“Why aren’t you making more money?”
I don’t get this a lot, but I do get it here and there from people I knew in my old life when I was a performance and success coach doing $500 an hour video calls with clients I mostly acquired on Facebook.
I did get it a lot back then, though, even when I was making full-time income for part-time work. There were these constant demands that I explain why I hadn’t scaled my business up to the point that it was making six figures a year, or hell, six figures a month. That’s achievable. I know plenty of people who have achieved it and are doing it right now, as we speak.
And I know a lot of people who are powerfully offended at that, working as they do in something like a fish cannery, where it stinks and they come home stinking themselves and have to shower three or four times a day. They make decent money, $20 or $30 an hour, and there’s a lot of overtime working at the cannery so they can easily clear $65k a year even after taxes.
But the idea of making twice that seems unachievable to them, like it could never happen, and the idea of making twice what they make every year in a month is just obscene. How can your work be worth that? How can anyone’s work be worth that?
This is a long road. Buckle in.
At the top end of this are, of course, corporate CEOs making hundreds of millions of dollars every year. With a massive array of benefits and bonuses, to boot, and even if they screw up really, really bad and get fired… they have a “golden parachute” that will hand them another quarter of a billion dollars on the way out the door.
Surely there’s no work that’s worth that. Especially not working as a corporate CEO, who does nothing! Like all they ever do is sit around in their office and go to meetings and talk shit in front of news cameras. They don’t do any actual work. You never see them scrubbing the fish guts out of a machine’s innards. Hell, they mostly don’t even go down to the factory floor at all! Ever! They don’t even know what we do in here.
Except, you know, sure they do. You’re the process. Everything in life comes down to a simple equation.
Parts + Process = Product
Working in the cannery, you take the fish that come in the door — the parts — and subject them to a process that makes them into canned fish, the product. At a high level, it doesn’t matter what that process is. The CEO doesn’t need to know how the fish get into the cans. All he needs to know is that raw fish comes in the door, and canned fish goes out the door.
The CEO’s job is to make sure the raw fish keeps coming in and the canned fish keeps going out. Anything that gets in the way of those things, he has to decide what to do about it.
Like if there’s going to be a lot more fish this year for some reason, that means more fish has to be canned, and if there’s not enough capacity to can the fish fast enough… well, that fish is going to go bad, and that may as well be money down the drain. So there needs to be more capacity, which means he has to add new production lines to consume the raw fish faster and crank out more canned fish.
Of course, it’s going to be someone like you who actually does it - if new production lines need to be added, someone has to work those production lines, and that someone is not going to be the CEO or any of his cronies. It’s going to be you and your buddies working overtime, until they can hire more people. And then you and your buddies will work more overtime to train those people. Not to mention there are now a bunch more machines to clean fish guts out of, and all that canned fish is just sitting in a warehouse because nobody wants to buy it.
But from the CEO’s perspective, you’re the one who doesn’t do any work. You don’t have to make a single decision! You come into work and run the machine all day, and at the end of the day you clean it. Your job is the same, every day, the only question is how long you have to do it - and if you have to do it longer, you get paid more.
Meanwhile, the CEO is sitting in that meeting hearing about how last year ago, there was a projected shortage of fish. So the company contracted with extra fishermen, and also with two major fish farms, to buy all of their fish — every last one. But it turns out there was a surplus of fish, so now they have to buy all this fish even though there’s no way in hell they can process it all.
That’s several million dollars of unexpected expense, at above market rate, and it’s got to be turned into inventory because the market for fish hasn’t changed… so they’re not going to be selling any more than normal. And that’s more expense, because carrying inventory costs money.
Not to mention those four added production lines are going to cost an arm and a leg, because it’s not just a matter of ordering a machine and sticking it in a corner — there are installations and inspections and certifications and facilities expenses, and the CEO has got to give the marching orders to make all that happen.
If he’s a good CEO, those marching orders will happen in the right order and at the right time that the company never loses any money. That on paper, all of these expenses show up purely as a reduction in revenue, as money they did not get that they otherwise would have… instead of money they had to take out of their pocket and throw at a problem.
The money goes into fixing the problem first, before it ever goes into the company’s pocket, so the company doesn’t see money coming out of its pocket.
