The Soloist Life

Conventional advice from pundits says never serve "whales" in your consulting business. But what if they're wrong? (Hint: they are.) A whale model CAN work in the right circumstances, provided it’s a fit with how you like to work and you design and price them correctly. Here’s my advice on whether (and how) to add whale clients to your service mix:What exactly makes a client a whale?A few examples of highly successful whale business models—how they’re structured and how much revenue they deliver.Why conventional "wisdom" about whales doesn’t apply when you structure and price them correctly.The three challenges you’ll need to address to make sure whales will work for your particular business.Where to start if you decide adding whale clients makes sense.RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.BOOK A CALL WITH ROCHELLETRANSCRIPTRochelle Moulton00:00 - 00:47You just want to make sure that your whale clients fit neatly into at least one of your sweet spots, like the type of work, the industry, your client profile, et cetera. Otherwise, each one will feel like a supremely heavy lift, and that's the last thing that you want. Hello, hello. Welcome to the SOA's Life Podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth, impact, and power. I'm Rachelle Moulton, and today I want to talk to you about whether it makes sense to include whale clients as part of your service mix right now. I sent out an email to my list about this last week, and I got quite a few responses as well as a few questions.Rochelle Moulton00:47 - 01:27So we're going to do a deeper dive on this today. Let's start with what I mean by whale client. They don't have to be a giant company or a huge organization. The whale refers to how much of your revenue they represent. So I'd call any client that is 15 to 20% or more of your annual revenue a whale. Now, there is this assumption in certain circles that a whale client model is bad. That the best goal is to build revenue streams where you can sell smaller things to more people. That that is less risky over time.Rochelle Moulton01:28 - 02:12While there's nothing wrong with creating a diversified business, it isn't for everyone. Many consultants and advisors who are delivering major value to their institutional clients have built significant revenue and wealth using a whale model. So I'll give you a few examples. Number one, a specialty marketing consultant to big corporates who has a consulting book speaking model, earns $500,000 plus per year. They usually do a handful of $100,000 to $150,000 consulting projects and speak maybe half a dozen times a year, plus they earn royalties from their books. Now their downside is the travel required for speaking.Rochelle Moulton02:12 - 02:57So this would be hard to master in say 20 or probably even 30 hours a week. Two, a retainer expertise model where the consultant sells $100,000 plus annual retainers to three to five companies. They typically are retained for a few years, you know, with annual renewals with the need and the fees tapering off as they go. So maintaining a pipeline of future clients to replace the old ones as they roll off is critical to make this model work. Three, a change consultant who does one or two giant projects per year along with usually a few smaller productized service offerings that often lead to the big assignments like say an assessment.Rochelle Moulton02:58 - 03:44Now this is the most dangerous whale model because if even one project goes off the rails, you're at risk. And yet, it can also be the most lucrative. I've had clients routinely earning $500,000, $750,000, and even a million dollars as a soloist without employees or contractors. Now, I know I'm tossing around some big numbers, but we're talking about soloists who've got significant experience and are delivering a very specific high value transformation. Most of them didn't start there, but they migrated over time as they experimented with their work, figuring out who their best clients are and their most valuable to the client outcomes.Rochelle Moulton03:45 - 04:25So a lot of consultants and advisors don't even think about a whale model because it so goes against the grain of the typical advice out there. Build a huge audience, sell low price point products, right? But if you position yourself correctly, Price yourself right and carefully build a system that delivers a pipeline of future clients to you. This can be not only a lucrative practice, but one where you don't have to work 60 plus hours a week to make it happen. Now, as always, the devil's in the details. So I see three main challenges you'll want to address.Rochelle Moulton04:26 - 05:07Challenge number one, you have to deliver a transformation that is high value enough that a handful or two of clients can bring you some seriously significant revenue. Because it's not worth your time to focus in on a few whales if altogether they deliver disappointing revenue. So if you had five $30,000 whales when you were first starting out, that would be incredible. But when you've been doing that same work, same volume for five years, not so much. If you're committed to the model, you'll want to keep honing the client outcomes as you go so they deliver higher and higher value outcomes.Rochelle Moulton05:07 - 05:55So that $30,000 that you started with might become $50,000, $100,000, or even more as you keep zeroing in on your sweet spot. So challenge number two is positioning yourself correctly. You need to be in a big enough category to ensure there's sufficient demand for your thing, but you want to occupy your very own authority space. A generic communication consultant probably won't be able to hit those big numbers, but an M&A specialist might easily command them. And this too is going to evolve over time as you decide where you want to focus. And challenge number three is price yourself like the rock star you are.Rochelle Moulton05:55 - 06:39And if you aren't a rock star yet, then figure out the highest, best value you can deliver so that your ideal clients come to see you as their rock star. Now with pricing, you've got to experiment to find your sweet spot and then experiment some more because it's an ongoing process. It never ends. I've told the story in my book and here on this podcast about the client selling an assessment that was jam-packed with value for $15,000. All we did was bump it up by $10,000 each time until their ideal buyers said no. We found the ceiling, and then we experimented with providing more value so we could raise it again.Rochelle Moulton06:40 - 07:15Now, I get that blithely increasing fees by $10,000 a clip is hard when times are tough, but if you're having enough sales conversations, it's pretty easy to try it out for yourself. Which leads me to the question I really want you to consider today, and that's this. Should Whale clients be part of your service mix right now if they aren't already? Times are pretty weird right now. We are teetering on the edge of a recession, some are saying that we're already in one, and lots of buyers are pulling back or putting off big decisions until they have more clarity.Rochelle Moulton07:16 - 08:02Those buyers are less likely to reach out to someone new when they're in stress mode. But your clients, former and current, know what you can do, right? That makes them an easy starting point to lock in some revenue now on open items you know that they're going to need. Or you could start discussions for bread and butter type work that they're likely to green light once the dust clears. Concentrating on a few significant clients allows you to focus your sales, marketing, and relationship building intimately while keeping your revenue flowing and growing. And it limits any flailing around you might do if you get worried about the direction of your revenue line.Rochelle Moulton08:03 - 08:42You just want to make sure that your whale clients fit neatly into at least one of your sweet spots, like the type of work, the industry, your client profile, et cetera. Otherwise, each one will feel like a supremely heavy lift, and that's the last thing that you want. You never want to have just one client because that's usually not a sustainable business model. The only exception, and it's quite rare, where this can work is when you're doing intensive one-to-one work where you can only serve one client at a time. and you're billing them what feels like a crazy big amount, i.e.Rochelle Moulton08:42 - 09:27enough revenue to make for an outrageously successful year. Even then though, you've got to have a system that delivers you leads or you will spend way too much time sitting on the bench waiting for your next whale. Also want to make sure that any whale is worthy of investment, that they are good people with achievable goals who will view you as a trusted resource. Anyone who doesn't meet that standard is never worth your time and energy. They must value your services and be willing to pay for the value received. You only want whales who appreciate you, who see you as the rock star to midwife them to that big transformation they're looking for.Rochelle Moulton09:28 - 10:15You also want to be able to grow together or part company respectfully if your goals go in different directions. I'm going to argue that that means you like them, you like how they work, and you're aligned with their worldview. Anyone not meeting that standard cannot become a whale because I will, they cannot become your whale because I guarantee you'll regret it every single day you work with them. So you can probably tell I like a good whale model when it suits your skills, deliverables, temperament, and business and revenue goals. It doesn't work for everyone, but if your current business model isn't working for you in this kind of crazy business environment, it might be time to give a whale a try.Rochelle Moulton10:16 - 10:51You don't need to upend your entire business. Just try it with one current or past client, someone who knows you and trusts you and see where it leads. Because even if serving a handful of whales is not your long term vision, it can act as a lucrative placeholder while you navigate your business through this uncertainty. Just construct them thoughtfully and only let the very best folks on the train with you. Alrighty then, that's it for whale models today. I'll see you next time on The Soloist Live. Bye-bye.

Have you noticed that expertise podcasts—even from “celebrities”—tend to have an arc? They grow, they evolve, they might even shrink or pause for awhile and at some point they end.When Sales for Nerds host Reuben Swartz put his highly rated 100-episode podcast on hiatus with an intriguing announcement, I invited him to the show to talk about:Why he hit the pause button on Sales for Nerds.Where his podcast aligns with his core Soloist business—and where it diverges.How he thinks about the value of his time and the role his podcast plays in personal learning and driving business.The organic arc (rise, plateau, fall) his podcast experienced as his business and his goals have changed.How finishing 100 episodes made him review his experiences and think about what’s next.LINKSReuben Swartz Mimiran | Sales for Nerds | LinkedIn | YouTube (Mimiran) | YouTube (Sales for Nerds)  Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOReuben Swartz is the founder of Mimiran, the fun, “anti-CRM” for independent consultants, born of his experience as a sales and marketing consultant for the Fortune 500, struggling with his own business development efforts. He's also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast.RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.BOOK A CALL WITH ROCHELLETRANSCRIPTReuben Swartz00:00 - 00:28So i dropped an email to jason cohen at wp engine hey jason i got this new concept for podcast i bring a bottle of wine to your office and interview you talk about wine i really like your blog he writes this brilliant blog and i've heard you speak at blah blah blah blah blah and I really like what you have to say blah blah blah blah blah blah And I'm also a customer blah blah blah blah blah blah Right? Like this really nice, suck up email. He just writes me back 5 minutes later--you had me at wine, here's a link to my calendar.Rochelle Moulton00:33 - 01:08Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Live podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth, impact, and power. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm so excited to welcome Ruben Swartz to the show. Ruben is the founder of Mimarin, the fun anti-CRM for independent consultants, born of his experience as a sales and marketing consultant for the Fortune 500, struggling with his own business development efforts. He's also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast. Ruben, welcome.Reuben Swartz01:08 - 01:10Oh, it's so great to be here, Rochelle. Thanks for having me.Rochelle Moulton01:11 - 01:45Yeah. So we met on your podcast and the sales for nerds podcast, and I've been on your email list ever since. Just kind of like to keep tabs on what you're up to. And then last week I got this email, which with your permission, I'm going to read because it just felt very Ruben and very vulnerable and very true. So I'll just get to it. When you get this, I'll be recovering from eye surgery. Nothing terrible, but it's been an interesting year or so with 1.5 eyes. I won't get all my vision back in my left eye, but it should be much more functional.Rochelle Moulton01:46 - 02:15While I certainly hope to see better visually, I also try to keep seeing better conceptually. And along those lines, I'm putting Sales for Nerds on hold for a bit. Nothing against the great guests I've enjoyed speaking with, but I'm feeling like I'm not offering much that's new and that putting out new episodes is more for me to say I did it than to offer real value to you. If you think I'm missing something, let me know what you'd like to hear. I've got some ideas for a reboot, but I need to go think about it for a minute.Rochelle Moulton02:16 - 02:47So what I so appreciated about that email is that I know exactly that feeling, as does a pretty surprising swath of our fellow podcasters. So I just had to ask you to come on and talk with me about how we manage what I'm thinking of as the arc of podcasting, like how expertise business owners can roll with the different waves that hit our podcasts and our business growth at different inflection points. So that's the setup. I'm just so glad you said yes.Reuben Swartz02:48 - 02:48Well, it's greatReuben Swartz02:48 - 03:17to be here. And it's funny that we're having this conversation because in some ways I had been feeling this way for a while. And I think like most of us, I'm just kind of stubborn. And I think, well, if you know, if things aren't going great, that's fine. You just power through. And then I heard you and Jonathan discussing just ending your podcast. Like it had come to the end of its lifespan and you'd said what you wanted to say and you were going to move on to different things. And I was like, Oh, That's interesting.Reuben Swartz03:18 - 03:53Maybe I should think about that. And I've been sort of thinking about it for a while. And when I started, it was great because every single episode was just so new and so interesting. And I felt like I was learning so much and. a hundred plus episodes in, it's not that the guests were any worse or better than the earlier ones, but I didn't feel like I was learning as much. And whether or not that translates to the audience, if I'm not learning as much, then I'm not as excited to be there because I love learning things.Reuben Swartz03:54 - 04:40And so I didn't feel like I was bringing my best game to my listeners. And for a while I had sort of been thinking, okay, I need some better way of organizing this than just here's a bunch of random episodes that all have helpful info. I wanted