Enough with the business for a bit. Today we’ll explore a fundamental aspect of making sure we’re stronger for longer as we age. For that I’m turning the mic over to my better half, Samantha Clark. ~ Brian

Remember when fat was going to kill us all? When we were pouring skim milk on our Special K and wondering why we were ravenous an hour later?

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’ve been equally wrong about protein.

Like, by a lot.

For decades, the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) told us we need 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. For a 150-pound person, that’s about 54 grams a day. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly one large chicken breast. Or three eggs and a heaping cup of Greek yogurt.

For the entire day.

But now we are in a literal protein pandemonium. And if you’re confused by the violent swing to protein-infused everything — and more than a little skeptical of the marketing — you’re not alone.

My purpose here is to give some historical context to our current macronutrient frenzy before addressing the evidentiary basis for the claims that you’re not getting enough. And just maybe convince you that the protein hype of today isn’t hype at all.

The 1940s Called. They Want Their Science Back

Let’s talk about where the RDA came from.

It was 1941. Hitler was invading Russia, Citizen Kane just hit theaters, and the U.S. government was trying to figure out how to feed troops and ration food during World War II. They needed a baseline and landed on:

What’s the absolute minimum nutrition people need to not get sick?

Enter the Food and Nutrition Board, tasked by the National Defense Advisory Commission with creating standards for food relief efforts for both the military and civilians facing rationing. Let’s be clear on what this committee was not. It was not formed to determine how people could thrive well into their later years. Nor was it concerned with helping people gain and maintain muscle mass. Instead, the question before this committee was, “What keeps people from malnutrition while we’re at war?”

The answer came from a methodology called nitrogen balance studies. Here’s how that works. Protein is the only macronutrient that contains nitrogen. So, researchers measured how much protein nitrogen the study subjects consumed versus how much they excreted in their urine, feces, sweat, hair, and nails.

When inputs equaled outputs, that is, when they were not losing more nitrogen than they were taking in, they had reached “nitrogen equilibrium.” And that level became the protein RDA.

The problem is that this method literally measures the point at which you stop wasting away. It’s designed to prevent deficiency, not optimize function. It’s like measuring the minimum amount of sleep you need to not crash your car, rather than the amount you need to actually feel good and perform well.

The Current State of the Field

Fast forward to the 21st century. We can now conduct nitrogen balance studies with far greater precision than wartime researchers could. And we have newer methods with intimidating names like “indicator amino acid oxidation” (IAAO), which — instead of just tracking nitrogen in and out — measures how the human body actually uses specific amino acids at different protein-intake levels.

It’s like switching out a vintage wristwatch for an atomic clock.

Here’s what these newer methods consistently show: When researchers re-analyze the same old nitrogen balance data using better statistical methods, protein requirements come out 16% higher than the current RDA. When they use IAAO methods, requirements are 55% higher.

We’re talking about needing 50% more protein at baseline than the RDA.

Multiple studies using IAAO methodology across different populations — young adults, older adults, pregnant women, children, athletes — all show the same thing: The RDA is way too low. In fact, the RDA appears to be an outlier on the low end compared with every other approach to measuring protein needs.

So if the RDA is out, what’s the new number? The research converges on 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight as optimal for adults. That’s 50–100% more than the RDA. For our hypothetical 150-pound person, we’re talking 80–110 grams daily instead of 54.

Why Did It Take So Long?

Here’s something that applies far beyond the topic of nutrition: Official standards don’t just codify scientific findings; they ossify the cultural assumptions of the era in which they were created. The 1941 RDA was a reflection of wartime’s scarcity thinking, limited methodologies, and a “minimum viable human” approach to nutrition.

But once those standards got etched into institutional practice, the predictable happened: People and institutions whose careers were built on those standards had a stake in defending them. Admitting the foundation was flawed meant questioning decades of dietary advice, rewriting nutrition curricula, and awkwardly explaining to millions of people that the number on the cereal box was wrong.

So as time passes, the evidence evolves and assumptions get challenged, but the official number stays frozen in 1941. The RDA for protein hasn’t meaningfully changed in over 80 years not because the science supports the old number, but because changing it requires institutional willpower that is only now starting to emerge.

But if you think the current (and overdue) emphasis on protein is a new-fangled thing, sit tight. We’ve actually been through this all before.

When “Most Important” Became “Eat All of It”

The word “protein” comes from the Greek “proteios,” meaning “of the first rank” or “primary.” Dutch chemist Gerardus Johannes Mulder coined it in 1838 when scientists of the era believed they’d discovered the most essential component of nutrition.

And while they weren’t entirely wrong, they did a very human thing and completely overshot the runway.

The First Time We Took the Focus on Protein Too Far

After the discovery of the protein macronutrient, the 19th century became the golden age of protein worship. In 1877, German physiologist Carl von Voit declared that a working man needed 118 grams of protein daily — a number that came from his observations of what Bavarian laborers ate, then blessing it as optimal.

His student Max Rubner took it further, ranking foods by their protein content as if it were the only metric that mattered. “Flesh makes flesh” became the rallying cry of an era convinced that protein was the master nutrient, the one ring to rule them all.

And then came the backlash.

The “flesh makes flesh” doctrine led to some spectacularly bad ideas. Arctic explorers and frontier settlers learned the hard way that trying to survive on lean game alone causes death even with a full stomach. The condition is called “rabbit starvation” or “mal de caribou” by northern Indigenous peoples, who’d seen it happen to desperate Europeans more than once. The Inuit knew how to avoid it, which is why they prized fat-rich seal and whale over lean caribou.

So, what happens during rabbit starvation? Our bodies prefer fat and carbs for fuel because they break down cleanly into energy — we even store them for lean times.

But protein is different. Burning amino acids for energy releases ammonia, a toxin your liver normally clears via the urea cycle. When a lean person (say, an Arctic explorer) continually eats protein alone, ammonia accumulates faster than the urea cycle can clear it. In days to weeks, the liver and kidneys become overloaded with this toxic byproduct, and victims suffer nausea, diarrhea, headaches, fatigue, and eventually death… despite being technically “fed.”

Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson documented this extensively after spending years with the Inuit in the early 1900s. He noted that experienced Arctic hunters would sometimes throw away rabbit meat entirely during lean times.

In fact, he was so intrigued by what he’d seen that in 1928 he checked himself into the metabolic ward of New York’s Bellevue Hospital and deliberately induced rabbit starvation by eating only lean meat with the fat removed. Symptoms appeared within days. When fat was added back in, he recovered.

His experiment confirmed what the Inuit had known: The body needs something in addition to protein to actually burn for fuel. As for the upper limit when you don’t have fat reserves to fall back on, it’s about 35% of total calories — a ceiling that rises and falls with how much you’re eating overall.

So, Then We Swung the Other Way

By the early 20th century, the pendulum had already reached its far end. The protein obsession gave way to vitamin mania (when scurvy and pellagra were the scary diseases), then calorie counting, and then the great fat panic of the late 20th century.

Each era convinced itself it had found THE thing to fear or worship.

Protein quietly slipped into the background, nominally “important” but certainly not a priority. With the RDA already locked in at the wartime bare minimum, protein was already sidelined. The war on dietary fat through the ’70s and ’80s finished the job, and carbohydrates won by default.

As a result, bread, cereal, rice, and pasta occupied the entire base of the 1992 pyramid, with 6–11 servings daily. The most protein-dense foods got one undifferentiated tier shared with dairy and a modest 2–3-serving maximum that was intended as a ceiling, not a floor. Fats got a tiny triangle at the very tip, with instructions to essentially disappear.

We went from “protein is everything” to “you get plenty of protein from grains and vegetables” without ever stopping to ask what “enough” actually meant.

Next week, we’ll dive into what we now know, and what that means in practice:

• Why you can’t trust labels

• The Leucine Factor

• The truth about supplements

• The Protein Tax

• Why older muscles get “hard of hearing”

• How to fight back at midlife

Keep going-

Samantha (and Brian)

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further: flashback

🎶 Anthrax & Public Enemy - Bring The Noise, Attack of the Killer B's, 1991 🎶

The greatest rap/metal mashup is either Linkin Park & Jay-Z with Points Of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer, or Anthrax & Public Enemy doing Bring The Noise. I can’t decide, it’s up to you. (YouTube)

further: sharing

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Down below is the replay of the Q&A we did on Friday for those of you doing the Sovereign Startup Foundations challenge.

We kicked it off with a preview of the new Further Premium course that will be launching once SSF concludes. It’s called Leading Expert Launchpad, and it’s an all new and improved version of the concepts introduced in Personal Enterprise Accelerator and Business of Expertise Blueprint.

Read more

Halò from Bonnie Scotland!

C’est vrai, we’ve departed France and are now in Scotland for a wee bit, before flitting off to Copenhagen at the end of the month.

And in the spirit of all things Scottish, I’ve officially retired the Further tagline of “Live Long and Prosper” (I think some people thought this was a Star Trek blog anyway).

It’s now “Lang may yer lum reek.” That means “May you live a long and healthy life,” but it literally translates to “Long may your chimney smoke.” Och aye!

Back to France for a bit.

Our second extended stay in Grenoble was everything we’d hoped for. It’s such a great town, surrounded on all sides by mountains, and as the “Capital of the French Alps,” it’s exquisite for both hiking and as a jumping off point to the best skiing in France.

I’m still bad at French. But my pronunciation improved quite a bit this time, which is more than half the battle with the language. I’m still doubling down on Spanish, though, given that Panama and Mexico will be our primary home bases.

After a closing whirlwind tour of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, we hopped on the Eurostar from Paris to London and ventured on to Scotland. I have to admit, after two months in France, I was looking forward to being in an English-speaking country. But after a week in Glasgow, I’m not convinced that’s what they’re actually speaking here.

Anyway, we’re splitting time between Edinburgh and Glasgow, with a couple of day trips into the Highlands. A month is nowhere near long enough to get a handle on Scotland, so this is just a warm-up for next time.

But we really do need to head to Denmark for July. Our son is doing a study-abroad program for architecture in Copenhagen, and we need to stop by and hassle comfort him. What 21-year-old doesn’t want to see his parents on his first solo trip to Europe? 😏

And no worries, the business is running just fine despite all the migration. In fact, we just kicked off the second week of the Sovereign Startup Foundations challenge.

