May 3, 2025
Don’t Forget Pricing
Out of curiosity, I typed the following prompt into ChatGPT:
Other than hiring employees, what are three strategies a solo consultant could use to scale their business?
Here’s what I got back:
Here are three highly leveraged strategies a solo consultant can use to scale without hiring employees:
1. Productize Your Expertise
What it means: Turn repeatable aspects of your consulting into fixed-scope, fixed-price offerings with clear deliverables and timelines.
Examples:
- Diagnostic assessments
- Strategy roadmaps
- One-day intensives
- Retainer-based advisory
Why it scales: Reduces sales friction, increases perceived value, and enables delivery in less time with higher profit margins. Once dialed in, productized services can be sold repeatedly without customization.
Pro tip: Bundle access to your IP (worksheets, frameworks, tools) so clients pay for outcomes, not hours.
2. License Your Intellectual Property
What it means: Package and license your frameworks, methodologies, or training materials to other professionals or firms.
Examples:
- Certify other consultants in your method
- License a curriculum to training companies
- Offer white-labeled workshops to agencies or boutique firms
Why it scales: You decouple income from time by letting others deliver your material. It also builds distribution and market reach without additional delivery effort on your part.
Pro tip: Frame licensing not just as access to content, but as a business opportunity for licensees (e.g., “use this system to generate $100k+ in new revenue”).
3. Build a Leverage-First Content Platform
What it means: Use a publishing medium (newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, LinkedIn) to attract inbound leads, pre-sell your expertise, and create sellable media assets.
Examples:
- Publish a high-trust email newsletter
- Host a podcast interviewing your ideal buyers or successful clients
- Create mini-courses or lead magnets that build your list while positioning your value
Why it scales: You create a repeatable, automated way to attract and nurture clients over time. Plus, media assets increase in value the longer they’re in circulation.
Pro tip: Reuse content across multiple formats and build a repository of evergreen thought leadership that continues working for you long after publication.
Overall?
I’d say it’s a decent response.
Thoughts...
Longtime readers will not be surprised to learn that I especially liked option 1 (i.e., productizing your expertise).
I’m not personally a huge fan of option 2 (i.e., licensing IP) because it implies a bunch of enforcement and other administrative overhead that I stink at, but I’ve certainly seen it work for other people.
Option 3 (i.e., build a content platform) is a smart move in general for solo experts, but ChatGPT seems to be assuming that the monetization with figure itself out. And it’s not clear to me what “sellable media assets” means in this context.
Notably missing?
ChatGPT doesn’t say anything here about getting better at pricing.
Getting better at pricing is probably the single most effective way to scale your business.
You could argue that pricing is implied in all three options, BUT all three of these approaches would fail miserably if priced badly.
Pricing is suuuuuper important.
Yours,
—J