If I Were Stuck At $10K/mo, This is Exactly What I'd Do

If I were stuck at $10K a month, this is exactly what I would fix. Now, before we get into this, I'm not promising you'll make any money doing what I tell you to do. This is a YouTube video, and the probability you make any money at all is close to zero. With that said, the reason you can't charge more is a demand problem. You don't have enough people who want to hire you. When demand is low, that means you have zero pricing power. You take whatever you can get, you charge less than you should, you spend a bunch of time on low-quality people, and you're afraid to charge more money because you're scared that they're going to get mad. The differential between supply and demand is not in your favor. So this video is going to give you an exact framework of how to influence the supply and demand dynamics to make it more in your favor. So if you don't know who I am, my name is Daniel Fazio. I'm the co-founder of Client Ascension and Liskit. Here's screenshots of us collecting $29 million. It's over $30 million when you consider PayPal and other processors and wires. This is exactly what we're going to go over inside this video, so there will be timestamps as well. Supply and demand applied to your agency, the scarcity trap, why rejecting clients feels impossible, the 3 demand channels, demand to pricing progression, diagnostic framework for solving this issue yourself, and then how you can work with me directly. So let's get straight into it. Supply and demand applied to your agency. So your ability to charge a specific price is a function of how many people demand your services from you. So relative to how much capacity you have, that's it. So the quality of your work and the value of the deliverables and your case studies and your sales skills, none of that determines your price as much as raw demand does. This is a very simple graph we have here. So what this is, is on the left we've got your pricing power, and then on this axis is we have the demand for your services. As demand increases, your pricing power goes up. Like, it's a very simple supply and demand graph. It's an intersection of them. When demand is higher than supply, prices go up. It's the same as a housing market. If you have a city that 250,000 people live in and then there's 250,000 housing units available, and then you double the population of the city to 500,000, but you don't make any new housing units, the price of housing is probably going to double. It's really that simple. So what you're trying to do with the pricing of your services is you want to make the maximum amount of money as is possible in your business. That's the entire purpose of you running a business is for you to make a lot of money doing it. Therefore, if we get more people demanding your service, you are able to charge more money doing the same thing without changing anything. That's how this works. This is fundamentally how this works. Okay, so with your demand level, if it's far below the supply, you take any client at any price. You say yes to everything. You do work you hate for less than it's worth and you have zero pricing power. You charge whatever they'll accept because losing anyone and any client is terrifying and you just need to make some money. You're in a scarcity mindset. This literally is what that is. Demand is scarce. So therefore you are in a scarcity mindset. It makes sense. If your demand level is roughly equal to supply, that means the market is in an equilibrium. You're busy and making decent money, but if one client leaves, you feel it pretty immediately and you don't have much pricing power. You charge market rate, but you can't push above it without losing people. However, if you just suddenly had 10 people a day who wanted to become your client, what would that do to you? You'd be like, well, I got to raise my price because I can't work with all these people. Yes, congratulations, you're getting it. That's how supply and demand works. So once that happens, you can start turning people away and you start only working with ideal fits and you start rejecting bad clients without a second thought and you're not in a scarcity mindset, your pricing power is high. You name your price, they pay it, or the next person will. You don't care if they say yes or no because you got another person right there. Most agency owners live right here in row 1 or row 2. They think the path to row 3 is a better offer or more case studies or sharper sales skills, which is a part of it, but you just need to increase demand as well. You just need exposure to more humans. Another way of saying this is that you just need a tremendous amount more leads. I'm not saying your case studies and your offer aren't important. It is. But a lot of what is lacking is that you are not doing enough lead gen to increase demand. Like, not even close. When you don't have consistent lead flow, this is the cycle that takes over. So you're not doing any cold calling, you're not doing any cold email, you're not running any ads, you're not doing any outreach, you're not doing any content. All of your clients probably come from referrals or like something like Upwork. So there's no new demand. You don't control it. So what that means is that every client is irreplaceable because you have no control over the replacement of people. It just happens to come to you. So if they leave, nothing fills the gap, and you can't risk losing anyone because then your income is going to drop. You're justifiably in a scarcity mindset. It also means that you start charging less than you should. You take on $1,500 projects that should be $6,000. Also, you're consumed by low-value work, so you spend your whole day on low-value work. There's no time left to even build the outbound system that creates the lead gen in the first place. So you're in this little death spiral. I had to just walk Somebody threw this on one of my coaching calls I just did. So he runs an automation agency. He's got 12 clients, solid results. The way it works is he has like a $1,500 service where he like manages some of their like AI automations. Sometimes some of his clients come to him, they're like, hey, can you build this? And it's some like insanely complex