The Half A Million Dollar Client Formula

Am I going to die poor in a homeless shelter in the ghetto and leave my kids nothing?

This time of year always reminds me of that question I asked over a decade ago.

I lived in a family homeless shelter, just my two kids and I. It was in a really rough part of town. It’s a thirty-day shelter, meaning you have 30 days to figure something out, and you’re gone.

Well, I managed to find excuses to stay from just days before Thanksgiving all the way through the new year. I worked a job, did extra chores, and did whatever else I could to buy more time.

On the new year, gunshots rang out, and I remember being terrified that a bullet would travel through the roof. 

I’ve come a long way from that to advising hundreds of business owners and generating clients that pay half a mil+.

Even if you’ve never been homeless and you’re consistently doing a quarter mil to ten mil a year, there is still a poor, ruined version of you that lives in your head.

The higher you climb, the more breathtaking the idea of falling is.

Which is one of the many reasons I’m going to cover as to why charging more is difficult.

Being able to charge more and scale is only going to come from a place of stability most of the time.

Because the broke, afraid version of you will not allow you to tell someone to pay you twice what you’re charging now and actually pull it off.

You will struggle to write up the offer and convey the value to your sales team, or ad team.

Same goes for increasing revenue and profit without charging more even being in the mix.

If you do actually pull it off, it won’t stick. You’ll have a couple of great months of higher revenue than usual and then you will have a steep spiral down. I’ve experienced it firsthand, and I get calls every single month about it.

I can see the financial sheets mentally right now, of the numbers getting worse line by line, and I can still hear the horror stories mentally.

It’s one of the reasons I act with the sense of urgency that I do. It’s why I write these newsletters. Put out content. And kick team’s asses in gear like I do (in a loving way, of course).

I know what’s at the bottom of that spiral.

Three years ago, I was in this spot.

My son was born, and I underestimated the support we’d need. I had four other kids, so I thought this would be a breeze. 

But the unforeseen happened. There were complications. He couldn’t lay flat on his back at night, or he would choke, among many other problems. So he needed constant supervision and due to the complicated delivery, my wife also struggled. 

This was on top of raising other kids, businesses, clients, etc.

I didn’t hire enough support at home.

Because I had gotten burned in the past and I was afraid, I made some bad decisions around hiring and getting advice.

It turned into me controlling things more than I should.

I got very sick and almost died due to the lack of sleep.

I had only been doing organic marketing, so I couldn’t push a button to increase the traffic and sales calls needed to get the added support we needed. 

And because I was controlling everything and trying to do it all myself, it was impossible to take on any more than I was at the time anyway.

We were also taking care of a family member at the time, which also came with unforeseen issues. 

Needless to say, I ran into things with my business and homelife that I didn’t expect at all, and they came with a price tag I couldn’t afford, even though I was doing pretty well financially.

Just months after, I got home from the hospital, after leaving my wife to take care of a struggling newborn all on her own and losing 15 lbs from being deathly ill.. 

Right after getting my bearings, 

We were hit with another surprise. We had rented our house for around five years, staying until we were ready to buy. We found mold in the house, and days later, a tree went through the roof, so we had to up and leave.

Thankfully, just before this, I made a decision to increase my price and scale from a place of certainty instead of fear, chaos, and lack.

I’m going to share more on how I did it.

This decision paid for us to travel for months, a new team member, and later, a car that I had a lot of fun in. It funded many other things, including charity.

Our landlord never responded to us, so after much back-and-forth, we decided to travel until we found a place to stay for a while or a house we’d like to buy.

It was pretty weird, crazy, and divine, and we had a blast. I made more money traveling and scaling than I ever had before.

The first thing you MUST understand about this is in order to charge more or scale, and it actually work and stick..

You have to think about your business and strategy like a racehorse.

If you had to bet on a horse at a track, would you bet your money on a hobby horse that only races when it feels like it? A horse that only trains, sleeps, or eats like a racehorse when it’s convenient?

Would you be willing to put your neck on the line for that?

Well the same rule applies with scaling and charging more. Previously, when I tried to scale, I did it out of lack, and the strategy used was just a circumvention of things I needed to address that were missing.

(I’m going to kind of work backward here, so sit tight, hold on to your safety belt or grab the “oh shit handles” if you must.)

One of those things is solid sales practice and process. I see this all the time with teams and individual business owners. 

