A Starving Crowd - The One Advantage Freelancers and Consultants Need

Among copywriters Gary Halbert is a legend. Though he was most likely innocent of any real wrongdoing, Halbert was indicted and went to jail for fraud, and while there, he wrote The Boron Letters to his sons.

In Chapter 6, you’ll find a question (and Halbert’s answer) that will change your life if you let it:

"If you and I both owned a hamburger stand and we were in a contest to see who could sell the most hamburgers, what advantages would you most like to have on your side to help you win?"

You can imagine the sensible answers that freelancers and consultants might give:

• “The lowest prices.”
• “I want the best location.”
• “Give me the best recipes.”
• “The best ingredients matter most.”
• “No, people want the best staff and service.”

All of those things could give one hamburger stand a bun up on the competition, but none of them is the single most important edge that Halbert goes on to share:

“The only advantage I want is... a starving crowd!"

If you can find a group of people ravenous for burgers, Bentleys, or whatever you have, how could you not sell more?

Despite the black-eye obviousness of this observation, many of us focus more on our “supply” than on existing demand. One or more marketable skills, such as copywriting or design, get us into business, and when people don’t knock down our doors to hire us, we assume the problem must be with the hamburger, so to speak.

We tinker with the ingredients and recipes. We focus on incremental gains in quality, better results based on that quality, and upskilling which supports the first two.

The trouble is, you may have excellent skills and deliver impressive results and still finding selling difficult if you’re selling juicy hamburgers to a vegan crowd.

Many a talented service-focused solopreneur has described a low-earning conundrum to me, and after we tease out the loops in the knotty problem, I often see the twist in the business that started it all.

The target audience either wasn’t hungry enough, or they had empty pockets.

“How do you measure this hunger?”

Later in Chapter 6, Halbert asks another important question: “How do you measure this hunger?”

He qualifies his earlier statement about the most important advantage by explaining that the right crowd must have the  problem you solve (e.g., hunger) and the means to solve it (e.g., money).

If you’ve struggled to sell the type of work you want to do at the prices you want to charge, your offers may be off. Or, your messaging. Or, your perceived authority.

Or, you may simply be going after the wrong people.

Take, for example, my friend Bobbi. She wanted to help first-time authors with their books. More specifically, she wanted to do the cover design and layout.

Some of these authors were the sweetest people you can imagine. I met one woman who had spent hundreds of hours writing a beautiful tribute to her father.

The problem? The author had no money to spend on editing, let alone design!

Consider also the difference in outcomes with one product creator I knew personally and two others I read about.

Exhibit A – Andy

Andy and I joined the same Mastermind group in 2011. A former basketball player, he had increased his vertical jump, become more competitive, and gotten a college scholarship.

He later turned his own vertical jump training regimen into an online course, and the course delivered. The basketball players who followed the regimen jumped higher.

Why did Andy struggle to sell the course?

His target audience was high schoolers.

What’s wrong with high schoolers? They have no money!

Exhibit B – Adam & Justin

Adam Folker and Justin Darlington created a vertical jump program similar to Andy’s.

Instead of high school players, they targeted men in their twenties who want to learn how to dunk.

Their website, VertShock.com, claims that 20,000 people have gone through the $138 program.

If those claims are accurate, Fokker and Darlington have raked in close to $3 million in revenue.

Same core offer: jump higher. Different audience, and one with disposable income.

The result? Millions in sales.

Christian Nonprofits vs. PT Clinics

Now you begin to understand why one of the first things members of my Business Redesign program do is make an honest assessment of their chosen niche.

Tim, a designer, had two:

• Churches & Christian Nonprofits
• Physical Therapy Clinics

Can you guess which crowd has less money to spend? Ding ding ding! The nonprofits.

As much as Tim might applaud their missions, most nonprofits have shoestring budgets. Physical therapists aren’t swimming in cash, but they do have entrepreneurial drive that pushes them to go find the money.

Once he doubled down on PT clinics, Tim found it much easier to close big projects.

PT clinics have all four of the characteristics of a good market that Alex Hormozi mentions in $100M Offers:

1. Pain (i.e., desperate need for what you do)
2. Purchasing Power
3. Easy to Target
4. Growing

If your business has been struggling, you may need the habit that Gary Halbert mentions:

“The most profitable habit you can cultivate is the habit of constantly being on the lookout for groups of people (markets) who have demonstrated that they are starving (or, at least hungry) for some particular product or service.”

Key Takeaway

My friend, look for potential customers who make it easy to sell to them because they’re hungry and they have money.  Look for starving crowds.

To put it a different way, as long as you have a starving crowd, you can offer a mediocre product made from low-quality ingredients and sell it at a high price with unenthusiastic employees and still make out like a burger bandit. Baseball stadiums do it all the time.

Now it’s your turn to take a long, hard look at the crowd you’ve been targeting.

Set a timer for 30 minutes and answer these questions:

• Do your clients regularly have the budget you need to do your best work?
• Do they see the value in what you do and make it easy for you to sell?
• Are you able to get new leads consistently? Why or why not?
• Have you already found a starving crowd?
• Or are you making growth hard on yourself?
• Do you need to pivot to a more profitable niche?
• Which industries or markets place a high value on what you do?

You may just need to move your hamburger stand.

When you’re ready, here are ways I can help you:

1. Free Money. A pricing and money mindset guide for freelance creatives. If you’re unsure about your freelance pricing, this is the book for you.
2. Morning Marketing Habit. This course will help you build an “always be marketing” practice, become less dependent on referrals, and proactively build the business you want with the clients you want. My own morning marketing habit has enabled me to consistently make  6 figures as a freelancer.
3. Custom Business Roadmap. Gain clarity, confidence, and momentum in your freelance or consulting business.
4. Business Redesign. Raise your effective hourly rate, delegate with confidence, and free up 40 hours a month.
5. Clarity Session. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. I've done well over 100 of these 1:1 sessions with founders, solopreneurs, and freelancers who wanted guidance, a second opinion, or help creating a plan.