There’s one key difference between freelancers who struggle to get by and freelancers who can charge more and bank serious cheddar, and it’s something we’ve talked about many times before:
The former sells a commodity, and the latter sells a result.
Making the jump from the former to the latter won’t be an overnight event, and it also won’t be as easy as simply changing your service and demanding $12,500 every month. (Though we can certainly dream!)
But it is definitely possible for you (in a healthy, genuine lifestyle business way, not the hustle and grind 16 hours a day way) so long as you take Mike Shreeve’s hard-won advice from 10 years of front-line freelancing.
In a recent episode of The No Pants Show, Founder and Head Troublemaker of The No Pants Project, Mike Shreeve, shared the exact service he provides to bring in $12,500 each month…
From a single retainer.
On a signed and sealed year-long contract. (*swoons*)
But even more importantly, he shares the steps he took to arrive at the place, both mentally and skill-wise, where he could enjoy serving and profiting at the highest levels of his niche.
By following these steps, you will have a blueprint for the path to discovering your own premium, super-powered service.
We’ll dive into that first.
From Commodity to High Ticket Service Provider
Step 1 – Change Your Positioning In The Market
If you’ve been freelancing on Upwork or any other freelance job board site, you’ve probably already realized that the dream of working a few hours a day on a beach while sipping fruity beverages isn’t the reality for most freelancers.
Most of us spend long hours racing to the bottom by bidding on jobs with hundreds of other freelancers, just trying to get enough volume into the pipeline to cover our bills.
We run on heart-attack inducing amounts of coffee and are only pantsless because all our bottoms are in the wash, and we’ve had no time or gumption to do the alarmingly large pile laundry.
A lot of people give up and head back to employment when they face the inevitable burnout this creates. But when this happened to Mike Shreeve, he had a realization that shifted his entire business:
“The big shift that happened for me to go from really barely scraping by on like $2,500 a month, $3,000 a month, is when I realized that I needed to uplevel my skill set. I started to realize that what my clients really wanted was a compound result.
“A compound result is A + B + C = The Thing That They Want.
“I realized my clients didn’t want to hire a copywriter. They didn’t want to hire a Facebook ad specialist. They didn’t want to hire. That’s not what they wanted.
“What they wanted was the result of when a copywriter and a Facebook ads person and a designer get together and make something that creates a sale.
“What they wanted was the sale. What they were trying to do was plug the holes in the equation to find the sale.”
Your clients, your prospects, the market in general – they don’t want to buy a skill.
They don’t want to hire for “talent”.
In fact, nobody really does, regardless of what corporations and recruiters say.
When you go to the market and all you’re selling is a skill, a skill that anyone can learn if they spend the time, you’re a commodity.
(Which is exactly why the “secure” 9-5 traditional job is actually so dangerous.)
The change happens when you understand what clients are really trying to buy – a result.
People buy for a lot of reasons, but the heart of it always comes down to a result.
The number one result every business wants is a sale. Multiple sales. As many sales as possible.
That’s why there’s such a powerful difference between offering “copywriting” and offering “increased revenue” or “passive income” when you’re talking to a client.
They may want the gist of how you plan to get there, but in general that’s not the part they’re concerned with.
They want to know you’re going to deliver the particular result they’re missing.
In Mike’s case, he was able to determine through his experiences that his clients weren’t looking for just any result, any sales, or any revenue increase.
They wanted passive income.
And when he realized that, he was able to figure out what skills he needed to learn to deliver that result, and stumbled upon his superpower.
Step 2 – Discover (and Hone) Your Superpower
It’s hard to develop a bonafide superpower when you don’t have a specific problem in mind to solve first.
Even Superman needs friends with specialized talents to save the world, and he’s a literal super man.
Which is to say, no one can do everything for everyone.
So the first step to honing your superpower is to zero in on a small niche of people you’d enjoy working with and who have a problem you’d love to help them solve.
