Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 2 - 3 Unusual Symptoms Of A Bad Offer
Synopsis:
Mike Shreeve spotlights three counterintuitive red flags that your offer—not your ads or sales team—is choking growth.
1) You hate your clients. Marketing can’t sell an apple as an orange; your offer attracts the audience it was built for.
If you keep enrolling chaotic, cash-strapped, early-stage buyers, it’s because your offer was designed for them. Fix the offer design (who it’s for, the outcomes promised), not the copy.
2) You need volume to survive. Living on thin margins forces hype, discounts, and fulfillment shortcuts that damage reputation—the “price power circle” where low price → low value → weaker word-of-mouth → even lower price. Escape by redesigning the offer for fewer clients, higher value, higher price, and by creating a sequential offer path that solves the next problems success creates (e.g., front-end → $10k → $45k → ongoing), raising LTV so you can scale peacefully without chasing ever more transactions.
3) You struggle to get clients results. You’re only as good as the client allows you to be; qualifications and context matter. A great funnel is worthless without a viable back end; a weight-loss protocol differs for obese vs. stage-lean athletes. Start with the complete outcome clients actually want, price it so you can deliver it, and then market it. Repositioning alone can’t rescue an offer built for the wrong person or with missing pieces. Bottom line: most “marketing problems” are offer problems—fix the promise, the person it’s for, and the path that follows the first win.
Transcript:
3 Unusual Symptoms Of A Bad Offer
[00:00:00] Hello, my friend. Hope you're doing well. Welcome to this episode of the Peaceful Profits Podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about three unusual or uncommon symptoms of a broken offer. Now, we often make the mistake as business owners. Of saying that as long as the offer is selling, it's working.
And conversely, if it's not selling, then it must be broken. I've been doing this now for 14 years. I've seen in the backend of [00:00:30] thousands of businesses over that time, and I can tell you that very conservative estimate, 70% of businesses. Might be higher than that, are running offers that are actually hurting the growth of their business.
That because the business owner has convinced themselves that it's selling, so it must be working. They've actually. Halted their own progress. And I don't just mean financial progress. There's one of the most common [00:01:00] consequences of a broken offer is the business owner feeling like this is not the business I wanted to run.
Unnecessary stresses unnecessary work feeling sort of a slog or feeling just not having excitement around the business. And so what I wanna do in this episode is give you some symptoms to look out for in your own business because. As business owners, we have so many [00:01:30] inputs coming at us of information.
We have so many feedback loops. Is it the marketing? Is it my team? Is it the market? Is it the pricing? Is it, and oftentimes we assign incorrect data to outcomes or consequences that we're experiencing. In other words. We look at a problem and we make a conclusion that says something like the reason that sucks is because the marketing is horrible.
Or, oh, the reason this isn't working is because [00:02:00] that person I hired is really bad at what they're doing, when in fact it might actually be the offer that is the problem. The specific thing that you have decided to come to the market with. It might actually be the cause of your marketing problems and your team problems and your enjoyment problems, and your profit problems and your et cetera, and your et cetera, operations and profit and all that kind of good stuff.
So we're gonna run through three very [00:02:30] quick signs, very quick symptoms that I think if you. Begin to look into your own business, you'll be able to very quickly determine that it might be the offer that's doing this to you. So number one, if you hate your clients, okay, if you hate your clients, that is a symptom of a bad offer.
That's not a symptom of marketing. It's a very common [00:03:00] mistake that I see, especially with people in the world of internet marketing who are taught by, guys and gals who are regurgitating old, hand me down. Information marketing is at its core, simply you telling the world what it is that you have to offer.
Okay. In other words, you can't sell an apple as an [00:03:30] orange. You have to sell an apple as an apple. Now you can dress it up, you can use all sorts of copy and all sorts of language, and you can, at the end of the day though, before that person pulls out the credit card, you have to tell them that what they're about to buy is an apple.
