The Million Dollar Solopreneur | Ep 14

[00:00:00] Ken: Everyone is obsessed with how much money they make, but here's what nobody tells you about hitting seven figures and any listeners of my podcast or those that follow me on LinkedIn and read my weekly newsletter briefing, known. The number alone does not matter. It's really instead about how you're growing your business.
[00:00:24] Ken: And what you specifically take home, you could be doing a million, 2 million a year and barely paying yourself six figures. I've had those conversations. Or you could be doing 200 K and have it wrapped up in a single anchor client or a few legacy clients. And I've hit on this before in episode five, the a hundred K trap.
[00:00:45] Ken: I talked about chasing the wrong number and how that can backfire. And in episode three where I shared how I've consistently hit seven figures without a single employee. But today, we're doing things a little different. Until now, in this very new [00:01:00] podcast, I've only done solo episodes.
[00:01:02] Ken: This time I'm bringing you a behind the scenes. Listen to an interview I did recently. And I almost didn't share this publicly because a lot of people would charge for this. It feels more like a mentoring session than an actual interview. Here's what surprised me. We hit a huge point right out of the gate, what a system really is and why it's not about tools or ai.
[00:01:27] Ken: From there, we get into social selling, what I call offer magnets versus lead magnets, and why neither AI nor employees were what got me to seven figures. The host,
[00:01:38] Ken: one of my most successful clients, Danny Delvecchio, who went from totally unknown on LinkedIn to a Top Voice and was recently ranked the number one video marketing creator in the US two years ago, he wasn't even sure he wanted to do video And his story reminds me of people like Nick Broekema, another client who went from unknown to over 75,000 [00:02:00] followers and now gets hundreds of reactions per post. Both got their growth after we dialed in their offers and their differentiated positioning.
[00:02:08] Ken: So with that, here's our full conversation. A behind the scenes of what it's actually like to be a $1 million a year solopreneur who grows without hiring.
[00:02:19] Danny: You can build seven figure businesses without one employee or even a va. How
[00:02:28] Ken: I think we we're living in a, a fun time for sure. I think that's, that's part of it. You know, I don't know how far back you want me to go, but I was trying to push forward a lot of the thinking today before everyone understood that remote was a thing and remote's part of that for sure.
[00:02:45] Ken: But I think even beyond. Someone will just jump straight to ai. Right. We're just gonna go right into it. Right? Like even before going into ai, go, that's the idea. Just hit it hard right off that. Yeah. Like even, even before going into ai, like I got to seven figures without having ai. [00:03:00] Right. And the way that I did it in the past was very much thinking about systems first.
[00:03:06] Ken: I have a systems mind. I, a lot of people today know me for sales and marketing. But it really was more of being a product mind and thinking in systems. And the way that I eventually got good at marketing was because I was, became good at sales. So to me it's really a focus on systems from marketing, sales, and client delivery.
[00:03:27] Ken: And a lot of people will think about it, a system maybe in one of those, more on the backend than really anything else. So for me, it's having a repeatable way to get. Those clients, it's having a consistent way to get those sales. And then on the backend, it's not always saying, I'm going to get paid because I do more things and because I have more widgets.
[00:03:48] Ken: That's what becomes, I call the hungry dragon of more people, more clients, more people, more clients. And I'm not opposed to hiring either. Like we can go into that. I had a whole team, but I just think that people immediately try to solve a lot of growth [00:04:00] challenges. With people, they throw bodies at it, they throw low cost labor and suspect that someone who's gonna get paid significantly less than you is gonna do a better job at that thing.
[00:04:10] Ken: Especially if it was in an employee situation. When they have zero equity, they're not gonna work as hard, they're not getting paid as much. So the the first part for me, our systems, and you know, 'cause you've talked with me for a little bit, that I have systems for things like offers. I have systems for things like sales, and I have, you know, more.
[00:04:30] Ken: Recently developed a lot of systems on the marketing front because if you have those two parts working on the first part, you can grow. I think honestly, today's maybe even five or 10 million without having a large team, and I've seen it in the marketplace.
[00:04:44] Danny: I think a lot of people misunderstand what a system means.
[00:04:48] Danny: I think people just for sure.
[00:04:49] Ken: Yeah, understand it's a buzzword today
[00:04:50] Ken: too. Yeah. Not to interrupt you. Go ahead. No, it's a buzzword today. Yeah.
[00:04:54] Danny: People think like a system is like, just like an automation. It is, it is a software, it is an [00:05:00] automation, but I feel like there's more to it. And, and that's something that I've learned from you is that there is more to it.
