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PROVEN Strategies to Attract High Ticket Clients and 10x Your Income w/ Daniel Priestley
Chris Do and Daniel Priestley reveal the positioning and scarcity tactics needed to attract clients who pay 10x your current rates.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · October 18, 2024
The High-Ticket Myth
There is a pervasive myth in the creative and consulting world. The myth is that a bigger client means bigger problems. That a project with an extra zero on the price tag brings ten times the stress, ten times the micromanagement, and ten times the headaches. So you avoid them. You stick to the comfortable, familiar, and frustratingly small projects.
This is a mistake. It is a costly, career-limiting assumption.
In a recent conversation with The Futur’s Chris Do, entrepreneur and author Daniel Priestley dismantled this myth piece by piece. “My experience with super high-end clients is that they're completely reasonable,” Priestley states. “Small things are not a big deal to them.”
The reason is simple. High-ticket clients, whether they are a corporation with a $250,000 budget or an individual paying $50,000 for coaching, have a fundamentally different relationship with money and time. Their ability to generate a return on investment is exponentially higher than that of a small business.
Priestley offers a sharp analogy. “If you could make Lewis Hamilton drive one second faster around a racetrack, that's worth millions of dollars to him,” he explains. “But if you could teach me to drive one second faster around my neighborhood, that's not worth anything.”
Making good go to great is worth a fortune. Fixing something that is already broken is often not.
This distinction is critical. The service you provide gains its value not just from your skill, but from the context of the buyer. A logo for a local dry cleaner has a limited impact on their business. A new brand identity for a Fortune 1000 company is a multi-million dollar asset. Same skill. Different buyer. Radically different value.
The Two Types of Problems
The businesses that break through, the ones that become massively profitable and sell for millions, understand a core principle. They solve problems for a specific type of client.
Daniel Priestley frames it as a choice. You can serve clients who throw time at their problems, or you can serve clients who throw money at their problems.
This is not a subtle distinction. It is a canyon-sized gap that separates struggling freelancers from thriving entrepreneurs.
Priestley sees this pattern constantly. “I was talking to some young guys the other day, they're like, ‘Oh, we're going to work with students who are struggling.’ I'm like, these are people who like to throw time at problems. They don't like to throw money at problems.”
Creative professionals are particularly susceptible to this trap. They are drawn to nonprofits, unfunded startups, and passion projects. These clients have endless time to micromanage, to second-guess, and to demand revisions. They have no other tool. They cannot throw money at the problem, so they throw their time, and yours, at it instead.
A high-ticket client operates from the opposite principle. They want to buy a solution. They want to write a check and have the problem disappear. Their time is their most valuable asset, and they guard it fiercely.
Do points out the painful irony. “Designers love to work with nonprofits…and they find themselves having to pull like tooth and nail to get some money from them. And then they're super micro, they like to micromanage everything.”
Your client’s budget is a direct reflection of their problem-solving philosophy. If you want to build a high-margin business, you must deliberately target the money-throwers. Your expertise is the solution they are willing to pay a premium for to save their own time and energy.
The Gold Mine in Your Rearview Mirror
Before you can attract a high-end client, you must build a case for why you are the only choice. High-ticket buyers are not looking for a vendor. They are looking for a shortcut to a guaranteed result. They need to de-risk their investment, and they need to do it quickly.
Your job is to make it easy for them. According to Priestley, most creatives are sitting on a gold mine of untapped credibility: their own history.
“I think of your last 10 years as almost like a gold mine that contains all these gold nuggets,” he says. “And those gold nuggets are stories, it's pedigree, it's experience, it's intellectual property, it's the networks that you've got, it's the brands that you've worked with.”
The problem is an addiction to the next thing. Creatives are conditioned to believe “you’re only as good as your last piece of work,” as Do notes. This forward-only focus means they never stop to catalog, compile, and communicate the value they have already created. They make their prospects work too hard to figure out if they are a good fit.
This is not bragging. This is an act of service. You are saving the client time. Your pedigree, your awards, your client list, and your results are clues that help them make a fast, confident decision. This is a core tenet of effective positioning, a concept Do has explored in his personal branding workshops.
Priestley recommends a tactical approach to mining this history. It starts with collecting your metrics and building your case:
- Numbers: How many clients have you served? What was the combined project value? Can you aggregate the results, such as the total revenue uplift your clients experienced?
- Brands: List the recognizable companies you have worked with. Big brands act as a powerful signal of trust and quality.
- Awards: Industry recognition serves as third-party validation, saving a potential client from having to do that evaluation themselves.
- Stories: The most potent assets are your stories of success. They provide context, demonstrate process, and create an emotional connection.
To excavate these stories, Priestley provides a simple but powerful prompt he calls The Magic Sentence: “I did something special for a certain type of client and we got a remarkable result. Let me tell you about it.”
By systematically going through your past, year by year, and finding the best story that fits this framework, you build an arsenal of compelling case studies. These are not just project recaps. They are evidence of your ability to bend reality and deliver a transformation.
Stop Being a Worker Bee
When you present yourself to the world, clients are subconsciously sorting you into one of three buckets. Your ability to command high-ticket fees depends entirely on which bucket you land in.
According to Daniel Priestley, these are the only three positions that exist in the mind of a buyer:
- The Newbie: This person needs experience. When you approach a client and they offer you a project “for exposure,” you have positioned yourself as a newbie. “That’s your fault,” Priestley says directly. “The way you communicated, the way you showed up, led them to believe that you were a newbie.”
- The Worker Bee: This is a trained, qualified professional. They get paid the industry-standard rate. The primary question they get from clients is, “What’s your day rate?” or “What’s your hourly rate?” Most service providers live and die in this bucket, competing on price and availability.
- The Key Person of Influence: This person is in a category of one. They are seen as an authority, a specialist with a unique perspective. They have a niche, a following, intellectual property, and a track record of remarkable results. They don't get asked for their hourly rate; people line up to pay their fee, whatever it is.
The goal is to consciously move yourself from a Worker Bee to a Key Person of Influence. This is not about arrogance or ego. It is a strategic shift in positioning. It begins with how you talk about what you do.
Priestley shares a stunning example from one of his workshops. A woman introduced herself as a financial planner with 23 years of experience. Her delivery was flat, her description generic. She was a textbook Worker Bee.
Priestley spent five minutes asking her questions, using his Magic Sentence prompt. A completely different story emerged.
Her new pitch, paraphrased by Priestley, sounded like this: “For the last 23 years, I've been helping rural families that own farms to plan for the next two generations. I help spouses who are marrying into the rural farming family to assimilate into farming life. I help the grandparents who have aged out of being hands-on to find their new purpose. I run family team retreats where we align to values.”
She wasn't just a financial planner. She was the world's leading expert on multigenerational wealth and cultural transfer for farming families. The perceived value of her time in the room went up tenfold, from a few hundred dollars a day to several thousand. She hadn't invented anything. She just finally learned how to talk about the work she had been doing all along.
This transformation from generalist to specialist is the heart of becoming a Key Person of Influence. It requires you to find your niche and own it completely. It's about taking ownership of your unique ability to solve a very specific, high-value problem for a very specific group of people.
The Power of Scarcity
Once you have positioned yourself as a Key Person of Influence, the next step is counterintuitive. It will feel uncomfortable. It might even feel reckless.
You must become less available.
“Super high-end clients, even though they want you to be available to them once they're a client, they don't want you to be available before they're a client,” Priestley reveals. People want what they cannot easily have. Scarcity signals value.
The tactic is to officially close your books for new business. You are not taking on any new clients right now. Instead, you create a waiting list or an expression of interest form.
This simple act completely reframes the sales conversation. You are no longer chasing clients. You are curating them. The dynamic shifts from you needing them to them needing to qualify for your time.
Priestley advised a video production company owner to do exactly this. “I said, well, completely officially you're closed for this year,” he recounted. The owner's job was to reach out to his network, share a success story using the Magic Sentence, and then state: “Just letting you know that we now don't have any capacity for new clients 'til the end of the year. But if you're interested in doing something similar in the year ahead, let me know, and I'll give you the link to join our waiting list.”
The goal was to get 40 qualified names on that list. Until he hit that number, he was not allowed to take on another client. This creates real, tangible demand. It builds social proof and psychological leverage.
The Cinderella Principle
A waiting list is not just a tactic; it is the first step in a larger strategy Priestley calls The Cinderella Principle.
The story is well known. The prince wants to find his perfect match, so what does he do? He throws a giant ball, inviting hundreds of potential candidates. This is your waiting list, your expression of interest form. It is the act of attracting a wide pool of interested parties.
At the ball, he identifies his ideal partner, Cinderella. But he loses her. To find her again, he uses a rigid, non-negotiable criterion: the glass slipper. Only one person fits.
This is where you shift from attraction to selection. With a healthy waiting list, you are now in a position of power. You get to define your “glass slipper,” a set of criteria for your perfect client. This turns the entire sales process on its head, moving it closer to the “irresistible offer” model where clients apply to work with you.
You can tell prospects, “In order to take you on as a client, I've got some key criteria that I would want to check in with you on. I've figured out five questions that tell me whether I can add massive value to you or not.”
Now you are the one conducting the interview. You are the one with the high standards. This posture is magnetic to high-ticket clients, who respect and are attracted to others who value their own time and expertise.
This strategy is for those looking to level up an existing business. For those who are just starting out or “dead broke,” Priestley’s advice is different: become a master’s apprentice. Find someone who is so good they are swamped with work and become their go-to supplier. Feed on their energy, learn their process, and build your own pedigree through association.
But for the established professional ready for the next leap, creating scarcity and applying a rigid selection filter is the fastest path to a roster of high-end clients who respect your process and pay your premium fees without question.
You Get What You Pitch For
There is a voice of doubt that echoes in the mind of many creatives and consultants. “Easy for Daniel to say. Easy for Chris to apply. But what about me? I’m just John Doe.”
Priestley has a sharp, immediate response to this line of thinking. “You've just given me an incredible pitch,” he says. “We get what we pitch for, and we're always pitching.”
The statement “What about someone who’s just a loser nobody like me?” is not a question. It is a pitch. It’s a declaration of identity that you broadcast to the world, and the world responds in kind. It is a form of self-sabotage, closely related to the limiting beliefs associated with imposter syndrome.
If you pitch yourself as a newbie, you will be offered experience. If you pitch yourself as a commodity, you will be asked for your hourly rate. If you pitch yourself as an unremarkable “John Doe,” you will be overlooked. The story you tell yourself becomes the story others believe about you.
The shift to attracting high-ticket clients is not just tactical; it is psychological. It requires a discovery of your own value and an identity shift. You must see yourself as a Key Person of Influence before anyone else will.
This begins with the work. It begins with looking back, connecting the dots of your past successes, as Steve Jobs famously advised. You must find the patterns, name your unique intellectual property, and articulate the specific, remarkable results you can produce.
You are not inventing a new identity. You are discovering the one that has been there all along, buried under years of chasing the next project and ignoring the gold in your past. You have to do the work to excavate it.
