Skip to content
    32m 11 min read 177,744

    Create An Offer Customers Can’t Resist That’ll Print Money (Masterclass 4/5)

    Chris Do reveals how to re-engineer your service into an irresistible offer that commands premium prices and eliminates sales friction.

    Chris Do

    Chris Do

    Founder, The Futur™ · March 3, 2023

    Your Work Is Not Enough

    Your genius is not selling. You are exceptionally talented, your portfolio is strong, and your results speak for themselves. Yet clients hesitate, haggle over price, or walk away entirely. You’re left wondering, But I’m really good. Why don’t people just buy from me?

    The problem is simple. You believe good work should sell itself.

    It will not.

    In a world saturated with talent, good work is merely the price of entry. As The Futur’s founder, Chris Do, learned from a former business mentor, doing good work is the price of entry to be in business. It gets you a seat at the table, but it does not guarantee you the meal. Relying on your product’s quality alone is a strategy for obscurity, not success.

    The solution is not to create a better sales pitch or to add a layer of sensationalism. It's not about fluff. The real task is to transform what you sell into something so compelling that it sells itself. You need to create an irresistible offer.

    An irresistible offer is an offer so good that it compels the person to say yes, Do explains. It requires you not to pitch or convince or to do much sales.

    This is not about putting a nice package around a mediocre product. This is about re-engineering the service itself. It’s a radical shift from thinking about what you do to what your client gets. Your goal is to identify and eliminate the tension that kills a sale, creating an offer so good people feel stupid saying no to it.

    The Anatomy of Buyer Tension

    The single greatest point of tension in any sales cycle is price. Clients want a price that feels “just right,” like a Goldilocks syndrome where the cost can’t be too high or too low. Most creatives react to this pressure by defaulting to the easiest path: lowering the price.

    This is a mistake.

    Anybody can tell you to reduce your price to sell more, Do says. Few people can teach you how to raise your prices so you can sell less to more qualified buyers.

    To build an irresistible offer, you must first understand the profound business implications of your pricing. Do proposes a simple but revealing exercise: make two lists detailing the benefits and consequences of both raising and lowering your prices. The results are stark and expose the self-sabotaging nature of undercharging.

    This isn’t about greed or becoming a “capitalist pig,” as some critics might charge. As Do argues, it’s about building a sustainable, high-quality business that truly serves both you and your clients. The choice between charging more and charging less is a choice between two completely different business models, and two completely different lives.

    The Virtuous Cycle of Charging More

    When you raise your prices, a cascade of positive effects begins. It’s not just about making more money. It’s about creating the conditions for better work, better clients, and a better life.

    First, you attract a higher caliber of client. A business willing to pay a premium price likely has the revenue to support it and values the outcome more than the cost. They are invested in success, not just a transaction. This simple filter elevates the entire engagement. Do has seen this proven repeatedly in his own career, where a higher price tag signaled higher value and brought in more serious partners. This concept is explored more deeply in how to price the client, not the job.

    With more revenue per project, your entire operational reality changes. The benefits include:

    • Increased Focus. Instead of juggling dozens of low-paying clients, you can dedicate your full attention to a select few. I could focus more on you, Do explains. I'm not worried about taking on a bunch of clients because I have bills to pay. This focus naturally leads to a better product.
    • Room for Innovation. With a healthier budget, you stop cutting corners and start exploring creative ways to improve the service and the customer experience. You have time to think.
    • Access to A-List Talent. More money means you can hire the best. Do recalls winning jobs by telling clients he could hire the exact artist who worked on a blockbuster film they admired. Imagine if you could tell your co-workers, ‘we hired the team who hired Roger Deakins.’ ... Imagine if you had not just A-players but world-class, massive-breed All-Stars working on your team. This not only improves the work but grants the client immense status.
    • Stronger Portfolio. Better clients and better resources lead to better outcomes, which become shining examples in your portfolio. This makes it easier to attract the next great client, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of excellence.
    • Greater Profitability. Even if you spend nothing extra on the project, the increased profit creates essential business runway. You can upgrade equipment, invest in software, hire coaches, and develop your team.
    • The Power to Say No. Financial runway gives you the freedom to be selective. When a poor-fit client walks in the door, you don’t have to take them out of desperation. You can protect your energy and your team’s morale.
    • Improved Quality of Life. You can reward your team with generous bonuses. You can finally take that long-delayed vacation. The business begins to serve your life, not consume it.

    Charging more is not an act of taking. It is an act of creating capacity. It fuels quality, reduces stress, and builds a resilient business that can deliver exceptional value.

    The Death Spiral of Charging Less

    On the surface, charging less seems to have benefits. It makes your service more accessible, opening the door to a greater volume and variety of clients. The low price removes resistance, making it a no-brainer for someone to “just try” your service, much like buying a $25 fast-fashion shirt.

    But these perceived benefits are a Trojan horse for a business model built on burnout.

