Hey there,
A few months ago, I kicked off some offer offer work with a new client and asked, “What’s the biggest bottleneck you want your redesigned offers to solve?”
“Can I share my screen?” she asked.
And there it was, a calendar that had lunch and bathroom breaks built in. Otherwise, she might as well move in with each client.
Her revenue was good. Great, even - for a one-person business. But it was pinned at $650K. She had already sold every last hour of her available time.
Worse, because she consistently sold through via highly customized proposals, and equally bespoke delivery - hiring help was easier said than done.
Worst of all, some clients were profitable. Probably. But the rest were high maintenance - always demanding more and chipping away at her margins. It wasn’t atypical for them to ask for help with unrelated problems, “Ugh, can’t you just do it, Meliss? I trust you more than <insert team member name>.”
Her marketing was fine. The bottleneck was baked into her offers. Retainers with fancy names where she traded time for money.
When you sell time, you cap your ceiling and shrink your floor. You cannot stretch the gap between price and effort because the effort is glued to you. Worse, clients subconsciously learn to hire your presence instead of your systems.
Couple that with a high degree of customization in your marketing and sales, and you realize you’ve built a boutique that can’t scale without cloning yourself.
Dream businesses replaced by nightmares of hamster wheels.
Here's the shift most consultants miss:
You think clients want you.
They actually want the outcome you consistently deliver.
The custom proposals, bespoke delivery, and "I'll figure it out as we go" flexibility isn’t the differentiator you think it is. More like quicksand.
Because every time you say "yes" to customization, you're teaching clients they can't succeed without your personal involvement. You're building dependency instead of systems.
And here's what really stings...
The more successful you become at this model, the less valuable, scalable, and sellable your business becomes.
So we changed her offer stack. We codified the outcomes, named the constraints, and taught her tiny team of contractors to execute without her shadow over every deliverable.
We kept her visible on a new wedge offer that drew in her best-fit clients. And we kept her fingerprints on the strategy, but removed them from the (now) systematized onboarding and weekly status calls.
The promise got clearer. The delivery got smaller. The margins got bigger.
That's the game.
Here's exactly how we rebuilt it:
Defined the outcome clients buy
Fixed scope so work stops creeping
Codified a repeatable set of services
Packaged assets and templates
Assigned delivery to a capable team
Set rules for her involvement
Priced on known, predictable value (not hours)
Built a high-margin wedge offer that:
Funneled in ideal clients
Drove a new revenue stream
Converted signature sales
And now that that’s in place, we’re moving to stage two: Digitizing parts of delivery that she and her team have perfected, manually.
The goal for this time next year? 30% of her revenue coming from digital, on-demand revenue streams - giving her even more leverage in the 1:1 work she says ‘yes’ to.
📌 Note the common trap we avoided of digitizing too soon.
Your takeaways
If you're stuck at your revenue ceiling, it's not because you need better marketing or more leads.
It's because you've accidentally designed a business that requires you to stay stuck.
The solution isn't working harder. It's redesigning what you sell & how you deliver it.
Start with one offer. Make it repeatable. Remove yourself from 80% of the delivery.
Then watch what happens when clients buy your system instead of your time.
👉 So ask yourself: What's the first thing you'd systematize?
See ya next Sunday 🤘🏼
Jay Melone
P.S. If your pipeline feels like a place where your leads go to die, my friend Brian created a tool to help you surface real clients opportunities and get them un-stuck.
P.P.S. Want to build a productized wedge offer that pre-sells your premium work, diversifies revenue, and frees up your time? Request your free invite.
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