The results will not be instantaneous, but the shift in your own energy and confidence will be. The next time you present yourself could be the time that everything changes. Because you are always pitching. The only question is what you are pitching.
TRANSCRIPT
I think they think of talking about their projects and who they work with as some form of bragging just make it easier for clients to figure out if you're a good fit or not don't make them work so hard cuz if you do they're going to go somewhere else if you position yourself
as a newbie you'll get treated like a newbie when someone says oh the client just offered me experience you know I could come and do this thing for experience designers love to work with nonprofits or unfunded startups cuz all they got is time they don't have money they can't throw money at it
but they just love to go there the businesses that really become profitable and really end up selling for millions they solve a problem for a client who likes to throw money at their problems not time at their problems I'm going to share with you something that's tactical that actually leads to hiring clients
and it's going to be counterintuitive and the counterintuitive thing is you need to hey everybody what's up welcome to the podcast and in case you recognize this face over here it's probably because you've seen it many many times he the returning Champion his name is Daniel Priestley and he's been here one two
three times so this is our fourth episode together and we're now in a different place different space we're here in Santa Monica my old stomping grounds and we're right above the Third Street prominade so Daniel's been jet setting and we keep bumping each each other all the time and in case you haven't
seen those videos before I'm going to put the links in the description or wherever else you can see this video you'll see those check those out first and then come back to this episode save this one for later Daniel welcome back so good to be on the show thank you very much for
having me back number four number four we are we running out of things to say I don't think so I think we're GNA smash this one this is I think we've been building up for this okay well that no pressure no pressure okay Daniel I think you put out a a something on
X or tweet or something like that about what people want us to talk about and they're talking about how to get like high-end clients 10 high-end clients next not just one they're super greedy they want 10 10 that's kind of two months of just holidays okay I guess okay so first maybe we
have to put some definitions around what do you think they mean by first high-end clients yeah a great great question I think it's every business has like a client who spends way more money than most um so it's got to be a client that for you makes you go oo right that feels
big so let's say you're a coach or a consultant most clients spend five grand this would be someone spending 25 to 50 Grand okay um so maybe 5 to 10 times more than a typical average client um maybe you're a an agency uh you've got most of your clients doing something for 20
or 30 grand and then someone comes along and says hey we've got a 230 Grand budget um it's like oh okay yep I want to win that that would change the game that would be pretty good I was at a party the other day and this guy said my business is really risky
because we signed up one client who spends 200 Grand a month and he said all of my other clients combin to less than half a million and I've got this uh client that's doing 2.4 million for the year yeah so that's super high-end right seven figure what do you think of as highend
well I I think that's a pretty good place to start where it's not an incremental difference it's an exponential difference it's an orders of magnitude more than your typical client and I think we we when we smell one or we see one we're like it's a whale everybody let's do everything we can
to bring the whale in because here's the shocking thing that a lot of people don't realize they think okay number one when you have a really big client you have to do totally different things not necessarily true and you you and and that the other thing is that they're going to be really
high maintenance they're going to nitpick every little thing completely the opposite so let's dispel that myth first because although the idea is very attractive to our listeners that having a big client that's going to spend five three to five or even 10x of what you normally get that would just cause their blood
pressure to go up because of those fears but let's dispel that myth first my experience with super high-end clients is that they're completely reasonable um small things madean a big deal to them uh and actually their ability to get a return on investment is normally so high that even just doing a small
thing well will actually get them return on investment even though they've spent so much money so that probably is a key difference that you know when you're working with a small client where for them 20 grand is a big deal um you're going to have a situation where they're going to micromanage you
they're going to be really freaking out and also the underlying business that they have is probably so small that even if you do an incredible job they you know even if you double their business it may not even be profitable whereas when I work with a business you know that's super successful I
mean it's kind of as an analogy if you could make Lewis Hamilton Drive 1 second faster around a racetrack that's worth millions of dollars to him um but if you could teach me to drive one second FAS around my neighborhood that's not worth anything so you know making good go to Great is
worth a fortune uh broken needs fixing is not necessarily worth a lot of money so uh in many cases you know hiring clients are not more demanding well you pointed out something that I think is worth highlighting where the service that you provide depending on who's the buyer and the impact it has
on their life and their business can mean a world of difference in terms of what they're willing to pay maybe somebody helps you drive one second faster it gets you a ticket yeah because that's not really your main thing but for people who are in in a highly competitive field that's a difference
between first and second place and there's all kinds of differences in terms of the reward yeah okay absolutely um I I'll give you a real life example of this so I work with a lot of startups um and in many cases we do this thing called the entrepreneur sweet spot we look at
like where are you starting the business from and we look at a few different things we talk about their origin story their passion all of that sort of stuff we talk about the problem that they solve in the world we talk about the market and how they uh communicate the value of what
they do to the market and we kind of like just start with these three things and we just explore and in most cases at the end of a 2hour workshop a lot of them would describe it as oh that was enlightening that was interesting that was pretty cool but they probably wouldn't spend
huge amounts of money on that Workshop so I found myself in Tampa Florida the other day and I was talking to a client of mine who does about 200 million a year in sales and uh he brought me into the team and he had like 20 of his team members in the boardroom
and he said oh this is Daniel and he works with startups and he's going to give us a little quick talk about like you know what we what we need to do he's going to give us a bit of impromptu talk and I'm like oh I don't know why but I thought to
myself oh I'm going to do that little talk that I do about starting up and like what it feels like to be a startup and we'll actually go back to these three Basics so we end up workshopping these three basics for this company with an executive team who are on big money and
like 20 people in the room and this is a company that's established hundreds of millions of Revenue and here we are talking about their origin story and their passion and getting alignment to that and their vision for the future we're talking about uh what problem they solve and why that's valuable we're talking
about how they communicate that to and at the end they were like blown away and they're like that was Game Changer we're going to roll that out we're going to put that into some assets we're going to do some trainings on that we're going to we're going to put things up around the
office to that reconnect that so it's funny that same Workshop that I would do for for a startup which maybe they'd pay a couple hundred for was probably if I asked these guys to put a value on it they probably would have said I don't know 50 or 100 Grand you know so
and it was the same content so their ability to execute and take an idea and and basically find their own return on it is why it's so valuable to them okay so if you're listening to this and let me try to make it super relatable for folks if you design a logo for
a mom and pop business that does a couple hundred grand a year well that logo might not even matter to them to be honest because people are not really shopping or purchasing their services or Goods based on the logo and this is where designers get all Bann out of shape because they walk
up to local business like well your logo is not consistent and it's not the perfect way it doesn't follow the Fibonacci grid system or something like that and they're like huh I'm a dry cleaner right yeah exactly or you see this line of customers I've had for the last 40 years they've never
once said the logo bothered them but then you go into a fortune 1000 company and the logo matters a lot to them because even changing it a little bit creates all kinds of Havoc because of all the touch points and everything that they have to kind of almost uh educate the team on
how to use the new new logo new system roll out it's going to be on digital it's going to be on print right yeah okay now that we understand that having one of these really high-end clients is desirable it's good it's not going to cause you more stress and then you don't have
actually even have to fundamentally change your service you might need to change your responsiveness to them yeah and show them a little bit more TLC but other than that they might be the best thing that's ever happened to you I want to add one little distinction here as well from working with thousands
of businesses the businesses that really take off and really become profitable and really end up selling for millions and delivering huge amounts of financial rewards to the founder they serve a problem they solve a problem for a client who likes to throw money at their problems not time at their problems and that's
a real distinction because I see people I was talking to some young guys the other day they're like oh we're going to work with students who are struggling to get this I'm like these are people who like to throw time at problems they don't like to throw money at problems they don't have
enough money to throw at problems and then I talked to an IT services company that works with the biggest brands in the world and they deliver an IT service that these Brands need and these Brands don't want to throw any time at that problem they just want to pay for the solution and
just get it done so there is a huge distinction here a high-end client fits that description they really just want to throw some money at a problem and get the problem solved and get it done they don't like throwing time at their problem so that's one of the very clear reasons as to
why they're a good client that should be a warning signal for some people and you may disagree with with me on this but while designers love to work with nonprofits like real nonprofits like there's no money at all not like the fake nonprofit which is a whole different classification or unfunded startups CU
all they got is time they don't have money they can't throw money at it but they just love to go there and they find themselves having to pull like tooth and nail to get some money from them and then they're super micro they like to micromanage everything yeah yeah well they've got no
other tool yeah they're just throwing time at it so yeah so that's why you would want one so some of the things that you want to do in the leadup to having a highend client is um and you you know see what you think on this but looking at your background looking at
your history and actually I I think of your last 10 years as um almost like a gold mine that contains all these gold nuggets and those gold nuggets are stories it's pedigree it's experience it's intellectual property it's the it's the networks that you've got it's the brands that you've worked with and what
I find with a lot of people creatives especially is they go from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing and they don't stop and kind of catalog they don't compile the numbers they don't say I've worked on 47 projects with a combined value of x um they don't say oh I've
worked with Brands such as you know Bentley and Toyota and you know Ferrari they just kind of go to the next thing and they don't kind of like bring forward any of this pedigree or this story that they've got from their background so I think one of the things that is really important
in the leadup to approaching highend clients is that you got to have those stories you got to have your numbers you got to have your intellectual property you got to kind of do some digging and compile this stuff because I think pedigree uh and experience is something that you know these people look
for they're looking for a shortcut they don't want to do a whole lot of due diligence it's kind of like well if you've worked with great clients that helps me with due diligence if you've been featured on these blogs that helps me with due diligence if you've won these certain Awards then I
don't have to do much thinking about that so that's great so Awards uh are excellent for that big brands are excellent for that uh catalog of num and stories excellent for that so those are the kind of things that I want people to do before we even go looking when you say due
diligence I know what that means can you explain it in layman's terms for people like what do you mean due diligence so if we think of a hiring client as someone who wants to protect their time and they don't want mistakes they don't want things going wrong so they're trying to as quickly
as possible figure out is this uh coach consultant agency legit are they going to do a great job or am I going to have to throw time at this is is this going to be you know a a a drain where I'm going to have to fix it and then get someone else
to do it that's their biggest fear um they want the leverage of bringing in the right person first so they're looking for Clues what are the clues that you've done a great um a great job there's a magic sentence that I love to give people when we go looking at their history and
the magic sentence is I did something special for a certain type of client and we got a remarkable result let me tell you about it and that magic sentence what we do is when I work with a client we'll go through all the years and we'll actually have a little timeline and we'll
have the magic sentence I did something special with a certain type of client we got a remarkable result and we'll say what's your best story from 2019 what's your best story from 2020 what's your best story from 2021 and we'll actually pull down all of those stories that fit the description of I
did something special for a certain type of person we got a remarkable result um and we just cataloged those stories and that's one of the first things we do so they have to go into the history and kind of mine those for the gold that you're talking about so that when they meet
