Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: Offers are the lifeblood of your business. They aren't about happy meal deals, guarantees, courses that are gonna make you millions, low ticket or even high ticket. In fact, a lot of those ideas and terms are associated with people in the market. That have
[00:00:21] Ken: never actually sold six and seven figure consulting deals. They've never actually done a pitch in a room with a bunch of VPs. They've never done complex sales. So if you make the mistakes with offers around that kind of thinking. And the kind of mistakes that I've seen hundreds make that we'll dive into in this conversation.
[00:00:45] Ken: I promise you that you are leaving big money on the table,
[00:00:50] Ken: but it is because of the backdrop that many consultants, founders, and coaches have. Listening to people that have talked about offers who have [00:01:00] had very different businesses and have created the terminology. I mentioned that they don't take the word offers as seriously as they should. They're kind of biased.
[00:01:10] Ken: There's a negative connotation with some of it, because like them, you may have the wrong framing, you may have just gotten the wrong idea about what offers are. And you've approached building and iterating on them, or maybe really haven't approached building or iterating on them because of all of that bunk information.
[00:01:33] Ken: My experience and why I care about offers is really just from decades of building, consulting, and professional service offers.
[00:01:42] Ken: Even when I sold multi hundred thousand dollars deals, I used the concept of offers in there without having read a book about it. It just really came from experience, but I would get prospects to say yes or no relatively quickly without the complexity of [00:02:00] super custom proposals or boring my prospects to tears with long backstories.
[00:02:06] Ken: About my childhood and why my business was so great.
[00:02:09] Ken: My view of offers is also very much informed by my actual discipline as a technologist, and specifically being a product mind when the term product manager really didn't exist or wasn't really valued in the market.
[00:02:25] Ken: And I've mentioned how I focused on apps for the last part of my career, building the first apps that were ever on the app stores, and I did write a book published by O'Reilly. It was one of the last people to get an actual book deal. About how to bring apps that you have on your phone today successfully to the market.
[00:02:45] Ken: And I received 20 plus featured apps from Apple or Google. And the reason I mention that I'm not trying to fluff my feathers, it just very much informs how I think about bringing offers to the market. Because guess what? If you didn't [00:03:00] build your application the right way, you wasted a lot of time, money, and effort.
[00:03:05] Ken: We're talking about, in certain cases, millions of dollars. Because they're not easy to change. So my concept of building an offer is very much the same data-driven way because it also can cost you a good amount of money. It definitely would've cost me millions if I didn't build my offer to a certain way.
[00:03:24] Ken: I wouldn't have been able to scale a lot of other people who were building apps who didn't last very long. Or went after the wrong thing because they weren't listening to signals and ultimately didn't have an agency anymore. So being data-driven, informed by signals, feedback loops, and listening to the market,
[00:03:40] Ken: I like to describe it as test, fail, iterate, fail, win, and then rinsing and repeating on that. So unlike a lot of others out there that talk about offers, they either have never actually sold big offers like yours. They've never actually ran consulting agencies that scale to millions a year, or they think about them [00:04:00] as static one-time things.
[00:04:02] Ken: And a lot of that other group that I mentioned also are just doing a lot of psychology and psychological tricks because guess what? Those work for people that are uneducated buyers who are spending under $10,000.
[00:04:15] Ken: And there also are others out there that are having a more sophisticated market. And some of these people I also highly respect, but I don't agree with all of them when it comes to things like overly complex and slow value-based pricing. Or having to develop custom proposals every single time. I had the most custom work you could do, but I still had a very buttoned up standardized sales process that allowed me to have scalability in marketing, sales, and client delivery.
[00:04:46] Ken: Even though it was highly custom app work where we weren't building cookie cutter things, it was highly unique. The process was basically like building a custom house.
[00:04:56] Ken: So from my decades of building offers that are much [00:05:00] more relevant to someone like you, wanna drive into the biggest mistakes that I've seen working with hundreds of people around offers, because when you make these mistakes, again, we're leaving significant amount of money on the table you're spending.
[00:05:15] Ken: Time, energy, and effort, possibly on the wrong things, or you're not getting resonance in today's market because you're trying to sell something that was effective years ago and you haven't changed that, and then you're wondering why you're either regressing or you're not getting new interest. So let's dive into, as usual, some tactical things that we can look at and avoid you from leaving this big money on the table.