    The consequences of charging less are severe and numerous. By competing on price, you invite a host of problems that systematically degrade your work and your well-being. When you charge very little, you attract buyers who are not fully committed and are quick to discard the relationship if it’s not perfect.

    More dangerously, you create a system that is unsustainable by design.

    • You Become the Bottleneck. With no margin, you can't afford to hire subcontractors or build a team. You must do all the work yourself.
    • Attention Becomes Diluted. To make ends meet, you must take on a high volume of projects. With 36 clients instead of three, your focus is shattered. You have less time and mental energy for each one.
    • Mistakes Multiply. Constantly switching gears between projects while working long hours means you don’t have time to refine, double-check, or think deeply. Errors are inevitable.
    • You Have No Safety Net. If you get sick or hit a creative roadblock, you're toast. There is no one to help you, and the entire assembly line grinds to a halt.
    • Customer Service Collapses. You can't remember every client's name or needs when you're managing dozens of them simultaneously. You become the McDonald's of your industry, prioritizing volume over quality.
    • Burnout is Guaranteed. The cycle of long hours, constant pressure, and low margins is a recipe for exhaustion. You can only go this hard for this long before you're completely burnt out, Do warns. You can’t take vacations. You can’t even rest.

    Worst of all, you are actively educating your customers to buy based on price, not on value. When you compete at the bottom, you invite competition from everyone: hobbyists, students, and low-skilled providers. The higher the price of what you do, the less competition you have, Do states. The lower the price that you charge, the more competition you invite.

    The path of lowering your price is a race to the bottom you are guaranteed to win, and in doing so, you lose everything that matters.

    The Value Equation

    To escape the trap of competing on price, you must learn to build offers around value. This requires a new way of thinking, articulated powerfully in Alex Hormozi’s book, $100M Offers, which Do recommends as essential reading.

    The core of an irresistible offer is about systematically de-risking the purchase for your client. The higher the risk, the worse the offer is, Do says. So our main focus is to reduce risk.

    This is achieved by manipulating four key variables to create a Value Equation.

    Your job is to architect an offer that accomplishes two things:

    1. Increases the perceived likelihood of achieving the dream outcome.
    2. Increases the client’s perception of the value of that outcome.

    And simultaneously does two other things:

    1. Decreases the time it takes to achieve the outcome.
    2. Decreases the effort and sacrifice the client must make.

    The more you can amplify the positives and minimize the negatives, the more valuable your offer becomes. This isn’t about just promising results. It's about providing concrete assurances. A money-back guarantee is one tool, but more powerful assurances come from your track record, industry awards, publications, and speaking engagements. These elements increase the client’s *perception* that success is not just possible but probable.

    The other side of the equation is just as critical. You must relentlessly remove friction. How much work does the client have to do? How many meetings must they attend? How many decisions must they make? Every ounce of effort you can take off their plate increases the value of your offer. As Hormozi's framework suggests, a truly irresistible offer sounds like this: easy, instant, guaranteed results with minimal effort from you. It is your job to engineer your service to get as close to that ideal as possible.

    The 10x and 0.1x Offer Design Challenge

    To truly innovate your offer, you must break free from linear thinking. Do demonstrates this with a powerful thought experiment. He challenges creative entrepreneur Mo Ismail to redesign his social media content service, which he currently sells for $5,000 per month.

    First, the 10x challenge: What could you offer for $50,000 a month?

    The initial, predictable response is to simply offer “more of the same.” More videos, more posts, a slightly bigger team. This is the first sludge of mud that must be pushed through the dam before the creative ideas can flow.

    Do pushes further, freeing the mind from its conservative constraints. For $50,000 a month, or $600,000 a year, what becomes possible? The ideas become exhilaratingly different.

    • A 24/7 Production Crew. Inspired by the HBO series 24/7, which profiled boxers before a big fight, you could embed a film crew with the client to capture their life and work authentically.
    • An In-Home Studio. You could build a professional-grade studio in the client’s home or office, complete with lighting, audio, and one-touch presets. They push a button, and they are ready to record.
    • A Ghost Testing Channel. You could create a private channel to A/B test content ideas using AI-sampled audio and scripts, ensuring only proven “bangers” ever require the client’s time to record.
    • Vertical Integration. Taking a page from McDonald's, which owns its own potato farms and toy factories, you could build complimentary businesses that support the main offer. This strategy gives you an unfair competitive advantage, as seen in many successful seven-figure agencies. This content engine might lose money but generate massive PR and attention for the client’s primary business.

    Suddenly, the $50,000 price tag doesn't seem outrageous. It corresponds to an entirely different a world-class, white-glove experience delivering an unparalleled outcome.

    Next, the 0.1x challenge: What could you offer for $500?

    Again, the predictable answer is to offer “less of the same.” A few edited videos, a couple of repurposed clips. But as Do points out, there’s almost nothing meaningful you can do for $500 in a service-based business. The math doesn’t work.