someone or someone hits their website and they're checking basically they're just checking you out they're checking your resume they're checking your references to make sure you're not going to waste their time and their money that you're a credible person that you are who you say you are right yeah okay so if we
don't tell those stories we're making it much more difficult for the prospect the client yeah we're expecting people to be a mind Rao and they're not minories they don't have the time they're not going to they want they want it fast it's like if you've worked with Ferrari tell me you worked with
Ferrari if you've worked on this particular thing tell me you've worked on that if you won this award just tell me you've won this award makes my life easier you're not bragging for your benefit you're sharing those uh markers for their benefit to to save them time you're doing an act of service
by making it obvious and easy for people to see that you are the best to work with that it's I'm not expecting you to be a mind reader here's the five things that I've that I've recently done in the same way if I go to a doctor if I go to a surgeon
and they say look I can see that you're a little bit nervous I want you to know I've done over a thousand of these procedures it's not a complex procedure we're going to be fine they're not telling you that information to say check me out I'm an amazing doctor they're telling you that
to put your mind at ease so that you can then say Oh okay they've done it a thousand times no Big E so if we put ourselves in the buyer's mindset and say I'm looking to spend a lot of money with somebody if they make me work too hard to find it exhaustion
fatigue frustration might set in and you've already mentioned a couple different things so if a big your your dream client one of these high-end clients wants to hire you there's a couple things that you can do already right number one is you can you can mind those stories and be able to tell
them um what was the other thing you said earlier collecting your data collect the data so like how many clients have you worked with it's funny too because a client often doesn't necessarily have a reference point for what's or what's a little but just being able to say I've worked with 47 clients
across the last 3 years doing these types of projects oh wow okay you you've said that in a way that makes me feel like you've reflected and thought through so okay that must be you know that must be interesting that's good um you might say um collectively my clients have had an uplift
of $750 million due to the projects that we've done um so you might aggregate who are the clients that you've worked with what is the uplift that has happened as a result um you might say um you know I've I've coached clients uh who have combined revenues uh of $280 million a year
or something like that you know I work with small fast growing startups with you know combined revenues of X whatever it is so it's like finding the the aggregate kind of numbers um you might also say I've worked with highly funded startups I've worked with fast growth companies that have won awards I've
worked with um a family office uh that has over three billion worth of assets under management right so you kind of want to be able to list off these are the types of companies that I've worked with these are the these are the headlines the headline numbers the headline Awards the headline Brands
the headline uh Aggregates that make me go okay not your first rodeo now I remember what you talking about okay I should write it down so here we are I think you're you're hitting head on the mindset that a creative person has in terms of a they're addicted to new and next so
they're never looking back and so they can never catalog these things when you see it seems so obvious and I'm thinking why have people been so slow to do this because they're just excited and there's a phrase that is spread within creative circles which is you're only as good as your last piece
of work so they're always chasing that next thing cuz now like but that thing starting to fade in my memory well that wasn't good enough and I can always do better so they're addicted to that at Chase so don't look back and that's a big mistake number two is I think they think
of talking about their projects and who they've worked with as some form of bragging which you've already said and the reframe on that is just make it easier for clients to figure out if you're a good fit or not yeah don't make them work so hard because if you do they're going to
go somewhere else so it's not bragging if it's true and if you're really trying to highlight certain things that help them to determine what Seth Goden would say People Like Us do things like this so the I I guess the social proof that you're able to collect lets them know you're you're too
big you're too small you're too expensive you're too cheap whatever it is so they kind of understand yeah exactly that stuff so let's bring it all together with an idea that in the leadup to meeting with a highend client you want to position yourself as what we call a key person of influence
and that key person of influence position is that you either head up an agency or you head up a firm or you are a senior consultant gun for high coach right but but the the personification or the or the identity that you want to adopt is that I'm a key person of influence
in this industry or this field um and there's a a harsh piece of truth that I share with a lot of people around this idea that when you talk to people they judge you and they're putting you in one of three buckets they're saying this is a newbie who needs needs more experience
this is a worker be who has an alley rate that is in line with everyone else's alley rate this is a key person of influence who is in demand charges whatever they like and people line up to pay it now when someone says oh the client just offered me experience you know I
could come and do this thing for experience I'm going to say that's your fault the way you communicated the way you showed up up LED them to believe that you were a newbie and that you needed the experience and that they would be doing you a favor by giving you some experience that's
on you that's your problem you know it it could be it could be Mark knofler showing up and saying hey I can you know I love learning about guitar you know I just love learning you know new chords and it's like well I don't know you're Marist you know so have some experience
let's let's get you to play at my birthday right so people aren't mind is so if if you if you position yourself as a newbie you'll get treated like a newbie how do you know that you're positioning yourself as a newbie people are offing you experience um worker be is that whenever clients
just purely and simply want to know what's your day rate what's your hourly rate um and they're judging is that at the high end or the low end etc etc you've communicated worker B status worker B is I'm a trained professional I'm good at what I do I'm qualified um I have clients
I don't need experience I get paid what people in my industry get paid I'm I I'm in the middle to Upper range of what people in my industry get paid so you've communicated uh you know our agency is accredited with this and we do this and we've been established for this long and
blah blah blah you've just given all of the the credentials that would say worker be so key person of influence is different key person of influence typically is someone who says we've won awards uh We've we've got a niche we've got something that we're super specialized in we're we're we're considered to be
the best at this particular very narrow thing um I've written a book on it or I've written content created content about it um I'm followed for this I've got followers on social media so these are the types of things that point towards you being the key person of influence for X Y and
Z when it comes to the blank there there's only a few names that keep coming up mine included right so that sort of thing so that's what we're trying to embody that sounds wonderful but I know the people listening to this are going to say well easy for Daniel to say easy for
Chris to apply but what about me maybe I'm maybe I'm not even close to that does that mean I'm excluded from being considered this way a big part of it is how you pitch yourself okay um I once worked with a woman in a a workshop and she said I've been a financial
planner for 23 years I'm accredited by the financial planning body um I've helped Place assets of you know hundreds of millions but the way she shared this really just made me feel she's a financial planner that's great so I asked her about 5 minutes worth of questions in front of the group and
we rewrote the pitch and she says after the 5 minutes she says for the last 23 years I've been helping rural families that own Farms to plan for the next two generations I help spouses who are marrying into the rural farming family to assimilate into farming life and into agricultural life and to
understand the values of that farming business and to um become one with the family uh I help people who are the grandparents who have aged out of being Hands-On with the farming equipment and the farming thing to find their purpose as the uh Elder members of the farming family I run Family Team
Retreats where we get everyone together all the family and extended family and we align to values and I also do the financial planning for these families as well and she said I speak at the rural Women's Conference I write for the farming newsletters now as soon as she starts pitching this she was
just in New South Wales in Australia she ends up picking up clients in New Zealand Japan California and Brazil because they're like you're the best in the world at farming families like families that own Farms so she just owned this positioning she stopped trying to get everyone uh and be a generic financial
planner but it was funny because we asked the room in that that moment tell me how much do you think her time is worth when she's a qualified financial planner versus how much do you think her time is worth when she's the best in the world at helping farming families uh to plan
for two generations and it was an order of magnitude it was like something like $500 a day versus $5,000 a day uh was the perception in the room the average perception in the room so it had gone up at 10x the value of her time just by and this was by the way
this was not inventing stuff this is actually what she'd been doing for 23 years so she just wasn't talking about it she was pitching as a worker be versus pitching as a key person of influence okay there's a couple of critical things you said there though like for the last 23 years okay
so you looked at your history and so that's got to say something and then you helped her articulate her Niche and to demonstrate use cases which if you're in that space it's like either you're going to fit the first the second or the third or something like that I help farming Ames plan
for multigenerational something right and then I help Elder people transition out of this and I also help spouses are miring into this to adjust to the culture so it's like now I get the clear picture that comes from picking a niche and knowing that somebody he's done something repeatedly you automatically assume expertise
now she could be the worst person doing this but she articulated so clearly that you think by the specific specificity of her language that she must have done this many many times she must be good at it she must be yeah she's got a passion for it so she's got spark she's got
Vitality she breathes life force into this so what we want to do is just look for the Last 5 Years like even if you've got a case study where you really brought your aame and even if it was small like just start there what's the intellectual property there's this idea of intellectual property
intellectual property in a legal definition is copyright patents you know these kind of things from a philosophical point of view it's more your unique knowhow the kn that you've got that other people don't really have it's your experience in the world your contacts your connections uh you know your insights and it's bringing
that to the table and just packaging it up well and showing people these this is my body of insights and I've given it a name and I've given it a process and I'm bringing that to the world and I place a value on it and I think others should too and if you
don't that's fine it's not for everyone so it's it's just this different way of showing up in the world I've seen people who don't have 23 years experience do this as well I've seen 24 year olds who look like key people of influence in their industry um the other day I was with
a young guy uh and he said my background prior to launching this podcast is working with the LA Lakers to help them to double their social media accounts now immediately now obviously that's a big brand and all of that but if you know anything behind the scenes LA Lakers don't have one person
doing that they got dozens of people doing that right so but he's the way he puts a value on his experience with that brand and what they achieved and he actually said while I was there we went through this kind of growth we did this sort of thing we went through this process
that's all of the insights that I bring to the table when I work with you know my clients so this is someone who's young has a few years with LA Lakers but is leveraging it yeah is this a 505 podcast yeah yes yeah that's the 5x5 I recognized the bio there let's get
back to the lady who was a financial planner who came to this Workshop after she said what she said which you already knew fell flat what were you thinking about in that moment and I'm curious what you literally asked her to do so that you can then help her reshape her pitch so
it was it was the first thing was judging when she opened her mouth and explained like I said tell me a bit about who you are and what you do and immediately my brain go says do you sound like a new be who needs experience a worker be who's on an hourly daily
or monthly or annual salary or do you sound like a key person of influence someone who should be on a stage someone who should have a book deal someone who should be on a podcast right where where do I position you cuz I know there's a really only those three positions so she
sounded like a worker be so the immediately I'm like red flag this person and and just judging by her age I knew she she's got stories of course she's got stories everyone o over 25 has got stories of some degree so I asked her to the magic question tell me about a time
where you did something special for a certain type of person and you got a remarkable result she immediately tells me about a farming family where the son had moved out to the city and got a job with one of the big four accounting firms had met a city girl and then she had
married into the family and two years later they were looking at getting a divorce and she was brought in and in that experience she did some conversations with the family to help them to understand City girl mind ET and she did some conversations with uh the woman who was in the family to
understand farming mindset she slowed the game down she talked through the values they did an alignment Workshop they actually did some understanding about how F expectations she calibrated expectations so she explained what she went through this process the whole room's like in awe and everyone everyone sitting there is like what happened next
right so she's telling the story and I'm like immediately I know she can be a key person of influence so then I asked her the question have you done this before she's like oh well I was that girl 23y old uh 23 years ago I married into a farming family and I had