[00:05:41] Ken: And the first place I want to start is not listening to signals or feedback loops for your existing offers. The most important part of this one is the fact that we are looking at the offers that we have, And you might say to yourself, Ken, I don't have offers. I have services. I sell projects. [00:06:00] I sell deliverables. The point is that you're not looking at what you're currently selling. Ideally, you will actually have offers because offers help you package your expertise in a way that makes it much more accessible
[00:06:12] Ken: And understandable in the market. But the point here generally is that a lot of people build once and never touch something again, which if you think about last week's conversation around the 2030 company, this is a big reason why people are gonna go to zero because the world is changing too fast to use, not just what you built three to five years ago, but arguably.
[00:06:37] Ken: Three to five months ago really depends on your industry in certain cases,
[00:06:40] Ken: but if you are struggling with having prospects get back to you or a consistent way to generate sales conversations and leads, this actually is more about your offer than you realize. A lot of people think about the offer as the thing that they sell, but it really comprises of [00:07:00] how you activate in the marketplace because you have a better understanding of who you're targeting, why they've actually purchased from you in the past, and you have this feedback loop when done properly to make changes and to see what.
[00:07:15] Ken: Prospects are really actually asking for as well as possibly even your existing client base. And the biggest problem with a lot of folks is that they are trying to do too many things. I don't really love the word niching down, and often that's related more to an industry, but in general, almost everyone does over deliver.
[00:07:35] Ken: And these signals that you're looking for.
[00:07:38] Ken: Sometimes they knock you over your head and it might actually be more obvious that you shouldn't be doing all those things. But other times you need that pattern matching and that is why obviously getting outside perspective is helpful because you have the curse of knowledge in your business.
[00:07:53] Ken: This is also why I've talked about, and we're kind of coming out of it now based on the time of the year, this idea of sprinting and resting, [00:08:00] to give yourself a minute to pull back and actually looked at what's transpired in your business and say, you know what? This thing is not hitting like it did in the past, or, here's why I lost the last five deals that came through, or.
[00:08:16] Ken: I feel like I'm drowning in delivery hell, because we're doing all the things. We are a marketing firm. We're a marketing agency. We're someone who is and software, and we're still doing a lot of things in this world of ai. And a good example of this, and I have lots of them, but one that just comes to my mind is actually a marketing agency founder that was.
[00:08:39] Ken: Surprisingly doing way more than I realized when I first took them on as a client, to the extent that they were helping do paid acquisition on multiple channels. They were even helping out with some newsletters. They were building some landing pages, and you might think to yourself, oh, that sounds amazing.
[00:08:55] Ken: It's a full service marketing agency that does all the things, And [00:09:00] really what's happening in that case is that you're opening yourself up to risk on a lot of things, a lot of places of failure, and it's not very easy to describe who you are and what you do to the market, which is why marketing is the activation of sales, which is why we have to get the clarity on the offer and listen to these signals so that we can push that back into the market.
[00:09:20] Ken: This is a point of reference. I was a software app agency, again, one of the first ones. And we did help big brands and we helped startups. And this actually worked really against us because we always had to try to address both in something like headline texts on our homepage. So when we have these signals and feedback loops that sometimes we just are resisting.
[00:09:42] Ken: And I think about a marketing agency owner that. I just mentioned a moment ago. And ultimately we went through the top 10 clients that came to this person's mind.
[00:09:52] Ken: And I have a process and an exercise to walk people through. And what we realized was that people really valued. Not all the [00:10:00] things, but the best results, the best clients, the ones that stuck around really didn't just value the paid acquisition, they valued it specifically on Google Ads. So we repositioned them from being the marketing consultant, marketing agency that did all the things to being a hyper specialized Google ads expert agency that got very specific outcomes and very specific transformations.
[00:10:25] Ken: And guess what? This also really helped with. Hinted at it helped with marketing, helped with getting more leads and more prospects that wanted that specific thing. But it also helped, in this particular case, they're more of a niche agency, not having to hire all the people.
[00:10:41] Ken: Because you have to hire someone who's an expert on meta. You have to hire an expert on someone that can do the newsletters or the landing pages, even if you have contractors. It's still something that requires a lot more work, and it doesn't have the scalability that we want to get in the business and the marketing sales and the client delivery.
[00:10:59] Ken: So [00:11:00] we have to be very attuned to signals that are coming in real time, but also go look for signals and pattern matching inside the business for these existing offers and have feedback loop. Because we think that clients value all the things. We continue to do all the things. There also can be this seasonal element or some macro conditions mentioned both more recently.
[00:11:27] Ken: But as we do come out of, at least at the time of this recording, more of the summer season, there may be people in. Your specific Lighthouse client demographic who needs something different during that time of the year versus the holiday versus the start of the year. For someone that's in a health wellness or health tech industry, you know that you can capture a lot of interest at the start of the year with New Year's resolutions and so forth.
