Live from Marrakech 🌴, on the yearly break I align with my son's holidays.

Every year, this is when I look back. This time, one number kept showing up everywhere: 10x.

10x more thankful than I expected to be. And one 10x I completely missed on my own, even though spotting it is my job.

It's time I shared an update (and maybe something useful).

In short:

• 10x as in "Thanks"
• 10x as in "Popping Our Bubble"
• 10x as in "10% of the Value Created"
• 10x as in "How Big Is the Problem You're Willing to Solve"
• 10x as in "My Next 10x"

10x as in "Thanks!"

First, I want to thank you for still reading this after a few interruptions to my "weekly" promise. 🙏🏼

You have no idea how much starting this newsletter has helped me over the past 2 years!

Here's a quick list of what it helped me do:

• Write my first newsletter
• Grow my first reader list to 100+
• Observe and notice my thoughts
• Find my voice (still finding it 😆)
• Experiment with different offers: Public Speaking for Technical Founders and CTOs, a 5-day challenge, a 6-week accelerator!
• Make a living from my mission to help entrepreneurial engineers succeed in business.
• Refine my mission from Engineers Can Talk to Engineers Can Sell, and it works 10x better.
• Realise how much I miss writing here and sharing the lessons I pick up along the way!

So, sincerely, thank you for being part of the journey. This is just the beginning.

10x as in "Popping our bubble" 🫧

One thing that kept me stuck for a long time, and keeps most of us stuck, is not realising that the only limit to our growth is the one we impose on ourselves.

Instead of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, what about taking some distance and raising our altitude to think bigger?

Back in May, I took part in a Skool mastermind with some of the top voices on Skool, including a several-hour conversation with Matthew Thompson (host of the Skool podcast). The session was only 30 minutes, simple yet powerful: remember when you were making a tenth of what you make today? What happened that led you to 10x that? Note the event, person or story you could credit for that move.

When I did it, I remembered joining "The 100", a competition run by Aidan Labreche & Andrew Kirby (Skool's first investor). I went in to scale the first wins from my December 5-day challenge, which I'd sold for $55 as an experiment, with a deliverable promise: build your first $5k strategy offer in 5 days. So I thought... I'll do a 6-week accelerator with the promise "I help you close your first $5k client in 6 weeks", at $500. I even started "poorly" promoting it on my LinkedIn and free community before I joined the program. Here's how it happened in 90 seconds. I went from hoping to maybe charge $500 to actually charging $2,500 for my first cohort.

Today, seats in my cohorts sell at $5,800... It's mad, because this is exactly what I do for my clients: help them see the value they create. Yet I needed someone to get me out of my own way. When we're dealing with our own offer, we have a blind spot we can't see into without external help. I hope this shows you the way.

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10x as in "Pricing your service at 10% of the value created"

I love this definition from Jonathan Stark. It's a bit verbose, but it deserves proper meditation!

When you're able to determine with your prospect what value is being created, and they nod... you're close to closing your first strategy engagement.

If you're able to help them achieve that outcome, charging a tenth of it is a safe place to start pricing.

I want to help people close their first $5,000 strategy engagement; charging $500 for that is a no-brainer.

But the actual value created is more than $5,000, because clients will close more deals like that after learning the skill.

Still, different types of people value the same thing differently:

• Those who won't close because they don't have enough leads -> they'll get the least value from this deal.
• Those who have leads, can close 3 such $5,000 deals, then raise their price to $10,000 and close 3 of those within a year -> for them, the value created is $15,000 + $30,000, so potentially $45,000. Paying $5,800 is a no-brainer!

In the same way, if you're solving a 6-figure problem for your prospect or client, wouldn't they spend 10% of that to make sure they spend the other 90% the right way? In other words, if you can get the prospect to agree that building this mission-critical system will cost them at least $150,000 over the next 12 months, wouldn't they spend $10,000 on a diagnostic and roadmapping engagement to make sure they spend the other $140,000 building the right thing?

10x as in "How big is the problem you're willing to solve"

• If you want to sell your first $10k paid-strategy offer, what's the $100k problem you can help your prospects solve?
• If you want to sell a €100k project, what's the €1m problem you can demonstrate it solves?
• If you want to take your firm from €1m to €10m, what's the €100m problem it can solve?
• If you want to price your SaaS at €10 per month, what's the (at least) €100-per-month problem it can solve?

So it's not the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love" ❤️🤭, but "How big is the problem you're willing to solve?"

10x as in "My next 10x"

Now the question I'm asking myself, just like in that mastermind, but looking forward from where I am today: what do I need to do to 10x from here?

Here's my 10x, declared here so you can hold me to it:

• 10x the workshops: I'll run 10 more workshops before the end of 2026 (they will become the Academy courses. This will force me to 10x my content production too to drive more traffic.
• Divide by 10 what distracts me: working with non-technical founders, creating another new thing, overthinking before writing content, overthinking before launching a campaign.
• Then in 2027, run one public workshop every month.
• 10x the number of participants in my cohorts via partnerships & JV
• 10x the results I can help people achieve (the highest lever): go straight to a $10k offer instead of $5k. I'm working on my $10k offer to help founders close their 6-figure projects with serious margins: profitable, not a project you end up hating. And push my mission further: helping engineers get to their first profitable million. Reaching a million is not difficult. But a profitable one, with >40% net margin... in the service space... that's a different beast.

Next week, I'm running a private 3-hour workshop, "Niche The Hell Down". It will save you €1,000 in multiples so you can spend it the year ends gifts, and it's only €97. Reply "NICHE" to get the link to join.

"10Xful" Oth.