Hi!
I'm walking on cloud nine right now. 100+ people joined me LIVE yesterday for a free 5-hour intensive. Five freaking hours!! And I'm going to share a little bit of what we talked about.Â
Plus, huge update, I launched something new that I AM SO STINKING EXCITED ABOUT.Â
The Level Set:Â You are exceptional at the work. Decades of proof behind you. So why does selling it feel like guesswork? This week I am handing you a diagnosis.
You may have a business model problem presenting as a SALES problem.
From selling harder → fixing the model
Here is how it usually goes after you leave corporate. Tell me if this sound familiar. The referrals show up first. Your old network remembers you, the phone rings and the first year feels like proof of concept.
Then the wave thins out. You have a fantastic quarter because somebody refers a huge client. Then the project ends and suddenly you're staring at your pipeline.
Revenue starts to feel RANDOM. Feast, famine, repeat. The instinct is to blame your selling. Take a course, tweak the pitch, push harder on LinkedIn.
I am asking you to look one level up instead. Who is your ideal client? What problem are you uniquely equipped to solve? What do you want from the last third of your career? Maybe you answered all of that when you launched.
But leaving corporate was a pivot, and pivots have got this really annoying habit of putting all of your assumptions in business back into pencil. Answers you wrote in pen a year ago are guesses again today. So answer the questions again, out loud, on paper, current version of you. A predictable pipeline gets built on answers you have gone back and traced over in pen.
What This Looks Like in Real LifeThese are verbatim, from real people who have sat in a room with me this year:
- "I'm so tired of scrambling every time I lose a client. How am I gonna make more money?"
- "I have no idea what to charge my clients, and I still haven't replaced my corporate salary."
- "I've run through my network, have no more work, I am stressed out of my mind."
Scrambling. Guessing at pricing. A network that ran dry. Three flavors of the same thing: a business model problem presenting as a sales problem.
And fixing it means selling on purpose. Sales is actually matchmaking. And I will repeat this EVERYDAY.  Somebody has a problem, you have the solution, and you are looking eye-to-eye with a peer while you match the two up.
The matching gets harder when the product is YOU. Selling yourself is vulnerable as hell. When the nerves show up, because they will, remember: we ALL poop in toilets.
And the reps are the ONLY way through. You get good at this the same way you got good at everything else in your career: by doing it, in front of real buyers, over and over.
→ Your Next Move
Grab a pen. Answer this one in writing, in pencil if you must: what do you want from the last third of your career? Sit with your answer before your next sales call. Your ideal client, your offer and your model all hang off it.
Why This MattersThe money matters. BUT the money is the smaller half of it.
What I actually want for you is agency. Control over your business and your life. The ability to say no to the wrong clients and go after the work that lines up with your values. Who do you have to become? That is the question sitting underneath every pivot.
Work it out in real timeIf you want company while you answer it, that is exactly what the LevelUp Sales Incubator is for. We are not gonna sit around and pontificate for six months.
You are spending six months running your business, with me and a group of vetted peers in similar situations beside you. Real-time feedback from prospective buyers, while you run the thing. There is no reason to climb this one alone.
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