[00:05:07] Danny: So like can you define what you look at as a system?
[00:05:12] Ken: Yeah, so, and that's actually why I, I brought up AI because I think people will even just say AI is a system. A system is just a repeatable way to get results and. It has something more than automation for sure. In fact, I have a philosophy around before getting to automation, because you can automate things at and they don't get you results.
[00:05:36] Ken: I have had clients who are like, well, I'm automating using this tool, and I'm like, how's that going for you? And they were. Excited about like, oh, I'm automating connection requests and messages through Dify, or I'm automating this and that. I said, okay, like, tell me about them. They're like, yeah, I don't get any results.
[00:05:51] Ken: I'm like, so why have you been doing that? So for me, the system is the repeatable way to get results, and it's more than, you know, a snippet. It's [00:06:00] more, you know, when I say like a snippet, like it's not a copy and paste. That's not a system. It's a way to put together a bunch of things that have worked well manually.
[00:06:10] Ken: And then having those things work in a certain way without it being automation. At some point you want to automate that, but you have to earn the right to automate that. So I don't want to make a long answer here, like that's the simplest way to define a system is something that can get you repeatable results.
[00:06:24] Ken: It doesn't have to include technology. Obviously today, technology is a big part of that. Low-code. No-code, code tools, Zapier make are out there. Those now are almost like the OGs relative to some stuff like chat, GPT and some of these other platforms. But I'll just stop there for a minute so we can kind of, you know, get, get to where you want to go.
[00:06:43] Danny: Give me an example of. A system that you have in your business or a system that you've installed in a client's business and just kind of like, walk me through the steps and like why it works.
[00:06:55] Ken: Yeah. And let's use one of my more popular systems, right. Just to like, help [00:07:00] make it more real for people. Um, but I talk about.
[00:07:04] Ken: Scalable service offers, and a lot of people today talk about offers. They might even talk about scalable offers, but the way that we approach the offer in a way that understands, is it working today? Does it need to be changed? How do we do this in a way that where we sell one thing, we don't just sell it once and never do it again.
[00:07:24] Ken: And that's actually what happens with a lot of people. Like I can tell you, a bunch of examples come to my head when someone's like, I just closed this thing, and then I'm talking to them and they're off doing like a whole different thing. And I'm like, why did you not go do this thing that we just did for that one client?
[00:07:39] Ken: Like you should go to the well on that. Again, and again and again, and I'm gonna get more tactical, but just to say it like this way, I have a lot of wells that I've basically gotten to be empty to the point that they're dry. And then I will stay in that one well until it's no longer pro producing for me.
[00:07:58] Ken: So the idea of that also is [00:08:00] that maybe just a little bit of a discipline to say like, we're gonna keep doing that thing over and over again until we actually. Don't get results, but that's part of what the beauty of a system is, is it shows you what's working and what's not working. So going from the offer standpoint, right?
[00:08:14] Ken: A lot of people think about offers and they say offers are about sales. They think about it only in the sales conversation. But actually what the offer is, is we first look at who is the person that we're trying to target. How do we attract those people to the offer? The offer actually is the bait. I'm big on metaphors.
[00:08:32] Ken: I think they reinforce the way that people understand things. So a lot of people will say a social hook, but they don't have the right bait on that hook to pull someone into a social post as an example. So in this system that we're talking about here, the scalable service offers, we're gonna look at our laser targeting, which is like a much more precise way of targeting.
[00:08:53] Ken: We're gonna define a. Way of thinking about that client. I call it a lighthouse client. Simple way to describe it for today. 'cause we can't get [00:09:00] into all of it, is replicating your best client of all time. Then we need to think about our differentiated positioning. What is the Blue Ocean Service? I'm a big fan of Blue Ocean Strategy, right.
[00:09:09] Ken: Developed if we're service providers and then we finally can get into thinking about our offer, which is our offer portfolio, to expand the surface area to get a yes. And then we have a way to close that. And you're like, oh my gosh, dude, you're going way too fast. We're just getting into the conversation.
[00:09:26] Ken: But do you see why that's a system? Because first of all, it's right there in my brain. I literally could walk someone through this right now and help them to find some of how to go do this today, and it's going to show you what is or is not working. For example, let's say we're working together and then all of a sudden you're, you got people into the process of actually trying to close and we couldn't close.
[00:09:48] Ken: We don't have to go all the way back to the part of trying to track them into the, the funnel. We have to go to the part where it's not working. And a lot of people don't think about it in that kind of discipline way. They'll just like, they'll change their hooks, they'll [00:10:00] change their marketing, they'll change who they're targeting when they actually don't go precisely to the part of the system that actually is broken.
