Source: Alex Hormozi — Why you aren’t making as much money as you want (published 2026-02-23)
You aren’t making what you want because you’re selling to people who don’t have the money to give you. Go where the money is. “Sell to the rich, they pay better” isn’t pithy — it’s how wealth is actually distributed, and it has direct implications for pricing.
The Wealth Distribution (US, ~100 across 100 people)
- Bottom 50% hold ~$2.50 total.
- Next 40% hold ~$28.
- Next 9% hold ~$38.
- Top 1% — one person — holds ~$32, more than the bottom 90% combined.
Income is also skewed (top 10% earn 40% of income), but wealth is far more extreme. Most people compete against every other small business to slice the bottom $2 a hundred ways. If you want money, go where the money is.
Pareto, Stacked (the power law inside a business)
80/20 compounds: 20% of customers → 80% of profit; within that, 4% of customers → 64% of aggregate profit; and the top 1% → 51% of profit. A single high-end customer rarely costs much more to serve than the other 99 — more work, but far more profitable — only if your business model lets them pay more.
“The only thing worse than offering a 100 budget is offering a 1,000 budget.” (Lose 900.) Expect 99/100 to say no to premium offers — but Captain Ahab the whale when it appears.
Build Top-Down (Tesla)
Roadster ($250k, limited) → Model S → Model 3/Y. Anchoring high makes the cheaper line a favor to the customer (brand narrative works downward, not upward — a budget brand launching a luxury car “doesn’t hit the same”). Operationally, you also can’t handle mass volume on day one. There is money at the bottom — but only at razor-thin margins with extraordinary volume, which needs huge capital (Netflix/Spotify/Tesla were propped up by outside capital for years).
The Pricing Ladder — 5–10× per tier, expect ~20% to take it
Rule of thumb: each new tier is 5–10× the previous price, and ~20% of customers take it; aim for each tier to roughly double total revenue (or it’s not worth the operational complexity). Example: 8 customers at 80) + 2 at 100) → tier doubles revenue, and because the base covers overhead, the top tier can drop ~10:1 to the bottom line (profit 10 → 90).
Four-tier illustration (1,000 customers): 100/mo × ~160–200 · ~5–10k/mo × ~8. Hormozi’s own ladder: Skool 100 (pro) → 35k (L2) → $135k (L3) → portfolio company. Add tiers one at a time, ideally starting high (stronger top-down brand; “unscalable” high-touch is easier to operationalize for a few people than mass volume).
Put It Into Practice
- Stop selling from your own wallet. Forever imagine everyone is rich — the top 10% of Americans have $1M+ net worth (1 in 10). They have the money; you’re just not offering what they want — and you may be too cheap to be believed (a health company’s close rates went up after a 50% price raise).
- Whatever your upsell is, 5–10× it — and make it something you’d be happy to deliver at that price. “We have value and price — move one. Either do less or charge more.” (Usually: charge more; the 10× offer often costs only ~5% of the new price → very high margin.)
- Expect only 1 in 5 (or 1 in 10) yes. The sweet spot is the most money, not the most yes’s. Pitching the premium to the bottom 50% gets all no’s and fools you into thinking it’s a bad idea — you’re just talking to the wrong people.
- Absolute vs relative profit: one person paying 2k) = 400 people paying 25). Don’t underestimate large prices, small quantities.
Serving the poor masses profitably requires tons of money + automation at low price (volume game) — most service businesses (78% of US businesses) can’t, so go the opposite direction: best customer, highest price.
Rich vs Poor Buyer Psychology
Poor buyers think cost; rich buyers think ratio / return (“20k Berkshire A-share or a 10 to deliver what they’ll pay $100 for).
Tactics & Diagnostics
- Price-delivery tactics: write the price down and slide it over (or use a calculator) if you choke; say “before I tell you, it’s expensive” first — creates an emotional anchor calibrated to the buyer; breathe before the number.
- Close-rate diagnostic (under-pricing): closing 60–80% → you have ~2–3× pricing sitting there; 80%+ → ~3–4× (you’ll drop to ~35% closes but at 4× price = 120%+ of prior revenue); 40–50% ≈ appropriately priced; below 30% → get better at selling (better offer or better customers).
- Lead scoring / qualification: advertise that you only cater to the people with money; talk only to (e.g.) $1M+ owners → higher close rate.
- Decommoditize so price-comparison breaks — be so clearly different that prospects must evaluate you independently (the Offers book ch. 1).
- Pricing is two-way communication — it signals value; people use price as a proxy for quality. The virtuous services cycle: higher price → higher margin → better talent → better service → better reputation → more demand → higher price.
