Subscribe now

….

“A stocked pantry means nobody panics about tonight’s dinner…”

…

Five warm coffee-date conversations scheduled…

…means if someone says no I don’t feel like the whole train got derailed.

It’s the exact system pulled from one our Deals Over Clients community calls:

It runs on three things only:

👉 A minimum stock level
👉 A restock day
👉 And one rule for a stale prospect. Nothing else to manage.

Upgrade now and the tracker, the restock ritual, and a worked three-week example are yours.

….

Tony here,

A mentor on one of our Magic Monday calls said something worth writing down.

A stocked pantry means nobody panics about tonight’s dinner, even if we don’t make it to the grocery store that day.

An empty one means every trip to the store feels like life or death.

...and the same thing is true when it comes to transitioning to partnership deals.

When one coffee date feels like the only one

Monday’s Diagnostic named six fears.

Two of them, the Rejection Fear and the Spammer Fear, get louder every time there’s only one conversation running.

One prospect.
One reply pending.
One shot.

That’s not a confidence problem.

That’s a stock problem.

Five warm conversations running at once, and a cold reply from one of them barely registers.

One conversation running, and that same cold reply feels like the whole plan to transition to deals just died.

So today’s paid post is the fix.

The Pantry Pipeline Tracker.

A minimum stock level, a restock day, and one rule for when a prospect goes stale.

Read more

Subscribe now

….

🥚 “Ignoring fears & constraints is like wait’n to add eggs in after I bake a cake…”

….

Tony here…

Six fears.

Eighteen questions.

One number that comes back higher than the rest.

Somewhere in the last thirty days, an outreach to a possible partner got softened, delayed, or never sent.

And the reason given out loud wasn’t the real one.

So today’s free post is The Money Fear Diagnostic.

All curated from real calls inside the Deals Over Clients Skool community

Eighteen questions.
Six fears.
Score it in two minutes.

Bring coffee.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

The 6am emails

One guy on a recent coaching call works rotating day and night shifts at a corporate job.

He wasn’t stalled because he ran out of time.

He was stalled because of a fear he never said out loud...

That more income just meant more to manage, more to carry, more responsibility for everybody counting on him.

So he started sending five emails from his phone at 6am, before a 7am shift.

And the fear didn’t get smaller.

It just stopped being the one driving the car.

Here’s the thing about a fear with no name on it.

It doesn’t go away quiet.

It just keeps making the decision every single day…

…and the reason people give out loud is never the real one.

Six fears keep showing up on these calls, over and over, from people at every stage.

Only one of them is usually the one actually driving.

The eighteen questions

Six fears. Three lines each.

Rate every line 0 to 2. 0 is “not me.”
1 is “sometimes.”
2 is “yeah, that’s me.”

Add up each set of three.

Nobody fails this.

Something just finally gets a name.

1. Paperwork Dread — More income mostly reads like more to manage, not more freedom.

“I’m not really a numbers person” gets used as a reason to stay smaller.

Higher income brings headaches to mind before it brings options.

2. The Lane-Change Fear — Staying quiet about wanting this, because of what the current crowd might think.

Worrying it looks like giving up on what already got built.

Rehearsing how to explain the shift before even starting it.

3. The Pre-Work Fear — Assuming a real campaign needs nights and weekends that don’t exist.

Picturing weeks of tech and funnel building before anything gets sent.

The busier the week already is, the more this feels impossible to start.

4. The Spammer Fear — Reaching out cold feels like it reads as angling for money.

Messages get softened or skipped to avoid looking pushy.

Worrying a stranger reads the outreach as fake.

5. The Rejection Fear — A blunt or annoyed reply would sting enough to cause a retreat.

Messages get avoided because the reaction can’t be predicted.

Silence after reaching out feels worse than an outright no.

6. The Validation Fear — Some clients on the roster aren’t really about the money anymore.

There’s a quiet pride in being able to say how many clients there are.

A smaller roster would feel like a loss of identity, even at the same income.

Highest total wins.

What the number means

Paperwork Dread wins: Money’s a tool. Wield it. Hire a bookkeeper once there’s real money to manage.

The hassle gets solved with a fraction of the income that got feared in the first place.

The Lane-Change Fear wins: “Decision” comes from a word that means to cut something off.

Cutting away work that isn’t wanted isn’t giving up on anything. It’s just finally getting said out loud. (then you’re free).

The Pre-Work Fear wins: A real campaign runs on bare-minimum assets, written in real time off what people actually say back.

It needs less pre-work than the fear says it does. Not more.

The Spammer Fear wins: The fix is simple. Never lead with money.

Make the other person look like the hero, take the whole job off their plate, and outreach stops sounding like an ask.

The Rejection Fear wins: An angry reply means something got through.

It found the pain underneath the apathy. Stay calm, and let that person point the anger at the actual problem instead.

The Validation Fear wins: One real partnership can outwork a roster kept around for the feeling of having one.

One partner. Four campaigns. $1.2 million. 120 days. That’s what one clean decision produced.

Two minutes

Nobody fails this. Something just finally gets a name.

Run the eighteen questions before Wednesday.

Comment MONEY below and The Tell Sheet lands in the DMs...

Six behavioral tells, one per fear, so the next stall gets caught in the moment instead of thirty days later…

This one’s free because nobody pays to get diagnosed.

[Upgrade now →] and the scripts, campaign math, and deal tools that turn a reframe into an actual deal land every week for paid subscribers.

In your corner,

~ Tony

P.S. The highest number almost never comes from the fear anybody would guess walking in. It’s usually the quiet one, the one nobody’s put a name on until today.

Subscribe now

One copy-paste prompt sizes what a single campaign on somebody else’s asset can really produce... and what a 20, 30 or 50% cut of that actually pays.

[Upgrade and the whole thing’s below the line →]

Hey there!

A million subscribers.

Eighty people.

One of those produced $109,000.

And it wasn’t the million.

Monday priced what it would take to make one client on the roster optional.

Today is the other half of that number.

Which business can actually clear it.

So you’re getting The Deal Sizer...

A copy-paste prompt that gets run BEFORE the coffee date instead of guessing after it.

A buddy sent me a channel last week

Sharp guy.

Copywriter.

Real portfolio.

He’s written for names most people in this business would recognize on sight.

And he’s underwater.

He wants off client work so bad he can taste it.

So he brings me a creator he’s been following.

YouTube channel. A million subscribers.

The guy gets up at five in the morning and shoots a video before he walks out the door at 5:15.

Sharp work.
Investigative stuff.
Genuinely useful.

And at the end of every video he asks people to kick him $5 on Patreon.

My buddy’s watching that thinking, a million people, there’s money in there somewhere.

He’s right that there’s a problem.

He’s wrong about the number.

Because I asked him one thing.

What has that million ever bought?

And the answer was not much.

You see, I’d rather have somebody with a 50,000 person email list who actually knows those people...

…who’s got a few courses sitting there they’re not selling as much of as they want.

Over a million subscribers and a merch store.

Every time.

One of those has buyers in it.

The other one has an audience.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. [Grab the book →] if you want the full picture.

The number that lies

Audience size is the loudest number in any business.

It’s on the channel.
It’s in the bio.
It’s the first thing anybody says out loud.

And it’s the one number that has never once paid anybody.

A subscriber said yes to free.

That’s the whole transaction.

Free for free.

Nothing in that yes says a single thing about a $2,000 yes.

Meanwhile there’s an 80 person Skool group that did $109,000 with no sales call.

Eighty.

Not eighty thousand.

Because those eighty had already paid the owner money once.

They liked him.

And nobody had ever offered them the next thing.

So what does pay

Three numbers.

And all three of them are quieter than the one printed on the front page.

A million people said yes to free.
Eighty people said yes to a price.
One of those groups produced $109,000 in 30 days.

The three numbers that separate them, where each one is already sitting in public, and the Deal Sizer prompt that turns them into a dollar range and a GO or a PASS before anybody sits down. All below this line.

[Size the next one before the drive home →]

Read more

Subscribe now

Fifteen minutes and one free prompt prints the exact dollar amount that turns one client on the roster from mandatory into optional.

Scroll down. The prompt’s free. The client work isn’t…

Making Space for Choices

What’s the happs?!

The heaviest client on anybody’s roster usually isn’t the biggest one.

It’s the one that pays the least.

And almost nobody has ever run that number.

So today you’re getting The Threshold Number...

A free copy-paste prompt that prices exactly what it would take for one client on the service roster to stop being mandatory.

Not to fire them.

To stop having to keep them.

Bring coffee.

Nobody’s warming up

A starting pitcher is out there in the sixth.

He’s laboring. Everybody in the park can see it.

And the manager leaves him in.

Not because he’s the best guy for the sixth.

Because nobody’s warming up in the bullpen.

The second somebody down there starts warming up, nothing on the mound changes.

Same pitcher.
Same inning.
Same score.

But the manager just got something he didn’t have a minute ago.

A choice.

And that’s the thing missing from most client rosters.

Not better clients.

But a partnership deal that’s warming up.

A client doesn’t stay on the list because they got picked.

They stay because service providers think there’s nothing else better to replace them with.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

What “mandatory” costs

Every client name on a roster is load-bearing by default.

Not because each one is essential.

Because there’s one column of money, and every line in it holds up the same roof.

So the answer to everything becomes, “Yes...”

Yes to the extra round of edits.
Yes to the Sunday night texts for an early morning meet.
Yes to the call that moved four other things.

Not one of those yeses had anything to do with, “Wanting to.”

They get slotted as, “Have to” in order to keep clients happy and keep a roof over my head…”

The math nobody runs

Say a total client roster brings in $11,000 a month.

Feels like all $11,000 has to keep showing up.

But run the expenses first.

Rent, groceries, insurance, the car, the card minimum, the software that actually gets opened, and taxes.

Say all that comes to $6,400 a month.

So $6,400 is what HAS to get covered.

The other $4,600 is extra.

Now take the heaviest client on that list.

Say they’re bringing in $2,800 a month.

Here’s the question nobody ever asks.

If that ONE client disappeared tomorrow, what’s left?

$11,000 minus $2,800 is $8,200.

And $8,200 still covers the $6,400.

With $1,800 left over.

So the threshold on that client is zero.

They’re already optional. Nobody ever did the subtraction.

That happens more than anybody expects.

Now sometimes it doesn’t come back zero.

Sometimes the rest of the roster only leaves $4,500, and the gap is $1,900.

Sometimes the gap is $5,000.

But it’s a number. And it’s been sitting there unwritten this whole time.

Know that number?

And it frees up a few hours a week to run a partnership deal…

…that can replace the ENTIRE roster.

The Threshold Number

Copy everything in the box and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT.

Download the Prompt

You’re a plainspoken numbers guy. Thirty years pricing what it costs somebody to stop needing something. You never round in anybody’s favor and you never give advice nobody asked for. I do client work. I want to know the exact dollar amount that would make ONE client on my roster optional.

Context: I’m a copywriter, agency owner, or marketer (I’ll tell you which). Nothing here is a resignation letter. Every client stays exactly where they are. We’re pricing a word, and the word is “mandatory.”