to have themes and I thought about sort of having playlists. So, you know, if you work in marketing, if you're working on networking, if you're working on sales, here's a bunch of episodes you should look into and there's no good reason i haven't done that but what i realized later was maybe i want to have sort of like a start to start a new season of the podcast where it's going to be sort of more serialized content where you want to listen to episode one and it's going to lead to episode two to episode three and so on and then when you get done with it you've gone on this journey and you've learned the following thingsRochelle Moulton04:41 - 04:41the NetflixReuben Swartz04:41 - 04:43model. Kind of like that. Yes.Rochelle Moulton04:43 - 05:05Yeah. Okay. So before we go too far with the arc of podcasting, will you talk to us a little bit about how you got here because you operate what I would call a soloist business, but you also decided to develop a product to help solve a very common soloist problem. So talk about, you know, how'd you get here doing this right now?Reuben Swartz05:06 - 05:39With very poor vision and strategic planning would be the short version. I started a business 20 something years ago because I was young and single and didn't have a lot of expenses and had some savings and I remember thinking if I didn't do it then I would never do it. Brilliant business plan really. I've heard worse. It could be worse. Yeah. And it was a lot of fun, actually. And to be a guy in his mid-20s, flying all over the world, helping these giant companies and working with executives two or three times my age, it was great.Reuben Swartz05:39 - 06:29Something I had never envisioned myself doing. And I learned a ton and I like to think I was very helpful. And then life has its way of intervening because I thought I would do that for a while. you know my thirties i didn't mean maybe settle down and have some kids want to start gotten all that out of my system and then met my future wife and we had a certain schedule we had to get to if we're gonna have a family and that kind of threw off my planning and i didn't wanna travel as much and one thing led to another and i would love to tell you that In the course of my struggles to use the enterprise here we were helping our clients use that i saw the need for a CRM or an anti CRM geared towards the soloist and that's not what happened at all i literally accidentally started building things to plug into the enterprise tools.Reuben Swartz06:29 - 07:02And then people started asking me for access to them. So I made them from a tool for myself into an app that other people could access. And at the time, it was still mostly like enterprise type clients. And then what I noticed was the enterprise folks would start off really excited. They had good budgets. I was used to working with them. It was all great. But their requirements never ended. They would usually, they would want to bring me in because I'd say, hey, our, our sales teams just, they won't standardize anything. We need to standardize the way we're actually presenting stuff to prospects.Reuben Swartz07:02 - 07:36Your stuff is exactly what we need. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We just needed to do the following three extra things. Can you handle that? And I'd say, uh, sure. Okay. We can make it do that. We'll do that. And then I'd say, okay, everything's great. We just need to do the following three extra things. And eventually we all realized there was no end to the extra things and that's why they were using excel because. No one could ever say no to a prospect and say, here's how we're going to sell you stuff. If the prospect said, present it like this, they went off and presented it like this.Reuben Swartz07:37 - 08:09And the whole effort to standardize would fall apart. Meanwhile, there were other indie consultants who thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And they didn't have big budgets. You needed a lot of them to equal one enterprise customer, but they were thrilled. And it was making their lives better in ways that I could personally relate to, because I was doing the same thing. And they started asking for more stuff. I started off just like wanting to know if people had read my proposals. So I figured if I could put the proposal in the cloud, I could know if people were reading it.Reuben Swartz08:09 - 08:38That was sort of the genesis of this crazy journey. So then people said, Hey, the end of my sales cycles, smooth, easy, predictable, love it. What can I do to get more people in the front of the funnel? And I thought, you know, being the techie guy, I'll just go do some research and say, well, you should use this. And I had one of those moments like you have at the end of the movie where they show you all the clues and suddenly it's all obvious, but you missed it at the time. I have a lot of those in my life, but because I had tried so many things myself and nothing had really worked well for me.Reuben Swartz08:38 - 09:22And I realized that there were so many things out there, but they weren't geared towards this tribe. They were geared towards e-commerce type companies where you get an email address and you just Automate the crap out of email marketing or you have a big sales team that's gonna pound the phones all day and neither of those scenarios applies to the soloist and i thought well wait a second i've got this technology to let people share content online and no one someone's reading it what if we made that into a lead magnet. So instead of having one of those weird pinch and zoom experiences with a pdf you could actually read it on your phone and you could know not just when someone request it but if they look at it again next week next month whatever you have another chance to actually talk to them.Reuben Swartz09:22 - 09:48And so this work well people oh my gosh is amazing i'm finally getting leads off my website. And then I put them on my CRM, which I hate. And if it goes well, then I go into Mimarin and do the proposal. Can you please just make Mimarin do the CRM part? And as you can imagine, I said, no, that would be nuts. I would never do that. And so I kept hearing this from people and I kept saying, that's nuts. Like the world doesn't need another CRM. And I would be the last person to build one.Reuben Swartz09:48 - 10:18I freaking hate CRMs. I mean, I've literally used dozens of them. And here's what my, my customers were saying to me that that kind of makes sense is like, that's why you need to do this because you understand why we hate them so much. And again, looking back, it's all clear, but at the time I just couldn't see it. CRMs are built for a VP of sales to track a sales team. And I knew from my consulting days that the sales team doesn't even like them. Yup. We hated them. They're in there the whole time.Reuben Swartz10:18 - 10:46They at least know how to use them. The solo consultant who's maybe in the CRM a few hours a week, if you're lucky, doesn't want to think of his or herself as a salesperson, doesn't go through the formal training or anything like that. They just want to be able to do follow-ups. It's like, the analogy I like to use is, you're sick of carrying your groceries back from the grocery store. Someone says you should get a vehicle. And so you ask what you should get. And well, it turns out that there's a bunch of friendly vehicle consultants.Reuben Swartz10:46 - 11:21And the most popular one says, well, you should get a space shuttle. And then you wonder why taking the space shuttle to the grocery store is even more frustrating than walking home with your groceries, right? Yep. Salesforce. And then someone's like, oh, yeah, the space shuttle is just way too complicated. what you need is a 747, right? Now we're at HubSpot. And these are great tools. And there are times when you need a space shuttle or a 747 or whatever it is, but not to go to the grocery store. So that's sort of the long-winded way of saying, here's how we ended up building this thing.Reuben Swartz11:22 - 11:53with my customers kind of dragging me, kicking and screaming, because what I realized is we don't need to keep track of a sales team. We need to create and nurture relationships. And if you're in a relationship business, you're in a conversation business, which was very hard for me as an introverted anti-sales techie to accept. And if you're in a conversation business, you want to do two things. You want to get very specific about who you want to have conversations with, and then you want to have those conversations. That's it. Like it's no more complicated than that.Reuben Swartz11:53 - 12:02And the problem is we build up so much paraphernalia around everything that we don't do those basic things and then it's really hard.Rochelle Moulton12:02 - 12:42Oh, you are preaching to the choir. I mean, it's funny because I always associated CRM with relationships because I came out of a big firm when it was all about relationships. We worked with Fortune 500 companies and your job as a person who leads teams is to spider your way through an organization. And the way you do that is by building relationships with people in different functions. But then when all of the sales systems came out, I mean, they made no sense to me because I wasn't wired that way. But I did run a Fortune 500 company internal consulting group at one point in my career, and they had a rocket ship.Rochelle Moulton12:42 - 13:15And it was fascinating because they had salespeople. They had actual salespeople. And when I was watching them, that's when it dawned on me like, Oh, I get it. This is just so different than how I think of this stuff. I'm not thinking about tracking deals. I don't talk about deal flow. Right. Even in a big firm, we didn't talk about deal flow. We talked about relationships and the name of the client and the name of the company. So yeah. So how long did it take you till you had something that looks roughly like what you're offering today?Reuben Swartz13:15 - 13:47Well, it's funny. People always ask that and I say, well, it, how it looks today is different than how it will look in three months and how it looked three months ago. But I think, I mean, it probably took almost a decade from when I started building little tools for myself to when I would say, Hey guys, here's a CRM for solo people. And it wasn't that it took a decade of coding to do that. It just was never something that even occurred to me when I started out, which is probably, again, I'm not the most brilliant business visionary to ever walk the face of the earth.Reuben Swartz13:48 - 14:02Because you could have gone and built this in a much shorter amount of time if I had known what I was going to do. It's not that it's rocket science in terms of technology or coding. It's more a matter of carving stuff out than putting stuff in.Rochelle Moulton14:02 - 14:33Well, it's very organic the way you described it. And that's what a lot of soloists experience. I mean, even the soloists who come into this with a business plan saying, this is what I'm going to do. It changes like the first year usually. And it changes again, the second year and the third year and the 10th year and the 20th year. So, you know, it doesn't surprise me is what I'm saying. It's organic. And I would think that that's also what's helped make it more popular now because you get it and you've designed it for this specific audience.Reuben Swartz14:34 - 14:49I think that's so true. Like having a niche. And sort of cutting out the enterprise niche was, was hard. Cause that's where most of the revenue was...

When you’re building a Soloist expertise business, it’s pretty common to plateau around $200K or so in revenue.Typically at that point, you’ve found your groove and can reliably hit that number—but if you want to scale beyond that, conventional wisdom screams that it’s time to hire employees.Uh, no.You’ve got plenty of faster, easier and safer choices when you want to scale:Why hiring employees can be a viable model (I built and sold a boutique firm to the big boys for seven figures), but is front-loaded with challenges and risks.The role niching can play in busting through a revenue plateau—by weaving yourself into an existing cohort of clients and buyers.How to think about productizing your services and its impact on your revenue, your pipeline and your lifestyle.Moving from implementation or execution services to high price point advisory options.The three criteria you need to meet to make raising your prices a slam dunk.LINKSRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramRESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.BOOK A CALL WITH ROCHELLETRANSCRIPTRochelle Moulton00:00 - 00:52You might have a business where you come in, you do a project, and you exit never to be seen again. But many of you do work that produces deep tentacles into client organizations, so you want any productized services you offer to support that. Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life Podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth, impact, and power. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and frankly, I'm still deciding how it feels to add power at the end of this intro, probably because I've never really been about power per se, but about my personal definition of wealth, enough money, free time, independence, flexibility and impact to enjoy my life and my work.Rochelle Moulton00:52 - 01:37But as I said in my last solo episode, as soloists, we definitely have economic and leadership power, and it's time we use them. So I'm keeping that thought, power, and channeling it in this space for now. Speaking of power, today I want to talk to you about how to scale after you hit $200,000 or so in revenue. And the reason I want to hit on this today is I just tripped over a podcast episode about this topic, and I couldn't disagree more with the host's conclusions. See if you can't guess why. The main piece of advice was, wait for it, it's time to hire someone who does what you do, a mini-me.Rochelle Moulton01:38 - 02:24Now, look, if your goal is to grow a business with employees, this is actually not bad advice. Somewhere around $200,000 is often when solos selling expertise bump up against what feels like a revenue ceiling. So you hire a mini you, and theoretically, you can then double your revenue. Woo-hoo, right? Well, no, the devil lies in the details. You have to source, hire, train, and supervise this person. You have to pay them a salary, maybe even bonus them. You have legal obligations to them and anyone they touch as your employee. And there's no guarantee you'll be able to bring in enough revenue to actually make a profit on your hire.Rochelle Moulton02:25 - 03:07Hey, I built a very successful boutique consulting firm with employees. It can absolutely be done, but not without a real desire to nurture and lead your people. No matter what happens, you owe them the best version of you, as well as transparency about how they are or are not contributing to your firm's body of work and reputation. It's a lot. And besides, I'm betting if you're listening to this podcast, you're looking for ways to scale without dipping your toe into the employee pool. Am I right? Yeah, thought so. So let's talk about some other ways you can scale.Rochelle Moulton03:07 - 03:57And I see at least four of them. One, you can niche down into a highly lucrative segment of your client base. That allows you to experiment with creating multiple high value offers that are scalable. Two, you can build productized services where you're still present for some, maybe even all of the work, but you've streamlined it and priced it well upstream. Three. you can add high price point advisory options. Now, this can be very attractive when you've been focusing on execution or implementation work, because at some point, you'll be experienced enough and savvy