There’s still time to enroll and catch up if you join us today. If not, we’ll drop some health-related knowledge for you in the newsletter over the coming weeks.

Lang may yer lum reek…

(a.k.a. keep going.)

Brian

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further: flashback

🎶 Saturday Night – Bay City Rollers, So I Married An Axe Murderer, 1997 🎶

“Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers was a Gen X childhood staple at the skating rink, but hearing it in “So I Married An Axe Murderer” ups the Scottish signal significantly. Charlie (Mike Myers) is easily upstaged in the film by his father Stuart MacKenzie, also played by Myers. “Heed! Pants! Now!” (YouTube)

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Here’s something that will sound backward at first.

The more expertise you’ve accumulated over a career, the harder it is to see its value.

Not because the value isn’t there. It’s enormous. But because expertise, once deeply internalized, stops feeling like expertise.

It just feels like thinking. Like common sense. Like just the way things work.

Psychologists call it the “curse of knowledge.” I call it the Expertise Paradox. The people with the most to offer are often the last ones to recognize it.

After decades in your field, you’ve developed something that can’t be taught in a classroom or bought with a certification: pattern recognition. You know which problems look simple but aren’t, which decisions look obvious but are actually traps. You don’t have to think through these things anymore; you just know.

And that’s precisely why you discount the value. If it’s effortless for you, it must be effortless for everyone, right?

Not even close.

What’s effortless for you after decades is genuinely hard for someone at year three. The gap between where they are and where you are is exactly what clients pay to close.

The Second Expertise Paradox

There’s another paradox embedded within the first, and it’s the reason so many experienced professionals struggle when they first go independent.

The corporate job was never the right container for your expertise.

It was designed to extract value from that expertise at a fixed price, determined by whoever controlled the budget. Your expertise might have been worth $500,000 a year in actual value to the company. But they paid you $120,000 because that’s what the role was budgeted for.

When you’re an employee, your expertise is priced by your employer.

When you’re sovereign, its value is based on what someone will pay to get the outcome your expertise produces.

That’s a very different number.

But the shift presents a challenge. People leave the corporate world with decades of valuable expertise, but they have no idea how to structure it as something clients can buy.

They know they’re good at what they do. They just don’t know how to package it, price it, or position it in a way that makes the value obvious to someone who doesn’t already understand it.

So they default to what they know: hourly billing, project estimates, scope documents that look like the ones they used to write internally.

And they wonder why it’s so hard to communicate what they’re worth.

What Clients Actually Buy

Here’s what changed my own thinking about this years ago.

Clients don’t buy your expertise. They can’t see it, touch it, or evaluate it directly.

What they buy is the outcome your expertise produces.

The difference sounds subtle. It’s not.

When you sell expertise, you’re asking clients to understand what you know and why it matters. That’s a hard sell, because if they already understood it, they wouldn’t need you.

When you sell the outcome, you’re making it simple:

Here’s the result you’ll get. Here’s what changes for you. Here’s the before and after.

They can evaluate that. They know whether they want that outcome. They know what it’s worth to them to get it.

But here’s the thing… They’re not just buying the promised outcome your expertise produces. They’re buying trust in you to actually deliver it.

Surprisingly, neuroscience tells us that trust is more of a vibe than the product of disciplined analysis. It’s essentially pattern recognition — your prospect’s brain deciding in milliseconds whether you’re safe, credible, familiar.

So what drives that signal? It’s how you show up in your marketing and with clients. Whether your communication style matches how they think. Whether your values align with theirs. Whether something about the way you explain the problem makes them think:

This person gets it.

That’s your human architecture in action: It becomes the thing people trust before they can articulate why. And it’s why building a business on your actual configuration matters, because clients sense it.

Your expertise is how you deliver the outcome. Your human architecture is how you earn the trust to get hired in the first place.

Both matter. You can’t sell one without the other.

The AI Expertise Amplification

Here’s where it gets even more interesting.

AI didn’t make expertise less valuable. It made it more valuable by making the execution layer around expertise cheaper and faster.

Twenty years ago, if you had deep expertise in marketing strategy, you still needed a team to execute the research, drafting, analysis, and implementation. Your expertise was bottlenecked by your ability to coordinate all of that.

Now? AI handles that execution layer. You provide the strategic direction, the judgment calls, the pattern recognition that comes from having done this a hundred times. AI does the research, drafting, revision, and formatting.

Your expertise is no longer bottlenecked by execution. It’s amplified by it.

Which means the outcome you can deliver (i.e., the tangible result a client gets) is bigger, faster, and more comprehensive than it’s ever been.

But — and this is the linchpin — only if you know how to structure your expertise as an outcome-based service instead of selling your time.

Discover, Develop, and Enhance Your Expertise

Week 2 of the Sovereign Startup Foundations Challenge is specifically about what I call your Expertise Engine:

• How to surface the expertise you’ve internalized so deeply you can barely see it anymore.

• How to understand what it’s actually worth when it’s no longer priced by an employer.

• How to structure it as something clients can buy. Not your time, not your knowledge, but the result your expertise produces.

• How to position it so the value is obvious to someone who doesn’t already have your pattern recognition.

• And how to use AI to amplify the delivery without diluting the expert judgment that makes it valuable in the first place.

If you’ve been in your field for decades, you have more value to offer than you think.

You just need to learn how to see it, structure it, and sell it.

Not as credentials on a resume, or hours on a timesheet.

But as outcomes that change what’s possible for the people who need what you know.

Leave a comment

Keep going-

Brian

P.S. The Sovereign Startup Foundations Challenge starts June 1.

Four weeks that build to a marketable outcome unique to you. In one month, you’ll have a personalized blueprint for turning your decades of expertise into your own sovereign startup.

• Week 1 reveals how to build a business and a marketing approach that leads with what makes you genuinely irreplaceable.

• Week 2 specifically tackles the Expertise Paradox: How to surface, structure, and sell what you actually know as outcome-based services.

• Week 3 focuses on the AI layer of your business and building your version of it. You’ll see two detailed case studies, then map your own execution layer.

• Week 4 is about understanding why movements transcend marketing, finding the one you belong to, and identifying the specific position inside it that’s yours to occupy.

Join us to build your own foundation!

further: flashback

🎶 Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock - It Takes Two, It Takes Two, 1988 🎶

"There are many critics and listeners who claim that Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock's 'It Takes Two' is the greatest hip-hop single ever cut," notes music critic Stephen Thomas. RIP Rob Base, who last Friday reunited with DJ EZ Rock at the eternal house party in the great beyond. (YouTube)

further: sharing

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Grab your unique referral code here.

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Legendary producer Rick Rubin doesn’t make musicians sound like other artists.

He makes them sound more like themselves.

Johnny Cash’s American Recordings doesn’t sound like the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill or Jay Z’s 99 Problems. The Red Hot Chili Peppers don’t sound like System of a Down, The Strokes, or Slayer.

Yet Rubin produced all of them and many more.

His genius isn’t in imposing a formula. It’s drawing out what’s already there — the unique voice, the authentic perspective, the thing that can’t be copied because it’s inherently theirs.

Here’s what makes Rubin’s success remarkable. He’s not a musician. He doesn’t play an instrument. He can’t read music. By traditional industry standards, he shouldn’t be qualified to produce anyone.

What he has instead are “soft skills” that can’t be taught from a manual. Things like intuition, taste, the ability to create an environment where artists feel safe enough to be vulnerable, and the judgment to know when something is right versus when it’s just good.

“In a sea of information, the more yours is personal, the more it’s not like hers or his or theirs. It’s yours,” Rubin says. “There are different points of view around us. If we’re all thinking the same thing, it’s boring. Why would we make anything if everyone thinks the same thing? What makes us interesting are the differences.”

Building a successful digital business works the same way. And I should know, because I’ve been doing it that way for twenty years.

What Happened When I Stopped Fighting My Wiring

Back when I started my first online business in 1998, there were no “gurus” to emulate.

Back then, it was a new frontier, and everyone was figuring things out for themselves, yours truly included. For example, I taught myself copywriting by reading every book I could find and taking a course that arrived in a giant three-ring binder.

There was no “magic” formula, and no one pretended there was.

But I did carry certain preconceptions about what “starting a business” meant. They were shaped by societal messaging about entrepreneurship, combined with the intense law-firm environment that had been my only “grown-up” job.

That combination calcified my belief that starting a business is really hard. It’s a torturous grind. You’re meant to suffer in order to deserve the reward.

Sure, it’s hard. But I had this “whatever it takes” mentality that put me in models and roles that were guaranteed to make me miserable, thinking that’s just the way it is.

It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And yet, I was so determined to prove I could succeed outside of law that I did. And I wasn’t happy about anything other than the money.

After seven years, I decided to make a drastic change. To create a business that was perfectly suited for who I was and how I was wired. Even if that meant I made less, I was intent on actually enjoying my work and becoming a reasonably happy person.

We know what happened next. I did better financially than I had ever contemplated. Three highly profitable seven-figure companies. One highly profitable eight-figure firm.

Right now, everyone is telling you that you must make your business “as human as possible” in the age of artificial intelligence. I’m telling you this has always been a smart move.

You need a business that’s genuinely yours based on who you are, what you know, and why you do it.

And that business needs to fit you like a second skin, so you can express your winning difference to the world.

Your Wiring Determines Your Optimal Style

Every successful business is designed around someone’s temperament. The question is, whose?

Gary Vaynerchuk’s business works brilliantly… for Gary Vaynerchuk. It’s designed around extroverted, high-energy, constant-content, relentless-networking wiring.

When you try to build Gary’s business in your body, you’re not just risking burnout. You’re building something that only works if you’re someone like Gary. Even then, you look like a knock-off poseur.

Because you’re not Gary. You’re you.

And that’s not a limitation. That’s your competitive advantage.

Your temperament determines how you naturally show up, both in your marketing and with clients:

• Whether you’re energized by networking or drained by it.

• Whether you think by writing or by talking.

• Whether you prefer depth with a few people or breadth with many.

These aren’t preferences you can change with willpower. About one-third of your personality is genetic. That immutable third is your hardware, not your software.

When you build a business that works with that hardware rather than fights it, you create something no one else can replicate. Because it’s designed for your specific human configuration.