thing. It's gonna take like 12 to 18 hours to build the thing. And he wants to tell them $6,000, but he's stuck charging them prices like another $1,500 or like $2,000 for it. He feels like he's offending the people when he quotes prices like $6,000 because they're all on $1,500 a month subscriptions and low-ticket type people. Like, they just can't afford $6,000. Pretty much zero of them would be able to afford $6,000 at all. He doesn't want to offend them. That's why he can't charge more. The reason he can't charge more is because he has no pipeline behind those clients. These are all referral people from a franchise. He has no lead gen system right now. He's just taking up whatever people he gets referred to him. He can't get more high-priced clients because all the people he keeps getting referred to him are these low-ticket type, they literally can't afford a $6,000 project or an $8,000 project. So you can't break this loop by just changing your prices. I can't tell him just say the number $6,000 because all of the people he works with fundamentally literally just actually cannot afford to pay $6,000 or $8,000. They literally can't. They don't make that much money. They can't buy that. So the resolution to his problem isn't just changing the price for like, fuck, no reason. He needs to get more demand. He needs to have exposure to people who can afford that pricing. That's the only way this death spiral gets fixed for him. He just needs exposure to the people who can afford that. Some of these clients may in fact get offended when you start quoting them $6,000. They may in fact not buy those prices. Therefore, the resolution is to find new people. You just need new people who can afford that. I want to make this super clear. The way you get over a breakup is by finding a new girl. That is how you get over it. That is the resolution to it. It's not to like just keep going, finding people with the same quality quality or like try to get back with that person, go find a new one. That's the answer. That's always what the answer has been. Anybody telling you any different is lying, wrong, dumb, or malicious. This also applies to your business. So real quick, if you guys want to build an AI marketing agency, go to the first link in the description, go.clientascension.ai. That's our program where I show you what to sell, who to sell it to, how to get clients, and how to fulfill for the clients by using AI. So first link in the description, you can check that out. Here's why rejecting clients feels impossible. So the scarcity trap doesn't just show up in undercharging, also showed up as the inability to say no to people you just straight up shouldn't be working with. When you get on a sales call and like 20% of the prospects are good fits, closing those are super easy. Closing good fit prospects is really great and like you're confident that you can get these people results. But you might have 80% of the people you talk to are super sketchy. They just have like completely garbage businesses that you don't think are possible to get results for in the first place. You might have people who ask 7 different questions about the money-back guarantee. You might have people just seem difficult and you get the sense that no matter what happens with this person, they're going to ask for a refund. You want to be able to reject these people. The right move is to reject these people. I was talking to somebody me in Client Ascension about this, and they're dealing with exactly something like this. They're getting calls from Twitter and LinkedIn DMs, and their content, decent close rate on the good fits. However, they're stuck at the same revenue for months. So he was wondering if he needed to lower his standards to grow. The answer I gave him was no, it's not. That's not the answer to grow. He hit the local maximum of what his organic content could produce. His Twitter and LinkedIn were giving him stable, predictable amounts of business, and that number was never going to magically increase. This happens a lot with organic content. You hit a local maximum. Yes, it grows to a certain point, and And then a lot of times it hits like a peak and it's like, this is what your peak is for your content. He hit his peak. He needed a new channel to double his volume of qualified calls. That fixes his selectivity problem without compromising the standards. Right now, for instance, he's getting about 6 hyper-qualified prospects booked in with him a month. If he's rejecting 4 of the 6, you've got 2 clients. That feels devastating. Every rejection, you don't want to do that. Now, if you go from 12 qualified prospects a month and you reject 4 of the 12, you've got 8 clients. It's the same selectivity, it's completely different outcome, same standard, completely different feeling. You just need a higher absolute amount of exposure to qualify clients in the first place, and that's not going to just magically appear without you increasing your lead gen or marketing volume. So let's just say that this guy's charging $3,000 a month, he's signing 2 clients a month, he's increasing his MRR $6,000 per month every month, and he's done this consistently for the past 4 or 5 months. He's like gradually growing. He might be growing like net $3K MRR every single month, which is like, and In the land of reasonable expectations about a company that's good for you to run, like, yeah, bro, growing 10% a month is completely wildly insane. However, he just wants to grow faster, which is totally reasonable. You've got, let's say, 4 people that you really want to work with per month that come to you, and you're able to close half of them. You have a 50% close rate on those people. The answer is not to just start signing the unqualified people. It's to get not just 4 really good people on the phone with you a month, it's to get 8 really good people on the phone with you. You sign 50% of those, you just doubled your growth rate of your business. Now instead of signing 2 people a month, you sign 4 people. That's what you get. You need more calls. It has nothing to do with signing people who you shouldn't be signing, who are a pain in the ass. It's you just need exposure to more good people. And the way you do that is either you have to