I stopped using the phrase "high ticket" for nearly a year, even though it was the work that built my reputation. Not because I'd moved on from it, but because I'd quietly outgrown the business I'd built around it.

The clients were still coming in but the work I was doing behind closed doors had shifted into something the rest of my business hadn't caught up with yet. And the coaching industry has 2 rules about this kind of evolution that I think are quietly damaging the way mentors lead their clients.

I’m getting into premium positioning, the identity work that comes with this kind of evolution, and why the way most coaches handle this transition is repelling the premium clients they desire.

If you've felt the niggle that something is off, even while your business is still growing, this one is for you.

Topics covered on When You Outgrow Your Business:

1. The moment I knew I'd outgrown my business (and still ignored it for months)
2. Why I strongly disagree with the idea that clients should expand with you forever
3. The 2 rules the coaching industry teaches about evolution that I think are quietly damaging
4. What premium clients actually feel in your content before they decide to book
5. The energy audit to run this week if something feels off in your business but you can't name it

Connect with Rachel:

1. Come say hi on Instagram│Facebook │LinkedIn│Website
2. The Debrief Telegram group: https://rachelpearson.kartra.com/page/debrief

Resources mentioned in this episode:

1. Download your episode freebies: https://rachelpearson.kartra.com/page/sJM184
2. Calibration Mastermind: https://rachelpearson.kartra.com/page/Calibration-mastermind

Detailed show notes: https://rachelpearson.kartra.com/page/ep16

[00:00:09] I have clients like this one who worked with me for 2 years, and she came back the other week and we did a day together. I know she'll come back in the future at some point, because she knows the mirror that I hold up to her, but she's also able to develop her own work.

[00:01:04] This is where premium positioning and building wealth meet for women who are rewriting the rules. Let's get into it.

Outgrowing Your Business As A High-Level Service Provider

Welcome back to Rich Work. In today's episode, I'm going into something which, I'll be honest, I'm still in the middle of. So I'm going to share what it's like to be in this process, not having come out the other side of it and be able to talk about all of my learnings with hindsight.

[00:01:50] Not in a dramatic "I'm burning it all down, I am pivoting, I am shifting everything up" way. More in a way where you still have clients, you still are making money, but something just feels off. You have moved, and you know that you've moved, and you have changed. But the clients you're working with, the reputation you hold, the type of work you're doing hasn't caught up yet.

[00:02:45] I'm also going to touch on how one of the key ways I see people fall down in this is that they start to over-prove themselves, and we're going to go into what that can look like too. So this is relevant whether you're in the middle of the shift, whether you are approaching it, or whether you're starting to feel a niggle that something is off.

This Evolution Can Take A Year, Not 2 Weeks (As Social Media Would Make You Think)

As I said, I am still in the middle of this. Well, not the middle, I would say towards the end of it, but this has been going on for a year, and I want to say that really openly. In the online space we have this tendency to say, "I decided, and then I changed things. Within 2 weeks, I was doing this, and I was doing that."

[00:03:57] But I also want to normalise that when you're building something for the long term and you're really looking at the foundations you have in place, it can take time, and that is okay. It doesn't mean you have to expect income drops. It doesn't mean you have to expect that your business moves more slowly.

My Journey Into Premium Strategy, Identity Work And Brand Architecture

So about a year ago, I had a period over the summer where the way I can describe it is I started to feel really boxed in. When I moved into coaching, about 2.5 to 3 years ago, I was initially known for high ticket. High-ticket sales, strategy, positioning, content, all of it was built around premium pricing, premium offers, and how to attract premium clients. It has been the work I've done, and it still is the work I do.

[00:05:20] Then around this time last year, I noticed that I just stopped feeling lit up by that work, and I didn't want to use the phrase high ticket. I sat with it for a moment and thought, "Is this because I feel like a high ticket is getting such a bad association in the coaching space?" High ticket were seen as charging people a lot of money and not really delivering much. It was seen as flashy, and it's a lot of the things that I don't resonate with.

[00:05:56] It was because the work I was doing in high ticket had evolved. The work I had started to do with clients over months, although it took me a while to recognise it, had deepened.

[00:06:21] The strategy had really shifted into something much deeper, something around this identity piece, but also what was coming out of it was brand architecture. I was supporting clients, and I still do, around the mission, the purpose, the values and the vision that come into their brand and are visually expressed, but also are the through line that comes through all of their work.

[00:07:05] I was still walking around at that point with a bio that said high ticket, high-ticket sales, and I just felt like I hadn't caught up with myself.

The Grey Area Trap When You're Evolving Your Brand

The piece I sat with when I was looking at how to evolve through this, because I had a mastermind that had clients who had come to work with me because they wanted me to support them with high-ticket content, sales and strategy, and it's still a large part of the work I do now. But that was predominantly what they had come to work with me on.

[00:07:49] The biggest thing it came down to for me was that I had to lean into trusting my client. This is where I see challenges, particularly in the coaching space, but I would say this goes across businesses. When we decide that we have evolved, when we really notice it, it's been happening for a while, but when we really notice it and we see that the work now is different to what it was before, it can feel like what I describe in your body as a contraction.

[00:09:07] We cannot sit in this grey area. But also we cannot assume, and this is the thing I had to really check myself on when I was going through this evolution again, because it's happened multiple times, that it's my role to assume which of my clients are going to evolve with me and which are not. It has to be okay that as I evolve, some clients will also evolve too, and they might decide that it's not the right time for them to stay in my space.

Evolving Your Brand With Premium Clients

To go into this in more depth, the coaching space in particular really has this very black-and-white view of "you're not for these clients anymore, you're only for these clients." I find it a bit bizarre, because if you work in a high-ticket or even a high-proximity way, in a high-depth way, in a way that you are working in depth with clients, you will be working with people who are dynamic, who are discerning, who have multiple facets to their personality, to the depth of their work, to their business, to their life.