Instead, here’s what most people do. They find a successful business owner and copy what that person does, or follow the “formula” of their favorite guru.

• That successful person networks constantly. So they force themselves to network constantly, even though it drains them.

• The guru creates daily video content. So they try to create daily video content, even though they think better in writing.

• This month’s new guru runs group coaching programs. So they launch a group coaching program, even though they’re energized by one-on-one interactions, not group dynamics.

Then they wonder why it feels so hard. Why they’re always exhausted. Why what works for others doesn’t work for them.

The problem isn’t lack of discipline or willpower. It’s that they’re running software designed for someone else’s hardware.

I don’t have to tell you that’s not sustainable. What I’m saying is it’s not necessary.

There’s a different path. One where you build on your own wiring instead of copying someone else’s. One where work doesn’t feel like you’re fighting yourself daily.

On this path, where you design a business around your biology, work doesn’t feel like work anymore. But the biggest benefit of designing your business around your specific wiring is that it’s harder for anyone else to replicate.

Sure, they can try to copy what you do (and if you’re successful, trust me, they will).

But all that does is remind people of the real thing, much like the Pepsi Challenge ultimately reinforced Coca-Cola’s position as market leader. Because clients sense the difference between authentic and performative.

Your Wiring Determines Your Movement

Your wiring doesn’t just determine how you market. It determines which business movements you’re naturally drawn to.

The things that frustrate you about the status quo aren’t random. They’re connected to your values, which are in turn connected to your temperament.

If you’re biologically wired to value autonomy and independence, you’re naturally drawn to movements that fight against systems of control. The sovereignty movement. The location-independence movement. The “own your digital assets and distribution” movement.

If you’re wired to value depth and mastery, you’re drawn to movements that fight against superficiality. The “slow business” movement. The craftsmanship movement. The “quality over quantity” movement.

If you’re wired to value community and connection, you’re drawn to movements that fight against isolation. The “third place” movement. The local-first movement. The community-building movement.

And here’s the key: Once you understand your wiring, you don’t choose your movement. You come to recognize it. Because you understand which movements already resonate with who you actually are.

And that recognition — that authentic alignment between your wiring and your movement — is something competitors can’t copy.

When someone tries to become a leading voice in a movement they don’t actually believe in, it shows. The language feels borrowed. The passion feels manufactured. The conviction feels thin.

But when you’re positioning in a movement that matches your values, which stem from your temperament, everything lands differently:

• You’re not performing belief. You’re expressing it.

• You’re not strategically choosing positions. You’re articulating what you truly believe.

• You’re not trying to sound like a leader. You are a leader, because this movement is fighting for what you’ve been fighting for all along.

This is the unreplicable combination. Your specific wiring, working in your natural marketing mode, positioned in a movement that matches your actual values.

No one else has that exact combination. No one else can occupy that exact position.

In other words, that’s your “moat.”

Your Wiring Is What You Must Discover

This article explored why human architecture matters. Why building on your wiring, rather than following formulas, creates a moat no one else can cross.

What it didn’t show you is how you specifically are wired.

It took me seven years of business models that were the wrong fit to realize what the right fit looked like. And it took me years beyond that to get fully comfortable with only doing what I was great at, and getting out of the way of what others were great at.

The first step is to identify your specific wiring. Your energy patterns. Your natural strengths. Your authentic marketing mode.

Then, how to identify which movements actually resonate with your values versus which ones just sound strategic.

And finally, how to build a business on your architecture versus copying someone else’s blueprint.

That’s what the upcoming Sovereign Startup Foundations reveals.

• Not esoteric theory about why temperament matters. An actual assessment that reveals your specific wiring across multiple spectrums.

• Not generic advice about “finding your niche.” The framework for identifying which movements match your values and where you can position authentically within those movements.

• Not abstract concepts about artificial intelligence and human judgment. The specific mapping of what goes in your (AI-assisted) execution layer versus what stays in your (human) judgment layer for your specific service.

Understanding that your wiring is your moat is the starting point. And it’s one that most people neglect, only to (one hopes) figure it out the hard way.

Knowing exactly what your wiring is, and how to build on it specifically, is how you create something that succeeds, perhaps beyond your wildest expectations.

Plus, your competitors can’t copy it, and AI can’t disrupt it. In this era of extreme uncertainty, that’s a gift.

Your Wiring or Someone Else’s?

Most people will keep copying guru blueprints. They’ll try to build Gary’s business, or Amy’s business, or whichever flavor-of -the-month they’re following.

News flash: The fundamentals of human nature don’t change, despite how gurus try to reposition it. You’re the X factor that hasn’t been taken into account. That’s where the disconnect is.

But most people willl keep fighting their own wiring daily. They’ll exhaust themselves doing things that energize other people. They’ll chase trends that seem strategic rather than becoming a leader in a movement that represents what they truly believe needs to change.

And they’ll wonder why it’s so hard and unsatisfying, like I did when I started.

But others will realize the game has changed.

The only defensible advantage left in the age of AI is being yourself at scale. Building on your actual wiring instead of copying someone else’s. Marketing in modes that match your biology. Positioning in movements that reflect your actual values.

And you do that by combining your specific temperament, experience, expertise, and values together in a business designed around them. That’s unreplicable by definition.

Because no one else is wired exactly like you. No one else has lived exactly what you’ve lived. No one else sees problems exactly the way you see them.

Will you build on it, or keep fighting yourself?

Leave a comment

Keep going-

Brian

P.S. Join the Sovereign Startup Foundations Challenge.

Four weeks. Four modules. One invaluable outcome:

Your personalized Sovereign Startup Blueprint.

You’ll explore how to discover, develop, and enhance your expertise.

You’ll discover your leading skills, specific temperament, and which models match your wiring.

You’ll map the intelligence/judgment split in your service so you know exactly what AI handles and what only you can do.

You’ll identify which movements align with your core values and how to authentically position yourself within them.

Not theory. Not some guru’s formula copied onto your unique life. Your blueprint, built on who you are, what you know, and why you do it.

Join us to build your own foundation!

Welcome to the seventeenth (and final) lesson of The Persuasive Presenter course. As always, there’s a quick video introduction followed by a deeper dive in text.

Watch, read, and let me know what you think in the comments.

FDR’s fireside chats worked because he adapted to the medium.

Churchill initially failed on TV because he didn’t.

Thousands of professional speakers struggled with Zoom in 2020 for the same reason.

The mistake to avoid is using the wrong delivery for the format.

Your fundamentals — story structure, rhetorical devices, voice control, body language — are universal.

But how you deploy them changes based on whether you’re on a stage, in front of a webcam, recording video, or speaking into a microphone with no visual element at all.

Let’s break down the key adaptations for each major format.

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Most client service providers think their limitation is expertise.

If they just knew more and had better credentials, they could attract more clients and make more money. But Expertise is not the limitation.

The limitation is that producing a high-quality outcome for one client takes 40 hours of work, and you only have so many hours. That math doesn’t change, no matter how expert you become.

What does change the math is when 30 of those 40 hours stop requiring your time at all. Not because you hire someone. Because AI handles them.

But not the AI most people are using. I’m talking about a different kind entirely.

You’ve probably used ChatGPT or Claude to help with your work.

You ask a question. It answers. You ask for a revision. It revises. You go back and forth until you get what you need.

It’s faster than doing everything yourself. But you’re still doing most of the work. You’re still the bottleneck. Every task requires your attention at each step.

This is why most people using AI in their service business hit the same wall: They’re faster, but they’re not actually scalable. They can serve maybe one or two more clients per month than before, but they’re still trading their hours for dollars. Still hitting the same time ceiling.

The issue is that they’re using the wrong flavor of AI for what a modern service business actually needs.

The AI most people use is reactive. It waits for you to ask something, responds, and waits again. You’re the engine. AI is the tool.

But there’s a different kind of AI that changes the economics of a solo business entirely. It’s called agentic AI, and it works in a game-changing way.

You give it a goal and the context to pursue it, and it works. Taking sequences of actions, making decisions along the way, using tools and resources, producing output, all without you managing each step.

You’re the director, while the agent is the executor.

That may sound like a small detail, and yet its implications are anything but.

What Most People Are Using

When you open ChatGPT and type “help me draft an email to a client about project delays,” you get a draft back. It’s probably pretty good, especially compared to most humans. Maybe you ask it to make the tone more professional, or add a specific detail. It revises.

You copy it, paste it into your email, maybe tweak a line or two, and send it.

That interaction saved you ten minutes, which is useful. But you were involved in every step. You had to prompt it, evaluate the response, decide what to change, prompt again, evaluate again, and finalize it yourself.

Now multiply that across everything you do in a client engagement.

Research. Drafting proposals. Creating deliverables. Revising based on feedback. Client communication. Project management.

Every single task requires the same back-and-forth. You’re moving faster than doing it all manually, sure. But your time is still the constraint, because you’re still managing every piece.

And that means you’re still the bottleneck, even when you might not need to be involved.

You’re still going to hit the wall. You’ve just slightly delayed impact.

What Changes with Agents

An agent works differently. Instead of asking it to draft one email, you give it the context:

I have a client engagement starting Monday. Here’s the project scope, here’s what the client told me in our initial call, and here’s the timeline. I need a complete intake process that asks the right follow-up questions, gathers the information we’ll need for Phase 1, identifies any gaps or risks early, and organizes everything into a structured brief I can review before our kickoff meeting.

Then the agent works.

It drafts the intake questions based on the project scope. It sends them to the client. It reads the responses and asks intelligent follow-up questions based on what’s missing or unclear. It flags potential issues. It organizes everything into a structured document. It creates a summary of key decisions that need to be made.

You don’t manage each step. You set the direction, and the agent executes. When it’s done, you review the brief, add your judgment about what matters most, adjust anything that needs your specific expertise, and move forward.

What used to take you three hours of back-and-forth emails and synthesis now takes thirty minutes of review and direction.

You’re no longer looking at a 20% time savings. Now you’re catching a glimpse of a completely different model.

The Work That Actually Matters

Here’s the way to think about this.

Some work is primarily intelligence work. Things like: research, drafting, analysis, synthesis, organizing, formatting, and following systematic processes. The rules may be complex, but they are still rules. Given enough information and clear instructions, AI can execute this work reliably and at scale.

