How creative entrepreneurs close $100k+ clients (secret)

What's up everyone? Today we're going to talk about how creative entrepreneurs can close six figure deals 100k Multiple hundred k's and above or the past few years. I've been working closely with a bunch of creative entrepreneurs that are pushing The limits of pricing. They're charging upwards of six figures to multiple six figures for creative engagements And on top of that, guess what the clients are paying happily for both projects for retainers for longer term consulting engagements The clients are seeing the value and if you don't know me I'm rich Webster I've been selling creativity at a high level for over 14 years. I've ran multiple businesses having built two creative businesses To multi-seven figures There's a reason when you look me up online over 400,000 entrepreneurs follow me for my insights on creativity on charging more on pricing and on the inner work It's because I've been doing this stuff for a while. Okay. I've been in the game for a minute and That is what we're going to talk about today So today I want to document some of my learnings and share some of this stuff with you about what my clients are doing differently than maybe what you're doing to close 100k plus deals I have one client that closed $192,000 deal For about a month of work for podcast production Another one 300k year full service design retainer Another one 216,000 dollar a year deal for e-commerce Development another one UI UX design 108k just off the top. Okay, so if you're someone who is good at what you do you're stuck selling that like mid High five figure projects or you just want to sell those six figure projects with more consistently This is going to be for you whether you are a solo Expert or you have built a little business behind you is it going to be entrepreneurs that are very serious about Creativity no out of closed clients, but still are not getting to that next big number All right, and if you're interested stick around to the end and we can talk about how we might be able to work together closely To help you hit that milestone and hit your first or your next million selling creativity. Okay, so I'm going to talk about a couple of trends patterns that I'm seeing with all of my clients these are things that just recur over and over again that maybe are Not intuitive counter intuitive Um, so the first one that I want to talk about is most people believe most experts believe Especially those in the creative industry that the reason that you make a shitload of money is because you are the person with the best skills At whatever it is that you did Okay, so the first misconception I want to get out of the way is that you need to be some special genius In order to charge six figures for a project. Okay, that's just not the case now don't get me wrong All right, I'm not talking to people that don't know what they're doing all my clients are great at what they do But the misconception is that the reason they're closing six figures or multiple six figures is because of that core skill Only in business is often the entrepreneurs who are great at what they do Not the best and then they combine it with other skills of business who end up making the most money Getting the best clients and helping their clients get the best results. Okay, now for some of you This is going to be shocking to hear and you may not like that. That's the case But I'm telling you it's true. I've just seen under the hood of enough businesses now to know like I think about There's this quote That Barack Obama says I think he was giving a speech or something and he was talking about like You know, I woke up one day and I was in a boardroom with allegedly the greatest leaders in the world And you would think like oh These people must all be geniuses and he was kind of like It's kind of just like a normal distribution You know, there were definitely some super smart people there were definitely some like idiot people And there was a lot of like average normal people Okay, and at the highest echelons It's more of a normal distribution and it's those who have High degree of skill in whatever their core area is plus a bunch of complimentary skills that get them there Okay, so listen, I lived in the design world for over a decade um I made more money during that period than probably 99 98% of designers and by my own admission I'm not a 99% skill level designer I'm good. Some might say I'm great Um, I love it. I love the craft But I'm also realistic about the level of skill that I had when I was running that business um, so the good news is you're gonna fall into one of two categories, right? You're going to be Person number one Okay, like me 9 out of 10, okay? You're great at what you do and you can add the skills of business on top of that and actually start charging a whole lot of money Okay, now if you're person number two This is gonna hurt All right, if you really are that 10 out of 10 designer that 10 out of 10 creative that absolute master Um, there are people that are worse than you making more money than you right now And that should piss you off Because at a certain day you got to wake up and realize Like do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Do you want to be right or do you want to be rich? Or at least make more money, right? You need to start using your creative brain To solve your business problems and at a certain point you need to use your creative brain to realize that just doing the work at a high level is not enough Okay, the year is 2026 Just doing the work is not good enough It's not going to get you where you want to go, okay? There's this book What got you here won't get you there I love books by the way where the title explains the point of the book I'd like just love telling telling my clients or I'm like okay, so there's this book and it's called what got you here won't get you there And