Rich People Buy Differently (So Price Like It) | Ep 949
44m 20s
The core argument is that financial success in business requires targeting wealthy customers because wealth is highly concentrated. The speaker illustrates that in the U.S., the top 1% holds more wealth than the bottom 90%, and in business, a small fraction of customers generates most profits, following Pareto's Principle. To capitalize on this, businesses should structure pricing with significant jumps between tiers (e.g., 5-10x increases) to align with the disparate spending power of different customer segments. A top-down strategy—starting with high-end, high-margin products or services—is advocated because it strengthens branding, simplifies operations by serving fewer clients, and is more profitable than competing for low-margin, high-volume sales unless one has substantial capital for automation. The summary emphasizes that mispricing by offering similarly priced tiers fails to capture the willingness of affluent customers to pay premium prices, which is key to scaling profitability.
You aren't making as much money as you want because you don't know how to get it from the people who've got it. My name's Alex Ramose, I run a portfolio of companies at Acquisition.com that during over $250 million per year, I did a book launch 12 weeks ago that did $106 million in sales in a weekend and broke a Guinness World Record for the fastest selling nonfiction book of all time. In this video, I'm going to explain a core shift in my understanding of how getting money actually works and why the rich do in fact get richer and I'm going to show you the math behind it and most importantly, hiking gain access to it. The first reason you aren't making as much as you want is because you're selling to people who don't have the money to give you. So think about it like this and this is really important. Imagine this pyramid as a representation of earning in the United States. What percentage of the people do you think earn 40% of the income? The top 10%. Earn 40% of the income in the entire US. Now that's income and that's pretty extreme but it's not even close to the difference when you look at, wealth. So US household net worth, okay, this is the value of their assets. Last year was $163 trillion and you're like, man, how am I going to pay rent? I'm like, let's get some of that 163 trillion. So this is going to blow your mind. So I want you to imagine that you had $100. Okay, so I'm going to equate this $163 trillion. It's now $100. Okay, and we're going to spread it out. Relative to how it actually is spread within the United States. So this is 100 people to represent 100% tiles in terms of net worth the United States. This $163 trillion, what would they have if there was 100 people to represent this $100? They would have $2.50. I'm just going to use bills because I don't feel like I haven't changed. So $2 out of that 100, the bottom 50. So the next 40% what do you think they would have? They're going to have 20, 25, 28 bucks. That's the next 40. Remember, we got $100 to distribute here. So the next 9%, so now we're getting the top 10, the top 10, the top 10, the top 10, of net worth in the United States. How much do you think they got? They got 20, they got 30, they got 35, they got 38. All right, $38 in just this 9%. Now, you ready for the drum roll? How much do you think the top 1% has? I mean, it's 1/10, right? So it can't be more than the other 9. What, right? I mean, you think that. The top 1, just the 1 guy, would have $32. 1 guy. Now, this means that this 1 guy has more than the bottom 90% combined. This is very important because it has implications for how you do business. So when you hear me say sell to the rich, they pay better. It's not some pithy statement. It's reality and it takes people a very long time to learn this. And people often take years before they actually start to figure this out. Usually there's belief issues. They're like, no one else could do this. And part of the reason is because everyone they know is poor. And they're like, there's no way I could sell something for that price. And so they make stuff against all the other small businesses to compete for these $2. Think about that for a second. You're putting all the resources because you see all these people, they're the ones that you're brushing shoulders with, they're the ones that you see in the street every single day. And you're trying to compete and slice these $2. 100 different ways, right? If you want to make money, go where the money is. So let's put this concept on steroids now and actually apply this to doing business. This is how big companies get big. They go where the money is at. And this is a breakdown of something called pretto's principle. You might have heard of it 80/20. It's one of those powerful concepts in business and most people still don't understand how to actually apply it. All right, so want you to freeze this idea in your head. Just look at the money here. $2 here, $28 here, $38 here. Now we're in the top 10 percent, right? And we have another 32 here. So I said earlier that this one guy is more than the bottom 90. But 69% of all the wealth is just in these 10 people. If this doesn't change how you do business, you are missing the plot. So the idea of 80/20 is that pretto, who is Italian economist, realized that there was this 20% of customers created 80% of the revenue. And you just noticed this 80/20 issue that continued to occur within all different types of data sets. And so that became his principle. Now here's where this gets really interesting. So within business, it totally range true. Where 20% of your customers will be responsible for 80% of your profits. And then here's where people miss the next point. Is that within this 80, within this 80%, 64% of the aggregate profit, right? Comes from just 4% of the people in there. 