enough to develop advisory options that put a value on your availability and applied wisdom, rather than on the hours you actually work.Rochelle Moulton03:58 - 04:47And finally, four, the easiest of all, when you're providing exceptional value to a specific audience, you can raise your prices. Now, I totally get that your mindset plays an outsized role in deciding to raise prices, but we're gonna talk about that, okay? All right, let's dive in. First, scaling by niching. This always feels counterintuitive. You're niching down, making your potential audience smaller to increase your revenue. But it can work beautifully if you choose the right niche, your people, and your specialty, and package your services effectively. If you think about some of the stories told by guests on this show, there's some huge advantages to niching down to a specific target market.Rochelle Moulton04:48 - 05:34Geraldine Carter, in episode one, is on a mission to help single owner CPAs get down to 40 hours. Literally everything she does is in service to that audience and her revenue keeps multiplying the more she focuses on helping them get out of chaos. Emily O'Meara in episode 14 is all about open source startups and their unique challenges. And just in the last episode, Sarah Kay Peck shared her 10 plus year journey on her mission to help parents in startups. You'll want to feel strongly about your people so that you're willing to cross that inevitable dip that will make it hard slogging for a while as you experiment to find what gets you the best traction.Rochelle Moulton05:35 - 06:30Ideally, you think of their getting the results they most want a bit like the Holy Grail. You're 100% invested in their success. Okay, number two, productize services. Productized service is a high value service you deliver in a tried and true way every time. Most of us have some sort of services that lend themselves to productization, like assessments, strategy sessions, strategy delivery, et cetera. And one of my favorites is Pia Silva's story on how she created her brand up. It's in episode 13, if you want to give it a listen. In a nutshell, she figured out that she made more money on her $3,000 one-day brand sessions than the $30,000 projects she was having trouble closing.Rochelle Moulton06:31 - 07:14Eventually, she doubled down on doing only those and gradually raising the price so that when she last did them, she was hitting $30,000 per project. But while it started out as a financial move, she quickly realized that it allowed her to live a much more flexible life than always being on call for clients. A couple of projects a month were enough to live the personal and professional life she was wanting. If you're doing big-scale implementation work, like, say, change consulting to large corporates or brand strategy, where your fees feel like an eye-popping risk to your clients, an entry-level productized service can be just the ticket.Rochelle Moulton07:14 - 08:00First, they get a taste of working with you without all of the financial risk. Say that your full-bore brand strategy work runs $300,000, while your front-end strategy is $30,000. Either party realizes this isn't going to work, you've got an easy out. And on the flip side, once you've had a solid working relationship, it's far, far easier for them to say yes to the other $270,000. Second, since it's a shorter term, lower dollar project, it's a lot easier to get that initial yes. Your time from proposal to close will feel lightning fast and you'll save a whole bunch of time and stress not circling around on big proposal check-ins.Rochelle Moulton08:02 - 08:45Third, your productized service doesn't have to lead to those big engagements. In fact, you might use it to smooth out your revenue between mega projects, or even to keep future clients warm until they're ready for the full scope of your work. To decide if and how productized services might work for you, don't just look at revenue flow, but the lifetime journey of your clients with you. You might have a business where you come in, you do a project, and you exit never to be seen again. But many of you do work that produces deep tentacles into client organizations, so you want any productized services you offer to support that.Rochelle Moulton08:46 - 09:32OK, number three, high price point advisory options. This can feel a bit elusive if you're used to execution or implementation work. It's like you say to yourself, really? Clients are going to pay me just to have access to my brain? I'm not giving them anything. I'm here to tell you, yes, they will. Now, it's not a slam dunk. It's a process. But you can start aligning your offerings right now to include an advisory option. If you're all about executing, then do this. Create an option at the end of your typical project that allows them access to pick your brain for some amount of time, three months, six months, a year.Rochelle Moulton09:33 - 10:24Mention it early on, preferably in your initial proposal, since it might actually seal the deal for you. And that's because clients don't just want work done, they want confidence that they'll be okay after you're done. Always remember, as a consultant or coach, you're selling confidence too. In fact, some of us are only selling confidence. For the right client, it's literally priceless. Now, I've had clients sell Access high-end advisory retainers for $3,000, $5,000, $10,000, and $20,000 a month. And the clients are thrilled because they know help is there when they need it. Of course, you have to have a high value skill and authority with your client base.Rochelle Moulton10:25 - 11:11And of course, you'll need to be solving big, expensive problems. But if you start wherever you are right now, you'll start climbing the ladder and leveraging your wisdom more every year. And finally, number four, raise your prices. To raise your prices successfully, you typically need three things. All right, you need a neatly defined and described outcome that you've delivered consistently to a specific client profile. You need enough sales conversations so you can experiment with raising your prices in specific situations. And you need a deep belief in yourself that you're adding value well in excess of your fees.Rochelle Moulton11:12 - 11:52What am I saying? That if you have experience consistently delivering value well in excess of your fees, and you're confident in your ability to continue to do that, you can raise your prices. A general rule of thumb is you'd like to deliver 10 times the value of your fees, because that makes the client's decision to hire you pretty much a no-brainer. Now, 5x is still viable, and even 2x when there's high trust and you're the authority on the issue. What's always interesting when I have these discussions with consultants is how conscious, or not, they are about the value they deliver.Rochelle Moulton11:53 - 12:32I've worked with people redesigning organizations who are saving tens of millions of dollars in employee turnover costs. Selling a project for $500,000 against that result is not hard, and they actually can price higher still without hearing a no. But I've also met some folks just like them with those same kinds of results who are petrified to bump their price over the $100,000 barrier. That's why mindset is so crucial here. You look at what you deliver, do the math on your fees versus the outcomes, and if it works, you've got every logical reason to raise your prices.Rochelle Moulton12:33 - 13:09If you feel like you can't, but you want that revenue bump, come talk to me to help you work through it, or even hire yourself a therapist if this is an issue throughout your life. This is a hurdle you want to jump over because it will literally change your life. Now, how you raise prices depends on your business and revenue model. In a practice with monthly retainers, you might raise fees at year-end for existing clients, but you could increase monthly fees for new clients as they come to you during the year. You can experiment. If you have productized services, especially if you don't post the price, it's easy to change with every new client.Rochelle Moulton13:09 - 13:46Just think of it as an experiment. You raise the price with new client one who says yes. Then you raise it again for new client number two who also says yes. New client number three, though, walks away at the new client number two price. So when potential new client number four comes in, you decide which way to go. If you've got plenty of work and revenue, maybe you hold the price that failed last time or even raise it. If you really need the work, then it's a tougher decision. Just remember that clients say no for all sorts of reasons, and your price might not have been why they declined.Rochelle Moulton13:47 - 14:28You want to do your best to get into their heads and understand their thinking, because it will make your next pricing decision far less stressful. I worked with a client who, when I met him, was offering an assessment to a very deep-pocketed target client for $15,000. Now, his results were off the charts. The savings his work brought his ideal clients were 10 times, 20 times, even 30 times his fee. So I challenged him to keep raising it $10,000 with each new client until he found the ceiling. And we had a couple of pause points where he stuck with the fee for multiple clients, but not too long ago, he hit $75,000.Rochelle Moulton14:28 - 15:23And we think there's still more room since he continues to produce those stellar results. All right, let's circle back to where we started. There are so many attractive ways to scale if you plateau around $200,000. You do not have to hire employees. I promise. I have clients who easily hit 300,000, 500,000, even a million without a single employee. And let me tell you from experience. A $500,000 or $1 million expertise business with employees means more uncertainty, more risk, and more headaches while delivering less net profit than the exact same revenue as a soloist. So if you want to stay solo, commit yourself to scaling the easy way.Rochelle Moulton15:24 - 15:44Niche into a highly lucrative segment of your client base, build productized services, add high price point advisory options, and raise your prices. Think of it as gunning for the least amount of friction and the maximum amount of joy. I'll see you next time on The Soloist Life. Bye-bye.

Maybe you’ve toyed with building a paid community as part of your business model. Or you gave it a shot and later shelved it because you just couldn’t make it work. Start-up Parent Founder Sarah K. Peck goes deep on how she built three paid communities:How she chose the initial idea that morphed into her company and multiple highly engaged (paid) communities.Why what looks like overnight success (260 applications for 25 spots) was actually years of experiments, trials and listening to a consistent audience.How she looks at experimenting today—and why a one-year commitment keeps her focused on the best outcomes for her members and herself.The role that lighthearted fun—joy even—can play in the success of your community and your own happiness.The intersection of motherhood and business and finding your sweet spot between the two.LINKSSarah K. Peck LinkedIn | ThreadsRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOSarah K. Peck is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of The Startup Parent Podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT Sarah K. Peck00:00 - 00:25I started interviewing folks who have big careers and are working at startups who have gone through pregnancy. That's why it was Startup Pregnant. I wanted to learn from folks. And about three years into the project, I realized that I didn't want to talk to only moms and only women. It was like, the shifts that happen when you're pregnant are just the beginning. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Like you're a parent for the rest of your life.Rochelle Moulton00:31 - 01:11Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life Podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I am so excited to welcome Sarah K. Peck to the show. So Sarah is the founder and CEO of Startup Parent and the host of the Startup Parent podcast, an award-winning podcast featuring women in entrepreneurship, business, and parenting. She writes about work, culture, and parenting, and her work has been featured in Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and more. Sarah, welcome.Sarah K. Peck01:11 - 01:14Oh, it's so great to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you.Rochelle Moulton01:14 - 01:47I was having so much fun in the green room that it was like I just had to stop and hit record so we could get some of this. So we talked a few years ago on my other podcast, but I've been watching you, and I've been fascinated by what I see as a very measured and successful approach to growth and how thoughtfully you've developed multiple professional communities, at least three that I'm aware of, that are at the intersection of motherhood and business. So I'm just thrilled that we can talk about this.Sarah K. Peck01:48 - 02:27That's really lovely to hear. It always feels, I think, on the inside, I'm sure other entrepreneurs can relate, that things are going so much slower than you want them to go. And it's taking forever, and you're trying some things, and then it doesn't work, and you try some new things. But yes, community has always been really important to me. And I have, since I was in my mid-20s, joined a number of communities that have really been supportive and helpful to me. And it's something that I really enjoy doing. It's like matchmaking. I think if I were living in a different era, I might have been a matchmaker.Sarah K. Peck02:27 - 02:44But I just really enjoy connecting people and bringing them together. And I recently took the StrengthsFinders, and it says that one of my skills is individualization. So it's like seeing people as individuals and then really getting to know them. So I'm glad that I was doing something that I'm good at.Rochelle Moulton02:45 - 03:16Well, yeah. And plus, you know, it's nice to have somebody come in and look at like your last 10 years of work and just be able to see it all in one fell swoop. It's a lot harder when you're doing the actual work in the trenches. So before we dive into Founders with Kids, which is your newest community, and why those two key words are compatible, would you share a little bit about how you got here? I mean, I know that you had a lot of writing and communications experience in your early days, but it looks like you've been an entrepreneur for a big chunk of your career so far.Sarah K. Peck03:17 - 03:57No, it's so surprising to me. I never knew that that was a path you could take until you reach that point where you want to make something exist that doesn't exist, or you're tired of other people telling you what to do. And so you branch out. But my background is in psychology and then architectural design. I got a graduate degree in urban design and landscape architecture. And I worked for five or six years in that field. And one of the things that i noticed and started to observe was that these brilliant people who are dreaming up the future in visuals they're able to do plans and design.Sarah K. Peck03:58 - 04:33were speaking in jargon. You know, when they got up and to write about what they were doing or speak about what they were doing, so often no one could understand them because it was like, well, the precipitous back channel of the blank blank is something. So, and I was like, I don't know what that means. Like, tell me in English, what is this? Speak to me like I'm a 10 year old so I can understand. And I ended up shifting and working in communications and through everything I was learning paired with some new startups at the time, like General Assembly and Udemy and other places to start teaching