Graham Cochrane (00:10.339)
Are you struggling?
Graham Cochrane (00:14.734)
Are you struggling to hit your business revenue goals? Well, it might not be your sales skills. It could be what you're selling. If your offer feels like a commodity, something that people can buy anywhere, then my friend, it is time for a shift. This year, you can start making more money in a way that feels almost effortless by selling the one thing no one else can copy, you.
In today's episode, I'm revealing three powerful shifts to make your offer stand out, become highly desirable, and ultimately more profitable. But fair warning, you're probably not gonna like number three. Let's jump in.
Graham Cochrane (01:17.476)
And before I get into the three shifts you need to make, you have to understand the history of online business, because this really is the context that makes what I'm about to share with you make more sense. It's 2025 right now as I film this, and I think things are gonna continue to change, and so this will be updated over time in terms of when we look back at the history of online business, when I'm an old grandpa.
and I'm talking to my grandkids about the old early days of online business. There'll probably be many, many phases, but the way I see it, there have been three, three.
Graham Cochrane (01:59.812)
The way I see it, there are three distinct phases of online business so far. Phase one was all about selling information. That was it. And when I say phase one, I'm thinking late 1990s, first decade of the 2000s, like to 2010, maybe 2011, okay? All you had to do was be online and selling information
and you can make a buttload of money. Think about why this worked. Number one, most people weren't building websites back then. Only people that were dumb enough or geeky enough or had enough patience to learn HTML and code and all these kinds of things. I started in 09, so I really kind of came to the tail end of this season and did not want to build websites, did not want to figure this stuff out, but tools like Kajabi did not exist. You had to literally code stuff.
in the late 90s, early 2000s, if you could build a website and then if you had curated knowledge that was valuable to people, it's still the same thing you need today. Knowledge about how to pick stocks, knowledge about how to lose weight, knowledge about how to start a business, knowledge about how to parent your kids, whatever it was, you won because you were the only person doing it. People were new to the internet, there were search engines, yes, you could find stuff, but
It's like the internet today, there's just so much information, it's all over the place. So when you found somebody who had a blog, who had even an early YouTube channel, 2005 to 2010, like the first five years of YouTube, and you realize, okay, they know a lot about this topic, and they have a website and they're selling a newsletter or an ebook or an online course even back then. Yes, people were selling online video courses before you could host them inside of a platform.
I sold zip files of videos when I got started. If you found someone teaching what you wanted to know and they could sell a course or a book on it, you would buy it because there weren't hardly any other people doing it and you needed the information. Guys like Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income got started selling a course on how to pass a specific architectural school exam or how to study for it.
Graham Cochrane (04:21.572)
Like it's a very specific thing that nobody else had the information on. And if you Googled it and you found some blog posts about it and then he had a, I have a whole course on this. Well, dude, you're gonna buy it. So when people say, it was easy to make money back then because you're an early adopter. Yes and no. No, because you had to build a website from scratch with code and I didn't know how to do that. None of us knew, but we were figuring it out and it was clunky and you had to convince people to.
pull out a credit card and it was safe to buy something in the early 2000s from a no-name person with a basic website. It was hard, bro, but at the same time, yeah, there was no competition and what we were selling was what exactly people needed and that was what was missing was information. You just couldn't get it anywhere. No one could get information so if you had information to sell, you won. That was phase one. Okay, phase two in the online business history, which was probably 2010,
to 2021, like get through 2020, maybe into 2021. So like the next 10, 11 years was selling information better than everybody else. Okay, so from 2010 to 2021, everyone was selling information, but most of it's garbage because most people are garbage educators or teachers because they don't realize that knowing something is one thing.