this experience and I was in finance and I married into a farming family and I became a financial planner and blah blah blah so she tells me all these stories and then I'm like oh okay right so this is this is easy for you to be a key person of influence in this
of course so we we just repositioned the story I then applied a framework and the framework was um name same Fame aim in a game so what is your name and your business name what are you the same as that I already understand what makes you famous or different uh what is your
aim what do you aim for and what's your big game that you want to play and we we got all of that into a 30second pitch and that immediately recontextualized her and repositioned her as a key person of influence so name same Fame aim in a game you did this when we were
in London and you had everybody tried to introduce themselves that way that was a tricky thing to do kind of on the Fly but I can see how if you sat down and work through it you can you can do it even if it took half an hour yeah and then you rehearsed
it into your phone and like got comfortable with it it would be a game Cher for most people now when you said something you did special for some type of person a specific type of person with a remarkable result I don't think a financial planners is somebody to come in for relationship therapy
or anything therapeutic like that so why would she even brought in and what what kind of area of expertise cuz you don't think like you think numbers yeah you know how how to grow an Investment Portfolio how to reserve Capital how to plan for un that's what I call the functional layer the
functional layer is the stuff everyone has to do anyway okay right you of course if you've got a design agency you got to be able to do design right right you got to be able to understand Brands and understand like like there's just the functional layer the the the bread and butter the
vital layer the life force layer the icing on the cake that is where you're doing something special something unique that goes above and beyond the functional layer that changes the course of the future right it changes the direction it puts us on a different timeline you know the thing about a key person
of influence is that they're committed to changing someone's future state that if they don't show up something's not going to happen right so they're they know they know that their job in the world is bending reality they Bend reality towards a different outcome that wouldn't have happened had they not been in the
room so when we discover that we're a key person of influence it's actually a discovery of our ability to bend reality um and to say hey when I'm in the room this project goes really well and if I wasn't here it would not go that well right I know that anyone else can
get you a 30% uplift I can get you a 300% uplift because I bend reality that way for this particular thing and I can't bend reality for everything but I can bend reality for that so she knows that she can bend reality for farming families that they're on a timeline that leads to
a divorce or you know breakup or the parents Farm being sold off because the kids don't want it and they're not aligned to it she comes in and she bends reality back towards where her clients want it so that's kind of like it's taking ownership of that of power I see so the
functional layer is kind of what's expected if you can't meet that minimum level of requirements then you're not going to be you shouldn't even be in business but what makes you unique and special is how you're able to go above and beyond that and do something remarkable okay that's pretty cool now I
have to ask you this question because I feel like our audience is going to feel this is everyone a key person of influence it can't be true can it there's a process of discovery and there's early stages in the journey and then there are late stages in the journey and when you compare
yourself to someone who's in the late stages of being a key person of influence it's not going to feel like it's on the same scale but there's going to be a feeling there's going to be a tingling sense of energy around you what will happen is that you'll stumble across you'll you'll stumble
across A New Perspective around your history and your story you'll realize that you've got valuable intellectual property Steve Jobs talks about you connect the dots by looking back so you will do some of this work you'll connect the dots by looking back and you go oh I'm really good at this I've got
a talent when it comes to this I've got some experience that this I've got these unique ways of doing this and the initial phases what will happen is you'll feel renewed sense of awareness you'll feel awake to the experience you might sit up late till 2 3:00 in the morning making notes journaling
you might be less distracted by the things you're normally distracted by and suddenly you get this almost Rush of energy where you start to identify as a key person of influence for something you you've had some sort of identity shift and the results for that will probably take years to turn up in
a big way where other people start to notice but what will happen almost immediately is clients onetoone interactions with clients will not be noticed differently um so you'll probably sign your first high-end client you you know and that might be 50 Grand which means you're not living in a different house you're not
living in a in a different reality but you've just signed a 50 client 50 Grand client when you used to sign five grand clients so something shifts right so this is the this is like this identity shift that happens obviously there's early stages and late stages okay so the way you answer that
question I think I know what you're saying but let's be clear so are you saying even if you're early in the game that there there's still stuff you can mine from your past to make you different and remarkable is that what you're saying yep and if you're really really really early in the
game you can leverage your Mentor you can leverage your vision for the future you can uh leverage an intense knowing about your current Mission but for the vast majority of people let's say over 25 we want to leverage a story or an experience that we've had in the last 5 to 10 years
okay that's very good so it's your belief that almost everybody maybe not everybody but almost everybody if they did the work and they reflected they can be some kind of key person of influence and what you're talking about is a game of positioning where you're able to find something that makes you radically
different and then you can just own that lane yep you can own that lane Y and in this world that we're currently in if you own you know I work with people who own Farms right families that want to transition for two generations there are literally thousands and thousands of people who'd be
interested in that and you can find them because of the internet so you don't have to be a generalist like we used to have to be 30 years ago MH this is wonderful because what you're talking about reminds me about a lot about how when I was able to connect the dots I
I found my own super secret superpow and so I'm I'm going to coin a term here there's there's a need for us to reflect on the things that we did not just always looking forward because we like to like oh we're we're present and looking forward never in the past but sometimes that's
very helpful for us and we'll call this the triaa because when you look back at your history you can gain an awareness that you didn't have before and that's very important and then you start to align the things that excite you that fill you with passion and joy so that that you can
be alive so those are the aaa's you got AAA Battery you plugged in then you had to one up it there okay very good okay so this means that everybody here has some some hope that if you put in this work if you make this commitment and I'm just going to say this
because it needs to be said to our audience a lot of times you're going to listen to guests that we bring on you get really excited about something and then the next new exciting things going to come along and a month two months 6 months later you're going to totally forget about this
thing until you hear it from another person again and here's the thing I want all of you to be super successful at doing what it is that you're doing because it's part of our bigger mission to help you make a living doing what you love but here's the thing I don't think you
need more information you need more action you have to go and apply this stuff otherwise it's not magic it's not going to work by itself so sit down Rel listen to this part where Daniel breaks it down ask yourself the magic question look into your past and start to figure this thing out
and then make that commitment today you don't even need to listen to the rest of this make this commitment today because the next time you present yourself could be the time that everything changes but even still there's going to be even more in this podcast there must be it's like an inferion wait
there's more there's more uh should we get into some tactics let's do it so um once you've positioned yourself as a key person of influence uh here's what we want to do and this is a little bit tactical okay I'm ready I got my pen so super high in clients even though they
want you to be available to them once they're a client they don't want you to be available before they're a client I know this is people people want what they can't have right so I'm going to share with you something that's tactical that actually leads to hiring clients and it's going to be
counterintuitive okay and the counterintuitive thing is you need to officially basically say uh I can't start with any new clients anytime soon I've got a waiting list and if you're interested I'd love to get you to fill in an expression of Interest or join the waiting list right so the official position as
to how someone works with you is not that they can just join that they can sign up they can register they can they can join the waiting list if they'd like to uh be part of the client now the reason that you have a waiting list is because you're highly protective of Your
Capacity so you protect protecting you're protecting your ability to serve other clients you're protecting your ability to do great work so because you're so protective of your ability to do great work you can't just be available to anyone and everyone when they want to start there has to be a starting point that
is a managed starting point okay so I was talking to a guy who runs a video production company and he says Ah you know it's it's uh you know four or five months until next year I really want to get some highend clients how do I do it I said well completely officially
you're closed for this year there's no more clients for this year and that if what you want to do is reach out to people and I said here's how I would reach out to people I said you've already got LinkedIn you've already got like emails you've already got plenty of people who are
in your circles reach out to people and say this year we did something special with a certain type of client we got a remarkable result so share the share the story The Magic sentence story I said just letting you know that we now don't have any capacity for new clients till the end
of the year but if you're interested in doing something similar in the year ahead let me know by just either responding to this message or uh I'll give you the and I'll give you the link to join our waiting list or our expression of Interest form and I said your job is between
now and the end of the year is to get 40 names on that list so that there are 40 people who have filled in the expression of Interest form and the only thing you're allowed to do up until having 40 names on the uh on the weit list is get more names on
the weit list you're not allowed to take on clients until you got 40 names on the weit list that's it so until you've got 40 names on the weight list you you are closed can't take on clients I don't know how you feel about this strategy but he was like oh that's a
bit different haven't thought about doing it that way um so this was this was basically yeah I'm I'm I'm done till next you can only join the weit list why 40 though well for his business uh he was hoping to get between four and six high-end clients um so I said you know
let's go for 10 times that number um as as a list to work with I used this thing called the Cinderella principle Cinderella principle is that um the the the prince wants to find his future wife and he only wants one so what he does is he throws a big ball for like
hundreds of fair maidens and then he identifies who Cinderella is but he loses her so then he has a rigid criteria called a glass slipper where he goes around and refines her by applying this rigid criteria and saying this is the glass slipper that I can now identify um Cinderella and the way
it works is that for the vast majority of the fair maidens in the land they got a nice free big dinner party and and dance but for Cinderella he was able to identify Cinderella out of the group and then he had a rigid criteria so he could refind her again so what I'm
talking about here is that we get people to uh we get a group of people who have joined the waiting list or the expression of interest list they've in some way signal that they're interested they're they're all the people who are showing up to the ball and then we have a rigid criteria
about who we're going to take on and this is where we tell people we say in order to take you on a as a client I've got some key criteria that I would want to check in with you on so that like I don't take on all the clients I can't help everyone
with everything but for the types of clients that I can add the most value to I've figured out five questions that we can ask and then that tells me whether I can add massive value to you or not so now we've got the glass slipper do you fit the glass slipper or not
it's a complete reversal of the typical way people go about winning clients okay if somebody is still debt broke and they want to move on this plan it's going be very difficult to say I don't have a whole lot of money or a whole lot of Runway how do they apply something like
this most of the clients that I would talk to um and not dead broke they're mostly here's who I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about who's watching this I'm thinking about someone who they've got a great little sixf figure business it pays them a reasonable wage life's not bad things are pretty good
they want to go to the next level they want to LEAP up um and and go next level so they got some clients paying bills they got you know some retainers they got some projects that are decent sized projects they're going along nicely but they're not like paying their mortgage down in one
hit you know they're not having any of those kind of big moments so I'm talking about how do we orchestrate a big breakthrough moment someone's dead broke I'm a big fan of go get a mentor right work under the wing of someone um do years working under somebody's Wing uh go join a
team be you know get get close to be like find someone who's so damn busy CU they're so damn good and become one of their regular suppliers at any price point that just moves you forward so that you're picking up the experience you're feeding on the energy you're getting the the key stories
you're getting you know all of that kind of brand Association um and you found one or two and you just become like an apprentice to that master um so you know if someone's dead broke then I'm my my my recommendation would be become a master's Apprentice in some way whether it be through