4 customers, if you had 100. And then of this 64, 51% of the profit comes from just the top 1%. Now, doesn't that all of a sudden start to make sense when you look at how the wealth is distributed, that the wealth is distributed in a way that also makes sense that the business what it gets profits in that way. And so we repeat this process and this is kind of power law within business. This is how you do less and make more. Profit takes into account the fact that a single person, even with more service, often doesn't cost that much more to handle than the other 99. So it's more work but significantly more profitable. Now this is only true under one very important condition. That you actually have a business model that allows them to pay more. Right? If you just only charge $10 for your thing, like this is one of my favorite things is the only thing worse than offering a $1,000 thing to somebody who's got a $100 budget is offering a $100 thing to somebody who's got a $1,000 budget. In the first scenario, you lose $100. In the second, you lose $900. Big difference. And so here's the important thing. If you have a model that allows for that, you have to understand that 99 out of 100 people are not the top 1%. Right? If we're pulling back here, all these people are not the top 1%. So you should expect them to say no to your expensive products and services. But when that whale comes, you should want to cap to an A-hab that bitch and get it done. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to a 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. What the constraint feels like? Like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it? And then what steps we actually took to graduate? And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's aptly free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you, all free. And so the reason that I talk about selling to the top 1% is that one of the most effective ways to build a business is from the top down. So what do I mean by that? Think about Tesla. We started with a $250,000 roadster and he had a very limited production. Very few people, more profitability per. What then happens? Well, then he was able to make the Model S and that was the next car. And then he made the Model 3 or Model Y, whatever. So he kept working his way down. But what's interesting about this is that when you anchor high, it makes sense. Think about from a branding narrative perspective. If I say, hey, I've got this really expensive car. It's amazing. It's super fast. And then I say, hey guys, many of you couldn't afford this. So I mean another car that's similar but more affordable for you. That brand narrative works because you anchored high. Now think about the reverse. Hey, I'm a budget discounter. And I'm going to now sell a really expensive car. It doesn't hit the same. Right? And so I love the top down approach because you have a brand reinforcer. But also from an operational perspective, being able to ship the amount of cars you have to ship for the Model 3, compared to the amount that he had to do for the roadster, it made more sense to start here because you can handle the volume. You might not have the operations to handle the amount of work that it requires to serve the masses. Like for sure, there is money at the bottom. There is. But you have to be doing it at very small, razor-than-margin with extraordinary volume. And unless you have the capital to create something that truly scales to that mass, you will probably just end up trying to squeeze the $2 for more than what they're worth. And so how do we actually translate this into pricing our products and services? This is super important. So here is my rule of thumb for upsells, taking to account that 20% of customers have far more spending power than the ones below. Now remember, we had $2 here and the next level at $28. So it was 14 times more wealth between just the bottom 50 and the next 40. But just using the Prado principle in terms of how can apply this pricing. Like, you not understanding this is why your business is not making you much profit as you want. All right? So my rule of thumb is that for every new tier is that you want to 5 to 10x your price and expect 20% of people to take it. Okay? So here's how it works. So let's say that you sell 10 customers. Okay, so you sell 10 customers to do. Let's do it again. Okay? Now, if you have eight of these customers at $10 per month, and you've got two of them at $50 per month, how much am I making on these guys? I'm making $80 per month in total on the bottom 80. And then I'm making $100 per month on my top 20% or my top two. And so by serving these two customers differently, we doubled the revenue of the business, which by the way, again, is my rule of thumb. I want each tier to bring me another double, like another full amount of revenue. Otherwise, I'm like, I don't know if it's worth creating the actual extra constraint of operations, right? But here's where it gets even nastier. Let's say that this covers the majority of our overhead. That means that this extra $100 might contribute 10 to one compared to this to our bottom line. And so sometimes when you make a move like this, if you were here and you had $80 and you were living your life on this 80, right? It's like, well, maybe your your your cost is 70 or you're taking 10 home. If you add this $100 in and maybe the cost on this is 20, you've got 80 left over, we five X the profits. So let's say our profit before this was 10 a month. And then we add this in and we add $80 a month in profit from this 100, right? Look at the difference in profit. We go from 10 to 90 just by adding this tier. And so the reason your business is not making this money and you're not making as much money as you want is because you're not priced appropriately for the people who actually have the money to give you. And so this is what everyone messes up. They say, hey, this is going to be my three pricing tiers, right? I'm going to have a $100 a month thing and I'm going to have $129 a month thing and I'm going to have a $100 and you know $39 a month thing. Okay, great. This is all the same price. It's a lot for a normie and just not a lot for everyone in the top 10%. And so to maximize revenue, you can think of it with four tiers of pricing. And to be clear, you don't need to serve everyone and the first product you have may not be your based tier. All right, so you might start here. I don't know yet. I don't know your business. But this is what you can walk through in terms of thinking through the pricing for your products and services. So let's assume that we have a thousand customers. All right. So on our, on our, our base tier, all right, so this is the lowest. $10 per month. And let's say we've got 800 customers at this level. Okay. Now our second tier, we might have a $100 per month. So 10 times that price with 