Being able to communicate it in a way for other people to understand is an entirely different skill. And so the people that really won during that season, and I'm one of those people, I got started in 2009 with my first business, the recording revolution. There were already people on YouTube and on blogs teaching audio recording. So I was kind of a late adopter to the early phase of online business. People say, you're at the beginning. I was literally 10 years late. But when I came in, it was still,
hard to get some of that information, but I came in and decided the people that are teaching it right now, it's still too complex, it's hard to understand, they're not really speaking to the average person that really just wants to know this for their hobby. They're not gonna do this professionally. So I'm gonna speak to that person and I'm gonna teach it better than anybody else. And so I remember my very first course, Pro Tools Bootcamp, was all about teaching Pro Tools, which is like the Photoshop of the music recording world. It's like the main software people have used for years.
Graham Cochrane (06:39.448)
I was like, I'm gonna teach Pro Tools, which is not new. There's tons of courses on it, but the guys that are teaching it sound like bored professors. They sound like the teacher voice in the peanuts, know, like, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Like, that's what they sounded like teaching this stuff. So was like, I'm just gonna teach it like a normal human being the way I teach my friends, and I'm gonna skip the parts that are pointless and gonna just be rabbit trails. I'm gonna get right to the meat of what makes a difference for them to go from not understanding the software to plugging in gear for the first time and recording something that sounds pretty decent.
So I won and became a millionaire teaching to a hobby market, budget courses, because I sold information better than my competitors. And so there was a movement and a phase for at least through 2020 into 2021 where you could win simply by still selling information, but selling it better than most people. Now, COVID changed everything. When the pandemic happened and
What was so funny is that all of us that were already selling online thought, oh my gosh, can you not sell anymore? We had no idea how ridiculously easy it was gonna be to make money. 2020, 2021, if you couldn't make money those two years online, you were missing something because all you had to do is have an online course available and money was printing. And so there was a lot of junk that came out because everybody jumped on the trend. A lot of good people came online that needed to be, that didn't realize the power of online courses.
So I'm grateful for that. It really accelerated some really great educators in our spaces, but it also brought in a lot of posers and a lot of people looking for a quick buck. It diluted the whole market so, so fast. So since 21, I think 2020 and 2021 is still kind of worked. was just like a lot of people, but there was a lot of people willing to buy. Since 2022 and beyond, I think we are in phase three. And phase three is not selling information like phase one.
It's not selling information better than your competitors like phase two, which is where I made my first millions. I made my mark. It is selling your way of thinking. Selling your way of thinking. Do you see the difference? Selling information alone doesn't work anymore. We can admit this, right? And there's three reasons why. Number one is saturated markets. Every market is saturated now. And that's not a bad thing.
Graham Cochrane (09:05.048)
Saturated markets mean a profitable market, proven market. I would rather have a business in a saturated market than an unproven rando niche that I don't know if anyone has money and is willing to spend money. So if you see a market that's saturated, that's not a bad thing. But that does mean there's plenty of information already available. So you bringing information to the marketplace, it's not gonna be really new information. mean, Solomon said 3,000 years ago, there's nothing new under the sun, and that's still true today.
coming in and thinking I'm just gonna sell information alone in 2025 and beyond the landscape, it's not gonna work very well. You could make some money, but not much. So that's one reason why selling information alone doesn't work anymore. Number two is AI. Artificial intelligence is basically information on steroids because now these tools can read all the information in the internet at once and curate a lot of it for you. That can be useful.
It also can be problematic, but I would say largely more useful currently than problematic. That's my take on it so far. I don't know what you think, but AI is diluting the information market landscape. So selling information alone, you have to compete with AI. Good luck, right? AI knows everything and can curate everything for you. So selling information alone doesn't work for that reason as well. And then number three, and this one is because of human nature, people still do not take action. They don't do anything.
Even though they are living in the golden era of all the information you could ever want to know about anything to make your life better in any area of your life, it's at their fingertips. And yet people don't take action.
So the problem is that they now know that they don't take action, so they're not gonna just buy another course just because. Because you know what, they know they're not gonna watch it and they're not gonna do anything with it. Now, those three reasons, and what I just shared with you up to this point, is a lot of where the skepticism and cynicism comes from a lot of the OGs that are like, it's not the way it used to be, you can't sell courses anymore. And it's also where lot of the cynicism comes from a lot of the beginners.