[00:11:56] Ken: But if you have clients that largely [00:12:00] go. On summer break or based on where you are located, especially in Europe, they take much longer summer breaks than here in the us, which is where I am. Then you shouldn't be trying to launch a bunch of things or test new things in the summertime, but you might get a signal that someone says, yeah, we want to really work on this thing inside the business during the summer to be ready for buying season again, and we have to make these kinds of shifts.
[00:12:25] Ken: When it comes to signals and feedback loops for, again, the existing offers, or we might be the agency that keeps churning clients. We might be the consultant that is losing clients because we're being judged on a whole bunch of things, or we're actually just not adapting to the market conditions. And this ultimately can drive us to zero, especially as I talked about again in the 2030 company.
[00:12:51] Ken: So that is the side of the house for the existing offers. But when we get into this next bucket, it's really more about [00:13:00] launching new offers or testing different angles. And this can be informed by the first point. New offers, though they give us not just. But they do do that alone. And I don't want to undervalue that you get excited about this new thing 'cause you see that it's gonna help you deliver more efficiently.
[00:13:19] Ken: You're not gonna have to do all the things on the backend. And you also have some ideas of how you can market this and you're just like, it's a new shiny thing for you. It's okay, but it also gives us an excuse to go back to past leads and clients. And that is again, why the feedback loops are so key.
[00:13:37] Ken: Because if we were listening to someone saying, here's why I didn't go forward with you and you weren't willing to make a change, then you have an easy way to go back to someone. Because there's been a lot of times that people have told me no. And then testing and iterating, they became clients within that same month or weeks later. In fact, the main thing I do today almost [00:14:00] never existed because I tried to do it one way and with some changes it now is the main part of my business.
[00:14:06] Ken: And I'm being a little bit ambiguous 'cause I don't want to go into the weeds on this one. Uh, but I will give you some more tactical examples here. And when we think about something like. Episode eight, where it was about stop waiting for growth. This iterative testing approach was really important. The bait essentially was your scalable offer, and if you try something for four weeks, for six weeks, for eight weeks, and you're just not getting bites, the idea was it's time to move on, but you don't give yourself to even have the chance for that feedback loop if you're not launching.
[00:14:38] Ken: Something new. And here's the really important part of this, I'm not asking you to launch something new every single day. People that have offers and they talk about offers, they'll talk about like launching things all the time. Sometimes people will actually even say like, launch a new offer every day.
[00:14:54] Ken: And that is just energy draining and it doesn't really work for our market either for these kinds of deals and the kinds of buyers that we [00:15:00] work with.
[00:15:00] Ken: But it is a disciplined approach to trying new angles. And the unconventional part of this is that often you might be selling the same exact thing. It just comes at it from a slightly different perspective. For a long time, I helped people and it was known exclusively for. Scalable service offers, and then at some point I talked about it as fixing your offer.
[00:15:22] Ken: It's effectively a lot of the same thing. It is coming at it from a different angle, and if I didn't do that, I wouldn't have gotten a lot of the clients that I got, especially when the market started to say, we don't want offers or offer help. The way that I was describing it at that point anymore. So the new offers may just be different angles.
[00:15:43] Ken: They can be new at some point. Again, I moved from just talking about offers to realizing that I was better at sales than a lot of the quote unquote sales coaches and consultants out there, and sold a lot more for our kinds of deals. So I began to offer something around that, and it's a big [00:16:00] part of my business today, but I previously didn't touch that.
[00:16:02] Ken: Three years ago, an experiment that I did run turned out to be my biggest revenue driver in 20 23, 20 24, and the first half of 2025. And what was happening in that situation was that I was hitting a part of the market. That really couldn't afford me to be a fractional COO, which is something I still did at the time.
[00:16:24] Ken: I was an early person doing that. Now everyone in the world thinks they're a fractional, but I also saw them being ahead of someone who maybe wasn't yet at $200,000 for example. And so I built a new thing that I called UN coaching. At that point, I was actually trying to position around being the uncoach, and that didn't work very well.
[00:16:44] Ken: And that's again, from testing and data signals and feedback loops. But as an offer, it became very interesting to a lot of people who were kind of in that range. And then, like I said, that went on to be a huge part of my business. And if I look at the [00:17:00] top line, revenue was most likely the top driver across those years, as I mentioned.
[00:17:05] Ken: Another example that comes to my mind is a brilliant product leader that I have in my client base. She's been building and adapting in a world that is really changing daily, and she's embraced the idea that. We need to sprint on offers, launch new offers. Because of her product background, she also has the same philosophy around data and talking with potential users.
