Stop Justifying Your Position When You Want to Be Somewhere Else

Jeremy Haynes asked a direct question that every consultant needs to answer honestly: are you justifying your position purely because it is your position, or do you actually want to be there?

Most agency owners defend their current client base not because they believe in it but because it is all they have — and letting go of it feels like starting over.

The musicians, the club promoters, the low-budget startups — these clients are not your identity, they are just the deals that were available when you started.

Haynes warns against attaching to a client type simply because they are the ones you have been working with, especially when you know you want to work with bigger businesses.

The sophisticated business owner who makes $75,000 a month and needs help scaling to $150,000 is a completely different conversation than the musician trying to get their first ten students.

Working with lower-tier clients requires dramatically more mental work for dramatically less financial return — and that gap only widens as you grow.

The transformation from serving poor markets to serving wealthy markets is not about greed — it is about matching your skills to the clients who can actually use them to produce results.

You will always have a higher success rate with sophisticated business owners because they have already done the hard internal work that the lower-tier client still needs to figure out on their own.

Letting the lower-tier clients go through their own growth process while you focus on clients who have already graduated from that phase is not abandoning them — it is being strategic about where your time creates the most value.

The hardest part of leveling up is admitting that the market you have been serving is not the market you want to serve — and that is okay.

Your revenue will not take off until you stop defending your current position and start building toward the position you actually want.

Honesty about where you are and where you want to go is the first step — everything else, from pricing to positioning to prospecting, follows from that clarity.