[00:10:06] Ken: So that's just one example. But notice that it gives us visibility into what is or is not working. And at some point we have a signal. To say we should no longer be doing that thing, or we have to come at it at a different angle, or we have to change our positioning. And again, the system helps show us that.
[00:10:22] Danny: Beautiful. So let's go back to these Blue Ocean services here for a minute. Every market I feel like is saturated these days, especially with like how many people are trying to be. Solopreneurs or trying to be coaches and consultants and, and even like small agencies and things like that. Right. How are you looking at it and how are you advising people who have a service that many people are, are competing for the same exact clients that promise, similar results, that have a similar service.
[00:10:53] Danny: Like how are you helping them differentiate in the market?
[00:10:55] Ken: Couple of stats too, to back up what you're saying and obviously. People [00:11:00] can watch this from around the world, but just the US stats or something like by 2027 and definitely by, you know, 20, 30, more than half of the workers in the US are gonna be people who are not getting a W2.
[00:11:13] Ken: They're not gonna be on payroll. And you know, there's probably some gig workers in there. But really thinking about it from the knowledge workers specifically, right? People are disillusioned with working the nine to five. They go back and get a job, they get fired again. There's now people that are trying to replace Cubans with AI saying we could just go cut costs.
[00:11:32] Ken: Some startups are even saying Duolingo and a bunch of them that are like, we're not hiring anymore. We're trying to actually just have every person duplicated by having an agent or AI or whatever. It's, so I definitely wanna just wanna back it up besides like our anecdotal evidence,
[00:11:47] Danny: right.
[00:11:49] Ken: I have worked with.
[00:11:51] Ken: Probably, I don't wanna say it's exactly this, but like let's say it's been dozens and dozens of ghost writers. I've worked with a lot of people who are marketers. I've worked with a lot of [00:12:00] people who are on video and I can tell you having worked with almost, and including all the top ones, we won't name drop I I want my episode to stand on its own terms, right?
[00:12:10] Ken: But be people can go look, and I've worked with all the top names. I can tell you. Having worked with all those people, including people like yourself. And that there actually really is a distinct lane for each one of them that we focus on their social proofing as well and their unique backgrounds, and which is not easy for that person to find out.
[00:12:33] Ken: That's part of why they actually like to go work with someone like me. 'cause they have the curse of knowledge. They can't see the patterns, right? They can't see why they actually are different. I kind of describe it this way. Sometimes Coach d I'll be the mirror that shows you the parts of the room that you can't see.
[00:12:50] Ken: When we talk about Blue Ocean Services, and I give credit to the Blue Ocean strategy, but again, I look at it from the angle of, you know, they did some really cool case studies on, you know, wine [00:13:00] brands, uh, you know, uh, south Southwest Airlines and all these kind of different things, and how they arrived at their Blue Ocean Services or their Blue Ocean strategy for our market, which is different than that, we're not at a global scale.
[00:13:14] Ken: I think the social proofing aspect and your place that you came out of is the best way to get into that lane. And if you could do this, I want everyone to listen to this part, and I know we're going around a little bit, but it's, it's a big thing. It is almost the thing, right? It's almost the thing that actually is gonna help people be successful.
[00:13:34] Ken: Can you sell to your former self? Can you sell to the former Coach D? In my case, I absolutely am because I scaled my agency to, you know, $5 million a year. Then was part of a global agency that was way bigger than that. Went through an exit process and that gives me knowledge into who I'm selling to more than anything that chat GBT can ever tell me.
[00:13:58] Ken: More than perplexity, more [00:14:00] than talking to a bunch of people, because I've just done it for 15 years and I've also always worked with entrepreneurs. So the Blue Ocean Service is not just who are your competitors, it is who are the alternatives, and then you start to map out what are called the factors of competition.
[00:14:15] Ken: It gets really geeky. So I'll stop here to figure out what is the part that is super competitive, like saying, I'm gonna go right. More posts or even saying, I'm gonna get you leads to, well, here's specifically what we really want to do with that person. And they actually don't really care about leads because they already have a bunch of leads.
[00:14:32] Ken: It's actually about transparently their ego. They want to go viral or they want to have more visibility, or they want their buddies from the golf club to say like, oh, I saw your post on LinkedIn. Those are the things that you can't get by just focusing on more, better, faster.
[00:14:49] Danny: Okay. All right.