basically the title is the whole point right so your skill is not going to get you to the next point another book that I often talk about by the way is The obstacle is the way Which is by Ryan Holliday. It's like a stoicism book and the title is the entire point. It's great I don't even have to explain it. I just say the title and then boom You got it. So anyway, listen, you need to use your creative brain to solve your business problems Okay, it's one thing to be great at what you do. It's another thing to be willfully ignorant of the reality of what you're engaging in Which is the entrepreneurial act? It's one thing to have creativity. It's another thing to sell it Right, okay, so if you're watching this video and you're sitting there and you're like Well, I do really want to hit six figure projects six figure retainers um The things that will get you to that point are not your core skill. Okay, so If you're a designer that means it doesn't have to do with design if you're a developer It means it doesn't have to do with development if you produce content Means it doesn't have to do with content the upper limits of price once you start charging a ton It begins about your ability To use some of the supplemental skills that you may have or you may not have Okay, that you pick up around the way that allow you to maximize the value that you create See the problem is people can be very good at their skill. They can be a master of their craft But they are terrible at articulating the value of that. They're great at the work, but they just can't sell it All right, so number one thing you need to do you need to get serious About all of the skills that come along with running a business use your creative brain On your own business you need to learn how to articulate the value of your work so that clients care about it You need to learn how to advocate for the value of your work. You need to learn how to price your work Based on the value that it creates you need to learn how to sell your work in a way that feels both good for you And good for the client where it feels like a total win-win You need to learn how to structure your engagements So they're super profitable and you need to learn how to unearth Additional budget additional funds along with it and most importantly you need to learn how to say big numbers And not flinch when you say them Got it All right, a lot of ways saying big numbers is like skateboarding And what I mean by that is when I was a kid I used to skateboard Wasn't very good. Okay, and in front of my house at the time we had this three three and a half stairs Concrete step thing in front of the house Okay, and I would always try to jump down that set of stairs But the problem with jumping down a set of stairs halfway Is you really can't do it halfway? If you have ass jumping down a set of stairs on a skateboard you're going to hurt yourself Badly Okay, and it's the same thing with saying big numbers with saying higher prices You must commit you can only commit to saying big numbers. Okay, if you have asset, people are going to be very uncomfortable. You feel weird. Okay. So anyway, that's number one. I want to just get this out of your head. Like, it's got to be a nine out of ten. Okay. Don't need to be a ten out of ten. Plenty of ten out of ten's out there, not making a ton of money. Alright. So that's number one. I've seen this across all my clients. Sure. I have some clients who are ten out of ten's. I have some that are nine's. Guess what? Correlation between making a lot of money, no connection. Okay. Second thing. Alright, they learn how to price for value, not deliverables. Now, the great irony to me about selling creativity. When I say selling creativity, I mean novel solutions to problems that are outside of the box, whether that's a marketing problem or a design problem or just a business problem in general. The problem with selling creativity is that we have somehow packaged ourself up in a way where we love to just talk about deliverables. And one of the biggest shifts that's required for six figure deals is selling outcomes and pricing for value, not deliverables. Okay. It becomes quite difficult to articulate the value of a series of deliverables at the highest level. You need to sell value, not the thing that it is that they're getting. Right. A website. Eat videos. You know, ten hours of coaching. Ten hours of consulting. Right. Now, that stuff really matters because the client wants the result. Okay. So don't get me wrong. You have probably heard and you can sell six figure deliverables. But what you're going to find is oftentimes with these six figure deliverables, the cost can get eaten up in the production. So we see this a lot with big video film projects where client closes a wapper and they spend their entire budget on the crew. Right. At the end of the day, it's like, damn, like 200 grand cleared my bank account, but I only made 10k at the end of it. I would have been better off just showing up with my iPhone and charging 20. You know. So there's a big budget, but when the project's done, there's not much in the way of profit left. Okay. So we need to be shifting to talking about value and outcomes, not deliverables. And this is a challenge that many creative entrepreneurs have because once again, they are good at what they do. And being good at what you do can be a curse because you can often inadvertently start to sound kind of selfish because you default to talking about the things that you like doing that you love to talk about instead of what the client cares about and what the client gets. And it's this focus on deliverables on what you're going to do on how you think as opposed to the outcome. So at the end of the day, all the client cares about is the results of the work. Okay. We're in the business of solving problems. And if you spend all of your time talking about the process instead of the solution, it's