Rules of thumb (services): consumer impulse ~3–10k. Business: mid-tier ~500/mo. His own belief-breaker: cold-pitched 8k, 60k in a morning — “I think we’re just doing it wrong.” Sell to the rich long enough and they’ll make you one of them.
Raw Transcript (Verbatim)
00:00:00
You aren't making as much money as you want because you don't know how to get it from the people who've got it. My name's Alex Hormozi. I run a portfolio of companies at acquisition.com that generate over $250 million per year. I did a book launch 12 weeks ago that did $106 million in sales in a weekend and broke a Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time. In this video, I'm going to explain a core shift in my understanding of how getting money actually works and
00:00:23
why the rich do in fact get richer, and I'm going to show you the math behind it, and most importantly, how you can gain access to it. The first reason that you aren't making as much as you want is because you're selling to people who don't have the money to give you. So, think about it like this, and this is really important. Imagine this pyramid as a representation of earning in the United States. What percentage of the people do you think earn 40% of the income? The top 10% earn 40% of the income in
00:00:51
the entire US. Now, that's income, and that's pretty extreme, but it's not even close to the difference when you look at wealth. So, US household net worth, okay, this is the value of their assets, last year was 100 and 63 trillion dollars. And you're like, "Man, how am I going to pay rent?" I'm like, "Let's get some of that 163 trillion." So, this is going to blow your mind. So, I want you to imagine that you had $100, okay? So, I'm going to equate this
00:01:23
163 trillion is now $100, okay? And we're going to spread it out relative to how it actually is spread within the United States. So, this is 100 people to represent 100 percentiles in terms of net worth in the United States. This 163 trillion dollars, what would they have if there was 100 people to represent this $100? They would have $2.50. I'm just going to use bills cuz I don't feel like having change. So, $2 out of that 100, the bottom 50. So, the next 40%, what do you think they would have?
00:01:56
They're going to have 20 25 28 bucks. That's the next 40. Remember, we got $100 to distribute here. So, the next 9%. So, now we're getting in the top 10, the top decile of net worth in the United States. How much do you think they got? They got 20 They got 30 They got 35 They got 38. All right, $38 in just this 9%. Now You ready for the the drumroll? How much do you think the top 1% has? I mean, it's 1/10, right? So, like it can't be more than the other nine. What, right? I mean, that you you think that.
00:02:41
The top one, just the one guy would have 30 $2. One guy. Now, this means that this one guy has more than the bottom 90% combined. This is very important because it has implications for how you do business. So, when you hear me say sell to the rich, they pay better, it's not some pithy statement. It's reality, and it takes people a very long time to learn this. And people often take years before they actually start to figure this out. Usually, there's belief issues. They're like, no one else could do this. And
00:03:18
part of the reason is because everyone they know is poor. And they're like, there's no way I could sell something for that price. And so, they make stuff against all the other small businesses to compete for these $2. Think about that for a second. You're putting all the resources cuz you see all these people. They're the ones that you're brushing shoulders with. They're the ones that you see in the street every single day. And you're trying to compete and slice these $2 a hundred different
00:03:40
ways. Right? If you want to make money, go where the money is. So, let's put this concept on steroids now and actually apply this to doing business. This is how big companies get big. They go where the money's at, and this is a breakdown of somebody called Prato's principle. You might have heard of it, 80/20. It's one of the most powerful concepts in business, and most people still don't understand how to actually apply it. All right, so I want you to freeze this idea in your head.
00:04:08
Just look at the money here. $2 here, 28 bucks here, 38 here. Now we're in the top 10%, right? And we have another 32 here. So I said earlier that this one guy is more than the bottom 90. But 69% of all the wealth is just in these 10 people. If this doesn't change how you do business, you are missing the plot. So the idea of 80/20 is that Prato, who was Italian economist, realized that there was this you know, 20% of customers created 80% of the revenue. Uh and he just noticed this 80/20, you
00:04:45
know, kind of issue that continued to occur within all different types of data sets. And so that became his principle. Now, here's where this gets really interesting. So within business, it totally rings true where 20% of your customers will be responsible for 80% of your profits. And then here's where people miss the next point, is that within this 80 within this 80% 64% percent of the aggregate profit, right? Comes from just 4% of the There you go, I'll just do that. of the people in there. Four customers, if you
00:05:22
had 100. And then of this 64 51% of the profit comes from just the top 1%. Now doesn't that all of a sudden start to make sense when you look at how the wealth is distributed? That the wealth is distributed in a way that also makes sense that the business would get in its profits in that way. And so, we repeat this process and this is kind of power law within business. This is how you do less and make more. Profit takes into account the fact that a single person, even with more service, often doesn't cost that much more to
00:06:01
handle than the other 99. So, it's more work but significantly more profitable. Now, this is only true under one very important condition. That you actually have a business model that allows them to pay more. Right? If you just only charge $10 for your thing, like this is one of my favorite sayings is the only thing worse than offering a $1,000 thing to somebody who's got a $100 budget is offering a $100 thing to somebody who's got a $1,000 budget. In the first scenario, you lose 100 bucks.