you know affiliation or you know Contracting or any of that sort of stuff but if you're good and you want to go great then this is a great strategy however let's say this let's say you do need clients you kind of want clients now here's how I might do it let's say I
get someone to join the waiting list and there's like 10 15 20 on the waiting list I might say to them get in touch and say hey Chris I noticed that you join the waiting list I can't take you on until next year but here's what I'd love to do let's do a
little test project together and see what the chemistry is like so that we get a feel for what it's like to work together I can I can slot that in between now and Christmas let's do a small project together and then next year we can ramp it up when when I've got capacity
but I'd love to do just a little test project with you so we can test some chemistry you know do you want to have a discussion around that or uh I might just simply make the appointment so thanks for joining the waiting list can't take you until next year but let's have a
oneto one let's have a half hour to an hour meeting find out what's going on with you find out what you're looking to achieve um and let's have a conversation in that conversation I might say if I could wave a magic one when would you want to start now in most cases a
lot of highend clients they think 3 to 6 months out anyway so the truth is that their dream start date might be 3 to 6 months and you say great let's start then but I need you to pay up front now you you need to put down some money now to to to
secure that spot so you can go that way or they might say look magic wand I would love to start yesterday like as soon as you can possibly go so okay so if we could if we could make that work right you'd want to get started straight away uh say let let me
look into it um out of curiosity would you be willing to do some work with me outside of normal business hours like if I if I brought you in and we did some stuff 5:30 till 6:30 or if if if I could do some stuff with you on a Saturday to get to
get this started um is would that work for you yeah we could do something like that right so you can you can say if I can juggle that around let me see what I can do and then you get back to them and say I got some good news and bad news I
can't start yesterday but we can start in two weeks H okay I like that you seem a little conflicted about this I'm not conflicted at all I'm actually thinking about a different question I want to ask you and so so you you dig this I dig this yeah absolutely yeah fantastic I'm trying
to think like all the angles that they're going to come at me with which is like no literally somebody mentioned in a video on our YouTube video together it's like great advice Daniel Priestly easy for Chris do but what about John do and I'm I'm thinking about this person right easy for Chris
what about J and I I wrote back like what is it specifically that you can't apply or give me some more feedback so I can answer well the first thing I would do is I would the first thing I would say to jundo is you've just given me an incredible pitch right so
everything is like we get what we pitch for and we're always pitching right great sentence you get what you pitch for you're always pitching easy for you but what about someone who's just a loser nobody like me now that's a pitch I just pitched you I'm I'm a you know I'm not I'm
not special what about someone who's just not special and doesn't have any coolness about them you know that's your pitch you just pitched it what about you know this other guy well easy for you but most millionaires are born into money and inherit it which actually isn't true like 10 to 15% at
most in any country is born inherited wealth uh but it's like dude that's a pitch you just pitched that the only way to become financially successful is through inheritance that's your pitch you're going to live into that you're going to pitch that into existence so great sentence you get what you pitch for
you're always pitching if you're going to put a shitty comment into the into the comments below you're basically saying that's my pitch to the world my pitch to The World Is it won't work for me okay you pitched that great come back to me when you want to change that pitch okay well
I have to bring this up you're a remarkable person you've done lots of things and still relatively young and I I have had the Good Fortune the foresight to get into what I got into and win Awards and do work at the very highest levels in the highly competitive market and then I
realized there are not that many people that fit those descriptions and there are more people out there who didn't find their path into whatever it is they're doing today didn't go to school for it kind of figured it out on their own so they have massive amounts of impostor syndrome they weren't raised
by entrepreneurial or forward- minded parents in fact they're raised by parents who kept telling them you can't do this who do you think you are you're nothing special and so they're working against a lot of limiting beliefs here and so I've Rec L came to this conclusion that sometimes the things that I
say are really hard for people to process because they keep thinking and it is there's some truth in it yeah you went to a great design school you graduated the top of your class then you got opportunities kind of just just dropped on your lap so you didn't have to grind it the
way we did well what's interesting is you and I are complete opposites okay you're talented and you're technically talented and you went to grade schools I went to a terrible school I went to a few months of University and then dropped out I got no qualifications other than a driving license I did
marginally interesting small things I I I built a $10 million Business Without winning any awards without uh having any famous brand names Associated without doing a single piece of work for a big name company that was a household name uh none of that stuff but one thing I did learn and the way
I learned it is I had to learn it which was because I don't have all of that stuff I have to make the most of what I've got I got to dust off these old pair of shoes and shine them up a little right so you know what what did you bring to
the table let's call let's call it Brook Daniel what did you have that you had to like dust off and shine up well first I got a job in a startup and that startup um I was employee number three we had no name or no bank account and I worked for this guy
called John and for 2 years we built his startup and it went from zero people to or three people to 60 people um so when I left John I leveraged I've just come off the back of a startup we went from zero to several million of Revenue and we went from zero people
to 60 people so like I've just worked on a startup that was s you know successful but now the way I tell it I'm trying to not tell it in a cool sexy way but I would tell that in a cool sexy way and I would tell it like it's the most amazing
thing in the world the truth is there are hundreds of startups every single year that go from zero to several million and that you know there is an early stage team that get hired and that I was working with what I had um so I was you know talking about the fact that
you know there's that do you know there was times where I would talk about the fact that I worked at McDonald's and I'd say look as a teenager I worked at McDonald's and at like 15 years old running thousands of dollars an hour worth of product through those bins and producing hamburgers and
the team out the front selling hamburgers and you know there was a whole system in a process at the time I couldn't clean my room but I could run a multi-million dollar restaurant right and it was because of the power of the systems and the processes that I was learning at McDonald's so
I I can talk about my McDonald's background I can tell you stuff about when I was delivering pizzas that is fun stories interesting stories and what I learned from being a Pizza Hut delivery driver um you know so there's something I'm I'm a big believer that you can you can look into your
background you can find some stories you know take the example that we shared before her story was not I worked at JP Morgan and floated a company for billions and worked with the world's richest people her story was I worked with a little family that had a farm and the son went and
got married and then she didn't want to be part of the family and then the family there was going to be a divorce and I came and stepped in and got the family aligned and you know I helped them not go through a divorce and I helped get that Family Farm back on
track and find the balance that worked for everyone that's not like some crazy Mark Zuckerberg story you know that that that's just I helped a family go through their you know one of their little life's troubles so we don't need to win an ammy you know obviously it helps if you do but
we don't have to win an enemy to be to to be a key person of influence okay so you're laying out tools and a way of thinking from very humble background yourself and you're saying to people if you don't want to use the tools you love this life that's not going anywhere for
you then that's the life you're going to keep getting you all have a choice and that's the thing I think is very frightening for people to say like you mean all this time I could have just thought differently and I would have acted differently and have a different result or outcome right now
and what would you say to that question I'd say that's a great story I'd say you should use that story you know for 20 years I just didn't see the value in what I was doing and then I suddenly started to see the value in it cool right have you ever seen the
book called Stone Soup I read this book to my kids every week Stone Soup Stone Soup and these Travelers they Rock up in a village and the village says oh we got nothing and they say oh it's fine you don't need to you don't need anything we're here to make some soup for
you like really yeah we're here for the we're going to bring the soup and he says all we need is a pot and then we can make the stone soup and they go oh we've got a pot so here here's the pot so he gets these stones and he puts the stones in
and he starts boiling the water he tastes it it's delicious needs a little bit of salt but other oh I've got salt right uh need some onions right okay onions and by the time every villager puts some ingredients in it's beautiful soup but it starts with just Stones right the stones in the
pot it's a great story because great on entrepreneurs do it like that they start with nothing but an idea or a vision and they enroll people and it can be very humble it can be a very simple starting point so look all I'm saying is that if you're sitting there go oh well
you know if that would have worked up until this point I would have done it it's like okay let's just assume that's now the background of the story but we're going to change the story we're going to repitch it we get what we pitch for we're always pitching we don't need self-belief we
need others to Believe in Us right we get self-belief after the fact so I'm a big believer that uh like it really doesn't matter what you believe about yourself it matters more what your clients believe about you you know you can be plagued with insecurities and some of the best people are but
if I if I believe if if the client believes this person can help me then that's you know that's great so focus on client belief focus on enrolling others into believing that you've got that that their business or their their timeline will bend I agree with you it doesn't matter so much what
you believe it matters more what they believe but I also find it that if you don't believe how can they believe because you're I I have this this idea that your your mouth and the words that you use they betray you because they reveal the real view so when some person comes up
to you and gives you their first pitch it's kind of revealing their own self-belief until you help them to reframe it I feel like that puts a lot of pressure on people yeah that they have to then check in with themselves to see if they believe it now let's say we were riding
motorcycles I wake up in the morning and say do I feel confident riding a motorcycle nope okay don't get on the motorbike um but it's normal not to feel confident until after I've ridden it a 100 times so what I have to do is say do I feel confident about riding a motorbike
no that's part of the process go through the actions go through the process start the engine put the helmet on put the crash gear on go through the process that you've been trained do what the instructor told you to do and park to the side the fact that you don't feel confident borrow
the confidence of someone who's already ahead of you borrow that confidence do what they say go through the process and then evaluate after you've been through a few repetitions we are going to feel confident about riding a motorcycle 100 trips in but we're not going to feel it at the beginning and same
we're not going to feel like a key person of influence the first time we pitch ourself a certain way if we're waiting for that feeling it's never going to start you know we're going to get it to we're going to get it never so you're talking about inertia a little bit here so
if you say static you're going to be static and if you move a little bit then you start to activate the Big Mo momentum yeah so I am like I I think about this in working out I don't love to work out actually I'm like oh God I haven't worked out I feel
guilty and I'm going to go do something so the first thing I do is just change into my clothes I'm like I'm not even committed to anything just going put the shoes on yeah and then I'm going to go to the gym and I'm just going to stand there maybe I'll just turn
on the TV and then eventually you're working out I'm like well I'm here might as well do something at the end of it it's like hey I feel pretty good about myself today yeah and who knows what will happen tomorrow but today was a good day that's often the case and you actually
by the end of the work out you feel actually I love working out yeah so the feeling of I love working out actually comes at the towards the end okay not at the beginning um yeah so I I just I just think that um go through the process of telling someone that you
have a waiting list or an expression of interest list for the year ahead mhm and just say to them uh here's the link join my waiting list I'd love to touch bases with you start by just filling in some basic information I can't take you on as a client in the next three
months but let let's start the process um try that see see what reaction you get right it's going to feel clunky and weird at first you're going to feel like a total imposter total fake yeah right but just just say look I protect I protect my ability to do great work which is
why I slowly onboard clients and I double check that they're going to be a great Client First there's a slow process um here's here's what we want to do okay now with your permission feel free to slap me down on this I'll make it even easier for you guys at the end of
the year we don't get a lot of work done anyways so let's I mean we're in August now it's going to be September in a blink of an eye you you can wait until like late October and then announce that you're not going to work until basically January can't take on any new
clients and you're risking nothing because you weren't planning to work anyways and I think there's a lot of us are very hopeful like December 25th some new clients going to come in the door and say we need you now you're the only person who can do this save me Obi-Wan and that doesn't