Step 1: Build the floor.

Ask me what actually has to get paid every month. Go line by line and don’t let me estimate in round numbers.

Housing. Utilities. Groceries. Health insurance. Car, gas, car insurance. Phone and internet. Minimum debt payments. Childcare or school. Software I actually open. Quarterly taxes divided by three. Annual bills divided by twelve.

For every line, ask me to mark it FLOOR or CHOICE. Only FLOOR lines go in the total.

Call that total THE COVER.

Step 2: List the roster.

Every client paying me right now, and what each one pays per month. Retainers, projects averaged out, all of it.

Total it. Call that THE ROSTER.

Step 3: Weigh them.

Now forget dollars completely. Score each client 1 to 10 on weight: how much of my week, my attention, and my Sunday that one takes up. Include the dread. The dread counts.

Step 4: Price the word.

For each client, run this: if that client’s money disappeared tomorrow, would what’s left still cover THE COVER?

If yes, that client’s threshold is $0. They are already optional and nobody noticed.

If no, the threshold is exactly the shortfall. Not the client’s full fee. Just the gap.

Print a table: Client | Pays monthly | Weight 1-10 | Threshold to make optional

Step 5: Name the first domino.

Rank the whole list by weight divided by threshold. Highest first.

That top line is the first domino: the most weight lifted for the fewest dollars.

Tell me who it is and what the number is. One sentence. No commentary.

Step 6: Size the one deal.

Here’s the deal I’m working toward. I find an underutilized asset inside somebody’s business, I run one campaign on it, and I take 20 to 50% of what it produces. They pay nothing up front. They don’t lift a finger. I only get paid when they get paid. All of the risk sits on my side.

Take the first domino’s threshold and tell me what one campaign would have to produce to cover it at a 30% split, over twelve months.

Then say the annual number out loud so I can see it next to the monthly one.

Step 7: Close it.

Ask me which number surprised me more, THE COVER or the first domino, and have me answer in one sentence.

Then close with this, word for word: “The list doesn’t get shorter. It gets optional.”

House rules: nothing on this page is a plan, it’s a price. No client hears a word about any of it. Nothing on the calendar moves.

How to read it

Two things once the numbers land.

First one.

The threshold is not a resignation.

Nothing on that list moves.

Next Monday’s calendar looks exactly like last Monday’s.

The only thing that changed is that one line on it now has a price attached to the words “have to.”

Second one. This is the part worth sitting with.

Look at the gap between THE ROSTER and THE COVER.

That money has been optional for a while now.

Which means somewhere back there the roster quit being about survival, and nobody went back and updated the story.

The bullpen doesn’t take anybody off the mound.

It just means the guy out there is pitching because somebody picked him.

Wednesday, the other half

Issue #22 lands Wednesday morning for paid subscribers.

The Deal Sizer.

Because a threshold is only half a number.

The other half is which business can actually clear it in one campaign.

List size.
Buyer count.
Price point.

What’s already been offered them, and what hasn’t.

Wednesday it’s something you run BEFORE the coffee date instead of guessing after it.

Run the threshold tonight.

[Upgrade now and the Deal Sizer lands in your inbox Wednesday →]

In your corner,
~ Tony

P.S. The first domino is almost never the biggest client on the list. It’s the one with the worst ratio of weight to dollars...

…and that one is usually cheap to make optional. Often cheap enough that a single campaign covers the whole year.

Subscribe now

…

“I see a lot partnership coffee dates go the way of wrangling a fish all the way to the side of the boat, every single time, and never once thinking to bring a net…”

…

Tony stopping by…

Monday’s report ended in a phone book.

Say three of those calls go well.

Most of them end the same way. “Great chat. Send me something…”

And that ending got decided before anybody ordered coffee.

So today you’re getting The Handshake Sheet...

One page, seven blocks, filled in BEFORE the conversation.

Eleven minutes.

Let’s write it down.

Two endings

Ending one.

Handshake, smiles, “Send me something over...”

Then twelve pages get built. Cover slide. A little About Me. Three case studies.

Out Thursday. Then Friday. Then a Monday with nothing on it.

Ending two.

October 6th through the 20th, written down while both people are still sitting there.

Split agreed to out loud.
First test scheduled.
Both sides clear on what would kill it.

Same forty minutes.
Same coffee.
Same guy across the table.

What decided it

Nobody gets talked into a partnership deal.

There’s no sentence that flips somebody. No case study that closes it.

The conditions decide it.

And every deal that goes sideways later traces back to one moment where a condition got traded for approval.

Somebody wanted the yes a little more than they wanted the condition.

Takes about four seconds.

Never happens on paper. Only happens in conversation, when nothing got written down first.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients... [Grab the book →]

Who sets the terms

Partner pays nothing up front.

Partner doesn’t lift a finger.

If the campaign makes zero, exactly one person ate the zero, and it’s the one who committed to testing it.

All the risk sits on one side of that table.

Yours.

So that side sets the terms.

Block two

Six of the seven blocks are what anybody would guess. Asset, offer, split, window, who does what.

Block two is the gate.

Block two asks whether this owner has a bleeding neck problem that a campaign actually fixes.

Not “would more money be nice.” Everybody wants more money.

Something with a date on it and a cost attached.

And if block two comes back empty, nothing under it gets filled in. No test gets offered. No campaign gets ran.

Because an owner with a bleeding neck approves copy in a few minutes.

A comfortable one takes four days to look at a subject line.

Same split.
Same list.
Two completely different campaigns.

The seven blocks, a filled-in version, the three questions that fill block two on the call, and the three planks behind all of it... below the line.

……………………

Nobody buys the car off the description. Below this line: the three planks that decide who’s holding the pen, the seven-block Handshake Sheet with the test built into block three, a filled-in version, and how the page gets worked out loud on the call.

[Get the page and the three planks behind it →]

Read more

Subscribe now

…

🎷“Everyone’s selling the juke box for a one time fee instead of licensing it out for half the coins for the next 5 years…”

…

The Royalty Report

What got built for somebody else, what it’s produced since, and what 35% of that would have been.

Somewhere in a folder there’s a list of things still making money without their builder.

Fifteen minutes and one free prompt prints what those things have produced since the day they shipped, and what 35% of that run would have been…

Nobody has ever handed a copywriter that list, and now it’s just one copy-paste away.

The prompt’s free…

Tony here…

An email went out this morning that somebody on this list wrote.

It was written in 2024.

It’s gone out every single day since.

And the last payment for it cleared twenty-six months ago.

So today you’re getting The Royalty Report…

A free copy-paste prompt that

👉 Finds every machine you built for somebody else
👉 Checks which ones are still plugged in
👉 And prices what they’ve produced since the day you handed them over.

Then it does one more thing at the end that nobody expects.

Bring coffee.

Half the coins

Sell a bar a jukebox and you get paid once.

Place that same jukebox in that same bar and you split every coin it takes, for as long as it’s plugged in.

Fifty-fifty is the standard.

The good ones run a thousand dollars a week.

Same machine.

Same bar.

Two completely different deals.

What the last invoice closed

The last invoice on a project closes the project.

Nobody’s arguing with that.

But it closes something else at the same time, and there’s no line item for it anywhere on the page.

It closes the meter (aka the creator doesn’t get paid anymore).

Whatever that thing goes on to produce…

…next Tuesday, next quarter, three years from now…

…it produces 100% for somebody else.

The build got sold.

Instead of partnered for a percentage.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

The math nobody runs

Say a welcome sequence got built for $2,000.

Shipped June of 2024.

Twenty-six months of sending.
Every day.
No days off, no sick days, no scope calls.

Say the list adds 500 people a month, and 3 out of every 100 buy a $400 offer.

That’s 15 sales a month. $6,000.

The build fee was $2,000.

The machine makes that every month and more...

Twenty-six months in, it’s produced $156,000.

Thirty-five percent of that run would have been $54,600.

Which is nine times the check that actually cleared.

And here’s the other column.

A 12,000 person list in the spiritual niche.

Ten days.

$197,000.

Nobody paid a dollar up front for any of it.

The asset was already sitting right there, plugged in, waiting on somebody to notice.

The Royalty Report

Copy everything in the box and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT.

Download the Prompt

You’re a royalty auditor. Thirty years finding money that kept getting produced after somebody stopped getting paid for it. You’re friendly, plainspoken, and you never round in anybody’s favor. I do client work. I want an inventory of everything I’ve built for other people that is STILL running right now, and what it’s produced since I handed it over.

Context: I’m a copywriter, agency owner, or marketer (I’ll tell you which). This is an inventory, not a grievance. Keep it warm. Everybody in this story did exactly what they agreed to do.

Step 1: Find the machines.

Walk me through the last three years and list everything I built that was designed to keep running after I left. Email sequences and automations. VSLs and sales pages. Funnels. Webinars. Ad accounts and creative. Launch assets. Courses. Communities. Lead magnets. Onboarding flows.

Ask me client by client. Don’t let me summarize. I want the actual list.

Step 2: Check what’s still plugged in.

For each one, ask me: is it still live today? Mark it RUNNING, RETIRED, or UNKNOWN.

If I say unknown, tell me exactly how to check in under two minutes. Opt into the list. Load the page. Search my inbox for the automation.

Step 3: Price the run.

For every RUNNING machine, walk me through what it’s produced since the day I shipped it. Use whatever real numbers I have. Where I don’t have them, build the estimate out loud with me: traffic in, conversion rate, price point, months live.

Be conservative every single time. If I want to guess high, talk me down.

Step 4: Print what got paid.

For each machine, get the fee I was paid to build it, and the month that payment cleared. One number, one date.

Step 5: Print the report.

Build this table: Machine | Client | Months running | Produced since | Build fee

Then print four headline numbers across the whole inventory:

THE BUILD FEE: what I was paid, one time, to make these.

STILL RUNNING: what they’ve produced since.

THE GAP: what 20%, 35%, and 50% of that production would have been.

THE MULTIPLE: the gap at 35% divided by the build fee.

Step 6: Flip the list.

Now throw out the ranking by dollars and re-rank the same list by one question: which of these owners would say yes the fastest?

Here’s the deal I’m working toward. I find an underutilized asset inside their business, I run one campaign on it, and I take 20 to 50% of what it produces. They pay nothing up front. They don’t lift a finger. I only get paid when they get paid. Every bit of the risk sits on my side.

Score each owner on four things: they’ve already watched my work produce money, I already know what’s idle in there because I’ve been inside, they can be reached without an introduction, and there’s something in that business I haven’t touched yet.

Then hand me the top three and tell me in one sentence what’s sitting idle in each one.

Step 7: Close it.

Ask me what surprised me most and have me say it in one sentence.

Then close with this, word for word: “The machine never stopped. The deal did.”

House rules: this is an inventory, not a grievance. Nobody gets an email tonight. Nothing on the calendar changes. The only job is to see a list that has never once been written down in one place.

How to read it

Two things once the report lands.

First one, and it matters more than the numbers.

Nothing on that page got taken.

