Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: Everyone loves to talk about high ticket offers, but here's the thing, most of the people using that phrase have never sold anything. High ticket. I wanna put it another way altogether when I hear the phrase high ticket, I die a little inside. I cringe a little, actually a lot. Not because selling at a premium is bad. In fact, it's necessary, but because of what the phrase does to our thinking, The origins of high ticket come from old school info marketers,
[00:00:38] Ken: not from consulting or founder led businesses, and in that world, quote unquote high ticket. Got pinned to selling a 5K or a 10 K program for info marketers. And today, the modern day version of that are people making courses. That number or [00:01:00] that range of 5K to 10 K felt like a stretch,
[00:01:04] Ken: but for us as consultants and founders, that's not high ticket. That's normal. My deal started at six figures in my agency. It's not high ticket. It's simply the right way to price and package your expertise.
[00:01:20] Ken: Here's why this matters. If you keep buying into the lie. Of the high ticket language, you'll end up structuring your business in a way that possibly feels exciting at first, but quietly you are sabotaging your growth.
[00:01:37] Ken: By the way, on the surface, maybe it sounds smart, but when you look at what's really happening behind the scenes, and I've personally reviewed hundreds if not thousands of offers, it flips the whole strategy on its head. I'll walk you through that in a moment in our conversation today. But before we go deep, the problem in calling it high ticket [00:02:00] makes you do this relative to what I mentioned a moment ago in terms of the thinking it sounds, get ready, exotic, special, even rare, but it's like calling, breathing high oxygen.
[00:02:12] Ken: That's a distortion. It tricks you into thinking premium pricing is some secretive move instead of the baseline you should already be operating from. You don't need high oxygen, you just need oxygen.
[00:02:26] Ken: So the real question isn't how do I sell high ticket? The real question is, how do I build offers that attract and serve my lighthouse clients that are scalable and price properly for where my business is going?
[00:02:44] Ken: So let me debunk a few parts of the lie, and it starts with the fact that high ticket is not a single offer.
[00:02:53] Ken: You've possibly heard the term, and if you haven't already, you will soon enough. If you're interested in this topic of [00:03:00] low ticket, medium ticket, and high ticket. And I get it. That is the language the industry uses, for better or for worse. It's a thing. It's a way to refer to different kinds of offers. So when I'm working with clients, I will sometimes borrow this language just to meet them where they are.
[00:03:18] Ken: But here's really what I want you to see inside of your business. It's not about low, medium, or high. Instead, get these terms and these concepts into your brain. It's about an intro, core and premium offer, and this is the key difference within a specific offer portfolio. There's not one offer. There's actually three different parts within high ticket.
[00:03:45] Ken: So for consultants, advisors, founders, your so-called quote unquote high ticket portfolio is actually the only one that you need to care about at least until you've maximized your active income. So when you [00:04:00] start thinking about other ways to scale and grow, please don't worry about courses. or cohorts or groups or even selling things that are just gonna get people across the door or even things that are gonna get someone into the business, because those are different kinds of offers with different purposes.
[00:04:19] Ken: So when I'm talking about. This high ticket today, I'm not talking about some generic tier. I'm talking specifically about the premium, highest priced offer inside that offer portfolio.
[00:04:33] Ken: And remember back in episode 14, we had a conversation around what it could look like to be a million dollar solopreneur. And the offer portfolio itself, having more than one offer is about expanding the surface area to get a yes. The difference here again, is that low, medium, and high ticket are actually serving different parts of the market that you're not serving.
[00:04:58] Ken: And so if you [00:05:00] have a low ticket versus a medium ticket versus a high ticket, you actually have different. Marketing funnels versus trying to build a single aligned marketing and sales funnel that's pushing into one part of the offer portfolio, namely, again, the high ticket part of it, and I'm trying to be very clear in language today because this is an important concept that leads you to have the scalability to even get into multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars or the seven figure range, as I've talked about in past conversations.
[00:05:32] Ken: I have a newer client who is coming out of a bigger corporate environment, and this was one of the biggest eye openers for her.
[00:05:39] Ken: This person had a high dollar consulting potential, but didn't understand that by having one option, they were signaling to prospects effectively. The Henry Ford model of offers. Let me describe it this way. You could have a car in any color as long as it's black, or in this case, you can buy whatever you [00:06:00] want from me, as long as it's this thing that I put in front of you, which does the following thing, you effectively give your prospect a take it or leave it situation.
[00:06:10] Ken: this dramatically lowers your chance to get a yes, and it might be great money, but if you buy into this idea the lie of high ticket and implement it the wrong way. You will find yourself stuck in a business model that looks good on paper, but breaks the moment you try to sell it consistently. I don't want you to sell an offer one time.
