This is the written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version, this is just the rundown of what we talked about, cleaned up from the transcript with an AI tool.

Hey,

UUugghhhhh i’m tired lads.

Too much travel the last few weeks. My brain is sludgy, but i’m back in the studio!

I had a completely different topic planned for this one, but I ended up talking about what’s on my mind, which is why this thing is called The Unscheduled CEO.

What was on my mind was what it’s actually like when strangers start showing up in your comments, because the channel is growing and new people keep arriving with zero context on me. It’s a good one if you create anything online, or you’ve been thinking about starting.

Anyway, here’s what we talked about in the episode:

Where the show actually is right now: the YouTube side did 984+ new subscribers and 30,000 views in the last 28 days, the channel is at 4,600 subscribers, and the total number of people listening across all the platforms is coming in on the 10,000 mark. Total, not weekly. My initial goal of getting each episode to approximately 10,000 listens is NOT going to happen, and I talk through why the Thursday videos grow fast while the main show grows slowly, and why that’s the right way for this to work.

The trade nobody warns you about: the closer your content is to something real, the more people connect with it, and the more people get irritated by it. The book funnel video is at 14,000 views and brought in a wave of new people, including a full grown adult male getting bitchy in the comments about my hair not being cut.

Criticism vs trolling, and how I tell them apart: a guy on LinkedIn told me the colours on the Substack made it hard to read, he was right, and I changed it immediately. A different guy commented “I don’t believe you” under a video he clearly hadn’t watched, and I made the mistake of trying to reason with him until I found him complaining about my haircut further up the thread. If the bigger videos keep growing, Eli will start removing the excessively trolley comments before I ever see them so I don’t just give up making them out of sheer annoyance.

Why I keep doing it anyway: I quit Instagram in 2020 and LinkedIn last year, and YouTube is the one platform I still enjoy. Creating stuff makes me feel good, consuming stuff all the time makes me feel bad, and the show brings new people into the orbit of our businesses, which beats relying on partnerships and paid ads. Tim Ferriss’s point about audio-only shows comes up too: way fewer people getting weird about you, but the video version just does so much better.

Bobby Fingers, and a little tease: one of my favourite creators of all time has a new video called “Who Crapped in Johnny Depp’s Bed?”, and if you’ve never seen his stuff, start with the Jeff Bezos one. This turns into a tease for a series I want to try on the channel called “works of art,” where I respond to things other creators have poured their heart and soul into.

If you only listen to one section of the episode, make it the criticism vs trolling one.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. If you know one business owner or creator who’d enjoy having this on in the background, send them this episode.

P.P.S. A letter from a listener named Nicholas arrived at the office mid-recording. Nicholas, I’ll read it.

I don’t have time to do the proper written version of this weeks episode because this one’s coming in HOT from a windy beach in Ireland!

It’s a short, 15 min stream of consiousness about success, money and creativity though. I think anyway. I also don’t have time to listen to any of it to remind myself of what it’s about.

BUT I hope you like it.

See y’all next Tuesday.

Cheers and love,
Jonathan

P.S. I listened to the first 15 seconds and, at least to me, sounds like that new mic I bought is fucking amazing. Can’t remember what it is, but compare it to the last outdoor episode and it’s crazy. THE WIND WAS INTENSE.

This is the written version of this week’s bonus Youtube video. The video is the full, unedited, chaotic version. This is the good bits, organised by taking the transcript and having an AI tool (who’s name is Stinky) clean it up.
[Watch it on YouTube]

Oh HULLO!

I think what you’re going to learn here is going to be a bit mind blowing. Especially if you’ve ever thought of writing a non fiction/business book to grow your business.

In mMay 2025 I launched a book called Strategy Signal. It’s short, essentially a little booklet, and it took 6 weeks total to go from not existing at all, to being on sale, and as of yesterday it’s generated $1,600,000 revenue.

And btw I don’t mean that it “could have contributed to bringing in 1.6 million”, I mean that 1.6 million dollars are directly attributed to this book (i’ll show the number breakdown later in the article).

It’s also the less successful of the 2 books we launched in the last few years. The older one (The Workshopper Playbook) made somewhere between $3 and $5 million (I couldn’t actually get the accurate numbers for this one because the attribution has become blurry in the 6 years since launch).

People congratulate me when we launch one of these. “Congratulations on writing a book!” And that’s not what this is at all.

I get asked about this constantly. Should I write a book? Will it get me more clients? What’s even the point? Most people don’t really understand what a book is for in a business context, so this week I opened up the actual funnel software, the real Facebook ads, and the exact sales numbers behind the book funnels we run at Facilitator. If you run a business, especially a consulting or agency type business, this is exactly the kind of asset you could be using to bring strangers into your world. (Quick note if you’re new here: I’m Jonathan, I run AJ&Smart, a holding company with a bunch of businesses in it, the biggest one being Facilitator.)

The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)

1. A book funnel is a paid lead magnet, and the whole thing is built to generate ONE thing: a call booking. The book brings strangers in from Facebook ads, the upsells qualify them, and the qualified ones get offered a call with my team. For every 100 calls we get 18 to 21 sales, and the thing we’re selling is a $14,000 in-person training. That’s what the $6.99 book is feeding.

2. People take a book more seriously than a PDF. We have normal downloadable lead magnets too, and the book funnel beats them every time. Nobody wants to hear me talk about a little PDF, but people do want to hear me talk about a book, even if the final product is still a PDF. It sounds stupid, it sounds weird, but people just like books.

3. The front end money is the least important part. Strategy Signal made around $400,000 up front, and only about 20% of that was profit, because we pump it all back into the Facebook ads machine. The back end made $1.2 million. 1 in 6 people who bought the book came back and bought something else from us. For every $1 the book made, we made $6.80 in sales.

4. We charge $6.99 on purpose, and it has nothing to do with the money. Reason 1: I saw someone else’s book funnel charging $6.99 and copied it. That’s the honest truth. Reason 2: it’s a small barrier. If someone is going to question spending $7, they were never going to pay $14,000 for a training, and we don’t need them on the list.

5. Launch to your warm audience first, cold 2 weeks later. The warm launch gets the physical copies, feels like an event, and made around $70,000 on its own. It also gets us photos of real people holding the book, which go straight into the cold ads. The cold launch is silent. No one even hears the cold launch.

6. Writing the book is the easiest part of the entire process. The hook, the angle, the upsells, the funnel itself: that’s the hard part. But the writing is where most people get stuck. Strategy Signal was mostly content that already existed inside one of our training programmes.

7. These funnels run hot for 6 to 12 months, then trickle. Strategy Signal had really good ad numbers for about 6 months, was fine for another 6, and then the diminishing returns kicked in. Now it sits in evergreen mode in the background, generating some call bookings but not a lot.

Okay. The story.

The colour came before the book

The moment Strategy Signal started was me sitting in a restaurant with my fiancée, looking at the table, which was this exact red colour. We were like, this would look really good in Facebook ads, this colour is going to stand out. So BEFORE we had the name of the book, before we even had the topic of the book, we had the colour of the book. Just to give you a feeling for how funny and weird these things sometimes go.

For most of the project the book was just called How to Run a Strategy Workshop. Then, while I was in San Francisco, I called Tim, our designer, and we changed the name to Strategy Signal, because How to Run a Strategy Workshop felt like a throwaway thing and Strategy Signal felt more serious.

What a book funnel actually is

Most people think about books the traditional way. You spend months writing it, you get a publisher, you release it, you go around trying to sell it, and if it all goes well you become the authority on a topic and corporates book you for speaking gigs. That process takes around 2 to 3 years from start to finish.

A book funnel is something very different. You’re rarely creating a full length book that you’d see on shelves. You’re creating a small asset, a pamphlet, that works as an entry point into your world. If you understand lead magnets, this is essentially a paid lead magnet.

In the funnel business this is called a self liquidating funnel. You pay for Facebook ads on the front end, people spend money inside the funnel, and the funnel pays for the ads. Let’s say the ads cost $30K per month but the funnel is making $50K per month. Well, then you can just keep spending more money on ads. The people who don’t book calls go into a sort of holding pattern newsletter and other campaigns, and we keep trying to bring them back towards a call from there.

And the reason it beats a normal lead magnet: people take it much more seriously. If I’m holding a book in an ad, people get it instantly. It’s a book, I’m going to buy a book. It also lets us do much more interesting marketing and turn the whole launch into an event. Nobody wants to hear me talk about a little PDF.

Where the book fits in the universe

The way we pick topics: draw your funnel. At the bottom is the thing you actually sell. For Facilitator that’s facilitation, and specifically things like Full Stack Facilitator, our in-person training that costs $14,000. Then you ask, what’s the step just before someone realises facilitation is the solution to their problem? For us that’s workshops, design thinking, Business Model Canvas. And a level above that sits the broadest problem of all, which is basically meetings and collaboration.

Strategy Signal deliberately enters at the workshops level. We targeted consultants who kind of already understand the aesthetic of workshops, who know about design thinking and all the innovation stuff, but don’t know that the underlying core of it all is something called facilitation. The word strategy clicks for them. The book’s only job is to move them one step down the funnel.

(We also have an unreleased book that’s just called Meetings, aimed at the very top of the funnel. It’s more like a zine. I still want to launch it one day.)

This works for any business. In the video I sketched the same drawing for an AI consulting business. At the bottom is what you sell, AI automations, done for you client work. A step before that, the business owner is messing around with ChatGPT and agents, chaotically. So your book is probably something like Your First AI Employee, a booklet that shows them what’s possible, and at the end of it, they can book a call with you.

The launch (and the disgusting rag)

We always launch to the warm audience first. Our list size is approximately 125,000, and whenever we build a new cold campaign, the warm audience gets it first as a completely separate campaign. Hardly anyone does this, and it was even hard to explain to the internal AJ&Smart team, but the warm launch is where the physical copies go, and it made around $70,000 on its own.

The launch itself was a webinar, about an hour and 25 minutes, where the book sat covered on the table until the reveal. My actual words: “I’m going to remove this very disgusting rag.” Then the announcement, then me leaving a silence for everybody clapping.

Why physical copies at all, when the cold funnel is digital only? Because we want pictures of people holding the book. That’s it. Those photos go into the ads and onto the landing page, and the whole thing becomes more and more trustworthy. I think we printed probably 10,000 physical editions of the Workshopper Playbook and 5,000 or so of Strategy Signal. Print stuff out and show your stuff. Especially now, with all the AI stuff making everything feel kind of not very real, you know what I mean. People really like to have physical things. (The physical copy I was holding in the earliest ads had a totally different book inside it, because the real one wasn’t printed yet.)

Then, around 2 weeks later, we turn on the Facebook ads and start pumping people through until it reaches diminishing returns. The ads themselves are simple. We make a lot of silly ones too, but as Eli pointed out while we were recording, the ads that always work best follow the same shape: the first image is always the book, then some movement, this is Strategy Signal, this is what it teaches you. One of them opens with me offering to change your consulting career “for the price of a very expensive cup of coffee” (the funny thing is, that’s not even expensive anymore).