    Here, the innovation must be a complete departure from the time-for-money model. The only way I can do volume is I create something that is infinitely scalable, Do reasons.

    The $500 offer cannot be a service. It must be a product.

    • A Comprehensive Digital Guide. You could sell “The Social Media Influencer’s Guide,” a detailed digital product filled with frameworks, templates, and strategies.
    • A Prompt Deck. You could create a physical or digital deck of cards with content prompts, hooks, and storytelling structures.
    • A Packaged Brand Guide. You could bundle your knowledge on building a personal brand into a do-it-yourself kit, complete with worksheets and pre-purchased coupons for essential software.

    This exercise forces you to think beyond your current model. It generates two new, viable offers: a high-ticket, premium service and a low-ticket, scalable product. Now, instead of one offer, you have three distinct tiers. By providing these options, you anchor the value and remove the client's need to go out and get three bids from your competitors. You become their only option.

    The Most Important Reframe

    For decades, creatives have been told that time is money. This belief has led them to sell their services by the hour, a model Do argues is a fool’s errand. When you sell units of time, you are incentivized to sell more time and not more results, he states. You're punishing innovation. You're being punished for being good.

    No client buys your time. They buy a result. They buy a hole in the wall, not the drill.

    But the phrase “time is money” holds a powerful truth, just not in the way most people think. Do delivers the final, crucial twist.

    Time is money, he declares. Not your time. The client's time.

    This is the ultimate reframe. Your value is not determined by how long something takes you, but by how much time and effort you save the client. Their time is more valuable than yours; that is the very premise of them hiring you. The person who saves them time and effort is, quite literally, creating money for them.

    Consider Amazon. They dominate retail not because their products are inherently better, but because they have relentlessly optimized to shorten the time between desire and delivery. They have made getting a package in hours so frictionless that the pain of driving to a store feels greater than the one-click purchase. They win on speed.

    So, the critical question for your offer becomes: how can you deliver the same or better result in less time? How can you collapse the timeline to value?

    When you combine speed with a reduced perception of risk and an increased likelihood of success, you have the components of an offer that is nearly impossible to refuse. You are no longer selling design, or copywriting, or video production. You are selling a guaranteed outcome, delivered faster and with less effort than anyone else.

    Stop packaging your existing service. Go back to the drawing board and redesign it from the ground up. Build an offer so compelling, so de-risked, and so valuable that it needs no selling. Build an offer that makes clients want to say, take my money.