Graham Cochrane (11:15.0)
who say, it's too late to do this. And Graham, you're just so lucky because you started in 2009, blah, blah, blah. Those are all just excuses and points of view. You can have those points of view and excuses if you want so that you don't have to go out there and make a great life for yourself, but the rest of us are going to go make a great life for ourselves. I don't want that to be you. The good news is the point of starting an online business, which was to make a great life for yourself, make plenty of money and help a ton of people, that's still available to anyone that wants it.
Okay, I'm not saying it's not available anymore. I'm saying things have shifted. And so in this new phase where you have to sell your way of thinking, not the information you know, I want to give you the three shifts that you need to make in 2025 and beyond to sell what can't be copied, which is you and your way of thinking. Are you ready? And like I warned you, you're not going to like number three, but we'll get to that. Number one, move from an information retailer
to a thought leader. Okay.
For about two decades, you can make millions of dollars by being an information retailer. What does it mean? Well, you have information and you retail it, you sell it. You have a storefront with lots of information, curated package in a variety of ways and formats that you could sell and that's how you made a living. That no longer works if you really wanna build a thriving business. Yes, you could still straight up sell information, that's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying, thinking of yourself as an information retailer is not gonna work, okay?
You have to move from being an information retailer the way you view yourself. Again, this is all identity work. How you view yourself affects how your life turns out. So it starts with, am I an information retailer? Nope, we are gonna move to a thought leader. Two different words. We're not retelling information, we're leading through original thoughts. Big difference. Okay, so a thought leader synthesizes information, number one, which means you need to consume information.
Graham Cochrane (13:17.88)
You need to own a lane and be obsessed with that lane. When I was doing music recording and teaching how to make home recording sound professional, I was obsessed with the whole industry. I went to trade shows. I read the magazines. I watched the YouTube videos. I read the books. I connected with experts. I tried things on my own. I experimented. I was obsessed with music and music recording.
So I consumed a lot of information and then I started to synthesize that for my followers, for my audience. That's gotta be your job. Whatever lane you're in, this is why you have to love what you do to really win at it because you have to synthesize information. Which means, and I just had a really cool conversation with one of my private clients who was readjusting his work week based off of my dream week formula. And he's like, man, I'm gonna dedicate two entire days to my week.
to my craft one day to just learn and consume and enjoy and stretch my thinking in the area that I'm in. And then the other day is I'm going to create just for myself, not for my audience, not for, I'm gonna create just for me. So I'm gonna consume and absorb and synthesize information and then go practice and perform and enjoy the craft itself two whole days out of his four day work week. And the other two days he's gonna then create his content around that and teach.
Beautiful, right? It's so beautiful. He's doing it because he loves the industry he's in. You gotta love the industry you're in. So gotta synthesize information. Then you need to add your spin in perspective. There are entire brands dedicated to people who just react to other brands and news. And that might sound ridiculous, but that's actually the common way people, and especially Gen Zs, like to consume information. They don't wanna go to the news source. They wanna go to their...
person that they like to learn from and watch them react to the news or them synthesize the news. Now this is problematic at times as well, but there's something important for us to learn about this, which is people like people. They don't like information, they don't like news, they like people. And so much like back in the day, like my grandparents and my parents grew up with, you know,
Graham Cochrane (15:39.126)
ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, and maybe you picked your Walter Cronkite or your Tom Brokaw or your whoever it was. Like you picked your channel based off of the news anchor you liked. They're all reporting the same news, but maybe you connected more with the news anchor. That's the same thing happening today, but now it's on steroids where you can pick your TikToker or Instagrammer or YouTuber or podcaster or blogger or substack, newsletter, writer.
