A few years ago, I had a conversation with my mentor that changed how I think about business. I still come back to it constantly.
At the time, I was doing what I always did. Talking products. I come from a traditional marketing background, so my instinct is to look at the offers, line them up, work out how to stack and sell them. Build the ladder, fill the rungs.
He listened, and then he said;
“You’re still thinking in products. The shift is proximity. The more of you people want, the more it’s worth.”
And he was right. It quietly undoes the way most of us were taught to build a business. So many of us are charging by the hour. Taking the one thing we do and stacking it up to sell more of it. Pricing our time, our sessions, our design time, our days – as though the value lives in the hours.
It doesn’t. The value lives in the access and in what that access gives them. The nuance. The perspective only you can bring. The sharper thinking and the better output that come from getting close to a mind that’s spent decades learning to see what others miss.
What people are really buying, when they buy from you, is proximity to your thinking. To your judgement. To you. And the closer they get – the more direct, the more personal, the more immediate that access is – the more it is worth to them.
That changes how you build everything.
It means the entry point to your work isn’t your cheapest product. It’s the first taste of proximity – a way for the right person to get close to your thinking without a big commitment, and to feel what it’s like to have you in their corner.
It means your highest-value work isn’t simply your biggest package. It’s your closest. The most direct access to you, your time, your mind. That’s the thing people will pay the most for, because that’s the thing they want the most.
And it means the ladder you’re building isn’t a stack of products at all. It’s a ladder of proximity. Each step closer to you, each step more valuable, because each step is more of the one thing they actually came for.
This is how I’ve built my own business and it matters more than ever in a post-pandemic, tech-driven, fast-changing world, where access to genuine human judgement and thinking is the rarest and most valuable thing there is. Not a list of products competing for attention, but a series of doors – each one bringing people closer to my thinking, in the way that suits where they are. Some want me in their pocket. Some want the room. Some want me beside them. Same thinking, different proximity, priced accordingly.
It is also why I am so certain about the approach I teach, because it all rests on one idea. Authority creates demand. Marketing only ever chases it.
When you build real authority, you stop competing on price and start being chosen for who you are. Authority makes you attractive. Demand gives you leverage. Revenue gives you confidence. And your network multiplies all of it.
That is not linear growth – more hours, more products, more hustle for incrementally more money.
That is compounding authority. The better known and more trusted you become, the closer people want to be – and the more that closeness is worth.
Which is really what I am about underneath all of it. Building a business by design. Days down, dollars up. It is why, in my world, we make such a noise when a client has her biggest month, her biggest quarter, her biggest year – and does it in fewer days than the year before. That’s the whole game. Not more hours for more money. More value, more proximity, more of the life you actually wanted when you started.
So this week, reflect on this.
How close do people really get to you – to your thinking, your judgement, your brain? And are you still charging for your hours, when what they actually want is proximity to your mind?
Janine x