Some work is primarily judgment work. This is deciding what actually matters in a specific context. Knowing which output is right for a specific situation rather than just being generically “good.” Reading what a client needs beneath what they asked for, and making the call when the stakes are real but the answer isn’t obvious.

This work requires experience, taste, and instinct built from years of doing it. It cannot be reduced to rules because the right answer depends on context that can never be fully specified in advance.

Chat-based AI helps you do the intelligence work faster. Even though you have assistance, you’re still the one doing it.

Agentic AI does the intelligence work for you, while you focus entirely on the judgment work. This division of labor mimics having employees, but allows you autonomy.

What You Keep, What You Delegate

The question people always ask is: “What do I actually do if AI is handling all the execution?”

The answer: Everything that truly matters.

What agents handle:

• Research and data gathering across sources

• Initial drafting and synthesis

• Revisions based on your direction

• Formatting and organizing deliverables

• Client intake and follow-up

• Project logistics and coordination

• Everything that follows a process, even a complex one

What you handle:

• Strategic direction: What approach will actually work here?

• Pattern recognition: I’ve seen this situation before, and here’s what works

• Quality judgment: This output is right vs. this output is just good

• Client needs: What they actually need beneath what they asked for

• The final call: When the stakes are real and experience matters

• Accountability: I own whether this delivers the outcome

You don’t use agents to diminish your participation. You use them to clarify and spotlight the uniquely human elements that you bring to the equation.

You stop spending your time on work that drains you — the research, the formatting, the logistics, the revision cycles — and spend it entirely on work that only you can do. This includes the judgment calls, the strategic decisions, and the specific pattern recognition from having done this a hundred times.

That’s what clients are actually paying for. When someone hires an expert instead of prompting Claude themselves, what they’re buying is the judgment call — the specific, experienced, considered read of their situation that only someone with your background can provide.

AI handling the execution doesn’t make you less valuable. It makes you more valuable because now your expertise isn’t diluted across tasks that don’t require it.

The Model You’re Actually Building

There’s a useful distinction in how AI gets deployed in businesses.

A copilot model sells the intelligence tool to experts, enabling them to work faster and more productively. But they’re still the ones using the tool and taking responsibility for every step of the output.

An autopilot model sells the outcome, and the client is buying the result. AI handles execution, you provide judgment and taste, and the client receives the finished deliverable. They don’t buy a tool; they buy the outcome itself.

When you build a service business powered by agentic AI, you’re operating on the autopilot model. You’re 100% focused on delivering desired results.

You’re not selling clients access to AI-augmented productivity, or teaching them how to use AI better. You’re selling them the outcome, which is produced by your judgment and executed through AI.

This is why services-as-software is the new “it” model in Silicon Valley.

Sequoia Capital is no longer funding businesses that sell AI tools to professionals. They’re now bullish on AI-powered services that target corporate budget line items and, eventually, entire corporate departments. Stated another way, they’re betting on companies that deliver outcomes at software-like margins with human-level quality.

That’s also what you’re building, just in areas that are too small for the big guys. And yet plenty big enough to give you a great business and lifestyle.

You’re building a service that delivers expert outcomes without the investors, without the team, without the overhead, and most importantly, without the time ceiling that used to cap solo practitioners at $200K-300K annually.

You Don’t Need to Build Custom Tools

The services-as-software companies attracting venture capital right now are enterprise operations. Legal tech firms, accounting platforms, and other AI-native consulting backed by engineering teams.

They’re building proprietary AI systems with custom infrastructure. The development process takes time and lots of money.

That’s not what a sovereign startup needs.

The agents available through general-purpose AI platforms are more than capable of handling the execution layer of a high-quality solo service business. And they’re getting better and easier to deploy all the time.

You don’t have to build the agent; you just have to smartly direct it.

That means you don’t need a technical background, and you don’t need to learn to code. And you most certainly don’t need venture capital to build a lucrative sovereign startup.

What you need is clarity about what’s execution and what’s judgment in your specific service. You need to know how to give an agent context and direction, and you need to trust your expertise enough to let go of the work that doesn’t require it.

That’s the entire “technical” requirement. It’s more about thinking and communicating clearly than it is about traditional tech skills.

So you have a choice.

You can keep using chat AI the way most people do, getting 20% faster while staying bottlenecked by your own time. Or you can shift to agentic AI and eliminate the time ceiling entirely.

There Are Two Paths You Can Go By…

For people looking to escape the lopsided relationship that employment in the United States presents, you can see this as a fork in the road as you venture out on your own.

One path keeps you trading hours for dollars at a slightly better rate. The other path changes the fundamental economics of what you’re building.

Most people will stick with the conventional consultant/freelancer route, using AI to do a few things faster while they try to enhance their credentials.

A few will realize the constraint isn’t their expertise, but rather the flavor of AI they’re using and how they’re using it.

The most recent Census Bureau data showing 16,279 no-employee service businesses at $1M+ came from 2022. That was years before agentic AI was widely available and simple enough for anyone to learn.

The next Census Bureau report is going to show something different. More solo practitioners than ever will hit high six and seven figures without teams, and without sacrificing quality for volume.

There’s still time to change the road you’re on.

Leave a comment

Keep going-

Brian

P.S. Ready to move from understanding this to building it?

The Sovereign Startup Foundations Challenge shows you the way.

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• Week 1 reveals how to build a business and a marketing approach that leads with what makes you genuinely irreplaceable.

• Week 2 specifically tackles the Expertise Paradox: How to surface, structure, and sell what you actually know as outcome-based services.

• Week 3 focuses on the AI layer of your business and building your version of it. You’ll see two detailed case studies, then map your own execution layer.

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Join us to build your own foundation!

Welcome to the sixteenth lesson of The Persuasive Presenter course. As always, there’s a quick video introduction followed by a deeper dive in text.

Watch, read, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Peter Norvig’s Gettysburg PowerPoint parody worked because everyone recognized the crime being committed.

You can’t take one of the most powerful speeches in history and turn it into bullet points without destroying everything that made it powerful.

And yet, that’s exactly what most presenters do. Not to the Gettysburg Address, of course, but to their own content.

They take ideas that could be compelling and memorable, then bury them under slides filled with text, bullet points, and clip art. They turn persuasive arguments into forgettable decks that people skim while half-listening.

The solution isn’t: “Never use slides.” It’s first to understand what slides should and shouldn’t do. And then decide whether to use them at all.

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Travel back with me to a magical time.

A time when social media was a content creator’s best friend.

A time when search engine optimization actually worked for regular people.

Content constantly went “viral” on these new social media platforms, resulting in traffic and email subscribers for publishers.

The exposure on social media led to links from other publishers. Those third-party links enhanced website authority, which catapulted content to the top of Google search rankings, resulting in… you guessed it… even more traffic and subscribers.

This was the beginning of the audience-first business model. Attract the audience, figure out what they want to buy, create it, and… profit!

Fortunes were made, seemingly out of nothing but words published online.

The idea that you “can’t make a living writing” was discredited, although it was more accurate to say that entrepreneurs who could write were the ones who made the money.

Then, in 2010, Mark Zuckerberg became the first to turn the lights out on the social media content marketing party. As Facebook implemented an advertising model, publishers on the platform found that they couldn’t reach the audiences they had accumulated without paying for an advertising “boost.”

Since then, social algorithms have routinely been tuned to keep people on the platform, stifling posts that link to off-site content.

Meanwhile, the jockeying for ranking position via SEO became insanely competitive, and Google’s top ten results are now quickly losing ground to the succinct answers provided by generative artificial intelligence.

And yet, with all that change, the audience-first model is more entrenched than ever. And that’s a good thing.

That’s because content marketing, whether text, audio, or video, has always been first and foremost about making a connection with people that leads to a conversion from prospect to customer/client. The fact that it once brought easy traffic as well was a happy but temporary bonus.

While most people struggle to build an audience organically, some still succeed wildly with the approach. One way to succeed is to be already famous — a celebrity, star athlete, or well-known journalist.

The other way is more old-fashioned. It’s the way the offline predecessors of today’s digital marketers did it, and thanks to the ruthless evolution of social and search, we’re returning to it.

How to Become a “Guru” in the New Reality

So how do people seemingly come out of nowhere and suddenly have an audience of tens of thousands, becoming the new “it” guru to that throng of fans?

Simple… they pay for it.

In other words, they use paid advertising to quickly attract what I call a minimum viable audience. Once you get to that tipping point and beyond, the audience itself starts helping you grow, while social proof signals to new prospects that “this person is worth following and subscribing to.”

When I tell people this, many seem shocked. But it’s completely sensible from a return-on-investment standpoint.

Think about it: If attracting an audience can lead to seven- and even eight-figure companies as it did for me and many others from the early days, what would that be worth?

Would you be willing to invest $10,000, $50,000, or even $100,000 to get that outcome? Any sensible investor would take that deal. I’ve even heard tales of individuals willing to spend a million dollars upfront, calculating that they’d earn at least that much back every following year.

It’s important to note that these people aren’t spending on a wing and a prayer. They are deliberate. They work with skilled copywriters and consultants to dial in their conversion process before they even start and make rapid adjustments based on ad performance and audience feedback.

This is not some new, radical development. This is a return to how things used to be before the brief anomaly of easy “free” traffic that lasted roughly from 2005 to 2015.

Back before the commercial internet, people used direct response marketing to make millions of dollars. But that meant paying for direct mail, radio spots, billboards, commercials, and infomercials designed to prompt an action, such as a toll-free call or reply-card response.

These marketers often lost money on the initial sale. But they had a ladder of increasingly higher-priced offers that converted at a higher rate with people who had already bought something from them.

Starting in the late 90s, direct marketers added website visits as a desired action. It took them a little longer to grasp that online, you build permission-based email lists. They were used to buying lists of prospects, which was disastrous when applied to email (aka spam).

At the same time, people like me figured out how to generate traffic with content that built a permission-based email list, and then promote relevant products and services to that list. Attracting an audience was much easier then; the trick was figuring out what to sell.

Once early social media platforms emerged, their first job was to reach a critical mass of users. So savvy publishers like me realized that building up a Twitter following was creating an army of people who would like and share my content, leading to more reach, more subscribers, and ultimately more profits.

It was fun while it lasted, but it was never going to last.

