I think most start out as The Doily Shoppe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFdq-8wwNeM

In fact, those three offer types; do-it-yourself, do-with-you, and do-for-you themselves get in the way of potential prospects. I say this as someone who would have liked to do the 5-in-30, but my own objections were based on me. I think Marshall McLuhan put it very well, "The medium is the message." We are used to passivity in a way as never before. We are groomed into passivity. Only now am I crawling out of my hole of passivity and actively pulling the disparate parts into something that creates value for learners. I just learned a little from a Jeff Mollander about sparking curiosity as a sales method and in theory it makes sense. I'll have to try it.

I just don't know how to prospect and I'm pulled in so many directions at once. My whine is that I have been trapped in tunnel vision for years about being better and getting more certifications and learning about the area *to get better jobs*. Now I see death. Jobs are dead. We're in a post-job era of sorts now where, should one accept it, we will die as serfs. I should have studied business systems and played around with branding, marketing, sales, and product/service design instead of instructional design. Anyway, better to wake up at 33 than when my dad woke up at... 50-something, so I can't really complain.

@Leonardo Gomes A learner once said something profound, "You can't start the game over again, but one move can change the entire game."

"The story of saying that the customer is always right. The customer doesn't have to hear what they want to hear, they have to hear what they're paying you to hear. In the case of a service provider, they want to hear what they need to hear. What do I want to give him? I's not what he wants to hear, otherwise he doesn't need me. So the customer isn't always right and you always have to tell the truth. It's very important that truth is the foundation of relationships. Exaggerated subservience or any kind of subservience is killing our business. I say this a lot in the advertising world: doing business at any price, charging anything so as not to lose a deal. This is a vicious cycle against you. If you do deals at any price, you end up being unprofitable. If you're not profitable, you can't pay your staff well. If you don't pay your staff well, you don't have quality pprofessionals producing great work. If you don't produce great work and you don't have quality people, your business starts to go downhill." - Roberto Justus Learners that are taking trips to places all the time and want a discount? It's better to find those that value what you do. I have no fat to burn, but I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and tell my learners that I'll be increasing my rate from July. If they want to cancel, that's their right and no hard feelings, but the world is like this. If we don't stand up for *ourselves*, no one else will. Personally I'm not good at business, but I figure that 5% of their estimated income will put me at the financial level of my learners at two hours of 1-on-1 lessons per week assuming I'm open to teaching 40 hours. I don't spend time on lesson planning, but if I were doing small groups, that is to say; if I were a bit sharper, I would have already been going in that direction, but my approach is nonchalant, transparent, and zen. Learners should feel like it was a stroke of luck that they stumbled on me. Those are the learners I want. I love Alex Hormozi's value equation:

@Holly Jensen I think 'the niche' has to be people that you like. For example, my wife is a doctor, but all of my experiences with doctors as learners have shown me that they're the worst fit for me (since I'm medically literate and able to engage them on medical topics; in my experience, they don't like that). Sometimes your niche isn't professional, it's just people you like. Maybe you just think Argentinians are cool and you like the country, the culture, you want to learn Spanish, etc. Maybe your niche is just people who like the things you really like so what do you really like?