

• You can’t avoid firing employees.

• You can’t avoid confronting unhappy clients.

• You can’t avoid difficult conversations.

Not building the capacity to handle conflict (by avoiding it) ultimately hurt him (and the business).

The external reveals the internal.

All three examples reveal the same truth:

The business bottleneck reveals the internal work to be done.

• The business reveals the bottleneck.

• The bottleneck reveals the blockage.

• The blockage reveals the path.

Moving through these internal blockages is an ongoing messy process.

Often there are deep wounds that need to be addressed.

But if we want the business to grow, we have to grow.

Working on yourself does not mean not working.

It means developing the internal capacity to take the actions your business requires of you.

Over time, we find it easier to take actions we previously avoided, minimized, or sabotaged, even though we knew they needed to be done.

The leverage is the internal work.

Once you grasp the basic principles, you realize that most of business is a game in between our ears.

Entrepreneurship illuminates a path to the parts of ourselves that are underdeveloped.

Bottleneck analysis shows us that a system will only grow as big as its largest constraint.

The internal work shows us that our freedom will always be limited by the greatest fear that keeps us from taking action.

The external bottlenecks reveal the inner work to be done.

The truest sign of the internal work “working” is whether your actions reflect the person you are trying to become.

When you address the external, the business grows.

When you address the internal, everything grows.

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What you don’t know is hurting you.

It’s why you feel exhausted despite accomplishing so little, why simple decisions take forever, and why you can never seem to gain real momentum in your business.

It’s hurting you while telling you it’s keeping you safe.

Many entrepreneurs have a habit of vagueness - about money, time, and what they really want.

Vagueness is insidious because it doesn’t feel deliberate.

We just don’t do things.

• We don’t check our bank account.

• We don’t know our profit margins.

• We don’t set goals.

• We don’t examine our patterns.

• We don’t ask ourself what we really want.

Vagueness is the opposite of clarity.

Clarity is essential to a healthy business. It leads to better, more aligned decisions.

But clarity is also terrifying. Because it often means change.

So we stay vague.

Vagueness is an effective strategy for keeping you stuck exactly where you are now.

But as entrepreneurs who want to grow internally and externally, that won’t do.

It’s time to get clear about:

• What you earn and what you spend.

• What you need and what you want.

• Who you are and who you aren’t.

Today I’ll show you how.

6 types of vagueness.

After working with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I see vagueness manifesting in their business in these ways:

• Vague goals - No specific targets or measurable outcomes. You know you want to “grow” but have no idea what that actually means.

• Vague finances - You don’t know what you actually earn, spend, need, or want. Your financial picture oscillates between hope and dread, based on the vibes of the day.

• Vague positioning - You’re for everyone, which means you’re for no one. You can’t articulate who you serve or why they should choose you.

• Vague self-worth - You’re unclear about the value you create. This manifests as chronic undercharging and over-delivering.

• Vague boundaries - You have no limits around your time, energy, or scope. You’re available 24/7 and wonder why you’re burnt out.

• Vague communication - You have difficulty understanding and articulating your needs and wants, to yourself and others.

See yourself in any of these?

You’re not alone.

But before you start beating yourself up, I want to help you understand WHY you do this.

Vagueness is a protector.

This may surprise you, but there is a part of you who believes that vagueness will keep you safe.

In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, “protectors“ are parts of our psyche that developed to keep us safe from harm, rejection, or pain.

They work tirelessly to prevent us from experiencing the deeper, more core wounds that our more vulnerable parts (called “exiles“) carry.

There are many types of protectors.

• A “perfectionist” that sets impossibly high standards to avoid criticism.

• An “inner critic” that beats yourself up before anyone else can.

• A “controller” who tries to manage every detail to prevent chaos.

• And our “vagueness” protector, who avoids clarity because it means pain.

We can observe this “vagueness” protector in action.

Here’s how it thinks:

• “If I don’t track my expenses, I won’t have to worry about whether I need to let someone on my team go.”

• “If I don’t look at my screen time, I won’t feel guilt for spending 4 hours scrolling instead of working.”

• “If I don’t check in with my clients, I won’t have to hear any negative feedback that will make me feel shame.”

• “If I don’t set goals for the next year, I won’t fear failing to meet them.”

Your vagueness protector operates on this principle:

“If we keep things unclear, we maintain control over our pain.”

This part believes that:

• Clarity = vulnerability = potential for devastating pain

• Vagueness = safety = protection from harsh realities

• Ambiguity allows for hope without the risk of disappointment

But in Internal Family Systems, there are no bad parts.

All of our protectors exist to help us, by guarding exiled parts - the vulnerable aspects of ourselves that carry old wounds.

Behind vagueness protectors, you often find exiles carrying beliefs like:

• “I’m not good enough.”

• “I don’t deserve success.”

• “People will leave me if they see who I really am.”

• “I’m fundamentally flawed.”

• “I can’t handle disappointment.”

Your vagueness protector believes its job is to make sure these tender parts never have to feel that pain again.

Our protector doesn’t see the big picture.

It just knows clarity is unsafe.

This leaves us stuck in the familiar pain of our current life, rather than the uncertain (and exciting) future that could await us.

If we are to address our habit of vagueness, we must learn to embrace clarity in a way that feels safe.

Here’s how:

5 steps to turn vagueness into clarity.