Whatever it is, you can pick your person. like, you know what, I like the way she thinks about the subject. I'm gonna just consume all of her information and her take on things, because it resonates with me and it's meaningful for me, or the way she explains it, I get it. And so really, that person is a content curator, thought synthesizer for her audience. That's what you need to be for your audience. And so you're synthesizing information, you're adding your spin and perspective, and ultimately you wanna create your own original IP or intellectual property.
What does this mean? Your own frameworks, your own quotes, your own processes to do the thing that you teach. So when I was teaching music recording, music recording has been virtually the same for 100 years. It's become digitized, audio is audio. It's science, it's physics, Sound waves. So there's nothing really new. But my way of approaching it, I created my multi-step process. I have some of my own terminology.
This is IP, this is Graham's intellectual property. I came up with a way of thinking about a thing. I do that with my business content. I have frameworks, I even have new frameworks that are dropping like this month, like new stuff coming that I've been cooking up that I've been testing privately with clients to see does this help them better understand this? Does this get them results? Does this shortcut the process? And the things that I see that work, I'm gonna be bringing to you.
This doesn't have to be that complex. You don't have to become an inventor. It's just, you're already doing this intuitively, the way you think about things. So, you gotta move from an information retailer to a thought leader. Think of yourself as a thought leader. You're not just teaching people stuff. You're bringing your thoughts into it and think of the word leader. You're leading by saying, there's a million people talking about this stuff, but I'm going to stand out and raise my hand and say, here's what I think.
Graham Cochrane (18:05.26)
is happening in our industry. Here's what I think is broken about our industry. Here's what I think is great. Here's what the news says about something related to our industry or topic. And you know what? I'm not gonna just like say you should read that article. I'm gonna give you my take on this. I'm gonna go first and pave the way and influence you for good, because that's what leadership is, is influence, right? John Maxwell says leadership is nothing more, nothing less than influence. And so I wanna be a good influence to my audience.
around the topic that I'm teaching in, and so I'm going to have thoughts that are original and I'm going to influence and lead as opposed to just retailing or selling information. So you move from an information retailer to a thought leader, number one. Second shift you need to make is move from low cost to high value. So the name of the game for years was low cost products. Now there've always been premium people selling $2,000, $5,000 courses and so on, but the majority of people were
for a long time selling courses for $20, $30, $50, $100 because it was like close enough to a book, which is like a $25 offer, but you know, it's video, so you can get away with selling it for more. we came into this industry thinking we're selling information, so what's the equivalent books or classes at a university? So those are the things we were anchoring our prices to, and the people that...
that made more money faster in the early days were the ones that understood this concept. They were like, wait, it's not about low cost, it's about high value. How can I give more value? And so there's a whole crop of people selling cheap courses, cheap memberships, cheap downloadables. It's really hard to make millions of dollars selling low cost products. I didn't say it's impossible. I'm saying it's really hard.
because you need a lot of leads and you need to convert those people to a lot of sales. And that takes a lot of work or a lot of money. It's a lot easier to sell fewer offers at higher price and make good money. So you wanna shift from low cost to high value. I love Seth Godin's line, charge more for more. I just have a higher priced offer but.
Graham Cochrane (20:18.478)
Don't just make it higher priced. That alone isn't gonna cut it, because if it's expensive but not useful, no one's gonna buy it, you know, just as hard of a time selling it. Think about how can I give people more value, not just more stuff, not more videos, not more downloadables, more value. So to help you with this, I wanna give you something like very, very useful. Seven things that people will pay more for. Write these down, okay?