20% taking it. All right. So that means we're going to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-ish people who'd qualify for this tier. Okay. And the next tier, we still have to follow our rule. Five to 10x. So that means we're going to be at 500 to 1000 a month for this next year. Just to keep it simple, I'm going to do 10x because it's nice and clean. All right. And so here, we're going to have maybe around 40. And they're like, wait, I have to wait a thousand customers. This would be 160. I'll read you the math. The dance you can see it. All right. Now our next tier might be again, five to 10 times this. And so it might be somewhere in this five to $10,000 a month. All right. And so if you're looking at this, you're like, holy cow. That's, those are very big differences in price. Yes. But they reflect how different the spending power that exists within customers is. All right. And so the main takeaway from this and is that if you're going to have an upsell, a very small percentage people are going to take it. And so you have to make it worth it. And so people will have these. I'll go a hundred and 129. It's like, it's the same pitch. It's the same price. The willingness to pay for that customer is the same. Let me show you how I've actually translated this into my own business. All right. Well, this and you can ignore the actual numbers of customers. But what do we have here? Ah, we have school. And then at a hundred dollars a month, what else do we have? We have school. This is our hobby plan. This is our pro plan. And so for me, the next number is $5,000, which is L1. And what's the next number after that? 35,000 dollars. Huh. Almost like it's between five to 10 times the price, which is L2. And then what do we have after that? We have something that's $135,000. So that's four times the price. All right. And this is L3. And what do I have underneath of that? No money because it's a portfolio company. And so the thing is, is it may take some time to build out this entire thing. I didn't start with school. I started building, you know, our brand. This is to be clear to start advisory practice that we have at acquisition.com. And so I'm just saying, like knowing this doesn't mean you need to do all of this at once. It takes years and it does take operational chops to pull this off, right? You want to add tears one at a time. My tip though is to start as high up as you can on this ladder for a few reasons, right? So the Tesla example gave earlier, the branding from top down versus bottom up is much stronger, like Honda making a better car is tough versus Royce making a Royce Royce light. It would be easier to play for them from brand position. The next reason is that I prefer to start with the unscatable. Why? Because it's easier to operationalize it serving these people because one, they actually believe it or not, as a percentage of that worth, this is actually lower than what this is for somebody who's poor, right? If you have $10 million, a hundred grand is 1% of what you've got. If you've got $1,000, a hundred bucks is 10% of what you got. And so for you, you will actually be more demanding for that 10% or that $100 reasonably so than somebody who's giving 1%, but from a business perspective, the hundred bucks versus the hundred grand, it's a gigantic difference. So you have an easier customer to deal with that has lower demandingness, but it requires, and to be clear, to get that $100 to equal 100,000 is you got to get 1,000 of those people. So it's serving the one customer for 100,000 easier than serving 1,000 at 100 as somebody who used to sell 100 dollar gym memberships for sure. And if we were to look at this from a profit contribution perspective, like what is actually dropping to the bottom line? It would look like this. All the profit is here, just like all the wealth is at the top. So you have to do more and charge more for it to people who can afford it. And the amount you do for a few people is almost always worth it for the far greater price for those people who are willing to pay it. Now you might ask, well, wait a second, I thought you said sell the rich, like, why do you have this $10 or this $100 a month thing? The only way to serve the poor masses, right? And I say this to be a little bit more like, you know, jarring, but to serve people with lower budgets is to have tons of money and then find a way to serve them in an automated manner at a low price. And if you do that, you can also make a lot of money, but via volume. But it takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of time. And the reason that Tesla has almost gone bankrupt multiple times is because it's incredibly hard. The reason most software companies like Netflix and Spotify and some of these big consumer, you know, companies, you know, who charged $13 to give you, think about how hard that is. Think about hard that businesses. They have to make world-class entertainment for all the different genres that someone might like just to earn their $13, right? Just to earn the equivalent of like a Chipotle bull. And again, I bring this up because some people come in saying, oh, I'm going to do that. So you're going to do that bootstrapped? No, these companies that you're looking to model literally got artificially inflated with outside capital to prop the business up until it would get to the point where it actually could make money. So to do something like this cost a fortune. And so the way that I'm trying to walk you through this is that 80% of businesses in the US or 78 are service-based businesses. And so you don't have an automated way to serve these masses. You likely don't. And so if you don't have an automated way, then you want to go in the complete other direction, which is I want to serve the best customer at the highest possible price, but people misprice their products and services. They say, okay, I'm, you know, my current core thing is $1,000. I'll make the next thing $1,500. It doesn't work that way. That's not how the buyer works. The buyer is at 5K 10K from the 1K thing. That's the next tier. That's the next rung on the ladder. All right? And so this hopefully should shift your perspective in terms of how pricing really works. A disproportionate amount of profits here. We have to make gigantic jumps with the assumption that very small percentages are going to take it, but still be