going to be significantly less attractive. So what I see with my clients, the best client, the ones closing six figure deals, multi six figure deals is how they present the work and how they talk about the work has shifted dramatically. Okay. You can sell a $50,000 website. But when you start talking about an engagement at a certain point, the deliverables just stop to make sense. All right. You need to talk about the outcomes of the deliverables on the client's business in order to reach that next level. And usually in most cases, there's not much of a difference in terms of the deliverables between a $50,000 website sold poorly and $150,000 website sold well. It's about how you shine the spotlight of attention. And no one wants to hear that, right? No one wants to hear that they're just bad at sales. And as a result, they're leaving a lot of money on the table. But the fact of the matter is more times than not, like I've listened to hundreds of sales calls. I see where these pitfalls happen. It's an articulation issue. It's a positioning issue and it's a value issue. And sometimes it's just that you're not working with big enough clients to capture the value that you need to. Anyway, so here's where most people get stuck. All right. In every engagement, you can talk about three things. All right. You can talk about deliverables and you will do deliverables. There will be a tangible output for the work that you're doing no matter what. Number two, you will think, which I call strategy. So there's the things that you'll do, which are the deliverables. There's your thinking, which is the strategy. And then finally, there's the outcomes, which are basically deliverables plus strategy equals outcomes, which are the end goal that benefits the client or the customer. And that's basically going to be either reduction in problems, less pain or more pleasure. Goals achieved. Now, you're free in your sales conversations and you're positioning on your website and your marketing. You're free to talk about any of these things. You can talk about deliverables. You can talk about your strategy or you can talk about your outcome. But most people at a certain point do realize that it does not make sense to continue to discuss deliverables. So they switch. So this is like step one. Okay. So you're like, all right. I'm no longer talking about deliverables. I'm going to sell my thinking and they switch and they rebrand themselves as a strategist because they say, I want to get paid for my thinking, not the hours I put in or whatever. And listen, strategists can charge higher prices for sure, generally two to three X sometimes more than what you would pay selling deliverables. But outcomes are where you can create unlimited upside. And the way to actually divorce your time for money and get paid for the outcomes you create means talking about outcomes, talking about the value that you're creating for your clients. And I know for creative people, this is so hard to do. But the big shift you need to do is shining the spotlight of your attention, whether it's in sales, whether it's in marketing, whether it's in the engagements with your client, you're positioning away from the deliverables away from what you do and towards tangible business outcomes. As we talked about, that means you got to have some understanding of business. Right. If you're selling high level creative services, generally speaking, there's going to be a tangible business outcome attached, whether it's something like increased revenue or conversions or something that's less tangible. But in many ways, more valuable. One of my clients told me this quote from like Albert Einstein or something. Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted. And I think that goes doubly, triply, ten actually for brand and intangibles, especially in this world that we're living in of AI. Okay. So listen, when you start pricing for value instead of deliverables, things shift dramatically. Peter Drucker said this very well. He said customers don't buy products. They buy satisfaction of a want. They buy value and doesn't make sense to dangle some shiny deliverables in front of a client. When at the end of the day, all they're thinking about is what those deliverables are going to get them. Okay. So I'll give you an example. I ran a design agency for a decade. So a lot of my contacts comes from this. But it's important that you ask your clients if you're building a website, for instance, like why do you want to the website? What do you think it's going to do for you? Is this a website that's going to increase your brand? Is it going to increase your conviction? Is it going to provide clarity for the organization? Is it going to help your customers to understand what you do and how you help them? Okay. You need to help them connect whatever it is that you do to specific outcomes. All right. Ironically, creative entrepreneurs are quite good at identifying this issue in their clients, but they struggle with this in their own business. Like usually as creative people were in the business of clarity and seeing things clearly, one of the skills that we have. And yet when it comes time to take a look at our own business and see why it's not maybe performing the way we'd like it to, we get stuck. There's expression you can't read the label from inside the jar. And I think that's true. Okay. So very practically, if you're trying to get out of the deliverables game and into the outcomes or value game, here are a few ways that are very simple for you to get started. Okay. First thing is just a simple vibe check. If someone wants to go into your website, your social media, I always talk about this with my clients. Like someone Google's you, five second vibe check. Are they going to feel like this is someone positioned as a deliverable doer or as an outcome creator? All right, so if they look at your home page, does it say, "We