00:06:31
In the second, you lose 900. Big difference. And so, here's the important thing. If you have a model that allows for that, you have to understand that 99 out of 100 people are not the top 1%, right? If we're pulling back here, all these people are not the top 1%. So, you should expect them to say no to your expensive products and services. But when that whale comes, you should want to Captain Ahab that and get it done. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to
00:07:01
100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so, I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as head count increases that you need to get through and I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh service
00:07:24
businesses, brick and mortar, all of this and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so, the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. And so, the reason that I talk about selling to these the top 1% is that one of the most effective ways to build a business is from the top down. So, what do I mean by that? Like think about like Tesla, right? We started with a $250,000 Roadster and he had a very
00:07:53
limited production. Very few people, more profitability per. What then happens? Well, then he was able to make the, you know, Model S and that was the next car. And then he made the Model 3 or Model Y, whatever. So, he kept working his way down. But what's interesting about this is that when you anchor high, it makes sense think about from a branding narrative perspective. If I say, "Hey, I've got this really expensive car. It's amazing. It's super fast." And then I say, "Hey guys, many
00:08:15
of you couldn't afford this, so I made another car that's similar, but more affordable for you." That that brand narrative works because you've anchored high. Now, think about the reverse. Hey, I'm a I'm a budget discounter and I'm going to now sell a really expensive car. It doesn't It doesn't hit the same, right? And so, I love the top-down approach because you have a brand reinforcer, but also from an operational perspective, being able to ship the amount of cars he
00:08:40
has to ship for the the Model 3 compared to the amount that he had to do for the Roadster, it made more sense to start here cuz you can handle the volume, right? You might not have the operations to handle the amount of work that it requires to serve the masses. Like for sure, there is money, right? At the bottom, there is. But you have to be doing it at very small razor-thin margins with extraordinary volume. And unless you have the capital to create something that truly scales to that mass, you will probably just end up
00:09:05
trying to squeeze the $2 for more than what what they're worth. And so, how do we actually translate this into pricing our products and services? This is super important. So, here's my rule of thumb for upsells taking to account that 20% of customers have far more spending power than the ones below. Now, remember, we had $2 here and the next level had 28. So, it was 14 times more wealth between just the bottom 50 and the next 40. But just using the Pareto principle in terms of how we can apply this to pricing, like
00:09:35
you not understanding this is why your business is not making as much profit as you want, all right? So, my rule of thumb is that for every new tier is that you want to 5 to 10x your price and expect 20% of people to take it. Okay? So, here's how it works. So, let's say that you sell 10 customers, okay? So, you tell 10 customers, do do do. Let's do it again. Okay? Now, if you have eight of these customers at $10 per month and you've got two of them at $50 per month how much am I making on these guys? I'm
00:10:24
making $80 per month in total on the bottom 80 and then I'm making $100 per month on my top 20% or my top two. And so, by serving these two customers differently, we double the revenue of the business, which by the way, again, is my rule of thumb. I want each tier to bring me another double, like another full amount of revenue. Otherwise, I'm like, I don't know if it's worth creating the actual extra constraint of operations, right? But, here's where it gets even nastier. Let's say that this
00:10:56
covers the majority of our overhead. That means that this extra $100 might contribute 10 to 1 compared to this to our bottom line. And so, sometimes when you make a move like this, if you were here and you had $80 and you were living your life on this 80, right? It's like, well, maybe your your your cost is 70 or you're taking 10 home. If you add this $100 in and maybe the cost on this is 20, you've got 80 left over, we 5x the profit. So, let's say our profit before this was 10 a
00:11:23
month. And then we add this in and we had $80 a month in profit from this 100, right? Look at the difference in profit. We go from 10 to 90. Just by adding this tier. And so, the reason your business is not making as much money, and you're not making as much money as you want, is because you're not priced appropriately for the people who actually have the money to give you. And so, to maximize revenue, you can think of it with four tiers of pricing. And to be clear, you don't need to serve everyone, and the first product
00:11:57
you have may not be your base tier. All right, so you might start here. I don't know yet. I don't know your business. But, this is what you can walk through in terms of thinking through the pricing for your products and services. So, let's assume that we have 1,000 customers, all right? So, on our on our our base tier, all right, so this is the lowest, $10 per month, and let's say we've got 800 customers at this level, okay? Now, our second tier, we might have it $100 per month, so 10 times that price, with
00:12:25
20% taking it, all right? So, that means we're going to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-ish people who would qualify for this tier. Okay. And the next tier, we still have to follow our rule, 5 to 10x. That means we're going to be at 500 to 1,000 a month for this next tier. Just to keep it simple, I'm going to just do 10x, cuz it's nice and clean. All right? And so, here, we're going to have maybe around 40. Now, you're like, wait, I thought we had 1,000 customers. This
00:12:51