    if you've been struggling with putting together or taking your Genius and turning it into an offer that your ideal buyer would buy from you at exactly the price that you want that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today with the legendary Christo stick around for it now this is video number four out of a five part series discussing the five core Essentials for you to grow your creative freelance business if you haven't watched those three I'll give you a very small summary the first one we talked about was buying psychology the second one was sales psychology and the third one was pricing psychology if you missed those you're probably going to see a link here for it and there'll definitely be links in the description for the other ones because they kind of flow into one another now for this fourth episode we're talking about crafting an irresistible offer so Chris let's jump right into it when you say an irresistible offer what exactly does that mean and what do you mean by that an irresistible offers an offer so good that it compels the person to say yes which requires you not to pitch or convince or to do much sales in what you want to do is understand what motivates people and give that to them so you're removing resistance the thing that gets in the way of a sale is when people feel tension around making the decision to move forward and there's lots of ways to do this but I want to share a little nugget from my former business Mentor Kira McLaren God Rest his soul is that he's like doing good work is the price of Entry to be in business so what you have to do is take that off the table a lot of us think well the work should sell itself and what we don't understand is that as competition is increased and there are so many talented people in the world vying for the same kind of work that we're trying to get we can no longer rest on the product is good the product being the design services that you do the copywriting or the websites that you build because if you're not good and the work isn't good they don't even consider you in the first place so now what we have to do is we have to enter a new level of thinking about our products or services in ways that they become so attractive that that expression take my money comes from the client not literally but they feel that I'm curious about this because this is so timely I had a conversation with some of my students and we were talking about copywriting and particularly writing Hooks and how they're concerned that maybe they're sensationalizing the information that they're going to give in their videos aside from you know competition going up Talent going up some people may be feeling like but I'm really good why don't people just buy from me is there something to the idea of why do I have to like make it sound sexy or come across sexy or really sell it if people just want good work can you speak to that a little bit yeah and I would agree with them actually you should not fluff it up and fluff it up is the wrong concept you're not trying to put a nice package around a crap product when you talk about creating an irresistible offer it means you've actually redesigned re-engineered the product itself so that it doesn't really matter what the rapper is so we have to think about this radically different from the point of view of our client and what we have to do is we have to try to identify what are the top things that create tension in the Buy sales cycle so let's talk about that Mo there's a couple things right why would a client not buy well they feel tension around something oftentimes it's around price because they think it's too little or it's too much and it's kind of like the Goldilocks syndrome right where it has to be just the right price it's not too hot not too cold not too firm and not too soft and the natural reaction is well an irresistible offer is one that then must be at the lowest price well sometimes that's the case so when a client experiences attention around price what are ways to alleviate that tension well there's two ways that I can think of reduced to price to a point in which it becomes a no-brainer decision for them or increase the perceived value which is really where I'd like to spend most of our conversation today because anybody can tell you to reduce your price to sell more few people can teach you how to raise your prices so you can sell less to more qualified buyers for what reason let's talk about the reasons first the whys behind us so people will automatically have this knee-jerk reaction when they tell them raise your prices if you want better clients like what do you mean are we trying to just build clients out of money are we being greedy capitalists as some people will say well no let's let's talk about this so here's a simple exercise that we're gonna probably be doing the workshop together if we wind up seeing one another which is we're gonna make a list what are the benefits and consequences of raising your prices and then what are the benefits and consequences of lowering your price and what we want to do is attack both these lists from an unbiased objective point of view so Mo let's try and do this exercise what are the benefits and consequences so both the pros and the cons of raising price let's start with the positives what might happen if you're able to raise your price just throw out whatever comes to the top of your mind higher caliber client if the price is higher then that means that business is probably making more money and the perceived value of my product is higher because it's more expensive compared to other people in the space there's a accountability on me as a service the team as a service to deliver good value quality value so we hold ourselves to a significantly higher standard well that's pretty good let me ask you a couple of questions and I want those of you that are listening or watching this to play along hopefully I've given you enough time if you haven't hit pause write down some of your answers and come back to us and then we can compare notes it's kind of a way of having like almost an instructional video for you here okay so if I gave you more money to do the same work that you're doing how might you spend that money well the customer experience like making sure that from beginning to end the feeling of the service is quality the team would be of higher caliber higher Talent I'd get a player teams to then offload the work off me and then for them to take accountability you know I'm in the creative business so this may not apply to everybody but the higher the talent the more Innovative the end product is going to be when we're thinking about things like editing or filming or even script writing so I feel like it just everything just goes up with for quality and the experience of the service itself that's what comes to mind for me I'm gonna make this kind of uh almost pedantic or very super pragmatics that you don't feel like we're being hyperbolic and exaggerating pumping up the benefits so I was speaking real basic terms here if you gave me more money to do the project it would mean that I could focus more on you I'm not worried about taking on a bunch of clients because I have bills to pay that seems pretty logical right so all of a sudden I can focus on a few and if I can focus on a few logic would then lead me to the point in which I could deliver better product and instead of cutting Corners I can think of new creative ways to improve product or service customer experience or something like that and these are important things to me if you paid me more I could probably not only just focus on you but I can actually work on this longer back when