They don’t want to invest in sales processes, follow-up systems, hiring, or recruiting, so they try another strategy to avoid it (or they just don’t address it at all). They bet on a broken system, which only leads to anxiety so hidden, low-level, and subconscious that it wears on them without them even knowing it. Subconsciously, they know (without knowing) right out of the gate that it’s not going to work.

In this scenario, the worst hiring and strategy decisions are usually made. They’re usually made out of the need for feeling safety or missing something. Consciously, you might think there’s some kind of advantage or shortcut with this hire and feel relief. 

For myself, this meant hiring people but not doing my job to train them, mentor them or work with them because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to get on calls, be close with people, or really do anything outside of the way I was currently operating. I didn’t even have time for that.

I wanted results without upgrading my behavior.

It also meant using traffic strategies that allowed me(or so I was thought) to continue not investing in the sales process, training, or any of those hires once needed.

When I say I see this all the time, I really mean every single day. Even with companies that have begun to scale to ten million a year, they don’t have what it takes to do it consistently, and they’re always looking for the “next high,” not realizing that most of what they did before was either an anomaly or just won’t work at the level they’re trying to get to.

So I had to shift my mindset in these areas. 

Sure, maybe there are businesses doing big numbers without employees and all that. I hear it all the time. I also hear the phrase “passive income” all the damn time. 

I hear about unicorn businesses and strategies A LOT,

BUT every time I look under the hood, it’s almost never true. There’s always more to the story, followed by a bunch of misled people trying to copy something that isn’t true to begin with.

A business is a system that people work in. A business creates freedom if done right.

A job is something you have to keep doing yourself, and if you stop, the pay stops.

Personally I like having both with the option to walk away whenever I want.

The months we were traveling, my team did everything. I even shared with a mentor at the time that I felt guilty for just focusing on my health, family and not grinding daily.

The other shift I had to make was around my own value and self-worth. People talk about this like it’s magical, but it’s not.

The first thing I did was make a list of my past clients, average what they paid me, and make a list of the total financial value of them working with me. It doesn’t matter what you sell; there is always a financial value. If you struggle with this, start with the cost of them not having your solution. Go deep on this and look at how it impacts their lives and the value of it financially. 

Next, I looked at my top clients, and I prompted Chatgpt to ask, "How many people are out there like that? For example, how many business owners are there doing 300k to 5M a year?"

Then I asked it on any given day how many would most likely buy something. The number is usually going to be around 3%. 

Next, compare that number to the number of people who bought from you already. What’s the discrepancy? Now, divide that number by the next 12 months.

You’ll probably find that you’re not even close to penetrating that market, especially not in the next 12 months.

Then I dug into how much my top competitors are charging; what’s the discrepancy?

I compared what I currently charge and the cost of them not working with me.

I compared what I wanted to charge and the cost of them not working with me.

Based on all of this information, I even asked ChatGPT what I should be charging.

I then changed my entire mindset and behavior around traffic.

If you want to scale, charge more, and create freedom for yourself, you have to forget that any of these things I’m sharing are optional.

You have to get out of the “either-or” lack mentality.

Yes you will need to work at some things, but even that will subside if done correctly.

There’s no such thing as organic or paid traffic; there is only a traffic strategy designed to create the outcomes you want in a way that doesn’t require you personally to work 80 hours a week in the weeds.

Organic traffic is not optional.

Paid traffic is not optional.

Hiring is not optional.

Investing in the sales process is not optional.

Streamlining it all is not optional. 

Unless the outcome of freedom and wealth is optional.

When I talk about money, I don’t mean just to pay bills or even just to have nice things.

What is going to give you padding for disaster?

What is going to lead to the ability to give freely?

And what is going to give you the ability to buy back your time?

For me, buying back my time meant hiring really awesome team members or promoting existing team members.

I’m very passionate about helping people suffering, those in need, and families with sick children or family members who are having to decide between going to work and spending time with their sick loved one.

When you can overcome the lack, design these hires specifically, be clear on your targets, and have a traffic and delegation strategy aligned with all of this, it’s crazy how you’ll attract the right people.

What’s really wild is when you plug them in and you worry about something.

Then you go and look, and they already took care of it + other things you didn’t even think of.

When you can step away and the customers keep coming in..

When your behavior changes and context increases…

And you know deeply that you have a stable system you can bet on..

That’s when the “broke” version of you stops taking control and dive-bombing your growth and revenue.

That’s when charging more and scaling happens in a way that STICKS and creates freedom.

And that’s when the half a million dollar client appeared for me.