these skills.Sarah K. Peck04:33 - 05:19And eventually my journey into entrepreneurship was through freelancing. And I started my own thing. I brought together a writing community. I taught folks how to write and I did a lot of ghost writing for CEOs. So taking the brilliance that people had, the deep expertise in helping them craft thought leadership essays before it was really known as thought leadership. And things evolved because I learned how to set better boundaries with clients. I learned contracting and marketing. And then I started to learn how to build a very small team. How do you have an assistant and how do you lean on consultants or other folks to help you really narrow in on what you are uniquely good at?Sarah K. Peck05:20 - 05:51versus trying to do everything yourself. And learned a lot through that, by the way. One of the things I tried to hire out was I tried to hire writers and I did not realize how difficult it was to hire out for something that I'm uniquely good at. And I really should have hired out for other things. But in the early days, I just did not see that that was one of my strengths. I thought this was something anyone could do. And I had to do more CEO stuff and organization and operations, which is not my strength.Rochelle Moulton05:51 - 05:52Classic.Sarah K. Peck05:52 - 05:57So lots of learning that got me on the path of entrepreneurship.Rochelle Moulton05:57 - 06:12So you did all those things. I almost feel like some of the communities you created followed where you were in your life stage, right? Because I'm thinking startup parent was startup pregnant first. Yes, that's right. Yeah. How did that sort of unfold for you?Sarah K. Peck06:12 - 06:58I was working and I built a number of online writing courses and communications courses and I was partnering with some folks and running my own business. I ended up actually joining a startup, a venture backed downtown Manhattan. It was a coding and skill building startup where you taught people how to build with Ruby on Rails and Python and, and more. It was there that I got pregnant with my first kid and nobody in the tech startup world was talking about how do you do this while pregnant? Like you would occasionally see a woman with a perfect belly on the cover of a magazine and being like, hell, this founder earned $50 million and didn't skip a beat while pregnant.Sarah K. Peck06:58 - 07:31And I was like, that seems very watered down. You think? Yeah. Excuse me, but how? I was too curious and also too dubious. Just say, that does not make sense to me. How does this work? Meanwhile, I'm making this map across Manhattan of all the places I've had to secretly puke because I'm so sick during my pregnancy. I was like, that trash can I puked in, that bush I puked in, that Whole Foods. You know, it was all I could do just to get to work as sick as I felt. And I was like, this is nothing like what people describe.Sarah K. Peck07:32 - 08:12And so I started interviewing folks who have big careers and are working at startups who have gone through pregnancy. That's why it was Startup Pregnant. I wanted to learn from folks. And about three years into the project, I realized that I didn't want to talk to only moms and only women. And also that it was like the shifts that happen when you're pregnant are just the beginning. It's just the tip of the iceberg, like you're a parent for the rest of your life. And at least the next 20 years are fraught with challenges of raising children and continuing to figure out how do you make all of this work together?Sarah K. Peck08:12 - 08:54And, you know, what balls can you drop safely? And, you know, what do you do when you feel completely overwhelmed? And also I wanted dads in the conversation and all parents in the conversation. So we shifted and rebranded to startup parent. I still run a women's leadership community because I think gendered spaces are useful and important. But when it comes to parenting, the thing that I've heard and talked to a lot of people about is you really don't need gendered spaces after the first six or 12 months, right? You need some postpartum support groups. You probably need some birthing support groups, but everything out there is mommy and me branded and these dads don't have any places to go and they need to be a part of the conversation.Sarah K. Peck08:54 - 09:19So the more that we can make it about parenting in general, the better I think we can be. And we can have subgroups where it's like, this one's specifically for moms with trauma, or this is specifically for single dads. But it's way too siloed. So that's how I started StartUp Parent. I've been running that company for five years. and building it. And recently, this last summer, we launched the Community Founders with Kids.Rochelle Moulton09:20 - 09:39Well, let me just say, as another woman, it's about time that men get drawn into the parenting conversation because a lot of them want to be. Yes. Right? And a lot of these communities are kind of exclusionary, not in a bad way, but parenting isn't a one gender thing. No,Sarah K. Peck09:39 - 09:57it's not at all. And also there's, you know, folks that don't even identify as being a woman or a man and, or a mom or a dad, they're parents. And what about step parents and bonus parents? Like there's so many. additional people that we need. And if we want to have any semblance of the village back, we can't make it about one person.Rochelle Moulton09:57 - 10:28Yes. I speak as a step-parent. I didn't birth any babies, but I do have a lot of the other things that go along with, in this case, now grown-up children. But still, I think, yeah, it's important to bring a lot of people into those conversations. Exactly. So before we go more there, because I do want to go, I do want to ask you this question I love to ask guests that have built their own businesses. Do you remember when you hit your first $100,000 when you started running your own business versus working for other people?Rochelle Moulton10:28 - 10:33Yes. Was that like a milestone for you? Do you remember it? Yes.Sarah K. Peck10:33 - 11:13There's a couple parts of that. I remember both hitting it. I think we did like $40,000 the first year. It's funny. it's not up into the right. It's not a single line because there have been different years where different things have happened. Like way back when, when I was leaving my architecture job and moving into being a freelancer, I had made $30,000 in side projects in selling writing courses. And I was like, certainly I can double this if I have full time to spend on this. Like if I don't have a job and I was making about $50,000 a year at that job, And I look back and I'm like, how did I do it?Sarah K. Peck11:13 - 11:55I was like, roommates and buses, you know? Yeah, in Manhattan. I mean, design does not pay very well. But I remember that. I remember benchmarking against the job and then saying, at least if I could make that much. And then realizing, oh, wait, that doesn't account for half of what I need to make up for. But I also remember the milestone of, Realizing when $100,000 is not enough, like it's actually completely, there's so much out there. It's like, oh, and then once you make six figures and I want people to think beyond that because there's like, what are you reinvesting in your business for growth?Sarah K. Peck11:55 - 12:29What are you reinvesting for? a rainy day for volatility? What about learning and an education? What about taxes? There's so many places this goes. What about long-term savings and retirement? There's so many more things to think about that when I talk to people, we can map out all of these different pieces, and then we start to map out What's a luxury item for you? And the coolest thing is that people aren't like, I want a private plane. They're like, you know, I really want to like that fancy gym membership. That's $300 a month. That would be so cool.Sarah K. Peck12:29 - 12:55And you're like, great. That's $3,600 a year. So it's very tangible what would make a difference for folks. And then they can find their number, whether that's $140,000 or $180,000, but they can find the place or, you know, $500,000 because they want to be somewhere else or a million, wherever you are. But when you get to the specifics of it, you can find that life-changing number for you.Rochelle Moulton12:56 - 13:01Oh, yeah. Well, we could have a whole conversation about that. I call it your enough number, which getsSarah K. Peck13:01 - 13:01youRochelle Moulton13:01 - 13:36everything that you want for the life that you've planned. But I think of the hundred thousand for these kinds of businesses, for a solo business, as once you hit that on some kind of a regular basis, you've got a sustainable business, right? If you can do that on a regular basis, you know, it's sustainable. And then you can start to experiment even more with things that are going to push you through that plateau and get you to whatever your magic number is. And they're all different. I mean, even when people have the same number, what's in that number looks very different from person to person.Rochelle Moulton13:36 - 13:37Yes.Sarah K. Peck13:38 - 14:09Oh, I love that as the sustainable metric. I work with someone who teaches that there's validation, there's kind of the spaghetti, throw it on the wall phase where you're trying to figure out what works first in product offerings and like what you can you actually sell. And then in terms of marketing, you know, is, do I go over here? Do I go over there? Like, where can I reliably find folks? And when you get to a place where you can reliably and predictably, she says within a 10% kind of gauge, say, I'm going to do a sale at this point.Sarah K. Peck14:09 - 14:15This is how much I'm going to sell. And I can predict it, give or take plus or minus 10%. Then you're onto something.Rochelle Moulton14:16 - 14:16Yeah.Sarah K. Peck14:16 - 14:18You've got to get to that point, because otherwise it's likeRochelle Moulton14:18 - 14:51a hobby. It's not really a business. Yeah. OK, well, let's go back to where we were a little bit ago, because I think that you have a lot that you can teach our audience about this idea of community. So you had the Startup Parent Community. You still have the Wise Woman Council Community. And now you've started this third one, Founders with Kids. So I have to tell you, I did a double take. I just want to make sure I read this correctly, that you did a soft launch and you had over 200 applications in three days.Sarah K. Peck14:52 - 15:11Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah. About 50 of those applications had dripped in early and then we just, I announced it and then we just, boom, got another 150 and it jumped. It was like 260 by the end. Wow. That was really wild to me how quickly we had people throw their hat in the ring. IRochelle Moulton15:11 - 15:47can just see people listening to this going, I want to do that. So obviously you struck a nerve, but we all know that building a community is more than, you know, just having the right idea at the right time. I mean, you've...

Are you feeling whipsawed or demoralized by the U.S. headlines lately? You’re not the only one 😉. And yet after you take a moment to confirm your values, you'll realize that now is exactly the time to flex your power:Why building our businesses is precisely what we need to grow our wealth, impact and power. Yes, power.How to think about your economic and leadership power in this current environment.Why we need to do more than just resist cruelty, hatred and all the “isms”.When it’s time to step into your role as a leader—beyond your business.LINKSRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPTRochelle Moulton00:00 - 00:46Many of you listening do have privilege. We have businesses, we have economic and leadership power, and we need to use them. This, my friend, is time to step up, not to conduct business as usual. Hello, hello. Welcome to The Soloist Life Podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth, impact, and power. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and I'm ready to lean into the power word. How about you? So this is the first episode I've recorded in 2025. I waited until now, I'm recording this in mid-February, because honestly, I just couldn't decide what to talk to you about.Rochelle Moulton00:47 - 01:50Hearing, seeing, and feeling the cruelty and the hatred toward women, the LGBTQ community, the BIPOC community, left me numb. And then I got angry, really angry. What could I do? How can I use my unique talents to help build the world I want to live in? Well, I figured it out, and I got the fire back in my belly by asking myself a very simple question. How can we get more money and power into the hands of women and those disadvantaged by the system we live in? How? We build businesses, businesses that use our genius and produce copious flows of money, businesses that we control so we can work the way we want, when we want, where we want, so that we have multiple streams of wealth to invest in our families, our communities, and the causes we care about.Rochelle Moulton01:51 - 02:41to not only resist cruelty, hatred, and all the isms, but to actively find our people, to float new ideas and collaborate with the like-minded for change. At this moment, many of you are feeling stunned, disenfranchised, fearful, and confused. So what's next? Do you speak out and risk being ridiculed, targeted, or worse? Or do you put your head down, staying silent and complicit? Now, not everyone has the privilege to speak out. And if that's you, resist subversively so you're safe. But many of you listening do have privilege. We have businesses, we have economic and leadership power, and we need to use them.Rochelle Moulton02:41 - 03:24This, my friend, is time to step up, not to conduct business as usual. Now, I'm not talking about politics and political theory here. You'll get that elsewhere. What this space is for is figuring out how to juice your soloist business so you can maximize your wealth, your impact, and, yes, power to make your corner of the world into the place you want you and your people to thrive. Now, how you define that is up to you. Just know that until you step into your business fully as the leader, as well as a leader for your people, you're not using your full potential to be a powerful force.Rochelle Moulton03:25 - 04:13Now, I've needed some time to absorb the speed with which this new vision of America is being implemented. And you might too, and that's okay. But ultimately, We can't stand by and be silent. So while I don't talk politics here, I will speak to this being a very special time in history, not unlike Europe in the 1930s. It's a time when leaders are needed desperately. It's a time when making an extra $5,000, $10,000, $100,000, or even more in your business can accelerate the change you want to make in the world. That's leadership. Because make no mistake, money, wealth gives you choices, which means it gives you power.Rochelle Moulton04:14 - 05:01The power to work, to live, and to love the way you want. The power to direct resources to the people and causes that matter to you. Now is the time to fully stand in your genius and do the work to push your vision, your revolution forward. It's the time to flex your power. People are depending on you to step up. And I intend to do the same. Going forward, I'll keep introducing you to more guests who are kicking butt and taking names alongside solo episodes where I'll do a deeper dive on optimizing your soloist business and your life as a leader to build wealth, impact, and power.Rochelle Moulton05:01 - 05:20We need to take back our power. For now, be subversive where that makes sense and stand tall and proud and loud wherever you can, because that's what it's going to take. And I know we can do it. I'll see you next time on The Soloist Life. Bye-bye.