Every one of those deals got honored. The work shipped, the invoice got paid, both sides shook hands and meant it.

That gap isn’t a story about anybody behaving badly.

It’s a structure. It got set the day the fee was agreed to, and it’s been running quietly ever since.

Second one. This is the part worth sitting with.

Read Step 6 again.

Because that list of still-running machines is also a list of business owners who have already watched work by this exact person turn into money.

Not a case study about somebody else.
Their own revenue.
In their own dashboard.

There’s no research to do. No portfolio to send. No convincing anybody that campaigns work.

The report reads like a bill.

It’s actually a phone book.

Wednesday, the one page

Issue #21 lands Wednesday morning for paid subscribers.

The Handshake Sheet.

Because those conversations all end the exact same way.

“This sounds great. Send me something…”

And then nine days go by, because almost nobody in this game has ever written a partnership deal down on one page.

The split.

What moves it from 20 to 50.
How long it runs.
Who does what.
What happens if the thing flops.

Wednesday it’s a fill-in-the-blank page.

Run the report tonight.

[Upgrade now and the Handshake Sheet lands in your inbox Wednesday →]

In your corner,

~ Tony

P.S. The best part of this report is the part that looks like the worst part.

Every machine still running is a machine somebody’s already seen produce.

That’s the shortest distance to a deal there is… and the whole list has been sitting in a folder this whole time.

…

👉 There’s a version of this where the “test” conversation gets run a few times before it ever gets run once.

It’s the same forty-five minutes that turned a 5,000 person buyer list into $529,000 in eighteen days.

Confidence tips and closing scripts work on how it sounds; but today’s tool works on the four moments where the you either have control of the convo or don’t... [upgrade and run the Simulator before the next one →]

…

So…

Monday printed two columns.

One of them took twelve months, a designer, a VA, and a tax bill to fill.

The other one opens in forty-five minutes.

So today you’re getting the Coffee Date Simulator...

…a copy-paste prompt that plays the partner, plays the silences, and grades the tape.

Same conversation. As many times as it takes.

(Keep in mind Deals Over Clients Skool community members can have people like myself go on their first coffee dates with or for them)

Let’s go practice.

Forty times in the car

Someone reading this, has already had this conversation forty times.

Once on the drive to school. Twice in the shower. A dozen more at 2am with the ceiling fan going.

And here’s the thing about all forty.

They went great.

The imaginary partner leaned in around minute nine.

He never asked “so what’s your track record with this?”

He never went quiet for four seconds after the ask.

He never said “let me think about it” while already reaching for his keys.

Forty run-throughs. Zero resistance. Undefeated.

What passes for getting ready

There’s a whole shelf of things that feel like preparation.

Reading about the conversation. That builds a map.

Writing out a script. That builds a document.

Watching somebody else’s recorded call. That builds an opinion.

All three might feel worth doing…

But not one of them makes a sound.

That sound is a live human across from them on Zoom, with a real asset on the line, and a percentage of the sales that only exists if the next forty minutes go well.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

The forty-five minutes

Now back to the second column.

$529,000 in eighteen days.

Five thousand people on a buyer list that was already sitting there.

The partner paid nothing up front and didn’t lift a finger.

And the whole thing started with one conversation.

Forty-five minutes. Coffee on the table. No deck, no proposal, no pitch.

Two people finding out whether there’s a deal in the room.

That conversation is the only door into the second column.

And for most folks it’s opening night with no Wednesday in front of it.

Here’s what makes that expensive.

A coffee date has no script, so there’s nothing to memorize... which is exactly why it never gets rehearsed.

But it wobbles in the same four places every time.

The same four.

The open. The money question. The silence after the ask. And four words near the end.

Which four moments, what each one costs in the room, the exact move that holds the seat in every one of them... plus the Simulator that runs the whole forty-five minutes as many times as it takes...

…all of it’s below the payline.

There are four moments where a coffee date quietly changes hands and the Simulator prompt that plays the partner, runs the convo, and hands you back a scorecard... all below this line.

[Run the Simulator before the next one →]

Read more

Subscribe now

…
📊 “The invoice reads like a $300 ticket. The bank account reads like the $7.90 the airline actually kept…”

…

Somewhere on this list a deposit cleared on a Tuesday.

Biggest one in months.

By the 20th the balance was back where it started.

And nothing went wrong.

Everything got paid.

Everybody got taken care of.

The work shipped.

But the money “kept” is a lot leaner than one thinks.

So today you’re getting Boarding Pass Math...

A free copy-paste prompt that takes ONE client and finds what actually lands in the pocket after every single thing comes out.

Then it sets that number next to the money one deal brings in.

Bring coffee.

Seven dollars and ninety cents

Say a plane ticket costs $300.

The airline keeps $7.90 of it.

That’s the real number.

Profit per passenger, with every airline in the world, last year.

The rest goes to fuel, crew, gate fees, insurance, and the plane itself.

$300 in the front door. $7.90 out the back.

Now the part that ought to be illegal.

That same year, Delta got $8.2 billion in cash from American Express.

Not for seats. For miles.

No planes. No passengers. No pretzels.

The seats are the loud business.

The miles are the quiet business.

And the quiet one doesn’t get sold one seat at a time.

What the invoice never prints

An invoice prints one number.

That number is the $300.

It’s what gets said out loud at dinner.

Then the month happens.

The designer, the VA, and the editor get paid. Software renews. A revision round shows up that was never in the scope.

Then self-employment tax. Then income tax.

Then four weeks between projects where the meter is off and the mortgage isn’t.

Nobody prints THAT number.

There’s no line for it on any invoice ever sent.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

The math nobody runs

Say a client pays $4,000 a month.

Twelve months. $48,000.

That’s the boarding pass number.

Now start taking things out.

$9,600 to the designer and the VA who touch that account.

$1,800 in software that only exists because that account exists.

Forty hours a year of revisions and calls that never got billed. At $200 an hour, $8,000.

Twenty-two hours of unpaid runway to land the account in the first place.

Another $4,400.

Then the tax bill on whatever’s still standing.

$48,000 walked in the front door.

What walks out the back is a number most folks have never once written down on purpose.

And here’s the other column.

115 people bid in an auction that ran three hours.

It produced $99,029.

Three hours. Somebody else’s audience. An asset that was already sitting right there.

Nobody paid a dollar up front for any of it.

Boarding Pass Math

Copy everything in the box and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT.

Download the Prompt

You’re a forensic bookkeeper who has spent thirty years finding the difference between what a business bills and what it keeps. You are friendly, plainspoken, and allergic to rounding. I do client work. I want to know what ONE client actually leaves in my pocket over twelve months, after every single thing comes out.

Context: I’m a copywriter, agency owner, or marketer (I’ll tell you which). This is arithmetic, not a performance review. Keep it warm. The goal is one honest number that has never been written down.

Step 1: Pick the client and print the boarding pass.

Ask me to name one client. Best pick is the biggest one, or the one that FEELS biggest. Get the total they paid me across the last twelve months. That’s the boarding pass number. Put it at the top of the page and leave it there.

Step 2: Take out the money that left.

Walk me through the cash that went out the door because of that one account:



Subcontractors, freelancers, and team hours billed to their work


Software, tools, and subscriptions that exist because they exist


Ads, stock, licenses, research, anything bought for their project


Merchant fees, invoicing fees, and anything a payment processor kept

Step 3: Take out the hours that never got an invoice.

Price these at my rate. Ask me what I billed last month and roughly how many hours went into paid delivery, then divide, and use that number for every line here:



Revisions past whatever the scope said

Status calls, check-ins, and “got two minutes?” messages

Project management, file wrangling, chasing approvals

The “while you’re in there” asks that quietly got done for free



The unpaid runway it took to LAND this account: discovery calls, the proposal, the redlines, the follow-up

Step 4: Take out the gaps and the government.

Ask how many weeks in the last twelve months I had no billable work from this account and no replacement lined up. Show what those weeks cost.

Then apply my real tax rate to what’s left. Ask for the actual percentage. Don’t guess low to be nice.

Step 5: Print the take-home.

Build this table: Line item | Amount | Running balance

Then print three headline numbers:

THE BOARDING PASS: what they paid me.

THE TAKE-HOME: what’s actually left.

THE SURVIVAL RATE: take-home as a percentage of the boarding pass.

Then one more: take-home divided by every hour that account touched. That’s my real hourly.

Step 6: Open the second column.

Now ask me this: name one business I’ve already been inside of, where I personally saw something sitting idle. An email list that stopped getting offers. A buyer file nobody follows up. A course that quit selling. A community with no offer in it.

If I can’t name one, don’t let me stall out. Walk me back through every client I’ve had in the last three years, every community I pay to be in, and every person I’ve bought a course from. Ask what I saw in there that nobody was using. Keep going until I’ve named one.

Here’s the deal structure I’m working toward: I find that underutilized asset, I run one campaign on it, and I take 20 to 50% of what it produces. The partner pays nothing up front and doesn’t lift a finger. I only get paid when they get paid. All the risk sits on my side.

Have me estimate what one campaign on that asset could reasonably produce. Be conservative. Then show my cut at 20%, at 35%, and at 50%.

Step 7: Set the columns side by side.

Build a two-column table. Left column: the client, twelve months, take-home, total hours, real hourly. Right column: one deal, my cut at 35%, my honest guess at hours.

Then rank what surprised me most and say it in one sentence.

Close with this, word for word: “One column took twelve months to fill. The other one opens in forty-five minutes.”

House rules: this is arithmetic, not a review. Nothing on the calendar changes tonight. Nobody gets a phone call. The whole point is to see one number that has never once been written down.

How to read it

Two things once the take-home $$ amount lands.

First one: the number is not a verdict on the client.

That client is fine.

They pay.
They stay.
They send referrals.

The take-home number isn’t an argument about whether to keep them.

It’s a price tag on a seat, and it’s been sitting there unread this whole time.

Second one, and this is the part that matters.

Delta didn’t stop flying planes.

Thousands of them still go up every day. Seats are still a seven-dollar-and-ninety-cent business.

The card deal didn’t replace the planes.

It got built on top of them.

Same company.
Same gates.
Same crews.

One quiet piece of business off to the side that doesn’t get sold one seat at a time.

The same thing is true when it comes to partnership deals.

Nobody has to blow up a client roster to open the second column.

Wednesday, the forty-five minutes

Issue #20 lands Wednesday morning for paid subscribers.

The Coffee Date Simulator.

Because that second column has exactly one door, and the door is a conversation.

Forty-five minutes.
No pitch.
No deck.
No proposal.

And almost nobody has ever practiced it out loud even once.

The Simulator runs it. It plays the partner, it plays the awkward silences, and it grades what came out.

Run the math tonight.

Wednesday we go rehearse the conversation that changes it.

[Upgrade now and the Simulator lands in your inbox Wednesday →]

In your corner,

~ Tony

P.S. Fifteen minutes and one look at the invoices gets this done. And the survival rate is the line that does the work... because a percentage is a lot harder to argue with than a feeling.