This is just a shell game. It’s the same money. The company doesn’t magically not spend the money; it just gets spent out of a different bucket, so instead of “here’s this bucket, and now I’m gonna need some of the money out of that bucket” he gets to say “here’s the bucket, but it’s got less money in it than we expected, because of reasons.”
The entire point of the CEO is to make this process invisible. You’re not supposed to see what he’s doing. What he is doing, the vast majority of the time, is making things not happen. He made the potential fish shortage not be a risk to the business; he made the actual fish surplus not create a crisis; he made the added production not crash the market price; he made the expenses of all this not show up alarmingly on the balance sheet.
So at the core of it, he really does do nothing. Nothing is precisely the point of his job. Where there would have been a crisis or a failure or a crash, there is instead… nothing.
If he produces nothing exceptionally well, the nothing continues, and he gets to literally do nothing. There is no crisis for him to handle, no shortage to address, no projection to anticipate. He has managed the system well enough that the process takes care of itself, and he doesn’t need to interfere.
This isn’t all that different from the factory floor, where you are watching a machine to make sure that… nothing happens. You want to ensure it doesn’t jam up or stop running or get out of alignment. You watch a bunch of dials and gauges and mostly just have your hand near the emergency stop in case something really bad happens.
Over the course of the average day, like the CEO, you find that there is no crisis. There is no problem. You don’t push the button. You just watch the machine run, all day long, and then you pull it open and clean it. Because you are doing a good job. And doing a good job means… doing nothing.
But you don’t feel like you’re doing nothing, do you? It feels like you are working hard all day long, because you have to stand there and stare at the machine, and remember to check this, and make sure you verify that, and just generally pay attention. That’s legitimately tiring. But you don’t push the button, so it looks like you don’t really do anything.
What’s tough to remember is that you don’t get paid for the process, you get paid for the product. Nobody cares about the process. The process, after all, is ideally nothing. The labour theory of value says otherwise, of course, but the labour theory of value is catastrophically wrong.
What you get paid for isn’t really the hours you spend on the factory floor staring at machines, but the thing that comes out of the factory. You get paid when raw fish comes in and canned fish goes out.
You make $30 an hour, not because you are so good at standing there monitoring the machine, but because $2 in raw fish comes in and a $5 can of fish goes out — thousands of times a day. And you get a tiny little fraction of that $3 difference between the raw fish and the canned fish.
Meanwhile, the CEO makes his hundreds of millions not because he is so good at wandering around the office making decisions, but because $3 billion goes out to run the factory, and $5 billion comes in from selling the canned fish. And he gets a rather more substantial fraction of the $2 billion difference, because given the tiny few things he ever has to actually do… hardly anyone can be trusted to do them right.
You could teach the CEO to run the machine in the cannery. All you have to do is sit him down and point to everything and tell him what it all means. Pretty much any jackass could do it, if they sat down and learned. So you get a smaller cut of the proceeds, because you’re easier to replace.
You’re no harder to replace than the guy dropping fries at McRonald’s, either. But you produce a $5 can of fish, and he produces a $3 order of fries, and he’s lucky to get a hundred of them out the door in a day. You’re cranking out ten, fifteen thousand cans on a good day even before the overtime.
And he’s doing more work. He literally has to get the bag out of the freezer, and put the frozen fries in the basket, and put the basket in the oil, and start the timer, and take it out when the timer goes off, and dump it under the heat lamp, and throw salt on it. None of this is hard, but it’s sure as hell harder than standing around staring at dials and gauges with your hand on a button.
Again, I cannot emphasise enough that the labour theory of value is absolute garbage.
So anyway.
What matters in all of this is that you will receive a tiny portion of the value of the product, minus the cost of parts, scaled by an arbitrary value for how easily other people could adequately perform the process you are performing.
If you want more money, there are three things you can do.
Reduce the cost of the parts
Increase the cost of the product
Perform a less accessible process
In my life, I’ve performed a lot of processes. I’ve worked in construction, sales, retail, fast food, and — as you might have guessed — on a factory floor. I’ve also been a software developer, a project manager, a QA lead, a web designer, a web developer (which is different, because of the spelling), a ghostwriter, a copywriter, a marketer, and of course a coach.