Once you understand who you’re trying to serve and what your ideal clients are truly looking for, you’re in a much better position to determine your own superpower – just like Mike did when he filled in the blanks he was missing to create passive income for his clients.
Mike goes on to stress the importance of finding your superpower, saying:
“We have a mentoring and coaching program, and we spend a third of the program working through the super power process.
So instead of it taking you years like it did for me working through this process, we compress it to about four weeks, because the end result of finding a superpower is having the ability to get out of the commoditized market.”
When the idea of getting a client the result they desire lights you up, and you can enjoy that process, you’re on the right track.
Finding your superpower is the most crucial piece of getting you to the lifestyle freelancing business of your dreams, so do not skip this step, even if it seems like it will take you years.
In The No Pants Project we’re able to compress the process into about four weeks because Mike has already paved the path and lit the way.
This article is all about helping you chop down the time it’ll take to work this out on your own, so every freelancer has access to the tools and business plan they need for success.
Step 3 – Talk To Your Clients In Their Own Language
Let’s flex your empathy muscles (the most important muscles to have in your freelancing arsenal):
Imagine you know nothing about gardening and you hire a gardener to help you with your backyard.
You’re trying to figure out what a good job looks like and what they’re doing and if it’s worth your time for the first six to eight weeks when all the work they’re doing looks like playing in the dirt for XXX dollars per hour.
You don’t know if you’re managing them correctly or you’ve got the right guy or anything.
Now imagine you hire a gardener and the gardener looks at you and says, “I can help you have a lush garden blooming by June to make you the envy of your neighbourhood. You don’t need to worry about anything, I’ll handle it and manage any third party help we’re going to need. Here’s how much it costs. If you can make sure the payments are made, you’ll have a competition worthy garden by this date.”
Which sounds better? Which sounds like a huge weight off your shoulders and which sounds like just another thing you need to keep an eye on and juggle?
That’s how prospects feel because they’re just like you, successful business or not. They have feelings, emotions, stress, and struggles. They’re not machines.
If you’re able to apply this empathy and some language mirroring, the client will understand exactly what they’re getting and the value of that, and you’ll stop struggling to get new clients or charge higher prices.
Mike says:
“A lot of the reasons that you’re getting rejected or that you’re unable to charge higher prices is because clients just don’t fully understand what you do. They can’t understand the value of what you do because to them, you’re simply a plug to plug in to some equation that they may not even fully understand themselves.”
When you approach your prospects in their own language, offering the results they’re wishing for in their heads, maybe not even saying out loud, you’re going to have their undivided attention.
Taking a results first approach rather than an overwhelming step-by-step breakdown of the actions you take, is key to smoother, simpler, near-effortless client-getting.
You can only do this right when you use your empathy and mirror the client’s language and thought processes around the result they’re looking for.
Step 4 – Delegate The Parts of Your Service You Hate (Or Just Can’t Get A Handle On)
When you’re offering results like this, chances are you’ve stepped out of the realm of a single skill and are managing a bigger operation now. (Well, hello there fancy CEO hat…)
But that doesn’t mean you have to do it all yourself – it means the client is paying you to make it happen, manage the process, and deliver the results.
You don’t have to move each piece yourself to create the value and end result you’ve been hired to deliver.
There may be parts that you hate or that take you too long and you can outsource those, build your own team, and build that expense into your pricing structure.
Mike says:
“When a client pays me, they’re not just paying me for what I do. They’re also paying me because I filled in the gaps for them. You don’t have to stretch your imagination far to understand why somebody would want to pay for that.
“Imagine if there was someone who came into your current freelancing business and just said, ‘Hey, why don’t I just get all the business for you? You don’t have to do anything. You just do your thing.’
“That sounds really great because half of what you’re paying for is that they’re going to worry about it, not you.”
Step 5 – Practice The 10X ROI Rule
So how do you know you’ve got a service worth $12,500 every single month?
The handy-dandy 10X ROI rule.