Subscribe now

· · ·

The Vendor-Speak Detector

The runway from Monday had an author. Five phrases wrote it. This prompt finds them in the sent folder, turns them into rev-share deals…

· · ·

There’s a version of this business where the proposal never needs to be written...

Because the money conversation already happened in the first ten minutes.

It’s the same shape that turned an 80-person group into $109,000 with no sales call on the calendar.

Confidence tips and negotiation scripts work on the delivery; today’s tool works on the eight words that assign the seats before anybody sits down...

[upgrade and run the Detector on last week’s sent folder]

· · ·

Monday’s calculator printed a runway.

If it got run, there’s a dollar number sitting on your screen.

And a weeks dollar figure next to it that’s a whole lot harder to look at.

So today you’re getting the Vendor-Speak Detector...

A copy-paste prompt that reads real sent messages, finds the phrases that built that runway, and swaps them for the language of somebody who’s doing the choosing.

We’re not fighting for fees any longer.

We’re getting an ongoing piece of the pie.

Version three

There’s a copywriter writing a proposal right now.

Saturday. 2pm.

Version three.

He’s rebuilding the “About Me” section, because version two felt thin.

Nobody asked for an About Me section.

He added it because the prospect said “Send me something and I’ll take a look...”

And that sentence... “Send me something and I’ll take a look…”

It didn’t come out of nowhere.

It came out of what got said first.

The two standard prescriptions

Ask around about how to stop writing free proposals and the same two answers come back.

Answer one: charge for it. Paid audits. Paid strategy sessions. Paid discovery.

Answer two: qualify harder. Better intake form. Tougher questions up front.

Real advice, both of them.

And both keep the same seat warm…

But somebody charging for the audition is still auditioning.

The runway gets a little shorter.

The seat never moves.

There’s a third chair.

· · ·

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book if you want the full picture.

· · ·

Two guys, same car lot

Saturday morning. Used car lot. Same hour.

Guy one walks up to the salesman.

“Hey, I’m just looking around. What do you think you could do for me?…”

Guy two walks up to the same salesman.

“Which ones have been sitting here the longest?…”

Now watch what happens.

Guy one gets walked to the shiny row.

Gets asked about his budget.

Gets handed a brochure and a business card.

Guy two gets told the truth.

“That silver one’s been out there 94 days. We’re paying interest on it every week it stays…”

Same lot.

Same hour.

Same cars.

One guy got sold.

The other guy got the lot’s real numbers...

…for free.

Nobody planned that.

The seats got assigned in the first ten words.

The runway has an author

Back to Monday’s number.

Every hour on that list showed up because of something said early in a conversation.

“I’d love to learn more about your business...”

That one asks permission to go do research.

And it announces the research hasn’t started.

“Let me put something together for you…”

That one volunteers a document nobody required.

“Just want to make sure I’d be a good fit…”

That one hands over the gavel.

Every one of those is polite.
Professional.
Careful.

Literally what the industry teaches.

And every one of them is the reason the runway exists.

Monday’s prompt closed on one line.

Every hour on that list got spent proving.

Not one of them got spent choosing.

Today the words change.

Which five phrases do the damage, what each one costs in the room, and the exact swap for every one of them...

…all of it’s below the line.

· · ·

Guy two didn’t have a better pitch. He didn’t have one at all.

He walked onto that lot with a single question about what had been sitting the longest...

…and the salesman handed him the numbers.

Get the Five Phrases that assign the seat, the Vendor Index that scores actual sent messages, and the Detector prompt that rewrites them so you’re getting a piece of the pie (not fighting for retainers & fees)...

…all below this line.

· · ·

[UPGRADE: Run the Detector on my sent folder]

Read more

Subscribe now

· · ·

🪫 The Unpaid Runway Calculator

A year of discovery calls, proposals, and redlines. Priced in dollars, then counted in weeks.

· · ·

Tony here…

Somewhere on someone’s hard drive there’s a folder with a file in it called “Proposal_v4_FINAL_final.docx.”

Nobody ever opened v4.

The reply came back three weeks later.

“We’ve decided to go a different direction...”

So today you’re getting the Unpaid Runway Calculator...

A free copy-paste prompt that prices every hour that goes in before a dollar comes out.

Then it does something meaner.

It counts those hours in weeks.

The best caterer in the county

Picture a caterer.

Really good one.

Every couple that inquires gets a tasting.

That’s how the industry works, so nobody questions it.

Two days of prep per tasting.

Groceries out of her own pocket.

She drives it across town, plates it, and stands there while they taste.

She books one in five.

So four full dinners a month get cooked, plated, and delivered...

…to people who are gonna think about it.

Best caterer in the county.

Cooks more dinners for strangers than she does for customers.

And not one of those dinners shows up anywhere in her books.

The tasting menu nobody prints

Client work has a tasting menu too.

The discovery call is a tasting.

The proposal is a tasting.

The scope doc, the three rounds of redlines, the “can you send a few samples first?”

All tastings.

Every one of them eats real hours.

None of them have an invoice attached.

And the ones that go nowhere never get counted... because there’s nowhere to count them.

· · ·

📘This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book if you want the full picture.

· · ·

The math nobody runs

Say a copywriter bills $8,000 in a decent month across 40 hours of actual delivery work.

That’s $200 an hour on the clock.

Now the other column.

Four discovery calls at 45 minutes... three hours.

Two proposals at three hours apiece... six hours.

One round of redlines on a scope doc... two hours.

Chasing three quiet prospects with follow-ups... an hour.

Twelve hours.

At $200 an hour, that’s $2,400.

In one month.

And nobody’s got just one month.

The Unpaid Runway Calculator

Copy everything in the box and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT.

Download the Prompt

You’re a forensic time accountant with a stopwatch and zero patience for “that’s just part of the job.” I do client work. There’s a whole category of hours in my week that produces no invoice: the work I do to GET the work. Your job: find those hours, price them, and annualize them.

Context: I’m a copywriter, agency owner, or marketer (I’ll tell you which). This is a mirror, never a courtroom. Keep the tone friendly. The goal is one honest number... then one honest ratio.

Step 1: Lock my rate.

Ask me what I billed last month, and roughly how many hours went into actual paid delivery work. Divide the first by the second. That’s my on-the-clock rate. Price every line below with it.

Step 2: Interview me for the runway. One category at a time.

Walk me back through last month and dig for every hour spent before, around, or outside of paid delivery:

1. Discovery calls, intro calls, “quick chats.” Count the no-shows and the reschedules.

2. Proposals, quotes, and scope docs. Every version. Including the ones that never got a reply.

3. Redlines, contract back-and-forth, negotiating terms.

4. Spec work: sample pieces, test assignments, free audits handed over to prove I can do the thing.

5. Decks, case study prep, and portfolio updates built for one specific prospect.

6. Follow-up. Every “just checking in” message... plus the time spent deciding whether to send it.

7. Questionnaires, kickoff calls, and account setup that happen before the meter starts.

8. Referral coffees and networking calls that were really auditions wearing a nicer shirt.

If I’m guessing, send me to my calendar and my sent folder. Have me search “proposal,” “quick call,” “circling back,” and “following up.” Ask for the real number, not the comfortable one.

Step 3: Price it.

Name each activity, pin down honest hours, multiply by my on-the-clock rate.

Exact dollars. No rounding to spare anybody’s feelings.

Step 4: Print the runway.

Build this table: Activity | Hours (month) | Cost (month) | Hours (year) | Cost (year)

Then print two headline numbers:

THE RUNWAY: total annual dollars.

THE WEEKS: total annual hours divided by 40, so I can see it as full working weeks.

Step 5: The ratio.

Ask me how many of those runs actually ended in signed paid work last month. Then say it plainly: how many full runways I fund to land one job.

Step 6: Read it back to me.

Rank the categories biggest to smallest and circle the one sitting at the top.

Then tell me this, word for word: “Every hour on this list got spent proving. Not one of them got spent choosing.”

House rules to close on: nobody bills the past. Nobody has to quit anything tonight. This is a mirror... and it happens to be the one budget in the business that doesn’t need anybody’s permission to move.

How to read the runway

Two things once the number lands.

First one: the weeks matter more than the dollars.

Dollars are easy to wave off.

“Cost of doing business.”

But when the readout says seven forty-hour weeks a year, that lands different.

Seven weeks. Gone. Every single year.

That’s a thing a person can actually picture.

Second one, and this is the good part.

That runway is the only money in the business nobody has to approve.

A rate increase needs a client to say yes.

A new retainer needs a client to say yes.

The runway needs nobody.

It’s already funded. Already spent. Already gone every year like clockwork.

Which makes it the only capital in the whole operation that’s sitting there waiting to get pointed somewhere else.

Wednesday, we find out who built it

Issue #19 lands Wednesday morning for paid subscribers.

The Vendor-Speak Detector.

Because that runway didn’t build itself.

Five phrases built it.

Five ordinary, polite, industry-approved phrases that hand the other person the clipboard before anybody sits down.

The Detector finds them in actual sent messages.

Scores them.

Then swaps them for the language of somebody doing the choosing.

Run the calculator tonight.

Wednesday we go find the words that wrote it.

[UPGRADE CTA: Upgrade now and the Detector lands in your inbox Wednesday]

In your corner,

~ Tony

P.S. Ten minutes and one scroll through the calendar gets this done. And the number does something useful the second it exists... it stops being invisible. Nothing moves a budget nobody can see.

Subscribe now

🏡“A tenant renovated the landlord's house... equity: zero. Wednesday's prompt trades free decks for a piece of the rent…”

Monday’s free post handed out a ledger.

If it got run around here, there’s a number sitting on it right now.

And a name at the top nobody’s done anything with yet.

So today you’re getting the Retainer-to-Rev-Share Converter...

A copy-paste prompt that reads that ledger like intel, finds the asset behind the asks, and drafts the message that changes what’s for sale.

From hours...

…to a piece of what the work produces.

That’s partnership revenue.

Let’s flip it.

The Tuesday reply

There’s an agency owner staring at his inbox right now.

Subject line: “quick favor 🙏”

He knows what’s inside before he opens it.

Reads it.

Sighs.

Types “sure thing!”

Deletes it.

Types it again.

Sends it.

Because the retainer is good money...

…and good money buys a lot of swallowed sighs.

Here’s what makes that reply so expensive.

The favor costs him twenty minutes.

The reply costs him the quarter.

Every “sure thing!” renews the same job title...

The guy who absorbs.

The two standard prescriptions

Ask around about scope creep and the same two answers come back.

Answer one: Hold the line. Boundary scripts. “That’s outside our scope.”

Answer two: Bill it. Change orders. “Happy to! Here’s the change fee.”

Both can work.

And both leave the same costume on.

A vendor guarding hours is still a vendor.

The fee might grow a little.

The seat never changes.

There’s a third door...

…and almost nobody in client work knows it exists.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. [Grab the book →] if you want the full picture.

The Best Tenant On the Street

Picture a guy renting a little house.

Handy fella.

Year one, he renovates the kitchen.

His money, his weekends.

Year two, new bathroom tile.

A deck out back.

The place looks incredible.