Inside the funnel: an opt in page, a first upsell, a second upsell, and if someone buys the right things, they unlock the call booking page. The upsells do a double job. They generate the money that keeps the ads running, and they qualify people, because only people who buy certain upsells even see the call booking. (These days the team didn’t want call bookings from this funnel anymore, so it leads to a video training instead, and the call booking sits at the end of that.)

On the call booking page there’s a video of me explaining that half my month is spent running strategy and growth sessions for really interesting companies all around the world. So this person who randomly bought a $7 book off Facebook 10 minutes ago is watching that and going, oh shit, these guys are the real deal. That’s the drip feed: you’re feeding information about your company to someone who had never heard of you, and by the end of it they’re booking a 20 minute call with my team.

The actual numbers

Strategy Signal, front end: around $405,000. Around 19,000 people opted in, around 8,423 people bought the actual $6.99 book, and the average cart per customer was almost $50, because the upsells are doing the double job I described above. Roughly 20% of the front end was profit, and the rest went straight back into the ads.

The back end, meaning everything those buyers went on to purchase from us afterwards: $1.2 million. So this one book funnel generated $1.6 million in revenue. That’s revenue, not profit. I can only give you the profit margin of the overall business during that period, because this was basically the only core funnel we were running at the time, and it was around 47%.

The older book, the Workshopper Playbook, did even better. We put a lot more time and ad spend into it, back when the return on Facebook ads was just so much better, and I don’t know the exact numbers on it anymore. My guess on camera was somewhere between $3 and $5 million.

So people ask, why wouldn’t you just keep doing these? Well, a book funnel is one of the most complicated funnel types you can build. My name is on it, and because I’m a designer I get obsessed with making sure it looks good. It took 6 weeks from “hey, we’re going to do a book funnel” to launch, which doesn’t sound long, but it’s a lot of work, and it distracts me from other things. Like, right now I’m trying to grow this Unscheduled CEO thing.

How I’d write one today

Here’s the part everyone gets backwards. Writing the book is the easiest, easiest part of the whole entire process. Coming up with the hook, the angle, the upsells: that’s the harder thing. But the writing is where most people get stuck.

The Workshopper Playbook had no AI involved, because there was no AI around when I wrote it. I spoke the entire book out, stream of consciousness. We used Descript to turn that into a transcript. Someone from Fiverr structured it into chapters in a Google doc. Laura went through the entire thing and essentially rewrote it. Then I did the final pass. So I never did the first written pass, I did the first verbal pass.

Strategy Signal was even easier, because the content already existed inside one of our training programmes. I’d already said all the words. Me, Laura and my sister Rebecca took the transcript, wrote a story into the beginning, and broke it down into a step by step guide on how to run a specific type of workshop. Tim then made it into an actual book.

If I was writing one today, step 1 would still be speaking it all out. The video this article comes from could itself be turned into a book funnel on how to make book funnels (I’m not going to do that, but you easily could). Then I’d use an AI tool, something like Wispr Flow, to take the stream of consciousness and clean it up so it’s actually readable. And then I would personally go through and manually edit it, to make sure it actually sounds like me and says what I want to get across. That last step matters, because it’s really hard to make AI writing compelling on its own. But remember, you’re making a booklet here, a guide. You don’t have to write a lot.

And yes, this is exactly the workflow behind what you’re reading right now. I take the transcript of me talking, have Claude break it down into an article, and then I rewrite the intro myself, because somehow the intro is never getting my vibe.

If you’re thinking about doing one

Start with the funnel drawing. Work out what you actually sell, then work out the step just before it, and make your book there. And remember that you’re not trying to make money from the book. Strategy Signal made money, but on the scale of AJ&Smart that’s not what we were focussed on. You’re trying to generate calls with the right people, people who would never have heard of you otherwise, and a book gives you an asset you can hold up and point at: this is the book.

The writing part that’s been scaring you off is the easiest part of the whole process. Speak it out loud this week, get the transcript cleaned up, edit it until it sounds like you. Almost none of the work is writing.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. Want help launching a book, or even coming up with what it could be in the first place? Well if you’ve already got a large email list (over 10k) OR your business is currently making over $500k revenue per year then head over to AJ&Smart Partners and get in touch!

Or maybe you know someone who’s got a large following and might find this interesting? Connect us, and if they book, we’ll give you a 10% finders fee (of a pretty large number).

The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version. This is the good bits, organised by taking the transcript and having an AI tool clean it up.

HEY!

I was supposed to fly back to Berlin yesterday.

Instead I’m sitting on the ground in a forest in Sweden, recording this week’s episode on AirPods and a laptop camera. Changing my flight was quoted at €15, then the Eurowings website broke, so booking a whole new one cost €100. I paid it, because I didn’t feel like leaving yet.

I wasn’t going to record at all this week. The show is called Unscheduled, I can do it whenever the hell I want, and nobody would have noticed a skipped Tuesday. But I was sitting there rereading The War of Art, and I caught myself asking: why the fuck am I recording this episode anyway?

The answer turned into the episode. And I think it applies to your business as much as it does to my podcast.

The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)

1. Ideas behave like fish: you can’t summon them, you can only be out on the water when they show up. This is Rick Rubin’s framing and I’m stealing it openly. The fisherman casts lines for a chance to catch something. The fish might be there either way, but if you’re not out there, you catch nothing.

2. A dedicated practice matters just as much for making money as it does for making art. You have to be creative to figure out how to generate revenue. It’s the same muscle, and it responds to the same routine.

3. If talking is how you think, build your outlet around talking. This show is one unbroken, improvised take because talking is my way of getting ideas out. Your version might be writing or walking. Find it, then give it a slot.

4. Your workspace trains your brain. A band walks into a studio and creating becomes natural, because the studio is where they create. My office is set up as a place where I go to check our numbers. Worth noticing what your space tells you to do.

5. The content you make for other people doubles as infrastructure for yourself. This podcast is my brain dump, my idea generator, and my way of staying in touch with people without networking. Last week’s video handed me the idea for a whole new workshop.

6. If you’re loving a trip, check what staying actually costs before assuming you have to leave. Mine cost €100. Most people never even look.

Okay. The story.

The fisherman idea

I have a few books with me in Sweden but the 2 that I kept rechecking were my classics: The War of Art, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you listen to this show you’ll know I bang on about both of them. They circle the same concept, which is that ideas come from somewhere else, and if you’re in the right headspace you become a kind of antenna that can receive them.

Whether you believe that or not doesn’t matter, and I don’t even know if I believe it myself. It’s a useful metaphor because you can experience it. Paul McCartney says the entire melody of Yesterday appeared in his mind in one go. Chris Martin says the same kind of thing all the time. Writers say it, filmmakers say it: I was just driving, and boom, the idea arrived.

Rick Rubin has my favourite version of it. You’re a fisherman out at sea, casting lines into the water for a chance to catch something. That’s why writers sit at the desk from 10am until 1pm every day no matter what. They’re keeping the lines in the water.

And that’s why I turned the camera on today. I’ve been doing this show for almost a year now, since September, and most episodes have no specific topic when I start. Sitting down on a Monday and pressing record is me casting the lines.

I’ve felt this myself. When I was in a band and in the practice of songwriting, the songs just came. When I was writing scripts regularly in college, the film ideas flowed. Your antenna becomes more sensitive to the thing you keep showing up for.

The mustard jumper problem

Last week I told you about spending 2 days with my mentor Blake, so here’s the short version if you missed it. I went in with the goal of getting the company to 10 million a year. We were at six. By the end of the 2 days I realised I didn’t want that at all.

What Blake actually did was watch me. In San Diego I was in a great mood, excited about buying a mustard coloured jumper in a tourist surf shop, telling him how much I loved every coffee shop we walked into. Then we’d sit down to talk about the business and he’d say: whoa, your entire vibe just changed. More serious, more closed off, kind of practised and strange. He kept saying GERMAN.

When I talked about my relationship with my now fiancée, he said that’s the real version of you speaking. When I talked about the 10 million, it was the other one.

We dug into it and found the uncomfortable bit: to make AJ&Smart and Facilitator work as well as they did, I’d more or less stopped using my creativity. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I was a creative first. I was in a band. I moved to Berlin to be a filmmaker, not to run a business. And because the business was working so well, it was really hard to get out of that mode.

Blake’s point, over and over: there’s a state I can tap into where I do my best work. The in-person event we’d run the week before was the example. And the more time I spend in that state, the more successful the business will be.

Talking is my way in

Blake is a music producer, and he gave me an example I keep thinking about. A band puts themselves in the studio because the studio is where they create. Being in that room puts them in the headspace, and creating becomes natural there.

Which made me look differently at the AJ&Smart office. It’s beautiful and it’s fun, but it’s set up as a place where we make money, where I go in and check the numbers. So since that trip, the question has been: what situations can I put myself in where things just flow through me, no blockages, as natural as I can possibly be?

One clear answer: talking. That’s the actual reason this show exists as ONE unbroken, improvised take instead of an edited thing. If I bring any usefulness or strangeness to this business that’s hard to compete with, it’s that I can turn on a camera and talk for a long time, unscripted, and sometimes something interesting comes out of it.

There’s an exercise called morning pages, from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Every morning you fill 3 letter-size pages with stream of consciousness writing. Not a diary entry, just a brain dump. I did it for something like 7 years, I have piles and piles of notebooks. This show is my morning pages now, done out loud. The one twist is that I need the feeling that someone might get some use out of what I’m making, or I don’t feel like making it.

And it has a load of other benefits. New people find the companies through the show. People I’d never manage to stay in touch with (I’m not the best at networking) keep getting reminded I exist because episodes keep coming out. And it generates ideas for everything else. Last week’s video about Blake is what triggered the idea for the new workshop I’m building.

The €100 decision

Quick sidequest, because it belongs to the same thing. We were supposed to go back to Berlin yesterday and I didn’t feel like it, so we stayed. I know I have a flexible life because of the business I’ve built, but I’ve been around so many people mid-trip saying “we have to go now” when they don’t. If you’re loving something and dreading the return to your day to day, at least check the price of staying. Mine was €100. That was the entire cost of not breaking the flow.

And no, staying doesn’t contradict the routine-for-creation thing, because I’m still doing the routine. Same show, different location. Sometimes a new location is exactly what knocks the horse blinders off.

What I’m doing with all of this

I’m building my first personal development workshop. It’s born from the creative retreat I ran in February, 5 days, 5 nights, full digital detox, which a lot of you were actually at. I’m trying to find the compact version of that, something people could access more regularly, plus a new layer from the Blake stuff: how do you even figure out what you actually want to explore in the first place?

There’s a V1 of it done. I’ll test it on a couple of friends first, then in September on our guides in New York. (Guides are the top level of our facilitator business. A couple of you listen to this show, and yes, you’re our guinea pigs.)

That’s why the reading pile out here is The War of Art, Big Magic, The Surrender Experiment and The Second Mountain, plus my notes from February.

One more thing that fits. I saw The Odyssey at an IMAX here in Sweden on Saturday (not 70mm, in case you’re wondering). I’m not telling you it’s a great movie. What I love is watching someone get an insane, humongous thing out of their head and into reality. Long term, that’s the goal for me too: keep growing the business, sure, but make things that are creative, weird and risky. The February retreat was a first pinch of that. This show is another attempt at it. The business content has always been a bit of a Trojan horse to get you into this other stuff anyway.

If you’re in it right now

Maybe you have a switched-off version of yourself too. A thing you were before the business worked, parked because the serious mode was paying the bills.

2 small things to try this week. Notice which topics make you playful and which ones flip you into your own version of German mode. And find one slot in your week where you sit down, cast the lines, and see what shows up. You don’t need a podcast for it. 3 pages and a pen worked for me for 7 years.

Cheers, Jonathan

P.S. This is the cleaned-up version. The full episode has the forest, the rain, a very large ant, and me completely losing my train of thought after going to get my sunglasses... If you know one business owner who’d get something out of this, send it to them.

P.P.S. If you haven’t read The War of Art or Big Magic, please just read them. I have nothing to do with either of them, I just think you should.

The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version, this is just the rundown of what we talked about, cleaned up from the transcript with an AI tool. [Spotify / Apple / YouTube]

Hey,

This week it’s me and Eli in the studio, plus my daughter hanging out in the background because it’s summer holidays, plus a fire alarm inspection, plus plumbers on the way. Classic Unscheduled recording conditions.

It’s a hangout episode, but two proper threads came out of it: why wealthy people keep making content when they obviously don’t need to, and why adding a few thousand a month with a simple service business is easier than people think.

Anyway, here’s what we talked about in the episode:

We react to last week’s broken audio: Someone in the comments pointed out that I constantly complained about Laura and Eli making chair noises, and then I went and played background music so loud that it drowned out several minutes of us reviewing a drink. We replay the damage on this episode. Eli’s defence is that the music was so loud in his headphones he assumed I was just vibing extremely hard. This is what completely unedited gets you.

Why rich people keep making content: It’s under every Alex Hormozi video: “why is this guy still making YouTube videos if he’s basically a billionaire?” The standard answer, “I want to help people”, mostly hides the truth. The real reasons: promoting the business is part of a CEO’s actual job, a lot of people (especially Americans, where the appetite for wealth is basically infinite) just want more, and past a certain point you’re doing it to feel useful and stay relevant rather than fade out. I’d respect people more if they just said that.

An audience buys you optionality: This is the part I care about most for Unscheduled. If we keep bringing together like-minded entrepreneurs every week, we’re never locked into one business: we could run a creative retreat one year, open a video game arcade the next. A side effect I didn’t plan for: the more I do this show, the more interesting rooms I get invited into, like the two hours I spent on Greg Isenberg’s livestream on Thursday. Greg is the perfect example of all of this, he was already very successful when I met him, started the Startup Ideas podcast anyway, and it’s now one of the biggest AI shows on YouTube.

The six-week hypothetical I’m never filming: Give me 30 freelancers for six weeks and I reckon I could get them making an extra $3,500 a month in profit with dead simple service businesses. Examples from the episode: helping local businesses like the Tyre King (a guy who comes to your building and swaps your tyres, we hire him all the time) show up in Google and the AI tools, for 150 a month, half of what he makes on one job. Designing and running company offsites, because an HR person is googling exactly that every minute and mostly finding crap. Building a lead-gen quiz like the facilitator.com one for a €500 one-time fee. It is NOT rocket science.

Your competition is fucking lazy: Someone pitched me this week in German, when every trace of me on the internet is in English. Someone else opened with obvious AI slop, and in my mind that person is blacklisted, because lazy outreach means lazy work. My split: use AI for the research, the strategy, the list of who to contact and what their problems are, then write the email yourself, click their website, watch their videos, maybe record a quick Loom. Ten extra minutes of effort puts you ahead of basically everyone, because the people you’re competing against will not do it.

Revisiting the coaches video: We replay a piece of “I spent $600k on coaches so you don’t have to”, the Blake La Grange part. We paid Blake $100K to map the journey to $10 million, and by the end of day one he was telling me I didn’t seem like the person who even wanted a $6.3 million company, that I seemed more like an artist. I’d been waiting for someone to give me permission to say that. If your business works fine but you secretly don’t like it much, go watch that one.

Where the show is at: Honest goal check: 10,000 weekly listeners by mid-September doesn’t feel realistic if we’re only counting the podcast. YouTube’s last 28 days: 11K views, almost 7K more than usual, and last week’s episode is at around 2,000 listens across YouTube and Spotify so far. Maybe the better goal is a minimum per episode instead of chasing an average. It’s good to have goals.

If you only listen to one stretch of the episode, make it the simple-business-ideas one in the middle.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. If you know one business owner who’d enjoy having this on in the background, send them this episode. (On the recording I said probably don’t send anyone this one. Ignore me.)

This is the written version of this week’s bonus Youtube video. The video is the full, unedited, chaotic version. This is the good bits, organised by taking the transcript and having an AI tool (Claude Fable) clean it up. [Watch it on YouTube]

A few years ago I paid someone $100,000 to spend two days with him in San Diego.

By the end of the first day, he’d told me I shouldn’t even be running my company. The day after those two days ended, I had a pretty huge panic attack. And it was still some of the most profound coaching work I’ve ever done. I’ll explain in a minute.

Since starting my business in 2011, I’ve spent somewhere in the range of $550,000 to $600,000 on coaches, mentors and masterminds, and that’s before counting the flights, the hotels, and sending my team along too. So when people ask me the question I was asking myself ten years ago, “is any of this actually worth it if you’re running a small business?”, I think I’ve earned the right to an answer.

Below are three of the roughly 25 coaches and mentors I’ve worked with, the three most impactful recent ones: what each one cost, what they told me, and what happened to my business when I just did what they said. I’m using these 3 as a way to kind of tell my story around the value of coaching and to keep the story grounded VS vague.

The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)

1. The ROI of a great coach is usually one conversation, not the whole package. My first ever call with Sam Ovens lasted about 20 minutes, and my audio was broken the whole time. What he told me in those 20 minutes became the template for a program that has since made over $20 million.

2. Just do what they say. If someone is more successful than you in your exact domain, don’t debate them, just try it and see what happens. People in the mastermind kept saying “this wouldn’t work in my industry” or “this wouldn’t work in Europe.” I’m European, I was selling corporate training, and I just tried it. It worked.

3. The most successful people in the mastermind showed up the least. They’d appear once every six months, ask one question, get their answer, and disappear to execute. The people on every single call were knowledge gatherers, not action takers, and they were the ones struggling.

4. Coaches are for seasons. Sam was right when I needed hypergrowth. Blake would have been useless to me then, and Sam would have been wrong later. Figure out what season your business is in before you figure out who to hire.

5. Don’t try to extract every cent. The people who got the least out of these communities were the ones grinding to get their money’s worth on every call, annoyed whenever a topic wasn’t relevant to their business.

6. Paying for expensive things teaches you to sell expensive things. We paid Blake $100,000 for two days. We came home and started charging €100,000 for two days with us, and sold four of them in the first 12 months.

7. No coach will take you from 0 to 1. If the business barely exists yet, save your money. You still have to be a person who can just do shit.

Okay. The three coaches.

Sam Ovens: the $36,000 mastermind I barely used

Around August 2020, our biggest course at the time was making 130-something K a month, but it was plateauing, ad prices were climbing, profit margins were down to 15 or 20%, and I could see it slowly falling apart. The business was also getting really stressful to run.

Then a designer friend of mine, Ran Segall, messaged me: “Do you know about Sam Ovens’ Quantum mastermind?” The concept was $36,000 per year for a weekly group call with 15 to 20 other entrepreneurs, plus four trips a year to LA to hang out with Sam. I’d never been in a mastermind and didn’t really get it, so I asked Ran for his logins (hope it’s okay that I keep telling this story, Ran) and binge-watched the recording of Sam’s most recent three-day virtual event.

Something clicked. We were 20-something people making 2.5 million. Sam had a very similar business model with nine people making 12 million. Our system was incredibly complicated, ten funnels, tons of content. He had ONE funnel and made basically no content. Something was going on there.

So I joined. My first call with Sam went like this: my audio was broken, there was a big echo, and I sat there going “hey Sam, hey Sam, hey Sam” in front of everyone while he stared back with zero facial expressions (he’s not unfriendly, he just doesn’t do facial expressions). Then he gave me about 20 minutes of information: the VSL funnel, his Facebook ad system into a call booking setup, and the pricing structure he’d use. My team and I executed on exactly that, and it was the beginning of the hypergrowth stage of my business. The facilitation business fucking exploded. Two years later we hit our peak revenue, $6.3 million with a 50-something percent profit margin, after being plateaued for about a year.

That pricing suggestion became the template for Workshopper Master, which is still the most successful product we’ve ever made: 903 active members, $5,000 to $7,000 to join, over $20 million cumulatively since 2020.

Here’s the funny part. I stayed in Quantum for two years, spent at least $120,000 all-in (we even sent our sales team to hang out with Sam’s sales team), and almost never showed up to the calls. The other thing Sam gave me had nothing to do with funnels: watching him coach 30 people at a time while keeping his energy low, not performing, just staying his slightly weird self, is a big part of why I can make videos like this one at all.

You can’t join Quantum anymore, by the way. Sam shut it down while we were still members to go build Skool.

Bryan Franklin: becoming a sailboat captain

I met Bryan through a stranger. Someone recognised me at a conference breakfast in Nashville, we got talking, and I asked him the question I ask everyone: what’s been the biggest thing for growing your business lately? He said working with an executive coach called Bryan Franklin, and I asked for an intro on the spot. (It then took ages to arrange the first call. Bryan, I love you man, but you are busy as fuck.)

Bryan is an actual executive coach, the only one of these three where coaching is the real job. His website says he’s helped 12 startups reach 1 billion, and I don’t doubt it. We paid him around €75,000 a year for two years: a one-on-one call every two weeks for me, the same for Laura, plus occasional full-day in-person sessions at something like $15K a day.

On our very first call I told him: dude, I am so bored of running this company and I don’t want to do it anymore. We’d hired so many people that everything just worked, I didn’t know what my job was, and I was 33 and wanted stuff to do. He gave me an analogy some of you will have heard, but I hadn’t, and it landed at exactly the right moment. You spend your 20s like you’re on a speedboat, foot down on the gas, burning as much diesel as possible, running on fear and status, and that fuels the company’s growth. But now you’re the CEO of a multi-million euro company, and you need to become a sailboat captain: let the wind and the momentum that’s already there push you, and calm down.

The thing that made Bryan so valuable is that I could never predict what he was going to say. I have ADHD, I’m always guessing someone’s next sentence, and if I guess right I’m bored. I’d come to Bryan with “here’s my problem, there’s option A and option B, which one?” and he’d show me there were ten other options, many of them better than anything I’d thought of. The best coaches give you the courage to do the thing you already knew you should have done in the first place.

One example. Laura and I met him in New York for a one-day session and presented every direction we could take the company, because Workshopper Master had been running for two years and we thought it was basically done. He looked at our numbers and said: you’ve struck oil. This course is the oil. All you need to do for the next two years is build new and more efficient refineries and drills to get that oil out. Stop thinking about everything else.

It was so relaxing. I always have 30 to 50 ideas, and he gave us permission to drop almost all of them. He was right too: there was still probably 10 to 15 million left in a program we’d mentally written off. That one day cost $10,000 or $15,000. You can guess the ROI.

Blake La Grange: $100,000, two days, one panic attack

The most recent one, and the most intense. Blake’s deal was $100,000 up front plus a share of any growth in the business on top, and most of that 100K was those two days in San Diego. We went in with a very specific goal: take Facilitator from $6.3 million to $10 million a year over 18 months.

At the end of the first day he said: Jonathan, you don’t seem like the type of person who’s the right fit for having even a six point something million euro company. You seem more like an artist. He’d noticed the only time I got excited was talking about my music and art projects, and whenever I talked about growing the business I closed up and went into what he called “German mode” (I live in Germany, he enjoyed that one). And Laura, my fiancée, who runs the businesses with me and was sitting right there, said: yeah, that’s true.

That’s the thing the best coaches do: they see what you really want but won’t allow yourself to do, and they keep digging until you admit it. Blake told me I’d never like running the company the way it was, that I’d always be fighting my own personality, and that we should stop the 10 million journey entirely. Pursue the creative projects wholeheartedly and they’ll make a lot of money. Banging our heads against 10 million would just be an unpleasant burnout waste of our time.

The day after those two days, I had a pretty huge panic attack. It was that intense. And then over the next two to three years the business transformed massively, all of it traceable to that one weekend. We recorded the “future of AJ&Smart” video that’s still on our homepage, repositioned the whole company around bringing joy and creativity back to your OWN work, and finally used facilitator.com, a domain I’d bought but had been too scared to use. We killed the internal rule that every product had to make at least €1 million. I started Already There, the digital detox art retreat I’d wanted to go on myself for ten years. And Blake basically invented our “guides” model: instead of me being the face of everything and hiring more and more facilitators, the top people in our community now pay a yearly licensing fee to be trained by us and take on client work on behalf of AJ&Smart. That became a whole business in itself.

One more thing. Blake sold us this $100,000 deal in a Google Doc, on a call, no polished proposal, and I remember thinking “this is so janky for such a big deal.” Then I thought: well, if he can do it, we can do it. We came back to Berlin and created the Two Day Growth Jam, two full days with me and Laura at the AJ&Smart office, €100,000, jumping straight into your biggest growth blockers. We sold four in the first 12 months, and closed one of them over a call and text messages. Spending big money on yourself unlocks the cheekiness to charge it.

Even the thing you’re reading right now comes out of the Blake reframe. In the old AJ&Smart, an hour-long unedited video would have been the stupidest possible use of my time. Now, if two of you read this, connect with it, and in two years come to an art retreat or a business thing I run, that’s already worth it.

So, is it worth it?

For me, obviously, yes. But I’m not selling you coaching (I don’t offer any, and two of these three don’t anymore either, one of them is off making a movie, so this is not an ad and there’s no affiliate anything). Here’s the actual nuance.

You have to be coachable, and a lot of people just aren’t. The format matters less than you’d think: Sam was group calls, Bryan was a formal call every two weeks, Blake was hanging out on the beach for 18 hours straight. What matters is picking someone who’s ahead of you in the exact season you’re in, doing what they say without ego, and then going home and executing, because nobody, at any price, will do that part for you.

And if the money feels scary, that’s partly the point. Paying the 36K made me take it seriously: when Sam said something, we just did it.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. The full video version of this is on the YouTube channel, with the actual screenshots, the pricing breakdowns, and me getting interrupted by a wasp nest situation on my balcony. If you know one business owner who’s been going back and forth on hiring a coach, send them this.

P.P.S. Blake has actually been on the show. If you want to see what he’s like, search “a personal talk with my mentor” on the channel. He kind of coaches me on air. Fascinating guy.

The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, occasionally unhinged version, this is just the rundown of what we talked about. Listen: [Spotify / Apple / YouTube]

***BEFORE WE START I NEED TO TELL YOU ABOUT A VERY HILLARIOUS AUDIO ISSUE IN THIS EPISODE: Look guys, I dont listen to or watch these episodes before I hit publish so sometimes stuff is just… broken. This time around theres about 4 minutes where all you can hear is loud music and nothing else… im sorry :) **

Hey,

This week’s episode is more of a hangout vibe and less of a “learn something” one.

Myself, Laura (who runs Facilitator.com) and Eli (our video guy) are hanging out in our new, overly complicated multicam studio setup at the AJ&Smart office, just talking about stuff. It’s classic Unscheduled.

We did talk about some things that could be considered practical though, like we talked about how we’re currently using AI tools, we talked about how we deal with high monthly expenses AND we talked about how to sort of harness your weirdness as a competitive advantage.

Anyway, here’s what we talked about in the episode:

The new studio setup: What started as “let’s get Laura and Eli on camera” turned into a full multicam production with wires everywhere within about a week. Someone in the comments already asked if the background is AI generated, which I’m choosing to take as a compliment. If you normally just listen to the audio, this is one of the rare episodes where it’s worth having a look at the YouTube version.

Laura, one month into being CEO of Facilitator: Her day to day is almost identical to before, the difference is that she owns the numbers now. It turns out owning the numbers is basically the whole job, in Germany it’s literally your legal obligation as the head of a company to keep the thing liquid, which is also why we won’t stop talking about money on a show with CEO in the name.

The minus €450,000 months: There was a version of AJ&Smart where some months started at minus €450K, as in we had to make €450,000 that month just to get back to zero. It was a pressure cooker, but weirdly it was also some of the most fun and most cohesive the team has ever been. It forced us to get good, find mentors and build all the infrastructure we still run on today. Now that our costs are a fraction of that, it feels like we leveled up our video game characters so much that we’re back in the starter area. Small slow things like our Guides mastermind or this podcast, things the old “every product has to make €1M a year” rule would have killed on day one, actually get to exist now.

A sparkling water review: Lacroix Razz Cranberry, Mango and Orange enter the ranking, and Orange takes third place behind Tangerine. Eli, who grew up in Colombia with actual mango trees at his school, confirms that the mango one tastes like almost nothing.

How we’re actually using AI tools: Laura built one central context brain that pulls together everything she’s ever worked on with Claude and now uses the expensive model as the senior strategist and the cheaper models to execute. I use it to turn these unedited episodes into what you’re reading right now, plus research, lead magnets and a Monday morning growth report. Eli uses it for chapters, shorts and thumbnail ideas but still makes everything manually because the AI image output looks like shit. The common pattern between the three of us is that the AI runs the machinery in the background and never touches the thing the customer actually sees.

Harnessing your weirdness as a competitive advantage: The more AI standardizes everything, the more people seem to crave things that are obviously made by real humans. Clients are booking our trainings partly because we don’t pre-plan the agenda, and conference organizers are excited that the talk can never be repeated. Every listener who’s ever talked to Laura about this podcast praises exactly the things a growth consultant would tell us to cut: the mess, the tangents, the water reviews. It’s why this show will stay 100% unedited. Laura’s advice if you want to apply this in your own business is to stop taking the edges off yourself. The polish is the problem.

If you only listen to one section of the episode, make it that last one.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. My goal this year is to grow this show. If you know one business owner who’d enjoy having this on in the background, send them this episode. That’s the best way to help.

This is the written version of this week’s “sidequest” video. The video is the full, unedited, occasionally unhinged version (with a new camera setup!). This article is the good bits, organised. [Watch on YouTube] and copy/paste my Promotion Brain prompt!

Hey you,

Most of the CEOs I know who are using AI tools are not making more money with them. They’re making less. Which is actually kind of funny tbh.

Not because the tools are bad. The tools are insanely good, like anyone using Fable the last few days would be crazy to say they suck.

BUT… whats bad is

The tools keep pulling them into €50 an hour work when the job they’re supposed to be doing is worth €5,000 an hour.

I watched it happen at my own company. Early on, one of the people here who is responsible for making money spent ages building a vibe coded proposal machine. Client call goes in, transcript comes out, a standardised proposal comes out the other end. Really cool.

Except by the time a client asks us for a proposal, we’ve already closed the deal. The hard part, the part worth real money, is getting more of those calls in the first place. And the person working on that is now locked into an AI fucking dopamine fest. Great.

If you’ve spent an evening recently building some clever little internal tool for your business, you might already know exactly where this is going.

Before anything else: the thing I made for you. It’s called the “Promotion Brain” and it’s a free Google Doc, right here:

→ The Promotion Brain (free Google Doc)

Paste it into a Claude or ChatGPT project. It interviews you about your business, then makes every future AI session work on the €5,000 an hour job instead of the rabbit holes. You don’t need to give me your email address to get it. You can if you want to. If that’s all you came for, take it and go. If you want to know why it exists, keep reading.

The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)

1. Your job as a CEO is to be the promoter of your business. Most of your week should be spent getting more people to know your business exists. More awareness means more leads, more leads means demand beats supply, and demand beating supply means you can raise your prices. If you don’t like that job, you might need to hire a CEO.

2. AI tools are tricking you into €50 an hour work. Invoicing, scheduling, meeting summaries, internal systems, proposal generators. That work existed before AI, and you correctly ignored it or hired someone for it. Now the tools make it fun, so you’re doing it yourself.

3. Systems don’t correlate with revenue. You can leave your company an absolute chaotic mess and still make a lot of money. You can have the most structured, streamlined, calm company on the planet and be making nothing. I don’t see a correlation between those two things, at my company or any company I know.

4. Be suspicious of the perfect note-taking system. Including your own. When I meet a systems-obsessed founder, I assume one of three things: they’re not making much money, their company doesn’t need to make money, or they already made so much they’re just looking for stuff to do. If your meeting-notes setup is “so dialed,” the only question that matters is: how much money have you made?

5. AI-generated content is slop, and everyone can smell it. Everyone has access to the same tools, so everyone’s AI LinkedIn post looks like everyone else’s AI LinkedIn post. Use AI like a researcher on your team. Deliver the thing as a human. It’s the delivery that people connect with, and you cannot outsource that.

6. If you want to vibe code something, vibe code something wired to revenue. Not a meeting summariser. A quiz that collects emails from potential clients and ends, for the right people, in a call with your team. I built exactly that at Facilitator.com. It shows up in the P&L. The internal tool never does.

7. Steal the “Promotion Brain.” The free Google Doc linked above. It exists to catch you mid rabbit hole and point the tool back at the only work that pays €5,000 an hour: promotion. No email required.

Okay. The story.

€50 an hour work in a €5,000 an hour seat

Here’s how I keep it simple in my own head. There is €50 an hour work: invoicing, scheduling, summarising meetings, tidying documents, smoothing internal processes. Fine. Useful. Changes nothing.

And there is €5,000 an hour work: promotion. Getting people to know your business exists. Finding leads. Increasing the leverage of the whole company.

That proposal machine from the top of this article is the whole pattern in miniature. It was clever. It worked. And I had to say out loud: I don’t give a shit about the proposal process being crystal smooth. The deal is closed on the calls, so the clever person’s time should go to the actual hard part of the business: getting more of those calls to happen.

Here’s what changed with AI. The temptation to do low-value work always existed, but before these tools you had a kind of accidental focus: the boring stuff was boring, so you didn’t do it. Now people who have entire teams for admin are saying “no no, I’ll rebuild the proposal process myself.” And I know the counterargument, because I hear it every time: “but I build the system once, and then I never need someone to do it again.” Even that is wrong. The fact that you are the one building it at all is the problem. That was never the seat you’re paid to sit in.

A while ago we were running a revenue challenge at AJ&Smart, and I was talking it through with a few people. One of them suggested a well-known operating-system-for-your-business framework, which they were in the middle of installing at their own company, because their company was having challenges. And my thought in that conversation was: is this a systems problem? Or is revenue not coming in because there’s a lead generation problem?

Systems are easier to work on. That’s the trap. You can’t cleanly measure whether the system did anything, so you get to kick the results down the road forever. It happens inside my company too: I ask a team lead how a product is selling, and the answer is “this month we focused on improving the internal way we work so we can be more efficient.” I can promise you, that has never once shown up as money.

The tools are whispering that efficiency is how you make money. It isn’t. You make money by being better at the CEO job, and the CEO job is promotion.

The slippidy sloppidy problemidy

The second way I see CEOs using AI wrong: the generic content machine.

“I don’t like doing content anyway, so I’ll get the AI to do it.” Here’s the problem: It fucking sucks. It’s soulless. Everyone has access to the same thing, so your post reads like the same slop as everybody else’s. When I get an email from another founder that was clearly written by AI, I find it disgusting. I don’t even want to read it.

I’m not saying don’t use AI in the process. I used Claude to help me build the document I gave you above, and to get my head straight before recording. That’s the right use: AI as a researcher on your team. But then I sat down and recorded the video with no script and no teleprompter, and I write my LinkedIn posts directly into LinkedIn, spelling mistakes included. The human delivers.

The more people hand their voice to the tools, the more vanilla everything gets. Which quietly makes the human stuff more valuable every single month. That’s not a moral position. It’s an arbitrage.

The math on this exact video

Let me show you the €5,000 an hour thing with the video you’re reading the companion to.

Recording it took about an hour, because it’s unedited and goes straight from my mouth to YouTube. Add the research beforehand and the upload, call the whole thing three hours of my time.

Now the other side. From a video like this, a couple of people will join the newsletter. And when I eventually announce something, one or two of the people who joined will come along to one of my in-person events, and those are 8K per ticket. Run that math and be aggressive about rounding down: this video is worth somewhere around €4,000 an hour to my business.

The same three hours spent vibe coding an internal meeting summariser? Cool tool. Genuinely. And it generates €0 this quarter, and probably €0 next quarter too.

Yes, I know about the famous exception: Basecamp built an internal tool that turned into a multi-million dollar product. Sure. That is not what’s happening in most small businesses. Most of us are just making cool stuff that leads nowhere, with a permission slip borrowed from a company that got lucky once.

What I do differently now

One rule: the money work happens first, and the fun stuff happens after.

I still use these tools to make silly things I shouldn’t be making as a CEO. Right after recording this video I’m going on Greg Isenberg’s show, because that’s promotion, and that’s the job. And tomorrow I want to spend time building a little website I have no business building myself. I’m a designer, it’s fun, and someone else should be doing it. The difference is I know which hours are which. The €5,000 hours got spent first.

The “Promotion Brain” is how I make the tool itself enforce that rule. From the document:

The €50 per hour work is invoicing, scheduling, summarising meetings, tidying documents. Fine. Useful. Changes nothing.

The €5k per hour work is promotion.

Same free Google Doc linked at the top. Take it.

If you’re mid rabbit hole right now

I want to say this to the specific person who spent last night connecting three tools together for a workflow that saves nobody any real time.

I’m not judging you. I fell into the rabbit hole too, and I’ll fall in again, probably tomorrow. The tools are built to be delicious.

But your company can stay a chaotic mess and still make a lot of money. Nobody is coming to give you a prize for the streamlined internal process. So close the tool-builder tab, take the Promotion Brain, and spend the first hour of tomorrow on the only question that pays €5,000 an hour: how do more people find out that your business exists?

It is NOT hard to get started. That’s the whole point of the document.

Cheers, Jonathan

P.S. The full video is the complete, unedited, occasionally chaotic version of all of this, including me breaking my own document live on camera. If you know a business owner who’s currently three weeks deep into building an AI system for a problem they don’t have, send them this. That’s genuinely the best way to help this show grow.

This is the written version of this week's episode. As always, the podcast is the full, unedited, occasionally unhinged version — this is the good bits, organised. Listen on [Spotify / Apple / YouTube].

Hey,

So this is a crazy one:

Between roughly 2018 and 2022, at the exact moment AJ&Smart hit its peak revenue (around $6 million revenue, with a 47% profit margin), I wanted to give the company away.

Not sell it. Give it. To anyone who’d take it. Or shut it down. I was talking to people about both options. My co-founder wanted to be bought out, and honestly, part of me wanted to be bought out too. There is a very real alternate timeline where I am not running this company today.

If you’ve never owned a business, that sentence sounds insane. Peak revenue! Great margins! What’s the problem?

If you have owned a business, you might already know exactly what the problem was. So let me give you the short version first, and then the whole story.

The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)

1. The “held hostage in your own company” feeling is real, common, and almost nobody talks about it publicly. I now speak to founders constantly who describe the same thing: you walk into your own office and feel like you’re not wanted there. Like it’s not your company anymore. Like you’d have to ask permission to change anything.

2. It’s almost never a revenue problem. It’s a hiring problem. Not “hiring is bad.” Hiring badly, for years, in ways that compound.

3. Perks don’t buy goodwill. They buy expectations. We had a chef on Fridays, yoga twice a week, retreats, a basically unlimited tech budget. The result was not gratitude. It was “why don’t we have a chef every day?”

4. “Hire when you need someone” is a spending instruction. The second I removed myself from hiring and told the team to hire whenever they felt they needed to, people hired the moment they felt slightly busy. At our peak of dysfunction, we had four employees managing one small office. My friend Sam Ovens was running a $12M company with nine people and a cleaner who came once a week.

5. The way out was not “small team good, big team bad.” I want to be really clear on this, because it’s the lazy takeaway. Hiring is one of the only real forms of leverage a business owner has. The lesson is that there’s a right size and a right culture for you, and you probably can’t know it until you get it wrong.

6. If you feel this way right now: it’s fixable. But it takes years, not quarters. And almost everyone I know who took the eject seat and sold tells me the same thing today: I wish I hadn’t done it.

Okay. The story. (You can also just watch the video if you don’t feel like reading)

My own personal utopia (and how I wrecked it)

I started AJ&Smart to build my own little utopia. A place where I could work on interesting things with people I actually wanted to be around. And for years, it was exactly that.

Then it worked too well. There was so much demand for what we did that I decided to see how far we could push it, and we scaled aggressively: from a couple of people adding one or two hires a year to 36 people. My co-founder went on a six-month sabbatical and came back to a different company. I want to be honest about the responsibility here. The negative vibes that followed were mine. I built them.

Here’s what daily life looked like at the “peak”:

Every single day, someone knocked on my office door with an irritation. A political fight with another employee. A complaint about a perk. Someone would come in, maybe pissed off, maybe sad, or flustered, tell me something going on in their family, and ask for a raise. I was in my late twenties. I had no idea how to handle that, so I just... gave people ad hoc raises. Then they’d tell their colleagues, and the colleagues would come knock on the door.

Friends hired friends. Sometimes that worked (it’s how we got Laura, who now runs Facilitator). Often it created factions. We occasionally hired someone who turned out to be, let’s say, creatively honest, or who’d just vanish for days.

And the perks. My theory at the time was: maybe people are unhappy because there aren’t enough perks. So: chef, yoga, retreats, gear, very little spending oversight, because we were making so much money anyway. And every perk generated a new complaint about the perk. The yoga time doesn’t suit me. Why only Fridays for the chef?

We hired coaches who told us we needed systems: weekly check-ins, quarterly career talks, one-on-ones. We did all of it. Then we ran the anonymous employee survey and the results were worse than the year before.

I walked into my own office feeling like the least welcome person in the building. Around that time I had coffee with the CEO of a much bigger Berlin company and asked her how it felt when she walked into her office. She said: “I feel like nobody wants me there.” She got out. Derek Sivers, one of my favorite people on the planet, got out too, and was so wrecked by the whole thing he seriously looked into legally changing his name and moving to another country to disappear.

That’s the club I was about to join.

The accidental control group

I got so irritated with the agency side of the business that I did something that, in hindsight, saved everything: I started a completely separate team, in a separate office, and kept it hermetically sealed from the mess. It was called AJ&Smart Digital Experiments (AJSDX), then Workshopper, and today it’s Facilitator.

And that little team felt... light. Positive. Fun. Everyone who works at AJ&Smart today (except Kyle, our bookkeeper who’s been here since day 1) came from that team.

That’s what finally showed me the truth. It wasn’t “companies are miserable.” It wasn’t “I’m not built for this.” The original culture was rotted, and I had rotted it. Given a clean start and everything I’d learned, I could build something completely different.

I tried the other classic escape hatch too, by the way: hire a CEO, move yourself to the board. What actually happens is you lose even more control and hate it even more. And a dark little secret nobody tells you: when you put people in positions of power in your business and step away, some of them will try to take it from you. “Give us the business or we take the clients” is a conversation more founders have had than will ever admit publicly. They might even try to force you to sell them equity “or else”. I’ve seen it all.

The reset

I’m slow and cautious by nature, so I waited for a signal. The signal arrived: one part of the business lost about €1.2 million in a single year. Either I go in and fix it, or I take it as the universe telling me the board-member experiment is over.

I came back as CEO properly. And over the following years we went from 28-ish people (post-Covid) down to around six people today. Three office spaces down to one. There was a chaotic co-founder buyout in the middle of it, and a new baby at home, and honestly the whole 2018 to 2022 stretch felt like a nonstop beating. I only feel like I’ve recovered the excitement in the last two years. You can literally watch the moment it turned, in the relaunch video that’s still on the AJ&Smart homepage. Which, btw I recorded about a week after having a MASSIVE panic attack on a work

And here’s the thing: today, the vibe is genuinely amazing. I love everyone on this team, we spend time together as actual friends, and the people who leave mostly leave to start their own companies. Some of the people who found me most annoying back in the bad years have contacted me since, after hiring their own first employees, to say: I get it now. I’m sorry. That pressure is invisible until you’ve carried it.

What we do differently now (the honest handbook)

The biggest single change is that we stopped lying. To candidates, to employees, and to ourselves, about what kind of company this is.

We now have an employee handbook (heavily inspired by, and in places directly stolen from, the Valve, Basecamp, and Panic handbooks. It says so in the handbook) whose entire job is to describe the company as it actually is, not as we wish it were. It includes lines like:

“Internal information dissemination is not our strong point at AJ&Smart, and it never will be. The only way to find out what’s going on is to be proactive about it.”

And an entire section called “What is AJ&Smart not good at?”: onboarding new people, formal career development, making remote people feel fully included, hiring anyone who needs traditional structure.

Founders read this and say “are you serious?” Yes. Because the years of misery came from hiring people with a pitch for a company that didn’t exist, then drowning in the gap between the pitch and reality. The honest handbook filters before the first day. Nobody arrives disappointed by the DNA, because we showed them the DNA up front.

I’ll share pieces of the handbook in an upcoming Thursday article. If you’re subscribed, it’ll land in your inbox.

If you’re in it right now

If you’re reading this and you feel held hostage inside your own business, even if it’s just you and three other people, I want to give you the version of this I wish someone had given me:

You are not obligated to keep running the company you accidentally built. And you don’t have to quit to escape it. There’s a third option, which is slower and harder and better: reset it, deliberately, into the company you’d actually want to walk into. It cost me years. It was worth every one of them.

And before you sell: talk to people who sold. Almost every single one tells me the same thing. The money’s nice. Having something you love doing is nicer.

Cheers, Jonathan

P.S. This week’s episode has the full, rambling, unedited version of this story, including several tangents I’ve mercifully spared you here. If you know a business owner who needs to hear it, send it to them. That’s genuinely the best way to help this show grow.

P.P.S A correction for the episode this week: I keep using dollars and euro interchangably but the actualy revenue number i’m trying to say is $6.3 million, I was saying “around 6.5” but I asked kyle after for the real number.

As you might already know: I LOVE WEBINARS.

Webinars are the cornerstone marketing tool for all of my business and I’m ALWAYS trying to convince my entrepreneur friends to give them a try.

But then they ask me a lot of questions…

So i’ve decided to finally make a proper sort of “kick start” guide for anyone who’s either Webinar-Curious or already using them to generate revenue.

You can either read this article, watch the video or both

AND! You can copy/paste this entire guide into your AI tool and use it to help you design your own webinar!

Let’s go.

Why I keep banging on about webinars

One funnel in my facilitator.com business, ONE funnel, has made over €23 million since we launched it in 2020. At the center of that funnel is a webinar.

In my opinion, webinars are the most powerful marketing tool that exists. i haven’t found anything that can take a stranger from the internet and turn them into a customer more effectively and measurably than a webinar. That’s my personal opinion based on the last ten years of running them for myself, for collaborators and for friends.

And before you think this is just a “course guy” thing: Stanford Business School runs webinars. Basecamp runs webinars. SaaS companies run webinars. Daniel Priestley is running them all the time, he just calls them things like “Mid-Year Momentum.” People rarely call them webinars. They call them info sessions, workshops, free trainings. Same thing.

A webinar is just a live (or prerecorded) stream, usually around 90 minutes, where you demonstrate your product or service, and at the end you’re either getting call bookings or selling right there.

This matters most if you’re bootstrapped. If you’re VC funded you can spray money at ads and survive a bad conversion rate. If you’re a small business selling high ticket stuff, corporate deals, coaching, group programs, you need a relatively quick return on investment. What i love about a webinar is you get an answer VERY quickly as to whether your marketing is working or not.

Almost every webinar you’ve ever seen follows the same structure. Once you know it, you can mess with it and make it your own. Here it is.

Part 1: The intro (agenda, housekeeping, trust)

The intro is three things.

Agenda. Here’s what’s coming up broadly, and there’s a live Q&A at the end.

Housekeeping. This is where most people mess up. Tell people RIGHT UP FRONT that you’re going to pitch them something. Most people don’t do this, and so the audience spends the whole webinar nervously waiting for the catch. i literally say: “towards the end of this we’re going to offer you a way to work with us, you’ll know when that’s coming.”

It sounds counterintuitive but it builds massive trust. People think “these guys are very open about selling,” and they relax.

A few more housekeeping things we always do:

We don’t send the recording afterwards. If you tell people a recording is coming, they leave the webinar immediately. So we say up front: this is a live thing, take notes.

We set behavior expectations. No posting your LinkedIn link in the chat. One person does it and suddenly you have 1000 LinkedIn links and the whole chat is useless.

And i set expectations about MY style. i tell people this is not a TEDx talk, i’m a messy, chaotic speaker, i swear. If people don’t like that, they can leave immediately and i don’t have to deal with them in the chat. Your webinar should match your vibe, not some glistening clean Tim Ferriss thing (unless that IS your vibe).

Trust. Very quickly: who you are, what you do, in a nutshell. Use whatever trust elements you have. For us it’s things like “we’ve trained over 35,000 people” and having the biggest YouTube channel in our niche. You don’t need numbers like that. You need SOMETHING that says “you can trust me on this topic.”

One line i always drop in here: everything i teach today, you can get for free on our YouTube channel. You never have to give us any money. i say this because i’m going to come back to it in the pitch later: “you can take all of our stuff for free, but here’s why you might want to pay us.”

Part 2: The challenge (”that’s so me”)

The first 20 to 30 minutes after the intro is about ONE thing: articulating the problem your audience has better than they can articulate it themselves.

That’s it. That’s the whole job of this section.

If i’m doing a webinar teaching business owners how to get better with AI tools, i’m talking about how hard it is to keep up, how it feels like you’re being left behind, how your team is disappearing down rabbit holes that never turn into revenue. And i’m weaving my own story into it: me being completely confused about where to even start.

The reaction you’re fishing for in the chat is: “that’s so me.”

That’s the phrase. When people are typing “that’s me” and “that’s exactly my problem,” this section is working.

You back it up with news headlines, comments you’ve seen, statistics, clips from podcasts. And you’re constantly asking the audience: “how many of you guys feel that?” When the chat fills up with yeses, everyone else sees it and gets pulled in too.

This works for any business. Running a design agency selling to corporates? The problem is that in-house teams are trapped in day-to-day work and have no time for the next big thing, even though they’re being told to innovate. If you were Basecamp, you’d spend 20 minutes showing the chaos of juggling ten different tools with clients and teams out of sync.

Part 3: The vehicle (the solution, but NOT the product)

Now you tell them the solution you found. This is what the webinar world calls “the vehicle.”

Important: the solution is basically the thing you’re trying to sell, but WITHOUT the product name or the package yet.

Example from a webinar i ran in January. i told the story of being overwhelmed by AI tools, seeing everyone vibe coding while i understood nothing. Then i bumped into another CEO, Charles from Pip Decks, and he sat with me for three hours and showed me how he uses these tools. And it clicked. Months of confusion ended right there.

To be clean about it: the vehicle in that story is Claude Code. That’s the thing that actually solved it. The CEO was just who brought me to the solution. But here’s the important part: i’m not selling Claude Code. It’s not the product i’m pitching in that webinar. The vehicle is the thing you believe solves the challenge, and your product is how you help people get there.

If you’re Basecamp, the story is “we couldn’t find anything that worked so we built our own internal tool, and that solved it for us.” You’re not saying “and that tool is Basecamp, buy it now.” Not yet.

Part 4: The three secrets (destroying limiting beliefs)

This is the part everyone gets confused by, so let me make it simple.

After you present the solution, your audience has objections forming in their heads. Beliefs about themselves or the world that would stop them from even trying the thing you’re suggesting. “The three secrets” (a concept i first learned from Russell Brunson) is just a structured way of destroying those beliefs before they harden.

Here’s the process. Take a whiteboard and write down everything they might be thinking that would stop them. For an AI training program aimed at founders, it’s things like:

“i’m just not a technical person, never have been.”

“i don’t have time to keep up with all this AI stuff.”

“this is something my tech person should do, not me.”

Then you flip each one into an empowering, actionable positive. “i’m not a technical person” becomes: if you know how to use Microsoft Word, you can use Claude Code. And then you do a whole section proving it.

Real example from our facilitation webinar, these were our three:

1. Why learning more exercises will never make you a better facilitator (and what actually will). Because our audience believes memorizing exercises is the path to being great.

2. Why the best facilitators in the world look like they’re doing nothing. Because we teach a style with fewer post-its and exercises, and people worry their clients will think they’re not doing anything.

3. The one facilitation skill AI will never replace. Because we KNOW everyone is sitting there thinking “isn’t AI going to replace this anyway?”

That last one is the point of the whole section: hit the objections before they get to them, so nobody sits through your entire webinar with a “yeah, but” stuck in their head.

Part 5: The two paths (the pitch)

Now, and only now, do you pitch. And there’s a transition that makes it feel good instead of gross. i call it the two paths.

Path one: the long path. They take everything they learned today and do it themselves. Read the books, get the practice, spend the years. i tell them honestly: this is absolutely valid. It’s how i did it. Some people on the call will want this path. They’re not your customers, but offering it is what lets you transition cleanly to:

Path two: the shortcut. “For those of you who want this to happen sooner, who know you’ll forget about this the moment you close the tab, let me tell you about how we can help.”

And then you show the product.

Two ways to end it from here. Either a “buy now” where you send people straight to the purchase page with the bonuses, or a call booking, which is what we do for anything high ticket. As a rule of thumb, anything over about €2,000 should go through a discovery call first. i really like call booking webinars because you don’t have to do any hard selling at all. The pitch is literally “you can book a zero obligation call with my team to see if this is a fit.” Calm and easy.

Part 6: The Q&A (where the money hides)

This is not industry standard, but we’ve been testing it for a year and a half and i love it: stay on after the pitch. Sometimes for HOURS.

And here’s the move. During the Q&A i ask directly: “is anybody on the fence about booking a call or buying the thing? Ask me why you’re not buying. i want to either get you off the fence or make you a hell yes or a hell no.”

People love this. It’s honest, and it turns objections into content in real time.

In January i hosted a webinar for a partner company. Ninety minutes in we’d made €77,000 but the goal was €250,000. So i texted him: “this isn’t working, we need to stay on and do a longer demonstration.” We stayed on for 5.5 hours until we hit the goal.

Do this this week

1. Write your “that’s so me” list. Ten sentences describing your customer’s problem in THEIR words, better than they’d say it themselves. This becomes Part 2 of your webinar.

2. Write down the limiting beliefs. Everything your audience believes that would stop them from trying your solution. Pick the three biggest and flip each into an empowering statement. Those are your three secrets.

3. Draft your two paths. One honest paragraph on how someone could do it all themselves, and one on how you shorten it. That’s your pitch, and it doesn’t feel like one.

4. Pick your ending: buy now, or book a call. If it’s over about €2,000, it’s a call.

You don’t need a production studio. My €250,000 webinar was me in my home office on my Mac Studio’s built-in camera, at night, because our customers are in the US. It’s hard to get perfect, but it is NOT hard to get started.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. i stole 90% of this from watching the masters. If you want to go deeper, read Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson (whatever you think of him, he’s incredible at this) and One to Many by Jason Fladlien, who writes webinars for people like Alex Hormozi. i have nothing to do with either of them. Just buy the books.

In this week’s episode of Unscheduled I talk about what it’s like to run a business while being a fairly involved father.

It’s a very complicated and nuanced topic that gets a lot of people VERY angry on the internet.

My hope for this episode is to speak to the reality of what it’s like raising kids as an entrepreneur from both my perspective and my entrepreneur-friends perspectives.

One thing that’s very clear is that it’s a completely different story depending on which country you’re from, and there’s a massive gulf between how entrepreneurs raise kids in the US vs the EU.

Lots to talk about! Enjoy!

Cheers,
Jonathan

Random Thursday email/video for you about something I wasted WAYYYY too much time trying to figure out.

How do you figure out what to pay yourself as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, and how much do you leave in the business?

This confused the shit out of me for the first 10 years of running AJ&Smart, and I probably lost ludicrous amounts of money doing it wrong. I don’t even want to think about it. It’s painful.

So let me try to simplify it for you, because I really wish someone had simplified it for me. (I’ll put the video here for those of you who just want to watch or listen):

Quick note before I start: I’m talking here about when you actually have a business with its own bank account. In America that’s an LLC, in Germany it’s a GmbH, you can also do this as a GBR. If you have a very big business, you already know the answer to this. If you’re just doing freelance work, you maybe don’t need this. This is for people running a small business with a few people in it.

There are two camps

When it comes to paying yourself in a small business, there are basically two camps.

Camp 1: Take what you need, reinvest the rest

This is the one you’ll find when you search online. It’s the one mentors tell you. Look at your personal expenses, make that your salary, and leave the rest in the company bank account.

Why would you leave it in the business? Safety. Growth. Whatever it is. People in this camp will tell you the only way to grow is to keep reinvesting the profits and take the minimum you can take. They’ll also tell you it’s better for taxes, because you don’t personally get taxed until the money moves from the company account to your account.

Camp 2: Take as much as you safely can

This one says: look at the profits, and take as much as you safely can.

What does “safely” mean? Everyone has their own level. Usually you’re looking at how much cash is in the company bank, as in, how long could this company survive if we stopped making money today or had a couple of bad months. Some founders leave three months of cash in the bank. Some say six. Some say twelve. It’s based on your risk tolerance and how predictable you believe your business is.

I’m somewhere in between. I usually sit around nine months. Right now I think we’ve got twelve, but sometimes that’s just because I forgot to think about it.

So at the end of the year in this camp, you’re going: okay, we made a million, 400k of that was profit, I’ve taken a small salary that covers my baseline expenses, now how much of that 400 can I take while still keeping however many months of cash I want in the bank?

What I was doing (and why it was wrong)

Because most people were telling me to, I was doing Camp 1. And it seemed logical. The business is my investment. The asset is my investment. Taking the money out just makes the asset more risky, and I’ll get taxed the second I take it out anyway. Right?

What I did not think about were the negative side effects of Camp 1, which were pretty severe.

What Chris Do told me

A while back, when we were around 30 to 35 people and mostly a UX design and Design Sprint agency, Chris Do was hanging out in the Berlin office. (If you don’t know Chris Do, look him up, he’s an Emmy award winning designer and a legend.)

I told him I wasn’t feeling it. Not enjoying it, not really motivated to keep going. He asked how much I was paying myself. I told him: a minimum salary, basically what I needed for my expenses, plus a little at the end of the year. The number was roughly in line with a standard UX design employee at my own company. A bit more, but relatively in line with what I’d get paid as a UX designer somewhere else.

And he said, well, that’s your problem.

As the business owner, you have all the risk. Your employees have none. If you have a bad month, you don’t take a salary. If the company goes bad, you’re on the line for everything. I had the maximum risk and I was taking basically the same reward as everyone else in the company.

So I wasn’t seeing any tangible reward for growing the business. Yes, I had access to the money in the AJ&Smart account, but it wasn’t really mine. I knew that a couple of bad months and it’s all gone, eaten up by the business. My money was directly tied to every risk the business had.

His point: you need to feel the effects of this money on your personal life. If your life is exactly the same, if you’re still being super careful with money even though the business is making four million, something is off. I kept thinking “why don’t I just get a normal job?” That’s the problem when you’re not paying yourself in line with the risk and effort you’re taking. You get disconnected from the whole point of why you started, which was to build a business, work for yourself, and have your own thing.

Part of the issue was that I was getting advice from people who thought of us like a startup, not a bootstrapped small business. There was no investment in AJ&Smart. We started getting clients and grew from zero. There’s no real exit either. Sure, I could sell, but the deals are always kind of shit. So by not taking the money, I was just getting more and more disconnected from the point.

What Jason Fried told me

Jason Fried runs 37signals (Basecamp), so I won’t introduce him. Years ago he told me the same thing, more bluntly: it’s a terrible idea to leave the money in the company. Take it out, always. No one ever went broke taking a profit.

Here’s roughly what he said:

Unlike companies that reinvest all or most of the money back in every year, 37signals takes the profit out each year as distributions to the owners. This means every year they take risk out of the company. Companies that keep reinvesting keep adding risk. And when the company ends one day, as they all do, they’ll have enjoyed the upside as it went, instead of waiting for an outcome that might never come. They work to enjoy the now that’s guaranteed, not the future that isn’t.

You don’t hear people say this, especially because so much of our business advice comes from Silicon Valley and books written by people trying to build something massive. In that case it does make sense to reinvest and take investment. But if you’re a one-person show or a three-person show, you’re just creating a shit ton of risk for yourself.

He’s got an article called “Why we choose profit,” and the line that stuck with me: profit is the ultimate shield against bullshit. On the company level, if you’re actually profitable and not just burning cash, you don’t have to work on projects you hate or with people who suck. It gives you options. On the personal level, if the company’s burning you out and you’ve been taking the profits along the way, you have more options to walk away and do something else. If you stay on Camp 1, waiting for some imaginary day when you finally take the money out, you often never get there.

The zombie business problem

Think about it simply. Say you’ve got 2 million in the company account and your yearly costs are 1.5. You have a bad year, you get sick, COVID happens, the market shifts, and that year you’re not profitable. All that saving you’ve been doing is now essentially gone.

Here’s the trap: the company keeps going. So you get a false sense that things are working and will be fine, because you’ve got so much cash in reserve. But it might actually be a signal that the business is dead. You’ve got a zombie business. You see this with startups sitting on leftover investor money that just can’t die.

At AJ&Smart, our UX design work became a bit of a zombie business, because there was so much cash in the machine that I didn’t notice for a long time that it wasn’t really working. We could run months and months in the minus and it was all fine.

Cash also makes you do stupid things. A couple of years ago we had something like 18 months of cash flow, because I hadn’t taken it out (I need to reinvest, I need to reinvest). Someone came in and said let’s invest some of what’s left over into building something. I said cool, let’s do it. It dragged on for a year and a half, didn’t really work, and at least a million euro that’s no longer there. I could have taken some of that as a distribution and started the Unscheduled CEO thing sooner, with less pressure on us to do well.

The risk-reward thing

People will tell you that you should distribute profits to every single person in the company. Sure, if they also have the same risk. Meaning, if they also don’t get paid when the company isn’t making money, if they have to use their own money to keep it afloat, if they have to go to court if bankruptcy hits, like you do as the CEO.

The owner takes more money not because they’re an egotistical maniac. It’s the risk-reward thing. If I worked for someone else, my risk is low. They can fire me, but I can get another job. I don’t have to spend the next year or two shutting down a business, dealing with lawyers, and paying back the tax authorities. When a business fails, the amount of years that can drag on for is a lot.

So what should you actually do?

This is my opinion, not fact, but it’s also the opinion of people way more successful and way smarter than me: take as much as you safely can.

There’s nuance. This doesn’t mean you ignore the future. If you know you want to hire someone for Facebook ads next year, keep that in the company. Plan for those things. But take the rest. Take as much as you can without creating danger for the business, and don’t feel bad about it. That’s what a small business is for.

And there’s a responsibility side too. If you’ve got a few people relying on you, you have to be responsible enough that if the company fails, it’s not from pure negligence.

But here’s the real reason this matters. Another thing Jason said: you’ve just gotta take money off the table. If you don’t, you start to resent your own business. You start thinking “what the hell am I doing this for when I could make the same money by myself?” And usually that feeling means your effort isn’t bearing fruit, your personal life isn’t improving, you’re not feeling financially secure, and the machine is just eating you up while you tell yourself one day it’ll work out.

The whole point of making money is so you can do more of what you want and make more things. I would never have been able to spend my Tuesdays (and now a couple of days a week) messing around on a weird little art-business project called The Unscheduled CEO if I hadn’t been taking profits along the way.

Do this this week

Go look at your numbers and answer two questions honestly:

1. How many months of cash do you actually need in the bank to feel safe? Pick a number (three, six, nine, twelve) based on how predictable your business really is.

2. Are you feeling the effects of your business in your personal life at all? If the business is doing fine but your life looks identical to when you were broke, you’re probably stuck in Camp 1.

Then take as much as you safely can, off the table, into your own account. Don’t feel bad about it.

Cheers,
Jonathan

It’s the second heat wave of the summer here in Germany, 36°C in a country where almost nothing has air conditioning, so this is a short episode. But it’s a good one!

Last week I talked about the ideal business model for a consultant. This week I want to talk about a concept that changed how I sell.

For years I made selling harder than it needed to be, and then I understood one thing that made everything click. It’s a little unfair advantage hack that I rarely hear anyone mention. I use it all the time, and when it’s used on me, it makes me more likely to buy.

Btw last week’s episode looks like it’'ll be the first “non guest episode” to hit 10K listens, wohoo!

Anyway… sales…

It comes down to two things: speed and convenience.

The thing I didn’t get

I’m on both sides of this all day. As a CEO I’m constantly buying services. As the CEO of an agency I’m constantly selling them. And the thing that actually decides whether I hire someone is almost never that they were the best. It’s that they made it easy to start while I was still excited.

In January I was looking for help with the SEO of facilitator.com. I ended up on one call with one company. Not because they were the best, I didn’t do any research. Because they were the first to reach out and they could jump on a call straight away. Then they said they’d go away and make a proposal. By the time they came back, I’d figured out how to do it myself. They didn’t get the job.

Momentum is the whole game

Here’s the truth about CEOs. If you give them too much time to think, they’ve already moved on. The SEO thing was exciting to me for about a week. Then I was done.

So when someone gets on a call with me at AJ&Smart, it’s never about a big proposal. It’s about the soonest possible starting point. Someone wants help with a funnel, I don’t say I’ll prepare a proposal and we’ll have another call. I say: when can we start? This thing starts with a two-day kickoff, and at the end you might not even need us. No retainer to decide, no contract to sign. We just start.

That gives the other person the feeling that this can start now. Because I know they’ve got a million things going on. Right now this is a high priority. In two weeks it’s nothing.

Be the Michelin chef

A friend started a business this week and had a deal slipping. I told him: if you lose it, it won’t be the price or the service. It’ll be that the other CEO lost momentum. We’re so used to doing everything ourselves that if it takes you too long, we’ll just say fuck it and do it ourselves.

Too many of you get on a call, list everything you can do, then go away to make a proposal, then come back, then make the client choose a package. You’re handing the client the job of figuring out what they want from you. You’re the service provider. Be the Michelin chef. Say: this is what I think you need, let’s just start here and see where we get to.

Stop giving people homework

A CEO asks me, “Do you know someone for SEO?” I say yes. Two weeks later: “Oh, they sent me a proposal, I haven’t looked at it yet.” That person gave them homework. A lot of entrepreneurial people have that now-or-never thing, and a long proposal is a task they’ll never get to.

The best proposal anyone ever did for me closed a 100K deal in a Google doc, live, on the call. By the time we hung up, that was the deal. We started, I flew out, the paperwork happened in the background, and neither of us cared because we’d already begun.

Stay disconnected from the money

The move is to say: I’m excited, I can do this, let’s start. This is roughly my price. If it works out, my finance person will sort the contract. I want the client talking about the project and the dates, not the contract. If you’re a one-person show, your partner or a family member handles that part so you can stay on full speed.

And talk the price on the call. No jump scare in an email three days later. “Ballpark, around 15 to 20.” If you can’t say that on the fly, get better at running your business.

That’s the concept. Speed and convenience. Once I understood it, selling stopped being the hard part. You don’t need a better script or better marketing. You need to stop making it a job for people to say yes to you.

Cheers,
Jonathan

this week I want to try something a little different with the pod: i’m adding an enhanced summary of the “main takeaway” of the episode for those of you who prefer to just get to the good stuff and skip the rest.

Of course I still think you should listen to the full episode to get the context, or at least put it on in the background while you scan through this. But whatever way you like to consume my content, enjoy!

So!

Here it is:

The problem I had

Most consultants sell exactly one thing, and it happens to be the most expensive, hardest-to-buy thing on the menu.

It’s the lowest leverage thing too, meaning you have to put in a lot of time to get paid to do this… which takes away from being able to actually run your business.

For me it was selling design work to clients. Meaning the more design work I did, the more I would get paid. It was a 1:1 relationship with time and money.

Around 6 years in to my design career I learned that there was a completely differently way to approach running an agency, a completely different set of business models that I had no idea about… and honestly I wish I had known about them from the start because GODDAMN they changed everything for me.

Let me show you the other things you could be selling.

The three rungs

Every consulting business can be split into three offers.

Done For You. You do the work. The client pays top dollar and gets your hands on their problem. This is where almost every consultant lives, and most of them never leave.

Done With You. You don’t do the work. You teach their team to do it. Workshops, training, group coaching. Cheaper for the client, way more leveraged for you.

Do It Yourself. Courses, books, content. The client never interacts with you at all. Cheapest rung, fully scalable.

When AJ&Smart was a UX agency, Done For You was us running design sprints for clients. Done With You was teaching their teams to run sprints themselves. Do It Yourself became the Design Sprint Masterclass.

The part nobody expects

Done With You ended up being the most lucrative tier for us.

Here’s why. You train ten people at a company. Another team hears about it and wants the same thing. Then another. The training spreads inside the company in a way a one-off project never does. And the rungs feed each other: trainings generate sprint requests, sprints generate training requests.

There’s also a second thing that happens once you have three rungs instead of one. On a huge number of our sales calls, when the price for the top tier is too high, we don’t lose the client. We move them down a rung. If you only sell Done For You, every call is all-or-nothing. With three rungs, “no” to one offer is “maybe” to another.

“But my work is too custom to teach”

I said this exact sentence for years. I was certain there was no Done With You version of UX design. Too subjective, too dependent on me being in the room.

I was wrong, and if you’re thinking it right now, so are you.

The goal is not to turn the client’s team into you. It’s to find one fragment of what you do that can be taught. Maybe it’s just how you run a kickoff. Maybe it’s one part of your process. That fragment is a product.

And if you’re experienced, there’s a move most consultants never consider. You don’t only have to sell to clients. You can sell to you, ten years ago. There are people who would do anything to be where you are now, and teaching them is a whole second business. That’s where Facilitator.com came from.

Stop selling your time

The last piece. Once you have your rungs, price them as packages, not hours. No day rates, no itemized lists of what’s included. The moment you itemize, you invite people to negotiate you down line by line.

A rule of thumb I picked up that’s stuck with me: one month in your group program should cost about the same as one hour alone with you. That gap is what makes the cheaper rungs feel like a deal and the expensive rung feel exclusive.

Do this this week

1. Write your three rungs. One sentence each: what’s your Done For You, what could your Done With You be, what could your Do It Yourself be? Don’t build anything yet. Just name them.

2. Find the teachable fragment. Ask yourself what you do that feels boringly easy to you but looks like magic to clients. That’s your Done With You seed.

3. Add a down-sell to your next sales call. When someone balks at the price, instead of “no problem, bye,” try: “There’s another way to work with me. I can teach your team to do this themselves.”

4. Price by the rung. Top expensive, bottom cheap, and stop itemizing.

You don’t have to build a course this month. You just have to stop being a business with one product, where that product is the single hardest thing on the menu to say yes to.

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. The book that flipped this switch for me on packaging and pricing is Built to Sell by John Warrillow. It’s a short read. Worth doing this week.

I haven’t written something here in a while.. but I thought this could be useful.

DO let me know in the comments if it is.

So last week I ran an event where I hung out with a bunch of consultants and helped them figure out how to get more clients One of the big topics that came up is “what do you actually say on a sales call??”

And here’s basically what I said:

Most consultants ruin sales calls in the first sixty seconds, and they all do it the same way: an awkward intro, then “so... should I tell you what I do, or do you want to go first?”

You’ve just handed the lead the job of running your sales call. Then you panic-fill the silence by presenting your services to someone who never asked.

We’ve used essentially the same call structure at AJ&Smart for years. It was written for selling design sprints, but it’s the script for selling everything. Four phases.

Phase 1: The brain dump

You open. Small talk, then:

“The most useful thing for me would be to just hear where you guys are at right now: challenges, what’s going on. Would you mind giving me a bit of a brain dump?”

Then you shut up and take bullet-point notes while they talk. When they pause, you repeat their challenges back to them: “So one of the biggest things I’m hearing is that every time the product team gets together, nobody agrees on features, and that turns into five or six meetings. Is that right?”

Almost nobody does this. Most consultants are just waiting for their turn to present. Reflecting their problem back, in a clean and structured way, already puts you ahead of nearly everyone they’ve talked to, because they finally feel heard.

Phase 2: Connect the dots

Now link their problems to what you do. But do not present your services yet.

“Based on everything you’ve told me, this is exactly the kind of thing we help with. These two challenges? That’s what we excel at. This third one honestly isn’t our strong suit.”

That last part matters. Saying what you’re not great at makes everything else believable.

Phase 3: Turn the tables

If you’ve done phases 1 and 2 right, they’re now curious. So instead of launching into a pitch:

“I’m not sure how much you actually know about us. Do you have any questions?”

Now they dig the information out of you: what’s the service, how long does it take, what does it cost. You answer only what they ask. No case-study carpet bombing, no PDF on screen. If they have no questions at all, you’ve lost them. But you’d have lost them with a pitch too.

Two hard rules here:

• Never bring up price until they ask. Price tends to end the conversation; let it arrive on their timeline. (When they do ask, answer plainly. Don’t dodge.)

• Talk less than the customer. If you’re talking more than them, you’re explaining things they don’t care about yet.
  

Phase 4: Close the loop

They’ll eventually say “so what are the next steps?” Tell them you’ll follow up with a short summary email, and book the second call before you hang up. Not “I’ll send some times.” Booked, in the calendar, within seven days.

Corporate deals close on call two, three or four, never on call one. The first call has one job: being the person they want a second call with.

One uncomfortable extra

Clients will never tell you “halfway through, I got a weird vibe from you.” But that’s what loses deals, not your competency. What they’re really deciding is: will this person make my life easier, or be one more fight?

The only fix I’ve found is paying someone (a mentor, a coach) to tell you honestly how you come across on calls. Nobody in your life will volunteer it. I learned I came across as flippant and barely listening, and I’d never have figured that out alone. Knowing it (and naming it upfront with clients) changed more than any script. A great therapist could also work for this.

Do this on your next call

1. Open with the brain-dump question. Take notes.

2. Repeat their top three challenges back before saying anything about yourself.

3. Say one thing you’re not the right fit for.

4. Ask “what questions do you have?” instead of presenting.

5. Don’t say a price until asked.

6. Book the follow-up call before ending this one.

That’s it. The script isn’t clever. It just makes you the rare person on the call who actually takes the lead but also listens!

Cheers,
Jonathan

P.S. Watch this video if you want even more juicy sales nuggets:

After a long weekend camping with the family combined with a hospital visit… how do I still find the time to record a show?

In this episode I talk about how I still get content out there even when I really don’t feel like it.

Cheers,
Jonathan

Cheers,
Jonathan

In this episode you will learn the absolute best way to improve your sales and marketing, and it’s NOT something you hear a lot of people talk about.

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Jonathan

This week talk about why I haven’t sold my company yet, whether I’m thinking about it and a huge offer I turned down.

Hope you guys enjoy the show!

Cheers,
Jonathan

Enjoy!
Jonathan

And the podcast has a new look and feel this week (if you watch on Youtube anyways!)

This week I talk about the plan to get Unscheduled as a brand to its first million in revenue. It’s going to be a long road, but it’s exciting to start something new again!

Oh, and you can write into the show now too (more on that in the episode).

Enjoy!
Jonathan