okay with it because even a small number of people at a gigantic price is still a lot of money. So how do you actually translate this and put this into practice? Number one, stop selling from your own wallet, especially for one of the people who, you know, you're in that in that $2 category, right? You're that bottom 50% right now. I get it. I've been there. You have to forever imagine this is a gift forever imagine that everyone is rich. So here's the reality that will shock you. That top 10% Americans have a million dollar plus net worth. One in 10 people, one in 10 people, million dollar net worth. They've got the money. You just aren't selling them something that they want. And you might even be, and this happens a lot, especially for newer business owners. You might even be too cheap for them to even believe that you're good. Like we had a company that was in the health space a while back and looking at all the research, it was a doctor and all the stuff. And I just fundamentally believed that they were mispriced. And so what I did was I raised, I wanted to raise the price by double. You fought me back and forth forever. And I was able to finally get a 50% price race through. But guess what happened? We raised the price by 50%. That's a lot. What do you think it did to the close rates? They went up. They were so cheap compared to the promise and what they were delivering that people didn't even believe that it worked. And so some of you guys are so cheap because you're selling out of your own wallet. You're selling based on what your friends and family who might also be in that $2 bottom 50% are telling you. But why would you listen to people who don't have money on how to get money? They don't know where it is. They don't know how to get it. And more specifically, they don't know how to serve the people who've got it. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that if you're going to do this, listen to me on this. Whatever your upsell is, five to 10X the price. And then just make sure it's something that you'd be happy to deliver for five to 10 times the price. Sometimes I'll get pushed back from people who are like, "Oh, that would be so much work." And I'm like, "Cool. We have value." And we have price. Move one of them. Either do less or charge more. I would encourage you to just charge more. And so if I were to say, "Hey, I want you to 10 times the current price of your upsell, what would you do that would absolutely blow people away?" How much does that actually cost you? When you look at the cost compared to that 10X bigger price with a zero in the end of whatever your core offer is, you might find that it's like, actually, it's only like, you know, 5% of that price. It's like, right, really high margin. So as long as you're happy making more money, serving fewer people, go do that. The third one is that you should expect only one in five or one in 10 people to say, "Yes, expect more knows." And this is the sweet spot of making money, right? The sweet spot isn't the most yeses. It's the most money. And that is never with the most yeses. So if you pitch your 10 times bigger price to this bottom 50%, none of them are going to say, "Yes." And you're going to mistakenly believe that this is a bad idea. But the route is that you're just not talking to the people who have the money. And so you should expect that if you have a representative amount of people that you speak with, one in 10, maybe even one in 100, is the person who is the correct avatar. And for that person, you might also find, they'll just say, "Yeah, that sounds good." And you'd be like, "Oh my God." And I only say this to somebody who's had it happen for the first time, I can't even believe this is possible. I can't believe this person would give me this much money. It's because to them, it's not that much money. It's only that much money to you because you still live here. If you sell to rich people long enough, they will make you one of them. And so with your upsell, make it crazy. And this is called an anchor for a reason, right? If no one buys it, no big deal, or most don't, no big deal. But the good news is that it'll still help you sell the rest of everyone else, add a higher percentage, and even at a higher rate because it'll look like a good deal in comparison. And I said this before, but I'll say this again. The next reason is the only thing worse than selling a thousand dollar thing to a hundred dollar buyer is selling a hundred dollar thing to a thousand dollar buyer. In the first, you lose a hundred bucks. In the second, you lose 900. And not only that, that 900 is probably disproportionately profit. And this is what no one understands. This is why most businesses don't make money. They just try and sell to these people who are the biggest pain in the butt. And the thing is, is you see so many of them that you're like, oh, this must be how it works. No, it's not how it works. It's just how you're working. This is how the average business works, which is why the average business doesn't make money. They don't go to where the money's at. The next reason is you have to think about absolute profit rather than relative profit. And you'll be blown away. So a single person paying ten thousand dollars for something that costs two thousand dollars, a single person, right? One, right? Buying a ten thousand dollar thing that costs two thousand dollars is the same as four hundred people buying a fifty dollar thing that costs twenty five dollars. These are the same. So do not underestimate the power of large prices in small quantities. And so the reason that entrepreneurship is such almost like a spiritual journey is that you earn the right to charge more because you no longer think the smaller amount of money is worth your time. The reason that rich people get richer is less because there's some magic behind anything. But there's only two real forces in my opinion that make the rich get richer. The first is math, which is that compounding is a thing. When you have a billion dollars next year, it's one point one billion. If you do nothing, a hundred million dollars is made because the assets went up. Very difficult to outwork compounding over a longer period of time. That's a reality. And as that capital aggregates, which it does in capitalism, which is a system for allocating capital, that's the point of capitalism, is