Why I turned down $20,000 of (guaranteed) revenue

A New Year is upon us, and it’s got me feeling frisky! (Happy New Year, btw 🥳)

No, I didn’t do a Dry January.

No, I didn’t set an unachievable physical goal.

(I’m far from surfing overhead waves on a short board.)

And no, I didn’t set a single resolution.

(After all, 80% of them don’t make it out of January.)

But on January 4th – the first business day of 2021 – I said no to $20,000 of revenue.

I got receipts, y’all.

And here’s another:

Now this isn’t a weird flex. I’m actually not sure this is a good idea. But I want you to know: I’m committed to eating my own cooking.

My shift from $1,000/hr work to $10,000/hr work

I paused my coaching practice indefinitely. (If you’re an existing client reading this, you’re grandfathered for life!)

Coaching was roughly 80% of my 2018 revenue and 30% of 2019.

Coaching is quite lucrative, a typical engagement is $10,000 over 3 months.

Coaching is the ultimate $1,000/hour work. It’s the pathway to a damn good life by creating demand for your unique skill set. Yet it doesn’t have any leverage.

Leverage is the difference between linear and exponential growth. In that post, I described leverage as follows:

“The business keeps moving, when you stop working,” is my pithy definition of leverage. Leverage is the often overlooked distinction between “working on your business and working in your business” (a phrase pioneered by Michael Gerber’s business classic The E-myth Revisited).

This year I’m committed to “working on my business” and “not working in my business.”

It’s painful to turn down guaranteed income (that is also paid up front).

It might actually be outright foolish.

But like I said. I don’t want to just write blog posts about $10K work. I want to live it.

What is $10K work?

$10,000 per hour work is the combination of unique skills and leverage.

For RadReads, that currently means the following:

  • Leveraging teaching: I love teaching, especially when it combines incorporates technology. I’m going to build out the offerings for the $10K Institute.
  • Leveraging relationships: Continuing to scale the readership by partnering with incredible creators. (We’ve got collabs with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Kyle Westway, Ali Abdaal and Chris Sparks, just in January!)
  • Leveraging community: Currently 25,000 strong and we’re doubling down on creating more serendipity, accountability, and shared growth amongst our members.
  • Leveraging talent: We’re looking to expand the team in Q3 (Head of Education and No-code Operations)

So where did I take the newfound hours from halting my coaching? The upcoming bootcamp Your Roadmap for an Epic 2021 (beginning on 1/18). This free 5 day event covers the quixotic nature of $10K work.

It will take me 15 hours to produce

It will employ our small team’s resources for 2 weeks

It will generate zero revenue (and cost us money to put together)

it kicks off a year of shared learning and growth for the RadReads community. And as I wrote in the original $10K work manifesto:

$10,000/hour work is the exact opposite of its $10/hour brethren. There’s no swoosh sound when you complete it. Zero dopamine. The results aren’t seen for years, if not decades. But the trickiest part about $10,000/hour work is that the actual nature of the work itself is elusive.

So did I make the right decision?

Only time will tell.

Your path from $10/hr to $10,000/hr work begins with our Flagship course – Supercharge Your Productivity which is currently open for enrollment.

Supercharge Your Productivity

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