[00:14:50] Ken: I don't have any thoughts to share on that though.
[00:14:52] Danny: No. You, you know, obviously with, with like the speed of everything of like [00:15:00] business changing with AI and all this stuff, what is something that you've changed your mind about in the last. One to two years as far as like, you know, something that you used to find was effective, that doesn't really work anymore.
[00:15:15] Danny: Yeah.
[00:15:15] Ken: I will tell you this, it's a little bit scary how much is not being effective and how fast it's not being effective. You probably are seeing the same thing in your business, but I just to give you a little example, I've been talking about for the last couple years this idea of being a 2030 company and the idea was like, can you survive to be a 2030 company?
[00:15:35] Ken: What are the things that you need in your business to actually make it to them? Because I've been doing this thing for a long time and I've seen literally the internet start, right? Like people used to have to code to put something on the internet and upload it via an FTP server, and then this thing called Blogger came out and you could just press a button in your words magically appear on the internet.
[00:15:56] Ken: So I've lived through that apps, so on and so forth, [00:16:00] and the the speed at which this is coming. Is actually kind of like scary to me. Not to the point that like I'm shaking in the corner, but I am, I think the 2030 company might al almost be like a thing I can't talk about because it's really like, are you a 2026 or are you a 2027 company?
[00:16:19] Ken: So I've been talking a little bit about this through the lens of especially like marketing and that marketing, just marketing itself anymore doesn't work alone. It works very. Effectively, if you have a very large audience and maybe you have a volume play, but if you are someone who's trying to sell like a five or six figure thing, just having marketing alone isn't gonna get you the kind of leads that you want anymore.
[00:16:44] Ken: You actually have to have a go to market motion with that marketing. And I'm not saying don't like stop marketing, but don't expect that the post on social or the video or. The blog, you know, the blog or any of these [00:17:00] channels are gonna just get people to come over to you and say, Hey, I wanna pay you some money.
[00:17:04] Ken: Like that was a great glory days that we've lived through, especially if you're someone on LinkedIn, which I know a lot of your audiences a couple years ago. I would post something and get 500 to a thousand reactions, right? Like today, I'm getting less visibility than when I had 2000 connections and I have 31,000 followers.
[00:17:24] Ken: So I think the, the thing that I'm changing specifically is I no longer think about LinkedIn content or anything like that as the way I'm gonna get clients. I have to use that as sort of what I call the net. It's out there. Maybe it's getting someone that's interested, but a lot of the fish are just flowing past the net or there's holes in the net because of these other macro factors.
[00:17:47] Ken: And largely speaking, it's gonna be because you have a go-to-market play, like being in the dms or having other things. Support that, like having an email newsletter that does a sales CTA or that is just a sales newsletter or [00:18:00] transparently, that little newsletter is actually just showing you who's more engaged and then you're directly hitting up the people that are engaged there versus even trying to do a broadcast.
[00:18:08] Ken: 'cause I used to be able to do a send and say, would you like to learn about this thing? And I'd have a hundred people replying back and no one does that anymore. It just, it's just gone. I covered a lot there, so I'll let you, you know, go into something deeper if you want to.
[00:18:21] Danny: We're talking about social platforms.
[00:18:23] Danny: Are you saying like. You don't look at the social platform or the content on the social platform as your means to generate leads anymore, then what are you looking at the content to do? What is the purpose behind the content that you are putting out on LinkedIn or wherever other social channel that you're out there on?
[00:18:44] Ken: Yeah, and, and I've always talked about this through the lens of social content should be distribution versus conversion. So I still think there's an element. It's not like I just started talking about that concept. I just think in the past that we would actually get some [00:19:00] lead interest or some more generation of people into leads because we were getting the visibility, we were getting the distribution, that LinkedIn was rewarding people and honestly, we help build the platform that they then are.
[00:19:14] Ken: Monetizing, right? Like you and I were people and a whole bunch of, bunch of others were basically building their platform to, to help them. Now every single post has a boost post, so to some extent it still is an element of like just having some amount of visibility. So if someone Google searches your name, your LinkedIn profile is gonna probably show up pretty high.
[00:19:34] Ken: And if the last time you posted was three months ago, like people are gonna think that no one's home, right? People are gonna think that you're not. Out in doing business. So it's still up about some of the same things. It's still about thought leadership. It's still about establishing credibility. But I think about everything that I create as a thing that I can reuse within a sales motion as well, within a go to market motion as well.