There are typically seven things that your ideal client or customer are willing to pay more for. And so you can have one or a combination of these seven things. You ready? People will pay more for application or personalization. Can you teach me something, Graham? But how can I apply that to my situation? How can you personalize that? So application and personalization. They'll pay more for a curated community. In a sea of annoying and mean people on the internet,
We still want to be in a community where we can talk about these things and share ideas and share successes, invent problems and frustrations. But if you're curating a community of like-minded people where there's some threshold of quality control, that's valuable. People will pay more for that. I've made a lot of money on curated communities over the years. They'll pay number three for accountability or support. A course teaches you what to do, but there's no accountability or support after that. Can you give me ongoing support to kind of ensure that I do it?
or how can I ask you follow up questions to make sure that I'm staying on track and better understanding it. They'll pay more for accountability and support. Number four, in-person experiences, especially post pandemic. People are craving in-person community. I hosted five guys at a luxury Airbnb that I own in Tampa last year, right? This was a multi-five figure weekend for me and I had no content for them. I just got people together and facilitated a mastermind experience.
And we brought in a private chef and I took him out to my favorite speakeasy and restaurant and they stayed in the luxury Airbnb. It was awesome. But it's an in-person experience. They got to fly in from three countries to be in a beautiful city in Tampa and have an incredible experience. That's what people are willing to pay for. That's number four. Number five, done-for-you services. Yes, I love selling courses and I love selling communities because they scale, but you can sell done-for-you services at high cost because people are like, look,
Graham Cochrane (22:40.012)
I have money, the people who have money are the ones that wanna throw it at somebody else like you to just do it for them. Like, I don't wanna do this, I don't wanna watch a course, I just want you to do it for me. So if you can incorporate some sort of done for you element, you can make a crap ton of money. Number six, templates and swipe files. This is like a scalable version of done for you. So instead of me teaching you how to write sales copy, what if I give you a sales copy template, a swipe file? So now it's kinda done for you and you can just type in your stuff like Mad Libs and you got sales copy.
That's valuable. And then number seven, the most valuable thing you can offer and the people pay more for is you, access to you. So that can be in the form of private coaching, that can be in the form of a text thread or a vox or access or an event where they can interact with you. You can have different spheres where people pay the most, they get closer to you, the proximity principle, the more they pay, the more proximity they get with you and the more proximity they want for you, the more they need to pay.
At the end of the day, if you're doing your job, people are falling in love with you and they trust you and so they will pay to get access to you. And you need to protect that and you need to charge what it's worth and the more valuable, the more people you attract, the more valuable your time becomes. But those are the seven things that people will pay more for. So shift from, hey, how can I sell these low cost, how can I more of these low cost courses to how can I add more value to people? Those are seven ways to do it.
Okay, so we've moved from an information retailer to a thought leader. We're moving from low cost to high value. And as I warned you, number three, shifting you to make in 2025 to sell more effortlessly, to sell yourself, is to move from being likable to convicting.
Look, someone needs to hear this. Your goal as an online business owner, as a business owner, period, as a brand, is not to be liked. Like, this is why social media is so dumb. It's misused. People, the power of social media is not to get as many likes. It's to convict as many people as possible. It's a megaphone or can be a megaphone for your message.
Graham Cochrane (24:58.295)
But if you aim at being likable and getting likes and hearts, you ironically become invisible. You become vanilla. We've talked about this at length. But the goal isn't to be liked by as many people as possible. It's to make their lives better. And you do that by convicting them. Conviction is not condemning them. That's not the same thing. Condemnation and conviction are two different words. This is why, side note, as a Christian, people get this wrong. They think that
A Christian's job is to condemn people. No, it's not. It's to love people, actually. It's not even God's job to condemn people. The Bible says there's no condemnation now in Christ, but God does convict. And we don't like conviction because conviction can say like, hey, you probably need to change what you're doing. And we don't want to be told that we need to change what we're doing. This is why I knew you're not going to like number three. But conviction is powerful.