will be 160. I'll redo the math in advance so you can see it. All right? Now, our next tier might be, again, 5 to 10 times this, and so it might be somewhere in this 5 to 10,000 a month, all right? And so, times around eight people. Okay? And so, if you're looking at this, you're like, holy cow, that's uh those are very big differences in price. Yes, but so they they reflect how different the spending power that exists within customers is. All right? And so, the main takeaway from this and is that if
00:13:25
you're going to have an upsell, a very small percentage people are going to take it. And so you have to make it worth it. And so people will have these I'll go 100 and 129. It's like it's the same pitch. It's the same price. The willingness to pay for that customer is the same. Let me show you how I've actually translated this into my own business. All right? Well, this and you can ignore the actual numbers of customers, but what do we have here? Ah. We have school. And then at a $100 a
00:13:53
month, what else do we have? We have school. This is our hobby plan. This is our pro plan. And so for me, the next number is $5,000. Which is L1. And what's the next number after that? $35,000. Huh? Almost like it's between five to 10 times the price, which is L2. And then what do we have after that? We have something that's $135,000. So that's four times the price, right? And this is L3. And what do we have underneath of that? No money because it's a portfolio company. And so the thing is is it may take some
00:14:32
time to build out this entire thing. I didn't start with school. I started building, you know, you know, our brand. This is to be clear just our advisory practice that we have at acquisition.com. And so I'm just saying like knowing this doesn't mean you need to do all of this at once. It takes years and it does take operational chops to pull this off, right? You want to add tiers one at a time. My tip though is to start as high up as you can on this ladder for a few reasons, right? So the Tesla example I
00:14:58
gave earlier, the branding from top down versus bottom up is much stronger. Like Honda making a better car is tough versus Rolls-Royce making a Rolls-Royce light. It would be easier play for them from brand position. The next reason is that I prefer to start with the unscalable. Why? Because it's easier to operationalize it serving these people because one, they actually, believe it or not, as a percentage of their net worth, this is actually lower than what this is for somebody who's poor. Right? If you have uh $10
00:15:25
100 grand is 1% of what you've got. If you've got $1,000 100 bucks is 10% of what you got. And so for you, you will actually be more demanding for that 10 that 10% of that $100 reasonably so than somebody who's giving 1%. But from a business perspective, the 100 bucks versus the 100 grand, it's a gigantic difference. You have an easier customer to deal with that has lower demandingness, but it requires and to be clear, to get that $100 to equal $100,000 is you got to get a thousand of those people. So is
00:15:57
serving the one customer for $100,000 easier than serving a thousand at a hundred? As somebody used to sell $100 gym memberships, for sure. And if we were to look at this from a profit contribution perspective, like what is actually dropping to the bottom line, it would look like this. All the profit is here. Just like all the wealth is at the top. So you have to do more and charge more for it to people who can afford it. And the amount you do for a few people is almost always worth it for the far
00:16:29
greater price for those people who are willing to pay it. Now, you might ask, "Well, wait a second. I thought you said sell to the rich. Like why do you have this $10 and this $100 monthly?" The only way to serve the poor masses, right? And I say this to be a little bit more like, you know, jarring. But to to to to serve people with lower budgets is to have tons of money and then find a way to serve them in an automated manner at a low price. And if you do that, you can also make a lot of money, but via
00:16:56
volume. But it takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of time. And the reason that Tesla has almost gone bankrupt multiple times is because it's incredibly hard. The reason most software companies like Netflix and Spotify and some of these big consumer, you know, companies, uh you know, who who charge $13 to give you Think about how hard that is. Think about hard that business is. You They have to make world-class entertainment for all the different genres that someone might like just to earn their
00:17:22
$13, right? Just to earn the equivalent of like a Chipotle bowl. And I again, I bring this up because some people come in saying, "Oh, I'm going to do that." It's like, "You're going to do that bootstrapped?" No, these companies that you're looking to model literally got artificially inflated with outside capital to prop the business up until it would get to the point where it actually could make money. So, to do something like this costs a fortune. And so, the the way
00:17:47
that I'm trying to walk you through this is that 80% of businesses in the US or 78 are service-based businesses. And so, you don't have an automated way to serve these masses. You likely don't. And so, if you don't have an automated way, then you want to go in the complete other direction, which is I want to serve the best customer at the highest possible price. But people misprice their products and services. They say, "Okay, I'm my you know, my current core thing is $1,000. I'll make the next thing
00:18:11
$1,500." It doesn't work that way. That's not how the buyer works. The buyer is at 5K, 10K from the 1K thing. That's the next tier. That's the next rung on the ladder. All right? And so, this hopefully should shift your perspective in terms of how pricing really works. A disproportionate amount of profit is here. We have to make gigantic jumps with the assumption that very small percentages are going to take it, but still be okay with it because even a small number of people at a
00:18:36
gigantic price is still a lot of money. So, how do you actually translate this and put this into practice? Number one, stop selling from your own wallet. Especially if you're one of the people who, you know, you're in that in that $2 category, right? You're in that bottom 50% right now. I get it. I've been there. You have to forever imagine. This is a gift. Forever imagine that everyone is rich. So, here's the reality that will shock you. That top 10% Top 10% of Americans have a million-dollar plus net worth.