The landlord’s property is worth more every spring.

And the tenant’s equity in it?

Zero.

When the lease ends, the deck stays.

The tile stays.

Every improvement waves goodbye from the porch.

Now here’s the version nobody teaches.

A deal maker walks past that same house and makes the owner an offer with no way to lose...

“I’ll renovate the kitchen. Costs you nothing. When the rent goes up, I take a cut of the increase. If it never goes up, you owe me zero.”

Same hands.

Same skill.

One renovates for free and moves out.

The other owns a piece of every rent check the work creates.

Every unpaid “Sure thing!” is a renovation on a building somebody else owns.

The Tab is a Floor Plan

Back to Monday’s ledger.

Every ask on it looks like an interruption.

Read it again with a deal maker’s squint.

“Can you send something to the list?”

That’s a client pointing at an email list that barely gets mailed.

“Can you freshen up the course page?”

That’s a course that stopped selling, waving for help.

That ledger is 90 days of free intel...

A floor plan of where the money’s sitting.

And the name at the top of the ledger?

That’s the business that’s been pointing the hardest.

Monday’s post closed on two short lines.

The tab can’t be collected.

But it CAN be converted.

Today is the conversion.

Which asset gets the campaign, whether this client even qualifies, and the exact message that opens the door...

All of it’s below the line.

That handy tenant finally quit renovating houses he doesn’t own. He picked ONE property he already knew room by room, and made the owner an offer with no way to lose.

The ask-to-asset map, the deal qualifier, and the Converter prompt that drafts his opening message...

All below this line in The Retainer-to-Rev-Share Converter prompt.

[Convert my biggest tab →]

Read more

Subscribe now

🥃“The busiest bar in town went broke…every round after the first got poured and never rung up. Monday, the tab prints…”

The Tab That Never Got Paid

Tony swinging by…

Somewhere on this list, a freelance copywriter, agency owner, or online marketer is typing “Sure, no problem!” for the third time this week.

It’s 9:41 on a Tuesday night.

The ask was small.

They always are.

The Scope Creep Ledger Prompt

So today you’re getting the Scope Creep Ledger...

A free copy-paste prompt that reads the last 90 days of client asks and prints the tab in dollars.

Fair warning.

The tab is longer than it looks.

The Busiest Bar on the Block

Picture a little corner bar.

Packed every night.

Regulars love the place.

The bartender pours round one and rings it up.

Then a regular waves him over...

“Hey, while you’re down there, top me off…”

He pours it.

Doesn’t ring it.

Good customer, right?

🥃Round three.

🥃Round four.

🥃A shot for the guy’s buddy.

Poured.

Never rung.

At 2am the till tells a strange story.

Busiest bar in town...

…and the register only ever saw round one.

That bar goes broke while winning a popularity contest.

Same Bar, Different Counter

Client work runs the same till.

Round one gets rung up...

That’s the contract.

Then the pings start.

“While you’re in there, can you tweak the headline?…”

“One more thing... tiny change to the footer…”

“Quick favor... can you also look at the welcome email?…”

Each one gets poured.

None of them get rung.

And the invoice goes out at the same number it was always gonna say.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. [Grab the book →] if you want the full picture.

The Math Nobody Runs

Say the project was $3,000 for a planned 10 hours.

That’s $150 an hour walking in the door.

Six “quick tweaks” at two hours apiece...

That’s $1,800 poured.

One “small addition” that ate a Saturday...

…five hours, another $750.

That’s $2,550 off two habits and one lost weekend.

And 90 days holds a lot more than two habits.

Most folks have never seen their number.

Tonight that changes.

The Scope Creep Ledger

Copy everything in the box and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT.

Download Scope Creep Ledger Prompt

You’re a forensic bookkeeper with a bartender’s memory. Every client ask that slid past the agreed scope in the last 90 days got poured and never rung up. Your job: reconstruct the tab.

Context: I’m a copywriter, agency owner, or marketer (I’ll tell you which) who does client work. This is a mirror, never a courtroom. Keep the tone friendly. The goal is one honest number... then one useful name.

Step 1: Interview me. One client or project at a time.



What was the agreed scope, and what was the fee?

How many hours did I plan for that work? Divide the fee by those hours and lock in my effective rate. Use it to price every line below.

Now walk me backward through the last 90 days and dig for the pours: revision rounds past round two... anything that started with “while you’re in there,” “one more thing,” “quick favor,” or “can you also”... deliverables that appeared after kickoff... meetings that multiplied... weekend pings.



If I’m blanking, send me to my sent folder and Slack. Have me search “sure, no problem,” “happy to,” and “of course!” Each one is usually a line item wearing a smile.

Step 2: Price the pours.

For every ask: name it, get a real estimate of the hours it ate (no shrugging allowed), multiply by my effective rate.

Exact dollars. No rounding to protect anybody’s feelings.

Step 3: Print the ledger.

Build this table: Client | The ask | Hours | Line item

Subtotal by client.

Then print the grand total across all 90 days and label it THE TAB.

Step 4: Read it back to me.

Rank my clients by tab size and circle the name at the top.

Then tell me this, word for word: “This client spent 90 days asking for more of your skill. That’s appetite. It just never had a container that pays.”

House rules to close on: the past doesn’t get invoiced. Nobody gets fired tonight. The ledger is a mirror... and now I know exactly where to aim.

How to read the tab

Two rules once the number lands.

Rule one: no bill goes out for the past.

Collecting an old tab turns a warm client into a courtroom...

…and the money’s already gone anyway.

Rule two: look past the total.

The total stings.

The RANKING pays.

Because the name at the top of that ledger spent 90 days asking for more.

👉More words.

👉More fixes.

👉More of the exact skill they can’t seem to get enough of.

That tab is appetite... with no container to catch it.

Wednesday, the container shows up

Issue #18 lands Wednesday morning for paid subscribers.

The Retainer-to-Rev-Share Converter.

👉 It turns a ledger like a treasure map...

Every ask points at an asset sitting quiet inside that client’s business.

Then it drafts the conversation that changes what’s for sale...

From hours to a piece of what the work produces.

The tab can’t be collected.

However, it CAN be converted.

[Upgrade now and the Converter lands in your inbox Wednesday →]

In your corner,

~ Tony

P.S. do you think this lands with freelance copywriters, agency owners, or online marketers?

Subscribe now

✅ There’s a version of this business where the selling ends... and checks keep showing up for work done once.

It’s the same math that turned five emails to 6,500 previous buyers into $529,000 in 18 days, and an 80-person Skool group into $109k.

Rate raises still rent out hours; today’s tool starts the switch to owning a slice of the campaign... [upgrade and run the Client Roster X-Ray on your own roster →]

A Special Kind of tired

There’s a special kind of tired that comes from typing “just circling back” thirteen times in the same week, even if it is automated sometimes.

And the strange part...

The cure is usually sitting in a folder that hasn’t been opened since tax season.

Old invoices.

Businesses that already let you inside.

A few of them are holding idle assets worth more than every proposal currently pending.

So today you’re getting the Client Roster X-Ray...

A copy-paste prompt that scores every past client on 5 deal signals, then drafts the 60-word opener for the one at the top.

Grab the roster.

Let’s look.

The 9pm hunt

It’s 9pm and…

…a copywriter, agency owner, or online marketer is hunting for their next client.

47 browser tabs.

A Sales Navigator trial.

A half-typed DM to a stranger that starts with “Hey! Love your content...” (please never put that in your outreach)

Two proposals sitting in someone else’s inbox.

A third follow-up drafted... “Just circling back on this…”

Thirty, “Just checking in…” messages already sent.

Fifteen years of results behind them.

Still auditioning.

And here’s the part nobody in that line says out loud...

Landing another client won’t cure this.

It just schedules the next hunt.

👉Finish the project.
👉Walk to the back of the line.
👉Start over.

Revenue resets to zero.

Every month.

Like clockwork.

That right there is a diagnosis...

…the chronic kind.

Left unacknowledged, it’s terminal diagnosis for never divorcing time from money.

The work keeps coming just fine.

It’s the hunting that never stops.

The better they get, the more of their life goes to the hunt.

The prescription is the reason this newsletter exists.

Partnership deals.

Work done once that pays over and over.

A campaign that runs again and again...

IP once created, generating paychecks month after month.

With a piece of every run landing in the deal maker’s pocket.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

“Okay... but where do I find a partner?”

That’s the first question every new deal maker asks.

And the honest answer surprises most of them.

The first partner usually isn’t found.

They’re remembered.

The workbench table

Ever watch Antiques Roadshow?

There’s a scene that plays out almost every episode.

A guy hauls in a dusty table he’s been using as a workbench in his garage.

Twenty years of paint splatter and coffee rings.

He figures it’s worth a couple hundred bucks. Maybe.

The appraiser flips it over.

Goes quiet.

Points at a little stamp on the corner of the leg.

“Do you know what you have here?”

The guy’s been storing power tools on a table worth more than his house.

Nothing about the table changed.

The wood was always the wood.

The mark was always there.

What changed was the eyes looking at it.

The easy YES (and the real edge)

Real talk, because this part matters.

A deal does NOT need a long warm relationship.

I’ve sat down for 45 minutes with someone I’d never met before...

…and left with a deal put together worth six figures to me alone.

One coffee date.

Because the offer is an easy YES.

The partner doesn’t pay a dime until they get paid.

They don’t lift a finger...

I run the test.

The risk sits on my side of the table.

That’s why strangers say yes fast.

And that’s also why i say “no” fast.

Because I’m the chooser not the chosen.

So why does the X-Ray point at past clients first?

One word.

Intel.

Spotting a stranger’s idle assets takes research.

Digging.

Educated guesses from the parking lot.

A past client’s assets have already been seen up close.

👉 The copywriter who wrote the launch KNOWS the course stopped selling.

👉 The marketer who ran the ads KNOWS the buyer file never got a second offer.

👉 The agency owner who built the funnel KNOWS the list only gets mailed when the moon’s full.

Everyone else needs an invitation to the attic.

Somebody who’s worked inside the business has the floor plan memorized.

If you ran Monday’s Link to Upside Audit, it ended with one sentence...

“This client relationship is where a deal was hiding...”

That sentence was a map coordinate.

But here’s where almost everybody scans for the wrong thing.

They look for which client was the BIGGEST.

Or which one was the nicest to work with.

Or which one paid fastest.

None of those are the mark.

There are 5 signals that separate a name on a roster from a deal candidate.

I’ve been filtering partners with them for 10 years...

And they’re baked into the prompt below.

That guy with the workbench table? He drove it home in the same truck he brought it in. Nothing changed but what he knew.

The 5 maker’s marks for a client roster... and the prompt that scans for them... are right below this line.

[Run the X-Ray on my roster →]

Read more

Subscribe now

“Session players get paid once. Songwriters get paid every time the song plays. Here’s a 10-minute upside audit that does that math on client work…”

The Vendor Tax

There was a special kind of gut punch that used to land in my inbox years ago.

A previous client’s promo email.

Same funnel.

Same subject lines.

Same launch sequence I wrote back in 2013.