Oftentimes I'll come into someone's business. And they say, for example, I hate my clients. They're cheap skates. They have their businesses are horrible, so it's always high [00:04:00] stress. They never want to do what I say and they have this whole list of reasons about why they don't like their clients.
And then I look at their offer. And their offer is a program or a service that is specifically built for people who are struggling and who are, so I'll give you an example. If you have an offer that was specifically [00:04:30] built to help people who are severely overweight, lose, say 10 or 15 pounds. You can't be surprised when everyone who purchases your program is severely overweight.
The offer you created was to help those specific people. Now, I'll give you another example. In the world of business, everyone who always says, I help small [00:05:00] businesses to x. I help people get their first sales online. I help people establish their brand story for the first time. Of course, all those people who are buying that offer are at that stage in their business.
So naturally the people you are working with are. Small [00:05:30] business owners, people who still haven't figured out what their brand story is. People who are trying to make their first sale online and those people have with them a set of consequences. A small business does not have big cash reserves. They're still, they're in startup mode, which is to say, they're just getting going and they're still trying to figure themselves out.
There are, there's levels of chaos. There is levels of [00:06:00] boundary and scope creep issues because maybe this is the first time they've ever hired someone. 'cause they're a small business and it's set. And you can start to really think about the offer that I've created. Who did I create it for? Whatever it is where it's coaching or agencies or service providing, freelancing, whatever it is.
When you think about who did I actually create this thing for, that's who's going to buy it. [00:06:30] So if you hate the clients you're working with, that's not marketing, it's not sales. You can blame it on your sales person, you can blame it on your marketing, and all that will happen is you'll be very difficult to work for.
Because you'll have marketers and salespeople who are trying to put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. They're trying to sell your apple as an orange. But unless you're straight tricking people [00:07:00] doing unethical things, at the end of the day you have to tell people it's an apple. And the only people who buy apples are people who like to buy apples.
Apple people, if you'll so the same thing is true. If you look at your business and you don't like who you are talking with and who you're working with, it's because the offer you've created is for those people. So what do you do? You get to offer [00:07:30] design. That's why we're always talking about changing your offer, looking at your offer, fixing your offer.
Who is it for? How can you make it better for the right people that you want to work with? Next symptom, next sign is that you need volume to survive. Okay? That you need volume to survive. Again, this is an issue where we sometimes get wrapped up in our own [00:08:00] shortsightedness or our own lack of knowledge.
I've been doing this for 14 years. I still have blind spots. I will have blind spots until the day I die. That's part of being a human being, but sometimes the blind spot is, we think we just need better sales and marketing. We're like if I sell five and I make this much, then I just need to sell 50.
So the gap between what, where I am now and what I want is better sales and marketing. That seems [00:08:30] like a linear. Thought process to say if this, then this. So the gap is sales and marketing, but I can tell you having done this for so long and have, having looked in so many businesses, that the need for volume to survive is the riskiest way to stay in business.
It's the riskiest way to stay in business. It's also the most [00:09:00] stressful, okay? So if you have to have a high volume of transactions, there are a series of consequences that occur as a result of that pressure in your business. Some of the consequences are you have to stretch in your sales and marketing, and when I say stretch, I don't mean push yourself towards a positive [00:09:30] goal.
You have to do some dubious things because you need to eke out that extra one or 2%. You have to push for volume because your business will not stay alive without it. So that is a consequence of needing to have volume. Another consequence is that as volume increases, what decreases your [00:10:00] time spent on fulfillment or your attention towards fulfillment.
So what does that mean? If you need a hundred new clients a month, a hundred new for your coaching or service or whatever it's you're doing, if you need a hundred new clients per month, those hundred clients are never going to be able to get much from you. And I'm including scale. So you may or may not know this, but I'm involved in [00:10:30] 0% of the fulfillment to my business from a day to day perspective.