Because Google and the social platforms knew exactly where they needed to go. Once they reached their critical mass of users, they monetized that base. And that’s why they are now the largest and most powerful providers of direct response advertising in the world, and in the process have become some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world.

Once Facebook switched the bait of free audience building on the platform, things changed. And a different game started to be played.

The Power of ROI Advertising

There was once a Golden Age of Facebook advertising, too. When the ads were new in the early 2010s, they were cheap and highly effective.

This led to a much more efficient way to build an audience. Savvy internet marketers would use paid ads and “self-liquidating offers” to quickly build an audience.

First, let’s define what a self-liquidating offer is. It’s when marketers buy traffic through advertising and immediately sell a low-priced product, allowing them to break even on the spend while retaining the audience asset.

That entry-level offer, made immediately after opt-in, was called a “tripwire” product, designed to offset the cost of the advertising. This enabled marketers to build an email list at essentially no cost and without spending ludicrous amounts of time creating tons of content.

The problem now is ad costs. The tripwire model — a low-cost ($9–$29) product designed to break even and build your list for free — assumed cheap traffic. That era is also over, especially (and ironically) in the space where people teach internet marketing.

To give you a concrete example, when I returned from sabbatical in 2019, I launched an online course priced at $495. I consulted with several Facebook advertising specialists about running ads to sell the product, and they all said the same thing: You’ll have a hard time making a profit at that price point.

Put another way, I was trying to hire these people to help me run the ads, and they declined the work because they knew they couldn’t successfully do it on a return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS) basis. And it’s only gotten worse since then.

In addition to increased costs, the quality of the traffic and opt-ins from Facebook has also declined substantially. And Google AdWords is even more expensive than Facebook for those who don’t have money to burn.

Lastly, this approach assumes you already have a digital product to sell — and usually more than one — so you can profit from the upsell. But the biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make is creating a product first and then trying to find people to buy it.

Today, there is one group that can effortlessly make ROI advertising work for them. Not only can this crowd afford to build an audience on a “self-liquidating” basis, but they can also make a significant profit if their services are priced appropriately.

These people sell client services. And as we’ve explored, this may be the only highly profitable revenue model that remains viable as we move deeper into the age of AI.

A Self-Funding Audience Attraction Model

Most people selling client services never advertise. As a result, those freelancers, coaches, and consultants with relatively high-ticket offers struggle to stay afloat.

They network. They ask for referrals. They post on LinkedIn, hoping someone notices. They create content and pray it goes viral.

Meanwhile, course creators with $297 products are dumping thousands of dollars into Facebook ads every month, losing money on every sale, hoping the funnel pays off eventually.

The problem is that people who can’t afford paid acquisition are doing it. And the people who can afford it aren’t.

If you’re charging $5,000-10,000 for client services, you have unit economics that make paid customer acquisition not just viable, but strategic. You can spend $1,500 to acquire a $5,000 client and profit $3,500 immediately.

And the best part?

You still have the audience. You’re not paying for one-shot leads, and the first offer you make doesn’t have to convert everyone. Some people will become clients later, join a group coaching version of your process, or buy something else you offer.

Most service providers never think this way. So they stay small and stuck in feast-or-famine mode. They remain referral-dependent and hope the next client comes before the bank account runs dry.

When you invest money instead of only your time in audience attraction, you build and learn faster. You reach the point where productizing becomes an option years sooner than grinding it out organically on your own.

You’re not just buying clients today. You’re attracting the audience that funds everything else tomorrow. Here’s what this looks like in practice.

Let’s say you spend $2,000 a month on online ads to promote your email newsletter, and attract on average 850 subscribers each month. From that, you land four clients a month who pay you an average of $3,000 in revenue, one time.

You gross $144,000 for the year, with a total advertising spend of $24,000. That means you’ve just netted more for the year than most freelancers do.

But here’s the more important thing.

At the end of the year, you also have an audience of 10,000+ people. As long as you’re keeping them engaged, they’re now sharing your newsletter, telling their friends, and revealing product ideas to you so you can diversify into other revenue streams.

Most self-employed people would fixate on the revenue, which is solid for a new business. But the audience is the more valuable asset that emerged from the year’s work.

It’s the audience that will allow you to create new things and generate more revenue next year, and the year after, and so on. Now you have options.

A Smarter Way to Productize

When you’re new to attracting an audience and building the trust you need to sell them services, you are an unproven commodity. You need a way to gain initial traction on the way to building a trusted brand that makes revenue growth much easier.

Being “new” in this sense is much like having the novelty of a highly innovative product. One that completely goes against the grain of the existing market to such a degree that people aren’t sure if they should spend money on it or not.

Kind of like the electric vehicle market in 2008, when Elon Musk became CEO of Tesla after making a $6.5 million investment in the company in 2004.

Today, Tesla and its megalomaniacal leader are an ongoing case study in the dangers of hubris and indiscriminate ketamine abuse. But back in the day, they did a lot of smart things.

The electric car pioneer started with a high-priced, low-volume specialty car, the Roadster, built for the super-rich. They caught significant attention and made money doing it.

This is analogous to a client services business that attracts a small number of relatively high-priced clients each month. But the real prize is the audience you attract in the process.

Next, Tesla leveraged the revenue and buzz from selling the elite model to develop the Model S and Model X for a broader group of well-off consumers.

This would be your productized service phase, perhaps a cohort-based course or group coaching program, made possible by that broader audience that wasn’t ready to become one-on-one clients.

From the revenue derived from the mid-tier car sales, Tesla entered the mass market with a low-priced, high-volume car, the Model 3.

You do the same by taking what you’ve learned from working closely with clients to develop a self-paced course or Substack subscription.

The prices come down as volume goes up. In the Tesla example, it acquired customers and built brand awareness through each stage of the expansion.

You’re doing the same thing as both your audience and your business grow. And the audience will keep growing year after year, leading to more and better opportunities.

But here’s what’s different now compared to when I first developed my Personal Enterprise strategy a few years ago. You don’t necessarily have to follow Tesla’s full progression anymore.

Before AI, you likely had to productize to earn more than $200K-300K annually because you hit a time ceiling. You could only serve so many clients personally before running out of hours and sanity.

Now? AI can handle 80% of execution work. You can serve 12-15 clients in the time it used to take to serve 4-5. That means services alone can scale to $480K-$1.2M annually without productizing at all.

So the Tesla model becomes optional, not required.

• You can stay at the Roadster phase and make seven figures.

• You can add a group coaching program and take fewer one-on-one clients.

• You can develop a DIY course as a lead qualifier for both.

It’s all still the business of expertise, just with different modalities and price points. But add in AI and quicker audience attraction, and the benefits of starting and staying with client services have never been clearer.

The Choice

Most freelancers, coaches, and consultants have the economics (i.e., revenue per client) that support paid acquisition, but they never think to use it. They stay referral-dependent and slow-growing. They leave money on the table.

Meanwhile, wealthy people are becoming wealthier by investing out-of-pocket in audience attraction. Others are maxing out credit cards to join them, not realizing that starting with client services would let them make money in the process rather than just incurring debt.

The smarter path for you is to start with services, use the superior unit economics to fund audience growth via paid acquisition, build fast, and stay profitable the entire time.

Most people will keep grinding on organic growth alone. Substack is essentially the only remaining place where that can work, because it’s optimized to convert traffic into email subscribers. If you’re not already famous, that will cost you a significant amount of time.

On the other hand, some will realize they can afford to accelerate audience attraction by selling high-ticket services. And spend their time serving clients and enjoying life, instead of cranking out ridiculous amounts of content.

Which will you choose?

Either way, there’s more to consider. And the next step becomes even more important if you’ve chosen to invest in paid traffic.

How do you stand out? How do you become THE person people choose, not just another option in a sea of service providers?

That requires more than just a steady source of traffic. And that’s what we’ll explore next week.

Welcome to the fifteenth lesson of The Persuasive Presenter course. As always, there’s a quick video introduction followed by a deeper dive in text.

Watch, read, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Simon Sinek’s TED talk didn’t go viral because of superior content. Fields Wicker-Miurin’s presentation was just as clear and compelling.

The difference, according to Vanessa Van Edwards’ studies on TED Talks, was body language, specifically hand gestures. Sinek used 465. Wicker-Miurin used 272.

That 70% increase in hand gestures correlated with a 4,200% increase in views.

We’re not talking about a “performance hack.” It’s about a fundamental truth of human communication, that your body language shapes how people perceive you and whether they stay engaged with what you’re saying.

You can have brilliant content delivered with a monotone voice and stiff, locked-down body language… and people will tune out.

Or you can have good content delivered with an open posture, expressive gestures, and purposeful movement… and people will lean in.

Your body is part of the message itself.

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Back in 2005, I made a drastic decision after a near-death experience.

After spending the previous four years building an innovative real estate business fueled entirely by digital marketing and processes, I walked away.

This was the business that generated more personal income for me than if I had made partner at the big law firm I left in 1998. And I simply stopped doing it.

I tried to work out a sale of the business. It didn’t work because it was so dependent on me that there was nothing there without me.

That was the crux of the problem.

I was the marketing engine behind the business, and no one else understood how it worked. I was also the entire management layer, who still worked personally with investment-level clients. But I had no transferable systems for any of it.

And then I shifted to a model that better suited my talents and temperament. The fairy tale ending followed: I made substantially more money every year, sold the business and made substantially more than that, and received recognition as a pioneer in digital business and marketing.

Emergency brain surgery led me to quickly realize that the real estate business was only designed to prove I could make a lot of money at something other than the practice of law. I didn’t love the work by any means, and I decided that life was too short to do things solely for money.

So I became properly aligned and profited highly from it, which I think is no coincidence. But I wrongly blamed client services as the source of my previous discontent.

Even though I went on to build three seven-figure businesses and one eight-figure firm without doing client work at all, I had simply moved into a smarter model where others handled the systems while I handled marketing and drove product development. And at the time, selling software was highly lucrative.

In the last few years, I’ve been back to working with clients in a coaching capacity. It’s been deeply satisfying because I can now have a real impact on the desired outcome when I get personally involved, as opposed to only teaching (which I enjoy for other reasons).

And now I have technology that functions the same way my human collaborators did in the previous businesses. It allows me to do what I’m good at, and handles what I struggle with.

In short, if I were brand new to the game in 2026, I’d still start off with client services. And this is what most people do, for very good reasons.