Mike explains:
“If somebody pays me money, I want them to get at least 10 times what they paid me.
“So if somebody pays me $120,000 a year or $150,000 a year, depending on how you measure, I want them to at least make $1 million – 10 times what they pay me.
“Now, if you’re in a niche or an industry where it’s difficult to measure the financial ROI, the 10X rule still applies.
“There’s qualitative and quantitative measurements.
“Qualitative is, they’re happier, they’re more calm, they have better relationships – the hard to measure stuff.
“Quantitative is, they have lost this much weight, they have put this much in their bank account, they’ve made this much money.
“So I have a rule. My goal is to make you 10 times as much as you pay me.”
Notice that the key to this is to understand that not all returns on investment come in the form of dollars in the bank.
Think about the true values of life. Think about what your ideal client genuinely wants from their business.
(It isn’t money, even if they think it is. Money is just a tool to get something else.)
Then, make sure you’re getting them what they really want, or enabling them to get it.
If they want more freedom, you can give them back time, you can give them dollars in the bank, or you can give them mental bandwidth and stress release to help make that goal a reality.
Those are priceless results for so many people out there.
Step 6 – Guarantee Results By Being Choosy About Your Clients
“Now I know what someone’s going to say. Well, Mike, how the heck can you guarantee $1 million over 12 months? It’s actually really, really simple.
“The way that I’m able to guarantee that is I don’t work with clients who I don’t think it will be easy to pull off with.
“Let me say that a little bit better. I look at their business. I see what they have. I have conversations with them. I’m very blunt. I’m very honest. I’m very straight forward and depending on their answers, depending on what assets they already have, what their team already looks like, what their profitability is, and what their propensity for risk is – depending on all of that I will determine whether or not it’s going to be easy or doable to generate those results.
“So when I am prospecting, my goal is not to take on as many clients as possible.
“My goal is to disqualify, disqualify, disqualify, which is why I can deliver those results consistently.”
– Mike “Disqualifying is the Real Qualifying” Shreeve
And that’s why so much of making the big cheese is about making mental shifts.
If you’re operating in a scarcity mindset, turning away clients won’t be possible for you – it’ll create even more stress and desperation, which will undercut your confidence and authority even more.
Instead you’ll take on every client, make the same guarantee even though it doesn’t apply to them, and then fail to deliver to the clients that weren’t in a position to benefit from your services.
So how do you get yourself into an abundance mindset to start creating a high-ticket service and being choosy about your clientele?
You need to create a steady stream of prospects.
Mike levels with us:
“For those of you who are there right now, where you don’t have a system set up for leads to come to you, please understand that I hear you. I understand you. I’ve been there myself and I am empathetic toward where you are right now.
“So please, please don’t think that I’m sitting up here in my ivory tower, ‘Disqualify, disqualify’.
“The answer to that problem is that you need to go build something that gets clients coming to you.
“We did an episode, 21 Different Ways to Use Content to Attract Clients. We did the episode, How to Make a Podcast Episode.
“If you need more help to build that machine, to get leads coming to you so you can get into disqualification mode, go to TheNoPantsProject.com.”
The $12,500 Per Month Service: How To Make A Million Dollars In A Year
Now that we’ve worked through the mindset shifts and positioning work you need to do in order to offer your own 5 figure per month service, here’s the exact service Mike offers:
“I help experts make $1 million in revenue in 12 months or less.”
He calls it the “Millionaire Maker” package.
How does he do it?
A simple, three step system, of course.
(It wouldn’t be patented Mike “ Freelancing Sensei” Shreeve if it were complicated, after all.)
Here’s exactly how it works, so you can see what goes in to a high-ticket service offering and get more insight for crafting your own “Millionaire Maker” service package.
Step 1: “Free Traffic” At Scale (The BEO)
The main engine of free traffic is actually paid traffic – done right.
“Now you may be saying, ‘But Mike, didn’t you just say it needs to be free traffic at scale?’
“Here’s what you do and here’s what I do for clients.