00:19:03
One in 10 people. One in 10 people. Million-dollar net worth. They've got the money. You just aren't selling them something that they want. And you might even be, and this happens a lot, especially for newer business owners, you might even be too cheap for them to even believe that you're good. Like, we had a company that uh that was in the health space a while back, and looking at all the research, it was a doctor and all the stuff, and I just fundamentally believed that they were mispriced. And so, what I did was I
00:19:32
raised I wanted to raise the price by double. He fought me back and forth forever, and I have I was able to finally get a 50% price raise through. But, guess what happened? We raised the price by 50%. That's a lot. What do you think it did to the close rates? They went up. They were so cheap compared to the promise and what they were delivering that people didn't even believe that it worked. And so, some of you guys are so cheap because you're selling out of your own wallet. You're
00:19:57
selling based on what your friends and family, who might also be in that $2 bottom 50% are telling you. But, why would you listen to the people who don't have money on how to get money? They don't know where it is. They don't know how to get it. And more specifically, they don't know how to serve the people who've got it. So, that's the first thing. The second thing is that if you're going to do this, listen to me on this. Whatever your upsell is, 5 to 10x the price. And then just make sure it's
00:20:25
something that you'd be happy to deliver for 5 to 10 times the price. Sometimes I'll get pushback from people who are like, "Ah, that would that would be so much work." And I'm like, "Cool. We have value, and we have price. Move one of them. Either do less or charge more." I would encourage you to just charge more. Right? And so, if I were to say, "Hey, I want you to 10 times the current price of your upsell, what would you do that would absolutely blow people away?" How much does that
00:20:50
actually cost you when you look at the cost compared to that 10 times bigger price with a zero in the end of whatever your core offer is, you might find it's like, "Actually, it's only like, you know, 5% of that price." It's like, "Right. Really high margin." So, as long as you're happy making more money serving fewer people, go do that. The third one is that you should expect only one in five or one in 10 people to say yes. Expect more no's. And this is the sweet spot of making money, right?