really happen so you can say this or if you're planning a vacation or you're going to take a sabatical what a great true and honest way to say like I'm not available to take on any new clients for the next three to whatever months when I return I will consider you but get
express your interest and we'll see where go that's less risky although entrepreneurship is full of risk we want you to do it the way Daniel says for the next four months I'm out but there are simpler safer ways to do this is that okay that that's that's brilliant that's fine and the other
thing too is that the high-end client loves that they love feeling in that they feel that the pressure's off and also I've had situations where I've put people on a waiting list and then I've said A week later um if I can get you in sooner would you want to start sooner yeah
okay let me call you back and then I call back and say we can start in 2 weeks they go oh amazing so no one no one's upset about this right I I or sometimes I've said to people look the way I work is that I get a lot of people who want
to work with me who aren't right so I put this waiting list or expression of interest list in front to filter most of those out but you're the type of client I'd love to work with so if you want to start sooner we can start sooner that filtering mechanism was just to kind
of like filter the majority of people who want to waste my time or that I just wouldn't want to work with them um but if you want to start sooner we can start sooner I'll find time for you oh great so it's not like some big thing that you're like oh you know
but if I say that I have a waiting list then I can't start for 4 months it's like change your mind yeah it's your business you make the rules you know there's an added benefit to this even if you don't fully Embrace this entire thing which we encourage Ur you to do which
is designers have a or creative people have a hard time saying no but if you were to put on the internet that I'm not taking any new clients when someone who's a poor fit for you calls up randomly not because you're soliciting them they haven't signed up any onto any weight list you
can just say you know what I'm actually not doing this and I've actually communicated to the world that I'm shutting down for four months because I can't take in a new work that's so great way to just filter out bad clients and you don't have to feel like a poor like a bad
human being for doing that yeah you can say I'm so sorry I've got a bit of a waiting list at the moment yeah let me recommend someone else to you cuz you've now got officially a waiting list right or you can convert that not a good client into potentially very good client they're
like wait wait I'm intrigued what are you talking about I was just kidding about our budget and our timeline what does it take to get on your weight list yeah right yep exactly how how do I get it yeah so this is the other thing one of the things that happens with most
of this type of work is you have to set appointments appointment setting is a big part of business in fact one of of the best things at some point we want to talk about is how do you set appointments cuz like I see a lot of people with lead generation they can present
once they're in front of someone but setting appointments is a big deal so one of the reasons people don't want to set an appointment with you is because they feel oh I'm going to be sold to and they're going to put pressure on me to get started one of the beautiful things about
having an official weight list is that the appointment process feels more like of a screening process or a like like it it doesn't feel like I'm going to twist your arm to buy today it feels like you're going to have to jump through hoops and prove that you're going to be a good
customer if I want to be front of the line at the waiting list um now the let me talk about best case scenario best case scenario between now and say Christmas you get 50 60 people you reach out on LinkedIn you reach out on Instagram you say I did something special with a
certain type of client you tell a little story one paragraph let me try let me try this on so imagine I message you and I say uh hey Chris um you I think you know me through Ali abdal or I think you know me through so and so um recently we worked with
the design agency and we set up an online assessment for them um and we got 5133 people to fill in that online assessment and then they generated 37 really great clients off the back of that um I'd love to unpack that for you and show you how we did that uh I'm not
taking on any new clients until 2019 uh 2025 um if you're interested in learning a bit more about that let me know and I'll send you through a link that can that can help with that oh okay cool now mind you 99 out of 100 may not even respond but if I if
I reach out to some people and say this is the story this is what we've done yeah I'd like the link tell me more about that now I'm just sending the process and I'm also saying I'm not taking on clients and still this but I'm letting people know about how we did this
thing if you want to know more let me know and I'll send you through expression of Interest form something like that so now we're just creating a little bit of this tension now if I can get 60 70 people on this expression of Interest or this waiting list form and then I say
Chris I've got like 70 people on the waiting list I'm just going to do a few little touch bases few little intros um could would it be okay to have a 15minute chat with you you know find out what you're up to what you're doing um just a just a touch bases and
find out what's what's going on with you yep great so now we're having a 15-minute chat but it's within the context of this person has a waiting list and they've done amazing things so you see that we're kind of creating a bit more of a balanced energy as opposed to I'm A supplier
and I desperately need a client and we're trying to just turn that around a little bit and saying actually I'm highly valued for what I do and I select clients who would get great value with what I do maybe that's you but it's maybe not and that's fine either way right so it's
just a little bit more like balanced energy yeah I like that because a lot of people who need work act in a very needy way and it's going to send that signal that you're a worker or you're a newbie yeah it really is yeah yeah you can't like neediness just immediately turns people
off and people can smell it a mile away nothing kills neediness faster than having a list like a list kills need let's say I wanted to raise investment for a company that I'm starting if I approach one high net worth person one investor and all my hopes are pinned on that one person
let's say I want to raise $100,000 I go to them I say I'm going to start a business and I need $100,000 and maybe you could put a 100,000 in and then I'll get started right I've got all the neediness energy imagine I spend more time and I build a list and I
say hm I built a list of 80 people I've gone through LinkedIn blah blah blah so then I go out to them and I say I'm raising $100,000 I've got a list of about 80 High net worth investors who I'm going to reach out to I'm probably going to split this between between
10 and 20 people who I'll let invest would you be would you be interested in seeing the presentation right so now it's like you're on a list you may not get through I've got options so just having a list just purely and Simply Having a list having a waiting list for 2025 automatically
recalibrates your brain to like oh I'm in demand yeah I'm not needy anymore okay even if a bunch of the people on the list are not perfect right because they don't know that yeah they just know there are 79 other people yeah there's there's there's 79 other people some of them are right
some of them are definitely not right but I've got a little bit of a list this is the other thing too don't be too picky when you when you're building a waiting list don't be like too fussy about who you're going to approach just build the list it's good thing to have people
who miss out it's really good word spreads mhm mhm you you mentioned tactics how many other tactics are there I think you started with the weight list are there other tactics or is that like you've the weight list is a great great one um an online assessment is a really really good one
um one of the favorite uh marketing conversations if you're marketing geek you know about how they sold toothpaste in like the 1920s or something like that something like 85% of Americans didn't brush their teeth uh daily and then they created this campaign where they said you got to see if you're squeaky clean
yeah and you got to go like this and if you brush your teeth and then you can see if it squeaks only this particular toothpaste gives you the squeaky clean thing so it gave people an assessment I gave them a way of self assessing whether they needed toothpaste or not so people are
reading literally reading the newspaper on the bus and they go oh I need that my teeth HTS squeaky clean and then they try it and then they brush their teeth and then they do it and then their teeth squeak and they're like oo now my teeth are squeaky clean so this is this
is called giving people an assessment giving people a way to self assess or a way to demo something um so one of the best things you can do is create a self assessment for people to self assess whether they need your thing so like for example let's say your specialty is helping family
businesses to Rebrand um and to you know let's say the business has around for 40 years 50 years and some of the elements you want to hold on tightly to some of the elements need a freshen up right you could say do you could do an assessment does your family business need a
refresh a brand refresh or a Rebrand answer 15 questions to find out if your family business needs to refresh its brand um and go through a rebranding process so then people can go through and answer the questions and they go oh yes to that no to that maybe yes no maybe scale of
1 to five I'm a five for this one I'm a three for this one oh one for that one right and then at the end it says based on how you answered there's a 78% chance that your business would benefit from getting a brand refresh brand uh you know Rebrand oh cool well
that was based on how I answered so it's me conducting my own assessment my own test so having a self assessment where people fill that in super super powerful how real was the squeaky clean test what do you mean well meaning I mean if I mean was it something they just invented to
to do it or was it a sign of I think oral hygiene yeah I think there is actually just a film that comes off when you brush your teeth and then it gives a squeak and then it comes back within 10 minutes or 15 minutes but but for most people on that situation
for most people like 85% of people weren't brushing their teeth at all there was this whole huge problem but it was just a way for people to self assess it was a way for people to to do an assessment um if I said to you um your your wife has a love language
and there are five love languages and if you don't know what your wife's love language is you might be wasting a lot of time energy effort and money on things that she doesn't even care about and you need to know which one of the five love languages your wife is immediately your brain
is like oh now I know there's five love languages I have to take the assessment and find out um so people love these assessments right so we've we've learned this obviously because we work with 6 and a half thousand customers 6 and a half thousand businesses to help them with self assessment tools
but people love the whole like self assessment do I need this could I benefit from this which one am I right which which type of sales manager do I have do I have a farmer hunter or a gatherer um you know which uh which uh type of athlete am I um you know
am I a sprinter a marathon runner or a weightlifter boom bo boom so so like people just adore self assessment yeah it is it's tapping to this innate human desire to know more about ourselves because it's so opaque to most of us it's like that whole phenomenon like you can't read the label
from inside the jar hence horoscopes astrology blood tests um tellers blood tests um 23 in me y DNA test all kinds of things um the Myers Brig test what other assessments are there so there's so many wealth personalities your money money making style your um IQ test right um EQ test uh so
all of these so people have an endless desire to learn more about themselves and their needs and their businesses it's so much easier to sell someone on a self assessment than to sell them on the product okay so if I let's say I'm an amazing designer it's such a powerful positioning to say
I don't know if you need me or not take the assessment it'll tell you right you might be totally fine for another 10 years take the assessment you'll find out oh okay I'll I'll take take the assessment um so like one of the most powerful sales techniques is to just not sell what
you do just to sell the assessment okay and it's just like and and to have an ambivalent Persona until you've taken an assessment it's like imagine you go to a doctor you say oh doctor doctor you know do do I need to put my arm in a cast they're going to say why
do you think you need an arm in a cast well cuz I got a sore arm well let's get an x-ray I don't know like let's have an x-ray before we talk about putting your arm in a cast it's like first we do the assessment then then we do the treatment yeah here
in America they're not going to send you go an x-ray they're just going to do a bunch of tasks before you can actually get the X-ray when what you really need is an x-ray but they're going to push that process out who knows what they're going to do in America yeah yeah you
might be dead it's like oh here have this over-the count of medicine that you could get anywhere else in the world for $1 but have it for $1,100 yeah yeah okay so we talked about two things the weight list the online assessment so something else so we got weight list we got online
assessment I love introduction events introduction events are great so an intro event is an introduction to blank introduction to rebranding um so once you once you are someone who's running a workshop by the way you're also a key person of influence that's a really powerful distinction the person who runs a workshop is
a key person of influence almost by definition so uh an introduction to um rebranding your family business um an introduction to scaling your family business through having a powerful brand uh if you're running that Workshop by definition you're assume to be well okay you like if you're running a workshop on it you
must be a key person of influence at that so like introduction workshops are super powerful you can do them on Zoom almost no cost super powerful mhm well on another episode we'll probably have to get into how do you architect one of those intro events because I'm curious because I'm sure some people
are going to run out there and try this and it's no one's going to sign up and when they do it it's terrible there's a lot of things to unpack there but maybe not on this episode you could do a weit list for the introduction workshop and then tell people I'm so sorry
you didn't get through cuz we only had one we only had one person you didn't you didn't get through but let's have a one to one instead yeah okay the intro event so we got intro that's kind of like how you got your start in in business right you started running my whole
first agency was my first super successful agency like I was 24 years old we're doing 10 million in sales um was just introduction events that was everything that was that's what we were specialists in we were the specialists in introduction events okay so someone who wanted to roll out a franchise we run