that it will always shift to the people who are the best at allocating it. And so in time, if everybody starts at even, on enough generations, eventually the capital pools. It's how all capitalism has worked out since the dawn of time. And so, that's what creates this great divide. The second thing, which you can do something about, which is why I'm making videos like this, is that there are beliefs that people who have money have, which translate to behaviors that poor people don't have and translate to different behaviors. So what does that mean? A rich kid will choose not to pursue a lower leverage opportunity because it's not worth their time because they were taught it wasn't worth their time. The career paths that they'll have to choose from will be significantly skewed towards things where they'll get disproportionate returns. And a lot of that is just knowledge about it, not even knowledge how to do it. I remember when I first found out I'd never heard of management consulting, I'd never heard of private equity, I'd never heard of investment banking, I'd never heard of any of this stuff when I went to college because where I was from in Baltimore, a rich person was a doctor. That was a rich person. And so, and to be fair, my dad's a doctor. So I felt I was like, okay, cool. When I went to Vanderbilt, I felt like one of the poorest people there because I'd never seen what New York money was. I'd never seen what California money was. I'd seen what Baltimore rich was, which is that you have, you know, my dad is a business with two secretaries and you know, we always had food. I never had to worry about it. I still have the immigrant mentality of like we don't use, you know, paper towels because they're expensive, but like that's just because he came here with a thousand bucks and I that's still got transmitted. In some ways, you have to hit above your weight class, right? And the story of when I actually made my first high ticket sale in my life was when I actually said a number that I wanted the person to say no to and then they said yes. That was how that actually that belief was broken for me. So as much as I want to say like, this is what you have to do. I'm this guy, you know, guy on YouTube that you just saw or whatever, like, Laylon, I were selling, we started doing these gym launches, we would sell memberships through gyms, we would collect the money and that was the model we'd fly around the country. That's what we did. There were some issues with that model, which I've talked about in other videos and so then all of a sudden Layla started selling weight loss directly made a little brand for her called Queen Transformation. We started selling these $500 online training packages over the phone and that started working. And so I had these gyms that I was supposed to do these launches at that I decided I wasn't going to do them anymore. And so I had eight gyms I was supposed to call up and like basically cancel on them. And so on the first phone call, the guy was actually referral and he was like, dude, you saved my, my friends gym. Like I know you can do this. And I was so beat down at this point. I was like, dude, I'm not like, I'm not doing it. And he kept asking for it. And then I finally I was like, all right, dude, like I'll show you what I do, but I'm not flying out there to help you if you can't close. And mind you, I come from the done for your word of like, I literally did everything. I fronted the money, I front of the cash, I built, you know, I'd literally buy the tables, I print the contracts out, I'd run the ads, we'd work the leads, and we'd sell them straight in the gym. So I did everything. So me saying that was just a hope that he would just like say screw off. And he was like, no, I get it, I get it. And he was like, well, how much? And so I said, and remember, I'm just to sell in $500, $16 week training packages where you have to show up like every, you know, three times a week to do stuff. I said $6,000. So for me, it was a 12x compared to the price that I was used to selling at. And I just said it's, I was like, he's just going to say nope. And then I can just hang up and just move on to my next call. And he said $6K. And I was like, yeah, $6,000. And he was like, done. And I remember like floating out of my body in this moment being like, holy shit, six grand from one call. And I didn't, I didn't even have the thing. I didn't have the thing that I had sold him yet because I just didn't think he was going to say yes, I didn't think to have to build it, right? And so I was like, holy shit. And so then the next, so I had seven more calls. I called the next guy. Same conversation was like, now I got to build this thing. But it wasn't really smooth. I was like, he's like, how much? I was like eight grand. He was like, yeah, done. And I was like, eight grand. I was like, I'm up $14,000. And I'm not even in a day. It's in a morning. So then I had six more calls. And by the end of the, you know, the next call, same thing, how much 10K next call. And by the end of the day, I done $60,000 in collected. And I was like, what the fuck just happened? I had no idea what was going on. It's a lady came back after she was selling the $500 bimper ships. And I was like, babe, I was like, I just made 60 grand. And she was like, what? She was like, I thought we were doing the way less thing. I was like, no, I think we're still doing the gym thing. I think we're just doing it wrong. And this is why I'm telling you this because like that moment of all the moments in my entire career, that was the moment where I elevated. That was the moment where my life really changed. And so I bring this up because you might be like, well, what price point should I start? It's going to be relative whether you're selling to consumers, you're selling to businesses. And this is just a couple rules of thumb that I'll just tell you that I've kind of worked around. I'd say that for a consumer, an impulse purchase is $500, $600, a higher ticket purchase is usually going to be somewhere between $3,000 and $10,000. Typically. And that's again, for services. If you're looking at assets, the different game, your buying houses and cars, the different game. But if you're selling just like pure, I'm going to help you do some stuff, fix some stuff. That's usually a price one that's quite a higher ticket. Business, it