How To Create Offers People Always Want: The Forever Offer Framework

All right. Welcome to day 1 of the Purpose Driven Prosperity Operating System Sprint. You are in the right place if you have signed up and indeed have showed up for day 1, which is about the Forever Offer Framework. You're in the right place if you are ready to create offers that are based on positioning instead of niching and preeminence instead of personas. And if you're ready to build an offer system or an approach to offers that is founded on clarity, conversations, and refining things as you go, what I recommend you get ready to do next is to— for those of you that are Circle member clients who are Circle members, be sure to take good notes. For those of you that are clients who are Inner Circle members, you already have access to the worksheet. And of course, you all will also have access to the Roth replay footage for the 7 days after today. And for those of you in the Inner Circle, you'll have access to the edited and enhanced replay, the worksheets, the GPT prompts, and everything else. And what happens after all of that? Is we're gonna go through this presentation. You're gonna have some time for Q&A. And my hope is that by the end of today, you will have clarity about at least one or two ideations, iterations of your forever offer, and some, uh, ideas and iterations around how you can put that into an idea virus, which will increase spreadability as we move into day 2, which is around the Be a Blessing marketing web. And so unless there are any questions before we begin in earnest, I'm going to share my screen and we're going to get going. So let's just get to the welcome and the framing. Today we're building the foundation that the rest of the operating system depends on. I am a person that believes in reasoning from first principles and using first principles thinking. The only 3 things that you need to succeed in business are an irresistible irresistible enough offer, an eager enough audience, and a process, system, or approach for putting that irresistible enough offer in front of that eager enough audience. And I believe that it really all starts with the offer. That doesn't mean that you don't necessarily start with the audience. I think the audience can be woven into the offer creation process. But for me, it really all comes down to the offer because your offer has to be an expression of who you are, what you're good at and where you belong. So it has to express your core values, guiding principles, and talents, your core talents and real skills. And you will be able to iterate, improve, revise, and, and continue to evolve this offer through being able to do this work out loud and in public in places where people who share your values and need your talents to enhance their lives exist. So I start with the offer. Doesn't mean that it's the most important thing, but in some ways, if you don't have an offer, you really just don't have a business. So the purpose of a forever offer is it is focused on positioning over niching. Positioning is an expression of who you really are, what you're really good at, the difference that only you can make in the way that only you can make it. And it does not rely on some sort of ideal customer avatar and niching your offering down based on demographics or psychographics or pain points around that ideal customer avatar. And it doesn't have to do with niching by features and benefits that help you stand out in a very crowded, confusing marketplace. The forever offer emerges from identity and integrity. It evolves and emerges from who you are, what you're good at, where you belong, and staying true to your core values, your guiding principles, your non-negotiables and boundaries, and the people who need your skills or talents to enhance their lives, but who also align with your values and guiding principles. And so there is no need for any digital marketing tools or hacks. You've all heard me say many times that, you know, one of my positioning statements, one of my idea viruses is business success without digital marketing BS. You can build a business entirely based upon your personality and preferences without any digital marketing nonsense. You don't need ideal customer avatars, you don't need niches, you don't need power offers, you don't need launch systems or anything like that. So a clear forever offer gives you a place to stand within a marketplace. Again, positioning. It reveals the difference that you make, and it provides a path to preeminence. And preeminence is the actual business hack. If you can become the very best in the world at doing what you do in the way only you can do that and refine your offering and your messaging and your marketing around that, you are giving yourself the opportunity to practice and hone your craft, which gives you the path to preeminence, to becoming the best in the world at doing what you do in the way that only you can do it. And the path to preeminence is going to only be interrupted if you don't in fact actually move away from your preeminence by engaging in things that actually don't foster it. So if you're engaging in any digital marketing Nonsense. You're investing time, attention, money, and effort into things that have nothing to do with the difference that you seek to make in the world. So the forever offer gives us a way of avoiding all that, provides us with that path to preeminence. So the paradigm shift for today is you're not going to find your forever offer. You're going to forge it, forge it based on who you are, what you're good at, and where you belong. So part 1, what a forever offer actually is. A forever offer is a clear expression of