I ran a production company where we made commercials and music videos we got paid a lot of money on average I think any job that would come in the door would be about a quarter of a million dollars 250 000 US Dollars on the highest end we we did a project for over a million and on the lower end we probably did a music video for like 40K so it's a broad spectrum I'm not trying to throw that out there to flex on anybody I'm just showing you this whole Spectrum but when they get into the three four five hundred thousand dollar range it means there's enough room in the budget for us to hire just about anybody and I've used this before where as a way to close the job I said you know this effect that we're trying to achieve I have the person who worked on that on the feature film that you're referencing I have that artist on tap and we've worked with them or heard before and they're going to do an amazing job imagine like how that would make you feel we talked a little bit about this in the buyer psychology which is we buy things because it gives a sense of status imagine if you could tell your co-workers we hired the team who hired Roger deacons the cinematographer who shot XYZ movie they worked on our spot I mean imagine if you had not just a players but world-class massive breed All-Stars working on your team yes and what would that do for us well if you have the best people you have a higher chance of doing the best work not always we know right right you don't always get a We Are The World song with the best artists sometimes you get a piece of crap song and if we look long term now not only did you make your client look really good and proud that they made this decision to hire you they get to tell all their friends they worked with the best people in the world which gives them status but also it means that the next time you go out to get a piece of new business you can use this as a shining example of what you're capable of doing the potential of your creative output and that's worth a lot but let's say you spend none of the money on trying to improve anything and that's your right and your prerogative too let's just say you're really dialed in with the team that you have and they're creative ninjas well what happens is now is you're more profitable what can you do with this profit you can upgrade the equipment for your team you can invest in systems and software and Consulting and coaching and personal development because you have extra Runway it means you can breathe a little easier so when a poor fit walks in the door you don't have to take them you don't like their Vibe you don't like what they stand for and you have greater power to say no you can be more discriminatory as who you choose to share your gifts with these are good things and that you know that end of the year bonus or the half year bonus that you may or may not want to give you can be more generous and reward the people who are there for you with you this entire Journey or you know that dream vacation that you had to delay for seven years because you've been working like a dog you can finally say to your partner to your loved one and say you know what here's where we're gonna go it's the dream place and we're gonna check out for two weeks because we can afford it so the quality of life goes up these are just some of the things that come with the benefit of charging more hey wait I want to tell you guys something why are we doing this because I want to bring awareness to something and I hardly ever do this which I need to tell you about a tour that I'm going on and it's one of the Endeavors that we're launching this year which is I love doing workshops I want to spend some time with you imagine doing this for eight hours with me with exercise Hands-On things and where you can get feedback from myself and from the other people in the room we'll do role plays we'll do exercises it'll be really fun and guaranteed you're gonna get made fun of and laughed at and laugh with me and laugh at each other and you're going to see a whole side of my personality you've never seen before so if you're a creative if you're an entrepreneur you want to learn about creativity and business and build your personal brand I'm going to encourage you to check out the link in the description below it's all there for you and hopefully I'll see you in person do we want to do the other half of this example the consequences of not charging enough so let's go there again I'm gonna throw the ball in your court first my friend and say what are the benefits and the consequences of charging less so let's go with the benefits first if you are able to charge less what are the benefits of that and do your best to try to be objective and neutral when you're describing this list again I'm going to prompt everybody hit pause right now to stop make your own list and then you can resume and compare and contrast what we say benefits there may be more demand for you because you're more accessible to a bigger group of customers it could not require as much resource so the cost for it is going to be less but that's out of necessity maybe it's faster in certain cases so that's what's coming to mind for benefits and I'm trying here what are the benefits of charging less well when you charge less it means you open up the potential customer base to more people so you're going to get a greater variety of clients and you can get a greater volume of clients you've removed a lot of the resistance in the buy sell cycle because you've priced it so low now that it doesn't even hurt me to try and this is like akin to say fast fashion where you're not sure about that trendy shirt or tie and so it only costs 25 bucks so it's like who cares if it doesn't work I throw it away but for whereas if you pay three thousand dollars for something it better work because you are now living with that and you can beat yourself up so it also means you attract a buyer who's not wholly committed who's willing to try stuff and it gives you a great variety of projects to work on and maybe instead of having three clients you're gonna have 36 clients and you can show all these potential projects that you work on and you might get a lot more experience and so by increasing the volume let's say you can sell logos for a hundred dollars if you do 30 logos it looks like a really big number so in order to fulfill all these things now we slip into potentially some of the consequences is here well who can afford to do this work well I can't hire subcontractors because there's not enough budget in there for me to hire someone if I hire someone they might even charge more than what I charge so I can do all the work myself but because I have increased volume and increased opportunity I have less time so I have less attention and focus to each client in each problem and I'm not spending all my nights thinking about this because my mind is racing with what I have to do the next day and the day after that and so now as a consequence I'm going to work longer hours for more clients I'm going to be Switching gears pretty often I may or may not make mistakes because I just don't have the time to sit there and refine and double check anything I'll most likely be doing all the work myself so that's awesome so no subcontracted work and some people love that my hands are in the work but it means I can get no help and should I get sick if I should have creative roadblock I am screwed and I'm not going to be able to give good customer service because I can't remember customers names it's the assembly line we've become the McDonald's of fill in the blank of whatever service you provide and very few people want to describe what