introduction events for their franchise someone who wanted to roll out a Financial Services offering or financial services financial planning business we run the introduction events so we were specialists in rather than selling the thing sell the introduction event with as much budget as you would sell the thing mhm and you will end
up making a lot more sales and we were very very good at that I'm noticing a theme Here Daniel about to try to convert a stranger into a customer it's a lot of work to too much friction there a lot of poor fits this bridge in between low commitment I'm not looking to
sell you anything I can give you some value it's the it's a Cinderella principle you're going to create an event that people feel valuable just participating in that you need to make sure you hold up your endend of the bargain y that the survey of the quiz is good that the intro event
is full of information it's going to really help them understand they have a problem and hear some potential Solutions so that then you can then cherry pick with the glass slipper the criteria like you feel like you might be a good fit for us let's dialogue perfect yeah exactly that all right so
it's building that bridge you can use these in conjunction you can you can use these you can actually use these tools all together so you could stack them yeah you could stack them so you could have an introduction event you could say I'm not taking on any clients until next year but we
are doing an introduction event and then at the end of the introduction event you could say I hope you've gotten value for that if you're interested in being a client join the waiting list and when you're on the waiting list we're going to give you a self assessment so once you join the
waiting list we'll give you a link to get a self assessment and that self assessment will highlight the issues and the needs that you've got M right it sounds super insestuous but I get it it's a good idea get people are like damn you've got a process for this you that's the thing
it's like you figure stuff out haven't you you thought through the entire seven course meal from the way that people are going to arrive at the event to the end of the event and the little goodie bag that you get to go uh with you on the way home and and you you
just you have to accept that you cannot do what everyone else is doing and get the different result if everyone else is just saying oh we're an agency and we start whenever you want to start and we don't have any way of explaining it and what do you what do you want we'll
try and do what you need whatever you've asked us we'll just try and do it if you if you behave like all the other agencies all the other coaches all the other advisers whatever if that's how you behave and that's how you show up in the world you're going to get the market
rate you're behaving like the market so you'll get the market rate there's nothing really different about the way you do it the agencies or the businesses or the coaches that are smashing it that are super successful they are communicating to the market I have figured this thing out I'm I'm smarter than you
are I know how this all works I've created some events for you to attend I've created some assessments for you I've created some uh value that's coming in the future join the waiting list and they're communicating where we're in demand we know what we're talking about you'd be you know You' you'd be
very lucky to uh get married to me because I'm Prince Jobing and you're going to be Cinderella it's going to be great right so they they're communicating that value in a very different way so people have to do it a little bit different yeah got it is there a fourth thing oh I
could I could go for days man I can keep keep should we draw it here then I think well otherwise people are going to get paralyzed with too many things this is this is three good things these are things that you can just have running up you can have these up and running
today but like you finish the podcast you use a template boom you know ready to go yeah okay um I I I had this question in my mind to ask you but I I don't want to interrupt the flow you often reference so there was this person I met who was asking me
this question the financial planner or the video production person or the where are you talking to these people where are you pulling these stories from oh well well well I always just talk about what I'm up to at the moment so some of those stories are recent this literally this week but the
financial planning story is actually uh s or 8 years old but I've used that as an example before and I know it's a good example um and I I saw that I saw her reposition her whole business as a result of that conversation so it's like it's just one that is stuck in
my mind um but there's hundreds of stories like that so they client stories um you know I run client tell me more like this is what I mean like was it a workshop you're running you like what do I do right yeah like where do all these people come from cuz somebody's in
the audience thinking get that conversation with Daniel yeah well you have to join the wait list uh there's two main businesses that I run so I have a software company called score app.com and score app is a lot of the stuff we talk about is I've templated it these are the things that
have worked for me and we've created templates and at sc.com you set up a free account and then you can use the template library and there's 80 templates in there and and that's all there and essentially this is a software that does online assessments and waiting lists and like all of that and
it collects data valuable meaningful data so scor app is an extension of my passion turned into software and then Dent is uh an accelerator that I run where over the last 15 years we've been taking people through a process to help them with their personal brand um we run the key person of
influence accelerator uh and every year now we take about 550 people globally through a process of developing their personal brand um and uh people do apply they go through a process they go through an educational and a bit of training that's free and then if they say yeah I want to go ahead
and Implement that they apply to go on the accelerator and we we take on about 550 a year okay some of our friends our mutual friends have enrolled in this kpi accelerator you said you take on 550 people so it caps out of 550 yeah okay and this is an ongoing thing like
how does it work and what does it cost so the way it works it's it's an online training y uh live events every two weeks for about 3 hours so it's quite a commitment like you like every two weeks you're doing a 3-hour training session for at least a year so we get
people to commit for 12 months minimum um and we have an online portal that's AI enabled so the online portal asks you a ton of questions about who you are and your background and all this then it uses AI to reite the pitch and to create like Frameworks for how you would productize
more effectively so then you're doing the live workshops and you're using the portal to reinvent your business we get our clients often to write a book we get our clients creating podcasts and being on guests on podcasts we get them in little uh social media squadrons where they help each other to amplify
their social media profiles um we teach them to rep pitch or we rewrite the pitch with them and then we get them practicing and rehearsing and and doing the pitching we do something called a product ised ecosystem where we take their intellectual property and producti it across different layers um so all of
that happens over 12 months if someone at the end of 12 months has got it and they're good happy days if they want to continue on they can just continue on and keep going every 2 weeks if the environment's really working for them every two weeks for 3 hours just keep going um
yeah and you said how much is it if they're a small business that's about five grand for the year uh because we have like a startup version if they're a more established business with at least six figures of Revenue it's about 10 grand for the year way cheaper than an MBA way cheaper
than a coach consultant uh to come into their business it's accelerator environment it gives you a great Network all of that sort of stuff okay so it sounds like you're using AI to translate a lot of the principles that you believe in that have worked to help make it scalable for people who
are joining yeah is it a rolling enrollment anybody can join as long as there's an opening we do interview process and then we have start dates throughout the year okay so you you you have to syn up to a start date yeah so you you'll interview and then you'll join with a start
date that works I see yeah um and then prior to the start date you'll have some portal work that you can get started with straight away so you start the process of going through the portal okay um who is it a not a good fit for uh it's not we we're not really
great for like B Toc like consumer products that are stuff that you might just buy like tangible goods trinkets uh physical things um we we we specialize in B2B services like the the absolute home run is B2B Services anyone who's an agency advisor coach uh we do a lot of Fitness related businesses
health and wellness we have a ton of doctors surgeons dentists who come through um we have a lot of people who have like got a PhD or an academic like they're super talented technically but they're not great at telling the world about that um but someone who wants to really hide behind their
brand where they're just like I just want to create this like Leather Pouch and people buy it and it's an e-commerce business and I don't want anyone to know who I am that's definitely a bad fit cuz it's the key person of influence program you're you're repping your business you're you're going to
be the brand um you know so we we often ask questions like if you wrote a book and gave away a thousand copies of the book what do you think would happen to your business if someone says oh my business would go through the roof like I'd be speaking and I'd be on
podcast and I'd win high value clients and all that sort stuff that's normally a good test that it would be good if someone's like selling this stuff they go well I can't see at all how that would work or if if you would invited to speak at a major conference what do you
think that would do at your your brand oh that would be amazing for my brand great let's get that happening if someone says oh well I don't really understand what speaking at a conference would do for my brand at all or or would do for my sales or my money then then that's
a no yeah okay so you mentioned there's primarily two companies that you're involved with yeah there's kpi which we just talked about in depth we'll include the links to those programs so you can apply and get on a wait list and perhaps go to an intro event who knows and then there's this
other thing called score app which is the online self assessment software that you built based on these principles you said it's a free to try but what like loves it what are the price points it's huge so expensive it's out of this world I'm Afra it's $29 a month um and then and
then if you're a bigger business it's like 59 a month and then a much bigger business is 99 a month so it's like between 30 and 100 bucks a month yeah um depend sounds crazy reasonable to me yeah I mean it it's you know our business is built a scale you know so
we it's a business that has thousand we're in 150 countries and um 6 and a half thousand people using score app and then we have on top of that we have Enterprise level which is like for bigger companies they want much more dedicated so that's like a grand a month but they're like
household they're like footy 100 and S&P 500 and those sorts is that coming like with an advisor helping out is it yeah for the for the for the Enterprise level stuff it's largely about the security features the multiple logins jumping through the Hoops that they want you to do for like on boarding
having dedicated service desk available for multiple people we also for those guys we do like special template libraries that are just for their clients and just for their uh employees and then it's like lock down so that they can't edit anything that I see yeah so it's a bit bit different so we
have our Enterprise level but most people are on our like small business tier okay so for Enterprises more about control security compliance corporate kind of corporate all the stuff the corporates want before they can even like they may love the software but if you don't have all this like two Factory authentification and
you know cyber security policy and all that if they if you don't have all that and if you're not willing to go through their process yeah so they're happy to pay a grand a month provided you've got all of this stuff and you can help them and support them get it working so
yeah so we have Enterprise but most small businesses they just sign up they get a free account they see how it works and then they when they're ready they just go to 29 a month from the score perspective is the Enterprise client the big client no my passion I don't have a huge
passion for big companies I have a huge passion for small businesses I want small businesses to win I'm conflicted about big companies um my my genuine authentic passion is I want small businesses to win I believe in the entrepreneur reevolution ution um you know there's this idea of like by 2030 you'll own
nothing and you'll be happy about it I'm like the opposite I'm like by 2030 you're going to own an amazing business and that's going to be your business and you and that business will pay for a house and you're going to own that house and you're going to be so damn happy because
of all the stuff you own so so I'm like I want the small businesses to win I think we're going through a time in history where all the systems that were built for the Industrial Age are breaking down but the one thing that's kind of emerging and it's providing a lot of happiness
and joy for people is ownership of a small business um so that's what I'm all about at the beginning of the show we said we're going to answer this one question that came at us from Twitter or X and it was about how to get 10 high-end clients yeah the 10 highend clients
probably is going to come from 100 people who engage with a waiting list 100 to 200 so you think about the fact that they join a waiting list or come to an event or fill in an assessment is already a filter but by definition Ultra highend client or a highend client is the
top 5 to 10% of people who are already filtered um so ultimately if you want 10 clients you're going to need 100 to 200 people so it's the top 10% of the of the people who have filled you know filled in a form um so I would say if you're looking for 10
highend clients across the course of the year you might want to repeat this a few times let's say get 50 on the waiting list and then you run the campaign again do it every quarter um so you're always pushing people out to the next quarter and you say I'm not taking on any
clients this quarter um and uh fill in the waiting list for next quarter or fill in expression of interest for Q2 Q3 Q4 so you can repeat this and if you're getting 50 people join the waiting list you're always going to be over subscribed you're always going to be able to cherry pick
those very top end clients now that's the other thing you want to have a list of people on there so you can select those top clients so you know let's say across the course of the Year 200 selected people engage you pick your 10 now you've got your your top 10 clients so
hopefully if you do this correctly when you launch your next quarterly campaign you can reflect back on hey we did this a remarkable thing for this type of client got this results so you're updating the narrative which would be very exciting because that's a fresh Fresh Victory right there right yeah probably make