who you are, what you're great at and where you belong, translated into a single sentence that others can immediately recognize as valuable, credible, and uniquely yours. Again, a forever offer is not a niche. Niches are tactical. A forever offer is foundational. A forever offer is not an ideal customer avatar. Avatars are fake. They're fictional. The scenes that you are going to show up in are made up of real people with real problems, with real needs, wants, dreams, desires, personalities, and preferences. And a forever offer is not a power offer. We are not saying, I help X ideal customer avatar achieve specific Y ridiculous dream without having to do Z, anything that they don't want to do. So typical power offer, and you've all seen these on social media, if not in your inbox, is I help fintech professional women who are single moms lose 30 pounds in 30 days without changing their daily routines or having to do any diet or exercise. That's a typical kind of power offer statement. Maybe I'm going a little bit into the ridiculous or the absurd, but I'm not far off. And power offers have only got increasingly ridiculous sounding and increasingly overpromise what they can actually deliver, especially given that most folks are not going to engage in doing the work necessary to make the change happen because that's the only way that people are trying to stand out. It used to be that people that were targeting coaches would say, I help coaches achieve consistent $5,000K months without having to pay for ads. And then it was $10,000 a month, and then it was $20,000 a month. Now it's $40K or $50K. The promises get more ridiculous than they get increasingly impossible to actually deliver on, which only creates more skepticism and cynicism in the marketplace. Forever Offers don't depend on any of that kind of power offer nonsense. So what are the 3 anchors of preeminence? The 3 anchors of preeminence— this is the heart of the Forever Offer— is who are you? Who you are, who you really are. What are your actual values? The values that we can witness being expressed through your day-to-day actions, what we see you doing out loud and in public. What are your guiding principles? What are your non-negotiables and boundaries? What are the things that you absolutely don't do? What is your personality, your preferences? What's your tone, your timbre, your temperament? This is all part of your, your positioning substrate. Again, the heart of a forever offer is it's an expression of who you really are. What are your core values? What are your guiding principles? What are your non-negotiables? This is the thing that everything rests on. When you're thinking about your forever offer, you are starting with who, and the who you need to start with is you. Who are you really? What do you stand for? What do you refuse to compromise on? What's the tone, pace, style that you naturally operate within? And what energizes you versus what drains you? Your forever offer should be able to express all of that because this is inherently part of who you are. The second part is what you are great at. This is where we're talking about talents and what we often call soft skills, what Seth Godin calls real skills, and, or you can think of them as the hard skills that you learned in school and on the job, but that also reflect your core talents and those soft skills or real skills that you're really good at. For me, examples that I have had reflected back to me by clients and by community members, the things that people say, these are your soft skills, Scott: pattern recognition, problem diagnosis, insight articulation, emotional steadiness, teaching, training, facilitation, Simplifying complexity, creative reframing, and disciplined execution. These are the things that I have worked really hard at. They're things that come naturally to me, of course, but I have worked really hard at refining them and I practice them every day in my work with you all here. I think everyone here is a client right now. With members of the community and with my Substack readership in general, I am always trying to demonstrate that these are my core talents and Layer over that the core values, guiding principles, and non-negotiables that are also part of who I am. And then the third part of the Preeminence Framework that is the foundation of the Forever Offer is where do you belong? What's your scene? And your scene is the orbit you share of people who share your values and need your talents to enhance their lives. This is not your ideal customers. Ideal customers are called ideal customers because they don't exist. They are idealized versions of the kind of person you might want to work with. Your scene is made up of real people with real personalities and real problems and real aspirations that they want you to help them solve or achieve. They are not manufactured pretend personas that you're going to write fake bios for and create AI-generated images of and paste on your laptop and pretend to try to talk to every single day. So the reflection cues here are: who naturally resonates with the way that you think? Who are the people in your current circle of friends, family, network of, of influence or peers? Who are the people that seek you out for your perspective without being asked? Who is your reputation already alive with? Talk about that more in a second, and whose lives get better when your strengths are applied. You know, one of the things about a forever offer being founded in your personality preferences, values, talents, and where you are seeking preeminence is that because it is not niched necessarily, although a niche may emerge, you are in fact often relying on your