So our done for you offers, our coaching offers, et cetera. It's entirely run by my team, but even with a team in place, there are limitations to the value you can provide at certain. Levels of scale, which means by definition, since you can't offer tons and tons of value, you have to decrease your [00:11:00] price. If some of you're familiar with the Price Power Circle I'll share it here very briefly.
It's a powerful concept to consider in your business. You got to the market, you set a price. That price that you set is what essentially buys you the time and resources to fulfill, right? Because if if somebody pays you $10 and then you can only give them $10 worth of your time and $10 worth of your resources in order for you to stay alive and pay your bills as well.
You set a price in the market. [00:11:30] That, that basically tells you what you can devote and give in return as value. That experience for the customer or client then is their sort of experience and their rating and their opinion, and thereby your reputation is a direct result of the results that you gave them, which then affects future price.
Okay, so here's a very simple way to think of this. What you charge starts a [00:12:00] cycle of what you can charge tomorrow, because if people hate what you're doing, what do you have to do? You have to lower your price. If you're not getting referrals, if you're not getting, a good reviews, if people aren't happy with what they're getting, you're forced to lower your price.
Now, what's the problem in this scenario? If the symptom in your business is that you need volume to survive, what's one of the reasons you need volume? 'cause your margins are so low, right? You need volume because [00:12:30] you're not making enough per person to not have to have volume. So if you're stuck in this called the price power circle, if you already need volume now to survive.
And you go out and you press for that volume. So forget about the pressure that's gonna be on the sales and marketing team. And if you have a team, how much they're gonna hate you because they're like, this is impossible. We've hit everybody in the market There is to hit. What do you mean we can't? So forget that [00:13:00] whole part.
And let's just talk about the sheer economics. What's gonna happen is you're gonna go out there, you're gonna press. You're gonna have to lower your price because you're not able to deliver that much value to each person. And you're gonna need even more volume. 'cause you started with a need for volume.
If you're lowering the price, you need even more volume now. And so many businesses get stuck in this cycle of a [00:13:30] need for volume to survive. And it's a symptom of a bad offer. Remember how I talked about, everyone thinks that as long as the offer is selling, it's working. This isn't working. This is a machine for ruining your reputation.
This is a this. This idea of needing volume to survive is a fantastic way to run yourself into the ground, to ruin [00:14:00] relationships with customers and clients and all sorts. So what is the antidote? What is the magic pill for this? It comes back to offer design focusing on fewer, so you can offer more value, but there's something else.
This is something that a lot of people just don't talk about. And it's so powerful. If I solve a problem [00:14:30] for you. So if I help you to get new customers for your business, I didn't solve all of your problems. In fact, I created a new problem. Okay, and if you're listening to this podcast, you're very likely in some in the help business.
So you're a coach, consultant, freelancer, agency owner, et cetera. It means you help people get a result, course creator, et cetera. If I [00:15:00] help someone get more customers, they have new problems that they didn't have before, what are some of those problems? How do they turn those customers into bigger lifetime value?
How do they manage all of those customers? How do they hire a team to deal with all those customers? What do they do with all the money that they're making to ensure they make the most of their money? How do they balance their [00:15:30] life now that they're really busy? How do they, so in the help business, okay, this is not true of e-commerce, but in the help business.
Every problem you solve creates new problems, and if you do not have an offer sequence, which once you solve the first problem, they come to you to solve the second and the third, and the fourth and the fifth, you will be forever [00:16:00] stuck in a need for volume. You'll just be there forever. We have pathways for $150,000 per year clients.
Now what do we mean? We mean by pathways? We're not out there hawking $150,000 one time, pay me 150 grand. You see a lot of time on the internet marketing people say, I closed $90,000 today. And what they really did is they closed a year of [00:16:30] $3,000 payments for three people. So there's a difference between deferred and collective.
When we say a hundred, $150,000 per year, what we mean is, maybe somebody comes in at $1,500. We solve their problem. They have new problem now. They come in at $10,000, solve some problems. New problem. They come in at $45,000, solve that problem. New problem we have ongoing. We, there's a whole sort of process and system [00:17:00] for setting up a way for people to pay you.