But now, with the right application of automation and artificial intelligence, you don’t need to shift into products in order to efficiently manage the business as a solo and profitably scale.

More importantly, outcome-based services may be the only highly profitable revenue model that remains viable going forward. Let’s dig into my reasoning on that.

The Sure-Fire Path to 7-Figure Small

For years, the standard path for expertise-based businesses followed a logical progression:

1. Start with client services (validate demand, generate revenue).

2. Hit a time ceiling (you can only serve so many clients).

3. Create information products such as courses to scale (trade margin for volume, leverage your time)

This worked, and it made sense. Your time was the limiting factor, so you had to choose: Stay small with high-touch services, or scale with lower-touch information products.

In fact, my Personal Enterprise strategy recognizes client work as the smart starting point, while laying out a path to productize sooner rather than later. Diversification of revenue streams is the justification, but under the surface is the reality that solo services simply don’t scale.

That once-enduring truth has begun to disappear over the last decade. You don’t hit the time ceiling with services as quickly, thanks to automation. And now with AI, perhaps not at all on the way to 7-figure revenue.

Here’s the thing. The trend toward powerful solo and very small client service businesses started before AI went mainstream a few years ago. Which means we’re now at the cusp of something truly revolutionary as AI adoption skyrockets among savvy solopreneurs.

According to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data, client services dominate the million-dollar, no-employee business category. The data reflects 16,279 one-person client services businesses earning $1-2.49 million annually. Another 2,465 hit $2.5-4.9 million.

Not info products. Not courses. Not software. Client services.

And that data comes from before AI made service delivery three to five times more efficient, and opened the door to developing entirely new revenue models built on delivering desired outcomes.

Sequoia Capital, the VC firm behind Apple, Google, and Airbnb, recently published an analysis explaining why they’re betting on services over software in many markets. Its key insight:

Services deliver actual outcomes. The client doesn’t have to implement — they get the result they paid for.

They call it “services as software,” a complete inversion of the software-as-services model that has dominated both the VC and bootstrapped entrepreneurial landscape for 20 years. And it may coincide with altered demand for courses and other information products as well.

Think about the difference:

Software/Course approach:

• Gives the customer the tool or information, but

• The customer still has to figure out how to use it;

• The customer is responsible for the implementation; and

• The customer owns the outcome risk.

Client services approach:

• The provider delivers the completed outcome;

• The client gets the result without the implementation burden;

• The provider is accountable for success; and

• The risk transfers to the expert.

This distinction has always mattered. But now, AI is:

1. Providing knowledge for essentially free, and

2. Eliminating the reason people get burned out and frustrated by a client services model.

Here’s what used to be true: A client engagement required 40 hours of your time. You could serve maybe four or five clients per month at full capacity. To make more money, you had to either raise prices (often uncomfortable) or create digital products (a different business entirely).

Here’s what’s true now: AI handles 80% of the execution work. You provide 8-10 hours of strategic judgment and oversight. You can serve 12-15 clients in the same timeframe.

Traditional model:

• 40 hours per client project

• Maximum four clients monthly

• Revenue ceiling: 4 × $10,000 = $40,000/month

AI-augmented model:

• 10 hours of your judgment per project

• AI handles the other 30 hours of execution

• New capacity: 12 clients monthly

• Revenue potential: 12 × $10,000 = $120,000/month

• Same hours worked, 3x the revenue

Sequoia funneling VC money into service businesses was unheard of in years past. But the bigger shift involves individuals building next-generation outcome models without outside capital at all.

Why “Done For You” Sells Better Than “Learn How To”

There’s another reason to start with client services. They’re easier to sell than products, especially information products, which require much more savvy “selling” than most people realize.

When you’re selling a product such as a course, for example, you’re asking people to:

• Invest time they don’t have

• Learn skills they know they need but may not necessarily want

• Implement on their own

• Take responsibility for the results

When you’re selling a service, the value proposition is simple:

• You have a problem

• I deliver the solution

• You get the outcome

• I’m accountable if it doesn’t work

Motivated buyers with budgets prefer “done for you” over “teach me how to.” They don’t want to become experts themselves; they just want the problem solved. And they’re willing to pay high-ticket prices for it.

If you’re 50+ with decades of experience, you’re not really selling information anyway. You’re selling judgment, lived pattern recognition, and strategic expertise applied to a specific situation.

That’s client services in a nutshell. And AI just made them highly scalable.

Here’s the breakthrough… You now have the efficiency of software combined with the judgment and experience of a seasoned human in one tiny yet powerful firm.

What AI handles:

• Research and data gathering

• Initial drafting and formatting

• Revisions based on your direction

• Project management and logistics

• Client communication scheduling

• Everything that’s execution, not judgment

What you provide:

• Strategic direction (what approach will actually work here)

• Expertise from pattern recognition (I’ve seen this 100 times)

• Quality control and taste (good vs. generic)

• Nuanced judgment (what the client actually needs vs. what they’re asking for)

• Accountability for the outcome

The result: Clients get expert-level “done for you” outcomes. You work a fraction of traditional consulting hours. The math finally works at scale.

And when you factor in the difference in price points, the relative ease and higher likelihood of success by selling services becomes crystal clear:

• Instead of: “How to Do Strategic Planning” course ($297) Offer: Strategic planning service with deliverable plan ($8,000-15,000)

• Instead of: “Marketing Masterclass” membership ($97/month) Offer: Complete marketing strategy with implementation roadmap ($10,000)

• Instead of: “Business Development Program” group coaching ($497) Offer: Business development consulting with accountability ($5,000/month)

The best clients don’t want to learn how to do it, they want it done. And they want it done by someone who’s done it before, and who provides accountability for the outcome.

That’s you. And now you can deliver it profitably at scale.

Are Information Products Dead?

No, I don’t think so.

But there are things you have to realize about the past, current, and future context of selling courses, paid newsletters (more appropriately called a membership model), and other digital information products.

• First, just about anyone you can think of with a course or membership model started out with client services. Beyond the fact that it’s easier to do at the beginning, working with clients is also where the content and the credibility for the paid education come from.

• Second, what you don’t see in many course businesses is the hidden service component that’s the actual profit center. You only get the call-to-action for expensive one-on-one services once you’ve progressed far enough up the typical offer ladder of either loss-leader or break-even information products. This is where many a “guru” makes their real money, all while preaching about “passive” income.

• Third, as the proliferation of artificial intelligence continues into the mainstream, there’s no doubt that what people will spend their money on when it comes to learning and knowledge acquisition will change, and perhaps drastically slow. Keep in mind that even today, only a relatively tiny fraction of people make a living from courses, paid newsletters, and digital information products, compared to the number of people trying.

With those three points in mind, here’s the winning go-forward path that combines the best of the past with the unavoidable promise of the future:

Start with client services:

• Fastest validation of what people will actually pay for

• Highest revenue per customer

• Easiest to sell (outcome = clear value)

• Learn what people actually need (not what you think they need)

Stay with client services:

• AI makes them scalable without hiring

• Higher margins with fewer sales than courses

• Better client outcomes (done for you > learn how to)

• Can build $200K-$1M+ business with services alone

Add courses and memberships strategically:

• If you want to serve lower-budget segments

• If you want a solid client-qualification mechanism

• If you want additional revenue streams

• If you enjoy teaching

Client services can easily be your entire business now if your client acquisition game is dialed in. Before the AI execution layer became a viable reality, freelancers and consultants who built audience-first service models often had to turn prospective clients away and raise prices, or hire and manage people to scale.

But now? Let’s talk realistic numbers.

Conservative client services model:

• 3 ongoing clients at $5,000/month = $180,000 annually

• 25-30 hours/week of your strategic time

• AI handles execution ($20-100/month in subscriptions)

• Minimal overhead, no employees, location-independent

That’s more income than most corporate jobs, with complete control over your time and location. Plus, there’s no low ceiling that requires you to pivot to a different business model if you want to make more. That’s demonstrated by a more aggressive approach.

Aggressive client services model:

• 8-10 clients at $5,000-10,000/month = $480,000-$1,200,000 annually

• 35-40 hours/week (same as corporate demanded)

• AI handles 80% of execution work

• Still no employees, still location-independent

These aren’t edge cases. The Census data shows 16,279 client-serving, non-employee businesses generating $1M-2.49Min annual revenue, and that’s before AI made client services even more scalable.

The 7-figure Small movement is just getting started.

What’s Next

The bottom line: Services are more valuable than software and information products in markets where outcomes matter. And those are the most valuable markets to pursue.

Solo and very small non-employee client services businesses were already hitting $1M+ at record rates, thanks to the reach of the internet and the efficiency of automation. Now AI has supercharged it: You can deliver expert services at scale without hiring anyone.

Client services are always the smart place to start when you’re transitioning from employment to your own thing. Now, it’s even more indisputable, and it may be the only revenue source you need.

Meanwhile, corporations are cutting costs. They’re using their own investment in AI to eliminate expensive employees like you. But you can use the same user-friendly technology to build something better of your own.

Start with client services. Let AI handle execution while you provide what people are really paying for. Deliver valuable outcomes at scale, and charge value-based prices.

And there’s another strategic advantage to starting with client services that most people miss.

This one determines how fast you can actually build your business and to what level of revenue you can eventually reach.

We’ll explore that next week.

Welcome to the fourteenth lesson of The Persuasive Presenter course. As always, there’s a quick video introduction followed by a deeper dive in text.

Watch, read, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Your voice is your primary instrument.

Not your slides. Not your body language. Not even your words, because the same words delivered with different vocal qualities create entirely different effects.

Your voice is what carries emotion, emphasis, meaning, and authenticity. It’s what makes the difference between a presentation people tolerate and one they remember.

The challenge is that most people have never consciously thought about how they use their voice. They just... talk. And that’s fine for casual conversation, but it’s not enough for persuasive presenting.

You need to understand the elements of vocal control and how to use them to calculated effect.

Read more

Your job trained you to be the wrong thing.

Not incompetent. Not unskilled. Just optimized for a role that doesn’t exist outside the employment machine.

For decades, you learned to analyze situations, make recommendations, and contribute your expertise to team outcomes. You got good at it. You were valued for it. Your performance reviews praised your strategic thinking, your insights, your ability to see patterns others missed.