[00:06:33] Ken: I want you to be able to sell it a hundred times, just like we've talked about in another episode where we talked about your next 100 clients, and I'll show you what I mean here in just a bit.
[00:06:44] Ken: So the next part of this lie is that we have to understand that high ticket is actually not the goal,
[00:06:52] Ken: And here's why. Too many people design their whole business around trying to sell that one big flashy premium [00:07:00] offer. You know the one that's gonna get you that whale client, and I call it the anchor client that's gonna sink you to the bottom of the ocean. But remember what we just talked about. If you are a consultant, a coach, a founder, a solopreneur.
[00:07:13] Ken: High ticket is not the goal. It's the only game in town.
[00:07:18] Ken: Now, again, to be clear, when I say high ticket here,
[00:07:21] Ken: I'm really talking about the premium offer in your offer portfolio. That's the part everyone loves to obsess about that we just mentioned, but it's not the thing that drives your business.
[00:07:30] Ken: The premium offer in your high ticket offer portfolio has one job.
[00:07:36] Ken: it's to provide a contrast as a pricing anchor or even possibly a decoy relative to the other options available.
[00:07:45] Ken: So it is not about selling the huge deal. It's about eliminating an option that clearly doesn't make sense often. It truly is the premium option. So you can have a discussion around the two options that make sense.
[00:07:58] Ken: So going back to my client [00:08:00] selling these high five figure consulting deals. They go from offering the quote unquote one black car of the same model, to, three options. Still all easy to compare and discussing the two that are most in line with the prospect's challenges.
[00:08:17] Ken: And if
[00:08:17] Ken: you think all the way back to episode five, the a hundred K trap. We talked about the lighthouse client being that prospect or that client that pays you more, that pays you for expertise, not for all the things that you do.
[00:08:31] Ken: And often in the premium option of the offer portfolio, there is some level of hands-on keyboard work. There are milestones. In certain cases, there may even be some level of outputs, and as I've told you before, I'm actually fine with that as long as they are buying from you because of the outcomes. But really again, the point here is that
[00:08:52] Ken: you're always focused on selling this premium option, you really are focused often on having to produce [00:09:00] widgets, deliverables, things.
[00:09:02] Ken: What you're really needing to focus on across these different options in the offer portfolio, in the intro and core are the struggles of the lighthouse client. The challenges that they're facing, the things that they want from you, and not just saying that you'll do all the things because you can get paid more money.
[00:09:21] Ken: Actually having this conversation with a bunch of clients this week and all of them kept saying, yeah, it's really hard to walk away when the client wants to pay you all the things, and that is because of this lie of the high ticket, which is. Sell things as high as possible, make more money. And then on the other side, you're stuck in delivery hell.
[00:09:41] Ken: And I see this all the time when I talk about this exact topic. When I talk about the lie of high ticket, and I talk about why the high ticket. It's actually not the goal. I'll see people say things like this, especially in comments and social. I'm so glad I figured out my offer, but every time I [00:10:00] see the offers of these same people and they show me their work, they have no clue what they're doing.
[00:10:06] Ken: I know because I have reviewed. Hundreds of offers and worked with the world's top consultants, solopreneurs, founders, and so forth, and I was, again, selling six and seven figure offers before this particular business.
[00:10:18] Ken: And this has actually been a new trend that I've seen over the last six months. I know a lot of people are working with ai. I'veAnd you've heard this phrase possibly called AI slop,
[00:10:28] Ken: but it's often talked about more around content.
[00:10:32] Ken: And increasingly I'm seeing people who have said, oh yeah, I worked with ChatGPT or Claude, or Name your favorite assistant, and here's what it came up with. And these same mistakes that I'm talking about today, the same lie. Is inherent in that work. The offers don't build on each other. There's actually only one option.
[00:10:52] Ken: It's all focused on trying to sell for the most amount of money. And I would say that what I'm noticing today is [00:11:00] that the way content looked a couple years ago is the way that offers that come out of AI look today, two to three years behind on where it really should be. Because it's not something that AI is very versed on as it stands at the time of this recording.
[00:11:15] Ken: So the funny thing is, the real value of what people call high ticket isn't even what most people think it is. The bigger payoff actually comes from a completely different place. That we'll talk about here in another minute.
[00:11:31] Ken: because as we get into this next point, it's one of the most common questions I get asked with clients.
[00:11:38] Ken: Which is around the premium part of their offer portfolio and how they can handle more than three to five of those.