Still selling.

That invoice cleared once.

The work never stopped working.

And here’s the strange part...

Nobody ever adds up the difference.

Not the client.

Definitely not the copywriter, agency owner, or online marketer.

So the gap just sits there.

Invisible.

Year after year.

Session Players vs Songwriters

The music business solved this riddle decades ago.

A session player and a songwriter can sit in the same studio, on the same afternoon, working on the same song.

The session player walks out with a check for the day.

The songwriter walks out owning a piece of everything that song earns...

…for decades.

Same room.

Same talent.

Same three hours.

One got a payday.

The other produced an asset.

Most copywriters, agency owners, and marketers I meet are session players who write hit songs.

They build the list.

The funnel.

The launch.

The machine that keeps paying the client long after the final invoice.

Then they hand back the keys and walk to the back of the line for the next gig.

Not sure if you can relate to that inbox moment...

But if so, keep reading.

Because I Built A Mirror

Below is a prompt I call The Upside Audit.

Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and it walks through your last 5 client projects.

It calculates what a 20%, 30%, or 50% deal would’ve paid on each one...

Right next to the flat fee that actually got invoiced.

Conservative math only.

It rounds down.

It labels every guess as a guess.

Takes about 10 minutes.

Download The Prompt

THE UPSIDE AUDIT (copy everything below and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT)

You’re a deal auditor with a calculator and zero flattery.

Your job: show me what my past client work would have paid me if I’d had a piece of the results.

Walk me through my last 5 client projects, ONE at a time. For each project, ask me:


What kind of business was the client?


What did I build for them? (launch, funnel, email sequence, ads, offer, site)


What did they pay me in total? (flat fee, project rate, or retainer)


What did the work produce for them? (real revenue if I know it, best guess if I don’t)


Is the work still being used today?


Your rules:

If I don’t know the revenue, help me estimate it conservatively. Use their price point, audience size, and how long the asset has been live. Label every estimate as an estimate. Round down, always.


Never inflate a number to make the result more dramatic. Boring honesty only.


No pep talks. No lectures. Just math.

When you have all 5 projects, build me this table:

Project | What they paid me | What it produced | My take at 20% | My take at 30% | My take at 50% | The gap

Then give me three things:

The total gap across all 5 projects. Label it “The Vendor Tax.”

For any asset still producing today, the gap I’m adding every year it keeps running.


The one project where the gap is biggest, with this exact sentence: “This client relationship is where a deal was hiding.”

Then stop. Don’t give me advice. Don’t tell me what to do next. Just show me the number and let it sit.

Before you run it...

Fair warning. The number can sting.

That’s fine.

The mirror doesn’t lie...

…and now you know exactly where to aim.

Because the audit proves something purty important.

Your skills already produce real money.

There’s a stack of evidence sitting in your old invoices.

The only thing that’s ever been missing is your seat at the table when the money shows up.

This Wednesday: where the first deal is hiding

Here’s what a decade of doing deals taught me.

The first deal is almost never with a stranger.

It’s hiding inside a client list that already exists.

That’s why Wednesday’s paid issue takes the same 5 projects you just audited and runs a second pass.

I call it the Client Roster X-Ray.

It ranks which past and present clients are sitting on underutilized assets...

The email list that barely gets mailed, the buyer file nobody talks to, the course that quietly stopped selling.

Then it drafts the opener for a different kind of conversation with the one at the top.

There’s no proposal in it.

No rate card.

Just a coffee date that can end with a piece of the upside.

That’s how I ended up with a slice of a $364k campaign that ran 14 days off a list of 47,000 people.

Same skills I always had.

Different seat.

[Show me where my first deal is hiding →] (upgrade link)

In your corner,

~ Tony

P.S. Run the audit before Wednesday.

The X-Ray hits different when the Vendor Tax number is still fresh.

And if your gap turns out to be small?

That’s worth knowing too. No harm, no foul.

Subscribe now

💦 “Same water, same hose... a thumb over the nozzle sends it twice as far. The five hours are the thumb…”

The Booked-Solid Trap

Full-time income, spare-time investment for calendars with no room left.

There’s a version of this business where a booked-solid calendar stops deciding when the escape gets built.

It’s the same spare-hours math that turned 15 to 20 focused hours a week into just shy of $2 million in partner revenue in a year...

…across roughly six working months.

Today’s tool asks for zero hustle and zero leaps...

It builds a 5-hour deal job that runs inside a full week...

[upgrade and let the Spare-Time Deal Engine build yours →]

The most dangerous sentence in freelance copywriting or agency businesses sounds responsible.

“I’ll start partnership deals when things slow down...”

Things don’t slow down.

They’re not supposed to...

…a good business eats every hour it’s fed.

And the standard advice makes it worse: quit, go all in, burn the boats.

I tried that once.

It cost me eight months.

So today you’re getting the Spare-Time Deal Engine...

A copy-paste prompt that builds a 5-hour-a-week deal job around a calendar that’s already full.

Set hours.

Set duties.

Punch in.

The fullest calendar in town

There’s a freelancer no amount of new clients can save.

They’re booked solid.

Referrals waiting in line.

Rates going up every year.

From the outside, they won.

And every Sunday night they open the calendar and sees the same thing...

Five, six, and even seven days, pre-sold to other people’s deadlines.

The partnership deal plan is in a note on their phone usually.

It’s been there 14 months.

Every open slot that could’ve built it got claimed by a revision request or a “quick call.”

I’ve had many a copywriters and agency owners tell me they keep that same note.

Waiting on a slow season that never shows up.

Here’s the part that stings...

The better the business does, the less escapable it gets.

Full calendar.

Full income.

More employees.

No exits.

That’s the booked-solid trap.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

The $1,000-a-week side thing

Back in my 20’s I sold manufactured homes in Florida.

Full time. Doing purty good.

In my late 20’s and early 30’s, on the side, in spare hours, I started selling legal insurance.

$26 a month.

My whole “system” was one line.

“Got 15 minutes? Something important I wanna share with ya. You may or may not be interested... but I wouldn’t expect you to introduce me to someone if you didn’t know what I was up to...”

That little spare-time gig paid me $800 to $1,000 a week.

Week after week.

That as just the up front money…

…never mind renewals.

So I did the responsible thing.

I quit the homes and went full time on insurance.

And everything fell apart like a sloppy burrito with too much tequila.

For eight months I struggled to make what spare hours used to hand me.

I went from a few focused hours doing ONLY what mattered...

To 40 open hours, spread thin across every weird idea that wandered by.

Nothing about the product changed.

Nothing about me changed.

The only thing that changed was the constraint.

Turns out the constraint WAS the system.

I found my footing, stuck with that business 10 years, and built the side thing into an agency of about 49,000 agents.

Those play checks still show up every month to this day.

And I do absolutely nothing for them.

Run it like a Part-Time Job

So here’s the frame for anybody whose calendar is already spoken for.

Partnership deals isn’t a business to launch.

It’s a part-time job to show up for.

Think about every part-time job ever worked.

Set hours... miss them, you’re fired.

Set duties... skip them, you’re fired.

Nobody “finds time” for a shift at 15 years old.

The shift is just THERE, and life arranges itself around it.

And there’s a quiet law that makes small hours outperform big ones...

Stuff gets done in the time you believe you have to do it.

Hand a first deal 30 hours this week and it’ll eat all 30.

Hand it six... and research gets surgical, outreach gets specific, and limping deals get cut fast.

Slow up to hurry up.

The Year My Body Enforced it

I didn’t relearn this by wisdom.

In 2023 I landed in the emergency room three times in four days.

My now fiance Brandi ended up driving me three hours to a special hospital in Phoenix on trip #3.

After that, energy stopped being a debate.

It was a ration.

So the next year ran on part-time-job rules whether I liked it or not.

15 campaigns crossed my desk.

I killed 5 before they ever kicked off.

Killed 4 more after two or three emails, when the audience and the offer had no affinity.

Ran the 6 that earned it.

The total came to just shy of $2 million in partner revenue.

On roughly 15 hours a week... about six months of the year.

During a workshop on this exact topic, I dropped one line in the chat that sums up the whole philosophy.

So what goes IN the five hours?

That’s the whole game now.

Because plenty of folks carve out the hours...

Then fill them with lurking, list-scrolling, and polishing a niche statement for the ninth time.

The shift needs a job description.

Specific duties, in a specific order.

I run mine like a boss is watching.

And below the line, a prompt builds yours the same way.

I gave the insurance gig 40 hours a week and it handed me eight lean months.

I gave partnership deals 15 focused ones and they handed back just shy of $2 million.

The difference was a job description.

Yours is below this line.

[Yes, Build my 5-hour deal job →]

Read more

Subscribe now

🚪"It's like ringing a doorbell with empty hands, then wondering why nobody wants to open up..."

There’s an email sitting in a drafts folder somewhere.

Addressed to a dream partner.

Rewritten in the head a dozen times.

But it never actually leaves the outbox.

And the times it did go out?

Crickets.

Here’s the thing almost nobody talks about.

Positioning decides whether that email gets a reply.

Here’s what’s really going on.

Back in the 1950s, a fella named Harvey Brody…

…yeah, he ran a little experiment.

Same product.

Same list.

Same everything.

He changed one thing about how he showed up.

First version, he wrote like a seller. “Here’s my thing, please buy it…”

Second version, he wrote like a buyer.

Somebody bringing an opportunity.

The buyer version pulled ten times the replies.

Ten times.
Same words.
Different position.

Now here’s why that matters.

When most folks reach out to a dream partner, they show up as the seller.

“Hi, I’m a copywriter, I’d love to work with you, got any openings?…”

The desperation comes through the screen anyway.

And so can they.

That’s why it feels like icky.

Because it kinda is.

And it’s not anybody’s fault.

It’s just how most of us were taught to sell.

But watch what happens when that flips.

The ask disappears.

What’s left is bringing them money.

Instead of “got any openings?”...

A version that actually lands:

“Noticed you’ve got an old course just sitting there. Got an idea to turn it back into cash. Want me to walk you through it?…”

That’s an investor walking in with an opportunity.

👉Same person.
👉Same skills.
👉Totally different position.

And here’s the part that takes the pressure off completely.

The first email has ONE job.

Not to close a deal.

Not to get a yes.

Just to get a reply.

👉Reply first.
👉Then a quick coffee date.
👉Then a small test.

One job per step.

Once the pressure to win it all in one email goes away, hitting send gets easy.

One more move, then here’s where to go for the rest.

Nobody needs case studies to reach out.

Leading with what somebody SEES about their business beats leading with what somebody DOES for a living.

A sharp observation about their business.

Nobody needs a wall of testimonials to notice something smart about someone.

Lead with that.

This isn’t theory.

My buddy Chris Dyson booked a single partnership deal off a cold email.

Just shy of $700,000.

He did it by showing up as a buyer and booking a simple coffee date.

Chris put the approach into a short, free guide.

It’s called From Crickets to Coffee Dates.

Five pages. No fluff.

The positioning switch, the one-job rule, and the simple 3-part email that actually earns replies.