design websites," or does it say the language of outcomes in ROI? Okay, same thing, like you're still making a website, but it's how you talk about it. Do you talk about the outcome that it creates? Or do you just talk about the thing that you do? Same thing with case studies. I know creatives love case studies. They love to design their work, their portfolio to impress other creative people. And sometimes the creatives are buyers, so that can be okay. So if you're like, go into the marketing department, if you're working with another design agency, subcontracting, whatever, whatever, there is some argument for that. It depends on the market that you're in. Generally speaking, we'll get to this more in point three, you want to be speaking to the decision maker or the economic buyer is the term they often use in value-based pricing. So when you create a case study, instead of just making it look like very sexy for your designer friends or for your creative friends or social media or whatever, make sure the messaging speaks to business outcomes as opposed to just the deliverables that you create because you got to ask yourself, like, what is your site for? You know? Number two, you need to actually get clear on the value that you're creating for your clients. As I mentioned before, you got your deliverables, you got your strategy, you got your outcomes. Okay, it's worth doing a thorough post-mortem with some of your best clients to really get clear and articulate the outcome of the work. Okay, and this is over certain periods, like what does the outcome look like on a short period, medium period, long time period? Okay, so you can really get some clarity and articulate real outcomes. Generally what I see when one of my clients do this exercise, by the way, is they vastly underestimate the true value of the work that they're doing. Not only do they underestimate the economic value, they underestimate the intangible value as well. And by having clarity, you can actually go out and articulate that value at a much higher level to your clients. Okay, and then finally, you need to learn how to sell this stuff. Okay, you need to understand the process for conducting a thorough sales call that feels good for both you and the client. And I'm not going to get into the whole sales call process right now, but the most important part is a thorough discovery, which is about the first 50% or so of a sales conversation. This is where you unearth at a deep level playing the role of the doctor. Deep level diagnosing the problems and the challenges your client is going through and then diagnosing and prescribing what would be a solution that you could provide to help them solve those challenges. Okay, most entrepreneurs, they get those backwards. Okay, and this keeps them from like really going about five figures. They spend the whole sales call answering questions about deliverables and logistics and at no time unearthing the strong reasons why doing this project or undergoing this transformation is actually important. All right, so there's a lot more to that, but at the end of the day, you need to be spending more time thinking about value and less time thinking about deliverables. Even though, as I mentioned, you will do them, but at the end of the day, clients buy outcomes, not deliverables. All right, that's the deal. Okay, um, third thing. Clients that are doing six figure projects are able to get out of the industry bubble. Now, the next point is going to be a non-issue for some of you, but for others, it's going to be the number one thing that is holding you back from charging higher prices. And what I'm talking about is the industry bubble. And basically, what I mean by that is, it's essentially a community of experts. Okay, so these industries pop up over every discipline. The design community on social media, like X or Instagram, the film industry, the animation industry, the ad industry, the web development industry, coaching, yoga, um, content, right, they all the same pattern. And the problem is when a bunch of experts get together and hang out, no one actually gets rich, you would think it would be the opposite where everyone gets together. They share ideas. They're empowering, but I've just not seen this to be the case. It ends up being a race to the bottom. And you might hear terms like the industry or the scene or whatever I call the bubble. And the bubble keeps you charging lower prices for a variety of reasons. Okay, the clients that I work with generally make it to the higher levels of pricing with a couple of exceptions, but generally speaking, taking their work outside of the bubble. Okay, so they are in the bubble because it's a great place to learn. Okay, but then they take it out, right, because those working in their industry bubble, they tend to be competing on price with other experts, working with clients who don't value the work as much, like get stuck in this order, take a role and end up getting hired by people in the bubble, subcontracting to another agency, freelancing for industry peers. And there's just less opportunity. There's a book on value pricing. I'm blanking on the name of it right now. But in there, the author says experts buy on features, non-experts buy on value. And think of it this way. If the person you're selling to generally speaking feels like they know how to do what you already do, they are going to perceive the value of the work that you're doing significantly lower. Okay, think about like if you go to a mechanic or something and they coach you a high price, but you know how to fix your car, right, you're going to be like, dude, I could just go home and fix this for myself. Okay, it doesn't work. It's the same thing like when I was running my agency, because I know how to design, I was only going to pay so much money for freelancers to work under me because I was comparing their value to what I already knew. Meanwhile, if