I told him he was underpaid.

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #14

Jimmy Buffett said it best: “A change in latitude helps my attitude.”

I’m writing this from Maui. Before that it was San Francisco. Before that, Phoenix. Three cities in five days, and I haven’t opened Zoom once.

There’s something that happens when you step out of the two-dimensional screen world and into the three-dimensional real one. Conversations become more meaningful. Deeper. Connections form faster. Light bulbs come on that a screen keeps dark.

I sat at dinner with a handful of entrepreneurs Saturday night and had the kind of conversation that doesn’t happen on a video call. No agenda. No shared screen. Just people who’ve built things, talking about what’s working and what’s frustratingly broken.

And it reminded me of something...

The biggest moves don’t come from learning something new. They come from finally seeing what you already had.

A client named Jordan figured that out about months ago.

Jordan spent ten years as a military officer. Then fifteen years in retail and franchise management. The last stretch, he was consulting for Amazon’s delivery service program. Not as an independent. As their guy. Given his clients. Given his territory. Given his marching orders.

He was commuting from Long Island to Buffalo. If you know anything about New York, that’s an eight-hour drive. One way. He spent more time on the road than at home. And then Amazon told him they wanted him to relocate to Ohio.

He had a decision to make.

Here’s the part that surprised me when Jordan first told me this story. He didn’t leave Amazon because he had a plan. He left because he was done. Fed up. He talked to his wife, looked at his savings, and said if we’re going to do this, let’s do it.

He had twenty-five years of experience running operations, managing teams, and consulting inside other people’s businesses. He’d just never done it for himself.

That’s a sentence I could write about almost everyone reading this.

You’ve done the work. You have the skills. You’ve solved problems that would make most people fold up like a cheap lawn chair. But you’ve been doing it inside someone else’s system, on someone else’s terms, for someone else’s benefit.

And there’s this voice in the back of your head that says… maybe I could do this on my own. But it’s risky. And I’ve never had to sell. And what if I’m not worth what I think I’m worth?

Jordan carried every one of those doubts.

Here’s what he did. He joined the program. He showed up to every call. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. He reread every newsletter. He practiced everything… even the stuff that felt uncomfortable.

He spent three to four months refining his message before his first referral landed.

That’s the part nobody wants to hear. There’s no shortcut through the reps. Jordan didn’t skip them. He did the work of getting clear on who he helps, what he solves, and how to say it in thirty seconds without sounding like a brochure.

He joined a BNI group. Biggest one in the world, actually. Hundred and five members. But Jordan will tell you straight… he only talks to about ten of them. The ones whose clients overlap with his. The builder. The architect. The software company. Not the dog walkers.

His first client came from a referral out of that group. Not a member. Someone a member knew. And that first client paid him fifteen hundred dollars a month.

I told him he was severely underpaid.

He already knew. But here’s what Jordan said about it, and I think about this a lot: “It’s all about the ask.”

Four words. The difference between fifteen hundred a month and ten thousand a month isn’t a different skill set. It’s not a better certification. It’s the willingness to hold a straight face when you quote your fee… and then shut your mouth.

Jordan worked on that. We talked about the value of the outcomes he produces. We did the math together. And he started quoting higher.

Then higher again.

Today, Jordan won’t take on a client for less than five figures a month. He has four of them.

One of his most recent win: fifteen thousand dollars upfront as a retainer, plus ten thousand a month. He’s also built a group coaching program that started with one person and now has seven. He fills it through live workshops.

Fourteen months. That’s the timeline from “I just left Amazon and I have no clients” to where he sits today.

But here’s what made the biggest difference. It wasn’t any single tactic. Jordan treated this like what it is… a profession. Not a side project. Not a “let me see if this works” experiment. He showed up. He did the reps. He refined the message. He asked for what he was worth. And when his worth went up, he asked for more.

He jumped on one of our group calls with an hour free. No agenda. Just wanted to be in the room. And he ended up telling his whole story to a group of people at different stages of the same path.

One of them said afterward: “I love the case study of Jordan.”

It’s not a case study. It’s what happens when you stop renting out your expertise on someone else’s terms and start owning what you’ve built.

Here’s what I want you to do.

Pull up your client list right now. Divide your monthly revenue by the number of clients you’re managing. Hit reply and tell me that number. Just the number. I’ll write you back.

Because I can almost guarantee you… that number is too low. And the fix is simpler than you think.

P.S. I’m sitting on a lanai in Maui right now, working with a client this week who made the same bet Jordan did. Packed his bags, stepped out of the comfortable routine, decided to build something of his own. The ocean’s nice. But the best part of this trip has been watching people realize they’ve been selling themselves short… and deciding to stop.

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