👉 Grab the free guide: From Crickets to Coffee Dates

Read it tonight.

Then send the email you’ve been sitting on.

In your corner,

~ Tony

P.S. And it doesn’t start at $700K.

It starts with one coffee date and a small test.

A lot less scary than it sounds.

Subscribe now

✈️"Pilots don't take off because passengers are excited. They take off when the tower clears them…”

14 places it almost went sideways (and the exact lines that kept it on the rails)

Two seconds into the call.

Not two minutes.

Two SECONDS.

“Are you okay if we turn off the transcription?”

Followed by...

“I never record my meetings.”

That’s the very first thing a decades-deep industry veteran said to me on a recent coffee date.

Big exits.

A mountain of deals.

Major institutions endorsing his course.

And a lot of new deal makers fold right there.

They hear a big dog state a preference and they scramble to accommodate.

“Oh sure, no problem, whatever works for you!”

Thirty seconds in, they’ve already taught the partner a lesson...

Everything about this deal is negotiable.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of a campaign. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

Here’s what I actually said

“Yeah, I do record.

And moving forward, if we end up doing anything together, I will be recording them.

For documentation.

It makes my life easier when I’m running campaigns…”

That was it.

No apology.

No debate.

He said “sure” and we moved on.

See, this issue is different from anything I’ve sent before.

I’m going to walk through a real coffee date, beat by beat.

Names scrubbed.

Industry scrubbed.

Details changed enough to protect the innocent.

And I’m going to show all 14 places where this call could’ve gone sour...

Where a newer deal maker would’ve walked into a deal WITHOUT the ideal conditions in place.

Because here’s the wisdom up front.

Deals aren’t won by persuading.

They’re won by conditions.

Every sour point on this map is a spot where someone trades a condition for approval.

That’s an expensive trade.

The first 4 switch points came before discovery even started

Switch point 1: The recording.

Covered above.

First 30 seconds. Frame held.

Switch point 2: The unprepared prospect.

Then it got better.

“I haven’t had a chance to check my notes yet. The meeting just popped up.”

He didn’t remember why we were talking.

This is where newer deal makers panic and fill the silence with a pitch.

Worst possible move.

Pitching someone who doesn’t know why they’re on the call is how deals get built on sand.

Instead, I waited.

Let him pull up his notes.

Then HE said it: “My understanding is you have a method of monetizing my database that’s going to help me sell more courses.”

He articulated the opportunity in his own words.

Which means he sold himself.

Switch point 3: Leading the dance.

Before any of that, I’d asked one small permission question:

“If you don’t mind me leading the dance here today, I’ll make sure we both get our questions answered.”

Without it, a guy with decades of wins behind him runs the call by default.

With it, the investor runs the call.

That’s the seat I sit in. And it’s the seat I teach.

Then came the ask that kills more new deal makers than any objection

We got into discovery.

His course had sold 44 copies.

His target was 1,500.

His list had just shrunk from 110,000 to 78,000 after cleaning.

And then he leaned in with what sounded like a gift...

He offered to export his entire 16,700-person LinkedIn database.

Hand it straight over to me.

Run my campaign at it.

A brand new deal maker hears that and thinks they just hit the jackpot.

A 16,700-person list, handed over, no work required?

What I said next is the difference between a multi-six-figure campaign and a smoking crater with my name on it.

Most People Would Say Yes, I Said…

He’s holding out 16,700 cold contacts.

The clock’s running.

And I’m about to say five words that most people would consider deal suicide.

Paid subscribers get the rest of the call...

The exact line I used to turn down 16,700 “free” contacts.

The 5 deal breakers I stated out loud, word for word.

The millionaire math that turns a $250 course into a $2,500 cash flow machine.

And the Coffee Date Control Tower...

An interactive tool that scores your next coffee date green, yellow, or red BEFORE you commit to anything.

[Upgrade to see what happened →]

Read more

Subscribe now

📕 Multi-six figure paydays and ongoing monthly payments using free tools without our own audience, products, or service delivery. The entire model ==> Deals Over Clients Online Edition

Everyone Builds With a Big Idea.

But I build backwards.

Here’s what that actually looks like without AI.

I’m sitting across from a partner over Zoom, doing deal math on a napkin.

100 sales…

50% of them pay in full of $5000

50% of them do 10 payments of $600.

30% of of the total campaign up front...

…the other half over 9 more months.

…carry the one...

…is that right?

Add 3 more campaigns this year…

That napkin IS the business model.

So I built an online calculator that does that napkin math for me now.

Then one for tracking every deal I’ve got running.

Then one for scoring a partner before I ever grab coffee with them (and I can update after).

Then a scanner that reads Reddit for me so I’m not doomscrolling for leads.

None of These Started as “Products.”

They started as ME being annoyed at something small in my own business.

I’m not a coder.

I don’t know Python from a pool noodle.

But I do know how to get annoyed enough to fix something.

That’s the whole system.

Below are 14+ things I’ve built using AI...

Guides, landing pages, SaaS tools, dashboards, even multiple Claude Skills.

Each one saves me time, money, or both.

Family included.

Because every hour I get back from a dashboard is an hour I get to spend with my fiancé Brandi and our two cat kids.

Let’s kick it off…

SaaS Products

Reddit Scanner

My good friend Travis always taught me…

And lemme tall ya, Reddit is a treasure trove of understanding.

But I didn’t have the time to scroll all of Reddit for my ideal peeps and their issues…

So I brought them to me.

This one sits local on my computer…

No need for me to scan Reddit for an hour looking for symptoms and issues.

It finds them for me…

I enter tags of who I’m looking for…

It adds them to my daily dashboard.

Even drafts up a response in my voice.

I may change the copy up a bit…

…but it saves me a ton of time from starting from scratch.

Substack Notes Manager

I love me some Substack notes.

And in full transparency I’m using writestack.io alongside my own creation right now.

Writestack.io gets better everyday.

Orel really cares about his people…

And the MCP feature is a godsend when you plug it into Claude Cowork.

I built my own notes manager before writestack got crazy good…

…and it sits on my local machine still producing, scheduling, and posting notes.

But your best bet for creating, scheduling, and repurposing notes without creating your own (which would be hella expensive) is writestack.io.

👉 writestack.io

Thread Genius

I built Thread Genius because I was using another similar software.

But the output was terribly generic for me.

So knowing important a personal voice is?

I gave Thread Genius features that eliminated the AI slop of traditional AI.

• It can write threads in your voice

• You can upload one or multiple PDF’s of your custom content

• It’ll produce custom threads in your voice

• And produces custom Facebook images, TikTok & IG reals, along with custom LinkedIn carousels (just upload to LinkedIn & roll)

• I’ve baked a bunch of custom images into it too

Example of how it’s made me money?

This past November I was posting 2 or 3 threads a day on FB.

One of them got 6 hand raisers for deals.

One of those deals turned into a partnership deal that did $110k in December with 115 people.

You can get an annual subscription here:

👉 ThreadGenius.ai

Claude Skills

I’ve built multiple skills for Claude that save me time, energy, & money.

But just as important, they produce time, energy, and income for me as well.

Without my blood, sweat, & tears.

Here’s just a few:

🔥 Skill 1: YOUR BUSINESS BLUEPRINT (AKA: STOP BEING GENERIC)

What’s actually happening here:

This is your “brain upload.”

You’re teaching AI:

• What you sell

• Who you sell to

• What you refuse to sell

• How you talk

• What makes you dangerous (in a good way)

👉 Without this? You get templates.
👉 With this? You get you.

How to use it (don’t overthink this):

Say:

• “Set up my business blueprint”

• “Create my business config”

Then just answer like you’re talking to a friend.

💡 Aha moment:

Every other skill pulls from this automatically.

Which means:
You do this ONCE…
…and everything after gets sharper, faster, and way more “sendable.”

✍️ Skill 2: WRITING CONTENT THE MOJO WAY (YOUR MONEY MACHINE)

What this really is:

Not “content writing.”

This is:
👉 persuasion disguised as storytelling
👉 sales that don’t feel like selling

It runs on:

• Symptoms (what people are secretly dealing with)

• Stories (how you sneak the lesson in)

• Structure (so it actually converts)

What you’ll notice:

Instead of:

“Here are 5 tips…”

You’ll get:

“Ever stare at a blank screen at 11pm wondering why nothing’s coming out?…”

Yeah… that.

How to trigger it:

• “Write me an email about X”

• “Create a campaign for [partner]”

• “Write a Substack post about X”

⚠️ Reality check:

If you skip Voice DNA…

You’ll get:
👉 structurally solid
👉 emotionally flat

If you include it?

Now it sounds like you on your best day.

🧩 Skill 3: METAPHOR MACHINE (THE SNEAKY WEAPON)

What most people do:

They try to “convince.”

Which triggers:
👉 resistance
👉 skepticism
👉 mental eye rolls

What this does instead:

It tells a story that leads people to the conclusion themselves.

No pushing. No forcing.

Example:

Instead of:
“Your offer isn’t clear…”

You get:
“Trying to sell this offer is like handing someone a map with no destination…”

See the difference?

How to use it:

• “Generate a metaphor for this situation”

• “Help me say this indirectly”

💡 Aha moment:

This is what makes your content feel smart instead of pushy.

📱 Skill 4: FB GROUP CONTENT COACH (YOUR INVISIBLE FUNNEL)

What this is really doing:

You’re not selling.

You’re signaling.

To the right people:
👉 “This person gets it.”

The play:

• No pitching

• No offers

• No “DM me”

Just:
👉 sharp insight
👉 specific pain
👉 clean delivery

And the right people come to YOU.

How to trigger:

• “Write a Facebook post for [niche]”

• “Attract [type] business owners”

💡 Aha moment:

This is how you get coffee dates without chasing.

🎯 Skill 5: PARTNERSHIP PIPELINE (THIS IS WHERE MONEY GETS REAL)

Let’s not pretend…

This is the part that actually changes your income.

And it comes in 4 parts that run on autopilot for me every morning.

Loads them up into smartlead for me…

Outreach happens on autopilot.

1. RESEARCHER → Find real players

Not broke beginners.

You’re looking for:
👉 existing audience
👉 existing offers
👉 underused assets

Say:

• “Find partners in [niche]”

2. QUALIFIER → Kill bad deals fast

Most people try to “make it work.”

Wrong move.

This tells you:
👉 go
👉 or no-go

Say:

• “Qualify this prospect”

3. WARM PATH → Don’t be a stranger

Before you go cold…

Check:
👉 do you already know them?
👉 does someone know them?

This alone can 10x response rates.

4. OUTREACH → Coffee, not pitch

This is key:

You’re not selling.

You’re opening a loop.

Short. Curious. Non-needy.

Say:

• “Write outreach for [name]”

💡 Aha moment:

You’re not chasing deals.

You’re choosing them.

🧾 POST-DEAL SYSTEM (WHERE MOST PEOPLE DROP THE BALL)

Skill 6: ONBOARDING DEAL

Takes a “yes” and turns it into:
👉 actual execution

Docs. Emails. Structure.