you go out and you hire someone who has expertise in something that you know nothing about, you are going to be looking at the value of the work much more than the actual comparison of how much it would take for you to do it, because you have no idea. Okay, so basically you want to be in a situation where you hang out in the industry, pay attention, contribute, communicate, but my suggestion is to get out of the bubble. Okay, don't get me wrong. Money can be made in the bubble. For sure, there's money, but generally the bubble is a good place to network, learn, hang out, and a terrible place to grow a business. Pretty much all my clients that are doing six figure, multiple six figure engagements, projects, retainers are working with clients who find their work to be irreplaceable and do not understand their work at a high level. They find tremendous value in the work that they do because they are unable to do it themselves and they are unable to easily find a replacement for them. Okay, this is also the case in my agency. When I was running my business, I was able to charge relatively higher prices because the industry that I was working in, a lot of my clients ended up being nonprofits, other clients that didn't have a high degree of creativity and design sophistication in the market that I was working in. So us coming in was quite revolutionary for them. They just did not have the capacity to do some of the things that we were doing. So therefore, it was quite valuable. So yeah, the best money is going to be made outside the bubble. The less your clients know about how to do what you do, the more value they're going to feel, the higher the perceived value, and the more money that you can make. Okay, so this may be hard to wrap your brain around, especially if you're in the bubble, like this will be your biggest challenge. And no one wants to hear this, especially because when they're in the bubble, everyone that they know is in the bubble. Right? But you can bring your expertise out of the bubble and find two to ten x price multipliers for it. Okay, so that's pretty great. All right, what else do my clients that are closing multiple six figure or six figure projects having common? This is a big one. Okay, now this won't come as a surprise to anyone, but what you will see is you are probably not doing it at the level that you need to be. And number four is they are obsessed with relationships. Okay, this is a commonality I've seen with all of my high six figures, seven figure clients. Okay, they're obsessed with relationships. Okay, they find one of the highest leverage activities that they can do is spend time building, nurturing relationships. Because when I go back and I dissect any of the entrepreneurs I work with who are doing seven figures and beyond one of the highest drivers of ROI for the business, bringing in new revenue is simply the relationships that they have. And when I'm working with someone at a higher level, what you realize is more often than not, it tends to be a conversation about people at a high level, about clients, about referral partners, about friends, about team. One of the big transitions that you'll need to make is to get serious about your relationships and realize that that is the highest value thing that you have. People don't just cut a hundred thousand or multiple hundred thousand dollar check without some trust behind it, which means you need to start having more relationships with people that are going to get you in front of the clients that you want to work with or help to transfer some of that trust that you have between them over to the clients. So there's this really simple exercise that I do with a lot of my clients that is from, I think, Keith Roboi. I bet, hopefully I'm not butchering his name. It's called the Calendar Priority Audit. There's something I often bring up with the clients that I work with, and it's really simple. You just ask them to grab a piece of paper and list in one column, all right, what are your priorities? What are the things that are most important to you in your business? Maybe like what are the five things that are the biggest things you need to focus on right now in the business? And the second thing is they pull up their calendar. And then we just go through their calendar and we look at it and we ask, well, you say this is important. You say relationships are important, but what percentage of your time over the course of a week is devoted towards building relationships. And the idea is that you see if your actions and the way you spend your time reflect the priorities that you say you have. And wouldn't you believe it just because you say it's important doesn't mean your actions reflect that. So one commonality with the higher level clients is spending more time on relationships. And I would suggest if you're interested in creating stronger relationships, which I believe are everything, their leverage, I would suggest you commit a block of time to cultivate new relationships and neutral relationships that you already have. And really ask yourself, well, what percentage of time would really move the needle for the business if you were to do this and if you were to take this seriously? Okay, so for some of you, you're going to need to go out and you're going to need to put yourself out there. You're going to need to make some new friends, you're going to need to make some new relationships. There's an individual on substack that I have come across several times. I think her name is, I don't want to butcher this, but Carly Valancy, who talks a lot about outreach and putting yourself out there and sending cold messages and making introductions. And I think her perspective is a lot more aligned than most people. Most people hear outreach and they think cold emails and spray and pray and it's very much a turn off. Her approach is very much a relationship based strategy. And