As we close out 2024 (and Season 3 of The Soloist Life), it feels like the right time to revisit how we can best bring our light to the people we most want to serve:Why now is the time to lean into your personal genius.What I’m committing to for 2025 😉.What exactly is a re*shift (and why might you be ready for one)?The eight areas of life and work that you can custom blend to create your uniquely rich life.Wishing you a happy holiday season and a joyous, healthy and prosperous 2025!LINKSRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramRESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPTRochelle Moulton00:00 - 00:45I've helped create millions of dollars in value for clients as a soloist, never mind the tens of millions I built as a partner in big firms where I led a variety of businesses. But in this new world, excellent isn't good enough. We each need to burrow into our personal genius, serving the people who matter most to you in ways only you can do. Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm recording this special episode, the last to close out season 3, a little over a month after the US election results.Rochelle Moulton00:46 - 01:32I'm not gonna lie, It pains me to know that slightly over half of my country's voters have glommed on to a dark, dark vision for the future. It's not even remotely aligned with what I stand for, and yet this is where we are right now. But we soloists still have choices. We have agency. We do not have to accept these attitudes or work within their confines. Instead, we can choose differently. We can choose to operate in a positive, hopeful way, bringing our light to the people we most want to serve. I've been thinking about this quite a bit, even before the election, as I saw some extreme behaviors, and I feel it even more strongly now.Rochelle Moulton01:33 - 02:10It all comes down to your personal genius. How can you best use your highest talents and skills to help the people you most wanna serve? For example, my work has been focused on helping soloist consultants break through their revenue plateaus. And that's because I'm really, really good at building expertise businesses. In fact, without false modesty, I'm excellent at that. And pieces of that work are in my genius zone. I've helped create millions of dollars in value for clients as a soloist, nevermind the tens of millions I built as a partner in big firms where I led a variety of businesses.Rochelle Moulton02:11 - 03:00But in this new world, excellent isn't good enough. We each need to burrow into our personal genius, serving the people who matter most to you in ways only you can do. Now rest assured, I will be walking my talk. I've decided to more fully embrace my own genius moving forward. And that genius is around helping entrepreneurs navigate transitions, the kind where you're recalibrating your life and your work, or what I'm calling re-shifts. Now, my guests here on this podcast have actually talked a lot about their reshifts. Reshifts are what begins to percolate when you start asking, what's next for me in my life and my business?Rochelle Moulton03:00 - 03:38You start pointing toward your next transition. You want to know how to keep doing meaningful work as you shift up or shift down in the amount of time you want to spend in your business or the impact you want to make with your life. You want to know how to keep a certain amount of revenue flowing, even as you explore other aspects of your professional and personal interests. You want to double down on impacting the people in your public and private lives who you care most about. You want to live a life of meaning and be the braver, bolder hero of your own life.Rochelle Moulton03:38 - 04:24You may even start thinking about legacy. What do you want to leave behind for your people when you no longer want to do this? And all of this means that you want to spend as much time as humanly possible in your genius zone. You want to create that continuous upward spiral that business and life can be if you allow yourself to shift, to change, to experiment, to discover what's right for you in your next chapter. Now, I've midwifed so many of my one-to-one clients through these transitions that I've developed a framework that walks soloists and expertise entrepreneurs through a thoughtful process of evaluating where and how you want to go next in your business and your life, your reshift, if you will.Rochelle Moulton04:25 - 04:57This framework, we think of it as the reshift roadmap, is built on 8 factors that I've come to believe are the basis of a rich life, especially for us as entrepreneurs. And let me give you a quick overview so you can see what I'm talking about. We'll start with craft. How well does your business reflect your personal genius? Are you doing your best work there? Money, do you have enough, and that's in quotes if you couldn't catch that, or are you planning to earn more? How much more do you want to live the life you've imagined?Rochelle Moulton04:58 - 05:43Impact, are you Contributing to others in a way that makes you feel good about your interaction. Are you impacting your people in a way that's meaningful to you? Growth. Are you stretching yourself personally and professionally? What adventures are you still seeking for your life? Community. Are you part of a vibrant set of communities where you're a vital contributor? Where do you most want to engage? Health. Is your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health where you want it to be. How does this play out in your next chapter? Relationships. Do you have a small circle of close relationships where you can be yourself and are freely accepted?Rochelle Moulton05:44 - 06:31How often are you investing in those relationships? And then last but not least, home. Is your physical space and your daily or family life set up for your optimal health and happiness? What tweaks or overhauls would improve your life? Now, your vision of what each 1 of these looks like for you and how they ideally tie together in your life is unique. They form the basis of your one-of-a-kind version of a rich life, and no 1 else can tell you what they should be. How do you figure out your unique roadmap? So my research has uncovered precious few resources for entrepreneurs to rethink your next chapter in a way that incorporates both your life and your business.Rochelle Moulton06:32 - 07:07And even fewer where you get to rub shoulders with others going through the same experience. I want to help. So as a first step, you may have noticed I've started writing about this in my weekly emails. And I've been sharing both there and here on this podcast how we entrepreneurs can and are recalibrating our lives and businesses. Now, where that goes next depends on you. If you're not already on my list, you can start by signing up for my emails, and there's a link in the show notes for that. And you're welcome to drop me an email at rm at rochellemoulton.com with your thoughts.Rochelle Moulton07:08 - 07:34If you're thinking you might like to join a group of soloists actively re-shifting, tell me that too. I'll be weaving this idea into this podcast even more. So stay tuned on that. In the meantime, thank you. Thank you for closing out season number 3 of The Soloist Life with me. I'm wishing you a very happy holiday season and a joyous, healthy and prosperous new year. Bye-bye.

When you’ve run your Soloist business long enough, you’ll see cycles: changes in the market, changes in you/your interests and situation and your bank account. Business coach Ed Gandia shares how his business, his financials and his mindset have changed over 18 years as a Soloist:Growing his first freelance business entirely by word of mouth—and the markers he used to decide when to invest more or pivot.The role of fear in his decisions and business growth (and why it’s different today).Building a community when that skillset isn’t part of your DNA—and the advantages of longevity.How using even small wins as fuel can re-wire your financial mindset (and your finances).Traveling the full circle of financial mindset growth—from scarcity to success to recklessness to abundance.LINKSEd Gandia Website | LinkedIn | TwitterRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOEd Gandia is a business-building coach who helps established freelance writers and solo marketers earn more in less time doing work they love for better clients.His High-Income Business Writing podcast has more than 1.3 million downloads. And his insights and advice have been featured in SUCCESS Magazine, Forbes, Inc. magazine, Fortune, Fast Company, The Christian Science Monitor and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather, connect and learn.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:22Ed Gandia: I had a rule that all my side hustle income during those 2, 2 and a half years, after taxes, I would take 10% to reward myself and do something fun with or buy something cool. And then the rest straight to savings. I have 3 indicators that would show me I was ready to make the transition. And 1 of them was have a year's worth of living expenses.00:27 - 01:10Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Molten. And today I'm so excited to welcome Ed Gandia to the show. Ed is a business building coach who helps establish freelance writers and solo marketers earn more in less time doing work they love for better clients. His high income business writing podcast has more than 1.3 million downloads and his insights and advice have been featured in Success Magazine, Forbes, Inc, Fortune, Fast Company, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Ed, welcome.01:10 - 01:16Ed Gandia: Well, thank you, Rochelle, and I'm really delighted to be here and talking with you.01:16 - 01:33Rochelle Moulton: Well, I still can't believe that we haven't met before this. So I know we have and I checked last night. I checked over 100 contacts in common just on LinkedIn. And quite a few of those are people that I know very, very well. So we've been running in these parallel universes for years.01:34 - 01:36Ed Gandia: It's still a small world, isn't it?01:36 - 02:00Rochelle Moulton: It really is. Well, once we connected on LinkedIn, I started reading your posts and I found I was doing a lot of head nodding. And especially when you veered into this idea of financial mindset. And I'd like to talk about that with you, but first I'd really love for you to share your story, starting with how you segued from selling software to being such a beloved touch point for freelance writers.02:01 - 02:30Ed Gandia: Absolutely. So I'm going to maybe give you an extended version of the story, because I think some of the details matter for some of the things we're going to be talking about today. But I have a finance degree. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. It just sounded like a good degree to get. But in the early 90s, we're going through a big recession. Our professors are telling us that most of us are going to end up in sales. And I thought that is the last thing I will ever, ever do.02:30 - 03:07Ed Gandia: There's no way. I have a finance degree. I don't do sales. And interestingly enough, those are the only interviews I got later that year. I ended up in corporate sales. The last thing I wanted to do. The other thing I had told myself is that I'll never live in South Florida because I went to school in Tampa. And I ended up in South Florida. So yeah, be careful what you wish for or don't wish for. So I was in corporate sales and I for 6 or so years ended up working for companies that didn't do much03:07 - 03:27Ed Gandia: in the way of marketing and sales enablement resources, what we now call sales enablement. So I ended up creating a lot of my own materials. Most of my sales roles involved very aggressive quotas in environments where if you don't make your numbers, you're not going to have a job.03:28 - 03:29Rochelle Moulton: You're gone.03:29 - 04:03Ed Gandia: Yeah, you're pretty much gone, especially my last employer, which was a bit of a startup. They were kind of past the startup phase. But these were not Fortune 500 companies that could afford to just kind of keep you. You couldn't hide. Your results are extremely visible. So that was kind of the training ground that I had. And because I had to make these numbers and I was under pressure, I realized that I couldn't scale my efforts enough. I had to find many of my own opportunities. And there's only so much cold calling. Yes, I actually cold04:03 - 04:39Ed Gandia: called a lot, like pick up the phone, cold calling. And there weren't enough hours in the day. So I kind of came across this idea that people were calling copywriting. I found it fascinating. To me, I thought of it as selling on paper. I just thought, well, I can duplicate my efforts because if I can somehow do this well, I can have other people, so to speak, calling on prospects for me, cold calling. So that's what I did. I studied copywriting and I created campaigns that actually ended up generating pretty significant results and they helped put04:39 - 05:08Ed Gandia: money in my pocket. I had to create results. So I did that for a long time, but it wasn't until I realized 1 day that other people did this for a living, that I could actually turn this into a business. I had already set a goal that eventually I wanted to go out of my own, start a business, launch a business. But I was thinking more traditional brick and mortar. And I realized maybe this is it. Maybe it's just, you know, I've become a freelance copywriter and that's what I did. So in summer of 2006, I05:08 - 05:23Ed Gandia: had already built up my client base to a point where I was working 7 days a week. I had enough of a side hustle. It was healthy and consistent enough that I could afford to quit my day job. And I haven't looked back. So it's been what 18 years and...05:23 - 05:24Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, going on 20.05:25 - 06:03Ed Gandia: Going on 20. It was nerve wracking, but it was also a lot of fun just to be able to go out there. And my clients were enterprise software companies. Just word of mouth, referrals, email marketing, some direct mail relationships. I would just go out there and do my thing. Eventually, people would come to me, other colleagues, fellow freelancers, because they saw my quick success. So I was earning a nice six-figure income in software sales. When I quit my day job, I transitioned straight into a six-figure freelance copywriting business. And they felt, to me, I just had06:03 - 06:38Ed Gandia: to make that happen. I had a young family. But to them, that was very, very unusual. So people started coming to me for advice. And I realized, maybe I should create some kind of ebook or information product. And that's what I did. And I put it out there and long story short, it just did well. That turned into partnering up with a couple of colleagues. We co-wrote a book by the name of The Wealthy Freelancer through an imprint of Penguin, which is insane. First time author and I'm writing a book for Penguin with 2 friends.06:38 - 06:39Rochelle Moulton: It is.06:40 - 07:14Ed Gandia: Yeah, yeah. It was pretty amazing. The book didn't really make any money, but It was the launch pad for my coaching business a couple years later. So in 2012, I started doing business coaching. And that's pretty much been my focus ever since then for about 12 years. I still had some writing clients in 2016. The last 1 got acquired. So I just became a full time business coach. And that's what I've been doing ever since. Lately, I've been kind of looking into maybe my next iteration, the next phase of my business. That's been my journey so07:14 - 07:14Ed Gandia: far.07:15 - 07:38Rochelle Moulton: Wow. So you've been what That's 14 years we're recording in 2024. So 14 years at business coaching, which is a nice run. This is so interesting to me that it's it just it doesn't sound like this was planned in advance that you latched on to opportunities as they presented themselves. Does that sound right or was there more intention in this?07:39 - 08:07Ed Gandia: Well, the only intention I had was when my first child was born, a few months later I realized I want to take matters into my own hands. Within 5 years, I want to have my own business, whatever that looks like. But other than that, everything else was pretty much serendipitous. I was doing writing just to be able to meet my quotas, put money in my pocket, put food on the table. And that worked. Realized that could be turned into a business. And then people were reaching out to me, hey, I could use your advice. And I08:07 - 08:34Ed Gandia: thought, really? Because I was asking you for advice a couple years ago. And then coaching a friend of mine, who's a great coach, told me, and I was actually, he was my coach, he said, you should do some coaching. I said, oh, there's no