they do as a parallel or an analog to fast food we want to be fine dining not fast food so now I'm overwhelmed I'm trying to make money to make things work and and you know you can only go this hard for this long before you're completely burnt out we have nothing left in the tank because you know why because you can't take vacation you can't even go to the toilet because you're worried about the 13 other projects you've taken on Taco [ __ ] Chris I mean think about it yourself the logic I want to go all the way to end of this thing you might alienate your friends and your family and your loved ones because you're working all the time they might label you appropriately as a workaholic but you're saying I'm just trying to provide this is what's happening the benefits are few the consequences are many so I want you all to think about that so when you craft your irresistible offer and people want you to price your project lower it takes a creative person with self-confidence and communication skills and business Acumen to charge more and that's a challenge we want to do the things that are difficult because few people are willing to do the difficult things means I have less competition this brings me to another point the higher the price of what you do the less competition you have because there are only a few people that charge that premium price the lower the price that you charge the more competition you invite when you charge quite literally 100 for a logo which some people argue is too much for logo to begin with it means that Sally who is a hobbyist designer also charges 100 an hour Jake the student's still in school and freshman design course is like I'll do a logo front so you're inviting a lot of competition and at this point you've educated your customer to buy based on price not on value yes to buy based on price not on quality so how can we do this because you're sitting there thinking great great ideas Chris just charge more we've heard it blah blah blah that's all you talk about right that corporate American capitalists agreed that you're always talking about and I'll tell you this friend if this content doesn't sit well with you doesn't resonate just skip the video but for everyone else who wants to know how to charge more yet reduce friction you're going to want to stick around for the rest of this so here we go what kinds of things do people feel that create tension and resistance to buying how much risk is involved will this workout am I spending too much have you done this before do I know anyone that you've worked with that could vouch for you this is risk the higher the risk the worse the offer is so our main focus is to reduce risk we do this through many different things we increase the perception or likelihood of success and it's a perception it's not real just if they believe it will work that reduces buyer tension so we need to assure them an assurance is a fancy word for how do we guarantee them that this is going to work and I don't mean money-back guarantees even though that is a viable vehicle for an irresistible offer I mean guaranteeing that I have a track record I'm published I judge shows on the work that we do I speak on stages all these things help to assure the buyer and to reduce risk perception of risk increase the likelihood of success next pain what can you do to reduce the perception of pain when it comes to this project well I have to manage this project Chris how many iterations will I see how do I know this will work is this connected to my goals so what you want to do is simultaneously reduce the pain while you increase the perceived gains and we can talk about it as Alex hermosi has written in his book and I'll hold the book up here if you like some of these Concepts I strongly encourage you to read this book because it's going to go deep into this it's called 100 million dollar offers I'm not affiliated with Alex at all I make zero money by mentioning this but what I want to do is share resources and Source material so that if you want a deeper dive you will go here the other thing that you want to do is you want to look at effort and sacrifices Alex writes about in his book 100 million offers which is how much effort do I have to do as the buyer and what will I have to give up sacrifice as the buyer so if you take this to its logical conclusion it should sound like easy instant you don't have to do anything results are near instant as close as you can get that to design your offer the more likely it is that you have an irresistible offer so let's break this down and give some examples okay I know one of the things among the many things that you do is you create video content for social consumption to help authors thought leaders and business people to grow their presence online yes so let's try to imagine for a minute I'm a buyer of that I'm an author or a thought leader what are the potential things that I have to do in terms of effort and sacrifice so we want to reduce both effort and sacrifice because more effort and greater sacrifice means Lamar offer what can you take off the table to reduce my effort so coming up with the ideas topic ideas editing the videos you definitely don't have to do that should you we presume hosting scheduling monitoring the content across social this is probably the hardest but I'll say it because I know you're trying to just get it out of me filming if we can minimize the time or the process or the effort involved in them filming then it's a more appealing offer for sure now in order to work with you and share whatever number you want it could be real it could be imaginary it doesn't matter but for the sake of the exercise we'll go through this okay now in order to do this currently how much might you charge someone per month to do this because it's an ongoing need go five thousand now let's stretch your imagination a little bit let's say you were given a crazy amount of money we will say 10x if someone were to pay you a prospect to pay you fifty thousand dollars a month first of all I'm sure you'd be really happy what else could you do to reduce effort and sacrifice they would probably have a dedicated team for each of those components to where all they literally have to do is show up at a specific time out of their air-conditioned trailer and then just perform literally they all they would have to be is Talent keep stretching Mo this is where you have to put on your creative cap okay this is where most creative people Excel because most creative people are Divergent thinkers that can pull from different areas and they can bring them in they call me over here struggling uh no not yet because we we have to do is we have to grease the wheels and once you start to see where I'm heading the ideas will flow so like many things the dam push us through a lot of silt and mud and it's a sludge that comes flying out of dams and they open it up again once it works through that and then it flows like crazy you helped me out here a little bit give me no I want you to stop it for a little bit so people can see this in real time so you see this is a very helpful exercise right yeah yeah you want to 10x the rep budget and we just went through this whole exercise like what you can do if you were paid more money we just did this so you can just map back to that I see your eyes darting all over the place you can just map back today oh yeah yeah I remember we could do what as it relates to creating social content for Thought leaders I mean fifty thousand dollars a month they would have a film crew that's on them 24 hours a day that can just be filming every waking moment of their day there's an HBO series that they produce every