[00:11:45] Ken: The answer is a lot simpler than you realize. You don't. High ticket is not scalable. This is a fundamental shift in how you think about building out offers.
[00:11:56] Ken: The key shift is this, and why the first two [00:12:00] points really are foundational to it. You need to move from thinking about selling a high ticket offer to instead selling into a specific part of your offer portfolio. If you have a fractional consulting. Premium deal where you're charging 10, 20, $30,000 a month, you should not be trying to sell five or 10 of those unless you want to go build out an agency. Now, I'm not opposed to that if you do it the right way.
[00:12:27] Ken: The point here is that you don't say to yourself, sell more high ticket deals. You say The premium part of my high ticket offer portfolio is now sold out, and I really want to focus on selling the intro in the core, and in some ways, building maybe even a wait list. Or having the ability to grow people from intro or core into the premium.
[00:12:51] Ken: So what I help a lot of my clients work through is this concept of, which part of the offer portfolio do you [00:13:00] really wanna sell into and build the offer portfolio in such a way to maximize around that one.
[00:13:05] Ken: Remember what I said a moment ago, which is that a lot of times the premium does require some amount of hands-on work. When I was selling 15 K to 20 K deals as a fractional COO, it wasn't purely advisory based. There was some amount of me helping get tactical. In my agency, we started more at 25 KA month and we went all the way up to multiple hundreds of thousands dollars a month.
[00:13:30] Ken: So our ability to scale without having to hire a whole bunch of people or do so much work that we are stuck in delivery hell.
[00:13:40] Ken: That's why in episode three on how to Grow without hiring. I talked more about the scalable service offer framework. To make sure that we fit into the market in a way that gives us scalability, both in marketing, sales, and client delivery, and avoids that delivery hell.
[00:13:56] Ken: And this is why this conversation is so important, because if [00:14:00] you have. Subscribe to the version of quote unquote high ticket as has been shared, especially by very big internet voices. They actually just don't come out of a world that I've come out of. I've always been in consulting or high-end professional services, and I'm not saying some of what those people talk about is not useful at all.
[00:14:20] Ken: I purposely don't knock names, by the way, so that's why I don't mention them specifically. But there just is a different origin. I can remember all the way back to the days of high school where my English teacher of all people had this thing on the back wall that said, consider the source. So you have to understand the psychology of the people who use this terminology.
[00:14:41] Ken: Go back to the start of this conversation. It was information marketers, and a lot of the people today who are talking about them still are. Modern day information marketers that are selling books or courses or super low cost things compared to what we sell as people selling to businesses.
[00:14:59] Ken: [00:15:00] I don't personally base a lot of my philosophy when someone was paying $79 a month for something when my deals were. Driving into the 200,000 plus dollars per month range,
[00:15:12] Ken: or in certain cases for enterprise deals, legitimately seven figures. So make sure you understand that when you're applying these principles to your business. I say this all the time, has someone built a business like you and the way that you want to build it and scale it and the way that you wanna live your life.
[00:15:30] Ken: And if not, then you shouldn't actually follow any of those principles because they don't make sense for where you're trying to go next.
[00:15:36] Ken: So when it comes to this topic, and I'm positive, I will talk about offers again, because I'm very well known for building offers for consultants, founders, and agencies. Understand that it's not about a single offer. It's actually not about trying to sell that quote unquote high ticket thing.
[00:15:54] Ken: That's actually not our goal. And understand that if you try to sell that frequently, it's not [00:16:00] scalable. Especially not if you want to grow without hiring.
[00:16:03] Ken: So that is where we're gonna end it today. If you have not picked up my remote solopreneur blueprint where I detail this further, highly recommend it. You can go over to trs.club/blueprint and grab it right there. Walk through this in a lot more detail. I also talk a lot about this on social, so head over to LinkedIn, send me a connection request. Let me know you're listening to the podcast, read the posts I'm putting there, and you also can get my weekly briefing in the show notes where I send out much more detailed versions of these kinds of topics and conversations.
[00:16:38] Ken: If you learn something new today, I work hard to make sure that you do. If you got a nugget, please consider leaving a rating or review on your respective platform. The podcast is available everywhere, including on YouTube. Really helps me out. Lets me know that I'm doing a good job and that you wanna hear more of these things,
[00:16:54] Ken: As always, I appreciate your time.
[00:16:56] Ken: I appreciate your attention. I know that you could put it in any [00:17:00] number of things, especially those of you who listen all the way through,
[00:17:02] Ken: I love having these conversations with you. I love going deep into topics like offer sales and systems, and I can't wait to help you more as we discuss how to grow. Without hiring,