way, there's no way. And he talked me into it back in 2011 or so. I started coaching a little bit in 2010, 2011, but I would say 2012 was really kind of when I said, okay, I'm a business coach, let's put this out there and see what happens. So yeah, it's all been08:34 - 08:39Ed Gandia: just opportunities that kind of appear on the way to who knows what.08:39 - 09:10Rochelle Moulton: 1 of the things I like about all of this is that you did it in a very thoughtful way. That you didn't just go, okay, I'm gonna do this and then have no business and not sure what you're gonna do next. I mean, you tried things and you waited until you got to the point where you felt like, okay, this is a real business. I sometimes think that's the advantage of having a family, depending on you, is that we don't take flights of fancy, right? We do 1 thing at a time and see how it works.09:10 - 09:13Rochelle Moulton: We keep experimenting and then we succeed forward.09:13 - 09:46Ed Gandia: Yeah, I'm definitely a bit of a planner and I've gotten a lot better about taking risks. But early on with a young family, I was a sole breadwinner. I had to be thoughtful. I had to do some planning. I had to think about it. I had to mitigate risk any way I could. So that's why 1 thing I didn't mention is that my side hustle, I was running that for a little over 2 years before I felt comfortable enough actually quitting my day job. When I was transitioning into coaching, same thing. I just try to be09:46 - 10:01Ed Gandia: as thoughtful and plan for that as best I could. Sometimes that means doing a good job with savings. Sometimes it's really more about putting feelers out there, rapid prototyping and doing a lot of these things to make sure that you're not doing anything stupid.10:03 - 10:16Rochelle Moulton: I hear you. I'd love to ask soloists when they hit their first 100, 000. And it sounds like you hit yours really early on and never looked back. Does that sound right? Or did you struggle to hit that 100, 000 the first time?10:16 - 10:51Ed Gandia: Correct. No, I pretty much went right into 6 figure a year. I think my gross earnings my first full 12 months from June to June was over 160, 000 gross revenue in 2006. A lot of that was driven by the fact that I was running scared. I thought, and I think many of us have felt this, right? What if it all ends tomorrow? What if, yes, I've had 4 good months, but what if next month is not good? And the month after that, So you say yes to everything. I think there's something to be said for10:51 - 11:24Ed Gandia: the role of fear at different points in our business. It can be healthy if managed correctly. The problem is many of us never break out of that fear cycle. But for me, it was really, I was earning a 6 figure income in software sales. I remember running the numbers and figuring that I could get away the first year with 75k as a freelancer, but blew past that. I mean, twice, more than twice as much. But we were living pretty cheaply and which is by the way, it's always smart if you're trying to make a transition. So11:24 - 11:30Ed Gandia: it's fortunate enough that, you know, our costs weren't that high. Part of it is just living in fear.11:31 - 11:46Rochelle Moulton: I love that. So were you like a squirrel with nuts? Like were you like throwing some of that unexpected revenue aside saving for that rainy day in case you know, month 5 didn't prove as good? Like how did you think about that as you were growing your business?11:46 - 12:18Ed Gandia: Yes and no. I actually did that ahead of time. So I had a rule that all my side hustle income during those 2, 2 and a half years after taxes, I would take 10% to reward myself and do something fun with or buy something cool. And then the rest, straight to savings. I have 3 indicators that would show me I was ready to make the transition. And 1 of them was have a year's worth of living expenses, not income, but living expenses. So I was ultra conservative. And the other was I needed to hit a trigger12:18 - 12:48Ed Gandia: income goal, which is a number that if I can repeatedly do part-time, if doubled, would equal the full-time income that I need. Because I don't have the capacity being part-time, right? So a number that if I knew that if I were doing this full time, I'd be able to at least double. And then the third, and this is a member, this is 2005, 2006, is being able to secure health insurance for all of us. Because at the time, there was no ACA here in the US, you had to go through underwriting. And for whatever reason, you12:48 - 12:54Ed Gandia: could be denied to get self-employed health insurance. So those are the 3 milestones that I had to hit.12:55 - 13:27Rochelle Moulton: Well, or you could get health insurance, but it was prohibitively expensive. People who are just starting now don't realize the challenges that that created for a lot of business people. So what I'm hearing is that you were very consistent in terms of how you thought about the business, in terms of how you tucked away money, how you rewarded yourself. I'm thinking Erica Goody, who's been on the show a couple of times, accountant extraordinaire, CPA extraordinaire, would be thrilled with your strategy. So I just want to segue for a minute though, because there's something else you've done13:27 - 13:44Rochelle Moulton: that I really admire. And I wonder if you would talk about how you've built this community of writers. I mean, is it just wired in you from your years of selling, you know, which is all about building relationships or did you need to like buckle down to build it intentionally?13:45 - 14:19Ed Gandia: That's a good question. I didn't set out to do that intentionally. I would also consider myself a decent networker, but I'm not a community. That's not a quality that I think I possess. And a few years ago, I hired somebody for that role for a community that I was building. And I knew that it wasn't me. I was decent at that, but not great. The community I've been able to build in my, you know, we talk about the community, I guess, at different levels. My audience for my podcast, readers of my newsletters, customers for some of14:19 - 14:36Ed Gandia: my courses, workshops and clients, coaching clients. I think it's just staying power. I think I've been at this for so long, beating the same drum and that it's just, I don't know, I think I've just developed a reputation, I hope, a14:36 - 15:11Rochelle Moulton: good 1. Well, I have to say, it's actually refreshing to hear you say that because people talk about my community, my community. And I think a lot of us are not natural community builders. It's a skill, just like consulting is a skill and coaching is a skill and selling is a skill. Some people are just wired to do that community. But you know what I think though, Ed, and again, This is the outside looking in, but I've met quite a number of folks in your community and they are community people. So I think sometimes what happens15:11 - 15:42Rochelle Moulton: is if you stick around long enough, as you said, and your message is pretty consistent, that other people beat the drum, right? And they help move forward, help the community, the big idea move forward. I agree. So kind of coming back to the business end of this, so You've been serving writers and writer adjacent folks in 1 form or another for quite a few years. Once you started in the business coaching, how have your offerings and your ideal clients changed in that time?15:43 - 16:19Ed Gandia: Yeah, I think I started out as many coaches do. Hey, it's 3 months, we meet every week, 1 on 1, private coaching, and it's X amount. And it was very straightforward. I didn't really have a framework or a roadmap. We just kind of addressed your issues in a fairly loose way. So it started out like that. And that evolved into... I did that for maybe 8 months until I came across a model that at the time was actually fairly... It's kind of the way it is now, you know, it is period, but it was a group16:19 - 16:55Ed Gandia: coaching model. And the idea was you create a cohort of 10 people, and you have a process that you walk everybody through together on Tuesdays. And then on Thursdays, it's a group

Categories: Growing Revnue + Wealth, NichingLink: https://rochellemoulton.com/soloist_podcast/pulling-out-of-a-revenue-nosedive-with-chris-ferdinandi/?utm_source=subscriber What do you do when your consistently growing revenue suddenly takes a nosedive—and your peers are feeling it too? Soloist Chris Ferdinandi walks us through the experience and the experiments he conducted to start lifting himself out of it.Why he built his business as a side hustle and didn’t go solo until he matched his corporate salary.The financial and emotional hit of a 50% revenue drop—and how to experiment without morphing to panic.What to do when you’re “too feral” to go back into Corporate: the experiments that failed and those that gave hope.How selling to a 640-person email list outsold the results from a 14,000 list—by over 3X (hint: the new sale was in his genius zone).Two moves to make when your revenue is tanking—and one surprising upside.LINKSChris Ferdinandi ADHD Tips | MastadonRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOChris helps people build a simpler, faster, more resilient web.Early in his career, he felt like he couldn’t get anything done. Since then, he’s discovered a bunch of systems and strategies that let him turn his ADHD into a superpower. His ADHD tips newsletter is read by hundreds of developers each weekday.He creates courses and workshops, publishes several daily newsletters, speaks at events, and has advised and written code for organizations like NASA, Apple, Harvard Business School, Chobani, and Adidas.Chris loves pirates, puppies, and Pixar movies, and lives near horse farms in rural Massachusetts.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather, connect and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:20Chris Ferdinandi: I also feel very positive about my ADHD. Much in the same way on your episode, the phrase like ruthless self-acceptance or there was something along those lines kept coming up. Yes. And I believe that with my whole being, right? That I am great the way I am and that a lot of my challenges are just being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world. Yeah.00:25 - 00:38Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rchelle Moulton, and today I'm so happy to welcome soloist Chris Ferdinandi to the show.00:38 - 00:42Chris Ferdinandi: Rochelle, thank you so much for having me. It's really great to be here.00:42 - 01:25Rochelle Moulton: Well, I'm excited about this, Chris. So Chris helps people build a simpler, faster, more resilient web. Early in his career, he felt like he couldn't get anything done. Since then, he's discovered a bunch of systems and strategies that let him turn his ADHD into a superpower. His ADHD tips newsletter is read by hundreds of developers each weekday. He creates courses and workshops, publishes several daily newsletters, speaks at events, and has advised and written code for organizations like NASA, Apple, Harvard Business School, Chobani, and Adidas. Chris loves pirates, puppies, and Pixar movies, and lives near horse farms01:25 - 01:27Rochelle Moulton: in rural Massachusetts. Chris, welcome.01:27 - 01:34Chris Ferdinandi: Rochelle, thank you so much for having me. And can you tell that I'm a big fan of Jonathan Stark given the multiple daily newsletters.01:36 - 01:42Rochelle Moulton: I stopped for a second. Just the thought of doing multiple dailies just kind of makes me break out in a hive. But good01:42 - 01:44Chris Ferdinandi: on you. I know that's your personal hell, but yeah.01:45 - 02:10Rochelle Moulton: Good on you. So I love how this interview happened. I mean, you responded to my just checking in email I send to newish subscribers and you had a lot to say. So many of your recent experiences were 100% relatable for soloists. So I had to ask you to come on the show and dish because I just know that your story will inspire a few people who are struggling.02:10 - 02:12Chris Ferdinandi: Awesome, yeah, I happy to be here.02:12 - 02:22Rochelle Moulton: So let's start with how you got into your business initially. So you started as a side hustle, teaching developers to code about 10 years ago, is that right?02:22 - 02:53Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, so I am actually have a whole previous life as an HR pro taught myself to code became a developer. And a couple of years into that journey, realized that I at some point wanted to have my own my own business. I wanted to work for myself. And I know this came up in a recent episode you did on people with ADHD. So, and how they often tend to work for themselves because they have very low tolerance for the nonsense of corporate life. So I always knew that was something I wanted for myself, but I also02:53 - 03:23Chris Ferdinandi: didn't want to just jump out there without any safety net. So I started by very slowly kind of building this side hustle, teaching people how to code. It was 1 of these things where it started off as like, you know, like beer or movie night money, and then turned into like, oh, I can get an extra nice Christmas gift this year, which then morphed into, oh, I can go on a vacation with this, which eventually became like, oh, wow, like we could, we could remodel something in our house or like buy like a little something like03:23 - 03:55Chris Ferdinandi: fancy. And then at some point, I want to say about 3, maybe 4 years ago, it hit the point where it was basically on par with my day job, just as a side hustle. And because I had all this money coming in and the day job, we had built up a really nice savings cushion. And despite being surprisingly risk averse for someone with ADHD, I decided to, as you describe it, hang up my shingle and try the soloist thing for a bit. So that's kind of how I got to a roundish where I am now.03:55 - 04:08Rochelle Moulton: And 1 of the things that's interesting, everybody has a different approach to this, is that you built up your savings first. And for you, it sounds like that crossover point was when you could make as much in your side hustle as you did in your day job.04:08 - 04:38Chris Ferdinandi: Yes, it's 1 of those things where like given the house that we lived in and kind of the lifestyle we were used to, I absolutely could have done it sooner if we were willing to make some changes or some sacrifices, but I didn't want to ask that of my family just because I didn't want to work for the man anymore. So no judgment on people who do it differently or don't, but like I love my Disney vacations. I did not want to give those up. That's serious. I'm not just being sarcastic. I'm a Disney addict. So.04:39 - 04:58Rochelle Moulton: Got it. So I think what's part of what's interesting about that is that everybody has this different definition of risk and comfort level. And there's no 1 right answer. I think it's different for everybody. And it sounds like you figured out what would work for you and your family. Absolutely. So how long did it take you to hit your first $100, 000?04:59 - 05:36Chris Ferdinandi: So because the ADHD, I'm not great at record keeping, so I'm just ballparking here, it took about 6 or 7 years to hit that $100, 000 mark. And just for context here, my business model is entirely products. So this is not a service based business where I'm building websites for people and doing like advisory consulting and the kind of stuff that a lot of folks on your show often do. For me, this was nearly a hundred percent. I'm putting out courses on how to build websites and write code and built up a, like an email list05:36 - 05:39Chris Ferdinandi: of about 14, 000 folks that got me to that point.05:39 - 06:00Rochelle Moulton: And I don't want to gloss over this because this is actually big because it would be easy to say, oh, it took 6 or 7 years. Well, it took 6 to 7 years as a side hustle selling products. And we all know that unless you've got products with a huge price tag, you need a big list to be able to get that. And it takes time to develop that list.06:00 - 06:31Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah. So I started with like I had an old newsletter that had like 38 people on it that I sent out like maybe once a month. I don't know if you've ever heard of Jonathan Stark. He used to be on this really great podcast. He was a business coach of mine for a little while, but he was on me all the time about publishing daily and I really resisted. And I attribute that more than literally anything else to the success of my business. I know it's not for everybody, but the daily writing, I saw an instant06:31 - 07:01Chris Ferdinandi: growth in my business. I went from that stagnated 38 subscribers to 100, 400, 500. I hit a thousand in like 3 or 4 months and then it just kept growing