Years ago I sat across a table from a mentor I respected enormously. He looked at me, no drama about it, and said: “Janine, you are the world’s cheapest consultant.”
I had a rebuttal ready for every angle. Every one of them fell over, because he was right.
I was giving and giving. Every client. Every call. Every piece of IP. Every minute of my time, well beyond what I was being paid for. I told myself that was generosity. It was insecurity, wearing a very convincing outfit.
So I overcorrected, the way you do. Charged by the minute. Watched the clock like a hawk. Delivered precisely what had been paid for and not one thing more.
I hated it. Because I love being in service. I love rolling my sleeves up and solving the problem. Stripping that out did not make me a better business owner, it just made me a smaller one.
What actually fixed it was not the price. It was the structure sitting underneath the price.
Here is what I mean.
Almost every consultant I meet who wants a $20,000+ month starts by counting clients. Ten of them. Or five. Or one, if they are being optimistic. Then they look at their calendar, work out they could not possibly service that many, and quietly decide the number is not for them.
But a $20,000+ month is not a volume question. It is a structure question.
And when I pull a business apart, the gap is almost always one of two things.
Either you are not having enough conversations. The work is excellent, the client is delighted, and when the engagement ends there is nothing behind it, because nothing was quietly bringing the next one in.
Or the conversations you are having are worth less than they should be. The client is right there. They trust you. They would happily buy more. And you are selling them one thing, once, at a price you set three years ago when you were a less experienced version of yourself.
One is a demand problem. The other is an offer problem. Most people have both and treat neither, because they are too busy delivering the work.
Fix the structure, and the maths gets very simple, very fast.
One $20K corporate engagement. Or four $5K executive coaching packages. Or five $4K offers delivered to the same client across a year, because you finally built more than one thing to sell them.
Same client. Same expertise. Same you.
Different structure.
Which means the gap between where you are now and $20,000+ months is not more effort. You are already working hard enough. I would put money on you working harder than most of the people earning double.
The gap is strategy.
Most of us were taught that if the work is good enough, the work speaks for itself. And it does. Right up until the point it doesn’t.
Effort has a ceiling. Strategy does not.
So the better question is not how do I find more clients.
It is this: what is one client actually worth to me right now, and what should they be worth?
The distance between those two numbers is your whole business.
Janine x