00:21:18
The sweet spot isn't the most yes's, it's the most money. And that is never with the most yes's. So if you pitch your 10 times bigger price to this bottom 50%, none of them are going to say yes. And you're going to mistakenly believe that this is a bad idea. But the route is that you're not talking to the people who have the money. And so you should expect that if you have a representative amount of people that you speak with, one in 10, maybe even one in 100, is the is the person who is the
00:21:45
correct avatar. And for that person, you might also find they'll just say like, "Yeah, that sounds good." You'll be like, "Oh my god." And I only say this as somebody who's had it happen for the first time, you're like, "I can't even believe this is possible. I can't believe this person would give me this much money." It's cuz to them, it's not that much money. It's only that much money to you because you still live here. If you sell to rich people long enough,
00:22:03
they will make you one of them. And so with your upsell, make it crazy. And this is called an anchor for a reason, right? If no one buys it, no big deal. Or most don't, no big deal. But the good news is that it'll still help you sell the rest of everyone else at a higher percentage and even at a higher rate because it'll look like a good deal in comparison. And I said this before, but I'll say this again. The next reason is the only thing worse than selling a $1,000 thing to a $100
00:22:34
buyer is selling a $100 thing to a $1,000 buyer. In the first, you lose 100 bucks. In the second, you lose 900. And not only that, that 900 is probably disproportionately profit. And this is what no one understands. This is why most businesses don't make money. They just try and sell to these people who are the biggest pain in the butt. And the thing is is you see so many of them that you're like, "Oh, this must be how it works." No, it's not how it works. It's just how you're working. This is
00:22:57
how the average business works, which is why the average business doesn't make money. They don't go to the where the money's at. The next reason is you have to think about absolute profit rather than relative profit, and you'll be blown away. So, a single person paying $10,000 for something that cost $2,000. A single person, right? One, right? Buying a $10,000 thing that cost $2,000 is the same as 400 people buying a $50 thing that cost $25. These are the same. So, do not underestimate the power of
00:23:43
large prices and small quantities. And so, the reason that entrepreneurship is such almost like a spiritual journey is that you you earn the right to charge more because you no longer think the smaller amount of money is worth your time. There are beliefs that people who have money have which translate to behaviors that poor people don't have and translate to different behaviors. So, what does that mean? A rich kid will choose not to pursue a lower leverage opportunity because it's not worth their time because they were
00:24:13
taught it wasn't worth their time. The career paths that they'll have to choose from will be significantly skewed towards things where they'll get disproportionate returns. And a lot of that is just knowledge about it, not even knowledge how to do it. I remember when I first found out I'd never heard of management consulting, I'd never heard of private equity, I'd never heard of investment I'd never heard of any of this stuff when I went to college because where I was from in Baltimore, a
00:24:36
rich person was a doctor. That was a rich person. And so, and to be fair, my dad's a doctor. So, I felt I was like, okay, cool. When I went to Vanderbilt, I felt like one of the poorest people there because I'd never seen what New York money was. I'd never seen what California money was. I'd seen what Baltimore rich was, which is that you have, you know, my dad has a business with two secretaries and you know, we always had food. I never had to worry about it. I still have the immigrant
00:25:01
mentality of like, we don't use, you know, paper towels cuz they're expensive, but like, that's just cuz he came here with a thousand bucks. And I that still got transmitted. In some ways, you almost have to you almost have to bat above you have to hit above your weight class, right? Which is even though it sounds un like in the story of when I actually made my first high-ticket sale in my life was when I I actually said a number that I wanted the person to say no to. And said yes. That was how that actually
00:25:29
that belief was broken for me. So, as much as I want to say like, this is what you have to do. I'm this guy, you know, guy on YouTube that you just saw or whatever. Like, Leila and I were selling we we started doing these gym launches. We would sell memberships through gyms. We would collect the money. And that was the model. We'd fly around the country. That's what we did. There were some issues with that model, which I've talked about in other videos. And so, then all of a sudden, Leila
00:25:51
started selling weight loss directly, made a little brand for her called Queen Transformation. We started selling these $500 online training packages over the phone. And that started working. And so, I had these gyms that I was supposed to do these launches at that I had decided I wasn't going to do them anymore. And so, I had eight gyms I was supposed to call up and like basically cancel on them. And so, on the first phone call, the guy was actually a referral, and he was like, "Dude, you saved my my friend's
00:26:13