A hundred thousand dollars or more per year, which is not going from, hello Stranger, would you like to pay me a hundred thousand dollars? Instead, it's sequential and allows us to, on 10 clients a year, have a million dollar a year business. 10 clients that supports, that's a big team. That's a big, [00:17:30] that's still margin.
There's and that's not the only thing we do, right? We don't just have 10 clients. We have lots of people coming into 15 hundreds and three thousands and 10 thousands and 25 thousands and 45 thousands and thousand dollars a month, and $5,000 a month, and all sorts of different offers. But the point is that our business is peaceful because we don't need volume.
While everyone else is out there trying to find the latest, greatest marketing hack [00:18:00] we are focused on. How can we serve someone longer? How can we give them more? How can we extend this relationship? There's a story of, about Dan Kennedy and it's a story that I like to share.
So for those of you who don't know who Dan Kennedy is he was a very influe, who still is a very influential marketer. And there's, you can criticize Dan for a lot of things, but he really was a pioneer for a lot of this stuff that [00:18:30] we talk about. And I remember watching a seminar of his one time.
And in his seminar he had everybody stand up in the room. There was probably, I don't know, 40 or 50 people in the room. He had 'em all stand up and he says, remain standing. If you've been in my mastermind for more than a year, and maybe, 20% of the room sat down. So you've got 40 people, 30, 40 people who are still standing, which means that they've paid Dan, 30, 40, [00:19:00] $50,000 a year for more than a year.
And then he goes, remain standing if you've been in it for more than five years and more than 10 years. And then he got up to more than 20 years. And there was like a small handful of people who were, who remained standing. And that was such a profound lesson to me because I can do math. Those few people who had been with Dan for 20 years, who had been paying Dan whatever his mastermind fees were [00:19:30] from the beginning to where they are now, let's just say an average of $30,000 a year.
That is how you make business peaceful. Now you need to have an offer that makes people want to pay you $30,000 a year. And that's not the first offer you come out with. And maybe start with a $2,000 offer, get your feet wet, and how do you get that going? And then what does a $10,000 offer look like?
And then what does a, so [00:20:00] again, I'm not talking about going from zero to ask people for a bunch of money. What I'm saying is probably. The problem with your business isn't sales and marketing at all. Probably the problem with your business is that you have a fundamental need to survive on volume, which is a symptom of a broken offer, or in this case, a broken offer sequence or offer system.
So something to think about. Number three. So [00:20:30] number one was you hate your clients. Number two is you need volume to survive. Number three is if you struggle. To get results for your clients, it's an offer problem. Now, why is it an offer problem? Put number one and number two together that we just talked about?
I have a fundamental belief that you are only ever as good as the client allows you to be. You're only ever as good as the client allows you to be. What does that mean? It means that [00:21:00] I cannot help somebody. Who doesn't have what they need to be helped. Example, I can build you a funnel. And I'm very good at this.
Our team is incredibly good. We have amazing systems. I would say we're probably in the top five, if not top 1% of funnel builders offer creators, copywriters, designers in the world. And I've been around and yes, obviously I'm incentivized to say that, [00:21:30] but put that aside for a second. And I would say the team we have right now is incredible at making funnels, however.
I can make you a funnel. If you have nothing on the backend, then it was a waste of your time and my time, and I can't get you very good results. Now, let's say that you have, for example, a $10,000 offer, $5,000 offer a $3,000 offer, and you buy a funnel from me. What's gonna happen? [00:22:00] You are gonna take that investment to have a funnel from me, and within 24 to 48 hours be selling your backend like you've never sold it before.
You see the difference. If you don't have that, you bought something from me that is completely useless. It gets you zero results if you have that other piece in place, or you go through a program of ours, which helps you to put that piece in place. Which by the way, think about [00:22:30] number two. Why would we have a program that helps people put their premium offers together in place?