“I know that I need to be able to turn on Facebook ads tomorrow and just turn the floodgates of traffic on. So what I do is I build something called a ‘Break Even Offer.’
“This is something that’s fairly inexpensive. It could be a $21 Ebook, it could be a $7 guide. It could be a $49 audio course. It’s just something small.
“All I’m trying to do is make it so that when I spend a dollar on Facebook ads to drive that traffic, there’s something on the other side of that that’s for sale that’s cheap enough that people will purchase it so that I get a dollar back.
“So a dollar goes into Facebook ads and then a dollar comes back out of Facebook ads.”
– Mike “Making Money Magic” Shreeve
When you can perfect that machine, you’ve got “free traffic” to your high-ticket offer because your net investment is zero, and all that traffic is being exposed to your high ticket offer, which is what you’re really looking to sell.
What you’re doing is building a massive list of customers, and customers are 16 times more valuable than regular leads.
At the same time, you’re also building a regular email list of people who didn’t buy anything, but can now drive internal traffic to long-term traffic strategies like influence and blogs.
Which is to say you’ve built a self-perpetuating traffic machine.
The value of just this first step, for the right client with existing assets, would already add a $1 million dollars to revenue.
But that’s just the first step.
Step 2: The High Ticket Offer
This next bit might be life-changing for some of you, so hang on to your hats:
It is easier to make a million dollars selling something expensive than it is to make a million dollars selling something cheap – because it is equally difficult to sell expensive and cheap things.
That’s why the product Mike sells for his clients is always a high-ticket, $1,000 or more, product:
“We have this idea that it’s harder to sell something expensive than to sell something cheap – and it’s not true. Getting someone to pay $21 is equally as difficult as getting someone to pay $5,000.
“It takes the same amount of copy, takes the same pages, takes the same graphics, takes the same traffic, it’s all the same thing.
“So what you want to do is make sure that you’re selling something that you have to sell fewer of them to get to $1 million. If that’s true, then we know that not everyone’s going to buy the $5,000 offer and so we need to have lots of traffic.”
So the next step is to create a high-ticket offer from what your client already does or has in terms of assets, knowledge, service, etc.
In this case, you create a course and charge somewhere between $1,000 and $25,000 for it, starting usually at the low end for the first year.
Then you only need to sell 1,000 courses, which is easy to do with the massive customer base and email list you built with the breakeven machine, and you’ve made a million dollars.
But that’s not even the simplest way to do it, which is where step 3 comes in.
Step 3: A Way To Sell The HTO At Scale
The fastest and most efficient way to make a million bucks is not only to sell a high-ticket offer, but to sell it at scale.
Why make individual sales when you can harness the social proof and energy of a scaled event, where you can address multiple objections and questions live to set the minds of every event goer, outspoken or not, at ease?
(And where you don’t have to experience multiple people saying “No!” straight to your face!)
Mike says:
“We got a ton of traffic for a reason. A ton of traffic, that was free to get.
“All you need to do is create a workshop, a webinar, a sales video.
“I recommend my clients in the beginning to do a live workshop, which is get on something like Zoom, actually teach for about 45 minutes, and at the end say,
“‘Hey, I have this program. If you’d like to learn more here’s some information. It’s $1,000 or it’s a $5,000 coaching program, or it’s $25,000 to work with me one on one,’ or whatever that process is.”
Now you can accelerate the process and answer all the questions at scale, by addressing groups of 500, 1,000, 5,000 at a time instead of having conversations with every single person who buys or is looking to buy.
The webinar stands in for the individual qualifying sessions you would normally offer to sell a high-ticket offer, making it the most efficient way to sell your offer and saving you weeks or months of discovery sessions and coordinating.
Once you’ve gotten great at the live webinars, and gotten a good feel of the most common and challenging objections, you can turn it into a video sales letter and run the funnel with or without your client for maximum passive income.
Bringing It All Together:
And that’s it.