really depends on the size business. If you're selling to Disney, you can sell a billion dollar thing. If you're selling to just small businesses on Main Street, remember, some of them are poor too. And so for them, though, a more normal price for something will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of like, I'd say like a mid-tier, it's probably two to three thousand dollars a month. A cheaper price for a business owner would be somewhere in the neighborhood of like, $400 to $800 a month. Call it closer to $500 a month as like a cheaper number for a business. And you're like, $500 a month is cheaper a business. It's like, yeah, super expensive for a consumer. Pretty cheap for a business. And so if you're like, well, where do I start? Well, if you're currently not making money, add a zero and then think, what would I deliver for that? That's a great place to start. All right. And the thing is, I know that part of you is fighting this. Like in your head, you're like, there's no fucking way anyone's going to buy that. No, there's no way the 50 poorest people you know could buy it. But for sure, the people above that line can. And part of the reason that you never close 100% of prospects is because you're going to talk to some of these people. And the price point that you have to get an 80% close rate on, for example, is a price point that this person can spend five to 10 times more than the bottom 50. That is why the tiered pricing is so important. Is that and then you might find that you might just not want to sell to the bottom 50% until you have enough capital to actually build infrastructures. You can do it in an automated fashion. One of the big issues, I would say that poor people think about compared to rich people is that poor people will think in terms of cost. And I would say rich people will think in terms of the ratio, the return cost versus value. So if I were to say, hey, I've got this thing that's, let's say it's $20,000. A poor person just hearing the price would say, that's expensive. But if I said a rich person, if I said, hey, my thing is $20,000, they wouldn't then say that's expensive. They would say, for what? And if I said share a class A share of Berkshire Hathaway, which is an $800,000 stock for $20,000, that would be the deal of the century. If I said it was $20,000 for a brand new Lamborghini, they would say that's a great deal. So even though it costs a lot of money, it's great value. And this is what I struggled for such a long time to understand because it was like, I almost had this emotional reaction to zeros. It's like, I've asked all zeros, I was like, oh my god, it's so much, right? And so I know where you're coming from because you almost want to, you almost choke on the price. So I'll give you a couple little tactics for this to like get around it. So one is if you're in person, you can write down the price and then turn it and slide it to them where you can use a calculator and turn it to them if you like literally choke on the price because some people do do that. The second thing that you can do, and this is a really good little little pricing hack for selling, is before you say the price, you say, hey, for example, the price, it's super expensive. And so what's beautiful about telling someone it's expensive before we tell them the price is that if someone's rich, they're going to immediately think what's expensive for them. And so they're going to think a number and then you're going to say the number and they're going to literally be like, oh, fine. If they're poor and you say it's expensive, they're going to brace themselves for a number that's big. And then we give them that number, they were at least braced for it. And so in either way, you actually create what I would consider an emotional anchor that's perfectly accommodating to the buying power of the prospect. And most sales people get choked up right at that point. So it's like, give yourself a breather, it's going to be expensive. You take a breath, they take a breath, then you deliver, right? So just a little tactic that works and also can help increase sales. So a good way to know if you're actually underpriced is to actually look at your close rates. All right. And so if your close rates are 80% or let's say 60 to 80, I'll put this in tears for you. 50 to 60, 40 to 50, and then 30 to 40, and then 30. Okay. So let's say these are your close rates. So that means if you talk to 10 people, here you close eight, right? If you're closing 80%, you probably right now have it a two to three X in pricing. Sorry, a three to four X in pricing, excuse me, a three to four X in pricing just sitting there. I know that sounds absurd. But think about it, you're going to get the 80% are not going to say, yes, I'm going to be very clear. You might drop to like 35%. But if 35% of people are paying four times more, you're making 120% of the revenue that you were making before. All right. And so like you're making way more money. Now at 60, 80, you probably have a two to three X that you have sitting there in price. If you're between 50 and 60, you probably have a 1.5 X to 2 X sitting there. If you're at 40 to 50%, you're probably at 1.25 to 1.5 X. All right. If you're here, I consider this to be appropriately priced. If you're closing 30 to 40%, you're priced about right. If you're below 30, I would say get better at selling, which part of getting better at selling can be make the offer better or talk to better customers. All right. And so sometimes you will try and pitch a high-ticket thing, but not have your core offer, which might be lower. So you have an anchor offer. But the people that you're speaking with, you didn't qualify them. So if I want to say, hey, I'm talking to a million dollar plus business owners, I will have a significantly higher close rate if I'm only talking to them. And so most times you will dramatically change the feeling of your life if you just say we only do with customers about this. Remember all that money that was sitting on the table? So if you're looking at figuring out, who you want to serve, look at these people. Where do you think you'd draw your line? If you say, I would like to make money. Do you want to talk to these people all day? Or do you want to talk to these people all day? And these people speak differently than these people. And so part of what many