gym. Like, I know you can do this." And I I was so beat down at this point. I was like, "Dude, I'm not like I I'm not doing it." And he kept asking for it. And then I finally I was like, "All right, dude. Like, I'll show you what I do, but I'm not going to find out there to help you if you can't close." And mind you, I come from the done-for-you world of like, I literally did everything. I fronted the money. I fronted the cash. I built, you know, I'd literally buy the
00:26:32
tables. I'd print the the contracts out. I'd run the ads. We'd work the leads. And we'd sell them straight in the gym. So, I did everything. So, me saying that was just I hoped that he would just like say screw off. And he was like, "No, I get it. I get it." And he was like, "Well, how much?" And so, I said, and remember, I'm used to selling $500 16-week training packages where you have to show up like every, you know, three times a week to do stuff. I said $6,000. So, for me, it was a 12x
00:26:56
compared to the price that I was used to selling at. And I just said it. So, I was like, he's just going to say, "Nope." And then I can just hang up and just move on to my next call. And he said, "6K?" And I was like, "Yeah." $6,000. And he was like, "Done." And I I remember like floating out of my body in this moment being like, "Holy Six grand from one call?" And I didn't I didn't even have the thing. I didn't even have the thing that
00:27:25
I had sold him yet, cuz I just didn't think he was going to say yes. I didn't think to have to build it, right? And so, I was like, "Holy shit." And so, then the next So, I had seven more calls. I called the next guy, same conversation. I was like, "Oh, now I got to build this thing." But, it went really smooth. I was like, Uh he was like, "How much?" I was like, "Eight grand." He was like, "Yeah, done." And I was like, "Eight grand." I
00:27:45
was like, "I'm up $14,000 in a I'm not even in a day. It's in a morning." So, then I had six more calls. And by the end of the You know, the next call, same thing. How much? 10K. Next call And by the end of the day, I'd done $60,000 in in collected. And I was like, "What the just happened?" I had no idea what was going on. Uh and so, Leila came back after she was selling the $500 memberships. And I was like, "Babe." I was like, "I just made 60 grand." And she was like,
00:28:16
"What?" She was like, I She was like, "I thought we were doing the weight loss thing." I was like, "No, I didn't We're still doing the gym thing. I think we're just doing it wrong." And this is why I'm telling you this, cuz like that moment, of all the moments in my entire career, that was the moment where I elevated. That was the moment where my life really changed. And so, I bring this up because you might be like, "Well, what At what price point
00:28:37
should I start?" Right? It's going to be relative whether you're selling to consumers or selling to businesses. And these are just a couple rules of thumb that I'll just tell you that I've kind of worked around. I'd say that for um for a consumer, an impulse purchase is five or six hundred dollars. A higher ticket purchase is usually going to be somewhere between three and ten thousand dollars, right? Typically. And that's again for services. If you're looking at
00:28:58
like assets, it's a different game. You're buying houses and cars, it's a different game, right? But if you're selling just like pure I'm going to help you do some stuff. I'm going to help fix some stuff. That's usually a price point that's quite higher ticket. Business, it really depends on the size business. If you're selling to Disney, you can sell a billion dollar thing, right? If you're selling to just small business owners on Main Street. Remember, some of them
00:29:16
are poor, too, right? And so for them though, you know, a more normal price for something will probably be somewhere in the neighborhood of like I'd say like a mid-tier is probably, you know, two to three thousand dollars a month. A cheaper price for a business owner would be somewhere in the neighborhood of like four hundred to eight hundred a month. Maybe maybe just call call call it closer to five hundred bucks a month as like a a cheaper number for a business. And you're like, five hundred
00:29:38
dollars a month is cheap for a business. It's like, yeah, super expensive for a consumer, pretty cheap for a business, right? One of the big issues I'd say that poor people think about compared to rich people is that poor people will think in terms of cost and I would say rich people will think in terms of the ratio, the return, cost versus value. So if I were to say, "Hey, I've got this thing that's let's say it's let's say it's twenty thousand dollars."
00:30:03
A poor person just hearing the price would say, "That's expensive." But if I said a rich person, if I said, "Hey, my thing is twenty thousand dollars." They wouldn't then say, "That's expensive." They'd say, "For what?" And if I said, uh share a class A share of Berkshire Hathaway, which is an eight hundred thousand dollar stock for twenty thousand dollars, that would be the deal of the century, right? If I said it was twenty thousand dollars for a brand new
00:30:30
Lamborghini, they would say, "That's a great deal." So even though it costs a lot of money, it's great value. And this is what I did I struggled for such a long time to understand because it was like I almost had this emotional reaction to zeros. It's like if I saw zeros, I was like, "Oh my god, it's so much, right?" And and so I know where you're coming from because you almost want to you almost choke on the price. So, I'll give you a couple little tactics for this to like get around it.