[00:19:58] Ken: And so if I do a post, like I did a [00:20:00] post today, that is really not even on brand for me necessarily. And it's actually a post about the changes of social selling. I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna use that mostly through dms and emails. I might even do something where someone who I have talked to an email like, Hey, yeah, if you are someone who's on LinkedIn, like you have to pay attention to the new way, what I call the five new rules of social selling.
[00:20:24] Ken: So I might create something that I know that's not gonna like go viral or do something like that, but I'm creating it with an intention to use it within my larger, what I call my pipeline pushing system, right? So a lot of those things have an intention beyond. They're gonna die in the feed in the next two hours effectively.
[00:20:41] Ken: So how can I use that for the next three months? How can I create something that is gonna be an asset that I can go back to? I literally have hundreds of posts that I've tagged and I have little short URLs. Like you can go to Kym sh slash 103 K and that shows how I closed $103,000 in seven days. [00:21:00] No ice baths included, right?
[00:21:01] Ken: But I'm, I then can use that to social proof further while I'm having all these other conversations.
[00:21:06] Danny: If social content. Is not a lead generation channel, it's more of a distribution channel, like you're saying. Then you need lead generation channels, and one of the things that you brought to the table, or that you've kind of flipped on its head is lead magnets.
[00:21:24] Danny: You created something that instead of, instead of a lead magnet, you call it an offer magnet, which is that trade you, you need to trademark that. I feel like you need, I have so
[00:21:33] Ken: many things, man. I couldn't trademark all of 'em, but yeah, I think you need a
[00:21:35] Danny: tm, like offer magnets or whatever, right? Because it's, it's your thing.
[00:21:39] Danny: But anyway, so talk about the difference between like a lead magnet and why a lead magnet is one thing and an offer magnet is way more effective.
[00:21:50] Ken: And I think this is kind of goes into what we're talking about a minute ago. The idea being that lead magnets in general are where emails go to die. I kind of [00:22:00] lead with that every time I talk about a lead magnet.
[00:22:02] Ken: Most people go to build a lead magnet. It's not something that comes out of the current existing work where someone has told you that thing that you do is really valuable. And as a result of that, they don't get people into a queue who are actually gonna then convey into part of the business, into one of your offers.
[00:22:20] Ken: So the idea of the offer magnet is take something. Clients have already told you that's hyper validated and tie it specifically with an intention to generate revenue more quickly because it might be something that you do early on in the process. Right. When people come and join and work with me, one of the first things that we do is actually work on our offers because the offers are the link between marketing, sales, and client delivery.
[00:22:43] Ken: So I can take a portion of that, expose that publicly. People because they already have said, oh my gosh, I just had three new clients join last week. And they're like, I can't. My brain's exploding just on this one thing that we're doing. That's great. Right? So I know that that's validated. I can take [00:23:00] that out to the market and then use that to start generating sales conversations.
[00:23:04] Ken: But you have to have a process in place. Going back to systems, and I did this manually by the way, someone would buy an offer magnet and I would manually follow up and say, Hey, coach D, what is it that you're trying to do with this thing? Or what you know, what are you trying to solve right now? People that buy from you, even in a a $29 thing, it's not a course, right?
[00:23:23] Ken: Courses today really don't work as well, but something that they've spent a dollar on or invested their time into, they're gonna have a conversation with you. And I generated hundreds of thousands of dollars because that was a conversation opener, which I then later automated. So the idea of the offer magnet is to start those sales conversations more quickly.
[00:23:42] Ken: Today. I'll just end on this. These viral lead magnets are. Prolific, like I just wrote about this as well. Like every other post is a viral lead magnet. You comment for something and they just basically attract information, hoarders competitors, non-buyers, and you could obviously sort through [00:24:00] all those things to find the nugget.
[00:24:02] Ken: Why not just actually focus on building something and only giving it to people that really are what I call the White House clients and then having a much more. Valid conversation that's gonna lead to sales more quickly.
[00:24:13] Danny: Yeah, that, that's true. It is like, it's amazing how many posts you go see and it's like, comment the word this and comment the word this and comment the word this.
[00:24:21] Ken: Yeah. I did that years ago. Which is funny 'cause it was like, and you know, all things old become new again. But the way that they're doing it today is, is really I think indicative of like, I didn't mean to interrupt you by the way, but I just like it's indicative of the. Place of where people are trying to understand, like a lot of it is related to ai, right?
[00:24:39] Ken: A lot of it's related to these elaborate systems. Like, oh, I build an agent that replaces 2017 members and they show, uh, like all the employees being essentially AI agents. People are interested in it, but they're also not gonna act on that information because they have zero barrier to entry essentially.
[00:24:58] Ken: There's no commitment or [00:25:00] friction other than here's free information.
[00:25:02] Danny: You know, again, you've worked with. 500 plus solopreneurs or whatever. Again, helping them build and grow. What is something that, like your best clients or the best solopreneurs understand that most people don't?
[00:25:17] Ken: Yeah, and you know, I think the, you know, if we actually counted a number of entrepreneurs who would be even higher than that, but like that's who I've worked with in the last number of years, right?
[00:25:25] Ken: Like specifically as service-based businesses and. I, I would say it this way, maybe I'm gonna answer it slightly differently and you tell me if you want me to go a different way. It's less about understanding and it's more about people who understand that execution is better than perfection. I wanna say that again.
[00:25:45] Ken: Like execution is better than perfection. You were an example and you know, I think it's pretty transparent that, you know, I've worked with you and we've worked together for a while. Yeah, totally. I've also worked with you as well, like you've helped me on some video stuff. You're a perfect example. When I [00:26:00] talk about a lighthouse client of someone who I don't have to come over and I'm gonna like, use this visual.
[00:26:04] Ken: I know that people will listen to this as well, but it's like, let's take the mama bird and like feed the little baby out of the mouth and like spoon feed, right? Like making it so, so, uh, I'm making it vivid here because you didn't need that, right? It's much more about I see what someone like Ken is doing.
[00:26:25] Ken: He has given me a framework, a system, a playbook, but you just can observe what I actually did and implement and execute on that. And you're not gonna like ask for permission on how to go do any of those things. The people that come in and I have worked really hard because I have so much material and get just overloaded by that and they just go into like doing nothing for months.
[00:26:48] Ken: I keep ping them. I'm like, Hey, like you're working on doing content. You're working on your website, you're working on all these things that are not gonna move the needle in the business. Or you've actually built a decent sized audience on [00:27:00] social or email newsletter, but you're not selling anything.
[00:27:03] Ken: You're just showing up as a buddy execution and being okay to say that like you've provided a lot of value. It's okay to sell. It's not salesy to say. I've provided all this stuff and I'm here to do business. So I think the biggest thing, man, is like actually just going to work. I tell people if you come in, you can literally get results.
[00:27:22] Ken: I had some very large names. Again, they're all on my social, uh, profile that weren't doing well. No, people didn't even know who they were, and we did. The work and within five days they closed four deals, or they went out and closed a 320 k deal because they just went out and did the work. Versus worrying about it being overly perfect.
[00:27:41] Danny: Going back to when you, when, when you were working in your agency and you were building apps and you still had a, a big team that, that you were running, right? So, you know, you worked with some big companies like I know, like Toyota and Levi's, like stick out in my mind as like ones that you've mentioned before, right?
[00:27:55] Danny: What is something that. You learned from working [00:28:00] with that, those type of companies that you pass down to the solopreneurs that you're working with right now to help them close more?
[00:28:11] Ken: Yeah, and I think this is like a big difference of, you know, I get compared to a lot of what I'll just call gurus or business coaches or influencers because I have a decent sized audience.
[00:28:21] Ken: I know how to talk on camera and all those things. The big difference is that I've actually sold 200,000, 500,000 a million dollar deals, and I've been in the room with the VPs of these Fortune 500 companies who are used to having everything their way. I, I won't say the names, but I've literally been in situations where I had someone say, well, we're so and so, so we automatically expect a 20% discount.
[00:28:48] Ken: Because they also think that they probably are already always being overcharged. And I'm like, that's fantastic for you, but I'm not a global enterprise brand. I'm a small business and if you wanna work with us and get the [00:29:00] results and the speed and the agility, this is not gonna, that's not gonna happen.
[00:29:04] Ken: So, you know, sorry. Or we've had to literally get approval up multiple levels to a CIO level. For them to work with us. 'cause they're like, yeah, we don't usually work with companies under 50 people. So part of what I try to explain through that process, obviously part of that is the differentiator that I can actually pull from those stories, right?
[00:29:23] Ken: And be able to say like, here's what it looks like to run a $5 million thing, or as part of a $20 million agency and so forth. But it's really understanding that there is not a one size fits none approach to selling. If someone is selling you something that is a thousand dollars or $2,000 and they've only sold those kinds of things, they can't teach you how to close a deal that's bigger than that.
[00:29:51] Ken: Or if they sold something else that was wildly different, it was a completely wildly different thing that doesn't translate. So what I really, uh, help them understand is what specific [00:30:00] client are you trying to sell to? Where are you right now? And I will show you the specific system and steps that are only applicable to you.
[00:30:08] Ken: Remember when you first started working with me. What you're doing then is very different than what you're doing now. What someone who actually has a team that supports them, not saying they have to like be employees, is very different than someone that actually is just an advisor. If someone is selling a five figure thing, then we don't have to worry about a complex sales process that is for six figures.
[00:30:29] Ken: And I have solopreneurs or solo consultants or advisors who are legitimately doing six figure deals and they're closing that kind of deal in a month, and that's like one of their big deals for the year. But they closed two or three of those and they're at a million dollars themselves. So that is the big thing of like helping people understand that even for me, I had those bigger clients and then I also had startups that moved a lot faster and they were just different sales approaches.
[00:30:55] Danny: What is something that you see right now [00:31:00] with like the clients that you're working with that is like super over-hyped and they look at it as like, this is something that's gonna work, but it's really more of a distraction and like I'm sure you get this from a lot of people, like including myself.
[00:31:15] Ken: I think unfortunately right now there's a lot of more shiny object syndrome than there has been in the past. And I used to deal with this relative to just tools because tools aren't new, right? Like I was an app guy, so there'd always be a new app, but especially in the B2B world for consultants, and they'll, they're seeing not just like ChatGPT and Claude, but they're seeing that new thing in their feed every single day that they have to have.
[00:31:38] Ken: So I'm really focused on making sure that. They aren't getting distracted by saying, oh, well I just worked with, you know, chat bt, or I just worked with this thing and I, and I come back to just the foundations of, what are you doing today that's solving a problem that you have right now in the business?
[00:31:58] Ken: I had someone recently, and [00:32:00] I kind of alluded to a few of these, but they're like, oh, I'm overhauling my backend systems. I was like, last time we spoke, you have no leads, like you don't have any leads. Why are we working on the backend system? And it's because they saw something that's like, well, if I go build a bunch of agents or I can automate the 27 steps that happens once someone's buying.
[00:32:18] Ken: I'm like, that is a phenomenal problem to go solve that you don't have the luxury of solving right now. You have. Three months of, of runway, or you have to pay bills or you have a kid going off to college. So I think right now it's really keeping people on point A away from that. Like I almost would rather say this man, and I understand that AI is great, like I use AI in ways that people don't use ai.
[00:32:42] Ken: We can get into that if you want, but you don't need to go run to AI to ask it about marketing and sales because here's what AI has never done, it's never actually sold anything. Not one time. It may be it will at some point, right? Like at some point it might actually do that. But as it stands as of this recording, [00:33:00] it is understanding marketing and sales from a purely academic standpoint.
[00:33:03] Ken: It's a brilliant child prodigy. But if you know, 'cause it's, we just recently celebrated a holiday right around people like us and you go ask that really smart child. And then all of a sudden it goes off in some other direction and like you made the mistake from step one, not like step 17, like you messed up on step one.
[00:33:23] Ken: And I have a little bit of an advantage here. I know I'm digressing a little bit from the question, but having led a lot of engineers, especially I see AI like has the engineer brain, which is I know how to solve any problem, but unfortunately they try to go solve that problem in a way that doesn't make sense because they're so smart.
[00:33:43] Ken: I'm like, you tried to go through this wall with a sledgehammer, but this other door is open. Like why didn't we step through that door? And that's the kind of conversation that I'm having often with chat GBT, and I'm like, why did you think about this, this way? And I want it to get smarter. So I actually try to educate it first, and then it's like, oh, that's on brand for [00:34:00] UKY.
[00:34:00] Ken: Like, I'm sorry. You're right. We shouldn't have done it this way. So I'm, I'm digressing from the conversation over the question.
[00:34:06] Danny: Okay. Well, all right. So you're digressing, but like you're going in a good direction here and like I am definitely interested to hear what you're doing with AI that nobody else is doing
[00:34:15] Ken: well, and I, and like it sounds, um, conceded for people that don't know me.
[00:34:20] Ken: Um, but also like there are some prompts that you can ask AI and you can say like, Hey, I want you to rate me. Um, based on the market, how I work with you, so on and so forth. And don't just tell me things I want to hear. And I am in the top 1% according to that because I'm actually building end-to-end systems and I'm troubleshooting ChatGPT and Claude.
[00:34:41] Ken: Um, so beyond some like things that people have probably read about and seen in their feed, but I have some of those things like I legitimately can take a transcript and have a perfect newsletter written out, like a perfect newsletter that needs a few changes. It took a lot of work to get there and it took iteration, but that's part of what people [00:35:00] don't do.
[00:35:00] Ken: Like I set up projects. Projects aren't unique to me, but I have a set of projects. Some of them are about writing app scripts for Google Sheets. Some of them are about business help. Some of them are about giving it project knowledge. Especially in Claude, you can load up project knowledge. So. I have a lot of things that I know I would have to have paid someone, and I know that you have paid people to do some of these things that legitimately sounds more like me.
[00:35:24] Ken: You probably don't even know that I've been using that. You probably just thought like, this sounds like, Hey, why? Because I've worked so long and hard that it's literally just me. So there's some things on that. That side. The end-to-end systems though, I'm getting to a spot where I have some of these apps, scripts, for example, simple things.
[00:35:42] Ken: Let's say you and I. We're connected on LinkedIn, but I have never sold to you before. I have. And let's say we have, and this happens, you know this 'cause we both have okay size audiences. There's 173 people of shared connections. That's a lot. Something that [00:36:00] immediately translate authority and credibility to you is what your actual people that were shared connections that were clients.
[00:36:06] Ken: I now have things that I've wrote with chat GBT Claude, that immediately can highlight my five customers. Out of the 127 shared connections, right. It's a tool that I built, like I haven't sold it or automated, it's just my tool, but it's another example that when I'm going through and I'm like, oh, this person looks interesting.
[00:36:27] Ken: I used to go through and manually look at like who are the people that I might wanna mention? And if they're a person like you, I'm gonna prioritize them over a person that was a past client, even though I have big names. 'cause I don't talk to them as often. Just a bunch of things like that in my back pocket, right?
[00:36:43] Ken: That it's essentially what I call the fleet of me. And at some point I could even get a va. I have a person that actually just helps me with some very, very basic things. More recently and like I'm talking about like super basic things, but they're really good and attentive to detail. And I'm like, Hey, could you just do this one thing for me?
[00:36:59] Ken: It's [00:37:00] a data thing. And they just go do it, right? But I could even give all that tooling to a person like that and have them go use that. And that's like basically having me in their back pocket. Without ever talking to me. So I do think that there is a place very soon that could take you, and I'm probably not gonna try to get there just based on where I am with my kids and so forth.
[00:37:17] Ken: We can talk about that, where there's someone that's running a five or $10 million thing with almost no people, right? Like. It's actually a bunch of copies of them and like some lightweight help.
[00:37:28] Danny: So if somebody wants to get to that point where they can have a five or $10 million thing without a giant team of people, we're gonna close right here.
[00:37:39] Danny: So if you had to leave them with one piece of advice to help them get there, what would you, what would it be?
[00:37:44] Ken: Despite all of what we just talked about, and I know we went in a few different places. I still would come back to just a very foundational element, which is that if you can get that lighthouse client that I call that separates [00:38:00] just from an ICP and get it so specific, it doesn't have to be vertical specific, right?
[00:38:04] Ken: Like I've worked on making it very horizontal. But I think when you get that. Client that's willing to pay you for expertise, pay you for advice, pay you for not doing more things. I believe that that is the foundation for getting to whatever number you need to get to. The reason why that I am very scalable right now is because I have scalability in my marketing.
[00:38:26] Ken: I have scalability in my sales, and I have scalability on my backend. The scalability that I have on my backend now is bigger than what I had before. I don't want to make a long answer here for you, but I would just say like. I have a whole training and system on this called Why a Lighthouse Client is key to scale and grow in your business.
[00:38:43] Ken: And that would be what I would just say. Like, I don't care about all that other stuff. It's noise if you don't nail this one thing.
[00:38:48] Danny: Love it. And, um, just tell people where they can find you can,
[00:38:52] Ken: yeah. I think the best place to go check out would be TRS Club slash Blueprint, because my name is a mouthful.
[00:38:58] Ken: I'm sure you'll link it up for, [00:39:00] for things, but that will give you the way to get. My philosophy here spelled out, like you can read through it. Um, you also can connect from that spot to social. Um, and I do have. Uh, a pretty big audience on LinkedIn and have an a YouTube following. And I do have a podcast.
[00:39:18] Ken: By the time this will go live, the podcast will be out there as well. So that's a newer thing, but that's what we're talking about, like finding the new channels, finding new ways to stay engaged with people. So yeah, appreciate the conversation man.
[00:39:28] Danny: Dude, always man. Appreciate you and uh, I will see you in the club.

The Million Dollar Solopreneur | Ep 14
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