The steps to go from vagueness to clarity are simple.

• Take an inventory

• Decide what you want to change

• Make a plan to do it

• Get support

• Build ongoing systems

You really don’t need me to figure out it.

But there’s a reason you probably haven’t done this, even though you know you should.

Your protector will give you every excuse to not seek clarity:

• “I’ll do it next month when things are less busy.”

• “I’m pretty good at keeping track in my head.”

• “Too much information is overwhelming.”

• “I’m a big-picture person, not a detail person.”

• “I need to set up the ideal spreadsheet/app/system.”

If you don’t acknowledge it, your protector will continue to create problems, barriers, and distractions to protect you from addressing the deeper wounds you carry.

Step 1. Work with your protector.

It’s time to meet the part of you that believes vagueness is a helpful strategy.

You can do this work alone or with an IFS therapist.

If you’re going to do it alone, I recommend the books Self Therapy by Jay Earley and No Bad Parts by IFS creator Dick Schwartz.

A (simplified) Internal Family Systems process for connecting with your vagueness protector might look something like this:

1. Appreciate the Protector - “Thank you, vagueness part, for trying to keep me safe. I can see how hard you’ve been working to protect me from potential pain.”

2. Get Curious About Its Fears - “What are you afraid would happen if I got really clear about my finances/goals/worth? What are you protecting me from?”

3. Ask What It Needs - “What would need to be true for you to feel safe enough to let me be more specific and clear?”

4. Negotiate Gradual Changes - “Could we try getting clear about just one small thing? I’ll go slowly and check in with you.”

5. Connect with the Exile - Once the protector feels heard, you can gently approach the wounded part underneath and offer it the care and attention it needs.

As you continue to work with the vagueness protector (and the exiles it is protecting), something amazing happens:

Clarity stops feeling dangerous.

Your nervous system realizes being specific doesn’t mean being unsafe.

It means being empowered to create what you actually want.

Step 2. Take a “Vagueness Inventory.”

Once you’ve understood how vagueness has served you in the past, it’s time to get clear on what’s happening now, through a “Vagueness Inventory.”

This may be painful, especially if you have been avoiding some wreckage of the past like unpaid debts, failed businesses, broken partnerships, or abandoned goals.

But when it’s all out in the open, there’s a possibility for change.

Here are some simple prompts to start:

• What you earn. (How much are you making right now? Not what you hope to make or what you made last year - what’s actually coming in this month?)

• What you spend. (How much are you spending? Break this down into business expenses, personal expenses, and fixed vs. variable costs.)

• What you need. (What do you need to cover your basic living expenses and business operations? What’s your absolute minimum to survive and keep the lights on?)

• What you want. (What do you actually want to earn? What goals do you have? What would your ideal day look like - be specific.)

• How you spend your time. (Track your actual hours for a week. How much time goes to growth tasks vs. maintenance tasks vs. avoidance tasks?)

• What results you’re actually getting. (What is the gap between where you are and where you want to go?)

These answers are just the beginning of your journey to clarity.

Taking a fearless inventory will create awareness, which is the first step towards new goals, actions, and outcomes.

Step 3. Set goals and action plans.

Your inventory will likely reveal areas needing immediate attention.

They will be clear because the unmanageability will be tangible:

• Debts to pay.

• Untenable business partnerships.

• Clients to fire.

Start with the things that are most urgent, and work backwards from there.

It is time to start setting clear goals about how much you want to make, how you want to spend your time, and what you want to get out of your work.

For each goal, break it down into smaller steps.

This is your action plan.

Step 4. Get accountability.

Everyone has blind spots.

That’s where other people come in.

You need people in your life who can see your blind spots, will call you on your vagueness, and help you stay in a state of clarity.

This can be a group of entrepreneurs, a mentor, or a friend who can help.

Share your goals and action plans with them honestly, ask for accountability, and listen for their feedback.

Step 5. Build systems for ongoing clarity.

The final piece of the puzzle is to create systems so you have clarity on a daily basis, both externally and internally.

External Clarity

You would be shocked to learn how many entrepreneurs can’t immediately access important data about their business - things like finances, client payments, and conversion rates.

Create a system so you always have access to the data you need to make decisions.

When I work with my clients, I make sure they always know these 4 metrics:

• How much money they make.

• How much money they spend.

• How they spend their time.

• How much runway they have (time until the business runs out of money).

That way, we can make decisions based on facts, not just feelings.

Internal Clarity

It’s also important to have a regular practice of checking in with yourself, so you can have clarity about how you feel and what you want.

This could come in the form of:

• Prayer and meditation

• Morning pages journaling

• Checking in with your internal compass

The goal is to have systems that support ongoing clarity in both life and business.

Clarity = freedom.

The more clarity you have, the more alive you’ll feel.

When you do the work to address your habit of vagueness, things will start to happen:

• You’ll free up space, energy, and bandwidth.

• You’ll create possibilities that weren’t available before.

• Your actions will align with your values and goals.

A life spent hiding from reality is not a life well lived.

True freedom is not the absence of problems, it is the courage to face them clearly.

When you stop hiding from reality, you finally become free to shape it.

Thanks for reading. It would mean a lot to me if you shared this.

Share

It would mean even more if you implemented it.

If you’re interested in working closely with me, watch this.