from there. And it was the weirdest thing I really thought for sure no 1 is going to want to read that much from me. I'm never going to have that much to write about, but I've been doing a daily newsletter on code for 6 years now, maybe more, and I thought I would have quit long ago. I have no idea how I've kept it up for as07:01 - 07:01Chris Ferdinandi: long as07:01 - 07:29Rochelle Moulton: I have. Yeah, well, whether it's daily or something else, but a regular habit and consistent output of publishing your writing, it makes you think. And it forces us, you know, after the first, what, 10, 20 things that you write? Like, you've got to dig a little deeper, right? Most of us can write 10 or 20 things without thinking too much. But when you do more than that, you really have to start to think deep and start to develop your point of view.07:30 - 08:03Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, there's this really nice flywheel effect that starts to happen where the more you publish, the more people start to respond back to you with questions, comments, ideas, which a lot of times, like I would, 1 of Jonathan's other students used to call it turning sawdust into furniture. We're like, I would write a response, take it, and then publish it as an article. So, like, the more you do it, the point now where my list of articles is longer than I could ever possibly write in my lifetime. The ideas just keep coming in, and the toughest08:03 - 08:11Chris Ferdinandi: part is figuring out which of them I want to write that day It gets bigger every year, which is the exact opposite problem of what I thought was gonna happen for me08:11 - 08:22Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, well and I think that you also in that scenario You're getting feedback Like you feel like you're not sending this out to the ether, but to real people who have real responses.08:23 - 08:47Chris Ferdinandi: And regardless of your cadence, whether it's daily, weekly, whatever, like the most important part is the feedback. I'm refining my thinking. I'm not just writing a whole course or a whole book in isolation. Most of my courses actually started off as articles that then interacted with real people, got real-time feedback, and got cleaned up in some form and eventually became courses.08:47 - 08:58Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, this is a success story by any definition, especially because you were able to do this as a side hustle and with relatively low risk. But then came the reckoning.08:58 - 09:33Chris Ferdinandi: Yes, and that's why we're here. So the first year was awesome after I went fully solo. And then I hit kind of that dreaded $100, 000 plateau. So like I hit the $100, 000 mark, quit my day job. And I was just really enjoying being able to do just the tech education stuff full time and not not have to deal with all the corporate stuff. But then despite it had grown like 50%, 25% year over year, every year since I started, but then things started to like suddenly it wasn't growing quite as much. That first year09:33 - 10:05Chris Ferdinandi: didn't grow with the similar, I want to say exponential, but like that similar kind of hockey stick-ish growth that I had been experiencing. Still grew a little, not as much as I had hoped, but this was with me working on it full time. I'm like, wow, how is this possibly doing better as a side hustle in a full time? That doesn't make sense. And then the following year, my sales started to decline rapidly, like not just not grow, but trend very strongly in the wrong direction. And this was like the panic moment for me, because now10:05 - 10:39Chris Ferdinandi: I'm, this is my only job. I don't have, it's not a side hustle anymore. And I went from having a second full-time income to now like my sales are 2 thirds, half of what they had been the year before, I reached out to a bunch of my other tech educator friends to try to figure out like, is it something I did or are other people seeing this? And nearly universally, I was hearing similar things from everybody else I know in this space, regardless of the programming language they focused on or who their specific audience was. Anybody10:39 - 11:14Chris Ferdinandi: who sold courses on learning code was seeing the same thing. And so there's been a lot of speculation amongst my fellow tech educators about whether it was the economy, you know, kind of all the layoffs that were happening in tech more generally. So people have less disposable income, corporations aren't spending money on like education for their employees anymore. If it was more people leaning on AI instead of courses, I know that's been kind of a frequent topic on this show. If it was something else, like there's so much great content on places like YouTube and in11:14 - 11:24Chris Ferdinandi: blog articles for free now, like do people not feel like they needed courses anymore? My speculation is it's probably some combination of all 3 of those things. But nonetheless, my business was in a freefall.11:24 - 11:26Rochelle Moulton: What year was this, Chris?11:26 - 11:53Chris Ferdinandi: It started not this year, last year. So this would have been around like February 2023 is when okay, panic for me started to really sink in. Where like, hey, I had this great savings account and it's getting smaller instead of getting bigger, which is what I'd wanted to have. I knew we had some like I had to ramp up some more growth to stop that from happening. But now it's starting to like, not just take a little bit out here and there, but like starting to go in the wrong direction. That was my panic moment. That11:53 - 11:55Chris Ferdinandi: was like, all right, I need to, I need to reassess.11:56 - 12:08Rochelle Moulton: And you, you stated you're risk averse or, or at least you're, you're not the most risky guy. So having money come out of the bank account without seeing more come in has got to be that deer in the headlights moment.12:09 - 12:42Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, I did not love that. And my other thing that I was really like kind of cognizant of was Running a business and feeling desperate is kind of a bad place to be because it causes you to make dumb decisions, right? You make drastic decisions. ADHD folks in general have kind of this, let me just blow it all up and start over kind of impulse that you have to fight on a regular basis to begin with. And like doing that with a business that is your primary income because you're panicked about how it's going can be12:42 - 13:02Chris Ferdinandi: catastrophic. So I was really, really aware that I shouldn't try to do too much too fast. And so I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how I could salvage the business I already had. We can talk about some things I tried if you want. None of them worked. So it's totally up to you, which Which kind of avenue we go down here?13:02 - 13:13Rochelle Moulton: Well, I'm just curious about something. I mean, like, did you immediately figure, well, I've got this valuable skill coding, I might as well sell that work again, you know, to like corporate audiences. Like, did you go there?13:14 - 13:42Chris Ferdinandi: Not eventually, because I didn't want to do that. I had done that before I started my course business. I started off doing a little bit of freelancing and I did not have a great experience with it. It's 1 of those like, this came up on the ADHD episode that you did, but like the kind of like know yourself and how you work best. Like for me, that kind of work is not my genius zone. It's my excellent zone, but it's not my genius zone. And I know that's a really dangerous trap. Like I didn't want to13:42 - 14:01Chris Ferdinandi: fall into, oh, I could do this really, really well, but it's not where I thrive. That eventually became what I did because I need to pay a mortgage, I need to put food on the table, and that does pay the bills, but I view it as a temporary transition into the next thing.14:05 - 14:07Rochelle Moulton: Well, I love when in a private note you sent me, you said that you're too feral to go back to...

When you started your business, you probably imagined steady revenue growth under your original business model—only to discover that the only way to grow the way you want is by experimenting! Business Coach Jessica Lackey (a McKinsey and Nike alum) shares her year-by-year experience in crafting her ideal business model:How she contracted for “bridge jobs” in Year 1 to ensure cash flow—and why she’d do it again.Year 2: building a “whale” delivery model with enough whales so you’re not overly dependent on any one.Why she pivoted from a 1-1 delivery model to group and membership options (and it wasn’t because she had a large email list).The pros and cons of running multiple revenue models as you pivot vs. making a faster shift.How building interchangeable assets allows you to leverage your authority faster.LINKSJessica Lackey Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramBIOJessica Lackey is a strategy and operations advisor who blends business strategy, practical application, and a human-centric approach to create sustainable businesses.With a background in corporate leadership, McKinsey & Company consulting, and a Harvard Business degree, Jessica knows a thing or two about hustle culture and what it feels like to judge success by the bottom line…at all costs.Now, she combines her deep experience in consulting, Fortune 500 operations leadership and coaching to help businesses grow without sacrificing the well-being of their clients, team, and community.BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather, connect and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:19Jessica Lackey: I had a social media team, but I actually dropped Instagram in 2023 and I stopped doing as much LinkedIn. And I really focused on those marketing platforms that took more time, but had a bigger result. So again, I write once a week, I guess teach once a month. And people are like, you do that for free? I'm like, well, yeah.00:24 - 01:05Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I'm joined by soloist Jessica Lackey. She is a strategy and operations advisor who blends business strategy, practical application, and a human-centric approach to create sustainable businesses. With a background in corporate leadership, McKinsey & Company consulting, and a Harvard Business degree, Jessica knows a thing or 2 about hustle culture and what it feels like to judge success by the bottom line at all costs. Now she combines her deep experience in consulting, Fortune 500 operations01:05 - 01:15Rochelle Moulton: leadership, and coaching to help businesses grow without sacrificing the well-being of their clients, team, and community. Jessica, welcome.01:16 - 01:17Jessica Lackey: Yay. I'm so glad to be here.01:17 - 01:29Rochelle Moulton: Well, I feel like we're kindred spirits here, like escaping from big firm consulting and evangelizing on building sustainable businesses without buying into hustle culture. So let's just dive in.01:29 - 01:31Jessica Lackey: Sounds Good. First, your01:31 - 01:43Rochelle Moulton: resume reads like a who's who of American business. Harvard, McKinsey, Nike. You even interned at Apple. What made you decide to leave all that to start your soloist business?01:44 - 02:14Jessica Lackey: When you work in firms like that, there's, as you know, there's a real upper out culture. And these are places that will suck the life out of you if you let them. And in my 20s, like I did, McKinsey and Company Consulting, I was on the road, as you know, you are Arthur Anderson, 4 days a week, sometimes 5 days a week. Like I gave up my Sundays, I gave up my Fridays. I didn't have roots in town. All my friends were working. And that kind of moved with me to business school and that moved with02:14 - 02:46Jessica Lackey: me to Nike. Nike, it's so cool as a campus, there's the gym, there's restaurants and beer on campus, but it's really kind of designed to keep you in the berm, as they call it. Literally, they have a track and things like that. I was working 12 hours a day. The 1 job I was in, I was working weekends. And I realized at some point I had a health crisis and I realized, I'm like, okay, I have no life. I was making good money, but I didn't want the next step up on the ladder. And so I02:46 - 02:51Jessica Lackey: hit kind of a wall in 2015 and decided, all right, it's time for me to do something different.02:51 - 02:55Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, because it doesn't get any better when you go higher up the ladder. It usually gets harder.02:56 - 03:18Jessica Lackey: They tell you it gets better. And really, what's interesting is that you end up with more responsibility. But a lot of these places, you end up with more politics, you end up farther away from actually doing the work and much more Pushing powerpoints around and that wasn't I didn't want to play the politics I didn't want to be mucking around a PowerPoint our day I wanted to solve real problems in the the farther up the organization I got, the less I got to do that.03:18 - 03:36Rochelle Moulton: Well, preach, sister. That's exactly what it was like being a partner at a big firm. And the minute I got there, I was like, oh, finally, I've arrived. And then you look around and you go, oh, crap. It's like, now I have to do this every day. Yeah, it's a bit of a change, isn't it?03:37 - 03:44Jessica Lackey: Definitely. I'm thankful I had the experience, but at some point I was like, this is not the life for my second chapter in my professional career.03:45 - 04:12Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, exactly. So 1 of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show is that you've done some really intriguing Experimenting with your business model as you've grown. It's it's like you've served as your own Petri dish Which I love especially for soloists. So year 1 if I have this right so you started coaching but you subcontracted to a consulting firm to keep the cash flowing. So talk us through how that worked and why you made the decisions you did.04:13 - 04:40Jessica Lackey: Yeah. So a little bit of backstory. I tried, I got certified as a life coach because I thought I wanted to be a life and leadership coach in 2018. And I tried to build a coaching business as a side hustle 2019, 2020. And yeah, I mean, you know, I was working 1 of those big jobs where I was, you know, I didn't have time. I didn't have the mental mind space. So in 2021, I knew I was going to leave. I hadn't really done any biz dev. I had connections, but I was like, I don't really04:40 - 05:11Jessica Lackey: know what I want to do for my personal business. I was like, I just don't want to be at my job anymore. And so I quit thinking, I was like, I don't know what I'll do. I'll figure it out. And so I did my first year was all the subcontracting through a bunch of those matching platforms and with another firm. So I was through some connections. I got connected with, again, I did project management for a rebranding company. I did sales and operations consulting through, I got matched on a platform. I didn't actually know the firm05:11 - 05:42Jessica Lackey: I was going into. It was 1 of those like a BTG or Catalan. I think I was with Graphite there. And then some of my former colleagues from Nike started up a consulting firm. They didn't have a huge book of business, but I got to be part of some of those projects, which was really great because I got to show up and be an analyst associate from a consulting perspective without having to do any biz dev. It certainly wasn't the top money, but it was a way for me to get paid in fractional part-time work, which05:42 - 05:44Jessica Lackey: was fantastic for the first year.05:44 - 05:51Rochelle Moulton: Well, yeah, it's kind of like an easy glide path into seeing what it's like. And if you hadn't liked it, it wouldn't be so hard to go back.05:52 - 06:22Jessica Lackey: Exactly. And I'm super thankful that I quit during the pandemic where everyone was at home and it was normalized to be fractional. It was, You could do part-time, you could show up for the calls you need to show up to, do your work, but not have to be on site. I don't know if this would have been as doable of as an opportunity 2019-2018 before it got normalized that we worked from home, But I was thankful that it happened when it did. I didn't have to do a ton of my own biz dev during the first06:22 - 06:26Jessica Lackey: year and ended up making money. It was great.06:26 - 06:30Rochelle Moulton: Well, of course, that's the question I'm gonna ask. How long did it take you to hit your first 100, 000?06:32 - 06:34Jessica Lackey: I hit my first 100, 000 in my first year.06:34 - 06:36Rochelle Moulton: With those contracts? Those contracts, you06:36 - 06:57Jessica Lackey: know, when you're billing a hundred dollars an hour