reputation amongst the people who already know you and hopefully like you and hopefully trust you. And it doesn't matter how big that circle or network is. I was very lucky in that I started with a reputation built in Seth Godin's Akimbo Workshops as a coach and head coach in all of his different programs. And I had a very good reputation amongst a lot of people that are you know, associated with Alt MBA, Kimbal Workshops, and Seth's ecosystem in general. But I've worked with folks who claim to not have more than 100 people in their Gmail address book. You start where you are with what you have, and you protect the reputation that you already have with those people. And if you do it properly, and you don't succumb to the digital nonsense of ideal customer avatars and power offers and niches and all those things, not only will you maintain a good reputation, but you will be able to build upon that. And if you do great work with the people who already know, like, and trust you and delight them so thoroughly, they will tell their network or their network will notice such a profound change within them that they can't help but ask, hey, what the heck happened to you? And when they say, oh, I'm working with this fantastic person, so-and-so, it will help build and continue to cultivate and nurture and enlarge that reputation. So preeminence defined is being the best in the world at doing what you do and the way only you can do it. And that is the goal, the foundation, and how your forever offer is going to be expressed. All right, so let's get into the meat and potatoes of it. There is a very simple template that I have adopted for creating your first draft or your first articulation of a forever offer that comes from Clay Ebert. He is a, a someone that I know through our mutual association with Seth Godin. I think that this was part of the marketing seminar, but it might have been part of the Alt MBA. It might have been both. But his template is very simple. Clay says the way to craft what he calls a, uh, a powerful introduction is some version of, I help people achieve a result. And what you are going to do to start to ideate and iterate and improve your forever offers, start with this template. So the, again, a forever offer is not a singular fixed thing. I'll, and I'm gonna walk you through some examples that, that will illustrate this. What you're looking for is a small collection of forever offers that you can kind of pull out given whatever context you're in. I use a different forever offer when I'm talking to my friends and neighbors in Floyd, Virginia. I have another set of forever offer statements that I use when I'm talking to people that solo entrepreneurs, if I'm in a situation where I'm surrounded by a lot of solo entrepreneurs, if I am talking to friends and associates of my experience with being in the Modern Elder Academy, I have a different set. And if I'm hanging out with people that might know me as a musician or as someone that comes from, you know, Seth Godin's ecosystem as a head coach in Akimbo Workshops, I have other versions of this. So it's not a singular fixed thing. You're going to have a collection of them. They're going to evolve and be revised over time. And think of forever offer statements as experiments and conversation starters. You're going to test them in the wild. You're going to keep the ones that work, and you're going to either fix or get rid of the ones that don't work. So here's some examples, and I'm— this is kind of an evolution of my forever offer statements. My very first forever offer was, I help people get clear about and closer to what they really want. That was literally the tagline of my LinkedIn and my Facebook and my Instagram and at the time Twitter. And is it vague? Yes. Is it really general? Yes. Did it work? You betcha. And that was in part because I was already connected with people on various platforms through my association with Akimba Workshops, the Alt MBA, and, and work I had done on my own as a coach. Over time, as I worked with people and as I vetted prospects and collected the data, analyzed the data, and strategized based on the data, the first iteration of my forever offer was I help solopreneurs. Again, I help people. I'm getting more specific here. Solopreneurs achieve a result, build a business that funds and fits their ideal lifestyle. And that was probably my forever offer for at least the first half of this past year. Worked incredibly well, actually the first half of last year. This version of my forever offer, I can credit as being one of the force multipliers for helping me earn my I help people hit their annual revenue goal before the end of June, 2 years in a row. But I refined it further again based on analysis, collection analysis and strategizing based on data. And it became, I help solopreneurs optimize their business to fit the life they really want. Why that small nuanced shift in the messaging of Forever Offer? Because when I said I help solopreneurs build businesses, It attracted a lot of people that were at the very beginning, maybe people that for whom solopreneurship was more of a dream than it was an actual practice at that time. And by saying I help solopreneurs optimize, I was targeting people with existing businesses, which provided me with greater leverage because it's easier for me to help someone optimize a system that already exists to help it work better than it is to help someone figure out what their offer, initial offering is going to be, what their audience is going to be, and how to, and how to get that offer in front of that audience. It most recently has iterated to, I help purpose-driven solopreneurs grow their