Over the past several years, I've had a front-row seat to a lot of firms.

Some of them are scaling. Some of them have been stuck at the same revenue number for 2+ years.

Here's what surprised me:

The stuck ones aren't lazy. They're not undisciplined. Most of them are probably working harder than the ones who are growing.

They're just doing the right things in the wrong order.

That's it. That's the whole diagnosis.

And to be clear, I don't mean out of order like a recipe. I mean out of order like a triage list. Everything on the list is worth doing. Something else should be sitting at the top of it, and it isn't.

The firm owner who spent $8,000 on a website rebuild has no defined scope of work.

The one who just hired a copywriter to run her LinkedIn still can't describe what she's worth to a client without listing her deliverables.

The one who has rebuilt his CFO report template 3 times this year hasn't had a conversation with a potential referral partner since February.

Each of those is a legitimate thing to do.

None of them should have been at the top of the list.

Let's dive in.

The One Tip: Stop Asking What's Next. Start Asking What Keeps Getting Skipped.

When a firm owner tells me they're stuck, the instinct is always to look forward. What's the new lead source? What's the new offer? What's the thing I haven't tried?

Those are almost never the problem.

The problem is usually something that's been on your list for months, low-key living at item 9, capping everything you build on top of it.

What do I mean?
Great question...

You can't hire against a role you can't describe. You can't systemize a scope you never defined. You can't price work that you can't predict the hours on. You can't delegate a process that lives entirely in your head.

Every one of those belongs at the top of your list. For most stuck firms, not one of them is anywhere near it.

And because "business" is a cruel, cruel partner, the symptoms all tend to show up as growth problems. Revenue is flat. Leads are thin. The team is frustrated. You're working 60 jillion hours.

So you go looking for a growth solution, you buy the wrong thing, and 12 months later you're in the same spot with less money.

Blah.

Here are 3 signs your list is out of order.

1. You're Polishing the Storefront Before You've Stocked the Shelves

Logos and brand kits and team photos, oh my! Full website with a homepage and an about page and a services page. Professional copywriting.

All of it is worth doing.

Almost none of it is worth doing at your current revenue.

These things are stupid expensive, and they produce approximately zero new clients at the stage where most firm owners buy them.

Worse, they feel like progress. You get to look at something pretty at the end of the week and tell yourself you built the business.

I haven't written one of my own LinkedIn posts in 2026. We have a copywriter. She pulls ideas from me, I edit and approve, and it works great.

I also didn't do that until my firm could pay for it out of free cash flow without me flinching. Literally at a multiple 7-figure run rate at almost 10 years into things.

I'm not saying you should wait a decade, but it's probably too soon today.

Pro tip: if you cannot fund it from operating cash without touching your own take-home, it doesn't go at the top of the list.

2. You Look for Clients Only When You Need Clients

This one nearly killed my firm, so I say it with love.

For years I ran the exact same cycle. Get busy, stop prospecting. Lose a client, panic, start prospecting. Land two, get busy, stop prospecting.

Then I actually did the math on the lag. From the first prospecting activity to a signed client is sixty, eighty, sometimes ninety days.

Which means the day you realize you need a client you're already three months late.

Womp womp.

You are not prospecting for this quarter. You are prospecting for the quarter after next.

Prospecting is on your list. It has always been on your list. It just loses to client work every single day, because client work has a face and a deadline attached to it, and prospecting doesn't.

Item nine never happens. Not once. Not ever.

So the fix isn't a better lead source, and it isn't more willpower. It's moving prospecting to item one, first thing in the morning, before the client work eats the day. If it doesn't happen then, it doesn't happen.

"But I'm already at capacity today. If I prospect and a lead comes in, I don't want to turn them away!"

Champagne problems my friend.

It is drastically easier to tell a prospect that wants to work with you, "we can start onboarding you in 60 days," vs. going into freakout mode when a client churns and you realize you may need to cancel your Netflix subscription so you can keep your lights on.

3. You're Pricing Your Time & Effort, Not Their Outcomes

Ask a firm owner how he landed on his price and you'll get one of three answers.

"It felt about right based on my time."
"Eh, the work was pretty easy, so I didn't want to charge too much."
"I kinda guessed based on what I want my effective hourly rate to be."

Every one of those prices is built out of you. Your hours, your history, your comfort level. Not one of them has anything to do with the client and their outcomes.

This is how that story usually plays out after about six months or so:

"I started at two grand a month. Two grand isn't worth what I'm putting into this. My client is getting a fortune out of it. I'm getting run over."

He's right. And notice that he can see the value just fine. He simply didn't charge for it.

You and your client are keeping score in COMPLETELY different units.

You're over here counting hours.
While she's counting the four points of gross margin that came back. 

Those numbers aren't even CLOSE.

Your price should be based on their value, not your hours.

Which means you have to be able to say the outcome out loud, and "Monthly reporting and a strategy call" is not an outcome! 

That's a description of your labor, and labor is the ONE commoditized thing about you.

And this is the one that gets buried the deepest on the list, because it doesn't look like work. There's no deliverable. Nobody's waiting on it. You can put it off for three years without anyone noticing (except your bank account).

If you can get past the place where you're selling deliverables and start selling outcomes, you will unlock MASSIVE pricing power.

Quick note: this is also the reason you can't serve everybody. A business doing $500,000 a year does not have $60,000 of value sitting in it waiting on you. It isn't that they can't afford you. It's that it isn't there.

Price the outcome. Then go find clients big enough to have one.

Your Challenge This Week

Pick the single biggest thing you're currently working on for your firm. Not for a client. For the firm.

Then ask one question about it: is this REALLY the top of the list, or is it just the most comfortable thing on it?

Be honest with yourself here. The comfortable thing and the thing at the top of the list are pretty much never the same thing.

And if the honest answer is that you've never actually defined your scope of work, that's your item one. We'll talk about it next week.

You're probably not behind.

You're out of order.

And that is a much better problem to have because out of order is fixable.

Your coach,
Michael