Many of these processes have no parts. They start from absolutely nothing. So that’s about the best you can do on step (1).
As a coach, I already mentioned I charged $500 an hour. That’s the best I ever did on that, although I have also done online group coaching sessions at $350 a seat for classes of over 150 people. This isn’t as fantastic as it sounds; there’s a substantial cool-down time between these classes, which has to be short enough that people still remember you, but long enough that they have been wishing they took that class.
So you have to wait a couple months before offering another one, and then you need to make the offer with a few weeks of lead time so people can alter their schedules for it, and you typically need to partner with someone who has a large audience and wants half the money. You’ll make about $70k - $100k annually on that, which isn’t bad, but booking 200 hours of coaching each year instead will make you just as much money.
And this is one of those “no parts” processes. The only question is what your product is. That’s what really soured me to the whole process.
The product of a performance and success coach is supposed to be, you know, performance and success. But that is not what my clients were getting.
What my clients were getting was a false sense of progress and achievement.
The great majority of business owners, especially on Facebook and other social media, are just playing an elaborate game of make-believe. They want to feel like they are important and doing something meaningful, so they go through the motions. And one of those motions is to hire a coach when they have a difficult problem.
But the problem, like their business, is fictional. They don’t actually have a problem. They know what to do, they just don’t want to do it. And they pay my rates and take up my time not to solve their problem, which is already solved, but to pretend they are solving a problem they are pretending to have.
Now, I am a truly cynical fuck, and I do not have a problem with this. If you want to pretend you are running a business and pay $500 an hour to pretend you have a problem so someone else can pretend to solve it, great! You spend that money, and whoever you are paying to pretend they solve your problem, they can take that money. There is nothing wrong with this.
I just don’t want to do it.
That is me. It is not a commentary on what you or anyone else on this planet should want to do. It applies solely to me. I would prefer not to.
This sent me spiraling into a depressive period which was not helped by both my parents getting cancer around the same time. (They’re okay now, although they have also since had a knee and a hip replaced on top of needing to beat cancer.) And the thing I kept coming back to was that… the money is arbitrary.
There’s no such thing as “fair” pay. There’s the pay you can get, and the pay you can’t. What you want, you deserve; what you can get, you have earned. And the only way you get anything — the only way you earn anything — is to convince whoever has the thing that they should give it to you, instead.
Of course, this means whoever has the thing also deserves the thing and has earned it. You can tell, because they’ve already got it. They had to earn it, or they wouldn’t have gotten it; and they had to deserve it, or they wouldn’t have taken it.
Any other proposition you might have is just sour grapes, unless of course the thing was obtained by corruption, fraud, or abuse… but those accusations, too, are typically just shit people made up.
Someone will agree to work for $20 an hour, then find out other people are getting $30 an hour to do the same job, and complain that the deal they made all by themselves is abusive. Or that it was somehow fraud for their employer to take the offer without telling them everyone else gets $30. Or that there is some kind of corrupt conspiracy to pay them less money, often because of a racial or ethnic or political identity.
The fact is, you don’t get paid more because you failed to convince whomever is paying you that they should pay you more. That is all. It doesn’t matter whether that is an employer, a client, or a customer. You simply need to convince them.
And, again, you deserve more. You cannot possibly be paid too much. There is no such thing as being “overpaid.” There is only underpaid, which literally everyone is.
Yes, even that CEO making hundreds of millions a year. He deserves more, and if he asks for it and gets it he has earned it.
If you’re asking “but what did he do to deserve it” I will need to point out — for the third time — that the labour theory of value is lunatic horseshit. It’s not true. The quantity of work you do adds no objective value to anything. The value that you add may require a minimum amount of work, but the work isn’t what gives it the value.
You could have put an equal amount of work into scratching your arsehole, and that would have added no value to anything.
The thing to remember is that value has almost nothing to do with you, the person performing the process. The process is necessary to produce the product, but it adds virtually no value to the product, because the product in and of itself has minimal objective value.
Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The person looking at the product decides what it is worth, and that decision can be influenced by sales efforts, but the primary influencer of this is the marketer — the person who puts the product in front of someone who will give it a high value.
The marketer can give even simple products high value, by putting them in front of the right people. A plain white cotton t-shirt goes from $8 a dozen to $200 each, literally three hundred times the value, simply by putting it in front of the right people.