what's cool about it is you can literally just reach out to people that you want to talk to. You can literally just do stuff. Send messages, nothing bad will happen. You can reach out to people you want to talk to and more often than not, they're going to say yes. That's how relationships are built. And building this muscle of cultivating relationships is key. All the clients I know playing on a high level have this focus on relationships because this is where the bigger deals are done, where there's a higher degree of trust. So if you're not investing time into your relationships and then you're telling yourself that it's a priority to close bigger deals, I would tell you, it's probably not going to happen unless you're paying close attention to relationships. So even if you have like a big established audience, you have a bunch of followers, tens of thousands, thousands of followers, and some people that do listen to me, you need to figure out how to use that to your advantage. And most people, the best way that they can think of leveraging a massive audience is to sell a bunch of cheap stuff to them. Like make a $27 thing, sell it to as many people as possible. Okay, it's a very viable business strategy playing the volume game. But if you intend to take the opposite approach, which is scaling with price, to go deeper with a select group of clients, the missing piece between your audience and those prices is the connections. And that's really what matters. So instead of using your audience as a means to sell them cheap things, use it as a means to build relationships and to make connections. Okay, I'll leave you with one quote that really speaks to the power of these relationships and referrals to drive business. This is from the book, I think it's relatively old, to find old, maybe 20 years old now. It's called managing the professional service firm. I actually haven't read the whole thing, but it came across this quote. And in the book they say, only 10% of all referrals were found to be cases where technical considerations are quote unquote results were given as the reason for the referral. Fully 90% of the reason given for referrals were related to relationship issues. Okay, so at the end of the day, it's all about relationships. All right, I believe I have, how many more do I have for you? Okay, we've three more that we're gonna talk about. Alrighty, next one. They know how to turn money into more money. And this is a skill that you need to learn. All right, once my higher level clients get in the door, they don't ever wanna leave, and the clients don't want them to leave earlier. So this is super underrated, and this is really what happens after you close the deal, and you start building a relationship. But I think it's something that most entrepreneurs don't spend enough time considering, which is maximizing how much you can help your current clients continue to solve more problems. Because here's the thing most people don't realize. There is no such thing as a problem-free business. Every problem that's solved in entrepreneurship creates more problems. Every problem that's solved in your life creates more problems. It's just the nature of life. I'll give you an example from my work, okay? So clients will come to me, the work with me, they'll be complaining, "Ritch, I don't have enough clients, "like I'm not busy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Okay, they don't have enough leads, they don't have enough sales calls, and inevitably we'll work together and guess what? They end up booking more clients. And this literally happens so often that it's like a joke for me at this point. Because people will go from, "I have no clients, "I need more money, I need to close more deals "to that problem that's solved." The next time I talk to them, "Ritch, I'm super busy, "I don't have enough time, I'm maxed out, I'm overwhelmed." It's like you didn't even give yourself a second to enjoy solving the problem that you already solved. Because each problem creates a new constraint. It's literally hilarious and it perfectly explains the point. Each solution creates another problem. And in your business, you've experienced that, but with your clients, every new problem is an opportunity for you to help and to make more money. So practically what my clients that are crushing it are doing is very strategic. And they are aware of what's going on in their client's business beyond the scope of just whatever the thing that they originally started with. And what I always suggest that my clients do is something that I did in my agency, whenever you start working with someone, I want you to start a document like notion, Google Doc, piece of paper, whatever. And I want you to start writing down all of the additional problems, challenges, pain points, issues that you hear, that emerge, that come up, these will be things that you hear the client talking about, things you notice that are broken, that are outside of the scope of what you're working on, or just new challenges that you know are gonna emerge when you complete your initial engagement. And the beauty of this, and this is what my clients are making a lot of money do, okay, is when the engagement comes to a conclusion, it's very easy to pitch continuing to work with them to solve more problems. And listen, people love having their problem solved, especially when you're being proactive about it. So if you're not doing this, if you're not taking one client and turning it into a lot of more work, there's a very, very easy way to increase the value of each client that you work with. And tell you what, this is one thing all my high level clients have in common. They're constantly looking for new ways to add value, to be proactive, to help out, and their client love it. All right, next one, and this is huge. This is really, really, really important. To be getting to those high levels, six figures, multiple