No chaos.

Skill 7: OFFER WORKSHEET

Turns messy ideas into:
👉 sharp positioning
👉 real language
👉 actual leverage

Skill 8: IRRESISTIBLE OFFER

Gives you:
👉 3 angles
👉 3 ways in
👉 3 shots at winning

Skill 9: OFFER MULTIPLIER

This is the “oh…” moment.

It shows you:
👉 what you’re REALLY selling
👉 why it’s not landing
👉 how to 5–10x it

There are more but you get the point.

All of these skills and more are available inside the premium level of our private Deals Over Clients community.

If you’d like deets send me a message below.

I’ve got a few questions for you first to make sure my peanut butter mixes with your jelly.

Interactive DashBoards:

The Partner Pipeline Calculator:

How many coffee dates will it take for you to hit your income goal of $100k, $200k, or even $1MM this year?

That’s what this calculator figures out for you.

Enter the income you’re aiming at…

If you’re doing warm/cold outreach or both…

It does the math for ya…

Big Picture Commission Calculator:

A good friend told me once…

Our minds are like underwear…

…once it stretches it doesn’t go back.

That’s what this does for you.

Once you start to see what’s possible with partnership deals?

Your brain can’t let it go.

Deal Qualifier Dashboard:

I got tired of spinning my wheels on partnerships that didn’t go well…

So I built a dashboard to help vet sour deals out.

It’s not a guarantee but it sure has saved me a time or two from wasting a ton of time on partners that didn’t qualify.

Coffee Date Dashboard:

For Deals Over Clients students…

Doing their research before a coffee date is key…

…what they find out ON that coffee date is the other side of the coin.

Once they’re off a coffee date they can take this data they’ve collected, push a button, and bring the results to our private community for feedback.

One look and I know if they’ve got a live one or not.

Live Deal Payments Tracker:

Once I got a deal?

I wanna know what the money is going to look like up front and over the next 10 to 12 months.

But what about my next deal?

And the one after that?

Well this dashboard tracks your commissions throughout ALL of your campaigns.

So you can watch your campaign payments STACK on top of one another.

It gives you a clear picture of what your money looks like - with or without paying out a referral fee.

When you know you’re waking up to $30k - $50k on the first of every month…

…saying “No” to mediocre deals is EASY.

FloodMaker Campaign Command:

I built this to campaign command dashboard for my own private deals.

It’s fill in the blanks simple.

Adds up my sales.

Tracks all of my campaigns emails, opens, how many people I’ve responded to, sent an offer to and how many sales I made.

Right now I manually add the details and it calculates everything for me.

But coming soon, this will tie into another SaaS my buddy Jay Beckham and I are creating via API and this data will auto-populate!

Deals Over Clients Pipeline CRM:

I built this because I got tired of trying to track my smartlead leads that had replied inside smartlead.

It’s bit of a PITA.

So…

I built my own CRM with built in follow up reminders AFTER people respond in Smartlead.

I’ve built in a 1-by-1 manual input as well as a bulk lead upload feature.

As well as a manual input for Referral partners and THEIR leads.

Cool is?

I designed it so that each member can login and track their own leads, add their Smartlead API - and have all their replies piped into the CRM automatically.

Problem solved for ME…

…and my premium members.

🔥 Want to get your hands on all of these dashboards?

They’re all included in the premium level of our Deals Over Clients community.

If you’d like deets send me a message and let’s see if my peanut butters mixes with your jelly.

I’ve got a few questions for you first.

Landing Pages & Guides

The Partner Picker - No Clients Required

I built this guide and prompt to help new people transitioning from their freelance copywriter role to their first partnership deal…

…with no drama.

It does 80% of the heavy lifting for them.

Why did I create it?

Because I went through the exact same issue many years ago.

The landing page, 1 page tutorial guide & prompt, along with the emails…

All done with Claude skills.

What might have taken me a week?

Now only takes me an hour.

You can see the landing page here:

👉 The Partner Picker 1 Page Tutorial & Prompt

From Crickets to Coffee Dates

One of the guys I was wing manning on a partnership deal had a deal going off the rails.

It was a classic issue of him being the tail while the partner was the dog.

He was getting wagged every which way but loose.

So I had an hour call with him…

…and turned the transcript into a guide to help new deal makers AVOID these issues before they even come up.

Example #2 of a landing page, guide, along with the emails done in an hour using Claude Skills.

See the landing page example here:

👉 From Crickets to Coffee Dates Guide.

What’s Coming Next

My buddy Jay Beckham and I are working on two big SaaS right now, CreatorFinder AI and FloodMaker AI.

CreatorFinder

CreatorFinder AI is a beast that:

1. Searches it’s database of over 350 million creators, influencers, and experts…

2. Deploys 28 agents to search the interwebs for any and everything it can find on them like courses, offers, social profiles, sales pages, and more…even makes suggestions on how to improve upon those offers and landing pages.

3. Then customizes outreach messages and follow ups based on that data.

Our secret weapon?

Intent Based Marketing - no more guessing if someone has a thriving business or not…

…if they’re growing, hiring, running ads etc…

You’ll know.

The CreatorFinder API will give everyone a smooth way to integrate pulling data into their favorite cold outreach platform like Smartlead.

And my favorite feature?

Everything can be run from text on their phone using our Jesse Text Agent regardless if you’re on an iPhone or Android.

👉 Grab your spot on the early bird wait list

We’re taking our first 100 beta customers in July 2026

Now, it’s Your Turn:

Ok here’s what to do next:

Drop ONE annoying problem in your business in the comments.

Then tell me the simple thing you’d build to fix it... IF you knew it was doable.

When you do?

I’ll pick a few and tell you exactly how I’d build it.

In your corner,

~ Tony

Subscribe now

🎣 "You don't need more hooks in the water. You need to know which pond holds the fish worth catching…"

In 2024, I ran 6 campaigns.

Did $1.6 Millie in sales

4 of those 6 came from the same partner.

Every single one came from a warm introduction.

Not cold email blasts.

Not a LinkedIn content strategy.

Not ads.

Warm introductions.

And I took 6 months off.

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your skills by the hour and start owning the upside of partnership deals. Grab the book → if you want the full picture.

The question almost nobody asks…

Every January, freelance online marketers & copywriters make a plan.

Programs to build.

Funnels to set up.

Clients to sign.

Campaigns to “get going.”

But almost nobody asks the question that actually drives the outcome.

How many partner conversations do I need?

How many.

That single number changes everything.

Once you know it, you know if you’re on track.

Or off.

You know if you’re moving too slow.

You know whether to lean into your warm market or start building a cold outreach system.

Without it?

You’re just grinding and hoping something lands.

Warm market math is not cold market math

The outreach number…

The number isn’t the same for everyone.

It depends entirely on where your conversations are coming from.

Warm market math looks like this.

A handful of people already know and trust you.

Old colleagues.

Community connections.

A few referrals.

In warm market, maybe 3-5 conversations get you to 1 real partner.

Cold market math is completely different.

You might need 50-100 initial contacts...

...to get 10 coffee dates...

...to land 1-2 deals you actually WANT to do.

Same destination.

Completely different volume.

Most new deal makers I talk to?

Playing cold outreach at warm market volume.

And wondering why nothing’s happening.

Here’s the uncomfortable part

You’ve probably got a number in your head for the remainder of this year.

Maybe $150k.

Maybe $300k.

Maybe your first half millie.

But do you actually know how many partner conversations it’s gonna take to get there?

Because if you don’t...

You can’t know if you’re on track.

You can’t tell if you’re too slow.

You can’t decide if warm intros are enough or if you need a cold system running alongside them.

You just grind.

And hope.

That’s not a plan.

That’s a prayer.

Here’s the thing about 2024 for me.

It wasn’t harder work that made it happen.

It was getting clear on the number.

6 conversations.

6 campaigns.

Half a millie.

Most of those campaigns?

Came from one partner.

The math got simple real fast.

And what I want to give you on the paid side of this issue is a prompt you drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT.

It asks you 6 questions.

About your aim.

Your current situation.

Whether you’re going warm, cold, or both.

And then it does the math.

Not generic advice.

Your actual number.

The conversations you need. The path that makes sense for YOUR situation.

And a 30/60/90 day plan built around what you told it.

4 campaigns. One partner.

That’s 4 out of 6 of my 2024 campaigns coming from a single warm relationship.

Now here’s the question worth sitting with: how FEW conversations does that mean I actually needed?

And what does that reverse-engineered math look like for YOUR goal?

The prompt on the paid side calculates exactly that.

Drop it into Claude or ChatGPT, answer 6 questions, and walk away with your actual number for the rest of this year.

[Upgrade to keep reading → $20/month or $150/year]

Read more

Subscribe now

📘 This is Deals Over Clients. If somebody forwarded this, the idea is simple: stop renting your words by the hour and start owning a piece of what they build. Grab the book and case studies if you want the full game plan.

I was talking to a high level copywriter last year…

Solid guy.

Solid copy chops.

If I named off 2 of his 3 retainer clients?

You would absolutely know who they are.

Why not the 3rd?

Because they dropped him…

…right before the first of the month.

So he was scrambling to fill that 3rd retainer.

Otherwise things were gonna get ugly.

But that wasn’t the real problem…

It wasn’t a retainer problem.

It was a seat problem.

The Seat Change

Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you “go freelance.”

You don’t actually leave your job.

You just get a new boss every 30 to 90 days.

The client merry-go-round.

👉Chase the lead.
👉Send the portfolio.
👉Lower the price.
👉Take the rewrites.
👉Pray they renew.

Sweaty palms on every sales call.

And the worst part?

It’s the wrong chair the whole time.

See, a retainer copywriter sits ACROSS the desk.

Asking for a yes.

Auditioning.

A dealmaker sits on the SAME side of the desk.

Buying a problem.

Investing.

That’s the whole game.

Not the rates. Not the funnel.

The chair.

Two words change the game.

Adopt the Investors Stance.

You’re not auditioning. You’re interviewing.

The second that flips, everything downstream flips too.

But knowing the new beliefs and actually LIVING INTO them?

That’s two different things.

The gap between those two is where most copywriters get waist deep in the muck.

Part of the gap is the inner game.

And the inner game is what nobody else writes about.

Part of the gap is the outer challenges…

“Why would anyone give me access to their list?…”

“I need case studies…”

Why would anyone split the profits 50/50 with me?…”

Of course none of those are true…

But that’s where we’re doing next...

I wanna show you how to bridge those gaps.

The Tools, Prompts, and Templates

The inner game, outer game, the mechanics, and six prompting tools you can copy-paste into Claude or ChatGPT today to move from renting your words…

…to getting paid a piece of the pie.

It’s all on the paid side of the newsletter.

The four reframes that let you live the new beliefs. The exact scripts for copy control, the demand test, and the 40% ask.

Plus the walk-away number worksheet and a deal qualifier prompt that gives you a go/no-go on any prospect in 60 seconds.

All waiting for you on the other side of becoming a paid subscriber.

Six figure lucrative partnership deals are on the other side of, “I’m ready…”

Read more