time there's a big fight do you know what it's called no what it's called was it I think it's called 24 7 and it's so successful for getting people to care that then they start to make this as part of their package basically there's a fight they'll do 24 7. and the theory is they shoot for about a week leading into the fight so you kind of know what's going on so you see how they're cutting weight you see if they're in the gym so you could offer your prospects 24 7. okay what else see the wheels are starting to move now so one thing I'll tell all of you who are listening or watching this is the first thing that people do is they say when I give in 10 times more money I just do 10 times more of the same thing that's pretty natural what we got to do is work through that and there are ideas here that you're not even thinking of that have nothing to do with what you do today I'm thinking about the product maybe from a service standpoint I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna block man I know I know I want you to be in pain for a little bit it'll make the reveal much better so this person is theoretically just as a concept going to pay you 12 times 50k I believe that's 600 000 a year sometimes you need to look at it like that what could you do with 600 000 a year now this is not premeditated I'm just gonna go off what you young kids refer to as off the Dome if you were to hire me Mo let's just say you're a billionaire millionaire and you really care about your social presence I'm happy to take your money I'm going to help you the first thing I do is I would buy all the equipment that you need and set up a studio in your home lighting audio everything works all the time I would actually set you up with a desktop so literally you push one button on an app and everything turns on and I've gone in to set three presets for morning day and night whatever it is you're good to go let's say I create a ghost channel that only a few people see where I actually write concept using Ai and my team of copywriters and we use sampled audio from you to produce audio and video and we put it out there for a period of 24 hours to test to see if the concepts work so I'm going to do a bunch of a b testing Concepts so I waste none of your time so we're kind of saying these are bangers before you even record a single thing I'm just getting started Mo you want me to stop no I don't actually I want you to keep going so aside from the 24 7 crew which we will send for very specific events and we're going to think about the next time you do public speaking they're going to follow you through your writing Creator process and then you're going to document the whole journey from where you are to where you're going BTS fan reaction we're gonna do that so you can see how and this is not meant to like say anything about you or anybody else I've done this exercise before obviously not for this specific thing but I say I'm gonna give you 10 times as much money and what people do is they do more of the same but you can see like once my mind is freed from this after we push past the sludge and the silt and the dam we can get beautiful crystal clear water pushing through and sky's the limit one of the concepts I picked up from one of the speakers at Neil's Ford Mastermind which is the idea of vertical integration and the presenter forget his name I think it's Jeff but what he said on stage was what most people don't know is McDonald's is a very successful business but they also have the largest potato farms and they have the largest chicken farms and they actually manufacture more toys than anybody and they sell Zero toys now what they've done is they've set up complimentary businesses that support the main business that gives the main businesses an unfair competitive and legal Advantage businesses these vertically integrated businesses like the toy company makes no money doesn't need to make money has no customers but allows McDonald's to sell these happy meals for let's say 350 a Happy Meal I need to update my prices here and include a toy that had they purchased somewhere else would have increased the price of the Happy Meal by a dollar or two which then makes it too pricey to buy for your kids that they take a wash on and they're able to do this they can keep their prices at a certain place because they own the chicken farms so what business owners do very successful ones is they can set up a vertically integrated business that doesn't need to make money social media presence personal brand building and they can just lose money or break even on it because the amount of attention and publicity and PR that they get from that generate way more revenue for the other businesses so when you understand this this concept you might approach your business offering in a very different light to attract a different kind of customer so you can see this is really fun when we get away from what we do and we get to play in this thought experiment in this Fantasy Land of what could we do if we got a lot of money and we broke free of our conservative thinking we can come up with some pretty radical ideas wasn't that a fun exercise to do Mo yeah it's gonna make me replay this alongside the team to just figure out certain things uh to improve the business so now we have potentially two services to sell to a client which is one what you do right now for 5K which sounded pretty good one that we can sell to a different kind of client for 50k so guess where we're going we're going to do the 10 Rule now we just tried 10x I'm gonna go do 10 so now if you only had five hundred dollars as a budget to help people with their social content what could you do with that let's try to design some options go ahead Mo still editing probably with a limited quantity of output if you're already filming so say that you are someone who maybe does podcasts or you do a lot of coaching calls then we could repurpose existing footage to then edit so the repurposing is a piece of it and then schedule for you with a limited quantity of output for the month you've done exactly what I wanted you to do so this is brilliant this does not matter by the way so everyone's watching this is happening in real time we did not prepare this like I'm actually sweating having this conversation I'm just kidding so what a lot of people do is they assume this is scripted because it goes a certain way and then I say thank you that you thought it was that good that we scripted this whole thing I'm just taking notes right now just to show everybody hands in full transparency I just have notes and I'm just writing down thoughts right so let's quickly recap you had a five thousand dollar offer we went bananas with the 10x offer and the first thing that you do is you just increase the amount of what you do to come up with your 10x offer and what do you do in the reverse when I say you have 10 all you do is just reduce the quantity of what you're going to offer not a ton of innovative thinking there MO is always a great case study is it you did this you did this perfectly you really did and if you are watching this in the audience I know what you're doing you're screaming at the screen Mo say this say that but here's the thing you don't understand when it's not you in the hot seat your brain is really clear you know how you watch like design competitions I could do that and they put you into design composition and you suck butt you totally suck right why why why does that happen because adrenaline accelerator heart rate perspiration the idea that you're under the spotlight everybody's watching it makes you second guess so this is a pretty normal phenomenon so we did the exact same thing