of y'all's marketing is, and your price point actually tell these people, this isn't for us. So as somebody who is one of these people, now, so I feel like I'm like calling back and telling you what it's like on the other side, right? Is that if I see somebody who sells B2B services and they sell something that's $1,500 a month, I know it's not for me. I don't need to know anything else because I know that they're not advanced enough as a business to know how to cater to a company of my size. They just can't handle it. And so I have to do with an entrepreneur who's got a $20,000 month, $50,000 a month, subscription for whatever their services are because I would believe that they could actually deliver. If you've got $69 here, $28 here and $2 here, and think about the amount of conversations you got to have here. You got to have 10 conversations that have access to $69. Or you have to have 90 conversations that have access to $28 plus two, $30. Which would you rather have? Your price will signal two rich people that this is for them. And your marketing, if you're running flash sales and discounts and all that kind of stuff, you're telling these people who have money, this isn't for you. I'm inexperienced. I'm a low level business owner or I'm a business that purposely I might be a high level business owner, but I've truly made this dedicated to the masses. So all of what I described is something called lead scoring or lead qualification. And so what that means is that there's a certain type of customer that's more likely to buy your thing, right? Somebody who has more money is more likely to buy your more expensive thing. And so if we know that the people who have the money are the ones that buy our expensive thing, then we should try and just tell the world we only cater to these people. So what will happen is your marketing, the volume will go down. The cost per call, the cost per lead will go down. But the amount you make will go away up. And so let me give you a real life scenario. When we optimize for leads for my book launch, we paid about five bucks a lead when we optimize just for leads, which is volume, all right? And we had another campaign that optimized for purchases. And those leads cost $17. The question is which one would you go with? Now the poor business owner would say, well, $5 leads are better than $17 leads. The rich business owner would say, well, what kind of leads do I get? And so these $5 leads, after we finish the campaign, we're worth $20. Okay, 4x return, there's something there. The $17 leads worth $189. I don't know about you. I'd rather spend $17 to make $189 than $5 to make $20. And so one of the things that will change when you start serving the upper class, if you will, is that your cost per unit will go up. Your cost to deliver, your cost per sale will go up, but not proportional to the amount of money you will make. So I had to pay three and a half times more for something that was worth six and a half times that is a six. No, that's nine. Nine and a half. So I had to pay three and a half times as much for something that was worth nine and a half times the value. Which one's the better deal? This is an 11x. This is a 4x. This is what the lesser affluent do not understand. And this is why their businesses do not make more money. Now, the next thing that will come up is people will say, "Hey, I would sell for a really expensive thing, but no one will buy it," because there's guys down the street who will sell for less, because they're brokeies, selling to brokeies. You're right. And that's because you can't sell the same thing. You got to sell something different, which is why I wrote my first book on this, which is the first chapter is you're selling a commodity. You're selling something that someone could recently hold your thing and their thing up and say, "These two things are the same." So I'll chip pick the cheap one. And that's reasonable for them to do it. The idea is that we want to price our things so high and being such a clearly different category that people say, "These two things must be different. I've to analyze these independently." And so within the context of, "Would I get for my money?" The rich person wants three things. They want it to be fast, they want it to be easy, they want it to be guaranteed. And so everything that you do that is more difficult for these people, you have to make easier and these people will be willing to pay for it. And so you preview some of that work for them. You preview some of the food, you go ahead of time, you drive ahead, you scout the location, you drive it to the door, whatever it is. But when you look at, "What is it cost for me to drive this thing to the door?" It cost me 10 bucks, but they're willing to pay 100 for it. Whereas this person's nagging me on the last five bucks. It's a different game, but this is where all the money's at. And as you get further and further in business, you'll find out that it might be 40-year-old moms with at least two kids that live in these neighborhoods or these zip codes. That's the ones that are the best customers for your B2C thing. It might be if you're in home services, we only deal with home's over a million dollar value, which you can check. You know, there are adges and pull it up on on Zillow or any other website before you even talk to the leads. You know what kind of house value you're getting into. Like having those options available will show you in your CRM or whatever way you track data that some customers spend more. Then you want to take all that time and effort and look at those customers and say, "What makes these people different from everyone else?" And then that becomes your front end marketing. And also talking to those customers and saying, "Hey, what about my thing attracted you to my service or my product?" They will tell you the things that these people value, which will be different than what these people value. And these people almost exclusively value price as in they want the cheapest thing. They don't even want to hear because the same reason, they're traumatized by zeros. And so you can't judge whether you're priced properly by people who can never pay it to be in it. So in past videos, I've also talked about how like when you start, you should start for free. I have a Chick-fil-A approach to pricing. It's like, "You'd see they're free or it's