six figures. You have to have done the inner work to grow the business. And there's always an internal bottleneck in your business. When I start working with people one on one, generally speaking, it becomes clear to me in the first 10 to 15 minutes, that their biggest business problem is not a business problem at all. The biggest constraint is not external. It's internal, it's a belief problem. And I call this the internal bottleneck of the business. And I see this over and over again. One of the things that all my clients that are charging higher prices have in common is they are doing the inner work to grow the business because the founder ends up being the number one constraint of the business. Whatever external bottleneck exists in the business, it's really being constrained by an internal bottleneck of the founder. So let me just give you some examples of what this means. And then we'll talk about how to solve it. Okay, so here's an example, the marketing bottleneck. Huge bottleneck I see, especially with solar, pranore, small business type people is that the business is constrained by a lack of opportunity. And while referrals come in and you do great work, you're not marketing at a high level. Okay, you're not marketing at a level that creates the amount of opportunities that you need. need in order to grow. And when we do that calendar priority audit, which I often talk about, we realize like, oh, wow, yeah, you're like devoting no time to marketing at all. So that's the external constraint. So if you want to grow your business in this scenario, the external constraint is you just need to market more. OK? The bottleneck is literally that you're not marketing or not at the same level that you need to be because you have some degree of success from referrals, doing good work, being an expert, your personal brand, whatever. OK? So the connection is there's this external bottleneck marketing. But there's an internal bottleneck that is stopping the business from growing and having that excess of opportunity. And this is the inner work around visibility. All right, many people that I work with have this challenge. The challenge, the fear of being seen. Maybe we were like bullied growing up. You didn't want to put yourself out there. You're worried that you're going to be judged. You don't like public speaking. You say you're bad at it. You're embarrassed. All that stuff, right? At the end of the day, the business isn't really constrained by marketing. It's constrained by an inner bottleneck around visibility. Because usually if there's not an internal bottleneck, it's very easy to do the actions that unconstrained the business. OK? So if you don't tackle this at the root, which is the inner work, the business is just going to stay flatlined at the same level. This goes for any constraint. There's always an element where the founder is not taking action or not taking action at the level that they need to be because there's a degree of internal resistance. So this inner work is really, really important. Another one that's big is delegation. The founder struggles with the internal bottleneck of control because they're quite good at what they do. They feel like no one can do it like they can. And the inner work is realizing you need to let go of control in the business. And maybe the reason why you can't do that is because in all areas of your life, you are experiencing a need to control things. Maybe things were very unstable for you growing up as a child. And you felt like one of the ways that you created stability was through always being organized, controlled, on top of everything. OK? Another one is self-worth. Your beliefs about how money can be made. This is a really big one where people have this belief that the only way to make a ton of money is you need to suffer. That you need to-- don't get me wrong. You need to work hard to make money. But suffering is optional. And some people just believe that the only way that they can earn is through pain. And as a result, they create these business decisions that optimize their business to make them miserable, to ensure that they're the one doing the work, and they're the one suffering in order to get paid. And this can keep you stuck for a long time. So my high level clients, what they're doing, what they're paying attention to, is they're doing the inner work to grow the business. They're not just passively letting things happen to them. They're actively participating in some degree of inner work. So I always say you need three hires in your business once you get to a certain point, an accountant, a lawyer, and a therapist. OK? If you haven't ever scratched the surface of inner work, I can make it really freaking easy for you. Get a therapist or work with someone who understands the inner game of entrepreneurship a little bit, OK? Like myself. If you've gone deeper, I have some other modalities that I can recommend if you've done therapy. You're like, you're attuned. But just check out my self-stack, inner entrepreneur. That's a great place to start with that. But the table stakes is this, if you're not-- if you don't have some place where you can talk about what's going on with you internally, you're probably creating a lot of issues that you don't need to in other areas of your life. All right, so all my clients that are playing at that high level day are doing the inner work. They have some degree of appraisal of their inner state, and it's something that they're paying attention to. OK, final one that I'm going to give you, is a quick one. My clients are pitching clients the right way with the right clients. So just to give you an example, if you want to be closing six-figure engagements, you need to be working with clients that have a big enough vehicle to benefit from the capacity that you have. So if your target audience is 100k solo-pronors, small businesses that are not doing a