All of that made you an excellent knowledge worker.

And that’s the problem.

Because knowledge work — the thing your career trained you to excel at — isn’t a business. It’s a role in someone else’s business. And when you leave employment (or employment leaves you), that role doesn’t translate the way you think it should.

What Your Job Trained You to Be

Let’s be clear about what a knowledge worker actually does.

You analyze data and situations. You develop insights. You make recommendations. You contribute your expertise to larger initiatives. You’re part of a team that delivers outcomes, such as strategy documents, marketing campaigns, operational improvements, and financial plans.

Success as an employee meant being good at your part of the whole. The analyst who provides sharp analysis. The strategist who sees three moves ahead. The pro who catches problems before they become crises.

So your value was in both your knowledge and your ability to apply it within the system. You were measured on the quality of your thinking, the soundness of your recommendations, and the reliability of your judgment.

What you weren’t responsible for was the ultimate outcome. That was distributed: The team owned the results, or lack thereof, and the company produced the final deliverable. You contributed your piece.

This worked perfectly in an employment context. You were a specialized component in a larger machine. Your knowledge fed into execution systems. From there, implementation teams took your analysis and turned it into action. You did your part; others did theirs.

But here’s what that means when you leave: You’re trained to contribute to outcomes, not produce them.

Why Knowledge Work Isn’t a Business

When you go solo, clients don’t want your contribution to their outcome. They want the outcome itself.

They don’t want your analysis of their marketing problem. They want the marketing problem solved.

They don’t want your recommendations for their strategy. They want the strategy delivered and working.

They don’t want your insights about their operations. They want the operational improvements implemented.

The gap between what employment trained you to deliver (knowledge, insights, recommendations) and what clients actually want to buy (finished results, solved problems, achieved outcomes) is massive.

And AI just made it permanent.

The AI Shift

Here’s the brutal reality: Information is now essentially free.

For $20 a month, ChatGPT will analyze their situation. Claude will generate recommendations. Any flavor of AI will provide frameworks, best practices, and step-by-step guides. Instantly. At whatever level of detail they want.

If you’re selling knowledge such as information, analysis, frameworks, and recommendations, you’re competing with a practically free and instantaneous alternative that more and more people are turning to.

But there’s something AI can’t do. And that’s own the outcome.

AI can analyze the problem. It can’t be held accountable for whether the solution works.

AI can generate the strategy. It can’t take responsibility for whether it succeeds.

AI can draft the plan. It can’t guarantee the implementation.

That’s the difference between knowledge work and outcome production. And it’s why you need to shift your identity from one to the other, while adding your uniquely human skills to produce what clients are really paying for.

The Outcome Producer Role

An outcome producer doesn’t contribute to results; they deliver them. This changes several things:

• Accountability shifts from distributed to singular. As a knowledge worker, you provided good analysis, and the team owns whether the initiative succeeds. As an outcome producer, you own whether the client gets the result they paid for.

• The deliverable shifts from input to output. As a knowledge worker, you provide analysis, recommendations, and strategic insights. As an outcome producer, you provide a complete solution, implemented strategy, and an achieved outcome.

• Client expectations shift from “help me figure it out” to “you handle it.” As a knowledge worker, they want to learn from you and understand the situation better, so they can make informed decisions. As an outcome producer, they want the problem solved without having to become experts themselves.

• Pricing shifts from time-based to value-based. As a knowledge worker, you receive an hourly rate or a salary for your thinking. As an outcome producer, you receive a project fee or value-based pricing for the outcome delivered.

• Success metrics shift from the quality of thinking to the achievement of the outcome. As a knowledge worker, you ask, “Was the analysis sound? Were the recommendations good?” As an outcome producer, you ask, “Did we achieve the result? Is the problem solved?”

In practice, this looks like:

• Knowledge worker delivers: Market analysis showing three strategic options with pros and cons for each.

• Outcome producer delivers: Market positioning that’s implemented, messaging that’s live, and three qualified leads in the pipeline.

• Knowledge worker delivers: Recommendations for operational improvements with an implementation roadmap.

• Outcome producer delivers: New operational system running smoothly with documented 30% efficiency gain.

• Knowledge worker delivers: Strategic plan with quarterly milestones and success metrics.

• Outcome producer delivers: Executed strategy with measurable results against the metrics that matter.

The most valuable clients don’t want your expertise applied to their problem so they can solve it. They want your expertise applied to their problem so it’s solved.

How AI Enables This Shift

Here’s what used to make outcome production problematic for solo practitioners:

Producing complete outcomes required too much execution work. You’d need a team to handle research, drafting, implementation, documentation, revisions, and project management.

You couldn’t afford that team as a solo business. So you were forced to sell knowledge and advice instead of outcomes.

AI has eliminated that barrier, just as it made generic information unsaleable.

Now AI handles the knowledge work:

• Research and data gathering

• Situation analysis and pattern recognition

• Initial drafting and documentation

• Plans for process execution and logistics

• Revisions based on your direction

• Project coordination and tracking

While you provide the outcome production:

• Strategic direction: What approach will actually work here

• Expert judgment: What I’ve seen succeed and fail in similar situations

• Quality control: The difference between good and generic

• Accountability: I own whether this achieves the intended result

• Final delivery: Client gets the completed outcome, not homework

Example: Strategic Planning

Knowledge worker approach (pre-AI):

• 40 hours: Analyze client situation

• 20 hours: Research best practices and case studies

• 30 hours: Draft recommendations

• 10 hours: Present findings and answer questions

• Total: 100 hours of your time

• Client gets: Recommendations to implement itself

Outcome producer approach (AI-augmented):

• AI: Research, data gathering, initial drafts based on your direction

• You: 10 hours of strategic thinking and direction

• AI: Execution of plan based on your expert guidance

• You: 5 hours of quality control, refinement, delivery decisions

• Total: 15 hours of your time

• Client gets: Implemented strategy producing results

Same expertise. Same quality of strategic thinking. But you’re producing the outcome, not just contributing the knowledge.

This wasn’t usually possible before AI. Now it’s not just possible — it’s the only sustainable model.

Why This Shift Is Hard (and Necessary)

If this feels uncomfortable, that’s normal.

You spent your career building an identity as a knowledge worker. Employment rewarded you for your quality of thinking, sound analysis, and reliable judgment — and these things are still essential aspects of your skillset. It’s just that your expertise was valued for its contribution to larger initiatives.

Shifting to outcome producer means moving:

• From “I know things” to “I deliver results;”

• From advisor to owner;

• From contributor to accountable partner; and

• From providing input to producing output.

It feels risky. What if the outcome doesn’t work? What if you’re held responsible for things outside your control?

But here’s the reality: You can’t build a sustainable business selling knowledge anymore. AI provides knowledge for next to nothing. Clients can get analysis, frameworks, and recommendations anywhere.

What they’ll pay premium prices for is what AI can’t provide, and that’s someone who will own the outcome based on their expertise and judgment. Someone who takes accountability for the result. Someone who delivers the finished solution, not just the roadmap.

The mindset shift required:

Stop thinking: “I’m an expert who shares knowledge and advice.”

Start thinking: “I’m a producer who delivers outcomes clients need.”

Stop positioning: “I’ll analyze your situation and recommend solutions.”

Start positioning: “I’ll solve your problem and deliver the result.”

Stop pricing: Based on your time and expertise level (knowledge worker model).

Start pricing: Based on the value of the outcome produced.

This shift unlocks everything that follows: The right business model. The right positioning. The right pricing. The right client relationships.

But it starts here, with your identity. With understanding what you actually need to be in the age of artificial intelligence.

What Comes Next

Your job trained you to be a knowledge worker, and that made sense in the employment context because you were part of a larger system that was responsible for producing outcomes.

But as a solo business owner, knowledge work isn’t enough. Information is free, and analysis is abundant; AI provides frameworks and recommendations instantly.

What clients will pay you for (and what creates a sustainable business) is outcome production — being the person who doesn’t just contribute expertise, but delivers finished results.

AI just made this possible for individual business owners by handling the knowledge work while you focus on producing outcomes. The next question is: What model actually supports outcome production?

That’s what we’ll explore next week.

As promised, we’re taking a break from our regularly-scheduled lesson flow for a very special “behind-the-scenes” video that explains the why and the how of the product on of this course.

Here’s what’s covered:

• A reminder of why “face time” in front of your audience is increasingly important.

• My secret motivation for doing this course.

• The keys to scripting tight videos that don’t sound like you’re reading.

• How to edit video and audio like an article.

• Why sound enhancement is crucial.

• The instance in which AI has gotten worse instead of better.

• How to position your camera for best results.

• What to do with your hands while presenting.

Read more

Greetings from somewhere over the Northern Atlantic!

We’re on our way to France as I write this, and I’m going to do my best to do the impossible for me… sleep on a plane. We’ll see how it goes.

So, no video this week for the Persuasive Presenter course. But I did want to let you know that I’ve added AI prompts to every existing lesson that will help you implement the devices and ideas you’ve learned in the lessons.

I waited until now to add the prompts to make sure you knew the “why” and the “how” of using these persuasion techniques without AI. We’re never going to outsource our thinking and understanding, but once we grasp why a certain technique works and how to use it, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of assistance.

Read more

Welcome to the twelfth lesson of The Persuasive Presenter course. As always, there’s a quick video introduction followed by a deeper dive in text.

Watch, read, and let me know what you think in the comments.

You’ve learned some powerful rhetorical devices: metaphor and analogy, open loops, the Rule of Three, refutatio, anaphora, and antithesis.

Each one is powerful on its own. But master communicators don’t use them in isolation. They layer them, combining multiple devices in multiple moments to create compound effects that are far more persuasive than any single technique could achieve.

This is the difference between a competent presentation and mastery.

Read more

Note: The replay of our first Premium Member Q&A is here.

Welcome to the eleventh lesson of The Persuasive Presenter course. As always, there’s a quick video introduction followed by a deeper dive in text.

Watch, read, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Antithesis is a rhetorical technique that places two opposing ideas in parallel structure to highlight their contrast.

The word comes from the Greek antithesis, meaning “opposition” or “setting against.” You’re not just presenting two different ideas. You’re deliberately positioning them as opposites to sharpen both.