00:30:54
So, one is if you're in person, you can write down the price and then turn it and slide it to them. Uh or you can use a calculator and turn it to them if you like literally choke on the price cuz some people do do that. Um the second thing that you can do, and this is a really good little little pricing hack for for selling, is before you say the price, you say, "Hey, before I tell you the price, it's super expensive." And so, what's beautiful about telling someone it's expensive before you tell
00:31:18
them the price is that if someone's rich, they're going to immediately think what's expensive for them. And so, they're going to think a number and then you're going to say the number and they're going to they're going to literally be like, "Ah, fine." If they're poor and you say it's expensive, they're going to brace themselves for a number that's big. And then when you give them that number, they were at least embraced for it. And so, in either way, you actually create
00:31:39
what I would consider an emotional anchor that's perfectly accommodating to the buying power of the prospect. And most sales people get choked up right at that point. So, it's like give yourself a breather. It's going to be expensive. You take a breath, they take a breath, then you deliver, right? So, it's just a little tactic that works and also can help increase sales. So, a good way to know if you're actually under priced is to actually look at your close rates, all right? And so, if your close rates
00:32:04
are 80% or let's say 60 to 80, I'll put this in tiers for you. Um 50 to 60 40 to 50 and then 30 to 40 and then 30. Okay. So, let's say these are your close rates. So, that means if you talk to 10 people, here you close eight, right? If you're closing 80%, you probably right now have a two to three X in pricing, sorry, a three to four X in pricing, excuse me. A three to four X in pricing just sitting there. I know that sounds absurd, but think about it. You're going to get the
00:32:43
80% are not going to say yes anymore. I want to be very clear. You might drop to like 35%, but if 35% of people are paying four times more, you're making 120% of the revenue that you were making before. All right, and so like you were making way more money. Now, at 60 80, you probably have a two to three X that you have sitting there in price. If you're between 50 and 60, you probably have a 1.5 X to two X sitting there. If you're at 40 to 50%, you're probably at 1.25 to 1.5 X. All
00:33:12
right, if you're here, I consider this to be appropriately priced. If you're closing 30 to 40%, you're priced about right. If you're below 30, I would say get better at selling. Which part of getting better at selling can be make the offer better or talk to better customers. All right, and so sometimes you will try and pitch a high ticket thing, but not have your core offer, which might be lower, so you have an anchor offer. Um, but the people that you're speaking with you didn't qualify them. So, if I want
00:33:43
to say, "Hey, I'm talking to million dollar plus business owners." I will have a significantly higher close rate if I'm only talking to them. So, all of what I described is something called lead scoring or lead qualification. And so, what that means is that there's a certain type of customer that's more likely to buy your thing, right? Somebody who has more money is more likely to to buy your more expensive thing. And so, if we know that the people who have the money are the ones
00:34:05
that buy our expensive thing, then we should try and just tell the world we only cater to these people. Now, the next thing that will come up is people will say, "Hey, I would sell for a really expensive thing, but no one will buy it because there's guys down the street who will sell it for less because they're broke you selling to broke you." You're right. And that's because you can't sell the same thing. You got to sell something different. Which is why I wrote my first
00:34:31
book on this. which is the first chapter is you're selling a commodity. You're selling something that someone could reasonably hold your thing and their thing up and say, "These two things are the same, so I'll just pick the cheaper one." And that's reasonable for them to do it. The idea is that we want to price our things so high and be in such a clearly different category that people say, "These two things must be different. I have to analyze these independently." And so, within the
00:34:53
context of what do I get for my money, the rich person wants three things. They want it to be fast, they want it to be easy, and they want it to be guaranteed. And so, everything that you do that is more difficult for these people, you have to make easier, and these people will be willing to pay for it. And so, you pre-do some of that work for them. You pre-chew some of the food. You go ahead of time, you drive ahead, you scout the location, you drive it to the door, whatever it is. But when you look
00:35:18
at, "Well, what does it cost for me to drive this thing to the door?" It cost me 10 bucks, but they're willing to pay 100 for it. Whereas this person's nagging me on the last five bucks. It's a different game, but this is where all the money's at. The reality of how services work is that you can tell how advanced a service business owner is by how expensive their product is. Because if you're actually good, you have more demand than you have supply. If you have more demand than you
00:35:39
have supply, what should you do? Raise price. That's how the supply-demand curve works. And so, you continue to raise your price until you're at a point where you're at equilibrium, where like you can handle the amount of demand that you have. If you're still good, you still get more demand because word of mouth continues, and you keep going up, and that becomes the virtual virtuous cycle of price and services. Because when you have a higher price, you have higher gross margins. You have higher
00:36:01
gross margins, you can hire better talent. When you have had better talent, you can deliver better services. You have better service, you get better reputation. You have better reputation, what does that do? Drives demand. Which then drives price. And so, this is the cycle that every business has to go through. And you signal to the marketplace, you communicate to the marketplace. Pricing is a two-way communication. You tell them what you're about, and then they will self-select as the correct
00:36:22
customers for you. And so, So can see where someone's at in their business journey by how high they are priced compared to people who sell comparable services because people will very much take price as an indication of value. They just do because in general things that are priced higher are better. Not always but often. It's a good enough rule of thumb that people in general will do that. Like this might blow your mind if you've like not met people with money. When they go to shop at a store, they
00:36:52
price from high to low. They literally look at the most expensive stuff first cuz that's probably the stuff that's for them. They don't want you save money anymore. They want to get better value. They want better stuff. They want to skip the line. They want to get it faster. They want it better. They want it to be a higher quality you know higher quality ingredients. They want it to be more made by somebody who's more noteworthy all of these things. And fundamentally that is what this book
00:37:19
goes into tremendous detail talking about which is the offers book. All right. So with that being said sell to the rich, they pay better. It's better to sell fewer expensive customers than many broke customers. And if you sell to rich people for long enough, they will make you one of them.
Reference: