Cut costly pieces from an offer and bundle the rest

1. The trade-off every option sits on

Anything you could deliver sits somewhere on a line between two ends, and the pairing below is what each end tends to be, not a law:

End of the line	What it is like to sell	What it is like to deliver	Typical shape
One end	Easy to sell	Hard to deliver	Done for you: you do the work for them
Middle	In between	In between	Done with you: a coach, a mentor, an advisor, a program you take them through
Other end	Harder to sell, especially at a high price	Easy to deliver	Do it yourself: hand over a login

Selling the do-it-yourself end well takes real skill at persuasion, marketing and building value in the buyer's mind. Selling the done-for-you end is straightforward, and then you have to go and do everything.

Easy to sell and easy to deliver is where you want to end up, and it is rare. It takes a strong operator, real infrastructure, a team and its culture, and a delivery method nobody else has worked out. It is a destination, not a starting point.

2. Start at the top and walk down

Picture how an electric-car maker built its range. It started with a car at $250,000: hard to build, few buyers, but the buyers it had could pay and wanted to be first. Then a car at $100,000, open to far more people. Then one around $30,000, within reach of almost anybody, at least in its home market.

The preference here is to build the same way, especially when you are starting out — from the top down, not the bottom up. Serving few people at high prices gets you your skills, anchors your price, and buys the credibility that makes the next thing down look like a deal. When you later open something easier for you to deliver, the reason why writes itself: demand for the custom version outgrew what you could do by hand, so here is a version more people can join.

The view here is that a very common mistake at the start is refusing to sell anything that does not scale. If you have no clients, scale is not your problem. The sequence is:

• Create flow — get people saying yes, even when the delivery is hard.
• Monetize that flow.
• Then add friction: make it harder to sell and easier to deliver, which is what scaling is.

Expensive things also mean you do not need many sales, so you can get going without solving for volume at the same time. Take the money first, then use it to build the business.

3. Cut everything that is not high value

Rate every option on your list twice — on value to the buyer, and on cost to you.

Rating	What it means
High value	Meaningful, fast, easy, and something they believe they can do and will enjoy
Low value	Not meaningful, slow, hard or complex, not interesting, and something they do not believe they will like
High cost	Needs people to scale it
Low cost	Scales without people, in exchange for effort up front

Then cut:

• Remove everything that is not high value. This includes the cheap ones. A low-cost, low-value item is not free — it is a distraction.
• Keep everything that is high value, whatever it costs, for now, and write the cost down next to it. The limit on high-cost items comes in §4.

The standard to hold is that every single piece of what you deliver should land hard enough that the buyer is delighted by it and tells somebody. If a component would not survive that test, it does not go in.

4. Bundle what is left

Now build the stack, checking off the grid of problems you wrote on SOP 4. Two things make this work:

One solution often closes several problems at once. A live tour through the task with a group can settle it is hard, it is confusing and I will not enjoy it in one move, leaving only it is not sustainable — which you then answer with a small piece they can use in their own time afterwards. Work down the grid until every box is ticked, so the buyer has no reason not to buy and no reason not to succeed.

Typically, carry no more than one or two high-cost items per set of solutions. Solve as many problems as you can at low to medium cost, and save the expensive slots for the heaviest hitting things. Everything else should be high value and low cost.

Cost to you	Typical items
Low	Recordings, tools, swipe files, documents, videos, group sessions
High	One-to-one work, personally reviewing a sales call, personally reviewing a therapy session, personally reviewing 10 deals for a property client, going to their home and clearing out the pantry, walking them around a store

A worked case for the expensive slot: a property coach offering to review 10 deals and sign off before the client commits to one. That is expensive in time. It is also exactly what that buyer is most afraid of getting wrong, so it is likely to carry more weight than any tool or calculator beside it. Judge the expensive slots that way — against the buyer's biggest fear, not against your calendar.

Where an expensive item can be replaced by something almost as valuable and much lighter, replace it. Pairing buyers with each other instead of running the session yourself keeps most of the benefit and takes you out of the middle. Two one-to-one consultations during the program may do the same job, and fit your week better.

A useful place to start the stack is with the least scalable, most valuable thing — the piece that gets people saying yes and gets money coming in.

5. The margin the result has to hold

For a service, hold gross margin at 80 percent or higher. Charge $100 and it must cost $20 or less to deliver. If delivery costs $200, you need to be selling at $1,000.

Gross margin here is the direct cost of delivering what you sold — the person who does the work. The test is: if 100 more customers arrived, how many more people would you have to hire? That is the direct cost. Rent, software, processing fees, administration, finance, premises and human resources are indirect, and they are not in this number. They are also why the bar is set so high: advertising, commissions, marketing staff and infrastructure all come out of what is left.

Set it high early. Starting out, you should be at your most profitable, because profitability falls as you add infrastructure to scale. This is a generalization and not always true — some businesses, software among them, get more profitable with time — and physical products work differently again, because volume changes the arithmetic. For a service, 80 percent or better is the number.

6. Then iterate

Sell the high-touch version. Deliver it. Then look back at what you promised and what actually mattered:

• What did the buyer get little value from, that cost you a lot to deliver? Cut it.
• What did they need that you did not have? Add it.

Repeat until the stack is made of things that are valuable to them and cheap for you. That is the offer, and it is arrived at by iteration, not by design in advance.

7. What this page does not cover

Generating the option list is not covered on this page; that is SOP 4. Bonuses on top of the core stack are on SOP 6, guarantees on SOP 7 and SOP 8, and the price itself on SOP 2.