Peter Szabo (YouTube video) tells a personal story about income instability among coaches and small business owners. He recounts traveling with a friend — a high-ticket coach who had a $50,000 sales month but collected only about $25,000 — and who later said he might not be able to afford his plane ticket home to Australia unless he got another paying client. Szabo uses this anecdote (and other similar examples) to illustrate the ‘feast-or-famine’ problem: large, irregular paydays followed by months of overspending and financial vulnerability. He warns that without predictable income systems, teams, and repeatable client-generation processes, business owners can quickly find themselves broke despite public-facing “highlight reel” claims; he also criticizes parts of the coaching industry for promoting unverified expertise.
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Hey there, Peter Szabo. And this is story time. So I just want to talk about a story of how I was last year in Venice, right? And I was essentially traveling with a buddy of mine, right? He's a high ticket coach. He's selling stuff for 5,000 bucks. And just a month before that, I mean, he had a very high month. I think he collected. Well, he had $50,000 in sales, but actual money collected maybe was half, so maybe $25,000. So he was doing really well. He was doing really well, but in Venice. And then we went to Rome, then we went to Amsterdam. Like, we traveled a little bit, you know, had some fun. Back then. I was actually 17, and, you know, one day he's like, dude, if I don't get one more paying client, I won't be able to purchase my plane ticket back home to Australia. So that wasn't actually the first case. When I saw this happen in real time, I saw a couple other people go through the same thing, you know, the same feast or famine. Like, you have a very high month, but then literally the next few months you kind of spend the same amount you had that you had earned on complete bullshit. You splurge that money. It's as if you had been blessed with a huge amount of income, and then out of nowhere, you find a way to spend it on complete bullshit, right? So it was ridiculous. And it was more than ridiculous. It was scary. It was scary when I thought into that situation, like, hey, what if I'm this guy and I just had a great month, but because my income is not consistent, you know, I don't have systems in place, I don't have my team in place. And I'm pretty much getting clients from social media or messaging people, referrals. Like, if I don't have a predictable system for turning a dollar into 5, 10, or even 20, then I'll be screwed, right? And that's when I kind of woke up and realized that I want to learn from his mistake because he almost could not afford a plane ticket back home to Australia. So eventually he ended up figuring out a way. I also do believe that life always works out. So there's. There's going to be some solution, right? But it was fucking scary. And if you just saw his eyes and just that kind of desperation, you know, that kind of chasing after the money, you know, that kind of fear, it was crazy. And I know, I've been through that too. And I know a lot of you watching, if you're business owners, you might, might have been doing this for a couple of years. I do remember a couple years back I was in the same shoes, you know I might have had like an amazing month, you know made five figures but the next couple months I was spending more money than I had earned and it was just fucking scary. And you know the next couple months go by and you find yourself broke, you find yourself at ground zero having to rebuild this business and what's even more ridiculous that you post all these accomplishments on social media you post your highlight reel of your life on social media and it's not even true. So yeah I hope, I really hope that the expert industry, you know the so called coaches, consultants eventually wake up and that there is going to be some sort of due diligence like people, people start seeing through this bullshit like there's so many people selling stuff out there that they're not true experts of. Interesting isn't it?