It's because we want to get them to eventually buy a funnel, but if they don't have that piece in place, then they don't make any money. But if you do have that piece in place, we're talking about making an investment which nets out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars over time. And so the difference between no money and [00:23:00] millions of money is the qualification of the client.
It's not me. It's not what I do. What I do for the person who would make no money is the same thing. It's the same system. It's the same team. It's the same offer that makes somebody else millions. The difference is. Who I'm applying that thing to. So another example, let's say that you are just an absolute [00:23:30] machine at helping people to lose weight.
Unbelievably amazing at helping people to lose weight. How you apply that knowledge and expertise to somebody who is obese versus somebody who already has ridiculously like. Zero, close to zero body fat will net you different results. You apply the basics, for example, to somebody [00:24:00] who is obese and they're gonna lose a significant amount of weight.
You apply those same things to somebody who's already wildly in shape, professional bodybuilder, and they may lose very small percentages of weight. And the satisfaction of both customer or client, is different, right? It's about expectations. It's about what we talked about in the beginning. If you hate your clients, you might be marketing to the wrong clients.
We're talking now about struggling to get results. You might [00:24:30] be applying your trade, your expertise, your knowledge, that the value that you can bring to the table. You might be applying it to people who aren't qualified to be your client. In other words, because you're only as good as the client allows you to be, you have not partnered with clients who can maximize their result, cannot maximize their [00:25:00] result.
So that's important to realize that again, it's not a marketing issue, it's not a sales issue. It's an offer issue, and I see this all the time. The online guru says, you just need to reposition your offer. You just need to, okay, but again, I can't reposition something that wasn't fundamentally built for the right person [00:25:30] because let's say it's just a very good example.
The weight loss program for a bodybuilder is different than the weight loss program for somebody who's obese. Getting somebody to consistently walk every day as like a fundamental step in the weight loss program is a very different program than somebody who's already actively working out two to three hours a day.
Now that, that's just a, that's just a good example [00:26:00] that can be applied to all things to business. If I am working with somebody who's never had a business before. Getting them to, overcome that initial fear of marketing Their business is very different than helping somebody who has a $5 million a year business grow their sales and marketing.
So if I've got a, whatever it's a coaching plan or a service that I offer or a course that I've built, the gurus will say, just reposition it. [00:26:30] But you can't fundamentally. Reposition an offer. An offer is built for someone specifically. So again, when we are thinking about why is my business stuck identifying correctly, the reason is more than half the battle.
'cause once oh, it's an offer issue, you can actually start thinking about [00:27:00] the offer. You can. Ask these questions. If you're over here being distracted by marketing and you're trying to, again, just trying to resell a, an offer that's fundamentally not appropriate for what you're trying to get out of your business, you're wasting your time.
And then the one last thing I'll say about struggling to get results, most people are not charging enough. To get their clients the results [00:27:30] that the clients actually want. So in the help business, many of us have been burned by bad clients, and that's because for most of us, early in our career, we were making silly mistakes.
We had bad offers. We tried to fix things with marketing where we would over promise. While the offer itself was definitely going to be an under delivery of what we promised, like that's, it's a [00:28:00] common thing. If you've made these mistakes, welcome to the club. I've probably made more of them than you have.
That's I learn best by just messing everything up. So the issue here. Is that we as these, as the service providers in the help business then start to do the opposite of what's conducive to actually solving our author problem. We start to pull back, we start to offer less. We start to tighten our grip on the control, and we [00:28:30] say I tried to do this for clients and I made these promises and dah.
What we should have done is when the first time we over promise it under delivered. For the first time, we made this big full of hope offer where we were like, and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna kick butt doing that, and it's gonna be so great and so amazing. What we should have done is instead of saying it's the client's fault, or it was the marketing's fault, or et cetera, [00:29:00] we should have looked at how could I have actually pulled that off?