[00:17:33] Ken: We'll call 'em users and that vernacular because that's what we would talk about as product people, but talking with potential prospects, peers, and through this process, she's really found her voice. Lots of conversations not building in a vacuum, and as any great product leader does now is sharing this information from the front lines as she puts it from the messy.
[00:17:58] Ken: Brilliant world of product, [00:18:00] leadership and ai.
[00:18:01] Ken: And this also goes back to the 2030 company in this age of authority because instead of filling up her legal pads, she's been building in public investing heavily into LinkedIn. Just like me, there are posts that get more resonances and ones that don't, especially in the current fluctuation. but she is building that authority brick by brick day by day and now also recently has some long form content on Substack, which obviously has become very popular and it's less that she's not looking to do product consulting work. And more, it's about the angle of how she's framing that and what resonates with what we call the lighthouse client and what they need today.
[00:18:41] Ken: So she could have just kept talking about how she had the experience and being a product leader, but she's finding excitement, she's finding energy, and she's really feeling like she's finding her voice because of being out there trying to launch new offers, have conversations, and test these different angles.
[00:18:59] Ken: [00:19:00] And then for this next one, I want you to do this a lot more. Please listen up on this, go back to the well, and keep going back to the well until it's dry. Keep selling what works. Until you have signals that it doesn't. So not selling more of an early validated offer or bringing it back to past clients, and I alluded to that earlier, is a big reason why you get stuck in what I call the hundred K trap in episode five.
[00:19:32] Ken: It's not about having to find new revenue capabilities or new lines of revenue necessarily. It could be, but it might just be that if you sold this thing two to five times or three to five times, you should go sell 50 of those and then sell a hundred of them and understand that so many of you get fatigued on what you're selling.
[00:19:55] Ken: Maybe you jump to something else or you don't really think about it as a system. You don't have [00:20:00] that system's brain, but when you have validation on a new offer. And again, I only care about validation as actual closed revenue. You can be someone that jumps from thing to thing to thing, and all of a sudden you have five clients that are needing five different ways to have delivery.
[00:20:16] Ken: Or you could be like some of my peers who legitimately in the last three years while I have continued to focus on this thing and built a very profitable high growth business. They have three or five or seven different kinds of businesses and they jump from thing to thing to thing, and it's a little bit opportunistic, frankly, because they aren't exercising discipline on themselves, and now they have to really run three or four or five different kinds of businesses.
[00:20:44] Ken: Without a large team behind that, it's very hard to do.
[00:20:47] Ken: So many of you, many entrepreneurs get bored. And then you get trapped in your head and you think that you have to sell something new. And I obviously am suggesting to sell something new, but something new [00:21:00] that's related to the current business, not completely in a different industry. But on that note, a lot of folks will think that when you have the new thing, you have to go to cold audiences that don't know you.
[00:21:11] Ken: But the best place to go to is that when you have that scalability across your marketing, sales, and client delivery, and you can go back to a lot of folks that have said no in the past or that are even past clients, and this is why you will wind up getting a lot of quote unquote bonus deals because. If you actually did the first two pieces and you changed the problems and the mistakes I pointed out there, you now have built possibly a new offer from feedback loops, from signals, and you can actually go back to people that actually told you they wanted that thing in the past, but you resisted for any number of reasons.
[00:21:47] Ken: But remember, as we talked about in episode five, we are not trying to. Have a hyper customized thing just for one prospect, but rather having that clear link across marketing, sales, and client [00:22:00] delivery. So you can sell that thing a bunch of times without having to also increase capacity because you have more people to do that work.
[00:22:08] Ken: That's the hungry dragon of more people, more clients, and so forth. So we're gonna want to use what I call the repeatable closing system. And if you don't have that, use your calendar. Go look at calls that you had. Maybe someone ghosted you or the timing wasn't aligned, but as long as they didn't say I hate you, and it didn't end in a negative way, You have a bunch of people that are willing to hear from you, that know you, that know more about your process, your philosophy, that maybe even liked you. But they just don't know this. They don't know that you have something new. They don't know that you have a different angle or a different way to help them.
[00:22:44] Ken: Again, maybe we think about the first bucket and you're now more of an expert in one thing, versus being someone that does 12 or 15 different things for your clients.
[00:22:56] Ken: And I was speaking with someone yesterday. You know, they said something that [00:23:00] stood out to me. I don't wanna sell to my network. Right? I don't, I'm not someone that takes advantage of my network that way. And I just want to sort of say this it's never about selling to your network. It's about providing value to your network.