If you can convict people, bring people to a conviction that, yes, the way I'm doing things, the way I'm managing my health is not good for me and I'm sick of it and I want to be around for my kids and my grandkids and I don't feel condemned by this person, but I feel a conviction that yes, this is the year I have got to change something about my health. that's powerful. If you can convict someone to take action, if you can bring conviction that there is a better way to parent or
be a married person or manage their money or run their business. I mean, this is what I'm doing right now. I'm not trying to get you to like me. I could care less if you like me. The only reason why I sit down every week to do this show is to convict you to make a change in your life so that it is better and so that your business thrives. Because I want you have three things. I want you to have money and lots of it.
because money is the oxygen for all the dreams. It's the fuel for all the dreams you have in your life. You can also do a lot of good when you have a lot of money. You can't be generous and you can't make a difference in the world if you ain't got money, right? You need money. The old saying that I think, was it Margaret Thatcher said that no one would remember the good Samaritan in the Bible if he didn't have money. The reason we remember him in that story is because he had money to take that guy who was beat up in the ditch.
Graham Cochrane (27:15.822)
to an end and pay for all of his treatment and for his stay at the end. He was able to help because he had resources. So I want you to make as much money as possible. Number two, I want you to have as much margin as possible. The whole reason to have a business is to have flexibility and ownership of your time, not to have a well-paying job. I don't want you to have a well-paying job. I want you to have margin, flexibility. So if you're working more than 20 hours a week, you're doing it wrong. You're just doing it wrong.
So number two, I want you to have margin. And number three, I want you to have more meaning. I don't want you to just have money and have all the time in the world because then you'll become a spoiled brat or worse, you'll get depressed, right? Because people with lots of money and lots of time on their hands go crazy. I want you to have money, flexibility and time, but purpose and meaning. I want you to like have a mission that you care about to make a change in the world. So that's why I do this show is to convict you to make these changes so you will.
operate your business and life in such a way that it makes more money, you have more margin and you have more meaning. If I were trying to get you to like me, I would probably post more images of me with women or with Lamborghinis or on a private jet that I rented or I would talk about just the crazy ridiculous lifestyle you can have or I don't know what I would do but it wouldn't be what I'm doing now because I don't believe in all that crap. That's what gets people to like and gets people to share but it doesn't convict them.
It doesn't convict them. And friend, you're gonna make way more money by focusing on conviction, not likes. Your job is to challenge or provoke your clients' and your audience is your client.
Like if you're watching the show or listening to this podcast, you're one of my clients, you just don't pay me anything yet. That's what's so beautiful about this business model is I'm the one paying. I'm paying with my time to make this for you. I'm paying with my knowledge and experience and expertise to give this to you for free. I'm letting you test drive my brain.
Graham Cochrane (29:15.17)
And the reason I do this is to build trust with you so that you'll hire me as your coach. You'll join one of my coaching programs, right? Or you'll buy a course. Or you'll come book me to speak, right? I'm trying to build trust with you. So I'm going first. And I'm challenging your thinking and provoking your thinking right now.
And you know what? People that pay me a lot of money, I challenge and provoke their thinking even more. I'm harder on them than I am on you.
Because if they're invested in me, I'm going to invest right back. And I'm not there to just be a punk. I want them to win. So I'm going to tell them the truth. This is the other reason why you need to be convicting is you need to say the hard thing that no one else in these people's lives are going to tell them. No one has the guts to say the hard thing to you. So I'm going to say the hard thing to you. That's love. That's love. The Bible talks about this, right? That true friendship is when you say the hard thing.
But enemies give you these smooth kisses, right? Like, it's easy to say something that will get you to like me, but that's not love. Love is telling you the truth, because I know the truth is gonna set you free. So are you doing that for your audience, for your clients? Say the hard thing.
Graham Cochrane (30:32.963)
Related to the truth, make sure that your content isn't just what they wanna hear, even if you have to wrap it in what they wanna hear. Because I understand the Trojan horse. mean, you've got it, the wrapping matters because you have to meet people where they're at. You have to enter the conversation they're already having in their mind. So maybe people, maybe you're a fitness coach and people want to lose belly fat and they think that they need some ab workout for that. So make a video on what ab workouts to lose belly fat, but in that video, tell them, know what?
The real way to lose belly fat is to stop eating crap.