business without the digital marketing hamster wheel, right? So by adding that without the digital marketing hamster wheel, there is an element of without doing the thing they don't want to do, but I'm targeting a pain point that was revealed to me through data collection, analysis, and strategizing based on that. Because over and over and over again, what people were responding to was, hey Scott, how do you do this without spending countless hours on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram or what have you? So the breakdown is, again, how do you help meaning how do you develop or optimize someone's business or life? People— who are those people? For me, it's purpose-driven solopreneurs. And what's the result that you help them get? For me, it's some variation of work-life integration. Now, as you can see through that analysis of that evolution, a very distinct niche has been emerging. From the days where I said I help people get clear about and closer to what they want to. I help purpose-driven solopreneurs optimize their business to better fund and fit their ideal lifestyle without the digital marketing gymnastics. But very, very recently, I have zoomed all the way back out to something that has a much broader through line, which is I help people craft their unique path to a life of greater prosperity and peace of mind, doing work that matters with people they care about. Because I wanted to weave back in those people that are in midlife or some other life transition where, you know, relationships are changing, career shifts are happening, maybe retirement is happening. I want to help those people to find the work that they're meant to do now in this next phase of life. And by just speaking to solopreneurs, I felt like I was excluding those people. Doesn't mean that 80%, 90% of the people I've, I've taken on board since changing my forever offer aren't still solopreneurs. They are, but over time the data will tell me, does this iteration of my forever offer help achieve the result I want, which is to, without excluding my solopreneur brothers and sisters, does it help bring in people that are looking for something that is more along the lines of finding a life purpose in the second half of life, living a legacy, finding their life's next true calling. So the important framing here is that your forever offer begins with this statement: I help people achieve a result. And it will be refined through the things that we've been talking about in other workshops, the icebreaker questions, the diagnostic conversations, just impromptu conversations that happen online or in person, iteration based on evidence, and continuing to refine and develop your preeminence over time. The forever offer emerges through interaction, not introspection. So one of the reasons I'm giving you this tight little framework based on Clay Ebert's model is it gives you something that you can write today. After this call and you can actually practice today. You can post it as a tagline on Substack, LinkedIn, what have you. You can include it in your Gmail signature line. You can put this, put your forever offer line out there and see how it does when you're testing for resonance. So the prompt for you here is what is the clearest, simplest, most honest sentence that expresses the difference you make and who that difference is for. The bottom line here is that you can start wherever you want to start. If it is undeniable that niching and power offers work well, if you're trying to get a quick test of resonance and maybe some quick sales, the problem with starting with niching and starting with ideal customer avatars and starting with power offers is you are focused on a tool or tactic to get this quick win, and it doesn't take too long before you get locked into some sort of offering or working with some sort of persona that you don't want to do. Like, that was exactly my experience. I had a lot of help crafting a, a niche and a power offer, and within months was earning $10,000 a month, but I was miserable because I was doing work I didn't like to do with people I didn't really care about. And it was very hard to say after another 5 or 6 months, you know, this just doesn't make me happy. I'm going to blow this up and try something else. So I think it's okay if, depending on where you are at, if you have some clarity and you want to try some things that are a little more niche, Go for it. If you're just getting started and you want to just start with a general statement to see who nibbles, who, who it connects with, who it resonates with, that's a great way to start because you can always refine based on what the conversations and the data from those conversations is telling you rather than trying to reverse engineer a result based on a bunch of guesses about a fictional person who may or may not want the thing that you believe that they want. Again, we'll get into more detail in just a second. Hey, it's Scott Perry. And if this has been helpful so far and you want the rest of Day One plus the full 3-day Purpose Driven Prosperity Model Operating System Accelerator, here's how to get it. Inside the Inner Circle, you get the complete Forever Offer Framework session, the Be a Blessing marketing session, and the Close the Gap session, along with all the worksheets, presentation notes, and Cornerman Coaching app to help you implement the system in your business right now. To watch the full replay and unlock the entire accelerator, upgrade to the Inner Circle on Substack. You'll find the link in the description and in the show notes. Just tap the link in the episode description or visit my Substack and choose the Inner Circle All Access option.