[00:10:24] Why are we making these assumptions about really smart, discerning premium clients who are already in our world? They're not standing still whilst we evolve. They're being shaped by our work. We just might not see it from them.

[00:10:56] When you are in that space where you are evolving and you see that some clients are not quite at the stage you are evolving into or not quite ready for that type of work, don't disregard them. Don't make the assumption. The only role we have, I believe, as leaders within spaces is to evolve with transparency and truth and not to project our belief that people aren't ready for that to happen into the spaces we currently run.

A Client Story That Shows What Premium Mentorship Really Does

I'll give you an example. I had a client who I don't work with currently, but I just did a Telegram day with her a couple of weeks ago, so this is going to illustrate how our relationship works. I had a client who I worked with for 2 years. She was in my one-on-one for a year, then she came into my high-level mastermind.

[00:12:05] Over those 2 years, I changed, I evolved, but an area I really stepped into more was my creative expression and the depth of the identity work and brand philosophy. I let that be a bigger part of the work I was doing, and now it's a really big part of the work I do.

[00:12:55] It came to the 2-year mark, and I knew in terms of business strategy, there was a lot more work we could be doing together, and she knew it as well. But there was just this understanding between us that she needed something different at that time. She needed to go off and explore her own creative expression, the modalities she's now really interested in. She's doing a lot more around somatic work, and I was not the best placed person for her at that time.

Clients Staying With You Forever Shouldn’t Be The Goal

I don't need to be a constant for clients. I've thought about this a lot, because whenever we're going through this evolution, I see it talked about in the coaching space. There's this almost unsaid intention that you should have clients who are constantly expanding with you. You start to sign the right level clients for your work, and then they just want to grow and grow and grow with you.

[00:15:07] I'm sharing this because in going through this process myself, there were times where I was feeling the pressure of, "Oh, well, now I've really got into this identity work and the leadership, and I've evolved my brand and my business. Surely I should now have these clients who just want to stay with me for years and years."

[00:15:44] Isn't that what this is all about? It's about us being able to choose what is the mirror we want reflected back to us at certain points.

How Over-Proving In Your Content Repels Premium Clients

This is where I'm going to pick up on when somebody is going through an evolution in their brand, when they have decided they want to do a different type of work or they want to deepen the work, I can see it in their content before they even start to talk about the depth of the work they're doing.

[00:16:43] You know, the client who would never sign for more than 3 months, or the client who would come in and ask low-level questions, whatever that is. I don't believe there are low-level questions in the world, but anyway. It's really this sense of, "This is me moving. There's a future of my business, and what I'm leaving behind, I want you to clearly know is what I'm leaving behind and is not for me anymore."

[00:17:20] But the tricky thing here is that, one, by doing this, you're actually speaking more to those clients who do have these traits, because they're the ones who think, "Ah, maybe I am the person who signs for 3 months, but maybe I'll try 6 months with her." What you're trying to speak to there is a mindset of a person who wants to be more long-term committed to developing their business. It's not about whether they're in for 3 months or 6 months, that's just the details.

What Premium Clients Actually Want To Feel In Your Content

The bigger piece for me is that for a client who is really at a level when you have evolved and your work has deepened, these premium clients who are discerning with their investment, it's a real turn-off to have somebody in their content say, "I'm not for this." They just want to feel what you're doing.

[00:18:35] The clients you want to attract at a high level are not looking for someone who can articulate why they've changed or even need it to be explained to them. They're looking for someone who is simply moving, who is in motion, someone whose thinking, whose presence, whose work demonstrates where they are now without needing to explain what they've moved away from.

[00:19:10] The ones who have already done their own evolution, who have already worked with the best coaches and consultants within the space, they don't need you to separate yourself from your past. They want to encounter your thinking and know immediately that you are operating at a level they want now.

[00:19:45] So if we're not talking about what we've moved away from, then how can we really move into this evolution? Because it's not just simply saying, "Oh, I've decided," and then the next day you start speaking about something different. There is a real strength in taking your audience and your community, your social media community, or your current clients along with you.

[00:20:42] Trust that they're perceptive enough to recognise that, and also trust that the ones who aren't right for where you're going will make their own call without it meaning anything about you or them. Some of them might come back, as I mentioned.

[00:21:20] When you hold onto that, the evolution of your clients stops being something you need to manage and contract around, and starts being something you just get to trust into.

The Energy Audit To Run When You've Outgrown Your Business

What I want to leave you with is that we talk a lot in the high-ticket coaching and premium space about refining your ideal client profile, about raising your standards for who you work with, about being selective, and it does matter. This is something I talk about a lot. I've got episodes on how to look at your catalyst client, that client you can really win with and who matches your level of expertise.

[00:22:25] Even that justification of what happened in the past is giving energy to it. The clients who will follow the version of you now is the version that shows up, that doesn't question, doesn't explain. You are so focused on where you're moving next, and you're trusting that the right people are going to see it.

The Room For Women Building Premium Businesses With Depth

So that is it for today. If this has landed for you, share it with somebody who is in the middle of the shift, or share it with somebody you've had conversations around this with. I think more people are going through it than we are talking about it.

[00:23:25] But as you've heard from this episode, so much more about the leadership, the depth, the identity it takes to hold building a business at the level you know you are meant for, and letting your business catch up with the work you are doing behind the scenes.

[00:23:58] Thanks for tuning in to Rich Work. I'd love it if you left a review. It helps other women to find us. In the meantime, follow me on Instagram, @rachelpearson.co, for a different take on premium positioning, one that's not about fitting a box. See you next week.