Because if you can go to the market with a better promise than your competition, you're gonna win. It's not about marketing and sales. If your competitor is saying, come to my house, pay me $50 to clean my toilets, and you go to the market and say, come to my house. I have gold bars in my garage. Whatever you can take from my garage, you get to keep, and I'm charging you [00:29:30] nothing.
You are going to win. It doesn't matter how fancy the language is, it doesn't matter what the videos are and all that kind of good stuff. So when you are, when you can make a bigger, better promise than your competitor, you will own your space and be able to charge premium and et cetera. But it comes down to being able to make the promise and deliver on it.
The price power circle that we just talked about. So what is [00:30:00] then the. Point of focus. It's improving what you can promise. But the thing is you're gonna have to charge for it. And this is where people start getting confused with the sales and the marketing and stuff. People who buy want the maximum thing.
Okay if I come to you and I and you own a restaurant and I wanna order a cheeseburger, I don't just want the meat patty, I want the whole cheeseburger. Plus I want fries, plus I [00:30:30] want Plus. I want, plus I want, that's what I want. If you tell me it's gonna be $10, then it's $10.
The same is true in the help business. We try to artificially. Or preemptively make decisions for people based on something as arbitrary as price rather than promise. And so we have clients who are. Or prospects really, who are begrudgingly buying [00:31:00] a thing that isn't as complete as they would have liked to anyways.
And so we experience sales resistance and we're thinking, oh, I need to improve my sales. I need to have a better script. I need to just be quiet on the phone until it gets so uncomfortable. Nobody can stand. I need to pressure people into the sale. And then when they actually get into the thing that they just bought, they're like, ah, this isn't even what I wanted.
And then you have upset clients. And then there's the cycle. Instead, if you just think. What is it actually going to take [00:31:30] to get the client the result that they're actually looking for? And then you start from there. Rather than starting from price, rather than starting from marketing, you start from what do they want and how could I possibly pull that off?
And then you price appropriately. What you will find is that you're getting clients' results a lot more often. Now, let's go back. Okay, so remember number one was hate your clients. Number two, you need volume to survive. Number three [00:32:00] is you struggle to get results. We start with an offer that's designed with results in mind, and then we start to work backwards.
So we've priced it appropriately so that what do we not need anymore? We don't need volume anymore. Also because we're actually getting them a result. What are we doing? We are creating more problems, good problems, but more problems. What happens when we create more problems? We get to offer them other stuff, to fix those other problems.
What happens now? [00:32:30] We need volume even less. All of a sudden, our business is starting to change. It's starting to look much more tolerable. Then what happens when we're getting clients wins and we're building long-term relationships? And we're enjoying working together, and they're paying us a hundred, $150,000 a year per client, and it's a scaled business.
The team is fulfilling, and you don't hate your clients anymore. It's all [00:33:00] one big ecosystem of interconnectedness. Where most people think the solution to all these problems is sales and marketing is actually the offer. It's actually the offer. So that's it for today's episode, my friends. Hopefully it's some things for you to think about.
If you want help with your offer, give us a call, peaceful profits.com/call. We have lots of different ways to help you fix this part of your business. It's a critical [00:33:30] point in your business. It's to fixing all that. Again, that's peaceful profits.com/call. Hopefully this episode has been helpful to you.
I'm gonna be doing a lot more of these fairly consistently over the next little while till we build up a big body of podcast material. And if you have things that you want to hear about, things you want to know, things you want to learn, don't be afraid to hit reply to any one of these podcasts. Episode emails that we send out.
And if we like your question, if it's a good [00:34:00] question or if you have a really good idea about what you want to hear, we will make a full blown podcast episode about it to answer your question specifically. Go ahead and hit reply. My team is on standby to receive those. And and sometimes you might have a podcast episode that you listen to, you hit replies, say, Hey, I'd like to learn X, Y, Z, and we already have the podcast.
Episode up. My team will be there to help support that as well. And then again, one more shameless plug here. If you actually want us to help you get this done in a variety of [00:34:30] different ways, peaceful profits.com/call and we'll see you in the next episode.