Midlife MavericksFriday night, my fourth Zoom of the day, and I’d stopped pretending to look interested. It was a call on The Newsletter Accelerator, Nathan May’s cohort, the one I told you a fortnight ago I’d chosen over the coaching programme I’d been circling. Homework gets reviewed live on those calls. Mine didn’t get reviewed. I shut the laptop and did the sum in my head: what that hour cost me, and whether I’d been sold something.
Sunday, a Loom arrived. Nathan had recorded a full review of one of my Emerging Manager issues. Line by line, the kind of feedback that rearranges how you think about your own work.
I watched it twice. Then a question turned up that I didn’t enjoy. How did I get access to this man’s attention?
I bought it.
Quote of the Week
“You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot — it’s all there.”
Maya Angelou
The phrase I’d use as an insult
I’ve spent my career in a regulated corner of finance where “pay to play” sits somewhere between a smirk and an accusation. You earn your way into rooms on track record. Buying your way in is what people with weak numbers do.
This year I’ve bought my way into four rooms. Justin Welsh. Melanie Goodman. Olly Richards. Nathan May. Same sequence every time. I read their free work for months, then bought something. What turned up afterwards was a relationship and feedback on my actual work, neither of which appeared on the invoice.
And I should say the obvious thing before you say it for me. I sell access for a living. When I introduce a hedge fund manager to an allocator, access is the product. I have built a business on the idea that the right room at the right moment is worth money. It still took me until Sunday to notice I’d been buying the same thing all year, and to feel a bit grubby about it.
Your employer has been buying this for you for twenty years
The MBA. The professional qualification with the letters after your name. The conference in the airport hotel where the actual value was the dinner. The leadership programme you were quietly pleased to be picked for. Every one of those was money spent to put you near people you couldn’t otherwise reach.
You never felt it. Training budget, a form, a signature from someone two levels up.
Twice in my corporate career I took a job because of a person. The role was fine. The person was the reason. I’d met them, I wanted to be inside how they thought, and the only door I could see was the payroll. Same transaction, priced in years instead of pounds.
What changes when you go out on your own is the invoice. It arrives at your house now, with your name on it, and a purchase you’ve been making your entire working life suddenly looks like something you should be embarrassed about.
Nobody sells the room
What I bought was a cohort with a curriculum and weekly assignments. What I got was a man with a very particular eye looking at my specific work and telling me what he noticed.
I couldn’t have written the brief for that. If you’d asked me in January what I wanted from him, I’d have said something vague about structure and hooks. The thing I actually needed, I had no vocabulary for. That’s why it isn’t on the sales page. It only exists once it’s pointed at your work.
Ask whether paying for mentorship is worth it and nobody can answer you, including the person selling it.
Everything you bought in corporate had a comparable. A market rate, and a budget holder who had signed off worse.
Out here there’s a sales page with a number on it and nothing to hold it against. Is twelve weeks in a cohort worth more or less than a conference plus the flights to get to it? More or less than the trade association membership you’ve renewed four years running without opening a single email from them? I don’t know. Nobody knows. There is no market rate for proximity to one specific person, because there’s one of him and the price is whatever he says it is.
So I gave up trying to work out the return in advance, because it can’t be done, and started asking a smaller question instead. Is this person’s attention the thing I want most this year? That one I can answer in about four seconds.
The receipt, and the write-offs
The receipt is easy to point at. The Emerging Manager, my newsletter for hedge fund founders, exists because I spent a year in Justin Welsh’s orbit and then paid to get closer to it. Most of my pipeline arrives through it now. Managers find me because of something I published, which is a sentence I couldn’t have said eighteen months ago.
The write-offs are less fun. I’ve built offers for this audience, for you, and quietly retired most of them. I looked hard at coaching and stopped. Every time I ran the numbers the answer came back the same: I make considerably more, with considerably less strain, working with hedge fund managers, which is the thing I’m actually built for.
You’ll have a version of this sitting somewhere in your own plan. The thing you’re best at pays. The thing you most want to be doing quietly doesn’t, and sooner or later you have to say out loud which one you’re running.
Which leaves this newsletter in a strange position. It doesn’t pay me. Put it on a spreadsheet next to the client work and you’d shut it by Friday. But four and a half thousand of you are here on a Wednesday afternoon while I think out loud about the things I’m getting wrong, and that has turned out to be worth more to me than any product. That return doesn’t fit in a column either, which is rather the point of everything above.
Two questions before you buy anything
Can you name the person? If the honest answer comes out as a category, something like “someone who knows about newsletters”, you’re shopping, and shopping is a mood rather than a decision. When you can say a name out loud, the product is just the door and what the door costs becomes a separate question from whether you want to be in the room.
Then open your calendar and find the evenings. Actual dates, not the general belief that you’ll make time. If it runs twelve weeks and you can’t see twelve evenings between now and October, the fee is the cheap part and you’re about to pay it for nothing.
So this week, name the person whose thinking you’ve been following free for months without ever giving them a penny. Go and find out what they sell and how you get yourself into their world. Or pick an event where they’ll be standing at the front of the room, and find a way to be there too.
Then tell me. Who is it, what’s the door they sell, and which one is actually stopping you: the price, or the evenings? Hit reply, I read every single one.
See you Wednesday,
Claudia
P.S. Since I’m asking you to do it, mine is Vinh Giang. Former magician, now teaches people how to actually use their voice, and I’ve been watching him from a distance for a good while without ever giving him a penny. I’m not buying yet, and the fee has nothing to do with it. I told you a fortnight ago I had no dry powder, and that hasn’t changed. My evenings don’t exist until September. So I’m currently failing the second half of my own test, in public, one paragraph after setting it. Make of that what you will.
