You Won’t Save the World by Giving Your Solution Away for Free

Have I already hit a sore spot?

I know it’s a touchy subject when it comes to making money from your passion, and I hit on it slightly in one of my posts a few weeks ago and I’m still getting emails about it.

So what’s the nerve I’ve hit?

I’ll tell you…

You won’t save the world by giving your solution away for free!

We’ve been doing all of this work on finding your passion and making money from it and discovering how you can help people…

In other words, defining what solution you have to someone else’s problem…

I do one-on-one and group coaching to help people do all of this and time and time again one of my clients will say to me…

‘But I want to make the world a better place and if I have a solution that someone else needs, shouldn’t I give it to them for free?’

YIKES!

NO!

Here’s the deal…

Do I want you to take advantage of people?

No, of course not!

But the fact of the matter is you are NEVER going to make the world a better place by giving your solution away for free for 2 main reasons…

1. If you give it away for free, how long do you think you’ll be able to keep giving it away? Honestly, won’t you end up depleted of resources like time and money and energy if you go this route? I say this to my coaching clients like a mantra, “When you fly in an airplane, there’s a reason they tell you to put the oxygen mask on your self first.”

2. People don’t have anything at stake if it’s free and if you REALLY want to help people they have to have something at stake.

Now before you argue with me on that second point, I have proof…

Years ago, I had enough people ask me why I didn’t give my coaching for free so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I invited 10 people to work with me one-on-one for free. This normally would have been a $5000 investment for them to work with me, but I agreed to have them pay that amount once they finished the program and saw what it could do for them.

What do you think happened?

Well…the first 2 weeks went quite well, everyone stayed accountable and took the action I gave them to take and then…

Well, let’s just say that after 5 weeks I was putting all my time and effort into chasing them down.

I called a group session together and asked them what they thought the problem was…

I’ll be completely honest about the response…

• 1 of the men in the group said that I just wasn’t the coach for him
• 1 woman said that she realized she really didn’t want to do what it would take to be an enterpreneur
• 1 younger guy didn’t even call into the group session
• And the 7 remaining people agreed that because they didn’t have any skin in the game, the program had gone to the bottom of their priority list…

They literally told me that because they didn’t have their investment in the program pressuring them to follow through, they just weren’t making it a priority at all.

Ultimately, as a group, we called off the experiment and 3 of the people made the investment to start working with me…

The results?

2 of them now have extremely successful businesses and the third didn’t follow through anyway so I let him out of the program.

So, I’ll say this a million times if I have to…

If you have a solution that will help people, and you really want to help as many people as you possible can, the results will be much better for everyone if you don’t give it to them for free!

I’m all for giving and charity, but that isn’t what this is about…

You don’t have to charge huge amounts of money, but it does need to be enough that it inspires the person to follow through and actually use the solution you have offered them…

If you want to make money from your passion, please take this to heart…

Put the oxygen mask on yourself first and then get out there and you’ll be able to help all the people you can reach!

Leave me a comment or shoot me an email to let me know how you feel about this, it’s a hot button topic and I want to open up a conversation about it!

Go Big!

Kristen