Most solo practices are a shelf, not a ladder

Four things somebody could buy, all sensible, with nothing running between them. Each one designed on its own day, on its own merits, usually at the point where somebody had already asked for it.

I know because I built mine that way, from the small end up, and it is the wrong end. It took me longer than it should have to work out why, so here is the argument I wish somebody had made to me, and then what the shape should actually be.

Why the small end is the wrong end

The obvious objection first. Starting small feels like the responsible choice. You have just left, nobody has bought anything from you, and asking a stranger for a five figure sum when your entire commercial history is a salary feels less like ambition and more like a category error.

That instinct is about your own nerve. It has nothing to do with how the buyer reads you, and the buyer is the one setting your price.

I spent years inside a bank designing the structures that decided what people were paid. The lesson that transfers, and it took me a while to notice it transferred, is that a number is never only a number. It is the fastest piece of information anybody has about what a thing is. People do not work out what something is worth and then look at the price. They look at the price and conclude what it is.

So the first thing you sell tells the market what you are. Sell a fifty franc guide first and you have not made a modest start. You have told several hundred people that you are the person who sells guides, and every one of them now has to be talked out of that before they will consider anything else. That conversation is far more expensive than the one you avoided by not asking for the big number in the first place.

There is a second cost and it is structural. A cheap product designed before you know what sits above it leads nowhere, because there is nothing yet for it to lead to. So you build the next thing in response to a question somebody has already asked, and the one after that the same way, and what you end up with is a shelf of individually defensible products with no route through them.

And a third, which is the one that actually hurt. Small products are almost always time for money. You fill your week with them, and then you have no week left in which to build the thing that would have paid properly.

The order that works

Design the most expensive thing first. Not because you sell it first, though you might. Because everything else is defined by it, and nothing below it can be designed properly until you know what it leads to.

Then work backwards, and let each rung answer one question.

The high ticket offer. The fullest version of what you can do for this person. It changes their situation rather than informing them about it. Design it first, sell it whenever. The test: if they finish it and their circumstances are the same, it is a course, not an engagement.

The mid ticket offer. What somebody buys when they believe you can help and are not ready to commit. Expect most of your volume here, because given three options most people take the middle one, and they take it for a reason worth understanding. The top feels like being sold to and the bottom feels like admitting you are not serious. The middle is where somebody lands when they want to move without being seen to decide. The test: could you deliver it eight times in a quarter without resenting it? You will have to.

The low ticket offer. Its job is not margin. Its job is to turn a reader into a buyer, because somebody who has paid you anything at all is a different person from somebody who has not, and the second purchase is a fraction of the work of the first. The test: can it be delivered without your hours? If it costs you time, it is not a low ticket offer, it is consulting at the wrong price.

The lead magnet. Its job is qualification, not volume. A good one gives a stranger something they would have paid for, and makes the wrong person leave. The test: does it tell them something about their own situation they did not know before? A general overview of your field fails, because everybody has one and it says nothing about you.

The part I actually got wrong

Not the order, in the end. The route.

I had the products. What I did not have was a plan for what a person does after each one. I had never sat down and walked the whole thing through from the outside, as one person moving from not knowing my name to working with me properly. So each rung ended, and nothing obvious came next.

That blank does not stay blank. It gets filled in live, in the last ten minutes of a call, by you, under pressure, in front of somebody who has just asked what happens now. What people improvise under that particular pressure is almost always a discount.

So the fix is a fifth column, and it is decided before anything goes on sale.

What this is. What it costs. Who it is for. What it does. And what comes after it.

Fill in that last column for every rung. Where the honest answer is that nothing follows, write that down too, because a decision reads differently from an oversight when you are looking at it three months later, and only one of them stops you reopening it every fortnight.

Where the machinery earns its place

Once the route existed on a page, something changed that I had not predicted.

I run a set of agents across this practice. They draft, they check my claims against what is actually true, they reconcile the bank against the expenses. All of them were useful and all of them were useful only about the writing, because the writing was the only thing I had written down.

The ladder was in my head. So they could help me phrase an offer and could not help me think about one.

Putting it somewhere they read is the dullest change I have made and it is the one that moved the most. One page, read first, every time, by everything. An agent that knows what you sell, what it costs and what comes after it can work on a live proposal with you. One that does not can only work on the adjectives.

What it does not do is set the price. I built something to argue with me about pricing, and its job is not to produce a number. Its job is to know what I already charge, what I already decided and what I said the last time somebody pushed, then to say so when I am about to contradict all three because the person on the call was pleasant and I wanted them to say yes.

That is not a pricing tool. It is a colleague who remembers, which is the exact thing you stop having on the day you leave.

The test

You do not need a beautiful ladder. You need to be able to answer one question, out loud, in the last ten minutes of a call, without inventing anything.

They have just finished working with you and they ask what happens now.

If the sentence is already written, you have a practice. If you are composing it while they wait, you have a shelf.

I am building a programme out of this material, for people leaving corporate to start something of their own rather than take another role.