full price." Right? Now, I want to keep doing free until I feel a thousand percent confident that I can deliver and then I go full price. Now, within my leads book, which by the way, you can grab all three of the books for free, hardback. I think five or six bucks each just cover the shipping. You can get all three. It's a special we have right now. If it runs out, apologies, glass, I'm gonna do it a couple weeks. I break down how to go from zero to hero in terms of pricing inside of this book. Now, part of that is me having to deal with this psychology of people who are beginners. Right? And so my preference is to have kind of an algorithmic approach to somebody who can, like, "I'm telling you this so that you can jump the line. If you just cannot wrap your head around it, start for free, and then whatever your price is going to be, charge 20 percent of that. Right?" And you're like, "Great." And then do that for the next five customers. And then after that, bump it by 20 percent and then bump it by 20 percent and then bump it by 20 percent, five and 20, five and 20, five and 20 until eventually you're closing one out of three people. When you're at one out of three people, your price is appropriately. And at that point, what do we do? We want to keep raising price over time because the reality of how services work is that you can tell how advanced the service business owner is by how expensive their product is. Because if you're actually good, you have more demand than you have supply. If you have more demand than you have supply, what should you do? Raise price. That's how the supply demand curve works. And so you continue to raise your price until you're at a point where you're at equilibrium where you're like, "You can handle the amount of demand that you have." If you're still good, you still get more demand because word of mouth continues and you keep going up. And that becomes the virtuous cycle of price and services. Because when you have a higher price, you have higher gross margins. You have higher, better talent. When you've had better talent, you can deliver better services. We have better service. You get better reputation. We have better reputation. What does that do? It drives to mid. Which then drives price. And so this is the cycle that every business has to go through. And you signal to the marketplace, you communicate to the marketplace. Pricing is a two-way communication. You tell them what you're about and then they will self-select as the correct customers for you. And so you can see where someone's out in their business journey by how high they are priced compared to people who sell comparable services. Because people will very much take price as an indication of value. They just do. Because in general, things that are price higher are better. Not always, but often. It's a good enough rule of thumb that people in general will do that. Like, this might blow your mind if you've like not met people with money. When they go to shop out of store, they price from high to low. They literally look at the most expensive stuff first. Because that's probably the stuff that's for them. They don't want to save money anymore. They want to get better value. They want better stuff. They want to skip the line. They want to get it faster. They want it better. They want it to be a higher quality, you know, higher quality ingredients. They want it to be more made by somebody who's more noteworthy. All of these things. And fundamentally, that is what this book goes into tremendous detail talking about, which is the offers book. All right. So with that big said, sell to the rich. They pay better. It's better to sell fewer expensive customers than many row customers. And if you sell to rich people for long enough, they will make you want to build.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Wealth distribution is extremely concentrated, with the top 1% holding more wealth than the bottom 90% combined, meaning businesses must target affluent customers to access significant money.
Adopt a top-down business approach by starting with high-priced, high-margin offerings for wealthy clients to build brand authority and operational capability before potentially serving broader markets.
Summary:
The core argument is that financial success in business requires targeting wealthy customers because wealth is highly concentrated. , the top 1% holds more wealth than the bottom 90%, and in business, a small fraction of customers generates most profits, following Pareto's Principle. , 5-10x increases) to align with the disparate spending power of different customer segments.
A top-down strategy—starting with high-end, high-margin products or services—is advocated because it strengthens branding, simplifies operations by serving fewer clients, and is more profitable than competing for low-margin, high-volume sales unless one has substantial capital for automation. The summary emphasizes that mispricing by offering similarly priced tiers fails to capture the willingness of affluent customers to pay premium prices, which is key to scaling profitability.
FAQs
You're likely selling to people who don't have the money to give you. The wealth distribution is extremely concentrated, so targeting customers with higher spending power is key.
Wealth is highly concentrated; the top 1% holds more wealth than the bottom 90% combined. This means a small segment of the population controls most of the financial resources.
The Pareto Principle states that roughly 20% of your customers generate 80% of your profits. This pattern often repeats, with a tiny fraction (like the top 1%) contributing a disproportionate share of profit.
Price tiers should increase by 5x to 10x between levels, expecting about 20% of customers to move to each higher tier. This aligns with varying customer spending power and concentrates profit from high-value clients.
Start by selling a high-priced, premium offering to affluent customers first. This builds a strong brand narrative and operational capability before expanding to more affordable, mass-market products.
Wealthy customers often demand less relative to their spending, are easier to serve in smaller volumes, and contribute disproportionately to profits. Serving the masses requires massive scale and automation, which is capital-intensive.
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