Which begs the question: who are the right people, and how does one find them?
It’s simpler than it sounds. The first and most important qualification for the people who will pay a lot of money for something is that they have a lot of money. You cannot sell luxury goods to a homeless person. You have to find someone with enough money to easily afford whatever you are charging.
The next thing you have to do is tell them that you have something they can buy in the first place, and this is what it costs, and this is why they should buy it from you. That is the extent of your involvement.
The last part of the puzzle is that they have to agree with you that yes, they should in fact buy this from you.
Their reason why may have nothing to do with what you said. You have to offer them a reason, but they’ll make up their own.
Therein lies the crux of the issue, for me. And we’re in the home stretch, now, so bear with me a little more while I get to the promise of the premise from the title.
You see, nobody actually wanted to buy what I was selling. What I was selling was “work hard and do a good job.” But what people were buying was “make money on the internet.”
I mean, “make money on the internet” does fall out of “work hard and do a good job.” But the making money part was already covered by, like… everybody. Frank Kern and Jason Moffat and Jeff Walker and Mike Carraway have that market pretty well sewn up. If you want to know how to make money on the internet, there is no shortage of people to tell you how.
But if you want to know how to work hard and do a good job, nobody really talks about how to do that. Like, what work you should be concentrating on, and where you should be focusing, and when you need to worry about this part or that part.
And when I tried to teach this, when I tried to explain how to work hard and do a good job, nobody liked that part. Even when I went to coaching calls, people didn’t call me wanting to work hard and do a good job. They called me wanting to pretend they had a problem so they could pretend to solve it.
They didn’t want to work hard because they weren’t working in the first place; they were playing. They didn’t want to do a good job because they had no job to do. They just wanted someone to play with them.
Now, again: no shade on this. I do not give a shit why you buy my stuff. The reasons you have for giving me your money are yours and yours alone, the only thing we have to agree on is how much money you will give me and what I am going to give you in return. I don’t care what you are doing with what I give you. Print it out and make paper airplanes. It is none of my concern.
The issue I had was that I could never get anyone to say “this helped me work hard and do a good job,” so I could get clients and customers that wanted to work hard and do a good job. I only got people saying “this helped me make money on the internet,” which got me more clients and customers who wanted to make money on the internet. You know, the ones I didn’t like or want or ask for.
It is hard to convince people that you’re selling one thing when everybody is praising you for selling something else. And I did not want to keep working for these clients and serving these customers. I would prefer not to.
So I decided to become my own testimonial. I knew it was going to be a long road. I knew there was no money in it, and probably wouldn’t be for a good many years. I am four years down that road now, and I’m still not sure when there will be any money. But there’s one fundamental rule I am working by.
I am not allowed to make any money telling people how to run a business. Because that was the big criticism of my “work hard and do a good job” content: that the only thing it had ever done was sell “make money on the internet.”
Since I can’t convince anyone my advice is anything else, I can’t sell that advice without falling right into that trap and having to admit that yes, pretty much all the money I’ve made in the last fifteen years was from people buying “make money on the internet” regardless of what I was selling.
Fundamentally, no matter what your sales pitch may have been, you sold what people bought. The meaning of a communication is what is received.
There are seven steps to the process I go through: the bucket, the beetle, the lizard, the dog, the monkey, the man, and the chief.
Four years into becoming my own testimonial, I am just beginning the third stage. It isn’t a fast and easy process. I’ve filled my bucket, and I’ve trekked through the desert rolling my little ball of dung for a couple years, and it’s time to put myself out there on a nice sunny rock and start gathering an audience.
The reason you work hard and do a good job isn’t because it makes the product worth more. It’s because working hard and doing a good job are good for you. They make you a better person. A person other people want to be around, because they like being around you.
Money doesn’t really do that. Money makes you a person other people want to be around, so they can convince you to give them some of the money. They want to have what you have.
I don’t want those people around me. It’s not having what I have that matters, but being what I am.
And those are the people I want around me. People who want to be what I am. To do what I do. Not to have what I have.
Anyway that’s kind of what this whole Substack is going to be about, me being who I am and doing what I do and the whole philosophy and reasoning behind that. Eventually I will probably collect the best articles into a book.