Tell them the truth, give them what they want. Sure, here's some ab workouts you can do, abs are made in the kitchen, not in the gym, right? Like give them the truth.
And ultimately, the reason you move from being likable to convicting is this will build more trust. At the end of the day, everything we're doing here is a trust funnel. I talked about this earlier. You don't wanna have sales funnels anymore. That's not the point. Don't optimize for sales, optimize for trust. When you tell people the truth, you bring conviction with a smile and they realize that, this girl really cares about me. This guy really cares about me, even though he's saying the hard thing or saying the thing that's a little bit offensive to me, because it's not what I wanna hear. It's not the easy thing. It builds trust.
Because there are plenty of people that want to tell you the easy thing. And they will, because it'll get your click, it gets your like, it gets your subscribe, maybe it even gets your purchase, your money. But your job is to build trust. Because once you have trust, everything becomes easier. Go back to what we said at the very beginning. The reason you're having a hard time selling is because what you're selling is a commodity. You're selling information. You're selling knowledge. We're out of that season.
Graham Cochrane (32:18.104)
The age of selling information and then the age of selling information better than your competitors, both of those seasons are gone. We are now in the age of selling you and the way you think that can never be copied, that can never be duplicated.
It can never be diluted. There's unlimited ways to sell your way of thinking, to share your way of thinking. And it's actually worth more than information because when you build trust with your audience, they've got you in a small part of their heart forever.
So you can sell a course, sure. You can sell a coaching community, sure. Ten years from now you could write a book. Yeah, they'll buy it. You can start speaking and come to their town. They're gonna come. You can do a meetup, they're gonna come. They like you because you make their lives better because you are functionally the voice in their ear that says the truth no matter what. Now when you go to pitch something, you're saying, hey, I have a new coaching program. You don't have to be cute to sell it.
You just show them how it's gonna make their lives better and they say, yeah, it probably will. Because this free stuff makes my life better, let's go. I trust this guy. Selling becomes almost effortless because you've done the hard work by realizing I'm not trying to convince them to buy information. They're buying me and I'm incredibly valuable and I'm unduplicable and uncopyable. I'm uncommoditizable. I'm one in a million. One in eight billion. There you go, my friend.
Move from an information retailer to a thought leader. Move from low cost to high value and move from likable to convicting.
Graham Cochrane (34:04.932)
If you don't have a personal brand and you sell something under just another name, like I did, the Record Revolution for many years, I need you to just stop thinking about it as like, sell products. I need you to think about it as I sell myself. Even if that feels overwhelming, even if you like, I don't wanna do coaching, it's fine. This is more of an identity statement than you having to change a lot of what you're doing. But I want you to view 2025 and beyond.
that you are the commodity, you are the asset, you are the offer. Your brain, your way of thinking, your thought leadership, your reaction, your perspective, your spin, your opinions, your spiky points of view, as Rich Lipton would say, this is what people want and this is what you can package up and sell. Just start to view your brand that way as you are the brand and watch the selling change
Watch the conversation around what you sell change. Watch maybe your offers change and watch the way you feel in the sales process change. Because if they don't want to buy you, that's fine. They're the one missing out. But you know that you have so much value to bring. And especially if you're in a crowded market, you realize I don't have to have new information. That's impossible. I just to have my take on this information and you can make millions of dollars. I've done it twice over in two different industries.
For hobbyists stand for business owners. And if I can do it, you can do it. Hope this episode has proved valuable to me. Let me know in a comment below on YouTube if you're watching which one of these three shifts spoke to you. Are you gonna be a thought leader? Are you gonna move to high value? Are you gonna move to conviction? Let me know in a comment below if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I've been getting a lot of good feedback on Instagram. That's a great place to message me at TheGrahamCocker and let me know which of those three shifts
you're making, I want to hear that this content is resonating with you. All right, my friend, have a great rest of your week. We'll see you on another episode real soon.