do more content or better content, or start going to other channels and start doing outbound, start doing high-volume cold emails, start doing Dream 100 outreach. Need more input volume to generate calls in the first place. That's the resolution, not signing unqualified Concept you have to understand: the world does in fact revolve around you. It does. In your life, the world revolves around you. You exist to maximize your compensation per unit of effort. When a client asks you to do something, you quote the price that you're willing to do it for. If the price they're willing to pay intersects with the price that you're willing to do it for, then the transaction occurs. If it doesn't, nothing happens. Nobody's getting scammed. Nobody's getting offended. It's just a mismatch. This is a visualization of this. So you have what you charge on this graph over here, then you have what they're willing to pay. Over here. If your price is greater than theirs, then there's a mismatch and the transaction does not occur. From this point here all the way to the left, that's when a transaction occurs. What you charge is either equal to or less than what they're willing to pay. As you go along the what they're willing to pay line, you get a progressively smaller and smaller quantity of clients because most people are poor and they can't afford anything. A means of scaling over time is that as you increase your demand higher and higher and you increase your authority higher and higher, the amount of demand that you get outweighs outweighs the amount of supply that you can supply, and therefore your price gets pushed up. This is always interesting to me when people say, when should I raise my prices? And the answer is when demand is outweighing supply and you cannot sign any more clients at the price that you've been previously doing it for. That's when you do it. It's very simple how this works. Where you have a problem is when you start going along this line, the what they'll pay, and you go down and down, and then you're not doing anything to push demand up. You're just living on what demand you currently have. That is the definition of living in a scarce environment. If you want to stop having scarcity mindset, you need to influence your environment to no longer be scarce. Change the situation. That's how you stop being in scarcity mindset. In scarcity, every no feels permanent. Rejection is devastating. When you're in abundant demand, every no is just a not yet. This is why you can't just decide to charge more. People try this. They read some post about knowing your worth, double your rate, get rejected 3 times, and then drop back to exactly where they were. Because the confidence to hold a higher price doesn't come from a mindset exercise. It comes from having other options. Options. If somebody says no to $8,000 and you have 2 other prospects that week, that rejection is meaningless. If they were your only prospect this month, it's devastating. That's how it works. You just need more demand. So let's talk about the demand channels. So we've got outbound, content, and ads. So let's go through each of these. Outbound, so cold email, cold calling, Dream 100. The speed is fast. You can start tomorrow and it works immediately. When you do it, you get immediate responses. The cost is money low. It's very cheap to do, but it takes a moderate amount of time. Do you control it? Yes. You send more, you get more. It's really that simple. What's the ceiling? The ceiling is pretty moderate. It's limited by TAM reply rates, and the scalability is linear. So what that means is the return you get from it is exactly linear, exactly in proportion to what you put into it. It doesn't compound. Content like YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, this works very slow, takes months to build. The cost is money low, but it's time very high. Do you control it? Partially. It's algorithm dependent. What's the ceiling? It's very high, but it generally fixes. It hits a local maximum and plateaus for most people. It's very skill dependent on that. So what's the scalability? It's progressive. It increases progressively. This is assuming you are doing more and more and it is getting better and better. If it's not getting better, then it caps out, it hits the local maximum. Channel ads, the speed is moderate. First close is normally like 2 to 4 weeks. It's money high. Ads are super expensive. B2B CAC is around $3,000. You need $5,000 to $10,000 before the first close just because of sales cycles. It takes a low amount of time though. Do you control it? Yes, once running. Ceiling, very high. You can scale to thousands per day. It's a high capital barrier to entry. The scalability is linear, only works in proportion to the amount of money you put in. So normally what you want to do is outbound first. If you're stuck in the scarcity trap, outbound is the answer. It's cheap, it's fast, it directly creates options for yourself. Content, Content generally hits a local maximum, takes a while to do, so I wouldn't recommend doing that until you started outbound. Content is the most capital-efficient way to acquire business, but most people using it as a strategy again hit a local maximum where your acquisition doesn't scale beyond a fixed point for years unless your content absolutely blows up. Now, ads require capital. So at $250 a booked call, 60% show rates, 80% close rates, your CAC is going to land around $3K. So we started a new ad campaign at ListKit 2 weeks ago. On day 13, it was $10,000 spent. 