lot of money or don't have a ton of profit, you're never going to be able to sell a six-figure engagement. They just don't have the capacity to majorly benefit from the value you can provide. So let me just give you and ballpark. OK, this is a litmus test. There's always stipulation, there are caveats or whatever. The clients you're working with need to be doing minimum $2 million a year if you want to close six-figure engagements. OK, that's just a nice round number. You can and likely should be working with clients much bigger than that, but 2 million a year should be a sweet spot where for the right investment with the right value, a six-figure investment can make sense. So if you're serious about closing 100k deals, you need to make sure your clients are big enough. They have a large enough vehicle to take advantage of the value you can provide, so doing minimum $2 million a year. All right, and if they're not, you need to get honest about who you're working with. OK, now with that out of the way, that is like the table stakes. OK, work with big clients. Duh. What's really interesting and what I am much, much more fascinated by is what you realize is when you start working with big-ass clients, talking like nine figures, billions, fortune 500, fortune 100. Once you start getting to big-ass clients, one of the things that you start to realize is price is not the main concern, and that you can easily lose a project by underpricing. You can lose the deal for being too cheap as the clients get bigger, because the main resistance you're up against with bigger clients is not that they don't have money to pay you. You're going up against opportunity cost and human resources. OK, it's not the money that they need to be sold on. They need to be sold on committing the resources of their team in order to do it. All right, so I've clients working with billion dollar companies, fortune 100. It's not the money that matters. OK, it is, do they want to commit to you? Do they believe that your point of view and your strategy makes sense so much that they will divert the attention of their team, of their strategy towards what you're saying? Right, because they're always asking of all the infinite things that we could do, what is going to be a priority? They have as much money as they need, but they can only have so many priorities. So at the higher level of budget, a lot of times, the way that you can get people to commit to a vision is to pay more money. Paying more means paying more attention. So if they don't feel like this is a big-ass investment worthy of them getting their team aligned on, it can just feel like not big of a deal, right? Like, if you pitch a billion dollar company, a hundred thousand dollar project, and you say, this is going to be the next big thing for you, they're going to be like, how could this possibly be important? This is how much we pay an average worker, right? So you need to understand that as the companies get bigger, it becomes more about priorities and selling them on why working with you and your strategy is the most important thing, and how everything fits together in terms of the internal dynamics within the organization. OK, so at the end of the day, these great clients, these clients that are closing these six-figure projects, they understand what needs to be said, how things need to be presented, and they're pitching the clients in the right way. All right, so I hope you found this helpful. These are some of the insights, some of the lessons that I have observed running my own business, helping other creative entrepreneurs, seeing under the hoods of a lot of businesses. Well, what are the clients that are crushing it, selling six-figure projects? What do they do? What do they have in common? And these are some of the things that I've noticed with all of them that seem to all fit the agenda. OK, so last thing I want to say is, if you want my help to help you hit this next milestone to bring in and close your first million, or your next million in your creative business, we can work together. There's a link below. We do a creative partnership, which is literally a partnership between you and myself. It's high-level consulting, where we're basically working together. My clients often call me a co-founder without a shares. And if you want my assistance to help you close that 100K, 250K clients while doing highly creative work, while creating a ton of freedom in your business, hit that button. Read on, you'll see how I work. I literally outline exactly what we would focus on together. So if it feels aligned, and it sounds like it makes sense, you can just shoot me a message, and we can talk and see if there's alignment there. So either way, I'm going to be doing more stuff like this in the future. It's a topic I love. like anytime I can talk to you. with the intersection between creativity, making more money, and inner work like I'm very, very happy. Okay, last thing I'm going to say is if you're early on in your journey, so you know, my like creative partnership, that's for businesses doing anywhere from 300 K to 5 million. And it's working very closely with me. I also have a program called How to Charge More. It's a live cohort that's going to be for you if you are trying to close five figure deals like higher or five figure deals, just raise your prices scale with higher prices basically. And you know, the goal is I help my clients to to 10X their pricing over the course of the cohort. I teach it over four weeks and we are having another live cohort coming up very soon. So there'll be a link below probably for weightless. Maybe when you're watching this, it's live, but you just hit that button below and you'll get all the details on that. So if you're early on in your journey, just hitting your first six figures, perfect place to start. Alright, that's it. I hope you got a ton out of this and I'll see y'all in the next one.