When done well, antithesis makes ideas more memorable, more quotable, and more persuasive. When done poorly (like the AI-generated “It’s not X, it’s Y” cliché), it becomes a meaningless formula that signals lazy thinking and poor writing.

Let’s explore how to do it well.

Classical Antithesis: The Rhetorical Foundation

Antithesis has been a cornerstone of persuasive communication for thousands of years. Some of the most famous lines in history are built on antithetical structure:

Read more

The storm has been brewing for a while now.

Is it finally about to hit? Will the dual threat of recession and artificial intelligence result in the mass layoffs that pundits have been predicting?

It seems more and more likely. But the encouraging news is that a lot of people aren’t sitting around waiting for it.

But first, let’s look closely at those storm clouds.

The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, a widespread and unexpected downturn for a job market that continues to struggle across a broad range of sectors.

The unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 4.4%. That’s not terribly high, but the problem is that no one is hiring. Everything from economic uncertainty to expectations that artificial intelligence will reduce staffing needs has employers sitting on their hands.

On that note, the U.S. economy grew at just 0.7% in the fourth quarter of 2025, which is half the rate they initially told us. Meanwhile, core inflation ticked up to 3.1%, well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

And these numbers came before the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran, a now extended event that sent oil prices spiraling upward thanks to the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz. This supply disruption pushes inflation even higher — immediately at the gas pump, and then everywhere else over the coming months.

This is how Dan Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, oil market expert, and vice chairman of S&P Global, put it:

For a time, we wondered whether the catalyst would come from the emerging problems in the private-credit market, or perhaps a backlash to the frothy A.I. hyperscaling economy. But the truth is that the Franz Ferdinand moment is often a surprise — the incident one least suspects. Could the catalyst come instead from Trump’s potentially misbegotten military adventure in Iran?

I’ll take ALL OF THE ABOVE for $200, Alex. The coming turbulence is starting to look like a perfect storm of suck.

Didn’t You Mention Some Good News?

Oh yeah, I did. And it’s the kind of news that gets me fired up for this inevitable and unavoidable revolution in the workforce.

The Census Bureau reports that 532,000 Americans started new businesses in January alone, a 36.8% increase from the previous year.

And according to the Wall Street Journal, 150,000 Americans left the country entirely in 2025, which is the first net negative migration since the Great Depression.

Let’s connect those dots.

Slowing growth plus rising inflation equals stagflation, which is the same economic environment that crushed workers when we were kids. Economists are already seeing “a whiff of the 1970s” in the current data.

Corporate’s response is predictable: When margins compress, they eliminate their most expensive employees first.

And if you’re over 50 with 25-30 years of experience and a salary that reflects it, that’s you.

So, those people are responding by fleeing to entrepreneurship and to geographic arbitrage.

The key is not to react in panic, but to start and build strategically.

In other words, will you build your exit strategy while you still have leverage, or will you scramble after the layoff notice arrives?

The Economic Reality No One’s Saying Out Loud

Let’s be clear about what’s happening.

The Commerce Department revised Q4 GDP growth down to 0.7%. That’s half the initially reported 1.4%. The economy was “losing momentum” even before the geopolitical crisis sent energy costs higher.

Core inflation rose to 3.1% in January, moving very much in the wrong direction. And with oil prices spiking due to the Middle East conflict, that number is anticipated to climb precipitously.

Slowing growth plus rising inflation equals one thing for corporate America: mass layoffs.

When companies face compressing margins, they do the math. Replace one experienced professional earning $150K with two junior hires at $60K each. Call it “reorganization.” Analysts approve. Stock price rises.

You’re not being replaced because someone younger is better. You’re being replaced because the Excel spreadsheet says so.

The corporate calculation is simple. But here’s what they’re not calculating: Your expertise is worth more outside your company than inside it. You just need a plan to extract that value before they make the decision for you.

The Location-Independence Play

Then there’s the exodus: 150,000 Americans who left the country in 2025. And it’s not just the wealthy or adventurous anymore.

Jen Barnett, a 54-year-old from Alabama who founded Expatsi, a company helping Americans relocate abroad, told the Wall Street Journal:

Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed. Now they’re ordinary people, like me.

Her company organized three group scouting trips in 2024. This year? Fifty-seven trips are planned. Expatsi’s stated goal: “Move one million Americans.”

When the economic shit hits the fan — possibly for years — you have options corporations don’t. Build a service business earning U.S. rates while living somewhere your dollar goes two or three times further. That’s personal cost-cutting that doesn’t require laying off the people who do the actual work.

The sovereign startup model means independence from your boss, yes. But it also means independence from a zip code that’s bleeding you dry.

Build your client base in the U.S., where clients pay U.S. rates. Live where your dollar actually works. Deliver your expertise remotely while AI handles logistics.

You don’t need to leave the country to build a startup. But the fact that you can, and it’s in your economic interest to do so, is another aspect that makes it sovereign.

The New Founder Explosion (And Why Most Will Fail)

Over half a million people started businesses in January. LinkedIn reports a 69% year-over-year increase in people listing themselves as founders.

The Wall Street Journal calls it “a mental shift toward self-reliance,” with many new founders feeling “they are better off on their own — or have no other choice after a fruitless job search.”

Some are chasing opportunities. Most are fleeing threats. And in their haste, a lot of them are building the wrong things entirely.

Entrepreneur Scott Cohen used AI tools to build a news app for $400 instead of hiring a coder, calling it “the democratization of invention.”

But guess what?

Everyone else can build that app too. And frankly, the last thing you should be building is an app, given that the software and SaaS markets are being decimated thanks to the very technology these newbie founders are building with.

AI both creates the threat and the opportunity, which means you have to understand the “value add” only humans can offer. Here’s what actually separates winners from the many of those 532,000 scrambling founders:

Harvard Business School professor Linda A. Hill notes that while AI can handle “hard” skills like coding and bookkeeping, “many [entrepreneurs] find the so-called soft stuff is actually harder.”

Hard skills are now easy. AI handles code, data analysis, graphic design, project management, and anything involving that damn Excel spreadsheet.

The much-maligned “soft skills” are now everything. Communication. Empathy. Positioning. Judgment. Taste. Curiosity. Connection with other humans.

And if you’re 50+ with decades of corporate experience? You have soft skills in abundance. You just need to know how to strategically use them to gain a unique competitive advantage.

Entrepreneurism Will Both Steal Your Job and Save Your Economic Life

So far, the layoffs attributed to AI, which number in the hundreds of thousands, have been at the big tech companies — Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, etc. And that makes sense, as that kind of adaptability is baked into their culture.

And then one of them finally came out and admitted it. Block CEO Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his staff, specifically due to AI implementation:

“Within the next year, I believe the majority of the companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey told analysts. “I don’t think we’re early to this realization. I think most companies are late.”

So the “regular” companies are next, right? Maybe not in the way you think, though, because most corporations have the nimbleness of a glacier trying to parallel park.

But it’s happening as we speak nonetheless, thanks to a new breed of AI-powered entrepreneurs who are taking aim at line items in corporate budgets. They’re starting with legal, accounting, and other outsourced services, after originally selling tools to the lawyers and accountants.

And if you think that’s ruthless, next up will be entire departments of employees. And your company can’t wait:

On the issue of job loss and headcount reduction … the survey results suggest that companies are making decisions to reduce headcount before they see the benefits of AI’s impact. A majority of surveyed organizations have already made either low to moderate (39%) or large (21%) headcount reductions in anticipation of AI. Another 29% is hiring fewer people than normal in anticipation of future AI.

Here’s the thing: Your ideal solo business will do the same thing, augmented by AI. Or you’ll provide exceptional outcomes to consumers and small businesses using the same processes.

I’ll be laying this all out for you in the coming months. But it’s still up to you to get started.

How 50+ Professionals Win This Game

This isn’t about whether to build your own solo or small company. It’s about whether you’ll build strategically or reactively.

Path 1: Hope

Hope you survive the next round of layoffs. Hope the economy improves before your position is eliminated. Hope the ageist job market suddenly values your experience.

Hope is not a strategy. And when GDP is at 0.7%, and you’re the most expensive line item on the spreadsheet, hope is a dangerous bet.

Path 2: Panic

Wait for the layoff notice. Join the feeding frenzy of everyone else who is in the same boat. Compete on price with desperate former colleagues. Burn through savings trying to figure it out.

Panic-building puts you in the worst position: No validation, no revenue, no time, depleting savings, competing with thousands in the same situation using the same tools.

Path 3: Build Strategically

Build while you’re still employed. Use that corporate paycheck to finance your transition. Validate your model before you need results. Position distinctly while others compete generically. Exit on your terms with proven revenue.

This is harder in the short term because you’re essentially working two jobs for several months. But it’s exponentially easier in the long term. Plus, just an hour or two a day of learning and setting the stage can get you far ahead of the pack.

• If corporate cuts you, you’re ready. Existing clients, proven model, no scramble.

• If corporate doesn’t cut you, you still choose to leave when your revenue target hits.

Either way, you’re entering sovereignty from a position of strength. Mark my words, we’re all going to get there one way or another… except for those who don’t make it at all.

Leave a comment

Keep going-

Brian

P.S. Ready to transform your expertise into location-independent income and upgrade your life at midlife? Further Premium gives you the complete roadmap, with business building instruction, financial planning advice, expat guidance, and more.

further: flashback

🎶 George Michael - Freedom! ’90, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1, 1990 🎶

George Michael reinvented himself from his pop dolly past with Freedom! ‘90. The lyrics are your first clue, followed by the fact that George refused to appear in the video. The burning leather jacket and exploding jukebox from Faith were less-than-subtle finishing touches. (YouTube)

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Welcome to the tenth lesson of The Persuasive Presenter course. As always, there’s a quick video introduction followed by a deeper dive in text.

Watch, read, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Repetition is one of the most fundamental techniques in persuasive communication.

• We remember what we hear repeatedly.

• We internalize what we encounter in patterns.

• We respond emotionally to rhythm.

Those previous three bullet points — We remember, We internalize, We respond — weren’t accidental. That’s anaphora at work: the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or paragraphs.

The word comes from the Greek anaphorá, meaning “carrying back” or “repetition.” You’re carrying the same opening phrase back again and again, each time advancing the idea forward.

But not all repetition works equally well. Random repetition feels redundant. Strategic repetition, specifically anaphora, feels powerful.

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