[00:23:14] Ken: It's a huge mentality shift in unlock to think that you're bothering someone to saying. I know that people in my network need help with this, and obviously it is about how you phrase it and it is about how you do outreach, but it's about helping people in your network past prospects that don't understand or know that you have a different way to solve their problem, something that may be more aligned with them.
[00:23:39] Ken: And that because of that, you are leaving that big money on the table.
[00:23:44] Ken: I was having a conversation with a client this week related to turning down a lot of prospects that they could have actually helped with, and there sometimes is a little bit of imposter syndrome on this, on offering a different kind of service or adding on. Something [00:24:00] that you haven't done before, but transparently, when I sold my 15 to 20 KA month fractional retainers, I had never been a fractional COO for someone before, oh my gosh.
[00:24:10] Ken: I can't believe you sold that. You kind of took one over on those people. No, I knew that. I had the background. I actually used myself as a proof of work and I showed my systems and my process, and especially on the operational delivery side to. Demonstrate that I could do that thing for them. So don't have imposter syndrome.
[00:24:32] Ken: Don't doubt yourself. It doesn't matter if you've sold that before or sold it to a certain segment. Sometimes when you have social proof or something even more significant, like a lot of times I was much more significant in terms of revenue level than some of these prospects I was speaking to. So I knew, again that I could deal with something less complex.
[00:24:50] Ken: And in this case, withit was a clear signal that they just didn't, for whatever reason, feel like they could pursue. And then as we're having this conversation, all of a sudden a [00:25:00] bunch of prospects came to their mind, were like, oh man, this person would've wanted this thing.
[00:25:05] Ken: This other individual that I just spoke to recently, I was actually just sending this work to referral partners. Because they didn't have the confidence. They didn't listen to the signal and there wasn't a new offer that was launched yet. But now they are saying, you know what? This actually could become the brand new offer that has different components that hits different people on their buying journey.
[00:25:27] Ken: And they have a way to quickly get resonance and validation. They have a short list of people they can reach out to. And this is what I say, can sometimes jolt your conveyor belt of clients, which is what I want every single person listening to this to have that optionality that I've talked about, because you can't grow without hiring, without this optionality and the ability to generate sales and leads and have sales conversations on demand versus them falling into your lap.
[00:25:56] Ken: so you've heard about the misconceptions that a lot of [00:26:00] folks out there talking about offers have never sold deals like you have sold. They. Are dealing with less sophisticated buyers. They've never actually had consulting deals or agency deals that have been in the six or seven figure range.
[00:26:13] Ken: I'm not saying there aren't any people out there that have done that, but a lot of them have not done that. We're learning about some of the terminology that they use that should hopefully make you understand why you should not listen to the approaches that they might mention on offers. And then understanding that this is a data-driven.
[00:26:32] Ken: Not one and done kind of thing, but rather listening to signals, having feedback loops for your existing offers. Make sure that we are launching offers consistently. That's why I run offer sprints for my clients on a regular basis. We do it at least quarterly. Really, that also when we do the launching of those new offers, it could be revamped or different angles.
[00:26:54] Ken: And then not getting bored with selling that thing. We're not selling it once or twice [00:27:00] because that is the a hundred K trap. You have to go to the well and sell that thing again and again until it's not working. And then we rinse and repeat. We test, iterate, fail. We do it again. And that is the full feedback loop to help us continue to bring new offers to the market.
[00:27:17] Ken: Because as I said at the top of this, the offer is the lifeblood of. Your business.
[00:27:22] Ken: So that'll be where we end it today. If you got something tactical today, if you got one nugget, really appreciate a rating or review still early on in this journey, and I promise you that there'll be much more to come. In some ways, what I'm doing today is the worst version that you're ever gonna get of this podcast.
[00:27:41] Ken: And I'm committed to it for the long term. So I'm doing what I actually talked about here today. I'm getting feedback loops and cycles, so if there's something that you felt was unclear or there's something that you want to go deeper on, highly recommend you connecting with me in the show notes. The best place on social is LinkedIn, and you can send me a DM there.
[00:27:59] Ken: [00:28:00] Also, let me know that you're listening to the podcast or you could jump on my weekly briefing, which also gives you a few ways to get in touch with me, and that also comes with my. Blueprint on how to do things like offers and grow without hiring beyond that. Always appreciate you taking a couple minutes with me to have these conversations.
[00:28:16] Ken: I love them. I work hard on them, and I look forward to helping you grow without hiring.