Forget Tim Ferriss’ 4-hour workweek; I opt for the 4-hour work month. (No, you won’t have to take on a single 1-on-1 client.)
Many people have bought into the fallacy that making thousands or tens of thousands of dollars has to come at the expense of tens or hundreds of hours of grueling, tedious, or at the least mind-numbing work. The consensus seems to acknowledge two viable options to attain those “riches”:
- Work for an employer, for a fixed salary or hourly rate, aware of the inherent cap on your earnings potential (and the rate of its growth).
- Work for yourself on various side hustles, seek out one-on-one coaching clients, or attempt to build a business, which will undoubtedly consume a roughly similar amount of time as your 9 to 5 option.
I’m here to dispel both of the above with one fact that even Tim Ferriss’ four-hour workweek doesn’t mention: it’s possible to make $20,000 in just four hours — per month. And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist, have advanced degrees, or spend years risking your life savings building a startup with a 90%+ chance of failure. You really don’t.
A 6-Step Approach to My 4-Hour Work Month
My four-hour work month is made possible by one simple, attainable decision that you, too, have the power to make — and no, this won’t have anything to do with manifesting money or “wishing” yourself rich.
It’s the one-to-many approach that allows me to remove the cap on my earnings, charge a premium, and still limit my required time investment to one hour per week.
Step One: Identifying your value-add
Think about what service you have to offer the world — this could be based on your personal or professional experience, and it can truly be anything.
Step Two: Assigning a dollar value to your time
Decide on an hourly rate you feel comfortable with — this could be $100/hour, $250/hour, $500/hour, etc. When you decide on this hourly rate, think about how much value you’re offering a person who gets a full, undivided 1-on-1 hour of your time and attention. Think hard, and don’t undervalue yourself.
Step Three: Removing the limiting factor
Now abandon the idea of 1-on-1 clients. Why? They’re the limiting factor in the equation of time and money. There’s no amount of money great enough to increase the number of hours you have in a week or a month, so taking on 1-on-1 clients is doing yourself a financial disservice and accepting the very costly sacrifice of capping your income potential.
Step Four: Crafting the package
Decide how many hours a client or customer needs to get a significant, worthwhile benefit from your services. Is it two, three, five, ten? Is there a natural progression to the service you would provide or a methodical way to break down its various aspects to offer clients a robust transformation, spread over that number of sessions? Craft a multi-session package around it — but remember, we won’t be entertaining 1-on-1 clients here.
Step Five: Multiplying your earnings potential
Consider the level of personalization required from your services and determine how many people could realistically benefit from a joint session. That number may be five, ten, fifty, or maybe even unlimited — but you’ll want to ensure you’re being thoughtful about providing the customers a positive experience and outcome.
Step Six: Reconstructing your package pricing
Based on the hourly rate you’ve assigned yourself, the number of hours in the multi-session package you’ve outlined, and the number of peers with whom your customers will be sharing their session, determine a price that you believe justifies the transformational value of the package, as well as the amount of your time and expertise each customer will receive.
- Discounts: Proper pricing should take into account a session-sharing discount to ensure customers feel that they’re getting a bargain, despite sharing their live access to you with a group of peers.
- Sweeteners: It should also cover the increased value of any “sweeteners” or bonuses that set this multi-package offer apart from a typical 1-on-1 session.
- Exclusivity: If this is a one-time or exclusive, limited package — perhaps something you only offer once or twice a year, or something you limit to a certain number of students — you can increase that price to account for those self-imposed limits and their exclusive nature.
The Formula for $20,000 Offer Pricing
The below formula uses sample pricing and ballpark discounts and upsells to illustrate how this type of offer can easily generate $20,000 in just a few hours of your time. You can easily modify the below formula by plugging in your chosen hourly rate, the number of hours included in your multi-session package, your session-sharing discount (entirely up to you), and your exclusivity upsell if you have one.
Maximum price, not including exclusivity upsell:
Multiply your hourly rate by the number of hours you plan to offer in a multi-package session. Assuming an hourly rate of $250 and a four-hour package:
Hourly rate ($250) x 4 hours = $1,000
This should give you the upper limit of the price range (for a single customer) since this formula assumes no multi-session or session-sharing discount.
Session-sharing discount: 40%
Now that you’ve determined the upper limit of your individual customer pricing for the multi-package session, you can apply a session-sharing discount to allow for the fact that customers aren’t getting the full 1-on-1 experience that your hourly rate justifies. Assuming the above $1,000 maximum multi-session package price and a 40% session-sharing discount:
$1000 x (1 — 0.4) = $600
The above example employs a 40% session-sharing discount, but there’s no right answer to the ideal or appropriate discount here; it’s completely up to you. That said, you’ll want to make sure you still feel like each customer is paying a fair price for this many hours of your real, live, face-to-face (or zoom-to-zoom) time and expertise.
Now, add in the exclusivity upsell: 20%
The exclusivity upsell accounts for the fact that this multi-session package offer is special. Perhaps it encompasses a more robust curriculum or wider set of services than months of 1-on-1 sessions would typically address. Or perhaps it includes some special bonus that is typically reserved for premium clients. Perhaps it’s a one-time opportunity that you may never offer up again — at least not for this reasonable price. Assuming a 20% exclusivity upsell on the above $600 discounted package price, we can arrive at our final price:
$600 x (1.2) = $720
If done right, this should still appear as a worthwhile bargain: for the 28% discount to your standard hourly rate of $250/hour, clients can gain four valuable hours of direct live access to you and your expertise, for just $720.
Turning $720 into $20,000
But how the heck will you turn four hours and a $720 price tag into $20,000 in revenue? It’s actually easier than you might think.
$20000 / $720 = 27.78 (let’s round up to 28)
All you need is 28 people to sign up for your exclusive, discounted, robust, four-session package — which you’ll deliver via one-hour/week live calls over four weeks — and you’ll have made $20,000. It really is that simple.
An Upfront Investment Will Pay Outsized Dividends
I’m not going to pretend steps one through four won’t take up the bulk of your pre-revenue time in preparation for the launch of your brand-new multi-session package; they will. But once you’ve done the pre-work, you’ll have a repeatable model and reusable content that can be monetized in a myriad of ways.
This six-step strategy will grant you unlimited upside earning potential and the ability to help more people than you ever expected, including those who couldn’t necessarily afford your full 1-on-1 client pricing.
And yes, this strategy can work across multiple industries. I’ve used this model numerous times and continue to do so for future projects across various domains. It’s worked for a vast array of subjects, customer audiences, price points, and offer structures, to the tune of thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars in earnings, in exchange for a set number of hours of my time.
The sooner you remove limiting factors and disconnect your time from your earnings potential, the sooner you’ll be able to reap outsized rewards and get paid for the value of your contribution, rather than the hours you clock. Now there’s only one question left to ask yourself: what’s stopping you?