“My clients happily pay $12,500 a month.
“Not because I’m awesome. Not because I’m the greatest writer who’s ever lived. I’m not the greatest writer who’s ever lived. There are, I would say, most writers are better than I am.
“What I decided to do though, was solve a bigger problem than just writing content or writing copy. My superpower and how I’m able to help people add $1 million in revenue in 12 months or less is a combination of factors because I solve and create compound solutions for compound problems.
“I fundamentally believe that anybody can come up with solutions to compound problems and to do so in a way that’s actually less stressful than being a commoditized freelancer.”
– Mike “The Millionaire Maker” Shreeve
That’s how you build a freelance business that isn’t defined by stress, hustle, and scarcity.
It’s about bringing a solution to the table as a vendor, that releases both you and your client from the stress of managing each other.
You don’t even need all of these pieces, or to offer them to clients. You need only take a few, apply them to your own business, and start benefiting from the transformation that will follow.
So to recap:
First, you need to make a mental and skill set shift:
- Change your positioning in the market by offering results to compound problems, not services or skills.
- Discover and hone your superpower by deciding who your ideal client is and a compound problem you can solve for them. Your superpower is making that result a reality in a way that takes it off your client’s plate. If you don’t have all the skills you need yet, now you know exactly what to learn or outsource to make this happen.
- Talk to your clients in their own language, approach them with empathy and understand the way they think about the problems they’re facing. Use that to communicate the results you’ll get them in a way that is easy for them to understand, and even easier for them to value.
- Delegate the parts of your business you hate or can’t get a handle on, to ensure you’re serving at your best and delivering the results. Your fee covers contracting and managing a team of people with the right skills to get the results the client wants – because easing the workload and stress of your clients is already a priceless service.
- Practice the 10X ROI rule when pricing. You should be delivering 10X what you charge worth of results, but remember that not all results can be measured in concrete, dollar sign or numerical methods. If you work in more qualitative service areas, aim to leave your client 10X better than you found them, whether that’s fitter, happier, better in their relationship, etc.
- Guarantee results by being choosy about your clients. Don’t accept just anyone and assume they can benefit from your services. Know what they need to have in place, both mentally and business-wise, to be successful working with you, and don’t allow yourself to take on anyone who isn’t a good fit. That’s how you ensure success.
Then, you create your own high ticket offer. Here’s what Mike’s “Millionaire Maker” offer looks like:
- Create “free traffic” for your client by developing a break-even offer with their current assets. Drive all paid traffic to the break-even offer first, to ensure you cover the expense of paid traffic in full, then use the customer list you capture to direct all that “free” traffic to your real goal…
- The high-ticket offer. Sell something expensive so that you need to sell less of it to meet your goals. Since you’ll need all the same assets as you would to sell something for $21, you might as well make it easier on yourself by selling something for $1,000 or more. Knowing not everyone can afford that is exactly why you spent time getting so much free traffic in step one.
- Sell the high-ticket offer at scale. For maximum impact and efficiency, have your client run live webinars where they can connect with all attendees and answer questions and objections for 500, 1,000, or 1,500 people at once. That takes care of qualifying sessions and saves you time and effort on the back end. Once you’ve got a good grip of the main concerns and objections, as well as motivators, for the audience, you can convert the webinar into a video sales letter and let the funnel work its magic on autopilot.
There you go.
Now you’ve got everything you need to shift your freelancing business into six-figure success, without sacrificing your health, hygiene, or sanity to the freelancing job mills.
If you’re looking for help discovering your own superpower and ramping up to build your own, low-stress, lifestyle business, join us in The No Pants Project.
Listen to the full podcast episode here, and if you’ve got a second and loved it, hop over to iTunes and give us a quick rating and subscribe to help other great freelancers find the resources they need to build real, lifestyle businesses today.
Ready to start charging for your own high-ticket offer, but can’t find the right clients? Here’s how to attract premium clients with a two-page website and authentic selling.
