In this segment, the speaker emphasizes that an entrepreneur’s income is directly proportional to the value they deliver to clients. He argues that merely seeking high fees without providing commensurate value is a common mistake. By overdelivering—such as writing substantially longer blog posts, adding videos, and promoting the content across multiple channels—entrepreneurs can dramatically outperform competitors, command premium pricing, and secure repeat business. The speaker illustrates this with a case study where a $500 blog assignment was expanded to 1,500‑2,000 words, included a video, and was heavily promoted, resulting in tenfold higher page views and comments, and enabling a five‑fold price increase on renewal. He advises targeting corporate clients for larger ticket opportunities, starting with small, low‑cost projects, and continuously adding high‑perceived, low‑cost value (e.g., free research presentations) to become an indispensable supplier, thereby generating referrals and scaling income.
Chapters
Sub-rule number 5: Your income depends on the value that you provide. Another really important one, at least in my opinion. The more you can help a client, the more money you're going to make, and they will pay a premium over existing suppliers if you can provide them with more value. And this is where a lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake where they just want to make a lot of money, but they're not actually helping their clients out that much. If you look back to that very first startup rule that we created, it was how much do you love it, and then also how much does it help your potential customers. And so the more you are able to help them, the more value you can provide, the more likely you are going to be able to make a lot more money, which is probably an important goal for a lot of you who are listening here on the call today. So that's important. A quick example from my experience, a recent one, I was asked to create a blog post for some of my corporate clients. And they came to me and said, "We'd like you to write for our blog." And I said, "Sure." And they said, "We'll pay you $500 to do it." I said, "OK, let's do it." And I started doing that. I thought, "Great, why not? I can get a link back from my site." And I didn't just write the bare minimum. And this is important. So I was going up against maybe 10 other people who they had also hired. I was one of 10 bloggers, and they thought, "OK, well, they're all the same. They're all bloggers. Throw some content and hope it works." works. The important thing that I did was try to add a lot more value. So as an example, they said we need 300 to 500 words. I wrote 1,500 words, 2,000 words. I wrote way more than they expected. I added a video. Nobody else added a video. And then I promoted the content. So I sent it to my newsletters, I sent it to my Twitter, I sent it to my Facebook, YouTube, and I'm sure a lot of you listening have read some of that content and hopefully you liked it. So those famous entrepreneur profiles. And we had all this momentum building up and if you compare the articles that we write compared to the articles that other bloggers write, we're blowing them away. It's like 10 times the amount of page views, 100 times the amount of comments. It's really crazy how much better our content does compared to everybody else. So when it came time to renewing a contract and figuring, okay, where do we go next year? Of course they want to come to us. And we also increased our prices, so now it's 5 times that to be able to hire us to create content for their site. All the content that we create is always value-add. It's never, "You need to go buy American Express products," or whatever it is. It's all value-add, but we were able to increase our pricing in a pretty competitive world by a huge factor, and it's because we provided so much extra value to our clients, and they didn't even know they needed that value. They just came and said, "We want a blog post." So I said, "Okay," and then we started going way above and beyond what they expected. So there's an opportunity for you as an entrepreneur, if you can get a client, especially a corporate client to start, I love going after corporate clients because they can be a bigger price ticket for you, they can spend more with you, and if you become an important part of their business, they're going to keep bringing you back. So it's a great way to get introduced and start building up that business. But if you can do it and then slowly start expanding how much work you do with them, so you start on a small scale and you overdeliver like crazy. So you offer a tiny little project, something that's meaningless for them but for you is important. And even if you don't make a lot of money on your first project, you overdeliver like crazy. You, you be the supplier that they've never seen before and they love working with you. You're so responsive. And you're really doing a lot of work that nobody else is doing, then there's going to be other opportunities to work with them and earn more dollars and get more referrals and do repeat projects. So that's really your way in as an entrepreneur. It's how you go up against the big guys. You provide amazing service and keep thinking of ways that you can provide value to your customers beyond what everybody else is doing. So a lot of that comes from talking to your customers and understanding your market. So if you're getting into something new that you have maybe passion for but don't really know much about, that's why it's important to go and do those things like get a job, even on a part-time basis, so you understand the industry and you're able to figure out other ways you can add value. Try to add value on things that are service-related as much as possible, or things that have high perceived value but don't actually cost you a lot of money. Quick example, every— for my business, every quarter we'll pull together some research on entrepreneurs just based on my own website and my own list of people that are asking questions, really common questions that are being asked, and kind of the trends that are happening in the world of entrepreneurship. And we use that to help create our content schedule going forward. So if everybody is asking about starting up, we'll create webinars on starting up, and we'll create more entrepreneur profiles on starting up. People asking about marketing, well, create more marketing content. So we are doing this anyway for our business. What I started doing is working with our corporate partners, and I go and I do a free presentation to them on our findings. So this is stuff that I am already doing. It doesn't take me a lot of time to put together. Maybe make the slides look a little nicer than what we would do for our own internal purposes, but I am not spending a lot of extra time doing it, but it is huge value to my clients. Nobody else is doing this for them, and they're getting a lot of industry knowledge that can help them plan their schedules as well. So again, this is going way above and beyond, and anytime somebody wants to work on a small business entrepreneurship project, they're going to come and talk to us because we're providing all this extra value. So same thing for you. Think of other ways, even if it doesn't cost you a lot of time or money, it will seem as being really important and valuable to your clients. Those are some of the best ways to be able to go out and do it because again, it doesn't cost you too many resources. So your income will definitely depend on how much value you provide, and you want to keep striving as much as you can to provide tons of value to them.