on a 20 hour a week consulting project, even if that's not nearly the kind of money you want to be making, It was easy to do in the first year, but I didn't. 70% of that was all through these contract jobs. I think I made 30K in my first year from business coaching and consulting under my own06:57 - 07:08Rochelle Moulton: brand name. Okay. So that was going to be my next question. So you were doing both. You were doing some business development for yourself, but the big kahuna, the big percentage of your revenue came from these other deals.07:08 - 07:39Jessica Lackey: Exactly. So I think I got my first business coaching client. I quit in March. I got my first business coaching client in June or July. That's not bad. Yeah, and I got my second 1 in September and then I got my third major 1 in December. So it took me quite a while to, I work on a retainer model for many of my clients. So once I get 1, then it's not a 1 and done type of project for my own business. So I kind of built 1, then the second and the third. But it took07:39 - 07:48Jessica Lackey: me, you know, if I hadn't had these other consulting jobs, I'm not sure what I would have done with my time, honestly, because there's only so many hours a day you can do networking when you're starting.07:48 - 07:56Rochelle Moulton: Well, and you don't want to have that sense of desperation, because people can smell it on you. So it sounds like it was a nice balance of those 2 for year 1, right?07:57 - 08:19Jessica Lackey: Yeah, and my husband actually told me, I was terrified about how I was going to get my first client, but I was like, okay, well, I have enough money. I made a bonus right before I left. So I was like, okay, well, I can, you know, I have an extra 3 months of salary. And then I got a call from 1 of the, my friend put me in touch with a matching platform and They said, hey, do you want a project? I'm like, okay, I was planning to take some time off. And then of course I08:19 - 08:25Jessica Lackey: didn't. Resh respect, I probably shouldn't have taken the time off, but I was terrified I was never gonna get that first client, so I jumped right in.08:25 - 08:38Rochelle Moulton: You're not alone, that happens a lot. Okay, so take us forward. We're gonna go to year 2. So do you still have these consulting contracts in year 2? Are you still doing that or do you stop?08:38 - 09:12Jessica Lackey: So I am not doing the subcontracting anymore through the matching platforms. That was year 1. But in year 2, What happened is 1 of the consulting, I was working again with some colleagues from Nike, they had some projects so I did those. But interestingly enough, 1 of the clients that I picked up in year 1 from a business coaching perspective, they let go of their CLO, they were a seed stage startup, and they said, will you step in to do fractional COO? So I went from doing subcontracting and doing strategy work to now actually being a09:12 - 09:28Jessica Lackey: fractional COO for 6 months. So I worked, I had like a part-time job, not even doing consulting, but doing in the business, running reports, running an account management process. I ran a fractional COO for a startup for 6 months with an existing client.09:29 - 09:35Rochelle Moulton: Let me just make sure. Do you still have your 3 retainer clients that you had from year 1?09:35 - 09:48Jessica Lackey: I did. I've had 3 of those. I picked up some additional coaching clients at that point in time, but 1 of those retainer clients, we went from, I think, a thousand dollar a month retainer to a $5, 000 a month fractional COO gig.09:48 - 09:55Rochelle Moulton: The fractional. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And how many clients did you have total? Just roughly.09:55 - 09:58Jessica Lackey: I think at that time, like 6 or so clients at that time.09:59 - 10:25Rochelle Moulton: Well, here's why I'm asking is because a lot of people get stuck with this idea and they stop when they get to the 2 or 3 whales because they're like, that's all I can do. I can't do anymore. And when you have 6, you've insulated yourself quite a bit, even if half of them drop off, you've still got a decent book of business, what I call a whale model. You don't need 60 clients, you need 6 or 10 or whatever your magic number is.10:26 - 10:53Jessica Lackey: Yeah. And everyone asks me how I managed to have, for my first 2 years, I had 1 whale client at a time and a bunch of other little ones, little as the eye of the eye of the holder, but you know, 1 like 5 to $8, 000 either fractional COO gig or consulting gig. And people are like, how did you manage having a bigger client and like a bunch of small ones? And the nice part about it is because it's flexible, I could manage in the pockets of time that I had. And so, you know, as10:53 - 11:18Jessica Lackey: a soloist, sometimes the time where I get to do focus work on my COO client was on a Sunday morning because that's when it made sense. I could really focus. And on other times it was sometimes hard for me to do a lot of like deeper dive work on when I had like coaching calls that day. So I structured my calendar to say, when can I serve my big client and when can I serve more of the in and out context switching coaching clients?11:19 - 11:38Rochelle Moulton: So if I had to sort of summarize year 2 from a big picture perspective, you got away from these matching relationships. You basically doubled your client base, but you also significantly expanded 1 of those relationships in particular and discovered the glories of fractional work.11:39 - 11:39Jessica Lackey: Yes, I did.11:39 - 11:46Rochelle Moulton: Yes. So should we go to year 3 or was there anything else that you kind of, some seeds that you planted in year 2?11:47 - 12:16Jessica Lackey: Yeah, So year 2, I actually started my first round of a group business coaching model. So it was in the fall of 2022. I realized that, again, in order to keep growing my revenue, I wasn't going to be able to take on, I thought at the time I was going to be taking on more clients, we'll talk about your 4, but I couldn't take on more clients at the price point I wanted to serve for that audience, which is small business owners. So I started a group coaching model, coaching program. And this 1, it was, there12:16 - 12:41Jessica Lackey: was no big launch. I think I invited, I had like 200 people on my list at the time. And I think it was 8 loom videos. They were like 5 to 10 minutes talking about some concepts. And then it was 6 weeks of teaching and 4 months of Q&A. And I had like 5 people sign up and they were all people I knew and they were all people from my local network who said, yes, I'm in for this round. There was no big launch. There was no fancy tagging or anything like that. There was no course12:41 - 13:00Jessica Lackey: platform. It was here's the link to register. And I taught live. Love it. Did you record? Oh, I recorded and I posted, I think I had a Mighty Networks at the time. So I recorded, but I didn't have worksheets. I didn't have templates. I just had like a 5 minute loom video where I taught about some concepts and then we did it all live.13:00 - 13:17Rochelle Moulton: I love that because it's starting with, I mean, think about it. Not having to do all that other stuff meant there wasn't really any pressure on you to fill, and I use that word in quotes, to fill your class, right? You just get a chance to try it out and see what works and your investment is fairly small.13:17 - 13:32Jessica Lackey: It was great. And I know what it takes now to put a whole program like that together, which was year 3. But it was so, it was low effort. It really was just an opportunity to, and I didn't sell hard. They all came from personal limitations. I didn't have a fancy sales page.13:32 - 14:01Rochelle Moulton: I was like, here's a Google doc. It was just really nice to step into that with low effort on...

If this last year was NOT smooth sailing for your Soloist business finances, now is an ideal time to pave the way to better. There’s still time to avoid unpleasant surprises (think giant tax bills) and start streamlining your financial life before year-end:The five strategic pieces of information you want in your hands before year-end.How to think about your financial team (and why it’s worth investing in the right experts).How a financial surprise made me completely shift how I managed my business cash flow.Why you want to build a cash reserve for your business and a resource to get you started.LINKSRochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | InstagramConsultants + Money podcast episode on cash reserves (Erica Goode)BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLERESOURCES FOR SOLOISTSJoin the Soloist email list: helping thousands of Soloist Consultants smash through their revenue plateau.Soloist Events: in-person events for Soloists to gather, connect and learn.The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.TRANSCRIPT00:00 - 00:43Rochelle Moulton: Think of it like a non-emergency emergency fund for your business. It's a way to smooth out the inevitable cash flow variations in our kinds of businesses. And once you fully fund a cash reserve, I can guarantee you will like the comfort and freedom that it provides. Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we're all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I'm Rochelle Moulton, and today I want to talk to you about getting your finances straight. It's late October as I'm recording this and it's the perfect time to get both strategic and tactical00:43 - 01:18Rochelle Moultob: as you pave the way for the year you want for your business and for your life. So let's start with the strategic. Okay, at this point in the year, you wanna have several things in the bag. 1, you want a reasonable idea of your current and projected financial position. That means how much revenue have you already closed and what's likely to hit before year end. Same thing with your expenses so you can get a feel for your bottom line year. It also means how much more can you tuck away in your taxed advantage solo 401k. Now01:18 - 01:59Rochelle Moultob: remember, you can make additional employer contributions above and beyond your salary deferrals. Don't have a solo 401k yet? Talk to your financial advisor or your CPA about the best options for you. Contributing consistently to your 401k is a baller move, especially for soloists since we don't have anyone funding our future life but ourselves. 2, take this understanding and combine it with whatever other income and expenses are happening in the other parts of your life. Maybe you have other sources of income like a spouse or other businesses. Share all of this with your CPA so you don't01:59 - 02:39Rochelle Moultob: get surprised with a whopping tax bill you haven't accrued for. 3, have your CPA give you a revised estimate for your annual federal, state, and local taxes. And I say revised because I know you worked out an estimate with your CPA earlier in the year, right? You're just honing it now, making sure you account for any unexpected blips. And 4, have you got your plan for your business firmly in mind for the next year? If not, now's a good time to start strategizing or finish strategizing? What investments of time and energy will your plan require of02:39 - 03:13Rochelle Moultob: you? Is this the year you write that book and say no to some new client engagements? Or is it the year you step on the gas and go court new clients or build out some new offerings? All of these have implications for your finances, and it just takes a tiny bit of time to line up where you want to go with keeping your finances on an even keel. And 5, how happy are you with how you manage your finances this year? So let me give you a few questions to think about here. Are you happy with03:13 - 03:50Rochelle Moultob: how your cash flowed this last year? Not just how much, but when? Did you get the right information on your financial results in the right way at the right time? Did you have any unplanned big expenses, like say a tax bill, that had you scurrying around to deal with? Did you have enough cash set aside so that you could invest in yourself without worrying to attend conferences or hire a coach or buy some training? Your answers to these kinds of questions will point to changes you can make, and some will be quite simple, to get your03:50 - 04:28Rochelle Moultob: finances in better order. Maybe it's time to hire a bookkeeper, or replace your CPA with someone more strategic, or just start holding yourself accountable for getting and keeping your finances straight. And make sure you don't cheap out here. Excellent business financial advisors cost money, sometimes a not insignificant amount of money, but the best ones will earn their fees many times over. You know, in the middle years of owning my business, I got slapped upside the head with a huge tax bill. It was a combination of an excellent year in my business with a mistake by my04:28 - 05:02Rochelle Moultob: CPA that I didn't catch until after the return was filed. Nobody likes those kinds of surprises. But my first move was to instantly change how I accrued for taxes. I started taking a percent of my revenue every month and tucking it outside my business checking account where it didn't co-mingle with my regular cashflow. And then I use that account to pay quarterly and annual taxes. And because I added a cushion to the amount the CPA told me to set aside, I almost always have a bonus left after our taxes are paid. And I just 0 out05:02 - 05:34Rochelle Moultob: the account. We take the funds and invest half for the long term and play with the other half. It's like a bonus and it always makes me smile when I transfer it over. I also use that situation to find a new CPA, not because they made a mistake. I mean, that can always happen, but because I knew it was the system we were working that was at fault. They were not interested in strategic discussions, but operated more like a tax mill, pushing out returns like widgets. So I hired myself a new team. I found a bookkeeping05:34 - 06:12Rochelle Moultob: firm with a standard operating procedure and secure systems and a tax firm with a vested interest in strategy as well as tactics. I will say I sleep so much better at night with that arrangement. But there's another piece to that too, and that is your cash reserves outside of taxes. So friend of the show, Erica Goody did an excellent episode. It's number 82 of her Consultants and Money podcast that I heartily recommend, and I will drop a link to it in the show notes. It's a quick and juicy 8 minute episode on how to set up06:12 - 06:49Rochelle Moultob: cash reserves for your business. Think of it like a non-emergency emergency fund for your business, it's a way to smooth out the inevitable cashflow variations in our kinds of businesses. And once you fully fund a cash reserve, I can guarantee you will like the comfort and freedom that it provides. So as you consider all these questions, you can decide which tactical moves make the most sense for you. The goal is to get and keep your finances working for you rather than the other way around. So let me give you a few examples of things my clients06:49 - 07:29Rochelle Moultob: have done to handle their finances with more ease and comfort. They have hired a fractional CFO to plan and manage their business finances. Not a low cost solution, but 1 that allows them to detach from the day-to-day tactical. They funded a six-month cash reserve to smooth out wide swings from a whale project model. They handed off monthly bookkeeping to a specialty firm that interacts directly with their CPA. They worked with their spouse to generate a 2 earner household cash flow and reserve model and I highly recommend this for those with more complex financial lives. You will07:29 - 08:09Rochelle Moultob: not regret doing that. They engaged a fee only financial planner to model various scenarios so they could make fully informed longer-term decisions in concert with their CPA. And while my clients tend to be well-established with six-figure plus incomes, don't think they haven't shared their past financial horror stories with me. The moral of the story is this. The sooner you get your finances working smoothly to support you, the faster you'll get to reap the rewards, the ease and comfort of focusing on your business without constant worry about it all crashing down around you. Take it from me.08:09 - 08:35Rochelle Moultob: It's worth the small amount of time now to plan and set up the systems that will keep your finances on the straight and narrow for years to come. Now, as we wrap up this episode, if you haven't joined my email list yet, now is the time. Your soloist business and your future self will thank you. The link is in the show notes. That's it for this episode. Please join us next time for the soloist life. Bye. Bye