16 people were offered on a call. Zero had closed so far. First close will probably come around day 21, and that will have been $15,000 in cash outlaid so far. You need cash to stomach that lag. This is an artificially high CAC. When we sign someone after spending $15,000, it doesn't mean the CAC's $15,000, because if we stop spending that day, there's still going to be 2 or 3 more people that close, which would make the CAC $3,000 to $5,000. It will equalize over elongated time periods. That's how ads work. Demand to pricing progression. So you got to figure out which stage you're at and focus exclusively on what moves you to the next one. Stage 1: no pipeline, all your clients are from referrals or like one-off random stuff. You have no consistent client acquisition. What you need to do is start outbound immediately. Cold email, Dream 100, cold calling. The goal is to increase demand. You just need people who physically want to buy your stuff. Stage 2: Pipeline exists, but the volume is low. So you got outbound running, maybe like 4 to 6 qualified interested prospects per month. You're still somewhat scarce, but you can see the demand going up. What you need to do from here is keep increasing the volume. More emails, more outreach, add a second channel. Going from 6 to 12 prospects is going to change everything. Stage 3: Volume is sufficient. So you're getting like 10 to 15+ qualified interested prospects a month, you start being selective naturally. This is where you might start raising your prices. If you're closing like 40% of qualified calls, your price might be too low. Increase it until the close rate normalizes around 20 to 30%. Stage 4: Premium pricing. The demand is far exceeding what you can possibly supply. You might be rejecting a lot of people. Your price reflects scarcity of your availability. What you do from here is add team members to expand your supply, or you can keep your business small and high margin. Both work. Both are valid strategies. This kind of works like this. You might have stage 1, $0 to $5K a month. What's normally broken here is that you do not have a front-end cold traffic offer that people are interested in buying in the first place. You don't have something people want to buy at all. That's normally the problem you have here. When you solve this problem, it normally leads to you hitting here, stage 2, $5K to $30K a month. Getting past that, the problem is normally that your volume's too low. You need more conversations. You need higher demand for your offer. You don't have enough exposure to qualified buyers. You need more of them. Stage 4, $30K a month plus, this is generally a supply problem. You physically cannot handle more clients. You need to figure out how to 3 times more clients without personally working more yourself. That's how you do this. Self-diagnostic. You got to find out where you're stuck. If this is true, all clients are coming from referrals, you sign clients randomly for just happenstance, then your problem is that you have no demand. What you need to do is buy domain, set up inboxes, write scripts, start sending 500 cold emails per day this week. Do Dream 100. Just do outbound to get more leads. You must figure out how to make this work. If this is true, outbound is running, but you're only getting like 4 to 6 qualified calls a month, then your problem is more than likely low volume. 2x, 3x, 5x your send volume. Observe what scripts and strategies are actually working for you and severely increase the volume of those. If you're getting 10 calls per month but you're closing 40% plus of them, your price is probably too low. You may now have enough demand to warrant increasing your prices. Test increasing them incrementally, not all at once. Test increasing it, observe what your close rates are and how they change over time, and track the data. Do not do this thing where you make decisions based off, I feel like this is happening. There's no I feel like this, it's what does the data say. If you're getting 10 calls per month, but you keep signing bad fit clients. Your problem might be that you have a scarcity mindset despite having volume. You actually have enough demand. Give yourself permission to reject. Track close rate on only good fit clients. You have a great offer and solid results, but can't break past the revenue ceiling. You might have hit the local maximum of your channel, so your current channel, organic referrals, won't scale. Add outbound or ads as a new source. You need to have more channels that can scale. Let's say you quoted a high price, got rejected 3 times, and dropped back down. Low demand made rejection feel permanent. The price wasn't the problem. The lack of other prospects was. Get more calls on the calendar and try the higher price again. You need demand to support pricing. It's also important to understand that you may only be able to charge an amount of money that is in line with what your social proof and level of authority warrants. That's still a factor in all of this. What you're able to charge a client is what the average client is willing to pay you. This is a function of demand level and also all of the elements that derive your level of authority, such as case studies client results. There are dozens of variables that account for this. Use nuance to understand your situation. Not everything is black and white. You can't just be like, well, Daniel, you said this in the video and then I did that and it didn't work. There's nuance. I don't understand your exact situation because I've never spoken to you. Execute nuance. It's not black and white. If you want my help scaling, you want my help building an AI marketing agency from scratch where we show you what to sell, who to sell it to, how to get clients, and how to fulfill for those clients with AI, go to the first link in the description, go.clientascension.ai. I'll also leave links to other stuff in there as well. You can buy one-on-one calls with me, all All this stuff I have will be at the link in the description. Here are some case studies. We got Daniel Warner, who went from $0 to $30K a month in 3 months. James Pimbo, who went from $0 to $15K a month in 60 days. Chris Burns, $10K a month in 6 weeks. Cameron Othello made $50K in 3 months. Doby Lynette hit $12K a month in his first month. Matt Huang went from $0 to $20K a month in 3 months. Cabrin added $44,000 to his MRR in 1 month. This is what works. What I have works. We have case studies. We produce more case studies than anybody else. I'm not promising you get these results. The probability that you do is extremely low. I'm not saying that you're going to get these results. However, if you join, you'll get access to everything that these guys had. If you want to check that out, again, first link in the description, go.clientassistance.ai. If you got any value from this video, leave a like, subscribe, comment, share it with your friends. All right, that's it for this one. Peace. I love you. Bye.