it a little EAS and then it becomes a bit more of a self-fulfilling prophecy now that you're selecting hiring clients you're positioned as a key person of influence more people want to join the waiting list it becomes that virtuous Loop right and then you get more qualified people raising their hand signaling interest
and it just gets better and better over time that's what we want okay now I have a question for you for your kpi program of 550 people are you running a weight list are you running a self assessment quiz so every single week something like 110 people jump onto the introduction Workshop um
240 will register but 10 will show up and then from that about 25 to 30 once they've heard the introduction workshop and they hear our criteria about 25 to 30 will then interview for a spot so we'll do we'll conduct interviews we even just on the questions that we ask to get an
interview screen about a third of people where we know in advance that we're not going to be able to take them on as a client we deliver Great Value we do a 15 to 20 minute session they know that it's only going to be a 15- 20 minute session Point them in the
direction for some content some books some some pre-work but politely decline then the others they will get between 20 minutes and an hour with one of our team and we do a pre-screening conversation and then uh when we get to the point of saying yes you'd be suitable for the program submit a
proposal which they can accept or or not the truth is that we probably have something like 5 to 7 ,000 people a year who engage meaningfully with us for us to get our 550 um where we screen so similar numbers to what I just talked about we probably we're picking our top 10%
from the people who engage mm um do do you do you do the same intro event is it recorded or is it done live so there's three of us who do it myself myself Glenn and Mike um so I actually do one or two a month okay it's a 90minut introduction event I
love doing it it's my finger on the pulse for our clients um and yeah we do it live okay well the reason we do it live is because what we're expecting for people over the following 12 months is that they're going to join live workshops and interact with us so we want to
give people a taste or a flavor of what's to come so we give them a live Workshop so it's so people go oh so it's going to be like this it's going to feel like this yeah so what you just experienced with us here is a little bit of a taste of what
it will feel like but you doing this every 2 weeks mhm um so we want people to if we did a pre-recorded then it sets people up to feel like the experience is going to be pre-recorded right so we we do a live Workshop because it's going to be live Workshop so okay
yeah so you're doing this one or two times a month yeah presumably at your night because you're eight or nine hours ahead of us and it's American Market or am I no we're a global market so we we kind of rotate through and there's just different times there are actually time zones that
kind of work for all all it might be morning in LA and like late afternoon in um in uh London yeah right yeah so we're a global business we we have clients in 40 countries for for that business we have clients for scor up we have 150 countries represented now and 40 countries
that we take on for for the key person of influence accelerator and although the live events are done live is it following a structure that you've already worked on are you changing it all the time I've been doing these for 15 years yeah so I'm like I'm like Metallica playing a Metallica concert
I can get up and do it I sure I believe you yeah I can just do it because I've been doing it almost weekly uh like almost once a week or once every two weeks for 15 years I've been talking about this stuff um so I put in the Reps okay yeah so
very selfish question here for me is to get people to join the future Pro Group which is $250 a month minimum 3-month commitment we run events like this but we teach them something but our audience is so broad that it'll get filled with people who are not qualified to be there so our
conversion percentage therefore is not so good what do I got to do to tweak that I wouldn't worry about conversion percentage I would worry about do you on board the right clients at the right levels that you want cuz if 5,000 people did an introduction Workshop but 25 of the perfect clients and
you only wanted 25 fine right that success that's fine um so for me personally there's a couple of principles that I would I'd be thinking about here okay an introduction Workshop should not be um it should not be a lesson like it it shouldn't be a sample it should be deliberately crafted and
designed as a way of introducing people to what's to come if they if they're accepted so like for example if you sat down at a restaurant and they brought out 10 samples of all the meals and you can just eat that or they or they say hey one of the dishes is cabonara
so we're going to give you a cabonara before you look at the menu and see if you want it's like by the time you eat the cabonara say well I'm full now I'm not hungry you say well why aren't you ordering we gave you a free carabano because you filled me up so
you run the risk of with an introduction event you can run the risk of filling someone up and then they go oh well I don't need it and that could be the reason there's low conversions as opposed to exploring the reasons that they do need to join the the group so if your
introduction event is more of a deep dive into the awareness of deficiencies that would be solved later if we if we go through the process that serves people more than giving them a starting point but not actually you know a full process so the goal of the introduction is to be an introduction
like an introduction to Harvard is not here let's start the MBA and give you a lesson it's no this is what Harvard life is going to be like and here's what here's how it's going to work and here's what we're going to teach you and here's what people say about it this is
the problem that you currently have and here's how we solve this you know here's our success rates so you're actually giving someone the information they need to buy so I would number one I would look at it I'm happy to look at it if you want me to um and I'd look at
it through the lens of does this create hunger or F or or make people less hungry um is it sating or is it hunger inducing um and then if you're particular about who you take on as a client which should be then I would use the assessment that the follow-up call to action
is to take the assessment and only if they answer the assessment honestly in a particular way will they get a link to join so it's first so you you're basically saying here's the introduction here's what you would get take the assessment based on how you would answer the assessment green light yellow light
red light red light this is not suitable yellow light these are three things we want you to do before you come back green light you're ready to proceed yeah so I think we're executing the mechanical parts of this but the devil's in the details we do have an assessment before somebody can get
the link to join it because we don't want it to fill up with so many people then the right people can't get in because there's a limit right yeah I'm also curious about the 250 a month price point yeah because 250 a month is expensive to the wrong person and too cheap for
the right person and that's something that kind of concerns me okay cuz like realistically for the right person 5 to 10 grand is actually signals that there's value here um but for the wrong person 250 like three grand a year is like oh that's it's a huge huge commitment I don't even spend
that on my laptop right and it's like yeah it's not that's not really so potentially this should be starting at 500 or a th000 a month um and it's a lot less people but they're the right people and it's a screening process and it feels like now I'm part of an exclusive group
and for anyone who doesn't want to spend a grand a month go look at the channel right right we got so much content but it's like in here this is where this is next level you're networking with the people who are going to get you next level so I feel like that price
point is a little bit potentially too far in the middle okay it's like too too I can hear that yeah too high for the too low for the others I can also I mean the the thing that happens with lot of when we use the score app we can see people retaking the
test over and over again until they can win they just keep changing their answers and car who runs a score app I was like what do you want to do go if they wanted to get in who cares what I going to do likeo the link I mean because eventually if you answer
the question correctly you get the link yeah yeah there's not much we can do there but they could go back through it well if it Flags you could just have a quick onboarding call you say hey look we noticed you took it three times right and um which means you really want to
be in the group but we've put that in there for a reason what makes you think we should move our criteria for you so maybe just have that little bit of a on boarding call if they TR if they flag that okay okay food for thought I got to make sure I'm answering
this question aside from the pricing question which is are we feeding them or are we creating hunger are we satiating them or the desire to do something okay that's something new for me because I really think of myself as a as an educor I just want to teach and so I'm writing new
webinars all the time I'm like let me teach you this thing I'm definitely feeding them I'm not creating hunger cuz the conclusion is let me go work on this before I join so we're not getting the conversion that we want so I'm messing up here yeah I I made that mistake many times
many times I'll give you one last little thing that we just found out okay um I know we're over time but one quick thing we ran an AI uh analysis of Glenn Mike and I's last 30 introduction presentations so you looked at the transcript and you uploaded it to AI we analyzed for
Trends and the AI and we we gave it the numbers the high converting the mid-con converting the low converting ones how's this for crazy it didn't really matter whether it was Glenn Mike or I and it didn't really matter some of the key topics that were discussed being different right so didn't have
to be the same presentation the lowest converting um uh introduction workshops had three calls to action the mid converting had five calls to action and the highest converting had seven calls to action and that was like the main correlation so seven calls to action in 90 minutes so it's pretty intense oh I
see now who was the most guilty of the three calls to action me so the other guys were doing five and seven I was the one doing the three which was my why my introduction workshops were actually low because I love fancing myself as an ed educator as opposed to doing the calls
to action I'm like oh they'll come through when they're ready no they don't they need calls to action so the calls to action so what I ended up doing is I when I do my workshop now I draw seven circles and then as I'm doing my workshop I do tick I've done one
tick two tick three so I've done that three times now with my little seven circles approach and my conversions are nearly double give me example what you might say during a live webinar is a CTA oh so a CTA would be um if you if you enjoy this workshop and you want to
proceed to The Next Step the next step is to have a on toone interview with the team you're going to answer a few questions and then our Software System will determine whether it's suitable for you to have a onetoone with a team um during that they're going to find out your vision for
the future your uh background your intellectual property that you draw from in the past your current mission for your business we're going to put forward a proposal as to how we could do more with your current level of intellectual property we going talk to you about productization all of that happen on a
one to one this presentation it's General it's for a group but a oneto one we can drill into your business um so if you're interested in taking your next step and you want to work with us a one: one is the only available next step you can't buy anything you can't sign up
for anything you have to book into a one: one for an interview um so that's available by clicking the link that's in the comments you're doing that seven times in a call now I I'll do it in different ways so that might be in the beginning so then I might talk about the
importance of x y and Zed and I'll say if that particular point Point resonated with you um The Next Step would be to book that one: one uh if you want the link for the one: one um it's in the comments uh so click on the link that's just jumped into the uh
chat into the comments there and we can drill into that particular point so we just discussed x y and Zed and if that's the thing that you feel is the most important thing for you to discuss make sure that you take that to a one to one okay so I'll do I've got
several versions of it but eventually I was only doing three of those one at the beginning middle and end yeah but the AI said do seven so now we do seven for a m I'm saying Chris you did it twice yeah yeah barely same thing because you feel like an educator and just
want to serve I'm the same my natural instinct but the true serve is let people know how much value they'll get from the prop from the commitment to the process the purpose of and being up front the other thing too is I say this is an INT C Workshop the purpose of this
is to show you what could happen to your business if you made a commitment to go through a much longer process so we take people through a 12-month Journey we we get you on a 12-month accelerator I'm going to give you an overview so that you know what would if you made a
commitment of time energy effort money to go through a 12-month process what would we take you through what would you expect to see at the end of it you know what results do other people get uh who's it for who's it not for we're going to go through that kind of information M
okay yeah so I'm I'm being upfront about it and I also tell people if that's not what you came for you don't have to sit through this whole Workshop you can leave yeah I'm big on permission yeah so you know I I'll say this is what we're going to be doing you know
you don't have to stick around if you know if if you get 10 minutes into this and you realize it's not for you drop off that's not a problem I won't be offended um your time's valuable my time's valuable you know that's totally fine the the benefit of doing that by the way
is the huge upside is the vast majority of people don't drop off so it actually signals to everyone oh everyone's getting Great Value everyone's here for the same reason right there's something about a live Zoom call for whatever reason once you commit to showing up very few people actually leave yeah exactly yeah
okay thanks for that as always I try and mind you for like one nugget that I can apply very selfishly to my own business and of course you did not fail there we're going to make sure that we include the links to both score app and to the kpi accelerator in the links
if you're watching this on YouTube it'll be down below if you're listening to us some podcast good luck where you can find that information but it'll be there in the description uh Daniel it's been a pleasure this is call number four you rocked it and thank you very much for doing this [Music]
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