we just reduced the quantity and that's not the answer either we must be Innovative and I think what happens is we have to fight the instinct to self-sabotage when you hear 500 bucks you're like this sucks I don't want to do this so you'll generate ideas that suck that Express that you don't want to do this and truth be told how many videos can you edit for 500 bucks how much content repurposing can you do how much post scheduling media management can you do nothing really so you have to break the mold we've heard of the concept neuroplasticity I think neural relating to the brain and plasticity is how far it can stretch and mold as we've learned the older you get the more rigid you become the less neuroplasticity you have and there are ways that you can do this to remain an Innovative thinker they'll say simple things like take a different route home to try to do something with your non-dominant hand to walk backwards up the stairway because you're building new synaptic nerves in your brain so it doesn't die on you so thinking outside the box is not only good for your company but it's also good for the preservation of these parts of your brain that you want to activate so we know that there are constraints it's very good to understand problem solving is understanding constraints and resources your constraint is 500 how can you make money in this modern world of 500 well depending on where you're from let's assume that doesn't buy you very much so the only way you can make money is to do it in volume which is a constraint the only way I can do volume is I create something that is infinitely scalable this should open up your thinking immediately you know for 500 I can write a pretty darn good guide the social media influencers guide how to grow your social following for business owners and it includes a pre-purchased coupon for a bunch of social media apps that you're going to need still premium not cutting any Corners it's just a different version of this and some people are like I love this it comes with a deck of cards not traditional cards but each card is some prompt for you to think about right and it might even come with a brand guide on how to build your personal brand from a friend of yours like Chris doe the killer guide to creating a personal brand let's just say and you've included everything that you need for 500 bucks so you're delivering tremendous value these are things that you're like now I'm thinking outside the box what else can I do this is where we kind of get unstuck when we start coming up with ideas and and actually now I'm going to ask you this and tell me honestly you had your base idea we told you a 50 000 thing did you get excited about the 50 000 potentiality of that a little bit just a little bit it would excite me a lot like wow if a client really gave me 50K and committed I'd be so excited I'm gonna ask this question is time money is this a trick question yes and no it depends on how much value you place on your time monetarily that's my answer I'm asking for yes or no and you're giving me a non-answer it's time money no so I think it's the truth time is money but not the way that you think that's why I said it is and it isn't a trick question okay everybody is time money let's pause right now and write in the comment comments your answer is time money and say why so you can say time is not money because time is money because that'll help us with the algorithm I appreciate you let's get back into the episode time is money yes this is why people charge hourly time is money so my time is worth money and they say well I should charge fifty dollars an hour or 100 an hour so they try to raise the price of what they charge hourly for and this is what people like to argue with me when I say trading time for money is a Fool's errand and when you do that you're punishing Innovation you're being punished for being good because when you sell units of time you are incentivized to sell more time and not more results no clients I know by your time by result I don't really care if it took you 10 hours to fix a hole in the wall in fact actually if you take too long I'm kind of upset so why am I saying this is true then because you know I don't believe in this so people say well just keep changing your hourly rate Chris but conceptually it's a flawed concept it doesn't matter how much you scale it up or scale it down you're still exchanging time for money which means the unit of measurement that is important is time and very few people buy your time okay get ready here's the big twist through on you okay time is money not your time the clients time that's the big flip on everybody so your clients time presumably because they can hire you is worth more than your time when you go in and you get your hair done by a stylist whatever they charge you is worth less than what it would take for you to get a degree in in beauty or hair styling and for you to cut your own hair it's just not worth it so you just pay your time and effort is worth money so the person who saves you your time and effort creates money for you so when you're designing your irresistible offer if you're feeling the pressure to reduce your price do not reduce your price decrease the time in which you can deliver the desired outcome if nothing else how do you think Amazon destroyed everybody they got you your package in hand in a remarkable amount of time through a lot of logistics and programming Automation and optimization that no company can compete against and the better they get at it the harder it is for somebody to compete now I love b h and they're based in New York when I order a camera I won't order from b h they're good people it takes a lot longer to get it from b h because they don't have all the robots inventory Amazon looks into their system they say our warehouse in Northern California already has it in fact we have one in La we can get into you same day nuts nobody can do that so Amazon has created Customer Loyalty even though you might not think of it like that but customer preference because they've been able to shorten the period in time in which it takes to get something in some instances I feel like it's more painful for me to get my car to drive somewhere to buy it to go back home versus hit one button it'll be here so fast so true so think about how you can deliver your product faster not deliver an inferior product but to deliver the same product or the better product in less time what can you do to reduce perceived risk and increase perception of success there's a whole host of things you can do and when you do that you want to package all this up and now you have three tiered pricing you have your 500 option you have your five thousand dollar option and you have the Ritz Carlton option Four Seasons fifty thousand dollar White Glove I'll give you a back rub while you're at it and by providing pricing options you've removed a necessity for the client to Triple bid you so to kind of land the plane here Mo is when we talk about riding an irresistible offer it's not about packaging it's literally redesigning from the ground up what your offer is so much so that your clients feel in Alex's word stupid for saying no an offer so good it sells itself that's my time my name is Chris and thanks for coming to church [Music]
    Download transcript

    Enjoyed this? There’s more where it came from.

    Get insights on pricing, value, and creative business.

    You can unsubscribe anytime. By submitting, you agree to receive communications and to our Privacy Policy.

    “Not your time, the client's time.”

    — Chris Do

    Length
    32m
    Views
    177,744
    Topic
    PRICING

    Share